Actually, an awful lot of successful businessmen got started through the hard work you describe. What they didn't do was take government handouts and become complacent, ambitionless wards of the state like so many poor do nowadays, nor did they get a government school "education" and become middling employees of the corporations run by those who are successful.
Your question as to "fairness" can't be answered because the statement that someone would have "no way of improving their lot" is a false premise. (And it's curious that you're defending statism as if it solves such a premise, because in truth the only situation under which "no way of improving [your] lot" can occur is a statist society in which social classes are enforced.)
Working class families had a "safety net" long before Uncle Sam became involved. Our grandparents and even great-grand-parents had benefit plans that protected them when they were sick, injured, out of work, or too old to work. Millions of workers belonged to "friendly societies."
Various forms of friendly societies have existed since ancient China, Greece, and Rome. In Britain, they arose out of the guild system. Daniel Defoe wrote in 1697 that friendly societies were "very extensive" in England. In the mid-18th century, as the Industrial Revolution hastened the growth of British towns, the friendly society system became well established. Sometimes they were called fraternal societies, mutual aid societies, or benefit clubs. Similar organizations developed in the United States in the 19th century.
For large charities such as the Salvation Army and smaller local charities run by churches and other private organizations, the fight against poverty has been going on for the past 150 years. Tragically, standing in their way has been the federal government. Besides an effort to wage "war" on poverty beginning in the 1960s, the federal government has attempted to intercede and dole out aid since the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. These interventions have proven costly and yielded disastrous results. By continually siphoning funds away from the private sector, lawmakers and bureaucrats further diminish the ability of civil society to deal with the problem of poverty. (As Charles Murray shows in Losing Ground, poverty was declining steadily through the 1950s and 1960s up until the Great Society programs kicked in during the early 1970s.)
If the plight of the poor is to be truly addressed, Americans should study the lessons of the past. Earlier in the twentieth century, private charities offered a more effective cure for chronic indigence, and it was through mutually beneficial activities and voluntary funding that the spirit of American compassion was unleashed. In the best interests of the poor, the government should withdraw itself completely from all activities designed to help them and allow civil society its full range of motion.
And here's a side-by-side comparison of what happens to groups who end up on the government dole vs. groups allowed to take care of themselves. Government Creates Poverty:
The government has made most Indian tribes wards of the state. Government manages their land, provides their health care, and pays for housing and child care. Twenty different departments and agencies have special "native American" programs. The result? Indians have the highest poverty rate, nearly 25 percent, and the lowest life expectancy of any group in America. Sixty-six percent are born to single mothers....
Consider the Lumbees of Robeson County, N.C. -- a tribe not recognized as sovereign by the government and therefore ineligible for most of the "help" given other tribes. The Lumbees do much better than those recognized tribes.
Lumbees own their homes and succeed in business. They include real estate developer Jim Thomas, who used to own the Sacramento Kings, and Jack Lowery, who helped start the Cracker Barrel Restaurants. Lumbees started the first Indian-owned bank, which now has 12 branches.
"At gunpoint"? Yes, that's ultimately true. So let's look at your alternative. Suppose I'm in your utopia, and I claim an unclaimed piece of land. I drill for oil, find some, and start pumping. Only my oil operation, with its noise, smells, and deadly hydrogen sulphide emissions, interferes with your ability to enjoy and make use of your adjacent land for farming. How will this dispute be resolved?
In a free society, you would have something like this.
By the way, how do you propose to use the government to solve such a dispute? Because the government, back in the 1800s, eliminated the use of the court system to seek relief against polluters. See what happens when you have one system trying to monopolize solutions? They can take it away from you just as fast as they gave it to you.
Your philosophy either ignores human nature
Actually, the exact opposite is true. Libertarianism is probably the one philosophy that both understands human nature---petty, greedy, self-interested, not at all altrustic---and tries to work with human nature as it is, rather than condemn and punish it, or try to change it.
