So, the state-run education system is failing and we're falling behind in science.
Recommended solutions?
*Even more* state-run education - more funding, prizes, competitions.
I'm waiting for the day someone will come along and say: wait a minute, maybe this SHOULDN'T be provided by central government. Maybe we should give people back the money we'd tax to pay for it and let them do it for themselves.
Of course, the reason you don't see this much is because if you say to the State: you don't need to provide this service now, the service stops for sure, but the tax reduction? *that doesn't happen*. So people cling on to whatever they can get out of the State, because they know if it's taken away, they only lose.
> Continuing your argument down it's slippery slope, what's the need for the State? According to your argument, > everything could be provided by corporations on a usage basis -- even private armies, where needed. If you're > only paying for what you use, there's no need for a State to provide what you use. Anyone could provide it.
And the thing is, this is exactly what I think.
I *detest* the State. I think it's one of the largest sources of misery and injustice in existance.
> Naturally, as the poor have less wealth to spare, that means a lot of services will no longer have the minimum > number of users required to support their existence.
Now, how'd you figure that?
If there's no State, there's no taxes. The poor just got a lot richer. The poor - as they are now, with taxes sapping their wealth - currently manage to have enough money to pay for all the services which exist right now. If they get richer, how will they have "less wealth to spare" leading to the shutdown of services?
The poor will then have to pay for services that they formerly received from the State - but the cost of those services is I suspect much less when paid directly than when paid through the State. The State is inefficient, corrupt and costly. Simply removing it from the equation saves a ton of money.
> Money doesn't always go to those who work (consider inheritance)
Their *parents* worked and amassed that wealth. What they do with it is quite rightly their business.
> money isn't proportional to how hard you work, in fact the opposite is often the case -your typical factory > worker busts his ass day after day and does overtime to hang onto the lower rungs of the economic ladder, and > your typical overseas labourer works even harder for even less pay
Money is proportional to how hard you work *and how skilled you are*.
> Your pay is not always proportional to your skill -how many celebrities including actors and singers are paid > based on their appearance? -exactly what skill are Paris Hilton and Nichole Ritchie exercising?
Pay is not always entirely monetery. Actors are partially paid by the chance of becoming famous, which is valuable to them. Ms. Hilton and Ms. Ritchie are examples of the first case, where their parents have worked hard.
> another question -why should your skill set (which is basically determined by chance) dictate your right to > life, liberty, and happiness (since these are all affected to some extent by your income they are in effect > determined by chance)?
Your skill set is by no means determined by chance. I worked hard in University for four years to get my degree, and I've worked hard for ten years since then in industry and now I'm skilled. It's not a fluke - it didn't materalise out of the ether; I worked hard.
The question you ask though is a good one; even if someone has no skills, surely there is an ethical imperative which means simply by being alive, being human, sentient and conscious, there is a natural right to the basics of life - food, warmth, justice, liberty, freedom, etc.
The problem with this question comes when the consequence of an affirmative answer is appreciated; if they have a RIGHT to these things and they cannot pay for them themselves, *someone else HAS to pay for it* and this affects THEIR right to liberty and freedom - for the sweat of their brow is now paying for someone else to have free food.
> another question -how does the sociological fact that the greatest predictor of your income is the income of > your parents play into your view?
One thing it means is that if your parents are well off, you're set an example as you grow up that you get well qualified and work hard. You do this, and naturally, you do well. If your parents are poor and say live in a violent neighbourhood, you learn to hang out with gangs, do drugs, don't get educated, live in a place with little or no unskilled work and you do very badly indeed.
(Polarized examples to illustrate the underlying thought.)
> How about the fact that they basically control the State through campaign *contributions* ?
Several things;
1. you're tarring them all with the same brush 2. is it true anyway? if so, to what extent? 3. if they do control the State, how come they haven't arranged so they aren't taxed? 4. if they do control the State, is taxing them heavily actually the response we want? 5. if they do control the State, and they are heavily taxed, do we sit back and go - "oh, alright then" and suck it up?
> Or that they keep themselves in that tax bracket by keeping the actual workers pay levels in the bottom tax > bracket ?
Please explain to me how they keep their workers in the bottom pay bracket.
Presumably by paying them very little? but if their skills were in demand, someone else would offer a little more, and they would go there; and pretty soon they'd be being paid what their skills actually properly commanded.
And, note, I am a worker, I'm sure this company is held by some very rich people, and I don't seem to be in the bottom tax bracket. In fact, the majority of people are doing quite nicely, all things considered.
