We previously discussed the exodus from France of top earners after the imposition of a confiscatory 75% tax rate. Now England is facing the same shift, according to a new report. More than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than £1 million during 2009-10. That number fell to just 6,000 this year. This appears to be a combination of people leaving Britain and concerted efforts to avoid income.
We continue to disagree on this blog on tax policy. I opposed the moves in France and England as economically unwise. I also oppose aspects of the Obama plan, though I agree with the need to increase revenue. I believe both Obama and Congress have been incredibly reckless with their budgets and continue to spend wildly without any sense of priority in spending.
Cities like New York also report declines in top earner following heavy tax bills.
George Osborne, the Chancellor, announced this year that the 50p top rate will be reduced to 45p from next April.
Source: Telegraph
Zombie,
>the received knowledge of your dead heroes of a bygone age that invented a mythological “science” of explaining the world by making stuff up.
Youre a liar with no evidence. Aristotle taught man to be rationally systematic about observation. Philosophers and scientists are increasingly returning to his philosophy and science. You will be laughed out of the universities.
@Stephen:
A) Bullshit.
B) You are not worth any further response, I have refuted everything you say and yet you still repeat yourself. Have fun in your echo chamber.
Zombie,
>As for “conventional dictionary definitions:” Damn straight. Claims have no meaning or basis in reality if you can just redefine words to mean anything you want. Thinking otherwise is idiotic.
How is your faith in convention different from faith in God? Both transcend observation of individual things as base of knowledge.
>I AM claiming your view is false. That is not contextual, fool, that is saying your view does not comport with observed reality,
Observed reality is [part of, see below] your context. You imply that your ideas are, as Ive said, out of context, ie, floating abstractions not derived from concretes.
>it does not predict what we will observe in experiments or in the field or under the microscope, it does not provide any predictive power whatsoever. False.
Your use of observation is not at the start of knowledge but merely for verifying arbitrary predictions. Raindances are not based on an observation-based theory about the cause of rain. But the raindancers then, and only then, observe the results of their experiment…uh, ritual. Observation is the start of reason, not merely for verification. Your start, as youve repeatedly said, is non-observation-based definitions, ie, not observation. However, reason starts in observation ,not in convention. Further, since definitions are definitions of concepts (or,as you ignorantly say, names), concepts are next scientific step after observation. Hypotheses are not the next step after observation. Concepts are. See Aristotle for the first systematic account of classifying observation. His biology starts with systematically precise, concrete observations of many living organisms that is what todays biologists do. Then he classifies (conceptualizes). Then he hypothesizes. Then he induces causes (with a theory of causes). Now rational prediction is possible. This is the method of the rise of modern science which the hypothetico-deductive method evades. You evade observation-and-logic-based classifying for convention. You rationalize convention w/an out-of-context use of science, as if you could reach the 3rd floor of a building without first reaching the 2nd floor.
Your alleged science is a rationalization of the evasion of the need to focus your mind, as if an unfocused mind will cause the reality you fear to vanish. Youre a pseudo-scientific ostrich.
“other than your own is zero.”
@Stephen: Life is the life of individual men,
You seem incapable of the simplest thoughts.
You do not value the life of individual persons if you put zero value on the self-sacrifice of even one minute of your own life to preserve the entire life of other individual persons.
The fact that you do not feel you should be obligated to sacrifice even one minute of your life to save the entire life of a child proves you do not put any value on the child’s life, because if you valued the child’s life it would be worth the “self sacrifice” of one minute of your effort to preserve it.
Oh, wait, I forgot you speak Aynish, I am sure in Aynish the word ‘value’ must have some completely opposite meaning to what the dictionary definition says. I will stick with the plain English meaning: The only “value” you put on any individual life other than your is zero.
@Stephen: Neurons act mechanically, like like a hit baseball.
If you are attempting to imply causal certainty, then you are wrong. Neurons are living cells. Like all living things, they can tire and fail to perform. Sometimes their nutritive environment provides an excess of energy, and they fire when they should not. Sometimes they are depleted, and fail to fire when they should have. Neurons also grow new connections and prune old connections; sometimes neurons die. Neurons are no more machines than a rose bush is a machine; they are predictable within an envelope (like a rose bush will not grow into sequoia) but then, so are people.
@Stephen: Youre a neo-primitive mystic,
No, I am a scientist. You are the primitive mystic if you believe consciousness is something that exists outside of physical biology and nature, which is what you are implying by making a distinction between “consciousness” and “neurons.”
@Stephen: Learning is an action of consciousness, perceptual or conceptual.
No, it isn’t. Learning is a physical, biological process of physical, biological transformation. Consciousness is a physical, biological process too, it is neurons firing. Any claim to the contrary is unsupported mysticism and an unwarranted belief in magic.
I reject your words of “perceptual” and “conceptual” because you cannot be trusted to use them in their common senses. So that part means nothing to me.
