>>China would have gone communist no matter how many green pieces of paper went towards Chiang Kai-Shek.
Probably not. The Chinese people are fundamentally capitalistic, and Chiang had more men and better trained men. The main crisis that cost him power was the inflation that spiraled out of control. Why? Because Harry Dexter White cut off the American funding that was stabilizing the Chinese currency.
For a company, sure, but I don't think there's any requirement that an individual has to save his receipts. If he writes it off on his taxes, sure, but I doubt anyone would come after you because you couldn't prove you owned your own copy of Starcraft. I think they circumvent the issue by going after people actively up or downloading.
No, the things like numbers of caps, etc., were all factors (whereas Graham's model only uses words). All of the factors were put into a large statistical space, from which it carved up the space into spam and not-spam regions. The only thing I'd have done differently was to allow arbitrary tokens, which I didn't need for the project since the spam database I was using already had the interesting tokens extracted. Someone else took my code and extended it for arbitrary tokens.
The reason it worked better than the Plan for Spam's model was because he actually threw out useful information. While he was right, that trying to hard code for that stuff is impossible to get right, it's actually wrong to throw out information that can be processed by your statistical method.
If one of your input factors is simply the percentage of words which don't match a dictionary, that can be tremendously powerful at filtering spam. You run into issue with HTML if you don't understand it, but I mainly consider HTML emails to be spam-ish anyway, but I could have rewritten the lexer to deal with that cleanly.
>>Furthermore, many of the people who were publicly humiliated and accused of being Communists were in fact nothing of the sort.
Which ones?
The sad thing is, while McCarthy was wrong about the level of communist infiltration in America, he was wrong the wrong way. He greatly underestimated the number of communist agitators in America and in the state department at the time. See, for example, Harry Dexter White, the founder of the IMF, senior Treasury Department responsible for cutting funds to Chiang Kai Shek in China (letting China go Communist), and Soviet Spy "Jurist".
Venona was an eye-opening revelation for everyone, left-wing, right-wing, and center-wing alike. =)
>>that means he thinks you are really worth FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS! Isn't that amazing!?
Note this is after you've already (from what I can tell from TFA) put together a business idea and they picked the top whatever percent of ideas. He's buying a chunk of your company for a couple pennies and a slap on the back, and then insulting people that don't think that's a great idea. It's not the offer that's necessarily insulting -- perhaps you really might only be worth a half million or so -- but calling people stupid for rejecting his offer, when they might have done the math and realized he's offering them a crap deal.
Taking 5% of a company for TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS? Anyone who accepts that deal should be shot. Saying that "they failed an IQ test" just makes Graham out to be a fraud.
Also, and this is a personal pet peeve for me, he wrote "The Plan for Spam" in August 2002. Bob Boyer and I (Bill Kerney) while grad students at UC San Diego wrote a very similar statistical spam filter, which we open sourced and released in December 2000 (and which some people took and continued working on it). And we didn't invent the idea either -- we based our work on the UC Irvine Machine Learning Database.
And yet somehow he never corrects the notion that he invented the idea.
He also didn't invent Bayesian filtering. I open sourced a similar statistical spam filter a year or two before he wrote the plan for spam. And I didn't invent it either.
As if there hasn't been a large modding community for games in the last 10 years...:p User driven content outnumbers original content by quite a bit in games which were designed for extensibility. Quake, NWN, etc.
10 years, and the TF1 community is still going strong. Visit www.customtf.com and download everything you need for free, and you can hop on a server immediately and start playing again.
There's actually been a lot of development in Quake1 these days. FTEQuake (with shaders and new particle effects) looks like a modern FPS, and is fully compatible with all the old Quakeworld servers and clients.
>>>>Are you actually ignorant of the "years and years of deliberation and negotiation" between the North and the South? >>Which one of these changed the nature of the union how? Which one offered a legal way for a state to unilaterally secede? Are you ignorant about what these negotiations actually produced?