> If they want tax leveled out then level out the pay as the same time.
You can't "level out pay".
People by and large are paid what their skills command.
If you pay them more, you're paying over the odds; you could get the same skills for less. If you pay them less, they leave you for someone else.
The only way to actually change what people are paid is for the State to intervene on a massive scale and set pay rates. This has been done a number of times - most recently in the States during WW2. It failed miserable and led to massive workforce shortages and excesses; those who's pay had been set below it's natural rate ended up being paid more on the side (for example, by receiving free private medical care - and this in fact where the whole sorry mess of American health care started), if they didn't change profession, and those who were being paid more than their natural rate were very happy indeed, and more and more people started to try to work in those professions, causing labour excesses.
However, of course, this kind of State intervention is a MASSIVE violation of our economic freedom. All those people who hired others were being *forced* to pay a certain rate - they had no choice in the matter. All those being hired *had* to accept that rate - whether it was too low or too high. They also had no choice in this matter.
How can this sort of behaviour be in any way compatable with our notions of freedom and liberty?
How can we tolerate the State arbitrarily waltzing in and telling us how much we will be paid for our work? how would we feel if we found ourselves being paid half as much? and with no way to contest the matter? and of course it all became a huge political football with vast amounts of lobbying and special interests; those employers now having to pay less than they should pressing for the laws to be retained, those paying more than they should pressing for the laws to be dropped or for their rates to be changed, those employed having their own interests as well, translating into votes which affects the voting behaviour of senators, etc...
A god-awful fucking mess. Violating our freedom and liberaty, costing a fortunate, placing far too much power in the hands of State and screwing the economy sideways - for people spend money to make more money, which is the basis of the improvement of all our lots, and this process became far less effective because people were forced to invest less effectively (lower rates of return) due to the new inefficiencies in the economy (massive labour shortages/excesses).
So - be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.
> It is very common in the Uk that top level managers are rewarded as highly for failure as for success.
Yes. The Economist had a nice article on this recently.
Certainly, in this particular case - and others - people have selfishly arranged matters in their own favour and temporarily beaten the market. It happens, unfortunately.
However, I don't see this in indicates the market by and large does not reward according to effort and skill.
And reward *should be* in proportion to effort and skill - if there's such a thing as natural justice, this is surely part of it.
The market by its inherent nature acts in this way and where it is beaten, it needs to be supported so it can return to effectiveness.
> You're conflating an ethical issue with an economical issue. Just because a capitalist economy has happened to > distribute wealth in such and such a manner
I could be wrong, but I think you shot yourself in the foot in with your opening sentance.
Free market economies do not "just happen" to distribute wealth. It goes to those who work, in proportion to how hard they work and how skilled they are.
As such, it IS an ethical issue for person A to take money from person B and just spend it; person B deserves that money, by the sweat of their brow.
> those that benefit most from the system in use should pay the most to support that system?
The rich have private medical care. They never claim benefits. They probably have their own library...
What State services do the well-off use that much more of because they're rich?
They benefit equally from say roads and justice as anyone does.
In general, with regard to the argument you've made, I concur - people should pay for what they use. It's not right for person A to use 100,000 dollars worth of services and pay for only 10,000 dollars worth. With regard to this principle, having the State tax everyone equally and then distribute services unequally is a real problem; it's fundamantally unfair and is also fundamentally expensise - the bureaucracy of State absorbs a lot of the money, just like lawyers do in court cases. I feel people should be taxed far, far less and instead should pay directly for what they use. IN this regard, the State should tax enough to provide a minimum level of wealth for everyone (redistribution) but that's it.
> Because the rich have more stake in the state keeping the status quo intact (i.e. enforcing property rights, > repelling foreigh takeover) than the poor. Not to mention many often receive indirect benefits in the form of > subisidies, etc. from the government.
Well, this seems to me tantamount to saying that yes, the rich *do* use 18% of State expenditure.
I think an argument not without merit. However, I think a more correct way of addressing the idea here is to ask; how much to I pay to the State and how much does the State pay to me?
Pay of course here in the all encompassing sense.
In that sense, I suspect we find we're all doing badly - I suspect only those who pay nothing and receive benefits actually come out with a profit. The State is horrendously inefficient at converting money into services - I only need to mention medicial services, for example. What's more, the State is also an enourmous administrative overhead. If we kept our taxes and bought the services the State provides from the market, we'd all be far better off - and we also wouldn't have the horrible problem we have now, of an overly-powerful, overly-centralized State spending more and more of *our* money monitoring us.
