OT: Higher taxes..

takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Actually the students that were interested in the subject would probably still get straight As so I don't believe it ever happened.

A more realistic scenario today is that when the rewards are high and higher education is treated like a commodity to be bought and sold cheating by students is rife. Willing seller, willing buyer and neither wants to make waves so they quietly ignore it and churn out illiterates.

Ever more sophisticated online services to buy an essay or PhD thesis are being set up to cater for the demand. The new ones will apparently defeat classic stick a phrase into Google and watch the summarised hits (which used to work well on Type I plagarisers).

So, the narrative is "no one forced Jews to stay in concentration camps--they were on holiday. There was an eventual threat of force, but if they'd all revolted there was no way the guards could've mustered enough force to contain them"?

Nobody forces you to pay taxes, but that's because you're you.

Again, you conflate all payments and purposes into a single pudding, then spice it with ginger, cinnamon, and other niceities. Maybe a raisin or two'd be nice, eh? (I like raisins.)

By far most of federal taxation is taken for redistribution, not services, not infrastructure.

Here's the organization you believe guarantees the performance of what we buy ...

Here's Barack Obama telling people that female preventive care is now free:

He also says they're saving money. Neither is true. He didn't make anything. He didn't make a better product, or improve anything. It costs more.

Here's Barack Obama telling college students he's made college more affordable:

It's not true. Tuition is higher as a result, not lower. Barack Obama didn't innovate anything, didn't create a damn thing. He didn't revolutionize education or figure a better way. He just redistributed resources from the kids' future to pay a higher tuition today.

Here's Barack Obama saying that 98% of Catholics have used artificial birth control...

...and therefore "we're not hurting anyone by forcing them." Neither is true.

It's far fewer than 98%...

...and that's no excuse to compel those who don't to pay for something against their beliefs.

That's who you think should rule us.

All these miracles you credit to government don't come from government, they come from men. Government lives off their efforts, not the reverse.

The first and primary purpose for a government is to defend its citizens' persons, property, and rights. This is why people band together and form governments.

That's why it's so ironic (and harmful) when gov't itself is used to attack those very things, for example, redistribution of property via the tax system. Bastiat illustrated it beautifully.

Legitimate government--laws and order--are so you can leave your hut and come back confident it'll still be there, with your family safe, and your possessions intact. That allows people to gather, cooperate, and produce more. Society is then much more productive; wealthier.

Yet today, while you're away at work, earning, producing, paying your share, armies of dull-witted bureaucrats and sharp politicians move against you, taking, and giving what you've earned to someone else.

"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." --Judge Gideon J. Tucker

-- Cheers, James Arthur

government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.= =20

happen!

I really appreciated the like to this:

?-)

This is pretty moronic, even for you. The Jews in Germany were a minority - "of the 522,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933, only 214,000 were left by the eve of World War II, and 90% of them died before 1945". That was 0.78% of the German population in 1933 (67 million), not really enough to overthrow a government that enjoyed appreciable popular support. Taxpayers are more numerous, and those that pay of lot of taxes can afford to arm themselves. Check out Libya, Eygpt and Syria for more relevant recent examples.

In fact it's because I pay my taxes voluntarily, but I suppose that is an aspect of my personality.

Only when you do the accounting. People with less ideological baggage come to other conclusions.

Governments compel all kinds of payments from taxpayers for money that is spent on stuff that individual tax-payers don't agree with. You pay taxes that get spent on social security. Why should the Catholic Church get a unique free ride?

Your are ruled by a more or less democratically elected government. What are you proposing to put in it's place?

Perfectly true, and totally irrelevant. Government is merely a bunch of men, in your case controlled by your democratically elected representatives, that spends the taxes collected under legislation passed by your democratically elected representatives.

If you think they are doing it wrong, elect a new bunch of representatives, but try to confine your political campaigning to more or less truthful statements - blatant lies damages your credibility and weaken your campaign.

