The morality of taxation

He is part of the same neoliberal corporate globalist system, he has everything to gain from pushing that system even if it means his tax rate goes up a little bit. The last thing he wants to do is see this system implode.

It is sanctimonious lying. Anyone can send more money to the government, nothing is stopping you. But the philosophical argument against people like Buffet is that they represent a system that believes in unlimited and unchecked massive growth in big government, which is strangulating the economy by decimating the lower and middle classes, and infusing radical leftism everywhere into society and economics. I posted a short list in another thread here about institutions controlled mostly or entirely by leftism, perhaps you saw that. People like Buffet want to expand this sort of leftist tyranny over all aspects of life, so when they get up and defend bigger and bigger government you have to know what they really mean. High taxes are just a way for this system to perpetuate itself.

The American colonies rebelled against high taxation and tyranny. That is what America was and still is. We do not want to live as serfs on the plantations of the super-rich. Buffet is a super-rich who wants us to stay in serfdom, he does not want economic opportunity for the greatest number, he does not want a reduction in big big government that takes control over more and more of every aspect of ours lives. Most people do not want to live as slaves. Buffet does not have to live as a slave, because of his wealth and position he can let this neoliberal globalist corporatocratic system of nanny state big big government continue indefinitely and it will never adversely impact him.

These billionaires are able to hire the legal teams and make the right political influences to secure their position in perpetuity, while any middle class person or small business owner cannot do that. How many jobs have been outsources, factories closed, towns decimated, how many people cannot even afford their own lives because they work 25% or 35% of the entire year just to pay the government? That is not rational.

High taxes only sustain massive statism. Since I am opposed to massive statism I am also opposed to high taxes, as the American founders were as well. This was the entire purpose behind the American Revolution, to throw off the oppression of wealthy bureaucrats who take huge chunks of your money, deny you freedoms, and force you to fall in line with whatever they decide is “best” for you. Fuck that.

But yeah, plenty of stupid people will swallow the propaganda that people like Buffet push. It is called virtue signaling. It is the antithesis of reasoning.

Ok I will respond to your other points now.

The wealthiest should pay more in taxes as they make more money where the poor should pay less in taxes as they don’t make that much at all by comparison.

The wealthy should lead by example in paying taxes by showing that they actually care about the domestic problems or duties of the nation that they live in. They should lead by example as being the most successful when it concerns charity, moral support, and helping out their own countrymen.

All employers should give their employees a living wage and long term benefits if they can afford to. Any individual that cannot be given a livable wage is practically a labor slave. Of course all of this isn’t just the fault of employers either but instead is the fault of centralized banks that don’t have a fiscal sound money supply. The United States dollar for instance has lost 85% of its original value over the years.

The numbers you mention are irrelevant, as is the phrase “live like kings”. That is purely arbitrary. If a CEO is working in his position to sustain a large company and his decisions and knowledge are instrumental to the success of all that capital, all of those jobs and earning and profits, then he will be compensated commensurate to that. The market decides what commensurate compensation means. A CEO is also free to leave and find other jobs, and boards of directors are free to decide how much to pay a CEO, or fire a CEO and get another one.

That is the entire point of a free market: people make decisions based on individual values calculations. There is absolutely no rational, real basis for the kind of moralistic outrage of saying something like “well a CEO makes 400x what a lowly employee makes and that is wrong!” Nonsense. Compare the efforts, education, knowledge, responsibility and work hours of the CEO to that of the guy working in the mail room. Compare the amount of capital generated directly by the CEO’s individual work to that generated directly by the mail guy’s work. If anything, the CEO’s actual contribution in simple dollar amounts in profits and capital growth of the company is going to be far more than 400x that of the mail guy’s.

I am so sick of all this leftist moralizing. It is bizarre to me that the left has degenerated into a bunch of moralists whining about fairness with their arbitrary standards and only looking at one side of the equation. What nonsense.