I would say that the rich and powerful have historically created the State as way of formalizing their holdings and position within society and culture. They didn't need the State to protect them from the poor - they could do that already, by being rich and so commanding military, social and cultural force.
The State also became a way to claim taxes from the poor.
It's awful, really.
The State should exist because those within it agree to its existance as a means by which they can achieve goals that they individually could not individully attain.
> Why are diamonds so expensive? Because they are rare? They sure are, why is that? Oh, cause there's people who > control the supply.
DeBeers have a monopoly which does as you say permit them to hold the price of diamons above the rate they they would otherwise command.
> What caused that recent spike in oil prices? Same thing.
Yes and no. Oil spiked because the supply of oil reached its maximum while China in particular continued to demand more and more oil. This wasn't so much a monopoly controlling prices (for everyone was pumping as much oil as they could), but demand exceeding supply.
> Why is software so expensive? Same thing.
No. Software production is not controlled by a monopoly. Do you mean Windows?
> If the price can float, then the people who control the production can jack up the price. The only thing that > stops most producers is competition.
Correct.
> This is easily overcome by collusion.
Not really. The problem with collusion is that it requires all the producers of a given good or service to hold in good faith to their elevated price. The temptation, however, is always there for one of them to break, charge a somewhat lower price and suddenly gain, for a short while, the whole market for themselves. In practise, collusion does not operate as a meaningful factor.
I would say to you that you over-rate the effect of this factor.
> Where there is bodies that prohibit that collusion, we see markets.
The Sherman anti-trust laws, in the States.
> When those bodies start to actively sanction or require collusion, we see monopolies.
It's not so much that the anti-trust bodies corrupt, it's purely and simply that the State overtly or covertly creates monopolies. For example, in the States, there is a monopoly on the carrying of first class post. This is an overt State monopoly. Covert monopolies are represented by bodies such as those who set and regulate the education of medicial students. These bodies regulate the supply of doctors, keeping it artifically low, and so support the income of qualified doctors. In fact, unions do much the same. By obtaining wages for their members that exceed the market rate they cause the prices of their employers goods or services to rise; in other words, they better themselves at everyone elses cost.
Rich people didn't materialise out of the ether in a rich state.
They *got* rich, either by working hard themselves, or by their parents working hard and choosing to give their children wealth.
Class envy is fundamentally unjust. It's wanting to take from others *simple because they have more* - it's theft. Those other people have more *because they worked and earned it*.
> So what? Even without a redistributionist agenda, there are good reasons to tax the rich disproportionately more > - we tax according to utility rather than in cash terms. Losing the same amount of cash hurts alot less if you > are rich than if you are poor.
I could be wrong, but you've got mixed up.
Your final statement is - if you're rich, loosing the same amount of cash (proportional to your income) hurts a lot less than if you're poor. I agree that this is true, because there are absolute levels of wealth below which living standards are seriously harmed - not enough food, warmth, etc.
However, you previous statement was that there are good reasons to tax the rich *disproportionately* heavily.
This means the rich pay *more*, proportional to their income, the richer they are.
So Mr.Poor Bloke pays 20% tax on his income, but Mr.Rich Bloke pays 50% tax on his income.
He pays a LOT more, not just in absolute terms, but in relative terms too.
So you've said 1. disproportionate, 2. because loosing *same* amount is worse when poor, which doesn't add up.
The tax system we have is like the most god-awful, badly written fucked up piece of software ever.
Complex, incomprehensible, arbitrary, unfair.
If you can afford the expert accountants, you can do very well indeed.
The Baltic States have a flat income tax, did you know that?
You pay 25% of your income. That's it. Simple as pie. At the end of the year, you look at your income (I was paid say 40,000 UKP) figure out 25% (not difficult) and transfer it to the State bank account.
No one gets screwed, shafted, or disadvantaged because they can't afford the accounts fees and so can't dodge out of a ton of tax.
> Excuse me for being rude, but this is just a dumb statement. How about this "people who own 40% of total assets > only pay 18% of the total tax burden." Life does not seem so rough when you put it that way.
I could be wrong, but I think you've overlooked something important - that percentages here can't tell the whole story. If people who own 40% of total assets (100% of assets valued at 1 million USD) pay 18% of the total tax burden (100% tax burden being 50 million USD) then they're VERY badly put upon.
