Re: The 'working poor' scam

From: Johnny Marcos (johnny5_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/02/04 

Date: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 10:15:47 GMT

royls@telus.net wrote in news:40e4b6b0.30831849@news.telus.net:

> Talk about fooling ourselves! It would be difficult to name a view of
> taxation more comprehensively contradicted by the facts than that one.

Please give me some facts proven by history so I can get new data and
change my mind if true.

> As a result of present taxation policy, both wealth and after-tax
> income are becoming _less_ equal, not more.
>

http://www.mises.org/efandi/ch9.asp

Inequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses' well-being,
not the cause of anybody's distress. Where there is a "lower degree of
inequality," there is necessarily a lower standard of living of the
masses.

So RoyLs - doesn't that imply where there is a greater inequality their
is a higher standard of living? I do agree what I have read on Mises
seems confusing - in one article he says taxation fights inflation and
is therefore greater for the common good - and then in another he says
taxation ultimately seeks to equalize all people and take us into
socialism - maybe as he aged he got new data and changed his opinions.

Or is it that taxation is good during certain times - and other times
taxes should be removed - when we are all pretty equalized we should
remove any taxation to give an incentive for growth and combat stagnat
socialism - and then the bill gates and other rich seekers lift us all
up in the rising tides - and when he gets too far up the mountain we
start taxing them to bring them back down into the valley and then the
cycle repeats itself - we live in a dynamic world and that is a dynamic
model - why are we cutting taxes if people are perceiving inflation and
a widening disconnect of the rich and poor?

Mises points out how do you determine the level of this disconnect? How
do you set your government in motion to tax for the greatest good for
the greatest number - where do you draw the line between a little bit of
medicine and an overdose of oxycontin? I think Mises is saying you
can't do this.

How rich should we let the wealth seekers grow beyond the commoner? How
rich is too rich - I hear some people say CEO's that earn 300 times what
their employees earn, I hear some people that are worth 2 million say a
man with 3 million is too rich, I hear some people making 5 dollars an
hour that 8 an hour is too rich and then I hear retirees on social
security saying 5 dollars an hour is too rich.

More from Mises:

The supremacy of the consumers consists in their power to hand over
control of the material factors of production and thereby the conduct of
production activities to those who serve them in the most efficient way.
This implies inequality of wealth and incomes. If one wants to do away
with inequality of wealth and incomes, one must abandon capitalism and
adopt socialism. (The question whether any socialist system would really
give income equality must be left to an analysis of socialism.)

But, say the middle-of-the-road enthusiasts, we do not want to abolish
inequality altogether. We want merely to substitute a lower degree of
inequality for a higher degree.

These people look upon inequality as upon an evil. They do not assert
that a definite degree of inequality which can be exactly determined by
a judgment free of any arbitrariness and personal evaluation is good and
has to be preserved unconditionally. They, on the contrary, declare
inequality in itself as bad and merely contend that a lower degree of it
is a lesser evil than a higher degree in the same sense in which a
smaller quantity of poison in a man's body is a lesser evil than a
larger dose. But if this is so, then there is logically in their
doctrine no point at which the endeavors toward equalization would have
to stop. Whether one has already reached a degree of inequality which is
to be considered low enough and beyond which it is not necessary to
embark upon further measures toward equalization, is just a matter of
personal judgments of value, quite arbitrary, different with different
people and changing in the passing of time. As these champions of
equalization appraise confiscation and "redistribution" as a policy
harming only a minority, viz., those whom they consider to be "too"
rich, and benefiting the rest—the majority—of the people, they cannot
oppose any tenable argument to those who are asking for more of this
allegedly beneficial policy. As long as any degree of inequality is
left, there will always be people whom envy impels to press for a
continuation of the equalization policy. Nothing can be advanced against
their inference: If inequality of wealth and incomes is an evil, there
is no reason to acquiesce in any degree of it, however low; equalization
must not stop before it has completely leveled all individuals' wealth
and incomes.

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