There were a lot of reasons for the large middle class in the 50s-70s, it wasn’t all about “redistribution”. Redistribution is not even the rationale of taxation, as you claimed; the rationale of taxation is nothing more than the fact we need to find a way to generate funds for government and whatever services and social programs it is doing. You do not need redistribution or welfare or socialism to accomplish any of that. Taxation alone can directly fund public projects like defense, education, law-making, police and courts, roadway construction and maintenance, water treatment, environmental protection, consumer protection and safety oversight, etc.etc. Nowhere in any of that do you need to “redistribute” money from the masses via taxation into the pockets of other people.

If you want to know why the middle class was decimated, look at neoliberal globalist policies supported by people like Buffet, whom you seem to like or at least agree with. Economics is bottom-up, it starts at the bottom and builds, like a natural ecosystem. The higher more derivative layers cannot survive without the bottom layers. And the more you bloat the top layers at the expense of the bottom, the more irrational and unstable the system becomes. Taxing “rich people” and redistributing that back to “poor people” is not going to produce bottom-up economic growth, if anything it creates dependency, apathy, victimhood, resentment and class warfare, and massive statism that always trends toward becoming tyrannical. No reasonable sane person wants any of that.

What you need to do is cut government spending while you also cut taxes. Obviously no one is willing to do that, not even Trump. Reagan cut taxes drastically and then refused to reduce government spending, which kicked off the cycle of massive deficits to cover domestic spending that has continued to this day and increased the total federal debt to be on par with the entire GDP, not a good situation. You first need to address government spending, which has steadily increased ever since the 50s if not prior to that too. And you might note that increases in spending on welfare and government social programs generally has not achieved any reduction in poverty rates. You might ask yourself why this is.

You get paid what you are willing to accept, and the employer pays you what he/she is willing to accept paying you for the work you agree to do. That is how it works. There is no other way for it to work. And as an employer you should be aware of how much more work you do than the employees; you are responsible for the maintenance of the business, you work twice as much as the other employees and ultimately it is your capital the employee is renting to use. You generate $30 an hour from a worker and agree to pay that worker $10 an hour, which the worker also agrees to; so what? That other $20 is mostly covering your own costs as a business-owner and is mostly being reinvested back into the business, with whatever is left over as profit being spent in the economy anyway on supplies and services you need for your business to continue. Again, there is no magic number of distribution of profits between worker and employer, any attempt to say what is “fair” is always going to be arbitrary. And think about it from there worker’s perspective: the worker at your company agreed to work for $10 an hour, which means this job was better than other jobs open to that worker. The worker was making $80 a day from a full time schedule, he got to go to your business, use your equipment and processes and systems, and go home at the end of that work day with $80 in his pockets. He is not able to act on his own, without access to your capital, and generate $80 a day for himself, and if he were able to do that then he would already be doing it. So the worker is profiting quite a bit from being your employee, just as you are profiting quite a bit from his being your employee. That is how it works. Mutual gain of profits based on individual free values calculations based on self-interest.

If you start abusing your worker or paying him far less then he will quit and find another job. If there are no other jobs he thinks he can get, he will have to go get some additional education or skills or knowledge in order to make himself worth more to a potential employer. And if you abuse your workers and do not pay them well enough you will lose workers, which costs you a lot in the long run not just on hiring and firing processes but also loss of institutional knowledge and experience of your workers at your particular business.

Businesses compete for good workers, and that competition is what drives up wages far more than minimum wage. Even so-called low-skill workers are a resource that businesses compete for, and this competition drives up the wages paid to low-skill workers, as economists like Thomas Sowell have pointed out many times.

The employee creates more value than he is paid for, and the employer creates more value than the worker contributes. Values increase across the entire interaction. The business gets the extra surplus-labor of the worker and the worker get the extra surplus-capital and productive process of the employer; neither the worker nor the employer has access to that extra ‘surplus’ on his own.

You are still adhering to the Marxist mistake. “The purpose of employing someone is to extract some value from him as profit”, no, the profit comes from the interaction between worker and employer, it is mutual. The extra profits generated are shared with the worker in the form of wages and with the employer in the form of profits. Again, there is no magical “fairness” number here. The employer decides what he wants to pay, and then he has to go find workers willing to work at that pay rate. The employee decides what he is willing to work for in terms of pay and work and job conditions. The worker has no right over the capital or decision making of the employer whose company the worker is renting access to.