Get it into your head that the collection of taxes under legislation passed by a democratically elected legislature isn't "plunder". You may enjoy claiming otherwise, but it's a lie.

Bastiat was a libertarian fruit-cake, if not quite as consistently silly as you seem to claim.

As a right-wing nitwit you find some his propositions sympathetic. The fact that you managed to find a dead polemicist that you can quote with approval doesn't mean that either of you are saying anything worht listening to.

But providing that law and order costs money, and is paid for by taxes.

The employees of the army and the police, amongst others.

So what?

They aren't any safer when the legislature is in recess.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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It's not an error I make - it's an error you'd like me to have made.

In my discussion of the income tax paid by the people in the US who earn more than $10M per year, I noted that while they paid out - on average - some 26.3% of their income in tax, I also noted that people who had been earning a lot of money for a long time - the examples being Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney - seemed to be able to organise their affairs so that they paid out less - about 17%, and I attributed the difference to group people in the "over $10M income" category who'd unexpectedly made a lot of money in a single year from some one- off event, which had made it more difficult for them to exploit all the tax loopholes available.

The greedy group exists, and should be paying out more of their income in taxes. Broad brush statistics don't identify the group particularly specifically, but it's easy enough to detect it's presence.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

ment takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

ver failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class= . That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one wou= ld be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

Obama's plan". All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the s= ame grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.... (substitutin= g grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood= by all).

students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little we= re happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little= had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a = free ride too so they studied little.

d name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the= benefit of anyone else.

alism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effo= rt to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no o= ne will try or want to succeed.

Or less relevant.

hy out of prosperity.

Correct.

for without receiving.

Correct. Every member of the US Army receives pay that they haven't done anything productive to earn. They are useful, but not - in peace- time - all that productive.

s not first take from somebody else.

Correct.

Actually, you can. That's exactly what a Keynesian pump-priming stimulus does, but only for an economy in recession. The wealthy can't be relied on to invest their money productively, particularly not when the economy is in recession, so borrowing it from them, and giving it to the poor - who can be relied on to spend it immediately - generates business and consequently wealth. The multiplier isn't large - 1.8 seems to be the practical maximum - so there's no overall gain, but it is a useful method of getting an economy out of recession.

The interactions are a little too complicated for the average right- wing nitwit to follow, but that doesn't stop them working.

ause the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half = gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going t= o get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation."

If anybody were silly enough to think that, it might. The only people who think the idea could be credible to anybody else are right-wing nitwits of the dimmer kind.

Australia has a liberal supply of right-wing nitwits, and Murdoch newspapers to publicise their ideas.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Actually even some members of the greedy group recognise the fact that banks have got so completely obsessed with making money that they no longer care about their customers or business ethics. See the resignation letter of top Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith published yesterday:

Perhaps you don't care if your bank views you as a muppet to be exploited for their gain and your loss - I do.

...or perhaps that the removal of a current program could solve it, yes.

I suppose it could be. However, I think there's plenty of evidence that various government assistance programs have helped many people. Of course, it has cost money, and certainly one could find programs that hurt people as well (and not just in the pocketbook)... so to me it's all a balancing act.

OK, that's fine for Act I... but for Act II it seems like you would be well-qualified to help come up with solutions as well, IMO; I still think it's a shame that you said you'd refuse to take a cabinet position in Obama's administration were you given the offer.

I'm not sure it always make them dependent, but otherwise I agree with your logic. However, what I don't like to see is that this fact (more people on government assistance) implies to some people that more and more people are lazy bums; that seemingly-common assumption tends to poison any discussions regarding what better solutions might be, and we get nowhere.

Whenever you're asking someone else for charity (from the feds, from a church, anywhere), there are rule and regulations that apply. Yes, it is a form of control, but it is *supposed* to be to make things "fair"

-- not just be an "intrusion into every aspect" for the heck of it.

Sounds pretty fraudulent to me... and she sounds like a very selfish individual.