Libertarians aren't going to try to force people to be charitable ("welfare," "social security") and then wonder why this does nothing but create anger and resentment. Libertarians aren't going to wonder why giving all this free money to people seems to do nothing but make them less likely to ever want to get back to being productive citizens. Some people are charitable; most aren't. Libertarianism is about fostering private, voluntary charity without trying to force the uncharitable to go along with it.
Libertarians aren't going to try to fundamentally change human nature like the communists did ("If only all the workers would all work together and support each other..."), and then wonder why this does nothing but create shortages. Some people are cooperative; many aren't. Libertarianism is about fostering private, voluntary cooperation (free-market businesses) without trying to force the selfish and loners to go along with the group.
Libertarians understand that people are going to be greedy and selfish, and try to come up with ways of making society work in light of this--not against it. Libertarians aren't going to try to tax, regulate, and punish these basic and inescapable human behaviors, and then wonder why no one is willing to work anymore. Some people are really greedy; many aren't. Libertarianism is about fostering people's natural desire to have things into productive labor, productive industry, and wealth creation, not trying to suppress these natural desires and then wondering why people turn to fraud, graft, the depredations we've seen in the world financial system, and so on.
Libertarians aren't pacifists and have no problem with "pointing guns"---when its a justifiable act of self-defense against the initiation of force, as understood by the Non-Aggression Principle. What libertarians have a problem with is the initiation of force---or worse, the insistence that sometimes that initiation is actually moral if it's done by a "legitimate" group (the government).
Getting back to the guns, well, yes, somebody, some agency that at least tries to be impartial, is necessary to both referee disputes like the one I outlined above, and to make sure that the (often temporarily) powerful, don't crush the (often temporarily) weak. And yes, sometimes, this requires guns. I know you still disagree with me...
Except what the government does with its guns is far from just "referee disputes" nowadays. If all we had was a government that, as in the late 1700s, merely protected "life, liberty,
Actually I posted several times in these threads, to the effect that the industrial-era leaders and modern-era bankers/financiers/&al. are backed by government force, and oppresses and feeds off of the working class as much as the government itself does.
Indeed, any company that relies on intellectual property is benefiting from a system predicated upon government force. But that doesn't necessarily mean that's why any particular IT company is incredibly successful: For example, there are plenty of companies that made fortunes on open source, and whereas F/OSS is based on IP laws, it only uses them to a defensive extent. For the most part, it actually turns IP law on its head, saying "go ahead and copy this."
If someone's going to produce content, there is currently no alternative to the IP system under which they can do so, and thus you can't conduct an experiment to see if the IP system is really the reason one of these companies succeeded or failed.
It's a pretty neat trick, though: The government completely monopolizes myriad aspects of our lives, then tries to claim we need the government because without them we wouldn't have those things. How about we allow competing systems, make the government-owned one compete fairly with the freely-operated ones, and then see which system wins?
Actually, there are an awful lot of people that are "waking up" finally. The topic of this article itself, and stuff I've linked to in these threads---the Free State Project, the Ron Paul phenomenon---attest to this.
Because some people produce new wealth. Or do you actually think that we have the same amount of "stuff" here in 2012 that they had in 1912, or 1812, or...?
Greedy people are often the producers: Business leaders, entrepreneurs, &c.. Not all are parasites.
If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.
James Lovelock, the scientist that came up with the 'Gaia Theory' and a prominent herald of climate change, once predicted utter disaster for the planet from climate change, writing 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.' Now Lovelock is walking back his rhetoric, admitting that he and other prominent global warming advocates were being alarmists. In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books -- mine included -- because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace.
If I'm not mistaken, the same applies to an unconscious person, also unable to give consent, being given medical services. If you're using something, even if you don't know or (eventually, after the benefit has been derived, natch) agree, it still counts as an implied contract.
A modern legal fiction that was invented by a system thoroughly immersed in this poisonous "social contract" idea to begin with, and the reason "living wills" and "DNRs" had to be invented.
You're basically trying to justify an evil idea by one of its own derivations. A cancer doesn't suddenly become a good thing because it's metastasized. I'm sure there's a name for this particular fallacy, but I don't know it offhand.
