They haven't run the country (though they certainly run large parts of the culture) because other people continually push back against them. That's the whole point. Whiny people who want to take stuff aren't as preoccupied in their day as the people who create the stuff they want to take. It's work to set aside time to push back against them, but if that isn't done regularly, they'll get to have their one-time feast. As has been recently served up in Venezuela, Greece, and Brazil.
You got it. If the British had won, George Washington and the founding fathers would have gone down in history as "terrorists".
But they didn't win, and thus the truth remains well known. The British were the ones acting in tyrannical ways, not the colonists. Resisting the tyrannical urges of a government that puts their troops in your home, deprives you of self defense, refuses you a voice in parliament, arrests you for manufacturing finished goods and so on - resisting such is not "terrorism" even if the tyrant in question wants to call it that. Terrorism isn't in the eyes of the beholder, it's in the act of the beheader - the person who kills school teachers for teaching girls to read. Who send drugged young women into vegetable markets with bombs strapped to them. Who slaughter villages full of people for being insufficiently the right way about some particular twist or turn of believing in magic and some specific flavor of fantasy mythology.
Nobody cares if Taliban wants to call school teachers terrorists, because we know, and they know that's bullshit. We just care what they DO, and what they do is try to scare people into conducting their lives the way their religious say they should. Beard police! No dancing! Fly kites and die!
The problem is that once you get in the business of allowing the government to soothe envious people by making a spectacle of chopping their boss's pay in half, you've jumped off a cliff. Because why should a person who just sits in front of a computer in an air-conditioned room doing some "coding" make five times as much as a guy who stands in ditches in the sun digging around water pipes? Why should somebody who just sits all day and plays with numbers at a car insurance company be allowed to make ten times as much money as someone who repairs cars? It's an outrage! We need to reduce THOSE people's salaries too, because NOBODY needs to make $120,000 a year while someone else is still only making $25,000, right?
And what about the guy who starts a one-man business - say, providing consulting services to the agriculture industry, based on his decades of experience. He scores some big contracts doing specialized soil studies, and is making $300,000 a year. But he's 60 years old, and could use some help driving around collecting little bags of dirt all day from the region where he's working. So he hires a guy who puts little handfuls of dirt in bags for him all day, and has his pick of ten people all of whom are happy to do that for less than a tenth of what he's making. This must stop! The best thing for society would be for the government to step in an make sure that consultant makes less money, so everything is more fair. Of course he'll have to fire the assistant, but it's all in the name of fairness, so that's OK.
Because the only pressure they had was their own sense of greed.
Which is exactly why the Bush administration made an appearance before the Democrat-controlled congress and warned them of the consequences of congress's pushing Fannie Mae to continue to underwrite (and to essentially REQUIRE underwritten banks to provide) things like no-income-proof, no-down-payment mortgages to people who couldn't possibly afford them once their rates ballooned. That Clinton-era policy, of putting more people into home ownership no matter what, started that bubble growing, and the congress under Pelosi and Reid kept pouring gas on that smoldering fire. The Bush administration spent six years trying to push through Fannie/Freddie control measures, and repeatedly warned congress about the problems and the dire consequences.
People selling derivatives around that mountain of unsecured, bloated housing debt didn't cause people to lose houses and banks to put the brakes on dishing out more credit. People lost houses because their income couldn't keep up with foolishly chosen mortgages, and because they had speculated on the prospect of a get-rich-quick turn around on the house in the near future, they owed more on those houses than they were really worth. It's not exactly mysterious. The banks got stuck with enormous piles of worthless debt, and houses it cost more to foreclose on than were often worth the trouble.
The government has a duty to those people as well as to the ones who do own companies.
And what is that duty? To tear down the people who found and run companies so they can, one time, dole out the carcasses? Or is it to foster a much more entrepreneurial environment that isn't so hostile to people running (and working for!) businesses so that we can see more people get out of the low end of the spectrum? It's not the government's job to "balance" incomes by taking it from one person and giving it to another. It's the government's job to stay out of the way of the things that produce competitive businesses in a global economy.
