Daily Archives: 22 October 2011

Tax the rich rebuttal

Her:

What sort of person thinks there is nothing wrong with asking the folks tasked with teaching our children to take a 20% cut on a $50,000 annual salary, but think it’s a terrible idea to ask millionaires to pay an additional 3% more in taxes?

Me:

I think taking someones property by threat of force, whether you take 3% or 20%, whether you take from a rich person or a poor person, whether an individual with a gun takes it or a government with a whole police force takes it, is stealing.

I also think the government is grossly incompetent at best, and outright evil at worst, and they don’t need to waste any more of our money.

Her:

I pay taxes willingly, grateful that I am able to band together with others to create something larger than myself. Stealing is when people accept free public education, use it to make something of themselves, and then refuse to help the their neighbors do the same. (This goes for our whole infrastructure.)

Me:

I think your logic breaks down, Carlynn. If I had the choice of not paying taxes and not accepting ANY “public” help. I’d take that deal in a second.

Just because government forces us to all steal from one another, doesn’t make everyone indebted to everybody else.

Inseparable from the idea of liberty is the idea that no one owes anything to his fellow man. The collectivist opponents of this idea often claim the mortal, intellectual, and artistic high ground, which is why I’m eager to site Mario Vargas Llosa and William Faulkner who specifically argued this point here: mises.org/daily/3674

Think of the barbaric implications of your idea. If I steal someone’s money and use a tiny portion of it to buy somebody dinner, is the recipient of that dinner then condemned to have his wealth stolen for the rest of his life?

Her:

I am very familiar with the anti-humanist rhetoric of the libertarians. Every human being begins life at the mercy of others and is sustained by them; grows to maturity and sustains others; grows old and requires care. By virtue of the fact that you have grown to adulthood, you have accepted the care of others. Whether you think this means that you are enslaved to them forever or whether you think this means you are part of an interconnected, sustaining community has to do with your attitude towards life, not with life itself.

Me:

I agree that people require care and mercy. I don’t agree that this justifies mass wealth confiscation by the state.

First of all, welfare for the suffering forms a small percent of the state’s spending. And within welfare programs 80% of the budget goes to sustaining the bureaucracy, not helping the poor.

We disagree and who should help the poor.

To quote Frederic Bastiast’s 1850 essay, The Law:

“Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a think being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the state — then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion – then we would have no religion at all . . . . They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.”

Her:

I didn’t steal my parents’ wealth when I was eating their food and living in their house, and I won’t think that they are stealing from me when they need my help in old age. This pattern can be extrapolated out in lessening degrees across a society. Taxes are not the government stealing from the people because in a democracy the government is the embodiment of the people. Taxes are one of the contributions that each of us makes to the common good. I think we all wish they weren’t very high, but I’d rather have high taxes and a successful common sphere than low taxes and a failed common sphere.

Me:

“taxes are one of the contributions that each of us makes to the common good.”

1 – assassinating Americans, invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uganda, Yemen, infecting unsuspecting Guatemalans with syphilis, spying on American, fondling people at airports, bailing out corrupt banks, giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a “green” company owned by Pelosi’s relative, Guantanamo Bay, et. al. do not consitute the “common good.”

2 – How can you call it a “contribution” when people can and do go to jail for failing to make the contribution? How can you not recognize the violence and brute force behind it?

America’s New Racists by Walter E. Williams

open quoteI recall my cousin’s and my being chased out of Fishtown and Grays Ferry, two predominantly Irish Philadelphia neighborhoods, in the 1940s, not stopping until we reached a predominantly black North or South Philly neighborhood.

Today all that has changed. Most racist assaults are committed by blacks. What’s worse is there’re blacks, still alive, who lived through the times of lynching, Jim Crow laws and open racism who remain silent in the face of it.

Last year, four black Skidmore College students yelled racial slurs while they beat up a white man because he was dining with a black man. Skidmore College’s first response was to offer counseling to one of the black students charged with the crime. In 2009, a black Columbia University professor assaulted a white woman during a heated argument about race relations. According to interviews and court records obtained and reported by Denver’s ABC affiliate (12/4/2009), black gangs roamed downtown Denver verbally venting their hatred for white victims before assaulting and robbing them during a four-month crime wave. Earlier this year, two black girls beat a white girl at a McDonald’s, and the victim suffered a seizure. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered an emergency shutdown of the beaches in Chicago because mobs of blacks were terrorizing families. According to the NBC affiliate there (6/8/2011), a gang of black teens stormed a city bus, attacked white victims and ran off with their belongings.

Racist black attacks are not only against whites but also against Asians. In San Francisco, five blacks beat an 83-year-old Chinese man to death. They threw a 57-year-old woman off a train platform. Two black Oakland teenagers assaulted a 59-year-old Chinese man; the punching knocked him to the ground, killing him. At Philly’s South Philadelphia High School, Asian students report that black students routinely pelt them with food and beat, punch and kick them in school hallways and bathrooms as they hurl racial epithets such as “Hey, Chinese!” and “Yo, Dragon Ball!” The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund charged the School District of Philadelphia with “deliberate indifference” toward black victimization of Asian students.

In many of these brutal attacks, the news media make no mention of the race of the perpetrators. If it were white racist gangs randomly attacking blacks, the mainstream media would have no hesitation reporting the race of the perps. Editors for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune admitted to deliberately censoring information about black crime for political reasons. Chicago Tribune Editor Gerould Kern recently said that the paper’s reason for censorship was to “guard against subjecting an entire group of people to suspicion.”

These racist attacks can, at least in part, be attributed to the black elite, who have a vested interest in racial paranoia. And that includes a president who has spent years aligned with people who have promoted racial grievance and polarization and appointed an attorney general who’s accused us of being “a nation of cowards” on matters of race and has refused to prosecute black thugs who gathered at a Philadelphia voting site in blatant violation of federal voter intimidation laws. Tragically, black youngsters – who are seething with resentments, refusing to accept educational and other opportunities unknown to blacks yesteryear – will turn out to be the larger victims in the long run.close quote (Read more)