The Missouri Compromise, among others. There's a popular belief among historians that if Clay had lived a while longer, he'd have found a compromise to prevent the Civil War.
As to the legality -- ultimately, it's settled by the last resort of kings. But of contemporaries of the time, there was a wide variety of opinions on the legality of secession. President Buchanon, for example, believed that both secession AND fighting to stop secession were illegal.
The point is, you said that the secession was immoral because the South didn't try to get a compromise, which is a blatant falsehood.
>>They tried to dress the Civil War up like it had parallels with the Revolution. That was propaganda that you seem to be buying.
There are definite parallels. They saw which way the wind was blowing. You said, "In order to claim a parallel with the abused rights of the Revolutionaries, there would have to have been legislation freeing slaves without compensation", which of course, is exactly what happened in all states but DC, where they did use compensatory emancipation.
Under the constitution, the government cannot seize property without compensation. You are ignoring this.
>>It says that there is no crime in talking about secession and that the Union can survive comments that are in error. Or did you completely miss the part about "error of opinion"?
Which I mentioned, if you bothered to read what I said.
>>That's possibly because you've bought into the "death tax" terminology that implies that somehow whenever somebody dies, the >> government gets a chunk of it. It's an estate tax.
No, I use that term because it IS a tax on dying. It's possible to give large amounts of assets to your children tax free. But if you get unlucky and die, then you get hit with a massive tax. It's not an estate tax, because all the large "estates", like the Kennedy family's empire, don't pay this tax. It's solely a tax on people who die in an untimely fashion, or without proper planning. Hence, death tax.
For example, consider the default: On death of one parent, the assets pass to the spouse. On death of both, assets pass to her. Upshot: she pays $675,000 or loses the house.
However, if the father is smart, he sets up a trust fund. On his death, $1M of his estate passes into a trust. No tax is paid, since it is under the limit. Then when her mom dies, she has double the effective exemption on the property, saving her $450,000, simply because the father didn't die before he set up a trust fund. And with smart use of gifting laws, they could take it all the way down to $0.
The death tax is simply a way for the government to confiscate assets from the unlucky or uninformed. Neither one of which is the basis for a just system of taxation.
>>That's why progressive tax rates are popular, and that's why an estate tax with an exemption high enough to cover a reasonably >> priced home makes sense.
Which is why the current situation is so ridiculous. Housing prices have shot through the roof, and, remember, those aren't the only assets a family has. If you have a life insurance policy, the government takes half of that as well, since your house has used up all of your exemption. Car? Half. Property? Investments? Half. Bank Accounts? Half. And all these things have already been subject to income tax, capital gains tax, and interest tax.
Defenders of the tax always try to parley it into a "tax only on the rich", but, guess what, a whole lot more people are labeled "rich" than actually are. And the rich don't actually pay it. It's solely a tax for the rising middle class.
>>he words you quote were not just penned up one morning after King George decided to raise a tax or two. >>It was after years and years of deliberation and negotiation in an attempt to address specific grievances, >>including the ongoing denial of already established rights of Englishmen.
Are you actually ignorant of the "years and years of deliberation and negotiation" between the North and the South?
You think they just decided to up and secede one day? Slavery had been one of the most significant issues debated in congress for FORTY YEARS leading up to the Civil War. What do you think Henry Clay is famous for? Irreconcilable differences built up in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and when Lincoln got elected, they saw which way the wind was blowing and seceded.
>>The South did not fulfill their obligations to reconcile with the North.
You ought to do your research. Various compromises were attempted by the South at the last minute to avoid the Civil War, and rejected by Lincoln.
>>The South did not meet the criteria because the only action that they claimed the North >>had taken against them was not being more zealous in returning runaway slaves and punishing citizens who helped them.
Setting aside the immorality of slavery for the second, the South perceived it as an attempt by the North to take away their "property" and ruin their ability to make income. Even for slaveowners which recognized the gross inhumanity of slavery, they rarely freed their own slaves, even after their death.
