We have been discussing the tax policies of President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government — a record that I have criticized as ruinous from an economic standpoint. A recent report indicates that for some high-earning families — more than 8,000 — the Hollande policies impose a 100% tax. It is the ultimate “eat the rich” policy. Even for those families facing a 75% rate, it is unclear why they would continue to work in the country. Many are not. France is experiencing a flight of both high earners and companies.
The bizarre 100% tax is the result of a one-off levy last year on 2011 incomes for households with assets of more than 1.3 million euros ($1.67 million). The surcharge was imposed shortly after Hollande took office on a promise to hit the rich with high taxes. The Hollande 75% direct tax was so unfair that the Constitutional Council struck it down. However, this report states that the one-off levy effectively pushed some families to a 100% tax.
The newspaper Les Echos found that nearly 12,000 households paid taxes last year worth more than 75 percent of their 2011 revenues due to the exceptional levy. ($1 = 0.7798 euros).
Putting aside how many families are impacted by taxes above 75%, it is in my view an insane, self-destructive economic policy for France. I just spent an evening with a friend and his parents discussing the situation in France. This is a moderate family politically that has long fished in French waters. My friend is now an American citizen but his parents and family remain in France. They recounted how they had to destroy half of their ships because of taxes. They are seeing other businesses doing the same or simply moving out of France. These a patriotic and proud French people but they are watching their government cannibalize off the economy. The government is getting instant revenue while killing revenue producing businesses. It is like eating the grapes and roots of the vineyards of Bordeaux for food and leaving the fields barren.
As someone who truly loves visiting France, it is disheartening to watch Hollande’s cultural war on the wealthy. I favor higher taxes as part of a comprehensive package of reforms in this country and other countries. However, Hollande’s expressed hatred of the rich resulted in a political success and now an economic disaster. It is also grossly unfair to wealth French who love their country and are not opposed to making sacrifices. Hollande played the class card and told the French that their problems were due to a sinister upper class rather than France’s high labor costs and burgeoning budgets. Even if one dismisses this study and the one-year levy, there are still many thousands of families and businesses who face a government demanding 75 percent tax rates.
These policies however will only lengthen the economic crisis. Indeed, France is already viewed as a hostile country for business and that is likely to continue under Hollande who is fighting the French judges to impose taxes higher than what is viewed as constitutional or fair by the courts.
Source: Reuters
DavidM: As far as sales are concerned, I have two shelves of books on sales. The best I have ever read is a scientific analysis of successful sales by Neil Rackham; entitled “SPIN Selling”, the SPIN stands for “Situation – Problem – Implication – Need,” shorthand for the steps in the approach. (I think that later “spin” acquired a negative meaning from politics that has nothing to do with this approach.)
The jacket says, “The Best Validated Sales method available today; developed from studies of 35,000 sales calls. Used by the top sales forces across the world.”
I had absorbed aspects of this method (without knowing it) by osmosis working alongside good salespeople, but this book made it clear to me what was working and why, and where I was going wrong. It is an excellent consultative approach to technical big ticket sales, which are fundamentally different than glad-handing, joke-telling low-consequence sales, at which I suck. It made a virtue out of my natural inclination toward skipping the (to me) awkward small talk and jumping directly into figuring out how to help the potential client; and it really worked.
Different books work for different people; but probably the best thing about this approach would be that it is based upon questions and observations; so by using it yourself you can build a sales formula that is teachable. i.e. like IBM you do not hire people naturally good at selling your services, you hire potential out of college and teach them how to be good salespeople.
DavidM: I do not want to give the impression I have never been burned by a hiring or disappointed; heck I have been defrauded by an employee before. It took me several years to question the wisdom of interviewing people as I myself had been interviewed, and decide I (and my interviewers) were testing for qualities that did not seem to me predictive of anything. Like you, when I hired people that did well with the common style of interview, they often turned out to just interview well and nothing else.
Your management style may be different than mine, and I don’t know how to test for the qualities you need, but as an expert hopefully you can devise a test and a focus on what you actually want to see from them in their work environment every day of the week should not fare any worse than what you are doing now.
DavidM: You probably need to change the way you interview; and hiring a salesman may be the wrong focus. I typically hire from the bottom, it is cheaper. For example, you can hire college students to do tech support for close to minimum wage; pay attention to their GPA (which is a good proxy for how well they can memorize and learn). That would give YOU time to sell, which is really the most important role in the business. The same would be true for development; although I wouldn’t use college students, I have in the past hired recent BS graduates and MS graduates.
