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
@Polly: You waste your time quoting Rand. Man is indeed a social animal.
As to your other infantile gibberish; “The thing speaks …”
No, it doesn’t. Only living things speak, inanimate things do not speak. At best they play back recordings of speech; or simulate speech, but only minds produce true speech.
Anybody that believes inanimate things speak to them is delusional and hearing voices in their head, they are falsely attributing externality to internally generated mental events.
Further, all the rest of your qualifiers are vague gibberish as well, an “active mind,” “logically focused,” “with its knowledge.” What a load of feel-good crap. Anybody that is not in a coma has an active mind. There is no such thing as “logically focused.” And finally, no particular “knowledge” is necessary for a mind to operate and discern patterns and invent and test rules; infants are born without any particular knowledge and without any help or instruction develop the basic rules of physics de novo. In fact they do that so well on their own that they can eventually learn language from scratch without ANY internal language employed to teach them, that language acquisition lets them take instruction, and then babies can become lawyers.
You produce one pathetic load of illogical crap after another, Polly.
Zombie,
> Man is indeed a social animal.
Man has many properties, including sociability. The one that explains most and most distinguishes man from all else is rational animal. You, of course, sacrifice mind to society.
>As to your other infantile gibberish; “The thing speaks …”
Thats the quote at the top put there by the lawyer who owns this blog.
>There is no such thing as “logically focused.”
So you publicly confess that youre not logically focused onto reality? We agree! For how many years have you been unfocused? Try Beck’s cognitive therapy tho youre probably too far gone by now. Do you drool a lot? And make messes in your pants when its too much focus to think about a toilet?
>Anybody that is not in a coma has an active mind.
“…an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants—a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear.” Rand
Your behaviorist materialism is the claim that mind is a passive response to things beyond it.
>no particular “knowledge” is necessary for a mind to operate and discern patterns and invent and test rules;
Thus your acceptance of mindless staring at unconceptualized patterns or, as some call it, insanity.
>illogical crap
This should appeal to opponents of logical focusing.
Turley’s Motto
>The thing itself speaks
The thing speaks to an active mind, logically focused, with its knowledge, onto the thing. The thing is silent to an unfocused mind, otherwise babies and psychotics could be lawyers.
@Polly: Society has value to all of us, which includes you. We do not require you to recognize that or agree with that for it to be true, just as we do not require you to believe that the world is round or that light has a finite speed.
Reality does not require your permission, Polly. Society has value to us, which means we believe it extends our life, reduces our hardships and grief, and makes us more productive and more likely to accomplish our goals, less likely to be exploited, enslaved, robbed, raped, poisoned, sickened, or murdered.
We believe it helps us get what we want through synergy; we believe that a thousand people working together can build something that a thousand people working individually could never accomplish.
You are free to disengage at any time. There are plenty of lawless places in the world where you can hunt and gather to feed yourself, defend yourself, and live out your life without our help and without using our resources or infrastructure. Your refusal to disengage only proves that you, too, find value in our society, and free infrastructure, and free police protection and military protection and free education, all while denying that this society exists.
That’s fine; you are like a four year old child and we cannot correct that. Four year olds insist they know everything when they know next to nothing; they insist they need nobody while having no idea that the clothes they wear, food they eat, and shelter and safety they enjoy were paid for by the very parents they accuse of oppressing them. You have much in common, Polly, denying the safety and productivity that society gave you for free as being worthless. If you were a four year old we would find the depth of your ignorance amusing, but as a presumptive adult we find your continued lack of comprehension just sad.
Zombie,
>Society has value to us, which means we believe it extends our life
“Us,” distributively or collectively?
“Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life—but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered).” Rand
“The social theory of ethics substitutes “society” for God—and although it claims that its chief concern is life on earth, it is not the life of man, not the life of an individual, but the life of a disembodied entity, the collective, which, in relation to every individual, consists of everybody except himself. As far as the individual is concerned, his ethical duty is to be the selfless, voiceless, rightless slave of any need, claim or demand asserted by others. The motto “dog eat dog”—which is not applicable to capitalism nor to dogs—is applicable to the social theory of ethics. The existential monuments to this theory are Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.” Rand
Bloody, Degrading Sacrifice,
>Did I offend your ego-worshipping lil’ self?
Said the Nazi death camp guard to the prisoner who asked not to be tortured.
>others and society both exist and possess value beyond your ability to exploit them for your own pleasure.
Value to whom?
Grossman,
Aww. Did I offend your ego-worshipping lil’ self?
Good.
