How's that Obamacare Repeal Working Out For You?

[StCapps]

Taxes are the core of the solution. Without them, we will be an aristocracy, which I'm not interested in help create. I'd rather let the flawed system collapse. I'll yell the answers into the wind but if people want to be turned into pillars of salt, let them. Perversity feels as good to me as it does anyone else.

p.s. I'm working on my "Politics" book as I write this. It includes my platform. I've got planks that will infuriate both sides. I'll let you know when it's done.

Your goal should not be to piss all sides off with your platform, the goal should be to piss off the least amount of people with your platform, while pumping the tires of those who are the most likely to vote for you, that's how you win at politics. Clearly you don't care about winning, your goal is to piss off the portions of the electorate that you don't like.
/shrugs

If your confiscatory inheritance tax is any indication, that's the vast majority of the electorate you are determined to piss off. Like I said, not a very successful strategy if getting elected is the goal. Taxes won't stop humans from nepotistic impulses like inheritance, every society who has tried to be overly confiscatory in this manner has always failed to get rid of the aristocracy by doing so, and the next time it's tried will be no different. You might as well try and put an end to all warfare with government taxation, that's about as likely to succeed as killing the aristocracy by taxing inheritance.

Utopian nonsense, that's what you are peddling by suggesting the aristocracy can be neutered by government taxation. Like many people pitching a utopia via government taxation, you are willing to bring about a dystopia, in order to one day get to this utopia, that will never come to pass. No thanks, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, whether you realize it or not.

The aristocracy will always exist, no matter how much you put your fingers in your ears, and pretend otherwise. A classless society, no such thing, and there never will be.

[StCapps]

Tell you what Hash, write your manifesto or whatever, and then I'll tell you what parts of it to focus on and which parts don't need to be brought up during your election campaign. That way you won't have to lie, but people will be more willing to accept your sales pitch.

[Speaker to Animals]

He's actually anti-utopian. It's the utopian ideologies (like libertarianism and marxism) that he is always criticizing. He's usually just advocating for a practical, ad hoc form of old-school liberalism. What he is saying would be taken for granted in the 1950s.

The libertarians always talk about some perfect stateless society we can all live in if only we destroy the state and stop taxing people. Marxists talk about a perfect statist society that we can all live in if only we accept the state as greater than the individual. These people are not practical or realistic at all. They confuse their model with reality at every level and will push disastrous policies all the way to the collapse because they can't bring themselves to admit their model is flawed.

I may not agree with everything Hash advocates here, but most of it is at least reasonable and reality-based. You can discuss it with him because he's not caught up in some ideological model of the world rather than looking at the world we actually have. The same cannot be said for progressives or libertarians.

Basically, anybody who believes there exists some perfect form of society from which all deviation is a corruption or degeneration is the problem. There exist lots of possible decent forms of society we can live in. Use whatever tools you have in the toolbox for a change..

[StCapps]

Pretending as if government taxation can put an end to aristocracy, sounds pretty utopian to me.
/shrugs

Next he'll claim he can end all poverty and war with confiscatory inheritance taxation, lulz.

[Martin Hash]

He's actually anti-utopian. It's the utopian ideologies (like libertarianism and marxism) that he is always criticizing. He's usually just advocating for a practical, ad hoc form of old-school liberalism. What he is saying would be taken for granted in the 1950s.

The libertarians always talk about some perfect stateless society we can all live in if only we destroy the state and stop taxing people. Marxists talk about a perfect statist society that we can all live in if only we accept the state as greater than the individual. These people are not practical or realistic at all. They confuse their model with reality at every level and will push disastrous policies all the way to the collapse because they can't bring themselves to admit their model is flawed.

I may not agree with everything Hash advocates here, but most of it is at least reasonable and reality-based. You can discuss it with him because he's not caught up in some ideological model of the world rather than looking at the world we actually have. The same cannot be said for progressives or libertarians.

Basically, anybody who believes there exists some perfect form of society from which all deviation is a corruption or degeneration is the problem. There exist lots of possible decent forms of society we can live in. Use whatever tools you have in the toolbox for a change..

Thanx. (That's 1.)

[Speaker to Animals]

Pretending as if government taxation can put an end to aristocracy, sounds pretty utopian to me.
/shrugs

It literally did that in the United States in the in 20th century. Go listen to FDR's economic royalist speech. Some good points in there. They taxed the living shit out of the economic royalists to fix the mess those royalists helped create.

It's not the only way to limit the rise of an aristocracy, but surely you can see that massive wealth imbalances between a small cadre of elites and the rest of the populace in a democratic republic means the legislature is easily skewed towards the elites. One way to limit that is progressive taxation policies. This isn't controversial (or it shouldn't be).

[Speaker to Animals]

I am starting to suspect being a software engineer predisposed one to not confuse models with reality. What seems like a simple mental orientation to me apparently is not so simple for a lot of other people. You have to separate these things when you build complex software. So it becomes more natural. But maybe it's just not obvious unless people have to do it all the time for other reasons.

[StCapps]

Pretending as if government taxation can put an end to aristocracy, sounds pretty utopian to me.
/shrugs

It literally did that in the United States in the in 20th century.

America had an aristocracy all throughout the 20th century, FDR didn't end aristocracy faggot.

It's not the only way to limit the rise of an aristocracy, but surely you can see that massive wealth imbalances between a small cadre of elites and the rest of the populace in a democratic republic means the legislature is easily skewed towards the elites. One way to limit that is progressive taxation policies. This isn't controversial (or it shouldn't be).

Progressive taxation can help reduce the prevalence of an aristocracy, but it does not eradicate it from existence. America has never not had an aristocracy, if you think otherwise, you drink American myth kool-aid.

[Speaker to Animals]

In any case, the fact that we can't even repeal this horrible legislation and replace it with Medicare for those who can't get insurance really doesn't bode well for the future of the federal government. I would argue that this represents good evidence we need to scrap the federal government and replace it with something else.

[Speaker to Animals]

Pretending as if government taxation can put an end to aristocracy, sounds pretty utopian to me.
/shrugs

It literally did that in the United States in the in 20th century.

It's not the only way to limit the rise of an aristocracy, but surely you can see that massive wealth imbalances between a small cadre of elites and the rest of the populace in a democratic republic means the legislature is easily skewed towards the elites. One way to limit that is progressive taxation policies. This isn't controversial (or it shouldn't be).

Progressive taxation can help reduce the prevalence of an aristocracy, but it does not eradicate it from existence. America has never not had an aristocracy, if you think otherwise, you drink American myth kool-aid.

Weird how we didn't have any real aristocracy until after the 1980s, then..

Or how the old economic aristocracy tried to fund a seditious plot to overthrow the government and install a fascist puppet dictator because they couldn't stand what was happening..

Strange that..