If your interview method is resulting in 80% misses, you should scrap it and start over, or rethink what you are hiring. For example, I have seen the sales job successfully broken into two parts; prospecting followed up by consultative selling and closing. So instead of hiring a sales person, you hire a sales prospector that does the cold-calling, research and legwork of finding likely prospects and the decision makers for you to contact. The time consuming part of the job, not the part that requires your full knowledge of capabilities, deliverables, time to finish and so forth.
Although I do recommend scanning resumes, and after I have interviewed people and decided I like them doing background checks and contacting references, besides those mechanical issues I recommend you forget anything you know about interviewing and approach it as a graded test of the key ability you want in the employee. Present and discuss an actual work problem with them, and judge them on that. For myself, I have always thought it was important they understand whatever is unique about the way I like to instruct them, so that is all I tested. Some thought it a weird interview, but I don’t care, it worked almost every time. Basically I gave them a realistic ten or fifteen minute simulation of an actual assignment, like I would give to a regular employee, and then have them tell me what they heard they were supposed to do. The better they understood the assignment and would have known how to proceed, the more likely they were to be hired, and the more likely I was to like their work.
I don’t care about their stories, or experience, or why they are looking, or what they hope to achieve in life. I do not see how any of that makes any difference to the work they will do. All I want to know is if they can do the work I am hiring them to do, and so I devote 100% of my interview to that.
If only one in five ever works out well, I suspect you are assessing people on a false measure of worth, like sorting fruit on size instead of flavor, so you let the good workers go and keep the flashy but bad ones. You need a different measuring stick, which would naturally be manifested in a completely different interviewing technique.
Excellent advice, Tony. I can see why you have been so successful in consulting and running businesses. Thanks.
I just have to laugh every time I read some poster regaliing us with stories of how as a student they defeated their professors in debate, left their classmates speechless at their brilliance, and their professors were sheepish, embarrassed and cowed by their own incompetence and inability to answer. As the student strides heroically from the fallen, sheathing their rhetorical bloody sword, their gaze steady on the horizon and a bright future.
Fantasy is a wonderful thing. You go, girl.
ROTFLOL. Nicely worded. There wasn’t any professor defeated in debate, but the way you said this, you had me in stitches too. 🙂
DavidM: If the money is not there, the idealized plan you outline becomes entirely quixotic.
Anytime I had a prospective client that said he did not have the money to hire me, my question was always, “What else do you have besides money?”
Money is not the only medium of exchange, as I said in the post that crossed yours an apprenticeship might be in order as part of your retirement plan. You can develop the business protocol book without hiring anybody; you can train existing employees to take on technical support duties to give you time to do that.
I don’t know you or your life well enough to label it a failure; if what you say is true you have found some success. I am not being supercilious here, I write about your business alternatives because my effort to do so costs me less than the slim chance you will take it to heart and it will do somebody some good, by preserving a value that would otherwise go to waste.
That will not benefit me directly, but might benefit society in the long run. It is the same reason I do not mind paying thousands per year in property taxes to educate kids that are not mine, and that I do not even know, because I think they have potential value that should be realized and not wasted, and although I will receive no specific return directly, I think society and mankind are better off for it.
What I think is there may be a value in your business that you currently plan to let go to waste, so I was trying to point that out because you still have time to save it. If for the sake of your ego you prefer to pretend the business must die with you, or before you, because saving it is just too much work, fine, do that.
Tony, I do appreciate both the content and the tenor of your post that crossed when mine went through. I am at that stage and trying to determine the best way to navigate it. I also have considered going after venture capital to move forward, but right now I am trying to see how a new salesman does to bring in the needed capital to bring on additional employees that would make the business less dependent upon me.
The most important thing for me in my business right now is to get it to be self sustaining with no need for me. Getting there seems to take a lot of time without capital.
One other aspect is I stumble when hiring people. It seems like only about 1 in 5 employees ever work out well. Others just drain me of money and I have to start all over again with someone else. Sometimes I’m so burned by the experience, I have to be without a replacement for five or six months until I can afford to try someone else.
DavidM: My beef with Fox News is that it purposely lies and deceptively edits in order to influence people into thinking things that are not true.
I no longer watch MSNBC, but looking at things through a liberal lens and presenting events from a liberal POV, or failing to present the Conservative counter-arguments, is NOT the same thing as outright deception and falsehoods that Fox News and some right wing radio engages in.
