All of them graduated from MIT with engineering degrees in the 1960s.
I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be a warning against taking mere academic credentials as evidence of anything, or a demonstration that being clever is not the same as being a good person.
You have identified the problem correctly, namely crony capitalism and rent seeking, you are simply misidentifying the culprit.
The thing about crony capitalism is that it's capitalism.
Ultra right wingers who think that our system is not capitalist enough should have the intellectual honesty to point out to people what they really want, namely a return to the days of the early Industrial Revolution, where capitalists made vast more-or-less untaxed profits and the workers were powerless and suffered horribly.
Social problems in the Gilded Age, such as they were were due to rapid growth and people just starting to figure out how a large scale modern economy works.
You really don't have a clue about history do you?
Surely Robert Heinlein wrote a book about evil commie alien-loving envirnomentalists destroying the Earth despite the efforts of hard-drinking space marnies to stop them?
The one thing that strikes me these days, is the way how the exact same people who solved the problems you are talking about - DDT, leaded gasoline, smog etc. - are still demonized and portait as plotting to destroy the earth.
They are car companies installing catalytic converters, oil companies developing anti-knocking agents without lead, power companies installing filters in their power plants, companies building spraycans, freezers, air-conditioners, styrofoam etc without CFCs and so on.
Yes, all those environmentalist actions were taken out of the goodness of heart of the various industries involved. As always, the Free Market sorted everything out, and no Evil Government Interference was necessaty to pass clean air laws or whatever.
I'd almost like to live in your world, it must be strangely comforting to be able to trot out "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" ideas and believe them.
People like to use the term "denier" to wind up the sort of right wing Christian whackjobs who generally pooh pooh the whole idea AGW, since it sort of reminds them of Peter denying Jesus.
However, treating dubious research funded by interest groups as being a balance to the weight of independent scientific research is a false equivalence.
If the fact that Exxon or the Koch brothers fund conservative and libertarian causes
Oops, bit of a giveaway there wasn't it?
As I always say, if you scratch a libertarian you'll generally find a bleeding fascist (sorry, ultra right wing ideologue who doesn't believe 100% in everything Hitler did and so therefore isn't technically a fascist).
As soon as you say - "you can't study that" to people who may disagree with the perceived status quo, you are limiting speech, period.
Pretending there's some issue of freedom of speech is a total red herring.
I don't care how much money petrochemical companies spend on propaganda, as long as I know it's propaganda. If there's scientific research they fund, why wouldn't they reveal that if the science is kosher?
What exactly is 'Climate Denial'? Denying that climate exists? For people claiming the moral and scientific upper hand here we aren't very good at framing the issue. I thought the issue was over the 'man made' element of it all. The fact that one thinks the other side of that debate is wrong isn't really a very good excuse to completely misrepresent their argument. A little integrity would go a long way to validate one's position: if you're not capable of fairly state the opposing side's claims, how are you going to refute them?
People like to have short tags to categorise other people with. "Deniers of the scientific evidence that overwhelmingly indicates the validity of the theory of man made global climate change" doesn't really trip off the tongue.
At least here in the uk, most small businesses don't end up paying corporation tax anyway: after salaries, very few are actually profitable.
You do realise that's absolute nonsense? Businesses, whether large or small, have to make profits or else they run out of cash. The only difference is internet start ups, which appear to be able to attract funding almost indefinitely despite no realistic prospects of ever making a profit *cough* facebook *cough*.
I would argue that what is needed is for all businesses to be worker-owned cooperatives
Absolutely. Something along the lines of the Mondragon co-ops, where the "CEO" is limited to earning 3 times what a cleaner does (or something like that).
If you have a start up company that becomes incredibly successful and rich, the excess profits are then re-distributed back into society because it is only by being part of that society that you were able to become successful and rich in the first place.
If you're Donald fucking Trump on a desert island, you can't create much wealth.
Incidentally - I'm opposed to most of welfare thrown to the poor.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that a proponent of a flat tax system doesn't believe in welfare (except a tiny amount to the truly, truly deserving poor, of course, which you have to throw in as a sop to reality).
Define where a company makes its profits. Easy enough when that is a durable good, but there are a lot of companies who just license intellectual property, or do services - where exactly do they "make their profit"?
Say you're a law firm that deals in Intellectual Property cases, and you have two offices, one in the US with a thousand partners and employees, one in the Cayman Islands with 1 part time janitor. You take the global profits for the entity and split the tax burden 1000/1001 in the US and 1/1001 in the Cayman Islands.
Except that as things are now, the office in the Cayman Islands would make a royalty charge to the US firm for approximately 99% of its profits.
Also, if options are not treated as an expense and is taxed, you are effectively taxing it twice when the employee cashes it. I think why the rule is in place.
A company can deduct the cost of paying employees, but the employee still pays tax on his earnings. The point is that you are taxing the corporation as a profit-generating economic entity separate from the employees and investors who are the actual people making it run.
Apparently companies don't pay taxes [theregister.co.uk] (ref [archive.org]) in the sense that anything they do pay someone else gets to pay -- the employees, the customers, the shareholders, you name it.
That register article is just another piece of capitalist-libertarian cheerleading which pretends that there is no such thing as a corporation, and uses the circular argument that because corporations aren't people the tax they apparently pay is really just money paid by actual people, because by their definition taxes can only be paid by actual people.
I believe Facebook and other companies eliminate their profits by paying "licensing" fees to a shell subsidiary. This not an investment in any way, just rerouting the profits somewhere else to avoid taxes.
Precisely. It's why there's been a big backlash against (especially US-owned) companies not paying tax in the UK.
In essence, say you have a trading business in Country A where tax is 40% on profits over $1 million, and a shell company in Country B where tax is 0% or close.
If Company A makes a trading profit of $1billion, Company B makes a charge for management costs, licensing, royalites or whatever of $999.5m and so has profits in Country A of $0.5m on which it pays little or no tax, and $999.5m in Country B on which it also pays little or no tax. You have saved $400 million in tax.
Slashdot Mirror
there is very little debate on whether AGW is happening or not
I think there is amongst right wing Americans.
All of them graduated from MIT with engineering degrees in the 1960s.
I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be a warning against taking mere academic credentials as evidence of anything, or a demonstration that being clever is not the same as being a good person.
All the panic and FUD about climate change is based on extrapolations, assumptions about economic and emissions growth
It's called predicting the future. And, no, it's seldom 100% accurate.
But it's better than sitting on your arse and waiting for the sky to fall, then being surprised when it does.
All these people have their own agenda, all of them are selfish, and none of them have truth or the common welfare at heart.
You're assuming that everyone in the world shares your bankrupt Randian moral outlook.
You have identified the problem correctly, namely crony capitalism and rent seeking, you are simply misidentifying the culprit.
The thing about crony capitalism is that it's capitalism.
Ultra right wingers who think that our system is not capitalist enough should have the intellectual honesty to point out to people what they really want, namely a return to the days of the early Industrial Revolution, where capitalists made vast more-or-less untaxed profits and the workers were powerless and suffered horribly.
Social problems in the Gilded Age, such as they were were due to rapid growth and people just starting to figure out how a large scale modern economy works.
You really don't have a clue about history do you?
So if DDT has now been proved to be safe, it's presumably on sale again and safe for your kids to shower in like in the good old days?
If not, why not?
The one thing that strikes me these days, is the way how the exact same people who solved the problems you are talking about - DDT, leaded gasoline, smog etc. - are still demonized and portait as plotting to destroy the earth.
They are car companies installing catalytic converters, oil companies developing anti-knocking agents without lead, power companies installing filters in their power plants, companies building spraycans, freezers, air-conditioners, styrofoam etc without CFCs and so on.
Yes, all those environmentalist actions were taken out of the goodness of heart of the various industries involved. As always, the Free Market sorted everything out, and no Evil Government Interference was necessaty to pass clean air laws or whatever.
I'd almost like to live in your world, it must be strangely comforting to be able to trot out "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" ideas and believe them.
Everyone, on both sides, knows that "denier" is the chosen term specifically because it parallels "holocaust denier". It's argumentum ad Hitlerum
Cool, you've just proved that you're paranoid as well as uninterested in science.
People like to use the term "denier" to wind up the sort of right wing Christian whackjobs who generally pooh pooh the whole idea AGW, since it sort of reminds them of Peter denying Jesus.
Google gives $5 million [worldwildlife.org] to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
I was trying to work out what percentage of Exxon Mobile's net profit for the year that was, but my calculator doesn't display enough 0s.
Also, we're under attack from interstellar aliens, who are hurling giant boulders at us.
I was beginning to think I was the only one who'd noticed this!
