RangerDave wrote:
No, I partially agree with it, as does everyone, frankly, who agrees with a percentage-based tax system (as opposed to everyone paying the same absolute dollar amount) or who thinks we should have any safety net at all. There are very, very few people who actually disagree completely with that statement, and most of them are 19-year old college students who just read Atlas Shrugged for the first time. At any rate, I'm not a communist, nor even a strong socialist; I'm a person who believes virtue is usually found in the mean, and thus I'm a fan of the modern mixed-economy approach.
...
You realize that you're contradicting yourself repeatedly, right? You say you partially agree with the statement but indicate that "virtue is usually found in the mean" and admit you're a "fan of the modern mixed-economy approach". Yet, you fail to accept or even acknowledge that the moder mixed-economy is a vested redistribution system that punishes and disincentives wealth accumulation in the United States and Europe. More to the point, not only is the system actually prohibitive when it comes to economic mobility, but it establishes a protected class of extremely wealthy individuals that function as oligarchs at the head of our nation and others. Barack Obama spent a $1,000,000,000 dollars getting elected President. He's spent TRILLIONS of dollars being President, and he's beholden none of us or our Congress or our Courts. Whether you agree with his stated political positions or not; his policies or not; one cannot deny that he's an advocate of national fiscal irresponsibility on a grand scale and leading by example in that regard. Yet, you talk about "virtue being in the mean" while you advocate an economic system that simultaneously punishes you for attempting to succeed while protecting the wealth engine of the people running this country.
RangerDave wrote:
Khross wrote:
yes, death by repeated failure is a key aspect of freedom. People must be free to **** up as much as they are free to succeed.
Why? What does that approach have to recommend it, particularly since history has shown that freedom to succeed and freedom to fail are not linked by a 1:1 trade-off. Rather, a small reduction in the freedom to succeed at the top produces a huge amount of protection from failure at the bottom. We have all but eliminated true deprivation in the US and, indeed, have given even our poorest a pretty cushy lifestyle by world-historical standards, while at the same time preserving sufficient freedom for the successful to achieve undreamt of wealth and choice.
It has the general history of human behavior behind it. Human beings learn from pain and failure: if you remove the consequences of failure from the equation, you end up with Mike Judge's
Idiocracy. As for the second part of your contingent, the United States doesn't preserve the freedom to achieve wealth and choice to that measure. In fact, you continually advocate the biggest system of marginalization possible: progressive, front-end taxation. I've explained, at length, how payroll and income taxes hurt the economy, hurt savings, hurt economic mobility and ... yet, you keep coming back and defending them despite know that the current system makes serfs out of 90% of the population. But, then, you also contradicted yourself against; after all ...
RangerDave wrote:
Your ability to accumulate that wealth was dependent on an intricate web of factors, both past and present, that have nothing whatsoever to do with your personal efforts.
You don't know what you're arguing anymore, RangerDave. You've lost your ability to be critical of your own beliefs. You're just another demagogue trying to sell me a party line without actually considering the arguments you're making.
Do I want people to starve to death? Absolutely not, but you and Aizle can't seem to separate desire from reality. People already start to death. More people would starve to death for a while in my system. And the people who survived would work or find themselves suffering the consequences of their choices. Someone who loses everything in some fluke disaster or because they were stupid enough to get scammed once can put things back together ...
When losing everything becomes a pattern, then I've no obligation to help someone who's demonstrated no desire to grow or avoid their past mistakes. You guys think I'm heartless; I know enabling the dysfunctional is a far greater crime than letting them suffering the consequences of their actions.
_________________
Corolinth wrote:
Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.
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Do we have to have this symantic argument again?