I do not wish to suppress anybody’s opinion, but I am not in favor of allowing lying under the pretense that it is “entertainment” and therefore anything goes. They do not present their lies as comedy or satire, shows like The Daily Show, Colbert Report or Saturday Night Live are clearly labeled as such. They present their lies as serious fact. There is a line, and Fox News lives on the wrong side of it. I think they endanger lives and cost society dearly by their irresponsible deceptions, and they just don’t care, because they are focused on their bottom line at any cost, including lying.
Tony C wrote: “My beef with Fox News is that it purposely lies and deceptively edits in order to influence people into thinking things that are not true.”
Without you offering any specific examples of Fox News lying, I’m not sure how to take your comment. From my perspective, news anchors and news commentators within all the news agencies present news in a way that makes sense to them. It use to be taught in journalism to be as objective as possible, but viewers are going to be bored with plain facts. Add to this the fact that ever since Woodward and Bernstein toppled a President, it seems like every news reporter realizes his power to affect world affairs.
I do not fault any news agency for attempting to give context and interpretation to the news they present, because historians do the same thing with history. It makes the information much more interesting to put it within a framework of understanding rather than just a jumble of disconnected facts. Nevertheless, I do fault those who fail to realize that this happens with every news agency. I would find fault with news anchors who misreport facts either by intellectual blunder or outright lying. It sounds like this is your perspective about Fox News, but like I said before, without hearing a few specific examples where I could agree that they had to be lying, I really do not perceive Fox News the same way that you do.
When I have time to watch some news, I usually flip between CNN and Fox News about equally. Often this is at the gym during my cardio workout. I record The O’Reilly Factor and watch it sometimes at home because I like the way O’Reilly approaches subjects and invites guests from opposite sides of the issue who he judges to be honest. I like his style of interrupting guests who go off on a rabbit trail. Whenever he has a guest hosting the program because he is not available, I usually don’t bother even watching the program because they just don’t have his style that creates the same thought provoking situations. His program, however, is a News Analysis show, and not a hard news show. The whole point is about providing opinion and analysis of news, not reporting news. I hope you appreciate the distinction. O’Reilly is not a conservative like me and so I often disagree with his opinion, but he seems to have an uncanny way of getting two people from opposite sides of an issue to debate passionately a current event.
For what it is worth, I started reading this blog because of Fox News. Jonathan Turley is somewhat of a regular on Fox News. Turley’s comments and news analysis on Fox News have been informative and interesting so for better or worse, Fox News led me to check out Turley’s blog.
Mike: Thanks.
DavidM: For most businesses, the real value of the business lies in the intangible relationships, channels, and awareness that have been built up over time. It is a particular network that has been empirically built, trimmed, and improved over time, by trial and error, that somehow results in cost effective marketing, sales and clients with reliable people and firms you trust.
In my experience many small business owners fail to grasp this fact, because they began with a product and no network. So for example, the value of NOW knowing who does a cost effective and good job of printing the manuals escaped them. That value is at least the cost of wasted time, money, and the frustration of busted deadlines with three previous printers. There is also the value of experience should that printer cease to function, knowing what to look for in a new printer.
In your case, I can probably raid Microsoft or Intel or the CS faculty of a university and find programmers comparable to you, but it would still be difficult to recreate your company with just that. You have clients that trust you that would not trust a new guy; and you have developed a mental model of how this business works and what to expect, with specific vendors and workers and protocols, that reliably (meaning with low risk of failure) results in a marketable product which a generic ‘good programmer’ would not have.
Which is good, because those relationships and that mental model can be preserved. In some businesses that “working business machine” is put on paper explicitly for the purpose of franchising: All the business experience gleaned by trial and error over years gets refined into a low risk formula so somebody without experience can execute the business, and all they really need to know is how to make a sandwich.
But even if your business is not franchisable, you can do something similar and document “how you do it,” and still preserve that value. If you earn well over what the average programmer earns then similar to a franchise, by preserving that intangible value, that abstraction of your business currently in your head, you (or your wife, or your kids) might find somebody with the necessary raw programming skill willing to take over your business and take your place in order to earn a higher income.
That is becoming increasingly easier to execute with the Internet. There are various ways to value such an opportunity; but the basic idea is like the “ten million dollar” hypothetical I put forth above: If you can hand over a business “machine” with a manual that lets somebody earn 50% more per year (versus simply working for others) for the rest of their career, how much of the “50% more” should they pay for the machine?
Break even is how much time and money it would take them to develop such a business all themselves, which may be a price out of reach for them, or too risky a proposition for them, or well beyond their skill set. (Being a programmer does not make one a successful entrepreneur.)