Even Patrick Henry didn't free any of his own slaves, and he was quite aware of his own hypocrisy: "Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot justify it. However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and lament my want of conformity to them."
The causes of the Civil War have many parallels in the Revolutionary War. See for example the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, the Tea Act, etc. Americans of that age were ready to go to war over laws that negatively affected their economics. From the South's point of view, it was immoral of the North to dispossess them of their "property", and so were justified in going to war.
You are taking a much too simplistic view to call the secession simply "immoral". Violating the natural right to property is an immoral act. Withdrawing from the Constitution is not inherently immoral -- even the founders of the Constitution talked about it being a possibility during Washington's second election, and in 1801 Jefferson inaugural address said, "If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." (And then went on to say that real patriots shouldn't want to secede, 'cause we're living in the best damn country in the world. But he supported the right for people to propose it.)
The most moral solution would have been compensatory emancipation -- both ending the abomination of slavery, and respecting the "property rights" of the South. It's not like it wasn't done elsewhere in the world, and without bloodshed.
>>Look, you've clearly not read anything written here, I'm really not sure why you bothered to reply
I simply said the causes were complex, because they were, and because I don't feel like writing a hundred pages on a complex subject just to answer you.
The short answer is, if you're interested in the "moral rightness" of the secession, then it breaks down like this: 1) Rebellion is not moral or immoral in itself. You're confusing this with legal or illegal, and even then, the secession was legal, to a certain degree. 2) The South was morally in the wrong for defending an institution that could not be defended. Slavery was a way of making money, and it is hard for people to willingly give up their source of money. 3) The North should have enacted a policy of Compensatory Emancipation, as did other nations before America, and as the Union did in Washington DC.
>>The Southern cause was based on a radical departure from the tradition it used to claim the authority for it's actions. >>Their position lacked integrity and you simply walking up and saying, "No, it didn't!" doesn't change that.
Ignorance is no excuse for ignorance.
This sound familiar to you?
"...that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
>>That's all good and fine, but this isn't exactly a sob story. I understand that it would be better if she got to keep all of the >>money that her parents earned, and it would be better if none of us ever had to pay taxes, but it doesn't make any sense from a >>public policy perspective.
It is a perfect example of why the death tax should be abolished. It says that every time a generation in the family dies, they have to pay as much money as a new house to get to keep the property THEY ALREADY OWN.
>>but those are the breaks when stumbling into found income.
That's precisely the point. This is not income, but the government confiscating assets. There is an enormously important difference between the two that you are missing. The current system of taxation we have says that individuals have to pay a certain percentage of their income, and then what they have left over, they get to keep. The death tax says that the government can confiscate your assets every time someone dies.
>>If you have an asset that you can convert to millions of dollars in cash, you're fairly wealthy. >>Trying to paint these folks as poor is really a non-starter.
Untrue, and you're missing the point. Theoretical wealth has no practical application. By your standard, all people in San Diego are "the rich" since most people who own houses now have estates over a million dollars. $700,000 is the average price for a standalone house these days in San Diego. I lived for the last two years in a four bedroom standalone house in Daly City that was appraised at $1.5 million dollars. And believe me, it's not a great house.
>>I'm sure that they worked hard and earned their income, but that doesn't make them any different from the rest of us.
They worked hard and earned their income, AND PAID TAXES ON THE INCOME ALREADY.
What you're saying is that the government is in the right to evict her from her house and have her move into a smaller house. Then when she dies, her kid gets evicted from that house, and so on and so forth.
>>You just described a person who has gotten an after-tax cash payment >>of more than $1.8M dropped in her lap (let's say, 30 years' income), >>and you're describing the result as tragic?
Yes, assuming she wants to stay in her family's house, as many people do. If her family preferred the cash, they would move out of San Diego, as many people here do, and live like kings in cheaper parts of the country. But her family likes their house, likes their neighborhood, likes the ocean.
If her parents die, the government tells her she needs to give them a check for $675,000, or move out. That's what I consider tragic.
