Item — HN Reader

That's the reason for the heavily-graduated property tax -- to target specifically those who might have profited under the bubble, yet who are not profiting as much now.

I never intimated that "the government is fleecing the average taxpayer more than it is fleecing the rich." (Although Warren Buffet has said just that.) And since we own the government, I find "fleece" to be a strange word. Yes, the rich pay a higher rate on some of their income. And what we're saying here is that there should be even higher rate for income over a million.

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This "bugger your neighbor" attitude that prevails in this country is removing every freedom that we teach our children make this country great.

Hell yes. Take more money at the point of a gun, why not? They have more money than you do, the greedy bastards. They don't deserve it. You deserve that money, or you know somebody that does. Go for it!

> This "bugger your neighbor" attitude that prevails in this country is removing every freedom that we teach our children make this country great.

This "defend the wealthy" attitude that prevailed in this country for the last 30 years has nearly ruined this country and served only to further increase the economic inequality between the rich and the poor.

If you think that what makes this country great is that the rich are allowed to walk all over the poor then fuck you. Now give me your wallet you greedy bastard, you can skip the steak so someone else can get some health care.

It's not a defend the wealthy, it's a defend what you earned, and that you should not have your wealth stolen from you by jealous people who wish they had what you had. I'm not wealthy. Income inequality is not by definition bad.

Your self-righteous attitude is disgusting, do you live at a subsistence level funneling all of your extra income to the needy around the world? If not, then how can you demand that others skip their steak to provide health care for someone else.

You are not an island and what price society decides to set for its services is not theft, they are not stealing from you and you do not earn anything outside the platform society provides for you which enables that earning in the first place. Society has a right to take a share of your earnings; so says our constitution.

Extreme income inequality is bad because it's bad for society as a whole and at some point society as a whole becomes more important than the individual.

Your self-centered fuck the rest of the country it's my money attitude is equally disgusting. We aren't talking about the whole world, we're talking about our country, because that's what our social contract obligates us to support with our taxes. I pay my taxes, don't cheat on them, and don't whine about it and call it stealing like a self centered narcissist who thinks his right to property matters more than someone else right to life. It doesn't, not even in the natural world; people would just kill you and take your property by force to survive.

If, as a collective, society decides to limit the maximum wealth an individual is allowed to obtain and funnel it back down to limit the amount of poverty, thus capping both extremes and making life generally better for the vast majority of people, well... I'm good with that as are the vast majority of people.

Inequality is not bad, you have to let people reap rewards for their efforts, up to a point, but not to the point that it damages us all.

you do not earn anything outside the platform society provides for you

What an interesting statement. Sounds to me like you're saying the individual is there to serve the societal structure, instead of the other way around.

As a simplification, I would certainly hate to live in a place where society made decisions for me. I'd much rather live in one where I made decisions for society. In other words the government is made legitimate by the informed consent of the natural legislature -- the people. The people do not exist to serve the government. Individuals exist just fine without governments, but not the other way around.

The entire structure of a democracy is that, at the end of the day, it is the person that is ultimately sovereign. Democracy isn't some club used by the majority to tyrannize the minority. If we were talking about Jim Crow laws, this would be immediately evident -- you can't simply take things from people because a greater number of voters want to. But somehow because we're talking about rich people the message doesn't sink in.

Okay. I allowed myself to get sucked into this. Sorry. I know better. It just seems like you guys are so close, yet I know in my heart you're not going to come to any kind of understanding.

> What an interesting statement. Sounds to me like you're saying the individual is there to serve the societal structure, instead of the other way around.

No, I think one can't exist without the other, but what I'm saying is things like trade and property don't exist outside the social structure setup by society in today's world.

> Individuals exist just fine without governments, but not the other way around.

Actually, no, they don't, because there are no individuals, there are just lot's and lot's of people and we can't get along without some form of government. With no explicit government in place, crime rules. We can all agree that criminal rule is not "getting along fine", and in fact we have, it's why we create governments to begin with.

No man is an island, we are tribal creatures, and always have been even before we were man.

> Democracy isn't some club used by the majority to tyrannize the minority.

Actually, it is exactly that. We've put protections into place in many circumstances to force a super majority to be required, but it very much is tyranny of the majority. Look at the laws around us we're all forced to obey and tell me it isn't?

America is NOT a society based on individual liberty and freedom, it IS a society based on the moral whims of the majority. If this were not the case, there would be no victimless crimes and the default position of everything would be legal and getting something made illegal would be a huge battle. This is the exact opposite of what were are now.

Interesting and enjoyable comments from you though, thanks.

You realize that the United States had no federal government for 12 years, from 1775 to 1787, right? And that for a large part of its history, people were responsible for their own crime control?

I could go on -- at length -- about various places where people did just fine without government structure. In the old west, for instance, marshals might not make it through town but once every couple of months. Didn't seem to slow down westward expansion that much. European traders worked all over the world just on a handshake and a promise for centuries.

Anthropologists studying tribes tell us that there are a few things that distinguish true tribes from modern cultures. One of those is the idea of private property: what is mine is mine and you can't take it from me unless under very unusual circumstances. In very primitive societies, the chief or the tribal elders can come around and just take what they want. It's only after we had the concept of private property and contract law that we saw significant economic and cultural growth. It was observing this state of nature that eventually created the political theory that is the bedrock of the country.

In communist China, just after the revolution, they would have "people's courts". These courts basically consisted of a mob of people who would bring in rich people, describe at length how they "exploited" the workers, and then strip them of all their goods. Sometimes for good measure they'd send them to jail or kill them. It was great political theater -- the crowds loved it -- but what were the results?

This was not a time of record growth, or even a time when the lives of the average citizen got that much better. All they really ended up doing was just replacing the folks who got rich signing contracts and respecting property rights with the folks who got rich being politically connected and doing whatever they liked.

Just some things for you to consider. I know I don't want to see any version of people's courts here in my lifetime.