The inflation point is interesting. Paul also wants to eliminate the Federal Reserve and end their profligate printing of money, thereby ending inflation. Maybe Paul accidentally ignored the inflation factor when he figured this, or he's expecting it to work out in a post-inflation system, and my math just worked out by pure coincidence.
As for the health care system, you sure can undo 22 years of rising costs: Eliminate the parasitic, oligopolistic insurance companies that the government created with the passage of the HMO Act. Up until the 1970s, people often paid cash for health care, and prices reflected actual market values for the services. "Strict rationing" is, of course, exactly what I'd expect the government to do: They created the crisis by inserting themselves halfway into the equation, on behalf of the insurance parasites, and now they'll come along and clean up the fallout by inserting themselves all the way into the equation.
Time and time again through history, when a single person amassed too much power or wealth, the poor and needy would rise up to take what was built upon their broken backs, and in so doing taking the life of those that would oppress.
You are comparing kings and tyrants who built their fortunes upon theft and coercion ("taxing" their "subjects"), to people who earned their money through productive labor.
1) Should the people of an advanced civilization that includes core values of compassion and respect develop means to systematically decrease the suffering of its less fortunates?
- I believe it should.
2) Can we rely on individuals, rather than systems, to reliably, and without discrimination, provide that means to decrease suffering?
- I do not believe so, regrettably.
Based on what evidence? Up until the early 1900s, providing for the needy was handled by a vast number of private charities, churches, mutual aid societies, fraternal orders, service organizations, and the like. This was all destroyed by the U.S. Government using the competitive advantage that rampant theft confers upon it.
Much of the crushing poverty of the industrial era was also created by the government, not by their support of the free market, but by their support of industrial corporations at the expense of everyone and everything else. They supported monopolies; they intervened in labor disputes, violently, on the side of the corporations; they passed laws destroying small businesses and farms; they eliminated common-law legal recourses when corporations injured or killed workers, polluted, and so on; they did everything they could to turn America into a country of millions of wage slaves working for a few rich industrialists.
And then in the 1930s when the stink got so bad they couldn't ignore it anymore, the U.S. Government came along and "fixed" a problem of their own creation by inserting themselves even more into private matters, but this time on the side of the common man. This is what libertarian Harry Browne meant when he said, "Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.'"
3) Am I willing to accept a certain degree of inefficiency in that process, based on the sheer scale of such an undertaking?
- I am, having an understanding of the nature of complex systems.
Does that acceptance of the "inefficiency" of this system include an acceptance of what I pointed out in #1?
You are right that the U.S. Government itself can't "do" anything. It's an abstraction that a bunch of violent people operate under, a "d.b.a." if you will, in order to evade personal responsibility for their actions.
Politicians, demagogues, and so on, did the "duping."
The people don't decide anything in this country. The political classes do. Politicians decide they want something, then go about "manufacturing consent" through propaganda, playing on people's fears, hopes, hatreds, and so on. Then the people duly vote for what they've been told they want or need.
Straw man. You had the option of not walking into that restaurant if you didn't want to agree to the implicit contract, and you understood that before doing so. By the time one even hears of, let alone understands, this "social contract" nonsense (14-18 years old?), the person has already used so much of "society's" services that you'd claim they're already bound by the agreement.
The social contract is a pathetic attempt at justifying the existence of coercive government. It doesn't meet any of the elements of a real contract. It was invented by philosophers who were beginning to understand the concept of individual liberty, but they either couldn't quite wrap their heads around the idea of complete freedom from coercion, or they were afraid of the implications, so they had to come up with some hand-waving rationale for continuing a little bit of coercion in society.
It's like Jefferson struggling with his assertion that all men are created equal with the inequality of slavery which was so firmly embedded in society around him. It's like the rationalists of the 1700s, who had supplanted religion with science as an explanation for every major question of existence except creation itself, so they came up with "Deism."
It's the kind of thing someone suffering from cognitive dissonance would come up with to quiet their mind.
