The morality of taxation

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.

I can see value in that, but I suspect there is no perfect way and every advantage has a disadvantage. We have to focus on education and teaching critical thinking in particular and then people will be smart enough or at least equipped enough to make the right choices as they go along, if that leads to dictatorship because the skillful thinkers choose that, then so be it. But step-one is to teach kids how to correctly process information. All the logical fallacies should be common knowledge like the ABCs.

Danish psychologist Helmuth Nyborg says some populations aren’t smart enough for a democracy and when the ave iq of Sweden falls below 80-90 through dilution with immigrants, the system of government will break down. He says dictatorship is the only way to govern low iq peoples. On the other hand, democracy works when the ave iq is high enough.

Then again, psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa says to expect the ave iq to decline throughout the 21st century due to intelligent women choosing not to reproduce.

Some are predicting a dark age coming because technology is dumbing us down, among other factors. Maybe we will have a dictatorship.

Multicultural or multiracial societies will always fail due to dissension. Democracy is the idea that the majority of dumb uneducated idiots can rule themselves or make laws for society and the state. Total epic failure.

The morality of taxation: how many rich people does it take to pay for the lives of a thousand poor people?

Answer: 1

So you have 1000 poor people on government services and handouts of all different kinds, living directly off of the efforts of a single successful person.

Wait, what does this have to do with morality again? I thought rich successful people were supposed to be the bad guys, so why is just one of them sustaining the lives of a thousand people?

Yeah I know what you mean. How do we ensure a dictator won’t be corrupt?

That’s a good point, but I addressed that by the fact that employment involves theft, so the theft of taxation rights the wrong. Two wrongs make a right, I guess, but if someone steals something and you steal it back then give it to them, is that wrong? So taxation is moral only if it’s redistribution.

If you’re super rich you don’t have to pay taxes. But then again, the rich don’t use public services anyway; and their loyalty is only to themselves and other super rich.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers

Yes, Oligarchs of the World Unite!

That’s what Peter Schiff said about the 90% tax rates in the past… no one paid it. He said he’d prefer to go back to that since there were more ways to get around paying taxes. Well if that’s true, then what did Reagan and Kennedy accomplish?

Nice. They increasingly take money out of circulation.

I was surprised to see university names on the list, as well.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of … ise_Papers

More liberal hypocrisy: shakes head
theguardian.com/news/2017/n … ise-papers