However, treating dubious research funded by interest groups as being a balance to the weight of independent scientific research is a false equivalence.
If the fact that Exxon or the Koch brothers fund conservative and libertarian causes
Oops, bit of a giveaway there wasn't it?
As I always say, if you scratch a libertarian you'll generally find a bleeding fascist (sorry, ultra right wing ideologue who doesn't believe 100% in everything Hitler did and so therefore isn't technically a fascist).
As soon as you say - "you can't study that" to people who may disagree with the perceived status quo, you are limiting speech, period.
Pretending there's some issue of freedom of speech is a total red herring.
I don't care how much money petrochemical companies spend on propaganda, as long as I know it's propaganda. If there's scientific research they fund, why wouldn't they reveal that if the science is kosher?
What exactly is 'Climate Denial'? Denying that climate exists? For people claiming the moral and scientific upper hand here we aren't very good at framing the issue. I thought the issue was over the 'man made' element of it all. The fact that one thinks the other side of that debate is wrong isn't really a very good excuse to completely misrepresent their argument. A little integrity would go a long way to validate one's position: if you're not capable of fairly state the opposing side's claims, how are you going to refute them?
People like to have short tags to categorise other people with. "Deniers of the scientific evidence that overwhelmingly indicates the validity of the theory of man made global climate change" doesn't really trip off the tongue.
That is not my definition of liberty, since "personal responsibility" is just a right wing euphemism for not helping anyone out.
At least here in the uk, most small businesses don't end up paying corporation tax anyway: after salaries, very few are actually profitable.
You do realise that's absolute nonsense? Businesses, whether large or small, have to make profits or else they run out of cash. The only difference is internet start ups, which appear to be able to attract funding almost indefinitely despite no realistic prospects of ever making a profit *cough* facebook *cough*.
I would argue that what is needed is for all businesses to be worker-owned cooperatives
Absolutely. Something along the lines of the Mondragon co-ops, where the "CEO" is limited to earning 3 times what a cleaner does (or something like that).
If you have a start up company that becomes incredibly successful and rich, the excess profits are then re-distributed back into society because it is only by being part of that society that you were able to become successful and rich in the first place.
If you're Donald fucking Trump on a desert island, you can't create much wealth.
Incidentally - I'm opposed to most of welfare thrown to the poor.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that a proponent of a flat tax system doesn't believe in welfare (except a tiny amount to the truly, truly deserving poor, of course, which you have to throw in as a sop to reality).
Define where a company makes its profits. Easy enough when that is a durable good, but there are a lot of companies who just license intellectual property, or do services - where exactly do they "make their profit"?
Say you're a law firm that deals in Intellectual Property cases, and you have two offices, one in the US with a thousand partners and employees, one in the Cayman Islands with 1 part time janitor. You take the global profits for the entity and split the tax burden 1000/1001 in the US and 1/1001 in the Cayman Islands.
Except that as things are now, the office in the Cayman Islands would make a royalty charge to the US firm for approximately 99% of its profits.
Also, if options are not treated as an expense and is taxed, you are effectively taxing it twice when the employee cashes it. I think why the rule is in place.
A company can deduct the cost of paying employees, but the employee still pays tax on his earnings. The point is that you are taxing the corporation as a profit-generating economic entity separate from the employees and investors who are the actual people making it run.
Apparently companies don't pay taxes [theregister.co.uk] (ref [archive.org]) in the sense that anything they do pay someone else gets to pay -- the employees, the customers, the shareholders, you name it.
That register article is just another piece of capitalist-libertarian cheerleading which pretends that there is no such thing as a corporation, and uses the circular argument that because corporations aren't people the tax they apparently pay is really just money paid by actual people, because by their definition taxes can only be paid by actual people.
I believe Facebook and other companies eliminate their profits by paying "licensing" fees to a shell subsidiary. This not an investment in any way, just rerouting the profits somewhere else to avoid taxes.
Precisely. It's why there's been a big backlash against (especially US-owned) companies not paying tax in the UK.
In essence, say you have a trading business in Country A where tax is 40% on profits over $1 million, and a shell company in Country B where tax is 0% or close.
If Company A makes a trading profit of $1billion, Company B makes a charge for management costs, licensing, royalites or whatever of $999.5m and so has profits in Country A of $0.5m on which it pays little or no tax, and $999.5m in Country B on which it also pays little or no tax. You have saved $400 million in tax.
It is tax evasion, pure and simple.