We can't in fact know if the "rich" here are truly rich, or if it's just there are just lots of poor people.
As it is, I understand that these days, the middle class is vast; larger than it has ever been in history. There are now far more people who are fairly well off than people who are poor. It's never been like that before.
> The purpose of taxes "IS TO REDUCE THE WEALTH OF THOSE THAT HAVE DONE WELL!" The government budget may include > national defense and law enforcement but it is the social and welfare programs that take up the largest chunks > of the budget. They are there to stabilize the system and take money from the haves and give it to the have > nots.
Isn't that rather communist?
To put it another way; if I work hard for fifty years of my life and in doing so *earn*, by my labour, wealth - why can you come along, take that from me, and give it to someone else?
You can justify that, I think, if the other person would starve or die - but apparently even that only applies to *Americans* who would starve or die. Not Africans, or Indians, or Chinese...
But how else can it be justified? how can person A walk over to person B and simply *TAKE* their money - and it not be outright theft?
The richest 2% pay considerably more than 2% of taxes, however.
They are disproportionately heavily taxed.
I believe in the US, for example, the richest 1% bear 18% of the total tax burden.
The purpose of tax is not to reduce the wealth of those who have done well to the level of those who have not; unfortunately, class envy is a very significant factor in the perception of the masses of poor and averagely well off.
Novel introduce MS patent based technologies (WMV, DRM, interoperability stuff, etc) into their variant of Linux (while also keeping up to date with the kernel release, etc, done by the community).
People deciding which Linux to use have a choice between the souped-up version from Novel which will do lots of Windows stuff or regular Linux.
Regular Linux can't take the MS stuff into itself because it's patented. The MS Linux can take all the regular Linux stuff because it's GPL.
Result? MS start to get significant leverage over Linux by proxy, by trying to dominate the Linux variant market with "their" (e.g. Novell's) variant. MS would do this itself I think, without going through Novell, if they had the linux know-how.
MS then start putting seriously nice stuff into MS Linux, more and more people start to use it, become dependent on it, MS start making it easy to migrate from MS Linux to Windows, etc, etc - all sorts of strategies are available at that point.
I can see why a modified GPL is needed now, to exclude patented material from the kernel; this is to protect Linux from MS's embrace/extend/exterminate policy.
Because I suspect people *individually* are not particularly prone to torturing others.
What happens is that people get places in a situation which leads them to behave sadistically - and they do, with gusto, and so they would use such a device because they would enjoy it. It's not about being torturing people because despite a deep revulsion at the suffering caused, there's a intellectual belief that it will save the lives of others; it's about being sadistic, being deliberately cruel and dehumanizing and inflicting suffering.
As such, a lovely high tech weapon is another way to "tell" your victim, by your actions, that they are violated, dehumanizaed.
Question is, how long before people are tortured with this device?
In fact, given the current administration's apparent view that coercion which causes non-permanent harm is not torture (e.g. waterboarding), this seems ideal.
It superifically appears to assert that the number of people using OpenID is growing each week by 5%.
Is this the number of people *actively* using OpenID, or the total number of ALL users ever, e.g. including those by people who've used it once and then walked away?
Is this the totaly number of people across ALL OpenID service providers? this seems unlikely, since someone would have had to have done the work of collating all the stats from all those providers.
If it is then just a sampling of providers, how was the sample chosen? is it representative? or was it opportunistic, e.g. those OpenID service providers who are loudest about OpenID and so could be expected to tend to be those who see the largest growth rate in users?
Also, 5% each week sustained actually means an ever increasing absolute number of users, since it's 5% of an ever larger user base. When your user base is 100 people, 5% is five 5 new people, which isn't hard to sustain on a week in, week out basis. So what is this 5% - which could be completely inaccurate anyway, since we've no idea of the sample it's based - 5% *of*?
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So, the state-run education system is failing and we're falling behind in science.
Recommended solutions?
*Even more* state-run education - more funding, prizes, competitions.
I'm waiting for the day someone will come along and say: wait a minute, maybe this SHOULDN'T be provided by central government. Maybe we should give people back the money we'd tax to pay for it and let them do it for themselves.
Of course, the reason you don't see this much is because if you say to the State: you don't need to provide this service now, the service stops for sure, but the tax reduction? *that doesn't happen*. So people cling on to whatever they can get out of the State, because they know if it's taken away, they only lose.
Well, it had to happen.
A political body has done something sensible.