If the egoistic sociopath fits, wear it. The Aynish fall into two broad categories: those who share her mental illness (which to be clear is anti-social personality disorder commonly known as sociopathy as defined by both the DSM and the WHO diagnostic criteria) and those with the intellectual and/or emotional maturity of a malcontent teenager. If that presents a problem for you, I suggest changing from your chosen pseudo-philosophy and into something more adult that recognizes that others and society both exist and possess value beyond your ability to exploit them for your own pleasure.
@Polly: No, they didn’t.
Newton’s discoveries resulted from building models that could predict behavior; from asking questions about his results. For example, a prism split a sunbeam into a rainbow of light. What would happen if he isolated just the part he considered “blue” by masking the other colors with a paper shield, and sent that “blue” part through a second prism? Would it split again? It did not. And by experiment, he discovered that no individual color would split again; and this helped Newton develop a model for light that, while incorrect, was “closer to the truth” in the sense that it was more predictive of the behavior of light than previous models.
This has nothing to do with Aristotle or your bullshit Rand definition of “concepts” or “concretes,” or other made up words with purposely vague definitions that let them fit anything, this is about a constrictive, computable, predictive and simplifying model of what to expect with light. He did a similar thing with gravity, and other elements of physics. None of which explained everything there was to explain and all of which was just “closer to the truth” than what had gone before; that is why there was room for Einstein to overturn Newtonian physics and get even closer to the truth than Newton had (but still not THE truth that succeeds in explaining everything).
I am surprised you feel liberated, Polly, all you DO is make arbitrary claims freed from any need for evidence, proof, or predictive power of any kind. See, that is one hallmark of a religion instead of a science: When your belief doesn’t predict anything. Those that believe God has a plan do not have any idea what that plan may be, if that plan will cause their child to be raped and tortured to death, or grow up to rape and torture somebody else’s child. Those things happen, God knew they were going to happen and had the power to do something about them but did not, therefore they must be part of God’s plan. Thus the plan is not predictive, God’s protection is not predictive, prayers can go unanswered and therefore they are not predictive. They just have the appearance of being predictive and therefore comfort people, due to various defects in our evolutionary psychology, like confirmation bias and post-rationalization.
But that is where you are with your new religion. Using Rand’s philosophy only comforts you, it does not help you succeed or see where you have gone wrong. It is just your pathetic religion; something useful to redirect the blame for your failures in life, off of you and onto others.
Zombie
@Polly: Newton’s profound discoveries resulted from …
>No they didn’t.
Yes, they did. Hey, that’s liberating, making arbitrary claims freed from the felt need for evidence. 2+2=5! Wow! I feel a surge of power. You must constantly feel that. I’m jealous. I just cant seem to summon the will to not conceptually induce all ideas from perceived concretes. Can you describe your experience of this? Maybe submit an article to a journal?
Zombie
>Rand’s only principle was selfishness at all costs
Ive repeatedly said that Rand rejects conventional, predatory pseudo-selfishness for rational selfishness limited by absolute moral values and virtues. She repeats this throughout her fiction and philosophy. What rationalization do you use for evading this?
>she had to pretend that utter, ruthless, psychopathic selfishness would somehow magically lead to the greater good
You have condemned Rand for rejecting and now accepting the alleged greater good. The first sacrifice of altruism is one’s independent mind. As psychologist, can you describe the experience of begging social approval
to focus your mind onto reality? When society disapproves and you feel an
obligation to keep your mind unfocused, do you feel an inward rage at your willing violation of your own mind, perhaps a sneaking admiration of school shooters, maybe a guilty peek at gun magazines, just to see, maybe, if someday, you had the will to take revenge against society’s arbitrary demands? Or is your work as psychologist revenge enough?
@Polly: Newton’s profound discoveries resulted from …
No they didn’t.
I repeat: I do not read Rand. But I understand you cannot formulate any thought of your own, so when confronted with reason you have to resort to saying your Aynish prayers. It is pathetic whimpering display of your fear of reality and being exposed for the fraud you are.
Zombie,
>your abstraction is not Newton
Newton’s profound discoveries resulted from Bacon’s reintroduction of Aristotle’s discovery of concepts, abstracted from observation. Primitive man goes directly from observation to arbitrary hypothesis because they are ignorant of concepts and logic. Contemporary science evades the knowledge of concepts for arbitrary description that yields only, as Rand said, “probabilities of the unknowable.” Man’s life depends on conceptualizing perception because man has no innate ideas. Man must abstract from perception and then integrate the abstractions into concepts. Animals perceive concretes as this concrete here and now. Man perceives concretes as units of a class, a class that integrates all basically similar units throughout the universe, bringing the entire universe within man’s knowledge and control.