That's why we passed a cap on property tax incomes in California. Sure, it's "fair" (for some arbitrary definition of fair) that people should pay a percentage of the value of their house, but the practical upshot of it was that property values were rising so fast, working families and people on fixed incomes (i.e. retired people) were being evicted from their own homes.
I'm a firm believer in property rights. If I own a house, I own a house damn it. Making my friend pay the equivalent cost of a new house just to keep the house her family has all ready bought (and paid off) is just theft on the part of the government.
I'll say it again -- these people are not wealthy. They bought the house for next to nothing in the 70s, and property values have skyrocketed since then. They live on a very modest income. They're only theoreticaly rich, not practically rich. That's a very important difference to understand.
>>Aside from the fact that what you said is so self-contradictory that >>it boggles the mind that a human being could possess himself of such >>notions and still have the mental capacity to type on a keyboard
I can see why you failed Econ 101.
>>There *is* a limit. Your inability to conceive a limit does not refute >> its existence.
And there's a limit on our energy production as measured by all the energy on earth and in the sun. In other words, don't be a socalist moron.
Wealth is not zero-sum. I can independently create wealth without making another man poor. And if nobody works, then nobody has any wealth, regardless of how many rubles they pay you in your motherland, Amper.
>>In other words, more tax money is misappropriated per-capita at the >>local level than at the national level. OK, I have no statistics to >>support this, but seems that way in the US anyhow.:)
I think the local people might just be getting caught more, since they're lower on the totem pole, and the FBI doesn't seem to be less reluctant to investigate local governments than senators.
At the Federal level, you have ABSCAM, bridges to nowhere, all the same kind of nonsense you get at the local level, like we have here in San Diego.
>>just answered this Xth Amendment fallacy in another post on this >>thread.
And your response was just as lacking. The Constitution was an agreement between states, and so could be broken by the states.
>>There was an entire ideology surrounding the basis for the revolution, >> the debate and language was steeped in the concept of moral rebellion >> and just authority.
There were a number of causes for the Revolution, as there were for the Civil War. What I'm taking exception with is that you're claiming the Revolution was moral, and the Civil War was immoral. Don't Tread On Me and many other "moral" factors as you'd call them are shared between the two conflicts.
The death tax is actually a terrible idea. As a result of housing prices shooting up much faster than inflation (or the death tax bracket, which is getting reset to $1M in 2011), means that everyone with a house and otherwise moderate assets in San Diego is considered "rich", and their children will quite possibly lose their parent's house.
It's not the Bill Gates getting nailed by this. My friend's family bought a four bedroom house in La Jolla near the beach when they emigrated from Vietnam back in the 70s. If her parents died in a car accident in 2011, the tax on the house alone (now worth $2.5M), not even counting any other assets, would be $675,000. There's no way in hell that she'll be able to keep her parents' house. Her mom runs a nail shop, and she works as a wedding planner, with very moderate means. It would simply be tragic.
Actual "rich" people don't get hit by the estate tax at all. Do you think the Kennedy's actually 'own' anything?
Go back and take Econ 101 again, fool. Wealth is no zero sum. If everyone worked twice as hard, everyone would have twice as much real spending power on average.
Which is why communism doesn't work. When nobody is producing anything, nobody has any spending power, no matter what your bank account says on paper.
>>Wealth comes, ultimately, from the exploitation of natural resources, which are of finite quantity
Slashdot Mirror
>>China would have gone communist no matter how many green pieces of paper went towards Chiang Kai-Shek.
Probably not. The Chinese people are fundamentally capitalistic, and Chiang had more men and better trained men. The main crisis that cost him power was the inflation that spiraled out of control. Why? Because Harry Dexter White cut off the American funding that was stabilizing the Chinese currency.
For a company, sure, but I don't think there's any requirement that an individual has to save his receipts. If he writes it off on his taxes, sure, but I doubt anyone would come after you because you couldn't prove you owned your own copy of Starcraft. I think they circumvent the issue by going after people actively up or downloading.
