Dipping Into The Well

Hey, I said I might buy one. It's just, you know, what's a guy supposed to do with three shelves of t-shirts, each and every one of which has sentimental attachments or cannot be parted with?

I like the hat logo...

What are prostitutes categorized at, considering they're trading a genetic body part for money? J suspect who holds the presidency doesn't affect them ever.

I would suggest that they're classified as laborers. They certainly aren't capitalists and they're probably not landlords, unless you want to use a very unusual definition of "real property".

This kind of classification also ignores intellectuals, but that's ok since all they do is produce hot air. (Actually, Marx thought that intellectuals were irrelevant to the larger scheme of things; the great irony, of course, is that the bearers of the Marxist torch have traditionally been intellectuals.)

The larger point, of course, is that the Bush plan is to shift the tax burden off of capitalists and landlords and on to the backs of labor by greatly reducing or eliminating taxes on non-wage income: capital gains, estate taxes, and so on. The wet dream of the convervatives is, of course, a simple flat tax coupled with a national sales tax; both of those are, naturally, highly regressive.

The Bush plan also emphasises large tax cuts at very high marginal tax rates, making the income tax more regressive. The folks who benefit the most from tax cuts at very high marginal rates are, of course, capitalists and landlords...

As a side note, I believe that the capital gains tax needs to be drastically overhauled anyway; not for the purposes of reducing the tax load on the capitalist/landlord class but rather to encourage long-term investment and reduce market volatility.

yep about half the folks
who have the most TO LOSE by this president
voted for him
scary
ass
shit

Ah, New York twits. You could buy a lot more than a dozen with your dime these days, and they'd still want to be your master after you threw them back on the street to be picked up for loitering as they used to be before their collectivist and seditious (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 1, in its entirety: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.") Supreme Dictatorship asserted that enforcing such laws wasn't their partisan preference (Hey, fewer convicts, fewer people deciding to get working after a run-in with the law, and that means more votes to be bought with the stolen booty!). And what the heck, sure NYC went bankrupt with such genius a few decades ago, but nobody remembers that any more. Time for a new scheme! And since those carrying a torch for totalitarianism control what kids are taught, facts like that go down the memory hole anyway. Woohoo!

Besides, they're worth billions of taxpayer dollars in welfare, subsidies, and administrative costs, and unconstitutionally unionized government employees paid lavishly to administer collectivist programs give leftist parties massive kickbacks! Can't stop the gravy train now!

While one might admire the faithfulness of the collectivists to their so-called philosophy, the question of sanity becomes a little too pressing when they begin telling their repeated saviors that they aren't needed, but instead that they themselves are doing all the hard work, and they always want another chance to do it to us again. Of course, when you're voting over and over again on election day in NYC, you can't imagine it matters much since everybody you know thinks the same way, right? Even though socialism was shown to be logically impossible 82 years ago: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0224607421

I'll try to do this simply so you can understand it. Read it twice before considering a reply, OK comrades? It isn't so difficult: I exist. I prefer life. In order to live I must maintain my life. To do this, I must own property such as food, clothing, and housing so that I can maintain it and prosper. I can learn skills to improve my life. I can trade with others who have done the same, and our differing skill sets and interests result in a division of labor such that I do not need to do all of the work needed for my life, but instead can trade my labors for money, and use that money to purchase goods and services from these others who do as I have done. Thus property is a right as is life. Capitalism is born when these individual rights are recognized.

When you expropriate my property for your purposes, you are making me your slave. Which makes your designs immoral, no matter how you may try to evade that fact. Since a certain amount of coercive power is necessary to defend the innocent and weak against aggressive thieves etc., government is established to defend property and life. It requires funding. That is why it is called a necessary evil. Evil. Not God, but evil. But it doesn't require income taxes, and it doesn't require broad sales taxes. Which is why neither was in the Constitution. Relatively light import tariffs and taxes on things like whiskey were enough. It is only with the rise of the collectivists, influenced by the European jackasses following Rousseau and earlier creeps and fools (they date back to before the Middle Ages, indeed), and then following the despicable Karl Marx (he hated America probably even more than you guys do!), that the notion of government wanting to "do things to change society" came about, and for that they need a lot more than the 1% of GDP that all levels of government combined were taking back in the Founding era and into the first decades of the 19th century. Of course, once you start taking property in money, you reduce income directly, and reduce the return on investment, both of which reduce the rate of growth, further reducing income. So collectivists have to quit doing things like maintaining sewers, roads, bridges, government buildings, the armed forces have to be cut, etc., etc. And even after all the massive taxes, now much higher than serfs ever paid in the Dark Ages, they still can't afford to do the normal maintenance and expansion of government projects that are natural with a growing population. They live on the past capital investments done by the people they deem their inferiors. As we have seen. So someone has to come up with a new idea to concentrate people together in cities where they can't actually see things for themselves but must take their notions about the outside world on faith: Environ-mentalism. The next trick started gaining popularity late in the 19th century here and in Europe, and got very big in the early 20th century, because it seemed like they could force people to do things they otherwise wouldn't do but without imposing taxes: regulation. Well, it still deprives people of their property, so it also reduces economic growth, and the value of assets also decline. They still needed more money, so they came up with a central bank to monetize the debt (inflation) and make it seem like the economy was growing faster than it was. See the late 1920s, the entire 1934-1947 period, and the 1960s, 1970s, and 1994-2001 for the malinvestment such behavior brings. And your party's candidate wanted to return to that. "I can't believe I'm losing to this twit!" was his overheard remark to his staff. And when Tom Brokaw pointed out to him during his interview that the incumbent scored higher on his military IQ test than the Ingrate Reds' Hope did, he complained that his vaunted military records were secret so how could Brokaw know that? That didn't make the version edited for television, of course, but it was picked up by the AP wire. Irony can be fun.

Now to your complaints about an ownership society. I wonder if it ever pricked your conscience that the average black man dies in his 60s, never getting back more than a tiny fraction of the Social Security taxes he paid. And since he died, the government doesn't have to pay him any more, and keeps his supposed pension for itself. A private system would be put in jail for that behavior. So your political enemy wants to liberate blacks one more time, as well as the ill, and the young, by giving them ownership of their retirement savings, so that if they die young, it is theirs to give to their heirs. It also provides capital to the economy instead of spending by government, once more increasing output and income. And we know it works, because it's been done in other countries around the world. But continue opposing it, and keep your party out of power for as long as you can. It will take decades just to clean out the criminals appointed by the worst traitor in history (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895261960) from the judiciary and the bureaucracies, after all, and we can use the time to put patriots in place instead.

Now I'm too tired to continue, but there's enough to get things straightened out at least some, kids.