All of those obstacles are overcome if they are just running your business, and can buy it from you using your cash flow (perhaps by living on a third of your take-home for a number of years until the business is paid for; :-)). In other words, you can arrange the sale of the business as a loan from you (personally) to the buyer with the business as collateral and payment terms. Or you can set up a royalty system (always as a percentage of revenue, to avoid accounting tricks) or both. Or you might even be able to define it as a formal apprenticeship, transferring parts of your workload to a new hire (with experience), at a reduced salary while you train them to take over your position and eventually formally acquire the company.
Whatever the arrangement, it will illustrate for the buyer their own exit strategy, so although risk is still present their risk is diminished since the price paid by your buyer will be recovered by them in the future when they wish to retire and sell to somebody else, and recovered with bonus if they managed to grow the business.
Then your inheritors have some income, your employees have a job, and your customers don’t have to struggle to find somebody new. Unless you provide some unique, nontransferable insight or skill or talent, preserving the intangibles produced by your entrepreneurial work is something you should consider, it probably has a lot of value that you should not let go to waste.
P.S. And leave a document in the envelope with your will that details your latest thinking on that transition plan.
Tony,
Been following this thread with fascination, admiration and edification. You are delivering a seminar on government, politics and logic. Idf David didn’t exist we’d have to invent him to serve as a foil gor your brilliance.
DavidM: Take me out of the picture, and this business would not succeed, my employees would have to go find another job and my customers would have to go elsewhere for the needs they currently get satisfied by my business.
I think that is pretty bad business and family planning on your part, but perhaps your ego is more important to you than your family. Because, as I related my own experience of nearly being run over while sitting in my office, you can be taken out at any time.
If you are earning more per hour of work in your business than you could earn as an employee, then you should be able to hire employees that, in a stretch, could replace you. And in my opinion you should, that is your moral responsibility to your family and to your employees, to provide a backup plan for your own efforts that would allow the continuance of income from the machine you have built; it should not die with you just because you want to be egotistical and think it is all about you. You can avoid inflicting a double dose of cruelty on your family, the simultaneous loss of you and their primary source of income.
You should be training employees such that, with an extra 10 hours a week for a handful of them, they can keep the business going; perhaps with directional input from your family or a friend. That will also serve you well should illness or accident prevent your participation, another form of catastrophic cascade that can be prevented: An illness killing your business and income.
A solo practitioner like a lawyer or MD cannot mitigate the effect of their loss to their company, except by become a partner of a larger firm. Somebody in your profession can however, particularly since you claim working double hours is routine. It should not be. You could sacrifice some of your income now and restructure your work force so the business can survive and continue to generate profit with a routine replacement of you (earning less than you). Like a programmer. Your business should be structured for resilience, so if anybody vanishes in a car accident the business will survive. That transition does not have to be smooth, but it should be at least plausible and possible.
DavidM: …the success of my business is all up to me.
No, it isn’t. Just because you are a necessary ingredient does not make you the only necessary ingredient. Do you use the postal service? Do you rely on the electrical grid? Do you and your employees and suppliers depend on the roads, or do you all walk to work?
If I take away all your employees and prohibit you from having any, does your business survive?
Don’t you, in an abstract analysis, depend upon the government punishing burglars, kidnappers, and armed robbers to reduce the chance of those crimes being perpetrated against you?
If I have a hundred parts in a turbine, and the failure of any one of them will destroy the turbine, it is silly (and dangerously misleading) to claim that any one of them is THE most important part.
And what I am doing is objective. I supported Obama in getting elected, I now despise Obama as a liar and opportunist, I do not know of any President that has outright broken, by their own choice, more campaign promises they made than Obama. That position is because I can divorce my emotions from my logical thinking, something you are clearly incapable of doing.
Even though I despise Obama, that does not mean I will misinterpret his clear intent, or attribute malice to him that is not present, and in this case his intent was to reference the infrastructure paid for by other people, that is blatantly obvious.
DavidM: You are taking Obama’s statement out of context by ignoring the pause and the fact that the preceding statements are obviously intended to be prefatory and are obviously what he is referring to, because you want to take offense, precisely as Fox News wants to take offense and relishes any opportunity to do so, regardless of Obama’s intent.
Tell me, what do you think the purpose of those prefatory comments were? They are not pointless commentary, and it is idiotic to believe the pronoun “that” referred to anything else.