Probably because we've seen the result of leaving things to your way of thinking...
When was this? If you're thinking of the U.S. in the late 1800s, which is what most people think libertarians mean by a free-market society, you are deeply mistaken: This was an incredibly anti--free market time period, with all sorts of government laws and regulations favorable to large, well-connected industrial corporations. The government supported outright monopolies, gave massive subsidies to corporations, forcibly intervened on behalf of the companies in labor disputes, eliminated all common-law protections against pollution in the name of "progress," and so on. Laissez-faire didn't mean free market; it meant "let the industrialists do anything they want."
Since then, the government has simply, and only to some extent, "switched sides" as to whom it benefits with its legislating, taxing, and regulating power. In the twentieth century, they had to break up monopolies of their own creation. They had to legislate in favor of trade unions only after their attacks on such had allowed corporations to get away with so much. They had to create consumer protection laws, environmental regulation, securities regulation, banking regulations, &c., against depredations they allowed. They had to redistribute wealth to help the poor that they (effectively) created. And so on.
Your parents consented to it for you when they either gave birth to you...
A hereditary obligation? You just described feudalism.
If you wish to no longer be bound by that contract, I suggest you leave the country, forfeit the priveleges of the civilized society that has already given you countless advantages and protections without which you would likely be destitute or dead, and find some place else in the world to hang out with other 'rugged individualists'. Good luck with that.
Thanks! Many of us aredoing almost exactly what you suggest!
PS I used to be a Randroid too, and once upon a time I would have agreed with you. Then I grew up, attained some sophistication, discovered empathy, and got a clue.
So thieving from people at gunpoint is what you call "empathy"? Well, I guess it's not you who do the actual thievery: You let the U.S. Government and their bureaucrats point the guns, steal other people's wealth, and then redistribute it down to you using an immense, multi-tiered bureaucracy of state, federal, and local agencies. That must be the "sophistication" part!:)
This is mostly correct, although there are plenty of wealthy people out there that don't become such parasites.
Not understanding this is one of the reasons why no amount of government interventionism ever seems to help the poor or middle class in the long run. The wealthy parasites in and behind government (bankers, financiers, and similar assorted rent-seekers---all non-productive types) steal from the poor and middle class. When the people finally get sick of it, their anger and envy is directed toward "the rich"---which inevitably falls on the productive rich (entrepreneurs, businessmen, upper middle class), not the parasites who are truly responsible for the mess.
New laws are passed, new regulations are created, taxes are increased---all of which impact the poor, the middle class, the small businessmen, and other productive people. The parasites already know how to work around such laws and taxes because they wrote them---and wrote in the loopholes! So the end result is more people are pushed down into poverty while the parasites get richer.
Federal spending in 1990 was $1.1 trilion. Source. Federal spending is currently $3.8 trillion. Source. These figures are a combination of "discretionary" and "mandatory" spending.
The individual income tax for this year is $1.359 trillion, and the corporate is $0.358 trillion. Source.
( 1.359 + 0.348 ) / 3.809 = 0.449 = 44.9%
If you remove the $1.707 trillion that represents the income tax from the total Federal revenues of $2.902 trillion, you are left with $1.195 trillion of revenues. $1.195 trillion is bigger than $1.1 trillion, hence current federal revenues, minus the income tax, could pay for the 1990 budget.
Ron Paul states that:
I want to abolish the income tax, but I don't want to replace it with anything. About 45 percent of all federal revenue comes from the personal income tax. That means that about 55 percent -- over half of all revenue -- comes from other sources, like excise taxes, fees, and corporate taxes.
We could eliminate the income tax, replace it with nothing, and still fund the same level of big government we had in the late 1990s. We don't need to "replace" the income tax at all.
Ron Paul is telling the truth. His 45% figure is accurate; his assertion that current Federal revenues sans income tax could pay for the 1990 budget, is accurate. You, however, are trying to confound the issue by bringing up irrelevant statistics, conflating statements I made with Ron Paul's statements, and outright lying when you say that Paul is doing so.