No, the things like numbers of caps, etc., were all factors (whereas Graham's model only uses words). All of the factors were put into a large statistical space, from which it carved up the space into spam and not-spam regions. The only thing I'd have done differently was to allow arbitrary tokens, which I didn't need for the project since the spam database I was using already had the interesting tokens extracted. Someone else took my code and extended it for arbitrary tokens.
The reason it worked better than the Plan for Spam's model was because he actually threw out useful information. While he was right, that trying to hard code for that stuff is impossible to get right, it's actually wrong to throw out information that can be processed by your statistical method.
If one of your input factors is simply the percentage of words which don't match a dictionary, that can be tremendously powerful at filtering spam. You run into issue with HTML if you don't understand it, but I mainly consider HTML emails to be spam-ish anyway, but I could have rewritten the lexer to deal with that cleanly.
>>Furthermore, many of the people who were publicly humiliated and accused of being Communists were in fact nothing of the sort.
Which ones?
The sad thing is, while McCarthy was wrong about the level of communist infiltration in America, he was wrong the wrong way. He greatly underestimated the number of communist agitators in America and in the state department at the time. See, for example, Harry Dexter White, the founder of the IMF, senior Treasury Department responsible for cutting funds to Chiang Kai Shek in China (letting China go Communist), and Soviet Spy "Jurist".
Venona was an eye-opening revelation for everyone, left-wing, right-wing, and center-wing alike. =)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
We just called it Spamfilter.
E
z
Readme:
http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~wkerney/spamfilter.READM
Download:
http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~wkerney/spamfilter.tar.g
>>that means he thinks you are really worth FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS! Isn't that amazing!?
Note this is after you've already (from what I can tell from TFA) put together a business idea and they picked the top whatever percent of ideas. He's buying a chunk of your company for a couple pennies and a slap on the back, and then insulting people that don't think that's a great idea. It's not the offer that's necessarily insulting -- perhaps you really might only be worth a half million or so -- but calling people stupid for rejecting his offer, when they might have done the math and realized he's offering them a crap deal.
As far as I can tell, Paul Graham is a hustler.
Taking 5% of a company for TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS? Anyone who accepts that deal should be shot. Saying that "they failed an IQ test" just makes Graham out to be a fraud.
Also, and this is a personal pet peeve for me, he wrote "The Plan for Spam" in August 2002. Bob Boyer and I (Bill Kerney) while grad students at UC San Diego wrote a very similar statistical spam filter, which we open sourced and released in December 2000 (and which some people took and continued working on it). And we didn't invent the idea either -- we based our work on the UC Irvine Machine Learning Database.
And yet somehow he never corrects the notion that he invented the idea.
He also didn't invent Bayesian filtering. I open sourced a similar statistical spam filter a year or two before he wrote the plan for spam. And I didn't invent it either.
As if there hasn't been a large modding community for games in the last 10 years... :p User driven content outnumbers original content by quite a bit in games which were designed for extensibility. Quake, NWN, etc.
Obligatory plug for my mod: www.customtf.com. =)
CuTF is like TF1, but better. =)
10 years, and the TF1 community is still going strong. Visit www.customtf.com and download everything you need for free, and you can hop on a server immediately and start playing again.
There's actually been a lot of development in Quake1 these days. FTEQuake (with shaders and new particle effects) looks like a modern FPS, and is fully compatible with all the old Quakeworld servers and clients.
Ah, now we know who to blame for the ludicrosity of the autolevel system of Oblivion.
I'll avoid this game (whatever it is), at all costs.
>>>>Are you actually ignorant of the "years and years of deliberation and negotiation" between the North and the South?
>>Which one of these changed the nature of the union how? Which one offered a legal way for a state to unilaterally secede? Are you ignorant about what these negotiations actually produced?
The Missouri Compromise, among others. There's a popular belief among historians that if Clay had lived a while longer, he'd have found a compromise to prevent the Civil War.
