Its an interesting correlation. But I don't think that table says what you think it does. Its the percentage of total taxes that come from income tax. I think that having a higher percentage of taxes come from personal income tax is good thing. Corporate taxes chase away corporations and jobs, and other taxes like sales and vat taxes are too indirect and hidden and people don't appreciate how much they are sacrificing and how much of a drag it is on the economy. I think we should have taxes of course, but lets be up front about them. This chart shows that countries who have transparency in their tax system (via a high percentage of taxes coming out of personal income) are better off (US, New Zealand, Ireland).
And check out the correlation links here! That would be really cool to see in order figure if you're hypothesis is right. Its ten bucks though and I'm sure we'd still argue about the data anyway. http://www.nationmaster.com/cat/Taxation
Also, I think outside of 1st world countries, political stability will probably count as much or more than tax rates.
The person or group performing the central planning isn't in a position to know whats best for everyone in the community and isn't always going to work towards the benefit of the community (see government waste and corruption). Individuals know whats best for themselves and can be trusted to act in their own self interest. If individuals in a community have a common goal then they are free to get together via a company or a charity and work towards that.
My argument doesn't always work. I think armies and war are probably better off centrally planned. I'm not convinced that aids or cancer is one of those exceptions.
Also I don't think that it is my moral responsibility to help people other than myself and the individuals I care about in my immediate circle. If I wish to help others there is merit in that, but that is different from responsibility.
actually i am not so opposed to this idea despite my initial knee jerk libertarian reaction. i don't mind the no strings attached bounty as much as i do the price controls on the vaccine industry for example. price controls aren't effective at giving you cheaper goods. at least a bounty is effective at evoking the response you are looking for. and if we are going to spend money on helping africa i'd rather see the money spent this way than by giving aid to corrupt governments over there.
i'd like to see a bounty like this for osama bin ladin. currently the bounty is only 25 million, which isn't really enough to get investors together to create companies of experienced trackers to find the guy. a bounty of 1 billion dollars might create an industry.
Why bother with the government giving billions in tax money? Why not just let consumers spend their money on it directly if they want it? Whatever they are willing to pay is what the cure is worth.
Why do socialists always think that some centrally located guy can make a decision about whats best for everyone? Its fascist. Let individuals make their own decision.
i also want to see an anti congress: an elected body which does nothing but repeal laws all day. perhaps they would only repeal laws older than 3 years old or something.
i don't know anything about that bill. but if it does what you say it does, than i'm against it, i'm against corporate wellfare and i want to see a free market.
democrats bring plenty of pork to the union fat cats or whatever special interests that support them when they are in power.
i'd like to see a line item veto (and a president with the guts to use it) and a 1000 word limit to the tax code. this would go a long ways towards keeping out special interests on the left and on the right.
yeah because canada is a cultural holy land which such diversity.
culture is a word elitists use when they want to look down their nose at someone. everyone else calls it entertainment, grabs a beer and goes to their local cock fight.
and liberals have their own mythic boogie men -- free trade, big corporations, people who make money and don't feel guilty about it, starving people in africa, george bush, aids, etc.
The old saying is wrong. History never repeats itself. Saying the British occupation of Iraq is the same as the American liberation of Iraq is only slightly better than the people who say Iraq is like Vietnam.
The situation in Iraq is not a civil war. America had a civil war. There were armies and battles where 20,000 people died in one week. A guerilla war is completely different from a civil war. Not that there aren't any ethnic tensions, but the average Iraqi is looking for peace and a job, not fighting Americans who would like nothing better than to go home.
The reason there is any fighting at all is that the Baath party leaders in the Iraqi army never hung around to fight, but ran off into the desert and became a guerilla movement. They took billions of dollars from Iraqi banks (literally garbage trucks full of money) just before the war started and they are extremely well financed. Not to mention the billionaire foreign extremist sheiks who support the foreign fighters in Iraq. The average Iraqi was happy to be rid of Saddam and didn't think of us as occupiers and did welcome us with roses and they would have been happy to just move on with life. This insurgency is being led by wealthy baathists (socialists) and wealthy religious conservative nationalist muslims both of whom are anticapitalist. This is not a movement of poor Iraqi farmers. As usual the far left and the far right are really one and the same (see Stalin and Hitler).
Well I am for a palestinian state. But I don't like your justification any more than I like the grandparent's justification.
As another poster points out you could probably go back to the crusades and beyond if you want to start talking about who started it. The thing to do is take the present and work with what we have. Past Israeli abuses don't justify Palestinian abuses or vice versa. Lets just work with what we have and come up with something that will let us move beyond the past. I say work out a comprise and kill everyone who is killing everyone.
I never understood why the rest of the world thinks they are superior to America due to all the history that has taken place on their soil. Whats so great about the past? The future is what we care about. I think one of the great things about America is that it has very little baggage compared to so many places where people have been getting even for the last 1000 years.