Value is not “extracted”, it is freely given by both the worker and the employer. Again, the worker cannot go out on his own and make more value (money, in this case) for himself than he can working at your company, because if he could then he would be doing that already. He has already determined, on his own, rightly or wrongly, that this one job is better for him than the alternatives he thinks are available to him. Imagine how much extra value your company gives to a worker; that worker does not own a company, capital stock, know-how of how to run a business, legal expertise in human resources and insurance and health benefits and marketing and logistics and all the rest. And the worker does not need to know any of those things. The worker is allowed to be basically ignorant of all of that, yet still produce profit for himself by working at your business. It is win-win.

Yeah someone might not really want to work at Burger King, but they are free to quit and not have a job at all. Obviously that is far worse than working at Burger King, if that is their only option (which in a large economy like ours is never actually the case, there are always many options). And again, the worker has to bring his particular skills, knowledge, efforts, etc. to any job he has. If that worker does not happen to have very many skills, knowledge or effort then on what basis should that worker be paid some arbitrarily high amount by you, the employer?

Any reasonable employer knows that his workers are his most valuable asset. And any reasonable worker knows that he has to work hard to acquire knowledge, skills, etc. in order to move up to better jobs and better wages. This is just how it works. I am sorry you think it is somehow “unfair”, or whatever.

No. The relative value of a single unit of currency is not fixed, it changes. A dollar is not worth “one dollar” as if that were someone an objective measurement, a dollar is worth whatever you can buy with one dollar. If overall value is increased while the monetary supply remains the same, or if the overall rate of value increase is more than the comparable rate of increase in monetary supply, then the relative value of a single dollar goes up. I already explained this.

A large degree of profits comes from the relative value differences between the same product as valued by different people, particular between consumer and the company selling or making the product. Companies always buy in bulk at discount, because having a surplus of a given product is what allows for the relative cost of that product to be lower, and when this is lower it means the company can charge consumers more to buy just one of those products as opposed to a whole pallet of them. Surplus supply of food was one of the major factors that caused markets to form originally, and it still works like this. If you refine your process so that you can streaming production of a product and it costs you X per unit, and you now have 1000 of those units, you are able to charge people 2X to buy just one of those units, because the consumers who buy just one unit do not have that same process of production that you do. For the same reason, businesses store up a stockpile of products because it reduces the cost per unit that the business has to pay for those products. Whereas consumers just buy one or two of those products at a time, meaning they are able to pay a higher rate per unit and this is still a value-gain for that consumer.

Oversupply adds value so long as stockpiles are not immediately dumped into the market. This is why it is so essential to have surpluses, but surplus of inventory not necessarily of products on the open market for sale.

Money is just paper, or digital bits in a computer. It means nothing on its own. What matters is the relative value you gain from having some of that paper or bits. And, again as I said, this relative value is changing all the time. Real value increase, real creation of goods and services, is the source of economic growth. The money supply is just a secondary representation of that, as a means of allowing for smoother transactions than barter would allow for, and also as a means of symbolizing that value which has been created.

No. I have already explained why this view you hold is wrong.

No, profits increase as a consequence of the interaction between worker and employer, as I have explained. Then those profits are shared with the worker and the employer. Also with the consumer.

Your uncle sounds like an idiot, then.

What on earth make you say that? This is classic Marxism which does not work. For what bizarre reason would a worker somehow need to also be an owner? You as the business owner have created a business, you have your own brick and mortar, capital, surplus inventories, business systems, etc. etc. and that is yours. You own it. By what weird right would someone have to come in and demand that just because they agree to work for you, that they now get to also own what is yours? There is absolutely no justification for such an idea.

You seem to be forgetting that the worker is gaining tremendously from having access to your business. Without that access, without being your worker, that person would have no wages at all and no opportunities for giving his surplus-value to a meaningful enterprise that produces profits not just for the business but also for himself.

Not everyone can be everything, exactly right. This is reality. We each have something to offer, a unique personal surplus-value that we need to find a way to make use of. Having a multitude of different kinds of jobs is one way of doing that. It is not “evil” in any sense at all, except maybe to a crypto-religious Marxist moralist. But reality does not work that way.