As to the legality -- ultimately, it's settled by the last resort of kings. But of contemporaries of the time, there was a wide variety of opinions on the legality of secession. President Buchanon, for example, believed that both secession AND fighting to stop secession were illegal.
The point is, you said that the secession was immoral because the South didn't try to get a compromise, which is a blatant falsehood.
>>They tried to dress the Civil War up like it had parallels with the Revolution. That was propaganda that you seem to be buying.
There are definite parallels. They saw which way the wind was blowing. You said, "In order to claim a parallel with the abused rights of the Revolutionaries, there would have to have been legislation freeing slaves without compensation", which of course, is exactly what happened in all states but DC, where they did use compensatory emancipation.
Under the constitution, the government cannot seize property without compensation. You are ignoring this.
>>It says that there is no crime in talking about secession and that the Union can survive comments that are in error. Or did you completely miss the part about "error of opinion"?
Which I mentioned, if you bothered to read what I said.
Actually the default DOD response to cases like that is to throw more money at it, not to kill the guy's wife and set up an elaborate frame-job.
Of course, maybe they just wanted to mix it up a bit for variety, who knows?
The only thing that I've learned from the debate is that studies are a primary cause of conflict.
Scientific debates always seem to end with a bunch of guys in nice outfits yelling at each other until their faces turn red.
Clearly, we need to ban science.
>>That's possibly because you've bought into the "death tax" terminology that implies that somehow whenever somebody dies, the
>> government gets a chunk of it. It's an estate tax.
No, I use that term because it IS a tax on dying. It's possible to give large amounts of assets to your children tax free. But if you get unlucky and die, then you get hit with a massive tax. It's not an estate tax, because all the large "estates", like the Kennedy family's empire, don't pay this tax. It's solely a tax on people who die in an untimely fashion, or without proper planning. Hence, death tax.
For example, consider the default: On death of one parent, the assets pass to the spouse. On death of both, assets pass to her. Upshot: she pays $675,000 or loses the house.
However, if the father is smart, he sets up a trust fund. On his death, $1M of his estate passes into a trust. No tax is paid, since it is under the limit. Then when her mom dies, she has double the effective exemption on the property, saving her $450,000, simply because the father didn't die before he set up a trust fund. And with smart use of gifting laws, they could take it all the way down to $0.
The death tax is simply a way for the government to confiscate assets from the unlucky or uninformed. Neither one of which is the basis for a just system of taxation.
>>That's why progressive tax rates are popular, and that's why an estate tax with an exemption high enough to cover a reasonably
>> priced home makes sense.
Which is why the current situation is so ridiculous. Housing prices have shot through the roof, and, remember, those aren't the only assets a family has. If you have a life insurance policy, the government takes half of that as well, since your house has used up all of your exemption. Car? Half. Property? Investments? Half. Bank Accounts? Half. And all these things have already been subject to income tax, capital gains tax, and interest tax.
Defenders of the tax always try to parley it into a "tax only on the rich", but, guess what, a whole lot more people are labeled "rich" than actually are. And the rich don't actually pay it. It's solely a tax for the rising middle class.
>>he words you quote were not just penned up one morning after King George decided to raise a tax or two.
>>It was after years and years of deliberation and negotiation in an attempt to address specific grievances,
>>including the ongoing denial of already established rights of Englishmen.
Are you actually ignorant of the "years and years of deliberation and negotiation" between the North and the South?
You think they just decided to up and secede one day? Slavery had been one of the most significant issues debated in congress for FORTY YEARS leading up to the Civil War. What do you think Henry Clay is famous for? Irreconcilable differences built up in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and when Lincoln got elected, they saw which way the wind was blowing and seceded.
>>The South did not fulfill their obligations to reconcile with the North.
You ought to do your research. Various compromises were attempted by the South at the last minute to avoid the Civil War, and rejected by Lincoln.