Tony C wrote: “Tell me, what do you think the purpose of those prefatory comments were?”
The purpose was context. That doesn’t change the conclusion of the context, that if you have a business, you didn’t build that. It is amazing that you construct a sentence yourself that completely contradicts Obama’s statement, yet you defend him. Really amazing.
And what is your beef with Fox News? I’ve never seen someone so fixated on a news agency. Why do you keep mentioning them as if they are the only news agency people watch?
Tony C wrote: “I think that is pretty bad business and family planning on your part…”
Of course it is, but it is the reality of life. If the money is not there, the idealized plan you outline becomes entirely quixotic. The only way the business could keep going is if I had enough money to pay another developer (who surely would want more money than I pay myself right now) and another technical support person. If the government didn’t take so much, I could hire some people to perform these functions so that they could keep the business going without me. As it is now, I have to creep along until I can get to that point. Go ahead, keep telling me how stupid I am and what I failure I have been in all aspects of my life. That seems to be your only argument now, and Mike seems to enjoy watching you gut me with these emotional ad hominem slurs.
“That doesn’t change the conclusion of the context, that if you have a business, you didn’t build that.”
David,
Frankly that interpretation of yours is logically nonsensical, but exemplifies the problem with your partisanship. Due to it you are only able to comprehend that which agrees with your prior beliefs. This flaw makes an intelligent man such as yourself blindly ignorant to anything that differs from your view of “reality”. I assume that this flaw only extends to your personal beliefs, or else you would be unsuccessful in your business endeavor. Incidentally, Tony has a long history of despising Obama, but Tony does not let his enmity for the man interfere with his assessment on individual issue. That was what he was trying to explain about critical thinking. As for me, I began to believe I was on the path to wisdom when I came to realize I didn’t know anywhere as much as I thought I did. That could be called intellectual humility and I think a strong dose of it would benefit you.
Mike, you confuse opinions built upon different premises with bigotry. I reject the premise of Tony’s analysis of language, that pronouns have antecedents found in prior sentences. Blame my professors of English and Technical Writing for creating this alleged bias you claim that I have. I reject Tony’s premise that context changes the conclusions later made based upon context. Many sophists create a context so that the end conclusion which is unreasonable appears reasonable because of the emotions of agreement aroused by them. This is exactly what President Obama did here. I never find it helpful for any intellectual to assume that the person who disagrees with them does so because of a priori beliefs rather than carefully thought out analysis of the premises involved. Certainly we all have to be aware of internal biases that we have. Most people are not aware of them and cannot articulate them. My science education taught me to identify premises and think outside of paradigms that others take for granted.
It reminds me of a seminar class I had in graduate school on the concept of coevolution. At the end of the class, the entire class seemed in agreement that the papers we had studied that attempted to document coevolution had failed to do so. We were being taught to think skeptically and find holes in the arguments of scientific publications. I raised the point that there had been at least enough evidence for coevolution as we accept for regular evolution. Some of the classmates became agitated at that suggestion and I challenged them to present some evidence that was stronger. They started with the fossil record, and I challenged their point with specific examples of difficulties with the fossil record, asking, so what does it really prove with certainty in the same way you were convinced that coevolution is not proven? The students were speechless and looked to the three professors in the room. Two also were silent, but one professor sheepishly conceded that everything I had said was absolutely true and that there were these problems.
The problem was that these students, while being taught to be skeptical about certain issues, did not apply that same skepticism to other areas. This phenomenon also happens with you and Tony in these threads. There are areas you apply your thinking capacities properly, but other areas that you avoid because your worldview shapes your mind to resist going there. You have previously concluded with a firm conviction, for example, that big government is the solution to a multitude of problems, so almost every problem you look at is setup to bring you toward that same conclusion. There are areas in life for which you are objective, and there are other areas for which you are not. I brought up a slavery issue in another thread to test and demonstrate this same phenomena. Such reveals who is stuck in this kind of biased thinking and those who are able to be objective about issues that appear outlandish to others entrenched in the acceptable indoctrination of our culture.
“I reject the premise of Tony’s analysis of language, that pronouns have antecedents found in prior sentences.”
David,
Unknowingly, apparently, you made my point. Sorry to interrupt this fascinating dialogue, that I see is mainly a worthy lecture on Tony’s part.
DavidM: Just because I have some understanding of the arguments of others does not mean that I embrace them myself.
On the contrary, you do embrace them when you argue we should pass law that “respects” them and their argument. Which is what you did, you claimed there are enough of them that think it is murder that we should respect them. That is embracing their argument, like it or not.