@Stephen: Man must value his own life to remain alive.
Bull. Men remain alive in comas for years, from which they eventually recover. In a coma they “value” nothing, including their own life. The reason they recover, without starvation or having been killed for food by animals, is that OTHER people valued their life and preserved it.
Your ludicrous pronouncements are so easy to disarm it is ridiculous.
Zombie
>people are emotionally driven
Your public confession of the base of your pseudo-scientific materialism is noted. Ie, your alleged science is a rationalization for evading reason for emotion.
Zombie,
1, December 12, 2012 at 9:22 am
@You do not value life if you put zero value on self-sacrifice to preserve life.
Note the use of life as a floating abstraction. Life is the life of individual men, not an alleged mystical life transcending individual men. Man must value his own life to remain alive. If man (consistently) sacrifices his own life, he will not preserve his own life. Your tribal mentality demands the sacrifice of some individuals to preserve the life of other individuals. You have consistenly evaded the lack of a rational defense of that. For moral monsters like you,
Life is to be valued, not sacrificed. Morality is a guide to life, not the sacrifice of life. Sacrifice is for moral sub-humans who reject their own minds as moral guide and their own lives as the moral purpose of their actions.
gbk
1, December 14, 2012 at 7:03 pm
SG,
Could you please define the following phrases:
I dont have time now but see Rand’s Epistemology, Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, or David Harriman’s Logical Leap.
Also see the online Ayn Rand Lexicon for “concept,” “integration,” and associated concepts.
Zombie
1, December 15, 2012 at 11:11 am
@Bron: For those of us scientists that do not believe in souls or other made up stuff like “essences,” for those of us that do not just accept raw assertions or received knowledge or claims of divine inspiration,
For Aristotle, just as the shape of a door is the form of its wood, so the form of man’s body is its life or soul. Ie, the matter is arranged in a specific way, ie, not random as you neo-primitives believe. Soul, for Aristotle, is a natural explanation of a natural fact. Thus there are vegetative souls (plants), sensitive souls (brute animals) and rational souls (man). Youre merely associating his word usage with religion, a very religious cognitive habit, ie, believing that words control reality, ie, in the beginning was the Word. But words are symbols of concepts.
Altho Aristotle was perhaps insufficiently clear about essence, in practice he used it as a method of knowledge, ie, the basic property of a concept.
As always; the religious will resort to quoting their holy books, because they are utterly incapable of making an argument from their own mind. I do not read Rand, Stephen, once was more than enough, and hearing a clown tell a bad joke the second time does not improve it.
@Stephen: Percepually, one merely associates patterns.
Bull.
@Stephen: our claim that reasoning can start from false premises merely exposes your subjectivism and mysticism.
More bull. Aristotle believed there were five elements; Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Aether. Were there five elements, back then? Not one of those is “elemental” in any sense. If Aristotle reasoned from that premise, he was reasoning from a false premise.
Of course it is possible to reason from false premises; fiction authors do it all the time. Fictional detectives, for example, are hyper-alert to details, and always manage to see, in a trillion possible details, the one telltale detail that breaks the case. Quite often without even realizing it at the time! That is fiction. But the authors reason from that false premise, that any brain could be that attentive, filter that much information, and record that much detail, to create a dramatic story line. You do not have to believe the magic (as you have), but for the purpose of entertainment we suspend our disbelief to see how the heroes overcome their obstacles, and we do not enjoy the show if the rest of it does not logically follow from what we know is the false premise.
Aristotle began from false premises, but some of them could be described as approximately true. Because most of reasoning was already known, and rationality does NOT depend very heavily on knowledge of the natural world or what is in it, Aristotle was able to reason from his approximate truths to approximate conclusions.
But that is all: What I said is that Aristotle did not “KNOW” anything, meaning he did not have anything of certainty to report. Unlike Plato, because Plato did report many rational findings in geometry that remain true, because they do not depend upon anything BUT rationality.
Zombie,
1, December 14, 2012 at 8:34 pm
@Stephen: the pattern is conceptualized by selectively focusing on (abstracting) its similarities to other patterns in a context of differences from other patterns.
>How does one “focus” on “similarities”? That requires pattern recognition itself. Your whole definition is recursive, it depends upon itself, and therefore means nothing.
Percepually, one merely associates patterns. Conceptually, one selectively focuses upon a part of a pattern, ie, abstracts a part of the pattern from the pattern as a whole. And then integrates that abstraction with basically similar abstractions into a concept.
“Let us now examine the process of forming the simplest concept, the concept of a single attribute (chronologically, this is not the first concept that a child would grasp; but it is the simplest one epistemologically)—for instance, the concept “length.” If a child considers a match, a pencil and a stick, he observes that length is the attribute they have in common, but their specific lengths differ. The difference is one of measurement. In order to form the concept “length,” the child’s mind retains the attribute and omits its particular measurements. Or, more precisely, if the process were identified in words, it would consist of the following: “Length must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity. I shall identify as ‘length’ that attribute of any existent possessing it which can be quantitatively related to a unit of length, without specifying the quantity.”