I think you still haven't addressed my argument that open source doesn't conflict because we coders are essentially giving away something of small value in return for work experience.
I think Rand would support proprietary software for many of the reasons you mention. I think Rand would not have a problem with open source though either. Surely its not an either/or question, but how much value you derive from which product in your personal situation. Reliability and platform portability may be big issues for you but ease of use and autocad might be the big issues for someone else. I believe the market has rewarded open source when it is deserved. See Apache, for example.
The fundamental bedrock of Objectivism is "I like it, so it must be good."
I think: "the freedom do to what you like as long as you don't impose on other people's freedom" is more accurate. (I think the constitution and objectivism have some strong parallels. Many of the founders were fairly radical libertarians.) If thats not a good moral philosophy to live by I don't what is.
I think in the scenario you propose concerning you and your wife that because objectivists are supposed to behave rationally, they would presumably weigh the costs and benefits in a rational manner and decide whether its more important to me that the wife is alive than that I am dead (probably yes, if you love her), do you have kids, how old is whom, who has a terminal illness, etc. Personally I think thats a better answer than the one you seem to believe in which is just an unconditional self sacrifice that may be silly, useless, unfair to the kids if the wife was an axe murder who was scheduled to be executed the next day anyway.
i was thinking more in terms of a pin number or bank account number rather than the entire transaction. how are you going to authenticate who you are without having a secret of some kind?
if a goal of privacy is to prevent a bad powerful person from listening to our phone conversations, how does that problem get solved if we can listen to their phone conversations?
isn't anoniminity a form of privacy? isn't this contrary to your goal of open access to information?
I don't think free software is that hard to figure out. Its simple economics not mysterious spiritual communal altruism.
Code is so cheap to produce and reproduce that we give it away because no one would pay us for it. In return we get an improved user experience, work experience and perhaps prestige from our peers.
There are some exceptions like when ibm gives away code because its a complimentary good and -- very rarely -- occasional charity oriented coder.
There is no conflict between Rand and open source.
Open source isn't charity. We don't give code to the community because of our big hearts. We give code away because its so cheap to produce that no one would bother paying us for it and because we hope to recieve praise from people who use it. Thats why the communism argument doesn't stick to open source -- because it isn't remotely related to anything in the communist philosophy.
All they are doing is funneling more and more money from the bottom up, with none of it moving the other way.
The only way money could go to the top with out coming back down is if the people at the top put their dollar bills under the mattress. The people at the top either buy stuff, or invest it, or put in the bank. Any way you look at it jobs and growth are created. More venture capital means more companies and more jobs for everyone from construction, to janitors, to executives.
Capitalism is nice, but I don't consider it a free market when one unit wields so much power
Just because one company dominates a particular area of commerce doesn't make it unfair. If walmart ever started to have poor performance other companies would come in to take a piece of the pie. See target for example.
And by the way walmart never lobbied any politician for anything until recently. Walmart actually earns its money, unlike unions who spend pretty much all of their dues (about half of which is forced from unwilling members) on paying off politicians.
i wouldn't be a lot, but i might bet some money that taxes collected by state and fed governments over the years add up to more than what the war in iraq costs.
An American kid grows up seing foreigners represented in movies as barbarians, caricatured creatures. Just watch blockbusters in the last 20+ years (the "communists", the Chinese, the Latin-Americans, more recently the Arabs - terrorists, invariably - the North Koreans (in Bond movies), just about any non-Anglo group has been depicted as "primitive").
gosh you are right, the mao, stalin, terrorists, and kim are all real bastions of civilization.
He grows up smug in comsumer land and mall strips, not reading a paper, uncultured. In school, by 8th grade and high-school he know very little about History and Geography. He will never have read the Communist Manifesto, even though it spurred changes and inspired millions - even though you might find it wrong. Because, well, it was "communist."
have you read adam smith's wealth of nations? the communist manifesto inspired millions of murders.
When finally he reaches adulthood, he most probably won't speak a foregin language, he is too lazy and without interest to do it. He most probably won't read a newspaper, even though he has a very high income.
40% of americans are hispanic. i think a lot of those people probably speak spanish. not to mention all the other groups that live here....ok really not sure why i bothered to respond to such an immature troll.
Slashdot Mirror
you missed the point. the point is its not free just because the governemnt gives it away.
what makes you think low income families have $20 pc's?
Its an interesting correlation. But I don't think that table says what you think it does. Its the percentage of total taxes that come from income tax. I think that having a higher percentage of taxes come from personal income tax is good thing. Corporate taxes chase away corporations and jobs, and other taxes like sales and vat taxes are too indirect and hidden and people don't appreciate how much they are sacrificing and how much of a drag it is on the economy. I think we should have taxes of course, but lets be up front about them. This chart shows that countries who have transparency in their tax system (via a high percentage of taxes coming out of personal income) are better off (US, New Zealand, Ireland).
s _of_gdp&int=-1
This web site will tell more about what you were thinking of -- trying to correlate tax rate with gdp. (Though probably the data we really want is change in gdp and tax rate.)