---Joel

I agree, although I'd also add that I think part of the cause is that industry, in far more cases than they'd like to admit, asks for certain credentials (BSEE or whatever) that really have very little correlation to whether or not one can be successful in the job at hand.

Indeed, this sort of behavior -- requiring credentials that aren't really need -- is AFAICT mostly a CYA strategy on HR's part: If someone does turn out to be a dud, well, at least HR did their due diligence, right?

In those cases where you have, e.g., a corporate CEO who's running the company just fine but is then disgraced when it turns out he fudged his resume, it seems to me it ends up looking worse for the corporation since it point out just how artificial the position's requirements were in the first place.

Good article, although I'm not sure what they have about students preferring lectures notes/handouts to traditional textbooks: That's the primary source of what they're going to be tested on, after all, and if the lecturer is any good the lecture notes should be as good or better than what's in a textbook. Indeed, in many subject areas the lecturer can create a significantly "value-added" curriculum by culling good bits of information from dozens of books and presenting them in a cohesive handout.

---Joel

The depressing corollary of this behaviour by HR departments is that they start thinking that totting up qualifications and years of experience is all that you need to do to assess a candidate, and reject really good candidates (not always me) because they don't fit the picture they are looking for, without asking anybody with the sort of experience that would allow them to make sense of a CV and assess what the candidate's experience actually implied in terms of engineering competence. I've never met an HR person who had any chance of assessing an engineer as an engineer, nor one who recognised this elementary fact.

My favourite story involves a Chinese engineer with a mechanical engineering background who'd done a Ph.D. on electron microscopes at Cambridge University. His CV never made it through the Cambridge Instruments personnel department, but his wife played badminton with the wife of one of our engineers, so the CV eventually by-passed personnel. Engineering hired him immediately, and he revolutionised the way we built our electron microscope columns in the three years he lasted before he was head-hunted off to the US.

My father wouldn't let personnel talk to anybody with a degree until they'd signed the contract of employment - they'd manage to put off a few graduates before they'd signed, and it was already really difficult to get graduates to come to work in Burnie, Tasmania (population 15,000, location a long way from anywhere interesting).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Wow, and no Netflix at the time either... that would be kinda rough! ;-)

Googling for Burnie, it looks like a fantastic place, interesting unto itself. there's always something about those edge of the empire towns.

-- Les Cargill

--=20 Cheers, James Arthur

em.

What country/countries do I live in? Show us thy crystal ball!

duce or provide anything much, except hot air and have a better than averag= e income.

That's a bit rich - coming from you.=20

Even during the

Are you suggesting that the only people who vote Democrat do so because the= y think that the Democrats are Socialists? I believe I described the propo= nents of socialism as the 'chattering classes'. I did not say anything abou= t their being the only ones to vote Democrat. A lot of what you do could be= considered 'verballing'. Either that or you couldn't argue your way out o= f a paper bag.

e class was beginning to develop and before they had left the middle ages b= ehind them, totalitarianism was foisted on them by a bunch of terrorists. = =A0Then there were serfs in both factories and farms.

Why should it? The serfs didn't throw the terrorists out. The terrorists = had overextended themselves and Russia's colonies threw the terrorists out.= Since then, broadly speaking, the terrorists have returned fighting to mai= ntain their position in Russia. You wouldn't call it a democracy would you= ? They murder journalists. =20

The communist takeover in 1917 was certainly a coup

Cough, choke. They invested in creating a failure and organised a famine. = The elite had to try to get their hands on products from the Eastern Bloc = or the West - (exotic stuff like toothpaste and jam)- while one part of the= country could only buy shoes for the right foot and the others could only = get the left. They ruined agriculture and the environment and slaughtered = and oppressed people. That was the huge problem facing Gorbachev - how to = modernize the economy against the wishes of the Party bosses and vested int= erests. =20

How would you come to such a conclusion? Is that because they butchered mo= re people? Because they enslaved more people? Or because they conquered h= alf of Europe? Or perhaps you think it was a good idea to surrender in WWI= so they could concentrate on fighting a civil war?