“Tree” means all trees, past, present, and future, allowing man to apply his knowledge of the trees he immediately perceives to all trees everywhere. Thus universal gravity and laws of motion. Pattern probability provides no conceptualized grasp of concretes and no more prediction than using one’s birthday for selecting lottery ticket numbers. Further, there is a profound difference betwen perceptual models and conceptual models. Probability can be valid as an aid to conceptualizing large amounts of data. Eg, insurance, aiding doctors make immediate decisions. But its not a substitute for conceptualizing.
>[O]bjectivists…untestable claims.
“When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence—when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness—he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both—he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.”
Rand
@Polly: You continue arguing about words rather than concepts.
Because there is no agreement on what a “concept” even is; since you redefine words to mean whatever you want them to mean at the moment.
I do not read Rand, you waste your time quoting her. Once was enough hilarity, her joke of a “philoosphy” doesn’t play well when the punch lines are already known.
Rand’s only principle was selfishness at all costs, to value herself no matter what the outcome or fallout to anybody else, which is inherently predatory. But of course, she had to pretend that utter, ruthless, psychopathic selfishness would somehow magically lead to the greater good, because otherwise, she knew, everybody would reject it.
Thus her need to redefine the meanings of words, to perpetrate her fraud of justification, and thus my need to point out to her victims the foolishness of accepting her definitions, and the obvious stupidity of adhering to a philosophy that falls apart without them.
Zombie,
> Because there is no agreement on what a “concept” even is;
——–
“As a defense against the Witch-doctory of Hegel, who claimed universal omniscience, the scientist was offered the combined neo-mystic Witch-doctory and Attila-ism of the Logical Positivists. They assured him that such concepts as metaphysics or existence or reality or thing or matter or mind are meaningless—let the mystics care whether they exist or not, a scientist does not have to know it; the task of theoretical science is the manipulation of symbols, and scientists are the special elite whose symbols have the magic power of making reality conform to their will (“matter is that which fits mathematical equations”). Knowledge, they said, consists, not of facts, but of words, words unrelated to objects, words of an arbitrary social convention, as an irreducible primary; thus knowledge is merely a matter of manipulating language. The job of scientists, they said, is not the study of reality, but the creation of arbitrary constructs by means of arbitrary sounds, and any construct is as valid as another, since the criterion of validity is only “convenience” and the definition of science is “that which the scientists do.” But this omnipotent power, surpassing the dreams of ancient numerologists or of medieval alchemists, was granted to the scientist by philosophical Attila-ism on two conditions: a. that he never claim certainty for his knowledge, since certainty is unknown to man, and that he claim, instead, “percentages of probability,” not troubling himself with such questions as how one calculates percentages of the unknowable; b. that he claim as absolute knowledge the proposition that all values lie outside the sphere of science, that reason is impotent to deal with morality, that moral values are a matter of subjective choice, dictated by one’s feelings, not one’s mind.”
Rand
———
Gene H,
>I’ll have to give the egoistic lil’ sociopaths credit for persistence in the face of logic and evidence though. I guess that comes easy when you worship yourself.
If you were as dishonest, evasive, stupid and incompetent in law as in your post, you’d have no licence or clients. Tell us about spitting at yourself.
@Polly: To perception but not to the mind’s power of abstraction.
Except your abstraction is not Newton, or any valid representation of Newton. What you revere is a highly predictive result, a nearly perfected work of a highly imperfect man. A man that would have thoroughly rejected your objectivist philosophy because he believed fervently in God, miracles, and magic.
What Newton did was produce a simplified model of gravity that reduced it to mechanistic and highly predictable action amenable to mathematical formulae. You can mistakenly revere the man, I prefer to appreciate the utility of a simplifying probabilistic model. In fact I find that more uplifting and inspiring, to know that for all his flaws, foibles and petty bullshit and magical thinking, Newton was still able to contribute greatly to the pursuit of understanding reality.
Unlike objectivists, trapped in their religious circularity of denying anything that does not agree with their pre-determined and purposely untestable claims.
I’ve been busier than usual with the holiday season, so I missed almost all the fun of this thread until today. I have three things to say . . .
1) Newton was indeed both genius and an unredeemable jackass. Unlike Ayn Rand who was a sociopath. And an unredeemable jackass.
2) Objectivists are soooooooo easy. Fun to watch being deconstructed though. They’ve tried for years around here to gain some traction and yet always stumble in the face of critical scrutiny. I’ll have to give the egoistic lil’ sociopaths credit for persistence in the face of logic and evidence though. I guess that comes easy when you worship yourself.
3) Carry on, Tony. Looks like you’ve got things well in hand.
Oh, and I’ve seen almost all of this (sans Newton) before.
@Polly: Whatever your definition of “values” may be, I do not share it, because I do not attack them. Or defend them. If a person values one second of their time above the saving of a human life, then I attack that person, if they would choose prosperity for themselves at the expense of another, I attack that person, if they choose a path to prosperity that cares for others and does no harm, or only harms those in the first two classes, then I support that person. Those are my values about values.