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/tax_tot_tax_a
And check out the correlation links here! That would be really cool to see in order figure if you're hypothesis is right. Its ten bucks though and I'm sure we'd still argue about the data anyway.
http://www.nationmaster.com/cat/Taxation
Also, I think outside of 1st world countries, political stability will probably count as much or more than tax rates.
The person or group performing the central planning isn't in a position to know whats best for everyone in the community and isn't always going to work towards the benefit of the community (see government waste and corruption). Individuals know whats best for themselves and can be trusted to act in their own self interest. If individuals in a community have a common goal then they are free to get together via a company or a charity and work towards that.
My argument doesn't always work. I think armies and war are probably better off centrally planned. I'm not convinced that aids or cancer is one of those exceptions.
Also I don't think that it is my moral responsibility to help people other than myself and the individuals I care about in my immediate circle. If I wish to help others there is merit in that, but that is different from responsibility.
actually i am not so opposed to this idea despite my initial knee jerk libertarian reaction. i don't mind the no strings attached bounty as much as i do the price controls on the vaccine industry for example. price controls aren't effective at giving you cheaper goods. at least a bounty is effective at evoking the response you are looking for. and if we are going to spend money on helping africa i'd rather see the money spent this way than by giving aid to corrupt governments over there.
i'd like to see a bounty like this for osama bin ladin. currently the bounty is only 25 million, which isn't really enough to get investors together to create companies of experienced trackers to find the guy. a bounty of 1 billion dollars might create an industry.
Why bother with the government giving billions in tax money? Why not just let consumers spend their money on it directly if they want it? Whatever they are willing to pay is what the cure is worth.
Why do socialists always think that some centrally located guy can make a decision about whats best for everyone? Its fascist. Let individuals make their own decision.
i also want to see an anti congress: an elected body which does nothing but repeal laws all day. perhaps they would only repeal laws older than 3 years old or something.
i don't know anything about that bill. but if it does what you say it does, than i'm against it, i'm against corporate wellfare and i want to see a free market.
democrats bring plenty of pork to the union fat cats or whatever special interests that support them when they are in power.
i'd like to see a line item veto (and a president with the guts to use it) and a 1000 word limit to the tax code. this would go a long ways towards keeping out special interests on the left and on the right.
yeah because canada is a cultural holy land which such diversity.
culture is a word elitists use when they want to look down their nose at someone. everyone else calls it entertainment, grabs a beer and goes to their local cock fight.
and liberals have their own mythic boogie men -- free trade, big corporations, people who make money and don't feel guilty about it, starving people in africa, george bush, aids, etc.
wooptdeedoo.
The old saying is wrong. History never repeats itself. Saying the British occupation of Iraq is the same as the American liberation of Iraq is only slightly better than the people who say Iraq is like Vietnam.
The situation in Iraq is not a civil war. America had a civil war. There were armies and battles where 20,000 people died in one week. A guerilla war is completely different from a civil war. Not that there aren't any ethnic tensions, but the average Iraqi is looking for peace and a job, not fighting Americans who would like nothing better than to go home.
The reason there is any fighting at all is that the Baath party leaders in the Iraqi army never hung around to fight, but ran off into the desert and became a guerilla movement. They took billions of dollars from Iraqi banks (literally garbage trucks full of money) just before the war started and they are extremely well financed. Not to mention the billionaire foreign extremist sheiks who support the foreign fighters in Iraq. The average Iraqi was happy to be rid of Saddam and didn't think of us as occupiers and did welcome us with roses and they would have been happy to just move on with life. This insurgency is being led by wealthy baathists (socialists) and wealthy religious conservative nationalist muslims both of whom are anticapitalist. This is not a movement of poor Iraqi farmers. As usual the far left and the far right are really one and the same (see Stalin and Hitler).
Well I am for a palestinian state. But I don't like your justification any more than I like the grandparent's justification.
As another poster points out you could probably go back to the crusades and beyond if you want to start talking about who started it. The thing to do is take the present and work with what we have. Past Israeli abuses don't justify Palestinian abuses or vice versa. Lets just work with what we have and come up with something that will let us move beyond the past. I say work out a comprise and kill everyone who is killing everyone.
I never understood why the rest of the world thinks they are superior to America due to all the history that has taken place on their soil. Whats so great about the past? The future is what we care about. I think one of the great things about America is that it has very little baggage compared to so many places where people have been getting even for the last 1000 years.