Rand
:The child does not think in such words (he has, as yet, no knowledge of words), but that is the nature of the process which his mind performs wordlessly. And that is the principle which his mind follows, when, having grasped the concept “length” by observing the three objects, he uses it to identify the attribute of length in a piece of string, a ribbon, a belt, a corridor or a street.”
Rand
“Similarity is grasped perceptually; in observing it, man is not and does not have to be aware of the fact that it involves a matter of measurement. It is the task of philosophy and of science to identify that fact.
A concept is a mental integration of two or more units which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by a specific definition. By organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts, man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate concretes of any given, immediate moment.”
Rand
“In any given moment, concepts enable man to hold in the focus of his conscious awareness much more than his purely perceptual capacity would permit. The range of man’s perceptual awareness—the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time—is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units—as, for instance, five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.”
Rand
“Conceptual awareness is the only type of awareness capable of integrating past, present and future. Sensations are merely an awareness of the present and cannot be retained beyond the immediate moment; percepts are retained and, through automatic memory, provide a certain rudimentary link to the past, but cannot project the future. It is only conceptual awareness that can grasp and hold the total of its experience—extrospectively, the continuity of existence; introspectively, the continuity of consciousness—and thus enable its possessor to project his course long-range.”
Rand
tony c:
Aristotle knew a few things. he did pretty well with just observation. I dont know if you realize it, but he is responsible for the enlightenment.
@Stephen, Bron: Aristotle did not know anything, Aristotle was a mystic and reasoning from mystical principles, just as Rand was reasoning from false premises. When one starts from wildly false premises as they did, then even if the reasoning is flawless (and Aristotle’s was not, and Rand’s certainly was not) then no conclusions are known to be right or wrong. The less predictive the original premises, the more probable it is the conclusions are wrong.
Shano
1, December 14, 2012 at 6:57 pm
>Chimps and dolphins make and use tools. Animals have reasoning.
Scientists finally came out recently to confirm they have consciousness.
Your hidden definition of reason is perceptual association, a form of consciousness that can make primitive tools. Aristotle, 2400 yrs ago, knew
that brute animals have perceptual consciousness (or, as he called it, sensitive soul).
tony c:
Aristotle did not think the soul was immortal. he thought it was what animated the body. in other words the workings of the brain although he wasnt sure what it was, he just figured any living body was animated by it.
@Bron: For those of us scientists that do not believe in souls or other made up stuff like “essences,” for those of us that do not just accept raw assertions or received knowledge or claims of divine inspiration, some questions are a little harder to prove based upon repeatable experiments.
And at least for me as a scientist, it is not possible to be more than a handful of decades late to any party or conclusion.
tony c:
my son, when he was around 8, told me he saw an orange possum out of his bedroom window. I told him orange possums do not exist in America, he was adamant that he saw the possum and was not dreaming.
I saw the orange “possum” about a week later sunning itself in the back yard, it was a fox with mange on its tail which had stripped the hair off.
My son had knowledge of a possum and knowledge of a fox but had not yet learned to differentiate between a fox and a possum.
I never again dismissed what my children said even if it sounded whacky, there was an explanation but you had to figure out what they were saying from their level of cognitive development.
shano:
“Scientists finally came out recently to confirm they have consciousness.”
of course they do, I am not a scientist and I know that. They are alive and interact with their world and respond to stimulus. Aristotle recognized that 2500 years ago.
“Holding as we do that, while knowledge of any kind is a thing to be honoured and prized, one kind of it may, either by reason of its greater exactness or of a higher dignity and greater wonderfulness in its objects, be more honourable and precious than another, on both accounts we should naturally be led to place in the front rank the study of the soul. The knowledge of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of Nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life. Our aim is to grasp and understand, first its essential nature, and secondly its properties; of these some are taught to be affections proper to the soul itself, while others are considered to attach to the animal owing to the presence within it of soul.
To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world. As the form of question which here presents itself, viz. the question ‘What is it?’, recurs in other fields, it might be supposed that there was some single method of inquiry applicable to all objects whose essential nature (as we are endeavouring to ascertain there is for derived properties the single method of demonstration); in that case what we should have to seek for would be this unique method. But if there is no such single and general method for solving the question of essence, our task becomes still more difficult; in the case of each different subject we shall have to determine the appropriate process of investigation. If to this there be a clear answer, e.g. that the process is demonstration or division, or some known method, difficulties and hesitations still beset us-with what facts shall we begin the inquiry? For the facts which form the starting-points in different subjects must be different, as e.g. in the case of numbers and surfaces.”
you are 2500 years too late to that party and so are your scientists.