Exactly. You are as free as you are. If you have literally no job prospects better than flipping a burger or digging a ditch, then that is on you. And if that is actually the case for you, then you obviously have very little value already and you should be working on increasing your value somehow. Get more skills, get a different education, work harder, etc.

It is called personal responsibility. If a worker is really so shitty in what he can offer in the marketplace of jobs that he is forced to work for minimum wage at Walmart or whatever, that is a real reflection of the actual value that worker has in terms of jobs and employment.

Actually they aren’t. You are espousing basic Marxist ideas, whether or not you know it.

Right, because you are operating on Marxist ‘thinking’. I’ve already shown how that is incorrect.

It isn’t charity, I never said it was. Every person wants to give and make use of what they have as their potential, that is what it means to… have potential.

Automation increase the efficiency of a certain productive process, which causes there to be less need for human labor and some people lose jobs; as a consequence of this, the labor pool increases, driving down the cost of labor; as a consequence of this, more surplus labor is available to the economy to be put to use somewhere else, in different and new productive processes.

By your logic, we should all still be using typewriters and horse and buggies. Nonsense.

You are not sure how the extraction of resources leads to the creation of value? I am not sure why you would not understand this. If ore, oil, gold, water, wood, food, whatever else sort of natural resources are not extracted then where does everything come from? We literally take these sort of resources from the earth and feed them as inputs into economic processes of production, which creates the products we have. When you extract more resources, you increase the inputs which leads to more products, i.e. to more created values.

How is that hard to understand?

Only a very lazy person, someone with very little potential value to himself or anyone else, would sit around doing nothing. But yeah that is their free choice to make. If they have nothing to offer, then it makes sense that they are… offering nothing.

One thing I know about capitalists, libertarians, and the conservatives that fall into either camp is that they sure hate poor people or the lower working classes of people.

You’re probably right about there being levels of hypocrisy on the left side.

To get around that hypocrisy you just make taxes mandatory like a lot of Scandinavian nations.

There in lies the rub as you must protect the illusion of democracy and parliamentary republicanism at all costs. :laughing: [Even if it means ignoring huge swathes of your own citizens that you leave in massive amounts of poverty.]

Of course when founders said all of that too bad they weren’t familiar with the history of monarchy to understand that during that period monarchy was full of corruption that it was trying to get control of within the 1700’s. I think if monarchy was allowed to flourish a little longer it would probably of got control of the corruption that was experienced then, a bad king becomes replaced with a good king and so on.

At any rate modern democracies or republics in the west typically have the largest bureaucracies.

There are many reasons why the United States economy of yesterday from the 50’s to the 70’s no longer exists.

  1. We got rid of banking regulations that essentially protected the government from being influenced or bought off by banks.

  2. We got rid of stock market regulations that essentially didn’t allow corporations to buy their own stocks or conduct insider trading.

  3. We got rid of laws and regulations that essentially said that corporations shouldn’t be allowed to influence government or its politicians. [Now corporate lobbyists practically control everything.]

When all three of those laws were repealed the next thing that came about was the erosion of employee trade unions. After those were eroded or decimated companies were positioning themselves to ship all of their work production overseas which they promptly did because it was cheaper for them to do so and because they thought to themselves that the average American doesn’t deserve a livable higher standard of living. Now that 85% of factory jobs, manufacturing, and production has been shipped overseas we’re now debating how to cut wages even further for the lowest wage earners. There is also the demand for limitless immigration to further offset the lowest wage workers of the United States by hordes of foreigners. :laughing: Winning! USA! USA! USA! :laughing:

[What did you people expect when you get rid of all levels of laws or regulations?]

See what happens when you destroy the centralized power structure of the government or state giving it to the people? [Please remember that corporations are people too. :laughing: ]

Also remember this, capitalism is against any form of economic protectionism which means it is the death kneel of any form of nationalism. Capitalism and nationalism cannot coexist, it’s either one or the other.

The shipping of all jobs overseas, destruction of job/trade unions, unlimited immigration, and the erosion of laws protecting both the government or general public away from predatory business practices has all been done in the name of capitalism. Capitalists own all of that with their trickle down economics.