I mean, it's like proton decay. It *had* to happen eventually.
> It's called utilitarianism. As Mr Spock said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
Then why haven't you committed suicide and given your organs to medicine?
Your death will save many more than one life.
> Continuing your argument down it's slippery slope, what's the need for the State? According to your argument,
> everything could be provided by corporations on a usage basis -- even private armies, where needed. If you're
> only paying for what you use, there's no need for a State to provide what you use. Anyone could provide it.
And the thing is, this is exactly what I think.
I *detest* the State. I think it's one of the largest sources of misery and injustice in existance.
> Naturally, as the poor have less wealth to spare, that means a lot of services will no longer have the minimum
> number of users required to support their existence.
Now, how'd you figure that?
If there's no State, there's no taxes. The poor just got a lot richer. The poor - as they are now, with taxes sapping their wealth - currently manage to have enough money to pay for all the services which exist right now. If they get richer, how will they have "less wealth to spare" leading to the shutdown of services?
The poor will then have to pay for services that they formerly received from the State - but the cost of those services is I suspect much less when paid directly than when paid through the State. The State is inefficient, corrupt and costly. Simply removing it from the equation saves a ton of money.
> Money doesn't always go to those who work (consider inheritance)
Their *parents* worked and amassed that wealth. What they do with it is quite rightly their business.
> money isn't proportional to how hard you work, in fact the opposite is often the case -your typical factory
> worker busts his ass day after day and does overtime to hang onto the lower rungs of the economic ladder, and
> your typical overseas labourer works even harder for even less pay
Money is proportional to how hard you work *and how skilled you are*.
> Your pay is not always proportional to your skill -how many celebrities including actors and singers are paid
> based on their appearance? -exactly what skill are Paris Hilton and Nichole Ritchie exercising?
Pay is not always entirely monetery. Actors are partially paid by the chance of becoming famous, which is valuable to them. Ms. Hilton and Ms. Ritchie are examples of the first case, where their parents have worked hard.
> another question -why should your skill set (which is basically determined by chance) dictate your right to
> life, liberty, and happiness (since these are all affected to some extent by your income they are in effect
> determined by chance)?
Your skill set is by no means determined by chance. I worked hard in University for four years to get my degree, and I've worked hard for ten years since then in industry and now I'm skilled. It's not a fluke - it didn't materalise out of the ether; I worked hard.
The question you ask though is a good one; even if someone has no skills, surely there is an ethical imperative which means simply by being alive, being human, sentient and conscious, there is a natural right to the basics of life - food, warmth, justice, liberty, freedom, etc.
The problem with this question comes when the consequence of an affirmative answer is appreciated; if they have a RIGHT to these things and they cannot pay for them themselves, *someone else HAS to pay for it* and this affects THEIR right to liberty and freedom - for the sweat of their brow is now paying for someone else to have free food.
> another question -how does the sociological fact that the greatest predictor of your income is the income of
> your parents play into your view?
One thing it means is that if your parents are well off, you're set an example as you grow up that you get well qualified and work hard. You do this, and naturally, you do well. If your parents are poor and say live in a violent neighbourhood, you learn to hang out with gangs, do drugs, don't get educated, live in a place with little or no unskilled work and you do very badly indeed.
(Polarized examples to illustrate the underlying thought.)
> How about the fact that they basically control the State through campaign *contributions* ?
Several things;
1. you're tarring them all with the same brush
2. is it true anyway? if so, to what extent?
3. if they do control the State, how come they haven't arranged so they aren't taxed?
4. if they do control the State, is taxing them heavily actually the response we want?
5. if they do control the State, and they are heavily taxed, do we sit back and go - "oh, alright then" and suck it up?
> Or that they keep themselves in that tax bracket by keeping the actual workers pay levels in the bottom tax
> bracket ?
Please explain to me how they keep their workers in the bottom pay bracket.
Presumably by paying them very little? but if their skills were in demand, someone else would offer a little more, and they would go there; and pretty soon they'd be being paid what their skills actually properly commanded.
And, note, I am a worker, I'm sure this company is held by some very rich people, and I don't seem to be in the bottom tax bracket. In fact, the majority of people are doing quite nicely, all things considered.
> If they want tax leveled out then level out the pay as the same time.
You can't "level out pay".
People by and large are paid what their skills command.
If you pay them more, you're paying over the odds; you could get the same skills for less. If you pay them less, they leave you for someone else.
