OT: Tax the rich???

Yes, saw it opening day. Hey, not all the businesses were evil--how'd that happen?

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Chicken? Or was that just plain good sense!

We saw it a couple of weeks later (we don't see *anything* the first few weeks). It was good but was a little slow.

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A local entrepreneurs' group got a theater to request it, and had an event. They passed out cards saying

"Who is John Galt? we are."

That's pretty stunning from a pro-business, pro-innovation advocacy group. Interesting times.

Oh I didn't find it so at all. Maybe the roaring crowd helped (they were pretty enthusiastic).

The theater was empty, but that's normal for our theater timing. If there is anyone there it's usually a bunch of kids who have no interest in (anyone) watching the show. This wasn't their cup-o-tea, though. ;-)

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No, it does not. They themselves do. If you want savings bad enough you accumulate it. To get it, either you gotta want it bad enough to do what is necessary to get it, con someone into providing it to you, else you go without. The "con job" gets much easier if you can vote yourself largess from the productive.

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Gotta split this hair with you. Lots of alcoholics, drug abusers, (criminal) deviants, and crazies are profitable to employ. If they = become marginal otherwise they crash and burn (become "hard core" unemployable).

At a time when the more typical product of current education is more = often becoming more marginal and mediocre.

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Oh come on now. At least let us have the chance to vote for the seeming least oppressive idiot.

IOW the difference between bad and worse is often clearer than the difference between good and better.

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Actually is more usually spelled "largesse" (nine samples versus three in the word frequency list I could find) as it is in French, where the word came from.

The "con job" doesn't actually work for the bottom half of the population as a whole - there are simply too many of them and not enough of the rich to make it worth the trouble to try and transfer significant amounts of money from the rich to the poor, and the rich are too politically powerful to let it happen.

The rich don't like being pestered by beggars, or being infected with tuberculosis or HIV by their household help or by their paid sexual partners, so they are usua;;y willing to subsidise help for the sick and the starving - there usually aren't all that many of them to be helped in a well-run society, but the US isn't a well-run society, and its richer citizens are notoriously short-sighted.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Maybe, but these are more teething problems than evidence of fundamental flaws.We don't have the kind of ideological differences that prompted the American war between the states.

But little willingness to invest in education, and a passion for selling food in forms that encourages the bulk of the population to become obese. One of the reasons that you have lots of relatively younger people is that your expectations of life aren't high by international standards - you are 50th in pecking order, three years of life behind Australia, and two and a half behind the Netherlands.

And while you may have lots of resources, you also have a passion for using them up, which is why you feel the need to import enough oil to keep your international balance of trade firmly in the red, where it has been for the past thirty years.In this case, "lots" clearly isn't "enough".

You've also got exactly the kind of exploited under-class that makes for political instability, and an ossified two-party political system that only represents the interests of the relatively well-off, so your short-changed less well don't see any point for voting for either one of Tweedledum or Tweedledee, and are open to exploitation by politicians outside your electoral system.

You need to cast out the beam in your own eye ... Luke 6:42 and Matthew 7:5 if Google is to be believed.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No. Since our civil war, all you've had is World War I and World War 2 and a few other minor disturbances.

People eat what they enjoy. Businesses make what people want to buy.

And you apparently don't understand where babies come from.

John

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None of which were civil wars - the European Union was formed after the end of WW2, with most people placing it as starting in 1958

There has been a civil war in former Yugoslavia since then, but Yugoslavia wasn't a member of the Eurpean Union.

And the road to obesity hell is paved with deliciously good intentions, another example of the unrestrained free market producing a distinctly sub-optimal solution. Sweetening up nearly everything with corn syrup does make it more attractive, but it loads up the food items with "empty calories". The American consumer needs to consume fewer calories, and while legislative of control of the products that currently compete to whet their appetites is a restraint on trade, if does seem to be both necessary and desirable.

