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Most powerful argument for inheritance taxes ever. Avoid creating silver-spoon monsters whose entire self-worth is based on ratifying their childhood notion that daddy's money makes them better than everyone else. The world is better off, full-stop, without that entire genre of humanity. I'm ready to lose the few good ones to never have to deal with all the bad ones. Money makes people crazy.
crazy people exist everywhere... money, location, race, political affiliation, etc.. non of it matters. Crazy is Crazy and people who are in echo chambers their entire lives act like it when they are exposed to the world.
Grammar... The difference between feeling your nuts and feeling you're nuts.
Ent, I didn't say that you have to be rich to be crazy. I said that money makes people crazy. And I clarified -- not all of them, obviously. There are sane rich people. But I think it is pretty damn obvious that a lot of rich people are crazy, and it is pretty damn obvious why.
Ent, I didn't say that you have to be rich to be crazy. I said that money makes people crazy. And I clarified -- not all of them, obviously. There are sane rich people. But I think it is pretty damn obvious that a lot of rich people are crazy, and it is pretty damn obvious why.
Wealth and power are interchangeable, as I've often said here. The wealthy attempt to purchase power. The powerful use their power to attain wealth.
What is also obvious is that it is far easier to control power than it is to control wealth. Wealth derives, ultimately, from a disparity in human abilities (and luck), and that disparity will always be with us. Power, on the other hand, is often "granted" by some sort of "social contract". Not always, as in cases where it comes from the end of a gun, but often. The US Constitution was designed to dissipate federal power.
IMO, history shows that power tends to corrupt much more predictably than wealth. So it makes sense as a society to allocate power in a disbursed manner. To say the wealthy tend to be evil and harmful to society is just a bridge too far. Most people here are employed by wealthy persons, and, again, this is true throughout the world and throughout history. One reason the West is "developed" and Africa is "underdeveloped" has to do with capital. The West allowed accumulation of capital, and created ways to aggregate capital (like corporations).
When someone says something like "take it all away over a certain limit ..." that is just a sop to those who want equal outcomes. That "taken" capital goes somewhere. In the case of a death tax, it goes to the government. That gives the government more power, not only to spend, but to punish its enemies. The history of taxation in England, at least before the Magna Carta, is about individuals being able to keep what is theirs and pass it to their heirs.
Last edited by Da Geezer; October 4, 2017, 01:08 PM.
The West has accumulated a pretty big chunk of Africa's capital. $1bn annually in illicit financial flows in resources alone, if you beleive the numbers. Go back earlier and the West AND the East accumulated more African "capital" via the slave trades.
That said,
1. How many people here think Geezer is crazy?
2. How many others apart from Geezer were gifted family money sufficient to buy land at the outset of their career?
In all seriousness (don't mean to pick on you, Geezer, but you opened that door and I am all for walking through open doors), no extreme solution is a good solution. What we have now is an on-steroids version of capital accumulation. When the idea was first formed, the people who formed it didn't have THIS in mind. Capital accumulation was once a good thing, but, taken to a logical extreme, became a problem. Capital markets used to be a facilitative service to the real economy; now it's a casino that inhibits the real economy. And so on and so forth. Capitalism sold itself the noose by which it will hang. Which is a shame, because I'm not sure the coming replacement will be better. But it will certainly be different.
The Constitution was designed to increase Federal power. No ifs, ands or buts about it. There are certainly countries that have stronger central governments, but the US under the Articles had a much weaker Federal government, it had no real power.
Ultimately, federal abuse of power is a pretty theoretical concern. We have actual, real, current, severe problems brought about by the fact that we're so damn worried about government overreach that we've let commerce run wild. Private concerns have abused private data about us far more than government ever has. Nobody is spying on you, unless you possibly are a security concern. No militias need be formed. All of that is justified by the stale and abstract ivory-tower egghead nonsense Geezer put forth. We have data now. We don't need paranoid guesses at what could possibly happen when we know what actually is happening.
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