>>The South did not meet the criteria because the only action that they claimed the North
>>had taken against them was not being more zealous in returning runaway slaves and punishing citizens who helped them.
Setting aside the immorality of slavery for the second, the South perceived it as an attempt by the North to take away their "property" and ruin their ability to make income. Even for slaveowners which recognized the gross inhumanity of slavery, they rarely freed their own slaves, even after their death.
Even Patrick Henry didn't free any of his own slaves, and he was quite aware of his own hypocrisy:
"Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot justify it. However culpable my conduct, I will so far pay my devoir to virtue as to own the excellence and rectitude of her precepts, and lament my want of conformity to them."
The causes of the Civil War have many parallels in the Revolutionary War. See for example the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, the Tea Act, etc. Americans of that age were ready to go to war over laws that negatively affected their economics. From the South's point of view, it was immoral of the North to dispossess them of their "property", and so were justified in going to war.
You are taking a much too simplistic view to call the secession simply "immoral". Violating the natural right to property is an immoral act. Withdrawing from the Constitution is not inherently immoral -- even the founders of the Constitution talked about it being a possibility during Washington's second election, and in 1801 Jefferson inaugural address said, "If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." (And then went on to say that real patriots shouldn't want to secede, 'cause we're living in the best damn country in the world. But he supported the right for people to propose it.)
The most moral solution would have been compensatory emancipation -- both ending the abomination of slavery, and respecting the "property rights" of the South. It's not like it wasn't done elsewhere in the world, and without bloodshed.
>>Look, you've clearly not read anything written here, I'm really not sure why you bothered to reply
I simply said the causes were complex, because they were, and because I don't feel like writing a hundred pages on a complex subject just to answer you.
The short answer is, if you're interested in the "moral rightness" of the secession, then it breaks down like this:
1) Rebellion is not moral or immoral in itself. You're confusing this with legal or illegal, and even then, the secession was legal, to a certain degree.
2) The South was morally in the wrong for defending an institution that could not be defended. Slavery was a way of making money, and it is hard for people to willingly give up their source of money.
3) The North should have enacted a policy of Compensatory Emancipation, as did other nations before America, and as the Union did in Washington DC.
>>The Southern cause was based on a radical departure from the tradition it used to claim the authority for it's actions.
>>Their position lacked integrity and you simply walking up and saying, "No, it didn't!" doesn't change that.
Ignorance is no excuse for ignorance.
This sound familiar to you?
"...that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
>>That's all good and fine, but this isn't exactly a sob story. I understand that it would be better if she got to keep all of the
>>money that her parents earned, and it would be better if none of us ever had to pay taxes, but it doesn't make any sense from a
>>public policy perspective.
It is a perfect example of why the death tax should be abolished. It says that every time a generation in the family dies, they have to pay as much money as a new house to get to keep the property THEY ALREADY OWN.
>>but those are the breaks when stumbling into found income.
That's precisely the point. This is not income, but the government confiscating assets. There is an enormously important difference between the two that you are missing. The current system of taxation we have says that individuals have to pay a certain percentage of their income, and then what they have left over, they get to keep. The death tax says that the government can confiscate your assets every time someone dies.
>>If you have an asset that you can convert to millions of dollars in cash, you're fairly wealthy.
>>Trying to paint these folks as poor is really a non-starter.
Untrue, and you're missing the point. Theoretical wealth has no practical application. By your standard, all people in San Diego are "the rich" since most people who own houses now have estates over a million dollars. $700,000 is the average price for a standalone house these days in San Diego. I lived for the last two years in a four bedroom standalone house in Daly City that was appraised at $1.5 million dollars. And believe me, it's not a great house.
>>I'm sure that they worked hard and earned their income, but that doesn't make them any different from the rest of us.
They worked hard and earned their income, AND PAID TAXES ON THE INCOME ALREADY.
What you're saying is that the government is in the right to evict her from her house and have her move into a smaller house. Then when she dies, her kid gets evicted from that house, and so on and so forth.
