From: Steve Clancy (stevie-c@technologist.com)
Date: Tue Nov 10 1998 - 19:33:04 MST
Max M apparently wrote:
>>Therefore I find it is fair to steal money from those who has "wealth" and
"middle class wealth" to help those who has "powerty" or less.
"Making the rich 2% unhappier to make the poor 200% happier"
When that is done I also believe that ultimately those people should be able
to feed themself. Therefore I find it to be a good idea to steal even more
money from the more wealthy, to give the poor a free education. Then they
will become a productive part of society and there will be an ROI that will
benefit all of the society.
The educated mind is the greatest raw material there is.
Economics is a win win scenario, and taking money away from the wealthy and
investing them in other peoples education/helping the poor can eventually
make the wealthier even wealthier as society as a whole becomes wealthier
and the newly rich start spending their money.<<
These comments seem very puzzling to me. Why do people become
wealthy? Either by inheriting wealth, working and earning wealth, or by
theft of wealth. We may or may not agree on the merits of taking money from
those of us who inherit wealth or earn wealth, but we usually agree that
increasing wealth by simply taking it from someone else is not right. So
why would you propose to do just that - take from the rich to give to the
poor, by coercion? You appear to be disregarding liberty and personal
freedom in favour of some misguided socialist notion of equality.
OK, so I agree that the amount of poor may seem to be a great
injustice. But why forcefully tax wealthy simple on the basis that they
have more money than others?
I feel that we should start looking not at taxing the rich, but
rather where does the rich's wealth come from and hence why are the poor in
such a position.
Socialists would argue that capitalism's success lies on
exploitation of workers. So one would assume that all capitalist businesses
are greedy exploiters of the common worker. This argument is not true for
all cases. Sure, there are some businesses run by selfish arseholes, but if
the socialists are right then every business, to succeed, is run by selfish
arseholes. But there are a myriad of businesses, small and large, which
take people with little apparent capital and succeed in operating
efficiently in our capitalist world while at the same time not exploiting
the worker - actually improving the lot of him/her better than any
government would do.
So we can now state that the capitalist system is currently being
run by a mixture of decent business people and selfish arseholes. From this
we could argue that some people are poor because;
a. they want to be so.
b. selfish arseholes effectively 'oppress' them.
Argument a. seems unlikely so we could assume that b. is true.
So we can now argue that it is the selfish arseholes responsible for
denying some their freedom they strive for. If this is the case (which I am
inclined to believe is more often than not) then it is clear that rather
than taxation on those who are rich, legal discourse be taken on those who
oppress rights of freedom (the selfish arseholes in this case).
So we can still address the problems of the poor while not having
to revert to authoritarian means of state 'redirection'.
PS. I live in Australia, but I'm not a left-wing, pinko' commie' bastard.....
ha, ha,
Thanks, Steve.
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