I think you still haven't addressed my argument that open source doesn't conflict because we coders are essentially giving away something of small value in return for work experience.
I think Rand would support proprietary software for many of the reasons you mention. I think Rand would not have a problem with open source though either. Surely its not an either/or question, but how much value you derive from which product in your personal situation. Reliability and platform portability may be big issues for you but ease of use and autocad might be the big issues for someone else. I believe the market has rewarded open source when it is deserved. See Apache, for example.
The fundamental bedrock of Objectivism is "I like it, so it must be good."
I think: "the freedom do to what you like as long as you don't impose on other people's freedom" is more accurate. (I think the constitution and objectivism have some strong parallels. Many of the founders were fairly radical libertarians.) If thats not a good moral philosophy to live by I don't what is.
I think in the scenario you propose concerning you and your wife that because objectivists are supposed to behave rationally, they would presumably weigh the costs and benefits in a rational manner and decide whether its more important to me that the wife is alive than that I am dead (probably yes, if you love her), do you have kids, how old is whom, who has a terminal illness, etc. Personally I think thats a better answer than the one you seem to believe in which is just an unconditional self sacrifice that may be silly, useless, unfair to the kids if the wife was an axe murder who was scheduled to be executed the next day anyway.
i was thinking more in terms of a pin number or bank account number rather than the entire transaction. how are you going to authenticate who you are without having a secret of some kind?
if a goal of privacy is to prevent a bad powerful person from listening to our phone conversations, how does that problem get solved if we can listen to their phone conversations?
isn't anoniminity a form of privacy? isn't this contrary to your goal of open access to information?
I don't think free software is that hard to figure out. Its simple economics not mysterious spiritual communal altruism.
Code is so cheap to produce and reproduce that we give it away because no one would pay us for it. In return we get an improved user experience, work experience and perhaps prestige from our peers.
There are some exceptions like when ibm gives away code because its a complimentary good and -- very rarely -- occasional charity oriented coder.
There is no conflict between Rand and open source.
there will always be secrets. how do you propose to do financial transactions without them?
Open source isn't charity. We don't give code to the community because of our big hearts. We give code away because its so cheap to produce that no one would bother paying us for it and because we hope to recieve praise from people who use it. Thats why the communism argument doesn't stick to open source -- because it isn't remotely related to anything in the communist philosophy.
why shouldn't a grocery bagger make $25/hour
because other people are willing to take the job at $8/hour but unions prevent the $8/hour people from getting the job.
why shouldn't a grocery bagger make $25/hour
because other people are willing to take the job at $8 an hour.
All they are doing is funneling more and more money from the bottom up, with none of it moving the other way.
The only way money could go to the top with out coming back down is if the people at the top put their dollar bills under the mattress. The people at the top either buy stuff, or invest it, or put in the bank. Any way you look at it jobs and growth are created. More venture capital means more companies and more jobs for everyone from construction, to janitors, to executives.
Capitalism is nice, but I don't consider it a free market when one unit wields so much power
Just because one company dominates a particular area of commerce doesn't make it unfair. If walmart ever started to have poor performance other companies would come in to take a piece of the pie. See target for example.
And by the way walmart never lobbied any politician for anything until recently. Walmart actually earns its money, unlike unions who spend pretty much all of their dues (about half of which is forced from unwilling members) on paying off politicians.
...following the spring shift to Daylight Savings Time (when one hour of sleep is lost) there is a measurable increase in the number of traffic accidents that result in fatalities.i on/2005/07/does_dalight_sa.html
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolut
daylight saving is dumb anyway.
i wouldn't be a lot, but i might bet some money that taxes collected by state and fed governments over the years add up to more than what the war in iraq costs.
i'd mod you up if i had some mod points.
china will displace the US in 5-8 years?
An American kid grows up seing foreigners represented in movies as barbarians, caricatured creatures. Just watch blockbusters in the last 20+ years (the "communists", the Chinese, the Latin-Americans, more recently the Arabs - terrorists, invariably - the North Koreans (in Bond movies), just about any non-Anglo group has been depicted as "primitive").
...ok really not sure why i bothered to respond to such an immature troll.
gosh you are right, the mao, stalin, terrorists, and kim are all real bastions of civilization.
He grows up smug in comsumer land and mall strips, not reading a paper, uncultured. In school, by 8th grade and high-school he know very little about History and Geography. He will never have read the Communist Manifesto, even though it spurred changes and inspired millions - even though you might find it wrong. Because, well, it was "communist."
have you read adam smith's wealth of nations? the communist manifesto inspired millions of murders.
When finally he reaches adulthood, he most probably won't speak a foregin language, he is too lazy and without interest to do it. He most probably won't read a newspaper, even though he has a very high income.
40% of americans are hispanic. i think a lot of those people probably speak spanish. not to mention all the other groups that live here.