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, your words have no meaning, they are gibberish, you are a parrot repeating nonsense words and phrases. Noise in the room, nothing more, an intellectual suicide, lost in a circular maze of magical thinking.
Zombie,
Your explicit opposition to logically focusing your mind onto reality evicts you from rational communication. Bron continues only because he does not or will not recognize that you have chosen evasion as a way of life. Man makes choice and you have made yours.
Zombie, ‘
Reducing conceptual reason to perceptual association is your context for claiming non-humans can reason. If Newton had used perceptual association instead of concepts he would have been a scientific nothing, like you. You want his prestige but not his science. Your continued evasion of man’s volitionally focused mind evicts you from science. Testing people for perceptual association in the immediate moment is not testing man as man.
You remain a power-lusting ,selfless zero.
tony c:
at this point keeping 60% of what you make sounds like a good deal. a fuching mouse is more economically savy than most of the politicians and b-crats in government today.
@Bron: That’s how happy you could be by switching to GEICO. Oh wait, that started out as the Government Employees Insurance COmpany, you might have to check your ideological handbook first…
Animals do have consciousness, some have relatively advanced consciousness. They laugh and play, they have lifelong non-relative friends they will risk death to save or guard when injured. They have empathy. A hungry mouse will choose saving another (unrelated, same-gender) mouse over food, and then if the food can still be had, it will share that food with the mouse it saved, even though it is hungry and could finish it all.
(If two mice are just presented with food, they will both eat until the food is gone. But when one mouse saves another mouse, the saved mouse waits while the hero eats, and the hero eats about 60% of the food, and leaves the rest for the mouse saved. Mice are not selfish, and they understand context and fairness.)
I always think people should be careful when they dismiss such results as instinctual; there are enough different experiments like this that they might be arguing themselves out of having any consciousness. Occam’s Razor applies, the simplest explanation is that humans and other animals share a common evolutionary history for emotional processing, and while humans have a much more developed cortex it is just an added layer on top of a brain plan we share with many, many animals. Emotions are not unique to humans at all, and they are what drive most animals. They aren’t instinctual machines any more than we are, because ultimately emotions are what drive us, too. Hyper-Rationality and language are just tools we were lucky enough to acquire in the genetic lottery, tools we use to better satisfy our various emotional demands and desires.
Tony,
“To my knowledge, no other animal tells or gets a joke, or even plays practical jokes on members of its own species.”
I had a dog once, a Great Dane, that would disagree with you on that point. Sure, it’s anecdotal evidence, but there it is.
tony c:
animals do have consciousness. African antelope use night vision goggles to detect lions. They even make jokes about their “buddy” Carl turning vegan because he sucks at stalking.
@Polly: The one that explains most and most distinguishes man from all else is rational animal.
No, it isn’t. Other animals are rational. Also emotional. They also have language, imagination, and inventive creativity and problem solving, they make and use tools. Some can perform simple counting and arithmetic.
For almost all mental functions; what truly distinguishes man is in the degree of the function, not the existence of it. If you want to pin your hopes on any feature that seems to be unique to man; it might be our sense of humor. To my knowledge, no other animal tells or gets a joke, or even plays practical jokes on members of its own species.
A more complex explanation (which can explain jokes and why we have functions in such high degree) is that humans seem to have arbitrarily deep recursive abstraction which other animals do not (although dolphins seem pretty close).
The rest of your post is, as usual, gibberish. Or your parroted Aynish prayers in your own purposely deceptive Aynish language. We are not fooled, Polly.
Zombie, ‘
Reducing conceptual reason to perceptual association is your context for claiming non-humans can reason. If Newton ha
@Gene: The state is a tool of society. It is not society proper…
That is true, and it is a distinction I am guilty of blurring to avoid convoluted writing; basically pushing the problem of conflicts between what the state does and the will of the people to the side while sorting out what the role of the state should be in the first place.
Bron,
You mistake the state for society. The state is a tool of society. It is not society proper unless something has terribly gone wrong like totalitarianism.
@Bron: Why the adjective “small?” The question isn’t the size of the funding, the size is determined by whatever it takes to provide the protection we collectively demand to protect the rights we grant. The size of the funding is not determined first, because “small” amounts limit the number of rights we can protect more than larger amounts.
Pre-determining the size of the funding is the equivalent of saying that the right to a “small” government trumps all other rights, such as the rights to life, safety, property, fair trial, and so forth. It says that money is more important than human rights or constitutional rights. That is exactly the opposite of what the vast majority of people think.
First we determine our rights, then we determine what it costs, not the wrong way around.
Second, the question is not what is “absolutely necessary,” it is what is optimal, what preserves the most freedom for all, to pursue their goals whether they are economic or just personally gratifying, without harming others.
Third, how it should be collected is not really a major question either, if you are hinting at the “mandatory” and coercive nature of tax collection. That is a necessity of human nature. 99.5% of people in this country have a financial hole in their life, given a free hundred thousand dollars that had to be spent on themselves, they could manage that in short order. Nobody will voluntarily pay enough money to enforce the rights of others if they do not have to do that. That is why, as I posted, participation has to be mandatory, everybody would be a free rider (or at least pay far, far less than they do now, which is essentially free riding) if they could. Then we could not afford to enforce rights, and rights would not exist.
First we determine the rights (by laws) that we want, which currently include reasonably safe food, workplaces, air travel, medicines, products and neighborhoods. Then we pay whatever that costs.
Your demand for “small” payments is overruled by the majority’s demand to not be poisoned by produce or given throat cancer by a cough syrup. Thanks for the suggestion, but your greed is not worth endangering my life.
TONY C:
some small amount of funding for government is necessary. The argument is over how much is absolutely necessary and how it should be collected.
@Bron: The point of the post was not to state the obvious; the point of the post was to provide the justification for the necessity of both taxations and other mandatory obligations to one’s society.
tony c:
“Most people is not all people, and when 95% of people are not inclined to use force but five percent are, the five percent will enslave the 95% using force.”
thats right and that is what government is for.
@Bron: most people are not Initiators of force.
That is generally true, at least now, because there is a public and credible threat of punishment for initiation of force.
But even if that were true without law, it means the opposite of what you think it means. Most people is not all people, and when 95% of people are not inclined to use force but five percent are, the five percent will enslave the 95% using force.
That has been true for hundreds of thousands of years, Bron, it is how alpha male chimps rule their tribes, it is how we came to have words for kings, dictators, emperors, warlords and supreme rulers. A strong man gathers strong men around him and they summarily kill anybody that gets in their way or refuses to obey.
In the vast majority of cases, the elite ruling class is a very small percentage of the whole population, because, as you say, most people will not initiate a forceful confrontation, especially against a well-armed, brutal and ruthlessly subjugating force.
Society is not necessary to protect us against “most” people, it is necessary to protect us against the 15% or so that would engage in various crimes (including those requiring force) if they were not threatened by a legal system of cops, investigators, courts and prisons. Burglars, muggers, bank robbers, rapists, kidnappers and serial killers already run all the risks of personal confrontation with victims that are entitled to respond with lethal force. They are a small percentage of the population, but without the legal system as a deterrent against their predations there would be far more of them and their crimes would be rampant.
I think that is obvious; a man capable of murder is not restrained from murder by his victim, his victim is dead. If he is restrained from murder it is by the threat of retaliation posed by society and their obligation to investigate and punish murders.
tony c:
actually, most people are not Initiators of force. What most people dont understand is that property is one of the things our government was created to protect.
Insurance does not protect your property from people who will take it away from you.
@Bron: the state has a duty to protect the individual.
Yes they do. However, there is no way to protect one individual against a mob of individuals that could overwhelm him, unless a larger mob of individuals has the duty to protect him. That is just the physics of the real world, that an overwhelming force exists for all individuals. Taken to its logical extension, the majority of individuals must be obligated to protect each person; and the only way that can be fair and reliable is if the arrangement is reciprocal, and the only way to prevent free riders from enjoying protection without providing any is to make participation mandatory for the majority, with any exceptions (like children, the mentally disabled, the elderly) declared only by the majority.
Simply claiming the state has a duty to protect is only the first step; once we recognize that duty we must then recognize that protection, in a practical sense, requires time, money, and entails the risk of lethal retaliation. We must recognize that the state has a duty to protect all people equally, including children, disabled and feeble, including the rich and poor alike.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for shallow thinkers to handle is recognizing that protection is 99% a process of deterrence through the threat of punishment, so unlike most other products the benefit is 99% invisible, because it lies in the horrors that didn’t happen; the bombs that did not go off, the rapes and robberies and murders and burglaries and frauds that never occurred.
Insurance is a product with some similarities, in the sense that you pay a premium to cover losses that, while unlikely, would be financially catastrophic if they happened. But Insurance isn’t the same thing as protection, because insuring a property (or life) is a passive transaction, while protection is an active one. Insuring my house against fire does not reduce the chance of a fire occurring. But paying taxes to have criminals pursued and incarcerated does reduce my chances of being victimized by those criminals; left to go free they would surely commit far more crimes.
Gene:
Yes, they both have value, the individual has a natural right to exist, the state has a duty to protect the individual. When it does, the state has intrinsic value.
“I am rather perplexed as to how society can have instrinsic value if the individual does not.”
You pose the same old false dichotomy, Bron.
It’s not an either or proposition. Both have value.
one must ask, what kind of society has value. Certainly German society circa 1933-1945 had no intrinsic value. Why did German society during that time in history not have value? The most obvious answer is because they did not respect the right of certain people to exist.
We can also ask ourselves the same question about communist society crica 1917-1990 and we can answer that the individual was subservient to the state.
If we look at all societies which have little or no intrinsic value, we find the one missing element is regard for the individual.
I am rather perplexed as to how society can have instrinsic value if the individual does not. The German State circa 1933-1945 did not recognize the right of the individual to exist except as needed by the state. Every part of human existence was directed toward the continuation of the state. And so it is with other states which have little regard for the individual.
Society, is after all, nothing more than a collection of individuals. What is good for one individual is good for all. Liberty, self determination, the right to exist, the right to property are good for all individuals. The more free the state the better it is for the individual’s life.
We enter into society to protect our rights in a more efficient manner, we do not enter into society to give up rights. The only right we should be giving up by entering into society is the right to punish people who have violated our rights. That is why we have a court system, police and a national defense force.
Rand was very much for individual rights, all individuals had value as rational beings. Individuals, to her, had immense intrinsic value.
I am really curious as to why people think a person who believed in the sanctity of an individual human being and their metaphysical right to exist for their own sake would consider that person a sociopath?
We are only somewhat free?
“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.”
Said the Nazi death camp guard who tortured them anyway.
“>others and society both exist and possess value beyond your ability to exploit them for your own pleasure.
Value to whom?”
Spoken like a true exploiter of others. People and society have intrinsic value. You, of course, cannot see that because like all Aynish you think the universe revolves around you and you alone. Like a good lil’ sociopath.