No, really - that's too much. They had money but nothing to spend it on an= d a high rate of underemployment. In a modern economy you don't pay women = to sweep the streets or check who comes and goes from apartment blocks. In= a modern economy you don't have a flourishing black market. In a modern e= conomy you don't spend hours in a queue waiting to buy basic commodities.

You must read some Russian history and try listening to the German news occ= asionally before you try telling other people how the German economy functi= ons. =20 MR=20

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in s= ociety, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system tha= t authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." --Bastiat

Like I said. There's always some right-wing nitwit who will tell you that black's white - as here - and obviously, not all the stimulus spending got where it was intended to go. In this case Maryland's governor - Martin O=92Malley - stole a bunch of stimulus money to balance the Maryland state budget, by cutting the Maryland state spending on road maintenance by rather more than the federal funding made available for road improvement. This particular bit of stimulus spending was obviously ineffective, because it didn't get where it was supposed to go, but that's the US political system for you.

It's a fairly devastating criticism of the way US government spending can be diverted, but it doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of stimulus spending as such, a point that James Arthur lacks the wit to appreciate.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

judices, stereotypes and faulty assumptions.

them.

How would I know? You certainly write and think like a US resident, but you could be an expatriate, dreaming of "home".

roduce or provide anything much, except hot air and have a better than aver= age income.

You've yet to demonstrate that my perceptions are distorted - all you've done so far is tell us that you don't share them.

hey think that the Democrats are Socialists? =A0I believe I described the p= roponents of socialism as the 'chattering classes'. I did not say anything = about their being the only ones to vote Democrat. A lot of what you do coul= d be considered 'verballing'. =A0Either that or you couldn't argue your way= out of a paper bag.

Are you suggesting that the Democrats are socialists? They do support some socialist policies, but then again, so did Bismark.

dle class was beginning to develop and before they had left the middle ages= behind them, totalitarianism was foisted on them by a bunch of terrorists.= =A0Then there were serfs in both factories and farms.

rists had overextended themselves and Russia's colonies threw the terrorist= s out. Since then, broadly speaking, the terrorists have returned fighting = to maintain their position in Russia. =A0You wouldn't call it a democracy w= ould you? =A0They murder journalists.

It's not all that close to being a democracy, but then again, neither is the US - though the US bribes journalists rather than murdering them.

ne. =A0The elite had to try to get their hands on products from

ile one part of the country could only buy shoes for the right > foot and t= he others could only get the left. =A0They ruined agriculture and the envir= onment and slaughtered and oppressed people. =A0That

nst the wishes of the Party bosses and vested interests.

Nobody said that their investment was optimally directed - centralised planning never works all that well=A0- but they did invest enough to give Russia a more or less modern industrialised economy.

d more people? =A0Because they enslaved more people? =A0Or because

to surrender in WWI so they could concentrate on fighting a

The Soviet Union manufactured cars good enough to sell - in small numbers - in Europe. Libya and Irak never got that far.

n and a high rate of underemployment. =A0In a modern economy you don't pay = women to sweep the streets or check who comes and goes from apartment block= s. =A0In a modern economy you don't have a flourishing black market. =A0In = a modern economy you don't spend hours in a queue waiting to buy basic comm= odities.

It wasn't your modern economy, but it wasn't third world either.

ccasionally before you try telling other people how the German > economy fu= nctions.

I have read some Russian history - not a lot - and the Dutch news follows the German economy with some attention, because for most practical purposes the Dutch economy is a segment of the German economy.

What would either activity tell me that you think I don't know?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system t= hat authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." --Bastiat

And his example was? The last example I can think of was the Mongols under Genghis Khan, and they rapidly got more civilised once they realised that hanging onto plunder involved stopping other people from plundering it for themselves.

Bastiat did share your enthusiasm for mis-describing taxation he didn't like as "plunder" but that's merely misusing the word to create a misleading rhetorical effect. He, like you, couldn't think straight.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen