Showing posts with label john galt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label john galt. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Person Of The Year For 2012
I started the Person Of The Year awards back in 2010, when Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, decided that ebooks, Kindles and Nooks discriminated against blind people, and banned their use as State College/University textbooks.
That was a hard act to follow, since Thomas Perez is going to hell for that. Think of him during the next State Of The Union speech when The Teleprompter Jesus starts making noise about making college more affordable.
Then, out of nowhere came Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, and chief "business advisor" to the president best known for stating that everyone (except you, of course) should pay more taxes. General Electric hadn't been paying ANY taxes for a couple of years. That was enough to snag the 2011 award for Mr. Immelt.
This year the committee has set forth the following standards:
1) 2012 was defined by Tribalism and "identity politics". Economic, ethnic, political and social tribalism. If tribes could be set apart from any larger herds, our politicians did their best to make it happen. Therefore, the successful candidate for Person Of The Year will have displayed an uncanny ability to identify with unlikely tribes and to help further divide the nation into irrational voting blocs.
2. This was the year of the 1%. And the 98%. And the 47%. 2012's Person Of The Year will be a master of Advanced Victimology of this sort.
3. "You didn't build that." To create is evil. To be a parasite is a virtue. Most people with a lot of money have their money because they've created more than they've consumed. The successful candidate will be one who believes those people should be punished.
Here's a great character study from the John Galt radio speech in "Atlas Shrugged". Think of our godawful economy and hellish employment rate while digesting this. This is the type of person the committee wants to honor:
I know she's out there....
That was a hard act to follow, since Thomas Perez is going to hell for that. Think of him during the next State Of The Union speech when The Teleprompter Jesus starts making noise about making college more affordable.
Then, out of nowhere came Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, and chief "business advisor" to the president best known for stating that everyone (except you, of course) should pay more taxes. General Electric hadn't been paying ANY taxes for a couple of years. That was enough to snag the 2011 award for Mr. Immelt.
This year the committee has set forth the following standards:
1) 2012 was defined by Tribalism and "identity politics". Economic, ethnic, political and social tribalism. If tribes could be set apart from any larger herds, our politicians did their best to make it happen. Therefore, the successful candidate for Person Of The Year will have displayed an uncanny ability to identify with unlikely tribes and to help further divide the nation into irrational voting blocs.
2. This was the year of the 1%. And the 98%. And the 47%. 2012's Person Of The Year will be a master of Advanced Victimology of this sort.
3. "You didn't build that." To create is evil. To be a parasite is a virtue. Most people with a lot of money have their money because they've created more than they've consumed. The successful candidate will be one who believes those people should be punished.
Here's a great character study from the John Galt radio speech in "Atlas Shrugged". Think of our godawful economy and hellish employment rate while digesting this. This is the type of person the committee wants to honor:
In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils, which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins; it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.That's who the committee is looking for this year.
I know she's out there....
Monday, December 31, 2012
Ayn Rand, John Galt, and Original Sin
I just finished reading the John Galt "radio speech" from "Atlas Shrugged".
Parts of the early section are tiresome; the last half is some of the greatest stuff I've ever read.
The short section on "Original Sin" jumped out at me. For those of you who weren't raised in the Bible Belt, Original Sin is a St. Paul/St. Augustine invention which states that ever since Eve ate the forbidden fruit, we've been cursed (pre-birth) as sinners.
In the eyes of God, we're guilty as soon as the doctor cuts the cord. Here's some context from Genesis:
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.
For most of my life, I've tried to reconcile my somewhat fundamentalist religious upbringing with the reality that I saw around me.
I've seen that Knowledge is a good thing, as opposed to being something that is the consequence of a curse.
I believe that Knowledge keeps us warm, fed, healthy, and happy.
I believe that people are fundamentally good, and will help each other without being forced to do so at gunpoint.
I've noticed that a lot of kids who weren't raised in any particular religious rigmarole seem to have fewer problems than some of those who were.
And, of course, I've noticed that people who don't believe that most foreigners are going to go to hell....well, they get along better with foreigners.
Here's the section on Original Sin, from John Galt's infamous "radio speech" near the end of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".
"Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accepts his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some explicable claim upon him - it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.
The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.
Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil - he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor - he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire - he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy - all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was - that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love - he was not man.
Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives. They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man."
Damn.
This book, which was the Gateway Drug into Libertarianism for a lot of people, is slowly making my head explode.
I've read plenty of excerpts, and skimmed it a few times in the past, but reading all 1200 pages cover-to-cover has been one amazing experience.
I think I'm going to read Paul Krugman's "The Conscience Of A Liberal", just to cleanse the palate, and then read "Atlas Shrugged" again. This time with a highlighter.