Scarcely a conclusion that you could draw what I wrote. In fact I know exactly where they come from, unlike your anti-abortion legislators. One of the many other reasons that you have a lot of young people is that you have a national habit of making abortion and contraception more difficult to obtain than it needs to be, which means that you have rather more teenage mothers than is entirely desirable, producing kids who - for a variety of reasons - can't get, or absorb, the quality of education that who make them maximally productive members of your society.

In fact you have a much higher rate of teenage pregnancy that most advanced industrial countries

The league table is on age 6, puts you way ahead, with 52.1 pregnancies per 1000 15- to 19-year olds compared with 6.2 in the Netherlands. English speaking countries all do relatively badly - Australia at 18.2 and Canada at 20.2 aren't good, while New Zealand - at 29.8 - and the UK at 30.8 are even better evidence of the disadvantages of being prudish about sexual education.

You like to talk about -illusory - ethnographic time bombs in other countries, but you seem blind to the one that is making a mess in your own back yard.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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John Larkin makes a fatuous claim, and krw comes to an even more fatuous conclusion. John Larkin isn't good at constructing arguments, and krw doesn't even try.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I don't think the scores of millions of dead folks cared what anybody called the wars that were killing them. The US Civil War didn't involve poison gas or citywide fire storms or stuffing millions of men/women/children into ovens.

Places like Italy and Japan, with few pregnancies of any sort, are obviously going to have less teen pregnancies.

Interesting perspective, describing having babies as doing "relatively badly."

Making babies is a symptom of energy and optimism and caring; I doubt that you are subject to much of those. Birth control and abortion are widely available in the USA. Some people *want* to have babies, and it's not because they are concerned about their personal life expectancy statistics.

Which is the ethnographic time bomb: a fertility rate of 2.06 (USA) or a rate of 1.50 (EU)?

Incidentally, the replacement fertility rate in developed countries is about 2.1.

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Perhaps not, but in a discussion of whether the European Union might come apart, tallying up the wars that the component part fought before they became components parts doesn't say much about the mechanisms now in place to hold the union together. The US Civil War was fought after your constitution had been in force for some time, and the same constitution that failed to hold your union togehter back then is the same one that's supposed to hold it together now.

Probably because the technology wasn't available then - the combatants in the civil war certainly didn't shy off using the latest technology to kill the maximum number of people.

But you might ask yourself why your teenagers aren't taking advantage of the technologies that protect Japanese and Italian teenagers from unwanted pregnancies.

Interesting rhetorical device, in a discussion of teenage pregnancies, to generalise my comment about about teenagers getting pregnant into a comment about all pregnancies. Were you being sloppy, or intentionally dishonest?

It's not often a sympton of optimism and caring in teenagers - it mostly reflects an excess of energy and a deficiency in forethought, both over-represented in teengers.

Sure. And in the Netherlands we see 6.2 pregancies per 1000 15- to 19- year olds, as against 52.1 in the USA. The Dutch don't seem to see that 6.2 pregnancies per 1000

15- to 19-year olds is a worrying low figure - they'd prefer to see even fewer teenage pregnancies, because early pregnancy isn't good for either mother or child.

And an increasing population is a good thing? Granting that we already seem to have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet

and since the USA should be thinking about getting its population down to about 200 million, your current fertility rate does look rather like an enthnographic time bomb, while Europe seems to be acting more responsibly - without the state intervention that the Chinese have felt it necessary to impose.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Slavery was a big problem, which the Constitution was compromised to accommodate. Slavery was, of course, a lagacy of the European colonial powers.

Armies fought armies on battlefields. How can you compare that to concentration camps and ovens? Is your moral relativism that complete?

A fairly stable population has its advantages. Such as having enough young people available to work to support the unproductive old farts. Not naming anyone specific here, of course.

John

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Come on, John. You're not young. ;-)

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No, but I'm productive. And I pay a heap more in taxes than I absorb in benefits.

John