No, they're not failing to define "the wealthy"; you're failing to define "the necessary access humans need to be productive and compete successfully".stui magpie wrote:I never have and never will be able to parse this socialist concept of wanting to drag the achievers down.
People are carping at the "Wealthy" without defining who or what that actually is, with an attitude that if it's not outright envy it does seem to indicate a serious chip on shoulder. I see this kind of thing all the time with people's misplaced sense of "equity" which usually revolves around making sure that no one is getting anything that they aren't. Petty small minded crap.
The whole progressive scale thing sucks IMO. All it does is allows bracket creep to rob people and acts as a disincentive. A flat tax rate with an appropriate tax free threshold would be the best way to go, and scrap all the deductions, exemptions and other bullshit loopholes.
15% of $1,000,000 is still a lot more than 15% of $50,000.
And this philosophical issue with inheritance shits me to tears. Here's my simple solution to that issue.
If you believe you can afford to pay more tax - don't yap about it, do it. Or even better, donate more money to causes you deem worthy.
If you don't believe people should inherit wealth, then feel free to will your estate to the state or some other charity.
If you want to live in a cave, crapping in a crevice in the floor, eating lichen and keeping up to date with the news using a home made crystal set, go for your friggin life, knock yourself out, be my guest.
BUT, Kindly far coff from trying to impose your values on the rest of society who basically don't share them and don't want them.
Wealth and income are childish measures of human worth. According to such measures, a mother is worth less than an ice-cream truck vendor. No offense to the latter, but the computation is out. Or a media magnate that peddles lies and irresponsible nonsense is worth more than someone who educates and empowers young people with productive concepts and techniques, even though markets are only efficient under conditions of accurate information flow.
You are all stung by the idea that you're not special; that there's nothing about your contribution to society that warrants a special premium. I mean, have some irony, man. Of course there's nothing "special" about us; what were you expecting to find? Surely we're mature enough to move on from the nonsense we used as children to justify our taking more than others. It's all just rubbish cobbled together to sedate our consciences and avoid complexity.
For some reason, you find that very obvious point more upsetting than 22 out of 23 of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers promoting a failed 3T bloodbath in Iraq. I mean, really. Are you sure you haven't become addicted to a set of fairy tales worth tossing out? This stuff is nothing more than the religious nonsense you hate so much; in fact, there's a good chance it is neurologically identical.
And TP, a communist society? Tony Abbott is infinitely more communist than I am. If you want to call me anything call me a "competitionist". "Communism" at any serious level is about authoritarian control and a reduction in competition resulting in a reduction in productivity. Guess what? That's what Tony Abbott's policies do because he's not trying to increase productivity and competition, he's trying to sustain last century's massively stupid wealth gap by blocking people from fairly competing against it.
I'm all for helping people become more productive, moving people into genuinely productive industries, keeping wealth circulating so it can't debase competitiveness and competitive politics, and increasing broad-based access to productive work because it's the greatest driver of the economy by a country mile.
Do you think one magical face on Bloomberg actually produces more than a thousand well-skilled, well-equipped average Joes? The Henry Ford or Jack Welch stories are just that; fairy tales packaged up to trick people into thinking some people are more special than others. That's just laughable; plenty of others with the same skill set and psychology exist in the population. We know this because we can measure it and see it. There's only one CEO of GE because there's only one CEO, not because there's only one person among billions who can take that role on. When you think it through, it is no more likely than a gingerbread house.
The task isn't to grit your teeth and double-down on the fairy tales, it's to be mature enough to find more productive and less destructive ways of motivating yourself. There's nothing wrong with being motivated and driven and telling yourself tall stories which spur you on. But those tall stories don't need to be stories which damage the productive capacity of children, young people, the average Joe and the overall economy. That's just pathetic motivation.
The entire authoritarian, hierarchical notion of an economy with a special elite group sitting over a mass of resources thinking they know how to maximise the productivity of those resources is just another laughable fairy tale. It works when you're coming out of war and chaos because any order is better than chaos. But once you move beyond that you start getting diminishing returns because the central brain power and knowledge and access to information just isn't good enough. So at the next stage you have to do what really happened during the great boom after WW2; you have to unlock the productivity of the general populous.
That productivity had nothing to do with a handful of genius leaders. No, it was about the necessity of war breaking down old cultural mores and the bringing of more people online into productive activity. And so it is with every single major economic growth tale; you train people, give them access, let them organise themselves and before you know it they're productive.
Then the usual thugs get the usual delusions that they "created" all of that wealth because they bludgeoned their way to power atop a new hierarchical bottleneck. Then humans elsewhere in the world catch up and the rates of return begin to fall, leading to cries of "leaners" dragging down the economy. But what's really dragging down the economy is the grandiose delusion that Sir Fred Jones is special and needs to be given greater control and remuneration. Fred Jones tightens his fist, and manages to extract some blood. Rinse and repeat until the returns near zero, and massive serious structural economic and technological change is needed to rework how things are done again.
And guess what? That involves empowering a whole new generation of leaders, workers and young people with new productive ways of getting things done, and without exception, less authoritarian and hierarchical ways of getting things done. You can't squeeze blood from people without ruining the society on which you depend, and you can't make money unless those people are highly productive. So if you can't grasp the need for change, and if you can't let go of the "I'm so special" fairytales, you end up a fat blood-sucking tick on the body of a mangy dog, complaining that the poor bastard is anaemic, then coming up with the bright idea of taking more blood to solve the problem.
Alternatively, there are plenty of other ways of feeling special.