>>You just described a person who has gotten an after-tax cash payment
>>of more than $1.8M dropped in her lap (let's say, 30 years' income),
>>and you're describing the result as tragic?
Yes, assuming she wants to stay in her family's house, as many people do. If her family preferred the cash, they would move out of San Diego, as many people here do, and live like kings in cheaper parts of the country. But her family likes their house, likes their neighborhood, likes the ocean.
If her parents die, the government tells her she needs to give them a check for $675,000, or move out. That's what I consider tragic.
That's why we passed a cap on property tax incomes in California. Sure, it's "fair" (for some arbitrary definition of fair) that people should pay a percentage of the value of their house, but the practical upshot of it was that property values were rising so fast, working families and people on fixed incomes (i.e. retired people) were being evicted from their own homes.
I'm a firm believer in property rights. If I own a house, I own a house damn it. Making my friend pay the equivalent cost of a new house just to keep the house her family has all ready bought (and paid off) is just theft on the part of the government.
I'll say it again -- these people are not wealthy. They bought the house for next to nothing in the 70s, and property values have skyrocketed since then. They live on a very modest income. They're only theoreticaly rich, not practically rich. That's a very important difference to understand.
>>Aside from the fact that what you said is so self-contradictory that
>>it boggles the mind that a human being could possess himself of such
>>notions and still have the mental capacity to type on a keyboard
I can see why you failed Econ 101.
>>There *is* a limit. Your inability to conceive a limit does not refute
>> its existence.
And there's a limit on our energy production as measured by all the energy on earth and in the sun. In other words, don't be a socalist moron.
Wealth is not zero-sum. I can independently create wealth without making another man poor. And if nobody works, then nobody has any wealth, regardless of how many rubles they pay you in your motherland, Amper.
>>In other words, more tax money is misappropriated per-capita at the :)
>>local level than at the national level. OK, I have no statistics to
>>support this, but seems that way in the US anyhow.
I think the local people might just be getting caught more, since they're lower on the totem pole, and the FBI doesn't seem to be less reluctant to investigate local governments than senators.
At the Federal level, you have ABSCAM, bridges to nowhere, all the same kind of nonsense you get at the local level, like we have here in San Diego.
>>just answered this Xth Amendment fallacy in another post on this
>>thread.
And your response was just as lacking. The Constitution was an agreement between states, and so could be broken by the states.
>>There was an entire ideology surrounding the basis for the revolution,
>> the debate and language was steeped in the concept of moral rebellion
>> and just authority.
There were a number of causes for the Revolution, as there were for the Civil War. What I'm taking exception with is that you're claiming the Revolution was moral, and the Civil War was immoral. Don't Tread On Me and many other "moral" factors as you'd call them are shared between the two conflicts.
The death tax is actually a terrible idea. As a result of housing prices shooting up much faster than inflation (or the death tax bracket, which is getting reset to $1M in 2011), means that everyone with a house and otherwise moderate assets in San Diego is considered "rich", and their children will quite possibly lose their parent's house.
It's not the Bill Gates getting nailed by this. My friend's family bought a four bedroom house in La Jolla near the beach when they emigrated from Vietnam back in the 70s. If her parents died in a car accident in 2011, the tax on the house alone (now worth $2.5M), not even counting any other assets, would be $675,000. There's no way in hell that she'll be able to keep her parents' house. Her mom runs a nail shop, and she works as a wedding planner, with very moderate means. It would simply be tragic.
Actual "rich" people don't get hit by the estate tax at all. Do you think the Kennedy's actually 'own' anything?
>>Wealth *is* zero sum.
Go back and take Econ 101 again, fool. Wealth is no zero sum. If everyone worked twice as hard, everyone would have twice as much real spending power on average.
Which is why communism doesn't work. When nobody is producing anything, nobody has any spending power, no matter what your bank account says on paper.
>>Wealth comes, ultimately, from the exploitation of natural resources, which are of finite quantity
Not in any meaningful sense.