I got in the middle of yet another tif over "yoo stoopid teabaggers" not wanting to tax the rich and the rich are only rich because they exploit and it's better if the state has more power to slap down those evil, evil companies (and rich) by taxing the shit out of them because none of them deserve a dime they have, and ...
Oh, crap, I think I was channelling one of them and just got carried away. "Posessed" might be a better word. Good thing I cast it out before I got to hating brown people and blood for oil. Anyway, sorry.
I was arguing that if a person gains his wealth by legal means, it is no less his than any lesser wealth anyone else gains (never mind the fact that we already have a progressive tax structure that taxes the rich much more both in real dollars and percentagewise than the lesser wealthy). But the answer kept coming back, do you think that all business people are moral and upstanding and you're naive for thinking that. Which I don't, by the way. If a business is behaving immorally and a majority of people agree on that, they elect representatives to pass laws to punish that behavior. Oh, I was also told I need to "grow up".
The hell of it is, if you follow what they're saying is that businesses/"The Rich" do immoral things to make their money, and their solution is to confiscate a larger portion of it -- otherwise turning a blind eye to the actual [alleged] immorality. "Yeah, it's wrong, but we'll let you keep doing it if we can grab more of your dough."
Whereas our solution is, if it's immoral [ie, exploitative], then it should be illegal and once it is illegal then you can address the root of the problem, the immoral behavior.
Their solution is to punish all of the businesses or "rich" regardless of whether or not any of them individually have done anything wrong, and oh by the way make a tidy profit on it. In other words, they are compliant accomplices and beneficiaries.
This is why class warfare propaganda is so popular with politicians. "Tax the bastards!" It gets more money, and more power -- into their own hands.
Thought experiment: if punative taxing of “the rich” got them to cease the allegedly immoral acts that won them their wealth, would the state then turn around and tax them less at that point? Or is the assumption, “They have more. Therefore, it was ill gotten.”
In the end, they’re not really interested in addressing the root of the corruption, the immoral behavior – because what they’re ultimately interested in, in the end, is justification for taking something that isn’t theirs. Because they want it. But somehow that’s not “greed”.
2 comments:
Why can't they just say, "Those businesses who do illegal things should be punished for their acts, and the appropriate personnel held legally accountable," and leave it at that?
He never got around to addressing that ... which I did by pretty much exactly stating what you did.
The "retort" was that I was naive to think that businesses always did things on the up and up -- something I never even came close to saying.
But of course, that's all they've got. They make money, and have more than some people, so they obviously screwed somebody over to get it.
And the answer, again, is that this justifies taxing them at exorbitant rates.
Like I said above, it's because they're not actually arguing this to address the bad behavior. They just want to justify taking the money. They want the money, and I think somewhere deep down in those beanies of theirs, they know that the place to go to get it is to the people who make it
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