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Music, Dance and other cultural elements weren't something commercialised, that you could be sent to jail for copying.

How could you be sent to jail for copying, if you couldn't copy it? Even studios had to record the same song over and over again directly from the artist. Record to record copy was absolutely limited.
Access to culture is so much more abundant these days - you can get all the movies you want to see for the price of a monthly small meal. While music is expensive, it's way less expensive than it was.

More prominently though I would argue the issue of sexuality has actually gotten far less liberal in recent times. The age of consent has arrived, and gotten ever higher in some countries, homosexuality was much more widely accepted historically than it is now.

Yeah, before when girls were married to whoever their parents chose was extremely liberal. And homosexuality? Tell me again why Oscar Wilde was imprisoned? Or are you talking about before, when the inquisition merely burned them?

Also, people were generally healthier because they didn't have cars, didn't have TVs and so forth.

Are you kidding me? Do you know what the average life expectancy was, back then? Or the child mortality rates?
Life expectancy in the US has risen more than 25 years during the 20th Century! ( http://www.efmoody.com/images/12lifeexpectancy.gif )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lifexpec.htm http://www.efmoody.com/estate/lifeexpectancy.html

That's not to say that I completely agree with the grandparent poster. Medical science has progressed a lot during the past 100 years as well and medical screenings and diagnosis have improved to the point where we may be seeing more cases because we are simply better at screening and diagnosing illnesses where as a hundred years ago, many people may have died from illnesses that went unnoticed and their deaths were decided to be because of old age. Also misdiagnosis was likely common because so many diseases have similar symptoms and without today's medical labs to do testing, it's quite possible many patients were misdiagnosed before modern analysis was prevalent.

What if the government starts to print lots of money to fund that stuff, creating a large invisible tax on everyone through inflation?

The problem with this is it drives up interest rates. A bunch. If I'm losing 12% a year due to inflation, and I want 3% interest for my risk and profit, I will not loan out money for less than 15%, as it's a losing proposition.

We are in defect spending right now, and cutting services is political suicide. Here's the options:

1) Continue deficit spending. Eventually, that compound interest catches up, and we default. At that point, the US can't get debt as easily, and spending is cut to meet income. What a novel concept.

2) Inflation. Do it too much, and it gets too expensive for us to borrow. If we can't borrow, we're in the same boat as #1. This is effectively a tax on people with money.

3) Cut spending. This is a good thing. Running a house with a vicious cycle of debt never works. Why would it work for a government?

4) Taxes. Lots and lots of taxes. This leads to tax evasion, businesses (and people) leaving the country, etc. Excessive taxation is horrible for business, and places an unnecessary burden on small businesses and the poor (no matter how "progressive" it is.)

Sadly, it looks like #4 is the way we're largely going to go. With all the liabilities we have, we're in for some real pain in the not-so-distant future. This will not work as they think, either.

Here's a quick example:
I run a software company. We are a US corporation, hiring US workers, with US taxes. All of our sales are done in-person, or over the internet. Corporate income tax can be avoided to a large extent through business expenses, leading to an effective tax rate not too much more than the income tax. Company pays employees, employees pay taxes, done. It works out to something like 40%, all said and done.

Now, suppose the tax climate gets really nasty. A company like mine doesn't have to be located in the United States - most of our customers aren't anyway.

So, it is possible to:
1) Set up shop in Panama (who doesn't tax corporations on income derived outside the country).
2) Move to another country (for example, Japan). Japan doesn't tax foreign-derived income for people who aren't "permanent residents". The US exempts the first $80,000. So, the first $80,000 are tax-free.
3) If you can live off $80,000 for a while, you can get paid in options. Provided you meet the criteria, this can end up capital gains. So, your taxes on this ends up at 15%.

So, for a hypothetical person making $150,000 - the taxes would be approx $10,500, or a 7% tax rate.

Large companies can do similar things, like "license" a bunch of technology from a company they own, located in a jurisdiction that doesn't tax them (like Ireland). This lets them reduce their taxable income and funnel the profits to something taxed at a much lower rate. Invest in Irish corp, license _from_ Irish corp, pay 15% taxes.

Yes, closing the capital gains "loophole" would even things out a bit; however, it has a lot of collateral damage; including people renouncing citizenship, reduced investment, etc. Given the credit crunch we're having, it really doesn't make a lot of sense.

At age 72, expected lifespan is another 11.2 years (and those numbers are from 1996, it maybe be a few years longer now). If the skin cancer recurs, he's in worse shape, but dying in the next 4-8 years is not a foregone conclusion. Now, you aren't necessarily compos mentis that whole period, but we've established that that is not a requirement to be president.

On one hand the US is ultra-religious.

Wrong.

But on the other hand helping the poor is totaly unamerican

Wrong.

You might want to read this report.

You might also want to reflect that people have the same life expectancy in the United States that they do in Germany. Doesn't really match well with your notion that the downtrodden working class in the United States is starving in the street, does it?

The Europeans have basically "solved" the problem of poverty by making everyone poor.

Hope this helps!

A link

It's not the best, but IANAL and research isn't my specialty either. For a decent overview, google "fiduciary responsibilities"

It's also a big deal in Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. One of the characters is establishing a publicly-traded corporation with a specific idealistic purpose in mind, but he has to make efforts to appear as though "shareholder value" is his primary concern.

In practice, it doesn't usually come to a lawsuit unless it's pretty blatant. But you would do well to realize that "the little guy" is hurt when stock prices drop, and that "profit" ultimately doesn't refer to thickening stacks of green paper, but rather to the creation of valued commoditiies (food, shelter, heat, entertainment) which have real impact on real people. Don't convince yourself that "corporate profits" are just some perverse game played by old white men.

This page shows life expectancy at ages 65 and 85 increasing from 11.9 to 17.7 and 4.0 to 6.3 years in 1900 and 1997 respectively.

One reason to look forward to an aging population: World Peace, Thanks To Old Men?