Only later do you try to switch horses in midstream to claim the majority do not want taxes to fund abortion, which is a different argument altogether. it also is an argument I reject; should I be able to defund the military, or foreign aid, or the war on drugs, or immigration deportation, because I don’t want my taxes spent on those programs? Taxpayers do not get to vote on the details of how their federal taxes get spent, except indirectly through their Congressional candidates.
DavidM: The “built it myself” argument is a strawman you constructed to make me look foolish.
And it worked.
DavidM: I have never argued anywhere that I built it myself.
You said, The success of my business is all up to me, despite Obama’s silly comment,
You said, Obama distanced himself from people who have created a business from nothing.
Clearly, by saying the latter, you believe such people exist, and by your first statement and disaffection with Obama’s statement, it is fair to infer from the prior statement you think you are one of them.
Now you can try to weasel out of that, claim I got it wrong.
As for the grammar, the pause in the statement is what proves ‘that’ refers to the prefacing statements immediately before. They serve a purpose and cannot be divorced and discarded from the thought; thus they are the only plausible target of the pronoun that doesn’t make the paragraph incoherent.
I know that might strain your intellect, but that is what happens when you get married to taking a statement out of context. That is what “context” means.
Tony, the success of my business is all up to me. Take me out of the picture, and this business would not succeed, my employees would have to go find another job and my customers would have to go elsewhere for the needs they currently get satisfied by my business. That is not at all the same thing as the “built it myself” or “built it all by myself without credit going to anyone else” argument that you made and argued against. The “built it from nothing” statement is accurate also. You just read more into language than what actually exists. In President Obama’s statement, you create a similar effect by removing words in a sentence to make it say what you want it to say, despite the rules of grammar.
You are taking President Obama’s statement out of context by removing the phrase “if you’ve got a business.” What you are doing reminds me of Obama in the Presidential debate claiming that he called the attack on Benghazi an act of terrorism, when in reality his words were ambiguous, about any act of terror. Such is pure sophistry.
There seems to be some disagreement with my assertion of about 50% of our budget being spent on the military. This is from the War Resisters League analysis for the 2014 fiscal year.
43% – Human Resources includes health/human services, ss administration, education dept. food/nutrition programs, housing and urban devmt, labor dept, earned inc/child credits, health insurance credits, other human resources
6% – General Government includes treasury (including 20% interest on debt), government personnel, justice dept, state dept (partial), NASA (50%), judicail, legislative, allowances (proposals), other general govt.
5% – Physical Resources includes agriculture, interior, transportation, homeland security (partial), HUD, commerce, energy (non-military), environmental protection, nat. science fdtn, army corps of engineers, fed. comm. commission, other physical resources
27% – Current Military includes military personnel, operation and maint., procurement, r&d, construction, family housing, retiree pay/health care, doe nuke weapons/cleanup, NASA (50%), internal security asst., homeland security (military), state dept (partial), fbi military, other current military
20% Past military includes veterans’ benefits, interest on national debt
Current and past military is 47%. This adds up to about 50%
DavidM: I would be happy to support the idea that food stamps and assisted school lunches be Vegan. Sounds like a great idea to me, one that shows respect for others in society.
Great! How shall we do that and also show respect for the minority Atkins advocates that think (with solid evidence) all carbohydrates create health problems, and are directly responsible for the increase in diabetes in children; and it is immoral to deny children animal proteins?
How shall we do that and also show respect for the minority of calorie restriction advocates, who are actually healthier than the average person on almost every measure, that believe children should be eating 30% less than they do now?
How shall we do that and also show respect for the minority viewpoint that if children starve it is their parents fault, and providing any assistance to children for any reason encourages laziness?
You ignored the point and seized on a specific, but the point was that there are too many conflicting minority viewpoints to satisfy them all. It is nearly impossible to have conflicting majority viewpoints, that would require some people to hold two conflicting viewpoints simultaneously, and such crazy people that cannot choose between conflicting options can be safely excluded from the sample anyway, because the final decision will match ONE of their multiple viewpoints.
DavidM: No, it isn’t. The potential to become a human being is not a realized event. From the point of view of science, every cell in your body, including the ones in your mucous membranes that you kill by eating, blowing your nose or eliminating waste are potential human beings, all on their own. We have cloned animals so the offspring are 100% the DNA of the single parent, and thus every cell, by virtue of holding a complete copy of the DNA and (by science again) potentially a pluripotent stem cell to boot, is a potential human being.
Once again, your argument proves too much. If mere potential to be a human being is what constitutes “murder” than every sperm cell or egg is a potential human being. Does a woman commit “murder” if she fails to make every attempt to become impregnated when her eggs are fertile? If she chooses to abstain from sex for any reason, she sentences that potential human being to death! And yet, the religious promote (or even insist) upon abstinence until marriage, thereby sentencing to death dozens of potential humans, and for most females, preventing the birth of at least two or three children.
Your “reason” of potentiality when logically applied to all situations, results in complete absurdities. I think a large number of people have the potential to become a medical doctor, but the number that actually do so will inevitably be far less than the number that had the potential to do so. That does not mean the ones that failed to reach their potential can claim they are medical doctors.
The same is true for a fertilized egg. It is human DNA, but so is a liver tumor, and we don’t have to let it live. It is a potential human, but so is every human egg, and we tend to let the mother producing those eggs decide whether to risk (or attempt) fertilization of her eggs. There is something else that determines “humanity,” and although I understand there is not consensus on that point, in my view it is a degree of brain functionality, specifically when the frontal cortex starts correlated operations about the fifth or six month of pregnancy. Prior to that, I do not regard the fetus is a person, and the mother should be free to abort. After that, I think the fetus has crossed a gray line that borders personhood, and its human rights must be balanced with those of the mother (which might prohibit arbitrary abortion of a healthy fetus, if carrying to term involves no unusual risk to the mother).
Tony C –
I hope one day it dawns on you that I do not fit the stereotype in which you try to place me. Just because I have some understanding of the arguments of others does not mean that I embrace them myself. I never made any argument for “potential life.” As you surely know, most of those who see abortion as murder because of their scientific understanding of fertilization are against stem cell research and cloning too. Please do not attempt to push me into defending their position because it is not my position. I am more close to your view than theirs. Sometimes I even think you perceive me to be a Christian with one of your recent comments.
DavidM: Obama distanced himself from people who have created a business from nothing.
Nobody creates a business from nothing. Everybody relies upon society and their infrastructure to create a business, even a singer or laborer that uses nothing but their own body rely at a minimum upon law enforcement to keep them from being enslaved and their contracts enforced.
It is amazing to me that you are blind to this self evident truth.
DavidM: The amount of outcry about his comment should give you pause to reconsider that your experience in life must be different than all the American’s who felt slighted by what he said.
No, it gives me pause to wonder whether this level of ignorance and self-centeredness is really the best humanity has to offer. My experience in life is indeed much different than most Americans, very few of them were on their own at 16 and working 30 hours a week to support themselves while attending high school full time. That was a choice on my part but it is a choice few Americans have made. (My father, himself married and working full time at 15 (to my mother who gave birth at 16), did not even consider my plan that unusual; he found me the job I would need.)
I was on my own to find my way to college, which I paid for myself while contributing a third of my pay to help my family, and later when my father died my contributions increased to cover the shortfall in my mother’s income.
I think I have bootstrapped myself more than most. Perhaps not as much as people that have had to overcome cancer or disability, but for the most part if you had free shelter and food throughout high school, I win this silly “did it myself” argument.
However, I still do not think I did it myself, or built it myself, because I also did not pay for the public school I was attending, I did not pay for the roads I was biking on, and the pittance I paid for public transportation would have bought exactly zero transportation by itself, it did not even cover the gas, maintenance and labor expenses of the public transportation system, and I contributed nothing to the capital expenses of buying buses and building bus stops in the first place.
This “built it myself” argument is pure egotistical Bull, and supremely hypocritical of the supposedly Christian people the espouse it. Once again, an atheist is more humble and grateful for the support of the citizens of this country than you are. I will throw in, for Memorial Day, the next time you have the urge to proclaim you built it from nothing with the help of nobody you have the guts to do that while standing before the gravestones in Arlington National Cemetery.
Tony C wrote: “This “built it myself” argument is pure egotistical Bull, and supremely hypocritical of the supposedly Christian people the espouse it.”
For such a humble man, you sure do attribute a log of egotism and hubris to others.
The “built it myself” argument is a strawman you constructed to make me look foolish. I have never argued anywhere that I built it myself. My position is as you argued it against the strawman, that I built my business in an American system that made it possible. And as you know, building my business was not my first choice in life. I failed to achieve what my heart still longs to be doing in life.
Or, in the context of the tax question, out of respect to Vegans, should we insist that things like public school lunch assistance should be strictly Vegan, or that food stamps can only buy Vegan-approved food items?