You fail to distinguish between laissez fair free market capitalism (anti-statism) and neoliberal global “capitalism” (statism as corporatocratic fascism). Everything you mention has to do with the latter, not the former.

Real capitalism has plenty of oversight laws against monopoly, fraud and corruption. Same reason why we have laws and police and court systems against theft and violation of property rights.

I’m tired of your trolling. Get a brain, or keep cashing those Soros paychecks, I don’t care either way, but do it somewhere else.

No, you fail to realize that there has never been any purist state of capitalism where it has always been corrupt and a form of cronyism since its very beginnings. You’re just another dim witted American subsumed by Mises Institute of propaganda.

Soros checks? You do realize who you’re talking to right? :laughing:

Actually Soros types only have any real kind of power because of the international and globalist system of capitalism people like you promote. If that is your only argument you’ve already lost the debate.

Damn that some excellent posting, God.
It appears that the guy you’re talking to is not the sharpest tool in the shed. All the more praiseworthy what you’ve put down here.

Oh look, another expert on capitalism. Any prevailing arguments against counter points above? No, I didn’t think so either. :laughing:

Zero sum of… anything even remotely resembling an intellect.

Still waiting for substantial arguments to be made, I’m sure it will happen any moment now…

Still waiting…

Nice straw man. I already refuted your nonsense about how all capitalism is the same. You don’t even know what capitalism is or means, including that there are different varieties of it. Would be interesting if you actually tried addressing anything I said, though. But I won’t hold my breath.

And since you’re just trolling anyway, my engagement with you is quite limited. I don’t mind a good troll, it keeps things interesting. Occasionally I’ll spar with you when I’m bored, but otherwise I have actual shit to do.

You didn’t refute anything as all you did was make a blanket statement, I on the other hand denied the validity of your claim where I was kinda hoping you in turn would try to reinforce your claim so that I could have the joy of ripping it to shreds. Are you really going to refuse me that opportunity and joy? Damn kill joy…Oh sure, I enjoy trolling and sarcasm like anybody else but I do have my moments of seriousness.

You have shit to do? Well, don’t let me hold you up then. :laughing:

There is no market determining compensation because I could find someone to steal clients’ money for far less than Stumpf was paid. Name one thing than one human can do that is 400x better than another human? Nevermind the average human, which is what is required to justify 400x more pay than the average employee.

Let’s say someone has an IQ of 1, does it make sense that someone could have an IQ of 400? The weakest person could probably bench press 20lbs, but can someone bench 8000lbs?

There is no basis or justification to explain someone, anyone, making 400x more than anyone else and I’m certain there are people who could do the same job for 10x.

But all that is beside the point, which wasn’t bitching about how much they get paid, but claiming they can afford a 70-90% tax rate that had existed for the 50 years that Trump says he wants to return to… when america was great.

That’s why Remington is going under… because they decided to pad their own portfolios rather than run the company and now an heirloom gun manufacturer may be going extinct. They borrowed money on company credit then used the money to buy back stock which inflated their stock options. There, ladies and gentleman, is the “talent” on display that justifies 400x more pay.

Not 400x more. Maybe twice, but more realistically the ceo works 1.5x harder (12/8hrs) and maybe is 1.3x smarter on average (iq 150/110).

Not 400x more. The mail guy is just as necessary because the ceo couldn’t make 1 penny without the mail guy doing his job.

Borrowing on company credit in order to buy back stock in order to inflate options prices is not the generation of profit for the company, but the theft of company value. Working a position that someone else would and could do for 10x does not justify 400x in compensation and is therefore theft of company value.

It’s not morality, it’s good business to pay ceos less. Hell, my local walmart manager is overpaid for what he does. I could find someone for half the money to hide the horseradish just as well. It has absolutely nothing to do with morality.

Name some. Not war because that sends the middle class off to die and there were lots of wars going on back then.

Yes it is. Taxes come from the rich and into government, government spends the money into the economy either through employment or contracting or else sends checks to people.