We have a lot of problems in the U.S. According to some, honest accounting would prove that we have more unemployed workers in 2012 than during the Great Depression. Team Red and Team Blue are putting on Performance Art about an idiotic "Fiscal Cliff" deal. We're 17 trillion in debt. Obama is sending drones to kill children, and, incidentally, create more terrorists.
This could be improved if every industrialist, business owner, and creator were to send John Galt's message to Washington:
"Get The Hell Out Of My Way."
Parts of the early section are tiresome; the last half is some of the greatest stuff I've ever read.
The short section on "Original Sin" jumped out at me. For those of you who weren't raised in the Bible Belt, Original Sin is a St. Paul/St. Augustine invention which states that ever since Eve ate the forbidden fruit, we've been cursed (pre-birth) as sinners.
In the eyes of God, we're guilty as soon as the doctor cuts the cord. Here's some context from Genesis:
The Fall
3 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
16 To the woman he said,
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
For most of my life, I've tried to reconcile my somewhat fundamentalist religious upbringing with the reality that I saw around me.
I've seen that Knowledge is a good thing, as opposed to being something that is the consequence of a curse.
I believe that Knowledge keeps us warm, fed, healthy, and happy.
I believe that people are fundamentally good, and will help each other without being forced to do so at gunpoint.
I've noticed that a lot of kids who weren't raised in any particular religious rigmarole seem to have fewer problems than some of those who were.
And, of course, I've noticed that people who don't believe that most foreigners are going to go to hell....well, they get along better with foreigners.
Here's the section on Original Sin, from John Galt's infamous "radio speech" near the end of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged".
"Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accepts his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some explicable claim upon him - it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.
The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.
Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil - he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor - he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire - he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy - all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was - that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love - he was not man.
Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives. They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man."
Damn.
This book, which was the Gateway Drug into Libertarianism for a lot of people, is slowly making my head explode.
I've read plenty of excerpts, and skimmed it a few times in the past, but reading all 1200 pages cover-to-cover has been one amazing experience.
I think I'm going to read Paul Krugman's "The Conscience Of A Liberal", just to cleanse the palate, and then read "Atlas Shrugged" again. This time with a highlighter.
We have a lot of problems in the U.S. According to some, honest accounting would prove that we have more unemployed workers in 2012 than during the Great Depression. Team Red and Team Blue are putting on Performance Art about an idiotic "Fiscal Cliff" deal. We're 17 trillion in debt. Obama is sending drones to kill children, and, incidentally, create more terrorists.
This could be improved if every industrialist, business owner, and creator were to send John Galt's message to Washington:
"Get The Hell Out Of My Way."
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Wikipedia and Reddit go Galt.
Go to Wikipedia. They've shut it down.
Go to Reddit. They've shut it down.
Go to Google. It's still up, but they have a black "Censored" bar over their logo.
In protest against Texas Republican Lamar Smith's anti-piracy law, these companies have "Gone Galt". (If you're not familiar with the Galt concept, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow. Not today. Wikipedia has gone Galt.
This is what democracy looks like.
Here's a link to Lamar Smith's website. He's the author of the now-infamous SOPA bill (Stop Online Piracy Act.) Piracy being potentially defined as stuff the government doesn't like.
As of January 18th, there's some hilarious crap on Smith's site about job creation: "We know what will help create jobs in this country –lifting the burden of regulations that is strangling small businesses." Good work today, Lamar.
Here's a link to the site of the Libertarian who ran against this Statist last time. James Strohm.
Sign came from here.
Go to Reddit. They've shut it down.
Go to Google. It's still up, but they have a black "Censored" bar over their logo.
In protest against Texas Republican Lamar Smith's anti-piracy law, these companies have "Gone Galt". (If you're not familiar with the Galt concept, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow. Not today. Wikipedia has gone Galt.
This is what democracy looks like.
Here's a link to Lamar Smith's website. He's the author of the now-infamous SOPA bill (Stop Online Piracy Act.) Piracy being potentially defined as stuff the government doesn't like.
As of January 18th, there's some hilarious crap on Smith's site about job creation: "We know what will help create jobs in this country –lifting the burden of regulations that is strangling small businesses." Good work today, Lamar.
Here's a link to the site of the Libertarian who ran against this Statist last time. James Strohm.
Sign came from here.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
John Galt has left California
My employer, Jukt Micronics, recently opened a west coast warehouse to serve our customers in that region.
Where did we go - L.A.? Long Beach? San Diego? San Fran?
Nope.
We opened our west coast warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona. That's a long way from the coast, where the shipping containers come in, but it's worth the drive.
No one in his right mind will open anything in California. The place is a regulatory hell. The taxes are ridiculous.
Here's something from Bloomberg News:
It's called Going Galt. May the trend continue until Jerry Brown changes his ways.
Where did we go - L.A.? Long Beach? San Diego? San Fran?
Nope.
We opened our west coast warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona. That's a long way from the coast, where the shipping containers come in, but it's worth the drive.