The only way to actually change what people are paid is for the State to intervene on a massive scale and set pay rates. This has been done a number of times - most recently in the States during WW2. It failed miserable and led to massive workforce shortages and excesses; those who's pay had been set below it's natural rate ended up being paid more on the side (for example, by receiving free private medical care - and this in fact where the whole sorry mess of American health care started), if they didn't change profession, and those who were being paid more than their natural rate were very happy indeed, and more and more people started to try to work in those professions, causing labour excesses.
However, of course, this kind of State intervention is a MASSIVE violation of our economic freedom. All those people who hired others were being *forced* to pay a certain rate - they had no choice in the matter. All those being hired *had* to accept that rate - whether it was too low or too high. They also had no choice in this matter.
How can this sort of behaviour be in any way compatable with our notions of freedom and liberty?
How can we tolerate the State arbitrarily waltzing in and telling us how much we will be paid for our work? how would we feel if we found ourselves being paid half as much? and with no way to contest the matter? and of course it all became a huge political football with vast amounts of lobbying and special interests; those employers now having to pay less than they should pressing for the laws to be retained, those paying more than they should pressing for the laws to be dropped or for their rates to be changed, those employed having their own interests as well, translating into votes which affects the voting behaviour of senators, etc...
A god-awful fucking mess. Violating our freedom and liberaty, costing a fortunate, placing far too much power in the hands of State and screwing the economy sideways - for people spend money to make more money, which is the basis of the improvement of all our lots, and this process became far less effective because people were forced to invest less effectively (lower rates of return) due to the new inefficiencies in the economy (massive labour shortages/excesses).
So - be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.
> It is very common in the Uk that top level managers are rewarded as highly for failure as for success.
Yes. The Economist had a nice article on this recently.
Certainly, in this particular case - and others - people have selfishly arranged matters in their own favour and temporarily beaten the market. It happens, unfortunately.
However, I don't see this in indicates the market by and large does not reward according to effort and skill.
And reward *should be* in proportion to effort and skill - if there's such a thing as natural justice, this is surely part of it.
The market by its inherent nature acts in this way and where it is beaten, it needs to be supported so it can return to effectiveness.
> You're conflating an ethical issue with an economical issue. Just because a capitalist economy has happened to
> distribute wealth in such and such a manner
I could be wrong, but I think you shot yourself in the foot in with your opening sentance.
Free market economies do not "just happen" to distribute wealth. It goes to those who work, in proportion to how hard they work and how skilled they are.
As such, it IS an ethical issue for person A to take money from person B and just spend it; person B deserves that money, by the sweat of their brow.
> those that benefit most from the system in use should pay the most to support that system?
The rich have private medical care. They never claim benefits. They probably have their own library...
What State services do the well-off use that much more of because they're rich?
They benefit equally from say roads and justice as anyone does.
In general, with regard to the argument you've made, I concur - people should pay for what they use. It's not right for person A to use 100,000 dollars worth of services and pay for only 10,000 dollars worth. With regard to this principle, having the State tax everyone equally and then distribute services unequally is a real problem; it's fundamantally unfair and is also fundamentally expensise - the bureaucracy of State absorbs a lot of the money, just like lawyers do in court cases. I feel people should be taxed far, far less and instead should pay directly for what they use. IN this regard, the State should tax enough to provide a minimum level of wealth for everyone (redistribution) but that's it.
> Because the rich have more stake in the state keeping the status quo intact (i.e. enforcing property rights,
> repelling foreigh takeover) than the poor. Not to mention many often receive indirect benefits in the form of
> subisidies, etc. from the government.
Well, this seems to me tantamount to saying that yes, the rich *do* use 18% of State expenditure.
I think an argument not without merit. However, I think a more correct way of addressing the idea here is to ask; how much to I pay to the State and how much does the State pay to me?
Pay of course here in the all encompassing sense.
In that sense, I suspect we find we're all doing badly - I suspect only those who pay nothing and receive benefits actually come out with a profit. The State is horrendously inefficient at converting money into services - I only need to mention medicial services, for example. What's more, the State is also an enourmous administrative overhead. If we kept our taxes and bought the services the State provides from the market, we'd all be far better off - and we also wouldn't have the horrible problem we have now, of an overly-powerful, overly-centralized State spending more and more of *our* money monitoring us.
Interesting.
I would say that the rich and powerful have historically created the State as way of formalizing their holdings and position within society and culture. They didn't need the State to protect them from the poor - they could do that already, by being rich and so commanding military, social and cultural force.