You're confused. The recession didn't happen because we weren't collecting enough taxes. You get that, right? The recession largely happened because the credit markets dried up as a result of a housing bubble caused by too-easy-to-get loans as the industry was pressured (by democrats) into making. Far, far too many people were in over their heads, debt-wise. Had nothing to do with tax revenue at all. Combine the credit crunch with rapidly growing foreign competition in sectors that the US used to enjoy all to itself, and there you have it. The real question is why the recovery is so slow. Partly, foreign competition. But mostly, a business environment in the US that is completely hostile to the very sort of investment and activity that would generate job growth outside of the burger flipping and door greeter segments.
Do you own ANY stocks at all? Perhaps some mutual funds? Does any of your family? I'm glad to hear that you're willing to put yourself and your family somewhat at legal jeopardy for the actions of someone who works for one of the companies you partly own.
Of course you already know that people who work for (and in some cases run) large corporations are prosecuted and go to jail for some of the actions they perform or direct. You're just pretending you don't every see any news.
But corporations are just people. So they should pay income tax, just like us plebes.
When the people that run, work for, and invest in the company take a piece of that revenue home with them, it already IS taxed. Nobody gets to spend it on their kids' college, a new car, groceries, an iPhone, or a big house until it's issued as pay, dividends, or some other very much taxed form of money.
Taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else.
Or, we could spend less (especially now, before spending ever more on interest we can't afford is inevitable), and LOWER taxes in ways that generate - as they have repeatedly in the past - far more tax revenue because of much more (competitively, rather than punitively taxed) activity, especially as conducted domestically rather than overseas.
And that supply is infinite? You can't restructure the economy, Sanders-style, around permanently tearing down successful people and businesses - there isn't a permanent supply of them. Which is why they have to come after the middle class next.
What's with the false dichotomy? Are you really unable to imagine a government that isn't hostile to people who start businesses, and isn't hostile to the investments your mom makes for her retirement? Can you only imagine that it's either that, or a confiscatory socialist utopia that finally doles enough stuff out to the little people... and nobody will worry about where that money is supposed to come from?
Yes, and the responsibility of the government should be to its citizens, not corporations.
Because, of course, the people who form a business and incorporate it... they're couldn't possibly be citizens. And the teachers, welders, farmers, retirees and everyone else who decide to invest some money in a publicly traded company, no chance those are citizens. Nope. The companies are all owned and run by non-human invisible evil ghost people, or AI machines in the basement.
Wow, you really are either a completely disingenuous spinner on behalf of the hand-wringing progressive SJW quadrant, or you are so afraid of life that you probably scare yourself looking in the mirror.
You want others to behave in a certain way.
Which way? Be specific. Let's try a couple on for size:
1) Control what people say! Nope, I don't care, but the SJW/liberal crowd want to shout people down, shut people up, and censor those they don't like.
2) Control what people do! Nope, I pretty much don't care. But the SJW/liberal crows is absolutely obsessed with telling other people what they cannot do, what they cannot say, what size drink they cannot buy, which car they can drive, which skin color quotas must be obeyed, and all of the other controlling things they insist on.
Want more? Nah, what's the point. You are insisting that left is right, dark is light, hot is cold. Those that don't want control of people are the controllers, and those that insist on censorship and minute control over other people's lives are the ones who don't want control.
No, nobody could actually believe it when they say those things, so you're just trolling for fun. What do you get out that, exactly? Just curious.
So, let's see. I don't belong to any groups or associations that have been founded based on race or gender. I think that such groups are ridiculous. But of course I'm a big fan of the first amendment, so people should use their protected freedom of assembly however they like. But you know, and I know, that if I were to actually start group that's based on my sex and skin color (especially on a college campus!) there would be howls of screeching outrage from Big SJW, and formal finger-wagging letters written and signed by the members of people who started their own groups based on genitals and skin pigment. That's the difference: I don't care, but they are spectacular hypocrites on the subject.
You seem to think that the only way to improve the things you don't like is through the subjugation of others, based on things like gender and skin color. I think the best way to improve things is to stop obsessing about those things in the first place. Who wants control over others? You do. You're the one that's obsessed about "power," not me. Thanks for being so transparent about it, though - it helps the rest of us when you put those tyrannical urges of yours on display.