If I could take $1 million from Jaime Dimon and for some reason I could only give it to you, I’d be tempted to do it because it would benefit me more if you had the money. You’d spend it all immediately and you’d buy things I like to buy and that would make the prices of things I like to become cheaper. The more money is spread around, the more it helps ME, even if I get none of it.

Nah, we can print it. The sole purpose of taxation is the engineering of an economy.

Listen from the horse’s mouth. Start at 18:00 here: Like, 2 min of your time.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsqGR31zoVA[/youtube]

Well if you take from the rich in taxes to pay for police and military, you’ve just given it to the poor. See?

I like Buffett. He and his 2 sisters all have 150 iqs, so he’s genetically from good stock. He had good parenting and credits his father for many things. Buffett is a bit of a national treasure like Einstein et al. I also like him because he’s lived in the same house he bought in the 50s and doesn’t live extravagantly. He seems very wise to me. But that’s the problem… he’s so smart that people think he’s stupid because a bird that flies high looks small.

I’ll grant you that about globalist policies for the most part.

Right.

Exactly!

I disagree. Yes it will produce growth.

I concede that and add that it creates a sense of entitlement.

I’m not sure about all those.

Because of efficiency and automation, we need the gov to create meaningless jobs just to keep people “working” to justify being paid. Soon we will have people digging holes and others filling them back in because we cannot just hand people money to live on. It’s psychological.

Cutting taxes reduces tax revenue (Laffer curve doesn’t work) and making gov smaller reduces employment, so the outcome can only be detrimental to the economy.

Reagan… I can’t believe people bought that trickle-down nonsense. Deluge up and trickled down.

The reason for that is automation taking jobs as well as the need for more regulations, like making it so dogfood does not have euthanasia drug because they grind up pets to make dogfood. That’s what you get with capitalists; if there’s no law against it, they’re gonna do it. Granted, some regulations are stupid.

Because it’s not about welfare spending, but the taxation on the rich, which correlates perfectly with the wealth divide.

It doesn’t matter what the gov does with the money from the rich, so long as they take it and do something with it. Regardless what they do (military, welfare, stupid shit), it will support the middle class and poor. There is no way to avoid it. And the same money will flow back up again just to be retaken by the gov and recycled through the economy.

Lots of folks think when the gov takes money, the money disappears from the economy, but that’s not true at all. Many contractors are happy to get gov contracts… they’re the best to have! Guaranteed you’ll get paid and overpaid.

Yes that’s true, but it does not mean the employee is getting what the economy would say he is worth, if the economy could talk. The employee is only worth anything to me if he can make me money on top of what I’m already making.

One union-type guy threatened he would go on strike if i didn’t pay him more. I told him to knock himself out because I’m not doing community service by employing you. I’m not going to take a paycut because I decided to hire you. So in order to work for me, you have to make me more money than I’m making without you. And that’s how wealth is transferred uphill through employment.

Yeah, I could do 3 units to their one. And probably made about that much more money too.

It wasn’t much capital to get started. Just a truck and some tools. Paid cash and deducted from taxes. Hardly anything to offset the wage difference.

So I don’t know… it just shows how money goes uphill. The morality of it is subjective.

I didn’t need $160 per day from each employee for gas to drive 20 miles.

Some of it, but mostly personal use.

Yup, it all got spent.

I’m not arguing about fairness really, but only with regard to the theft argument. A moral argument against a moral claim. Otherwise, my argument is economical and what’s fair has nothing to do with it.

That’s how I was able to take advantage of them: I was the best thing going. I’m sure they would have been happier with $30/hr minus some tool renting and gas charges, but I needed to maximize profit.

No doubt we helped helped each other.

I have a friend working for a Berkshire company who told me they have 30 positions open continually that pay almost twice the minimum yet they can’t seem to permanently fill them. I said simply, “Raise the wage until you fill them; problem solved.” He said, “Uncle Warren wouldn’t like that.”

So the company would rather do without workers than to pay them more in order to attract them and they blame them for their unwillingness to work for meager peanuts as being part of a lazy and entitled generation.

The competition is the other way around.

Right. That’s my point.

That value comes from the employee plus his own labor.

That’s a good point but I don’t think it accounts for the real differences in pay. Even if it did, it wouldn’t challenge the point that money flows uphill and something needs to be done before the bottom is broke.