The State also became a way to claim taxes from the poor.
It's awful, really.
The State should exist because those within it agree to its existance as a means by which they can achieve goals that they individually could not individully attain.
> Why are diamonds so expensive? Because they are rare? They sure are, why is that? Oh, cause there's people who
> control the supply.
DeBeers have a monopoly which does as you say permit them to hold the price of diamons above the rate they they would otherwise command.
> What caused that recent spike in oil prices? Same thing.
Yes and no. Oil spiked because the supply of oil reached its maximum while China in particular continued to demand more and more oil. This wasn't so much a monopoly controlling prices (for everyone was pumping as much oil as they could), but demand exceeding supply.
> Why is software so expensive? Same thing.
No. Software production is not controlled by a monopoly. Do you mean Windows?
> If the price can float, then the people who control the production can jack up the price. The only thing that
> stops most producers is competition.
Correct.
> This is easily overcome by collusion.
Not really. The problem with collusion is that it requires all the producers of a given good or service to hold in good faith to their elevated price. The temptation, however, is always there for one of them to break, charge a somewhat lower price and suddenly gain, for a short while, the whole market for themselves. In practise, collusion does not operate as a meaningful factor.
I would say to you that you over-rate the effect of this factor.
> Where there is bodies that prohibit that collusion, we see markets.
The Sherman anti-trust laws, in the States.
> When those bodies start to actively sanction or require collusion, we see monopolies.
It's not so much that the anti-trust bodies corrupt, it's purely and simply that the State overtly or covertly creates monopolies. For example, in the States, there is a monopoly on the carrying of first class post. This is an overt State monopoly. Covert monopolies are represented by bodies such as those who set and regulate the education of medicial students. These bodies regulate the supply of doctors, keeping it artifically low, and so support the income of qualified doctors. In fact, unions do much the same. By obtaining wages for their members that exceed the market rate they cause the prices of their employers goods or services to rise; in other words, they better themselves at everyone elses cost.
Rich people didn't materialise out of the ether in a rich state.
They *got* rich, either by working hard themselves, or by their parents working hard and choosing to give their children wealth.
Class envy is fundamentally unjust. It's wanting to take from others *simple because they have more* - it's theft. Those other people have more *because they worked and earned it*.
> So what? Even without a redistributionist agenda, there are good reasons to tax the rich disproportionately more
> - we tax according to utility rather than in cash terms. Losing the same amount of cash hurts alot less if you
> are rich than if you are poor.
I could be wrong, but you've got mixed up.
Your final statement is - if you're rich, loosing the same amount of cash (proportional to your income) hurts a lot less than if you're poor. I agree that this is true, because there are absolute levels of wealth below which living standards are seriously harmed - not enough food, warmth, etc.
However, you previous statement was that there are good reasons to tax the rich *disproportionately* heavily.
This means the rich pay *more*, proportional to their income, the richer they are.
So Mr.Poor Bloke pays 20% tax on his income, but Mr.Rich Bloke pays 50% tax on his income.
He pays a LOT more, not just in absolute terms, but in relative terms too.
So you've said 1. disproportionate, 2. because loosing *same* amount is worse when poor, which doesn't add up.
Quite so.
The tax system we have is like the most god-awful, badly written fucked up piece of software ever.
Complex, incomprehensible, arbitrary, unfair.
If you can afford the expert accountants, you can do very well indeed.
The Baltic States have a flat income tax, did you know that?
You pay 25% of your income. That's it. Simple as pie. At the end of the year, you look at your income (I was paid say 40,000 UKP) figure out 25% (not difficult) and transfer it to the State bank account.
No one gets screwed, shafted, or disadvantaged because they can't afford the accounts fees and so can't dodge out of a ton of tax.
> Excuse me for being rude, but this is just a dumb statement. How about this "people who own 40% of total assets
> only pay 18% of the total tax burden." Life does not seem so rough when you put it that way.
I could be wrong, but I think you've overlooked something important - that percentages here can't tell the whole story. If people who own 40% of total assets (100% of assets valued at 1 million USD) pay 18% of the total tax burden (100% tax burden being 50 million USD) then they're VERY badly put upon.
We can't in fact know if the "rich" here are truly rich, or if it's just there are just lots of poor people.
As it is, I understand that these days, the middle class is vast; larger than it has ever been in history. There are now far more people who are fairly well off than people who are poor. It's never been like that before.