DavidM: Whether right or wrong, there are too many people who view abortion as murder, so it is wrong to force them to contribute toward providing abortions.
Then nothing happens, ever. There are too many people opposed to war and too many in favor of war, too many opposed to prostitution and too many that think it should be legal between consenting adults.
In argumentation there is a criticism that an argument “proves too much,” and this is a fatal flaw in much of your argumentation. It means that the argument you give, if applied uniformly outside the specific reason you are using it, can essentially prove anything. Therefore, logically, it is not a worthwhile distinction to make, it does not inform a decision, it is just an emotional appeal.
In this case, what is “too many?” If the majority of people believe abortion is NOT murder, why aren’t they “too many” to deny them abortion as a solution to their problem? Why does a minority get to prevail over a majority? The minority has every right to abstain from abortion, even if it is legal, so legalizing abortion does not personally affect them. Their desire to prevent abortion is a desire of a minority to force a majority to obey the morality of the minority.
That is why your argument “proves too much,” it is an argument for minority rule, which almost all of us find inherently unfair. It either leads to anarchy (because fragmented opinion produces many minorities and there is no way to choose between them), or it leads to a privileged minority, like a church or cabal of dictators, that oppress the majority against the will of majority.
The argument that some minority of medically ignorant and / or religiously deluded people think person hood begins at conception and therefore abortion is “murder” does not explain why we should feel compelled to respect their unscientific, evidence-free opinion.
I could say the same thing about Vegans, by the way, that sincerely claim eating meat or using animals as scientific test subjects is “murder,” and using animal products is “slavery.” They are a minority too. They also can eat as they will regardless of the law, nobody is forcing them to eat meat or eggs or drink milk. Should we all feel compelled to comply with their demands, and become unwilling Vegans in order to mollify their runaway empathy?
Tony C –
Actually, their reason for believing abortion is murder from the moment of conception is based upon science. Their reasoning is that all the genetic material that makes up this person is present at the moment of conception. As science does not believe in the concept of a spirit or soul, from a purely scientific analysis of the chemistry involved, that fertilized embryo is a living human being. Ironically, there are religious reasons that cause me to consider that it is not a human being just yet.
The issue of abortion deals with an unconscionable act, which is why it must be dealt with carefully. This is why the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v Wade that viability of the fetus was the key point at which they could no longer guarantee that the woman’s choice was solely her own. Therefore, they allowed the States to regulate abortion after the third trimester.
You seem to make the case that the majority have voted for abortion and for taxpayer assisted abortion, but that is clearly not the case. There was no vote taken to make abortion legal, neither was there any vote taken to use taxpayer funding for abortion. These decisions were made by the elite rulers of our society. The polls I have read indicate that the majority of Americans do not support taxpayer funding. It is the current oligarchy who has made it so, not the American democratic process.
Even if people did vote to make abortion legal, something deemed unconscionable (I assume you know the legal connotation of this term) by half of society, they should at least not have the audacity to claim they can’t pay for it on their own or through their own private charities. Forcing anyone to use community funds to support any unconscionable act, is immoral and uncivilized. Yet, that is what our present government is doing.
Tony wrote: “should we insist that things like public school lunch assistance should be strictly Vegan, or that food stamps can only buy Vegan-approved food items?”
I’m not sure that Vegans really perceive another person eating meat to be unconscionable. I don’t see their extremists killing others for eating meat or picketing outside restaurants or school lunch rooms for serving meat. Nevertheless, even if there was one person who felt that way, I would be happy to support the idea that food stamps and assisted school lunches be Vegan. Sounds like a great idea to me, one that shows respect for others in society.
Tony wrote:
“That is why your argument “proves too much,” it is an argument for minority rule, which almost all of us find inherently unfair. It either leads to anarchy (because fragmented opinion produces many minorities and there is no way to choose between them), or it leads to a privileged minority, like a church or cabal of dictators, that oppress the majority against the will of majority.”
It is not my argument that leads to minority rule. It is the pro-abortion side that is doing the minority rule thing that you assert almost of of us find inherently unfair. Basically, just 7 Supreme Court Justices ruled against the voting majority in 1973. The majority of people today would vote against taxpayer funding for abortions if they were given a chance to vote.
So you argued so strongly against minority rule, yet that is exactly what has happened with abortion. I doubt this will cause you to change your mind about what is fair, but these are the facts. I hope these others you mentioned who are against what you call “minority rule” will take notice.