Hilarious. I don't want to control them, I want them to not be awarded with control over me. Orwell would be proud of you, though: "Resisting others' control over you and wanting to be left alone is actually a way to control them!"
What are you even TALKING about? People don't change. The whiny SJW types are just like every other power-hungry group looking to exploit manufactured, phony victimization in order to control other people. History is full of that stuff, with minor variations.
Yep, you are a practitioner for sure. A sure sign of a seminar-trained SJW enthusiast is the cherry picked moral equivalence hysteria, and a careful avoidance of any sort of context or awareness of actual history. When WAS your seminar - just last week?
So you're suggesting that social justice is an undesirable thing? Or just that allowing oneself to be labeled as a crusader for it is unacceptable?
*sigh*
No. The point is that the people who carry on in this way are generally over-wrought, pretentious idiots that don't understand what the word "justice" actually means, but consider themselves to be passionate warriors for their nebulous cause because they tweet with some magic hashtags. They aren't "fighting" for anything, but they do get their feelings hurt for all the wrong reasons about all the wrong things.
Yes, "social justice" (as the term is used by its shrill priesthood, most of whom make careers out of getting paid to manufacture phony injustice that only they can solve through being paid to blog about it) IS an undesirable thing. Because it's not at all about justice, it's about faux grievances and misplaced senses of entitlement.
Nope, and I address the matter being discussed, instead of being an anonymous coward that can't manage anything but lazy ad hominem in hopes of changing the subject.
The feelings mentioned in step 8 remains with the person precisely because he did not transfer them to the corporation at step 6.
He's still running the corporation! He's making the exact same value judgments he did when he was mowing lawns without the "Inc" or "LLC" after his landscaping business name. Why would his feelings change just because he's structured his business in a more professional way? Please be specific. Did he love puppies while being a sole proprietor, but now that he owns an incorporated business, he doesn't care if puppies live or die? What are you saying?
Slashdot Mirror
They haven't run the country (though they certainly run large parts of the culture) because other people continually push back against them. That's the whole point. Whiny people who want to take stuff aren't as preoccupied in their day as the people who create the stuff they want to take. It's work to set aside time to push back against them, but if that isn't done regularly, they'll get to have their one-time feast. As has been recently served up in Venezuela, Greece, and Brazil.
Does a recording of a game that turns out that way actually promote the agenda of groups like ISIS? If so, how?
You got it. If the British had won, George Washington and the founding fathers would have gone down in history as "terrorists".
But they didn't win, and thus the truth remains well known. The British were the ones acting in tyrannical ways, not the colonists. Resisting the tyrannical urges of a government that puts their troops in your home, deprives you of self defense, refuses you a voice in parliament, arrests you for manufacturing finished goods and so on - resisting such is not "terrorism" even if the tyrant in question wants to call it that. Terrorism isn't in the eyes of the beholder, it's in the act of the beheader - the person who kills school teachers for teaching girls to read. Who send drugged young women into vegetable markets with bombs strapped to them. Who slaughter villages full of people for being insufficiently the right way about some particular twist or turn of believing in magic and some specific flavor of fantasy mythology.
Nobody cares if Taliban wants to call school teachers terrorists, because we know, and they know that's bullshit. We just care what they DO, and what they do is try to scare people into conducting their lives the way their religious say they should. Beard police! No dancing! Fly kites and die!
You sure don't need a novelist to describe what's coming out of the mouths of the Sanders-type people these days.
The problem is that once you get in the business of allowing the government to soothe envious people by making a spectacle of chopping their boss's pay in half, you've jumped off a cliff. Because why should a person who just sits in front of a computer in an air-conditioned room doing some "coding" make five times as much as a guy who stands in ditches in the sun digging around water pipes? Why should somebody who just sits all day and plays with numbers at a car insurance company be allowed to make ten times as much money as someone who repairs cars? It's an outrage! We need to reduce THOSE people's salaries too, because NOBODY needs to make $120,000 a year while someone else is still only making $25,000, right?
And what about the guy who starts a one-man business - say, providing consulting services to the agriculture industry, based on his decades of experience. He scores some big contracts doing specialized soil studies, and is making $300,000 a year. But he's 60 years old, and could use some help driving around collecting little bags of dirt all day from the region where he's working. So he hires a guy who puts little handfuls of dirt in bags for him all day, and has his pick of ten people all of whom are happy to do that for less than a tenth of what he's making. This must stop! The best thing for society would be for the government to step in an make sure that consultant makes less money, so everything is more fair. Of course he'll have to fire the assistant, but it's all in the name of fairness, so that's OK.
Because the only pressure they had was their own sense of greed.
Which is exactly why the Bush administration made an appearance before the Democrat-controlled congress and warned them of the consequences of congress's pushing Fannie Mae to continue to underwrite (and to essentially REQUIRE underwritten banks to provide) things like no-income-proof, no-down-payment mortgages to people who couldn't possibly afford them once their rates ballooned. That Clinton-era policy, of putting more people into home ownership no matter what, started that bubble growing, and the congress under Pelosi and Reid kept pouring gas on that smoldering fire. The Bush administration spent six years trying to push through Fannie/Freddie control measures, and repeatedly warned congress about the problems and the dire consequences.
People selling derivatives around that mountain of unsecured, bloated housing debt didn't cause people to lose houses and banks to put the brakes on dishing out more credit. People lost houses because their income couldn't keep up with foolishly chosen mortgages, and because they had speculated on the prospect of a get-rich-quick turn around on the house in the near future, they owed more on those houses than they were really worth. It's not exactly mysterious. The banks got stuck with enormous piles of worthless debt, and houses it cost more to foreclose on than were often worth the trouble.
The government has a duty to those people as well as to the ones who do own companies.
And what is that duty? To tear down the people who found and run companies so they can, one time, dole out the carcasses? Or is it to foster a much more entrepreneurial environment that isn't so hostile to people running (and working for!) businesses so that we can see more people get out of the low end of the spectrum? It's not the government's job to "balance" incomes by taking it from one person and giving it to another. It's the government's job to stay out of the way of the things that produce competitive businesses in a global economy.
You're confused. The recession didn't happen because we weren't collecting enough taxes. You get that, right? The recession largely happened because the credit markets dried up as a result of a housing bubble caused by too-easy-to-get loans as the industry was pressured (by democrats) into making. Far, far too many people were in over their heads, debt-wise. Had nothing to do with tax revenue at all. Combine the credit crunch with rapidly growing foreign competition in sectors that the US used to enjoy all to itself, and there you have it. The real question is why the recovery is so slow. Partly, foreign competition. But mostly, a business environment in the US that is completely hostile to the very sort of investment and activity that would generate job growth outside of the burger flipping and door greeter segments.
Do you own ANY stocks at all? Perhaps some mutual funds? Does any of your family? I'm glad to hear that you're willing to put yourself and your family somewhat at legal jeopardy for the actions of someone who works for one of the companies you partly own.
Of course you already know that people who work for (and in some cases run) large corporations are prosecuted and go to jail for some of the actions they perform or direct. You're just pretending you don't every see any news.
That Apple funnels US profits in a Nevada shell company to avoid paying state corporate taxes
Obviously you run your own company. Did you specifically choose to set up that company in a state with the high taxes? No? Why not?
But corporations are just people. So they should pay income tax, just like us plebes.
When the people that run, work for, and invest in the company take a piece of that revenue home with them, it already IS taxed. Nobody gets to spend it on their kids' college, a new car, groceries, an iPhone, or a big house until it's issued as pay, dividends, or some other very much taxed form of money.
Taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else.
Or, we could spend less (especially now, before spending ever more on interest we can't afford is inevitable), and LOWER taxes in ways that generate - as they have repeatedly in the past - far more tax revenue because of much more (competitively, rather than punitively taxed) activity, especially as conducted domestically rather than overseas.
And that supply is infinite? You can't restructure the economy, Sanders-style, around permanently tearing down successful people and businesses - there isn't a permanent supply of them. Which is why they have to come after the middle class next.
What's with the false dichotomy? Are you really unable to imagine a government that isn't hostile to people who start businesses, and isn't hostile to the investments your mom makes for her retirement? Can you only imagine that it's either that, or a confiscatory socialist utopia that finally doles enough stuff out to the little people ... and nobody will worry about where that money is supposed to come from?
Yes, and the responsibility of the government should be to its citizens, not corporations.
Because, of course, the people who form a business and incorporate it ... they're couldn't possibly be citizens. And the teachers, welders, farmers, retirees and everyone else who decide to invest some money in a publicly traded company, no chance those are citizens. Nope. The companies are all owned and run by non-human invisible evil ghost people, or AI machines in the basement.
You want others to behave in a certain way.
Which way? Be specific. Let's try a couple on for size:
1) Control what people say! Nope, I don't care, but the SJW/liberal crowd want to shout people down, shut people up, and censor those they don't like.
2) Control what people do! Nope, I pretty much don't care. But the SJW/liberal crows is absolutely obsessed with telling other people what they cannot do, what they cannot say, what size drink they cannot buy, which car they can drive, which skin color quotas must be obeyed, and all of the other controlling things they insist on.
Want more? Nah, what's the point. You are insisting that left is right, dark is light, hot is cold. Those that don't want control of people are the controllers, and those that insist on censorship and minute control over other people's lives are the ones who don't want control.
No, nobody could actually believe it when they say those things, so you're just trolling for fun. What do you get out that, exactly? Just curious.
Up is down! War is peace! You're fantastic.
So, let's see. I don't belong to any groups or associations that have been founded based on race or gender. I think that such groups are ridiculous. But of course I'm a big fan of the first amendment, so people should use their protected freedom of assembly however they like. But you know, and I know, that if I were to actually start group that's based on my sex and skin color (especially on a college campus!) there would be howls of screeching outrage from Big SJW, and formal finger-wagging letters written and signed by the members of people who started their own groups based on genitals and skin pigment. That's the difference: I don't care, but they are spectacular hypocrites on the subject.
You seem to think that the only way to improve the things you don't like is through the subjugation of others, based on things like gender and skin color. I think the best way to improve things is to stop obsessing about those things in the first place. Who wants control over others? You do. You're the one that's obsessed about "power," not me. Thanks for being so transparent about it, though - it helps the rest of us when you put those tyrannical urges of yours on display.
Hilarious. I don't want to control them, I want them to not be awarded with control over me. Orwell would be proud of you, though: "Resisting others' control over you and wanting to be left alone is actually a way to control them!"
Please, keep your comedy routine up. It's great.
What are you even TALKING about? People don't change. The whiny SJW types are just like every other power-hungry group looking to exploit manufactured, phony victimization in order to control other people. History is full of that stuff, with minor variations.
Yes, I can see that you're the very picture of level headed, civilized discourse. Please, do go on.
Yep, you are a practitioner for sure. A sure sign of a seminar-trained SJW enthusiast is the cherry picked moral equivalence hysteria, and a careful avoidance of any sort of context or awareness of actual history. When WAS your seminar - just last week?
So you're suggesting that social justice is an undesirable thing? Or just that allowing oneself to be labeled as a crusader for it is unacceptable?
*sigh*
No. The point is that the people who carry on in this way are generally over-wrought, pretentious idiots that don't understand what the word "justice" actually means, but consider themselves to be passionate warriors for their nebulous cause because they tweet with some magic hashtags. They aren't "fighting" for anything, but they do get their feelings hurt for all the wrong reasons about all the wrong things.
Yes, "social justice" (as the term is used by its shrill priesthood, most of whom make careers out of getting paid to manufacture phony injustice that only they can solve through being paid to blog about it) IS an undesirable thing. Because it's not at all about justice, it's about faux grievances and misplaced senses of entitlement.
First off, anyone using the term "SJW" is completely full of shit.
Why? It perfectly, succinctly describes what it's all about. It's dead on.
Nope, and I address the matter being discussed, instead of being an anonymous coward that can't manage anything but lazy ad hominem in hopes of changing the subject.
The feelings mentioned in step 8 remains with the person precisely because he did not transfer them to the corporation at step 6.
He's still running the corporation! He's making the exact same value judgments he did when he was mowing lawns without the "Inc" or "LLC" after his landscaping business name. Why would his feelings change just because he's structured his business in a more professional way? Please be specific. Did he love puppies while being a sole proprietor, but now that he owns an incorporated business, he doesn't care if puppies live or die? What are you saying?