> The purpose of taxes "IS TO REDUCE THE WEALTH OF THOSE THAT HAVE DONE WELL!" The government budget may include
> national defense and law enforcement but it is the social and welfare programs that take up the largest chunks
> of the budget. They are there to stabilize the system and take money from the haves and give it to the have
> nots.
Isn't that rather communist?
To put it another way; if I work hard for fifty years of my life and in doing so *earn*, by my labour, wealth - why can you come along, take that from me, and give it to someone else?
You can justify that, I think, if the other person would starve or die - but apparently even that only applies to *Americans* who would starve or die. Not Africans, or Indians, or Chinese...
But how else can it be justified? how can person A walk over to person B and simply *TAKE* their money - and it not be outright theft?
Do they use more than 18% of the expenditure of State?
If not, on what ethical basis do we justify taking from them what they or their parents have earned and spending it on ourselves?
The richest 2% pay considerably more than 2% of taxes, however.
They are disproportionately heavily taxed.
I believe in the US, for example, the richest 1% bear 18% of the total tax burden.
The purpose of tax is not to reduce the wealth of those who have done well to the level of those who have not; unfortunately, class envy is a very significant factor in the perception of the masses of poor and averagely well off.
Do I understand this properly?
MS signs patent agreement with Novel.
Novel introduce MS patent based technologies (WMV, DRM, interoperability stuff, etc) into their variant of Linux (while also keeping up to date with the kernel release, etc, done by the community).
People deciding which Linux to use have a choice between the souped-up version from Novel which will do lots of Windows stuff or regular Linux.
Regular Linux can't take the MS stuff into itself because it's patented. The MS Linux can take all the regular Linux stuff because it's GPL.
Result? MS start to get significant leverage over Linux by proxy, by trying to dominate the Linux variant market with "their" (e.g. Novell's) variant. MS would do this itself I think, without going through Novell, if they had the linux know-how.
MS then start putting seriously nice stuff into MS Linux, more and more people start to use it, become dependent on it, MS start making it easy to migrate from MS Linux to Windows, etc, etc - all sorts of strategies are available at that point.
I can see why a modified GPL is needed now, to exclude patented material from the kernel; this is to protect Linux from MS's embrace/extend/exterminate policy.
> Not to worry - this radiation doesn't penetrate beyond the first mm. or two of skin.
I wonder if it was actually *tested* on people with deep embedded metal?
Or is this just an assertation based on the idea that wavelengths of that frequency ought to be stopped by that depth of human tissue?
At which point Murphy's Law kicks in...
> Why?
Because I suspect people *individually* are not particularly prone to torturing others.
What happens is that people get places in a situation which leads them to behave sadistically - and they do, with gusto, and so they would use such a device because they would enjoy it. It's not about being torturing people because despite a deep revulsion at the suffering caused, there's a intellectual belief that it will save the lives of others; it's about being sadistic, being deliberately cruel and dehumanizing and inflicting suffering.
As such, a lovely high tech weapon is another way to "tell" your victim, by your actions, that they are violated, dehumanizaed.
> and any metal that could generate "hot spots".
I have two metal bars embedded alongside my spine.
Hard to remove and externally invisible.
I really wouldn't like them to start getting hot. You can take your glasses off.
Question is, how long before people are tortured with this device?
:-(
In fact, given the current administration's apparent view that coercion which causes non-permanent harm is not torture (e.g. waterboarding), this seems ideal.
I wish I was kidding
> reportedly growing 5% every single week
And WTF does that actually MEAN?
It superifically appears to assert that the number of people using OpenID is growing each week by 5%.
Is this the number of people *actively* using OpenID, or the total number of ALL users ever, e.g. including those by people who've used it once and then walked away?
Is this the totaly number of people across ALL OpenID service providers? this seems unlikely, since someone would have had to have done the work of collating all the stats from all those providers.
If it is then just a sampling of providers, how was the sample chosen? is it representative? or was it opportunistic, e.g. those OpenID service providers who are loudest about OpenID and so could be expected to tend to be those who see the largest growth rate in users?
Also, 5% each week sustained actually means an ever increasing absolute number of users, since it's 5% of an ever larger user base. When your user base is 100 people, 5% is five 5 new people, which isn't hard to sustain on a week in, week out basis. So what is this 5% - which could be completely inaccurate anyway, since we've no idea of the sample it's based - 5% *of*?
We seemed to have stopped wondering and asking why people behave badly in the first place.