Polly says: you call for the sacrifice of individual, real humans. No, that is your philosophy, because your philosophy calls for the permission to exploit the desperation and hunger of individual, real humans, which is the permission to enslave them, abuse them, financially coerce them and threaten them with disaster if they do not kneel to your whim. Your idiotic philosophy sacrifices everybody on the altar of selfishness and lets the psychopaths reign.
Zombie
>Your idiotic philosophy sacrifices everybody on the altar of selfishness
You continue arguing about words rather than concepts. You continue evading Rand’s “new theory of egoism” and her principled, absolute rejection of conventional, predatory, pseudo-selfishness.
——–
“The reasons why man needs a moral code will tell you that the purpose of morality is to define man’s proper values and interests, that concern with his own interests is the essence of a moral existence, and that man must be the beneficiary of his own moral actions.
Since all values have to be gained and/or kept by men’s actions, any breach between actor and beneficiary necessitates an injustice: the sacrifice of some men to others, of the actors to the nonactors, of the moral to the immoral. Nothing could ever justify such a breach, and no one ever has.
The choice of the beneficiary of moral values is merely a preliminary or introductory issue in the field of morality. It is not a substitute for morality nor a criterion of moral value, as altruism has made it. Neither is it a moral primary: it has to be derived from and validated by the fundamental premises of a moral system.
The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life—and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.
This is said as a warning against the kind of “Nietzschean egoists” who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin: the men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit. Just as the satisfaction of the irrational desires of others is not a criterion of moral value, neither is the satisfaction of one’s own irrational desires. Morality is not a contest of whims . . . .”
Rand
———–
@Polly: My point. You are evil, a death-worshipper. I revere Newton the scientist.
No, this is my point. You revere Newton, I do not. Qualifying that reverence with “Newton the Scientist” is no better, you still revere a person, and Newton the Scientist is unavailable without Newton the Jerk, Newton the Liar, Newton the petty, jealous, insecure, hurtful, manipulative, irrational credit thief. That is who you “revere.”
Despite his human flaws, Newton did produce a work of genius, and gave it free to humanity. Newton did not earn money from publishing his scientific work. He was born to a rich farmer, when he was three his widowed mother remarried into another well-to-do family, and he earned money as a professor and bureaucrat, and became wealthy through investments: But his scientific work was given freely.
I do not have to “revere” him to acknowledge that, or to acknowledge that his work was genius, and despite his human flaws he gave half of his life to the advancement of the understanding of reality, without any attempt to enrich himself from it. I do not understand how that makes me a “death worshipper,” that is just silly bird brained hyperbole, I assume another Aynish phrase you cannot help but use.
I will also point out that in revering “Newton the Scientist” you revere a scientific socialist like me, somebody that spends long hours developing new scientific knowledge only to give it away to better humanity. Newton was also a believer in giving to charities for the poor. Certainly if I am a “death worshipper”, so was Newton, and thus you revere a death worshipper.
Zombie,
>Newton the Scientist is unavailable without Newton the Jerk
To perception but not to the mind’s power of abstraction.
>human flaws
Youre rationalizing your choice to evade your power of choice.
> without any attempt to enrich himself from it. I do not understand how that makes me a “death worshipper,
You attack values, values in principle, and values are a need of life.
> you revere a scientific socialist like me
Have you had a schizophrenic episode? A drunken blackout? Ive repeatedly denied that you are a scientist and repeatedly said that youre basically like the nihilist intellectuals in Weimar Germany who convinced their nation that man’s mind was evil, impotent and irrelevant. And I note that you finally confess to socialism, the ideology responsible for maybe 200M murders as well as vast misery for its living victims.
>to better humanity
To better your floating abstraction of humanity, you call for the sacrifice of individual, real humans. “Humanity,” for you is not a value but a way of rationalizing your rage at real humans. This is Platonic/Kantian bullshit, an evasion of concretes (you deny them) for a rationalized emotion. Even the Bible recognizes (allegedly) good intentions as the road to Hell.
@Polly: Since you deny consciousness has content,
That doesn’t even mean anything. Consciousness is not a container. Not even metaphorically. You are a bird brain, Polly.
Zombie,
>scientific and logical refutation
Socially approved (“common definition”) scientific and logical refutation
Zombie,
>I accept no philosophy that is not firmly grounded in reasoning from self-evident axioms with plain language.
Since you deny consciousness has content, you cant be conscious of existence. Without existence and consciousness as axioms (properly, axiomatic concepts), what are your basic axioms?
teaparty76:
you might want to contribute something here:
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/12/29/is-selfishness-a-brain-defect/#more-58660