No one in his right mind will open anything in California. The place is a regulatory hell. The taxes are ridiculous.
California (STOCA1) Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to balance the state budget in part with higher taxes on the wealthy depends on a group of top earners that shrank by one-third from 2007 to 2009.Once again, here's the good part:
Tax returns with adjusted gross incomes topping $500,000 fell to 98,610 in 2009, the latest year available, from a recent peak of 146,221 two years earlier, according to data from the Franchise Tax Board, the state agency that collects income and corporate taxes.
California (STOCA1) Governor Jerry Brown’s plan to balance the state budget in part with higher taxes on the wealthy depends on a group of top earners that shrank by one-third from 2007 to 2009.
It's called Going Galt. May the trend continue until Jerry Brown changes his ways.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Iron Man as a Libertarian Superhero ???
I saw Iron Man 2 over the weekend.
The first movie in the series was great, but I only gave the sequel a 6 on the 10 scale. Lots of stuff blown up, but no plot to care about, and no characters to care about, only one-liners strung onto a skeletal storyline.
But the first 15 minutes of that movie are freakin' awesome. Awesome. Libertarian greatness is the only way to describe it.
It seems thatCongressman Henry Waxman a government dweeb wants to take away Tony Stark's Iron Man "unregulated weapon" for the good of the people, despite peace being preserved with Stark running around fighting evil on his own.
Here's Kyle Smith, who disagrees with me about the first movie, describing the Congressional hearing that follows:
The first movie in the series was great, but I only gave the sequel a 6 on the 10 scale. Lots of stuff blown up, but no plot to care about, and no characters to care about, only one-liners strung onto a skeletal storyline.
But the first 15 minutes of that movie are freakin' awesome. Awesome. Libertarian greatness is the only way to describe it.
It seems that
Here's Kyle Smith, who disagrees with me about the first movie, describing the Congressional hearing that follows:
Meet Tony Stark — Capitalist Tool. I liked “Iron Man,” and liked it even more the second time I saw it, but it didn’t overwhelm me. And I felt it was a little wishy-washy on questions of capitalism and patriotism.This section of the movie will be a YouTube classic within 15 minutes of being released on DVD. Hopefully sooner. Anyone hauled in front of Congress for a show trial should take notes.
Not so with “Iron Man 2,” in which Tony Stark is a Randian hero who all but goes Galt when seemingly the only force that could ever defeat him — the U.S. government — begins to make the outrageous demand that his Iron Man technology is somehow public property. Because … well, it’s really important. And everyone knows that when it comes to important stuff, only the government can be trusted to handle it.
Stark makes the argument that the opposite is the case. He says he has made national defense a triumph by privatizing it (!). Yes, he actually uses the word privatize, and though I part with pure libertarians about this subject (no, I don’t think cops and the military should be privatized), to hear a superhero outlining such a bold stance is a tonic to say the least. (As I write virtually every time the subject is a superhero movie, these things are so predictable that I can barely pay attention to the latest by-the-numbers plot.)
Moreover, Tony is unapologetic about getting rich (he’s simply smarter than the competition), openly mocks the senators who are grilling him about his alleged selfishness and warns the government about handpicking winners in the weapons business (such as Sam Rockwell, who plays a rival industrialist who, though this is never explicitly mentioned, has obviously won Pentagon contracts by buying off lawmakers). He notes that evil-axis-dwellers such as the Iranians and the Norks are five to ten years from developing Iron Man technology, and that the cocky-but-inept Rockwell character is “more like 20″ years away.
In a very Howard Roark/Galt-ish moment, Stark chastises the government that it cannot take away his private property.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Why tax breaks go to the rich
Here's why the bigest tax cuts go to the wealthy (besides the obvious fact that 43% of us don't pay Federal Income tax at all). I found it here.
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until on day, the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20." Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share'?
They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.
So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same percent, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
"I only got a dollar out of the $20,"declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!"
"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got TEN times more than I!"
"That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"
"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
Drinking overseas, or not drinking at all is also known to fans of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as "Going Galt". Also, you can go to Snopes.com for a discussion of who actually wrote this beer parable.
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share'?
They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.
So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same percent, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
"I only got a dollar out of the $20,"declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!"
"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got TEN times more than I!"
"That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"
"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
Drinking overseas, or not drinking at all is also known to fans of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as "Going Galt". Also, you can go to Snopes.com for a discussion of who actually wrote this beer parable.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Obama The Job-Killer
Here's Mark Steyn, in what I think is the best short piece he's ever written. Go here to read the whole thing. Memorize it, then teach it to your children. Give photocopies to the winos along your commute, and give them extra beer money if they promise to spread it far and wide.
Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.
That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along — and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.
In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More Washington, more micro-regulation of every aspect of your life, more multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more rigged against you.
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