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Actually, an awful lot of successful businessmen got started through the hard work you describe. What they didn't do was take government handouts and become complacent, ambitionless wards of the state like so many poor do nowadays, nor did they get a government school "education" and become middling employees of the corporations run by those who are successful.
Your question as to "fairness" can't be answered because the statement that someone would have "no way of improving their lot" is a false premise. (And it's curious that you're defending statism as if it solves such a premise, because in truth the only situation under which "no way of improving [your] lot" can occur is a statist society in which social classes are enforced.)
That other people's actions impact someone says nothing about whether or not that person is somehow obligated to do something.
Friendly Societies: Voluntary Social Security and More:
The Shortcomings of Government Charity:
And here's a side-by-side comparison of what happens to groups who end up on the government dole vs. groups allowed to take care of themselves. Government Creates Poverty:
In a free society, you would have something like this.
By the way, how do you propose to use the government to solve such a dispute? Because the government, back in the 1800s, eliminated the use of the court system to seek relief against polluters. See what happens when you have one system trying to monopolize solutions? They can take it away from you just as fast as they gave it to you.
Actually, the exact opposite is true. Libertarianism is probably the one philosophy that both understands human nature---petty, greedy, self-interested, not at all altrustic---and tries to work with human nature as it is, rather than condemn and punish it, or try to change it.
Libertarians aren't going to try to force people to be charitable ("welfare," "social security") and then wonder why this does nothing but create anger and resentment. Libertarians aren't going to wonder why giving all this free money to people seems to do nothing but make them less likely to ever want to get back to being productive citizens. Some people are charitable; most aren't. Libertarianism is about fostering private, voluntary charity without trying to force the uncharitable to go along with it.
Libertarians aren't going to try to fundamentally change human nature like the communists did ("If only all the workers would all work together and support each other..."), and then wonder why this does nothing but create shortages. Some people are cooperative; many aren't. Libertarianism is about fostering private, voluntary cooperation (free-market businesses) without trying to force the selfish and loners to go along with the group.
Libertarians understand that people are going to be greedy and selfish, and try to come up with ways of making society work in light of this--not against it. Libertarians aren't going to try to tax, regulate, and punish these basic and inescapable human behaviors, and then wonder why no one is willing to work anymore. Some people are really greedy; many aren't. Libertarianism is about fostering people's natural desire to have things into productive labor, productive industry, and wealth creation, not trying to suppress these natural desires and then wondering why people turn to fraud, graft, the depredations we've seen in the world financial system, and so on.
Libertarians aren't pacifists and have no problem with "pointing guns"---when its a justifiable act of self-defense against the initiation of force, as understood by the Non-Aggression Principle. What libertarians have a problem with is the initiation of force---or worse, the insistence that sometimes that initiation is actually moral if it's done by a "legitimate" group (the government).
Except what the government does with its guns is far from just "referee disputes" nowadays. If all we had was a government that, as in the late 1700s, merely protected "life, liberty,
Actually I posted several times in these threads, to the effect that the industrial-era leaders and modern-era bankers/financiers/&al. are backed by government force, and oppresses and feeds off of the working class as much as the government itself does.
I was being sarcastic.
Indeed, any company that relies on intellectual property is benefiting from a system predicated upon government force. But that doesn't necessarily mean that's why any particular IT company is incredibly successful: For example, there are plenty of companies that made fortunes on open source, and whereas F/OSS is based on IP laws, it only uses them to a defensive extent. For the most part, it actually turns IP law on its head, saying "go ahead and copy this."
If someone's going to produce content, there is currently no alternative to the IP system under which they can do so, and thus you can't conduct an experiment to see if the IP system is really the reason one of these companies succeeded or failed.
It's a pretty neat trick, though: The government completely monopolizes myriad aspects of our lives, then tries to claim we need the government because without them we wouldn't have those things. How about we allow competing systems, make the government-owned one compete fairly with the freely-operated ones, and then see which system wins?
Actually, there are an awful lot of people that are "waking up" finally. The topic of this article itself, and stuff I've linked to in these threads---the Free State Project, the Ron Paul phenomenon---attest to this.
Because some people produce new wealth. Or do you actually think that we have the same amount of "stuff" here in 2012 that they had in 1912, or 1812, or...?
Greedy people are often the producers: Business leaders, entrepreneurs, &c.. Not all are parasites.
Yep---just like I'd defend myself against a robber with whatever means I could. Doesn't mean I agreed to the robber's "terms" if he wins.
Let's put this alarmist prediction into context:
A modern legal fiction that was invented by a system thoroughly immersed in this poisonous "social contract" idea to begin with, and the reason "living wills" and "DNRs" had to be invented.
You're basically trying to justify an evil idea by one of its own derivations. A cancer doesn't suddenly become a good thing because it's metastasized. I'm sure there's a name for this particular fallacy, but I don't know it offhand.
The inflation point is interesting. Paul also wants to eliminate the Federal Reserve and end their profligate printing of money, thereby ending inflation. Maybe Paul accidentally ignored the inflation factor when he figured this, or he's expecting it to work out in a post-inflation system, and my math just worked out by pure coincidence.
As for the health care system, you sure can undo 22 years of rising costs: Eliminate the parasitic, oligopolistic insurance companies that the government created with the passage of the HMO Act. Up until the 1970s, people often paid cash for health care, and prices reflected actual market values for the services. "Strict rationing" is, of course, exactly what I'd expect the government to do: They created the crisis by inserting themselves halfway into the equation, on behalf of the insurance parasites, and now they'll come along and clean up the fallout by inserting themselves all the way into the equation.
A lot closer to what it should be?
You are comparing kings and tyrants who built their fortunes upon theft and coercion ("taxing" their "subjects"), to people who earned their money through productive labor.
I do not see how a system that forces people into handing over their money at the point of a gun, or the threat thereof, in order to help others, can be described as "compassionate" or "respectful." "Vicious" might be a more appropriate term.
Based on what evidence? Up until the early 1900s, providing for the needy was handled by a vast number of private charities, churches, mutual aid societies, fraternal orders, service organizations, and the like. This was all destroyed by the U.S. Government using the competitive advantage that rampant theft confers upon it.
Much of the crushing poverty of the industrial era was also created by the government, not by their support of the free market, but by their support of industrial corporations at the expense of everyone and everything else. They supported monopolies; they intervened in labor disputes, violently, on the side of the corporations; they passed laws destroying small businesses and farms; they eliminated common-law legal recourses when corporations injured or killed workers, polluted, and so on; they did everything they could to turn America into a country of millions of wage slaves working for a few rich industrialists.
And then in the 1930s when the stink got so bad they couldn't ignore it anymore, the U.S. Government came along and "fixed" a problem of their own creation by inserting themselves even more into private matters, but this time on the side of the common man. This is what libertarian Harry Browne meant when he said, "Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.'"
Does that acceptance of the "inefficiency" of this system include an acceptance of what I pointed out in #1?
I showed how this works for 1990; you showed how it doesn't for 1995. What's your point? Does it work for 1990 or doesn't it?
The budget has gone up far out of proportion to population increase.
The parts of the budget that are increasing most rapidly have nothing to do with baby boomers.
You are right that the U.S. Government itself can't "do" anything. It's an abstraction that a bunch of violent people operate under, a "d.b.a." if you will, in order to evade personal responsibility for their actions.
Politicians, demagogues, and so on, did the "duping."
The people don't decide anything in this country. The political classes do. Politicians decide they want something, then go about "manufacturing consent" through propaganda, playing on people's fears, hopes, hatreds, and so on. Then the people duly vote for what they've been told they want or need.
Rich people are greedy; poor people are envious.
Envy is worse than greed: Greed is merely acquisitiveness, the desire to have. Envy is the desire to have something that is already someone else's.
So if greed is "sick," what does that make envy?
Straw man. You had the option of not walking into that restaurant if you didn't want to agree to the implicit contract, and you understood that before doing so. By the time one even hears of, let alone understands, this "social contract" nonsense (14-18 years old?), the person has already used so much of "society's" services that you'd claim they're already bound by the agreement.
The social contract is a pathetic attempt at justifying the existence of coercive government. It doesn't meet any of the elements of a real contract. It was invented by philosophers who were beginning to understand the concept of individual liberty, but they either couldn't quite wrap their heads around the idea of complete freedom from coercion, or they were afraid of the implications, so they had to come up with some hand-waving rationale for continuing a little bit of coercion in society.
It's like Jefferson struggling with his assertion that all men are created equal with the inequality of slavery which was so firmly embedded in society around him. It's like the rationalists of the 1700s, who had supplanted religion with science as an explanation for every major question of existence except creation itself, so they came up with "Deism."
It's the kind of thing someone suffering from cognitive dissonance would come up with to quiet their mind.
The concept of property rights is derived from, and inherent in, self-ownership.
When was this? If you're thinking of the U.S. in the late 1800s, which is what most people think libertarians mean by a free-market society, you are deeply mistaken: This was an incredibly anti--free market time period, with all sorts of government laws and regulations favorable to large, well-connected industrial corporations. The government supported outright monopolies, gave massive subsidies to corporations, forcibly intervened on behalf of the companies in labor disputes, eliminated all common-law protections against pollution in the name of "progress," and so on. Laissez-faire didn't mean free market; it meant "let the industrialists do anything they want."
Since then, the government has simply, and only to some extent, "switched sides" as to whom it benefits with its legislating, taxing, and regulating power. In the twentieth century, they had to break up monopolies of their own creation. They had to legislate in favor of trade unions only after their attacks on such had allowed corporations to get away with so much. They had to create consumer protection laws, environmental regulation, securities regulation, banking regulations, &c., against depredations they allowed. They had to redistribute wealth to help the poor that they (effectively) created. And so on.
A hereditary obligation? You just described feudalism.
Thanks! Many of us are doing almost exactly what you suggest!
So thieving from people at gunpoint is what you call "empathy"? Well, I guess it's not you who do the actual thievery: You let the U.S. Government and their bureaucrats point the guns, steal other people's wealth, and then redistribute it down to you using an immense, multi-tiered bureaucracy of state, federal, and local agencies. That must be the "sophistication" part! :)
This is mostly correct, although there are plenty of wealthy people out there that don't become such parasites.
Not understanding this is one of the reasons why no amount of government interventionism ever seems to help the poor or middle class in the long run. The wealthy parasites in and behind government (bankers, financiers, and similar assorted rent-seekers---all non-productive types) steal from the poor and middle class. When the people finally get sick of it, their anger and envy is directed toward "the rich"---which inevitably falls on the productive rich (entrepreneurs, businessmen, upper middle class), not the parasites who are truly responsible for the mess.
New laws are passed, new regulations are created, taxes are increased---all of which impact the poor, the middle class, the small businessmen, and other productive people. The parasites already know how to work around such laws and taxes because they wrote them---and wrote in the loopholes! So the end result is more people are pushed down into poverty while the parasites get richer.
Federal spending in 1990 was $1.1 trilion. Source. Federal spending is currently $3.8 trillion. Source. These figures are a combination of "discretionary" and "mandatory" spending.
The individual income tax for this year is $1.359 trillion, and the corporate is $0.358 trillion. Source.
( 1.359 + 0.348 ) / 3.809 = 0.449 = 44.9%
If you remove the $1.707 trillion that represents the income tax from the total Federal revenues of $2.902 trillion, you are left with $1.195 trillion of revenues. $1.195 trillion is bigger than $1.1 trillion, hence current federal revenues, minus the income tax, could pay for the 1990 budget.
Ron Paul states that:
Ron Paul is telling the truth. His 45% figure is accurate; his assertion that current Federal revenues sans income tax could pay for the 1990 budget, is accurate. You, however, are trying to confound the issue by bringing up irrelevant statistics, conflating statements I made with Ron Paul's statements, and outright lying when you say that Paul is doing so.