I haven’t seen the evidence that it’s a mistake.

I didn’t need employees to make plenty of profit and many jobs I worked by myself; I needed employees to make me lots of profits.

The $20/hr they gave me was not their charity, I assure you. Like I said, one guy threatened strike; not because he wasn’t paid enough, but because I made so much more.

Work for peanuts or starve is not a free choice.

He should be fired and not paid at all because he isn’t worth the minimum. That was Peter Schiff’s point about the minimum wage hikes causing job loss because people aren’t worth he wage and will be fired, but in 20-some times of raising the min wage, the number of employed people keeps rising.

Then that’s not oversupply, but optimal supply. Oversupply is defined to be detrimental.

No issue with that.

Well aren’t you also advocating to eternally pay rent on things that should have been paid-off long ago??? I can dig out my old tools and go back into business, but I still have to charge my employees rent on tools?

Because it’s logical.

.
This is [insert demonizing label], therefore it doesn’t work.

To share in profits and expenses.

Well, I didn’t say it was right, just that Richard Wolff advocates for something like that and it stops money from flowing uphill through the act of employment. You brought up the issue of rents, as if the employee should have a stake in the expenses, so naturally I suggested a stake in the profits as well. But it’s not what I advocate. I like the system we have now, but with higher taxes on the rich and no taxes on you and I.

Idk… mom invested in dad’s education and she planned to be a domestic engineer, which didn’t count as a job skill after the divorce, so she was relegated to menial work just to make ends meet. Too many single mothers are in that situation and it’s not fair to the kids to have to starve while everyone argues about what’s fair.

Mandate a minimum income and everyone can aspire to make more. First eliminate suffering and go from there.

Send him home and send him checks to stay out of the way. Either that or take him out back and shoot him. Whichever way you’re most comfortable with. That’s what we do with animals… if you can’t support a pet, you have to euthanize; if you can’t euthanize, you have to support them. Setting them out to starve is illegal I believe. But with people, it’s ok.

That’s what dad said too. But it’s a logically fallacy to wrap an original and logical idea in a cultural bad-connotation and pander to emotion to discredit an idea (kinda underhanded too).

For instance I could say you’re a DittoHead whether you know it or not and are therefore wrong because all Dittos are wrong because they’re called Dittos and that’s bad.

I missed that part.

It doesn’t drive down the cost of labor per my Berkshire-friend-example and the “new productive processes” will be gov jobs building bridges to nowhere.

I don’t think so.

Because you didn’t say it that way.

Most people are lazy. It’s odd to find someone who is driven.

Dang, it’s some kind of record long post… I didn’t think it would go through :laughing:

I appreciate the long response, I am sure it took you a while to write.

Skimming it, I’ll just be honest that I probably will not bother to reply. You missed or mistook almost everything I said, and ignored key other things. The amount of effort it would take me to honestly address these glaring problems you display is simply not worth the potential payout, even if I thought you might rise to the challenge, which I don’t really think is likely.

Best luck.

Can’t argue against other people’s points and just assumes he’s right where everybody else is wrong. What’s not to like? :laughing:

I knew that going in, but just wanted to be sure of my own reasoning. Trial by fire. I ran my idea by Richard Wolff, but he didn’t reply. So I’m left with random forum people to show me my error, but everyone is biased one way or the other and no one wants to be wrong.

My theory is simple: Money flows uphill by employment and there has to be a governmental mechanism to recycle the money back down so it can flow up again. Explaining it easy, but explaining why it’s true is difficult.

My dad has accepted it, or at least can’t find error, but can’t take it to heart because he’s a Rush Limbaugh fan. If he bought my ideas, he would lose his identity. Ego trumps all else, including blood… sons, daughters are all expendable to preserve the ego. Dad’s strategy is simply not to talk to me or have meaningful relation-ship and in that way he won’t have to be wrong. It’s better to not have a son than to admit you’re wrong. If people would sacrifice their own kids to preserve their ego, there is no getting through to them.

Serendipper,

All you need is a state that devotes itself to the livelihood, social well-being, and dignity of its citizens, you know, the complete opposite of what we have now.