Re: Samuelson: "It's More Than Social Security"

From: Kent Paul Dolan (xanthian_at_well.com)
Date: 01/15/05 

Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 23:00:28 +0000 (UTC)

"sinister" <sinister@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> http://geolib.pair.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html

Well, that's a fairly good precis of one of the
kinds of economic insanity that calls itself
Libertarianism [and it is hilarious to see
Libertarians, the enemies of everything liberal,
trying to become retroactively children by adoption
of Thomas Jefferson, who would have kicked their
greedy butts down the stairs if he'd ever met them],
but it doesn't in any way, shape, or form support
the point you cited it to support.

Nor does our society "move wealth only upward", and
Samuelson's warning against a majority that votes
itself entitlements from monies it does not, in the
main, provide, is well taken and widely restated by
other scholars of political economics. Our society
is more effective at moving the "money gained by
labor" from the center to the exremes, to the idle
wealthy and the idle poor, both happy to fatten on
what they do not sweat to earn.

xanthian, who, frankly, thinks it all went
floobywards when the agriculturists established
"land ownership" to fence out the hunter-gatherers.

The answer isn't royl's one-trick pony "land tax",
which merely punishes those who accumulate property
over a lifetime of work by taxing them into poverty
and homelessness when their working days are over,
but is instead straightforward abolition of private,
or indeed any, ownership of land.

ssc: I reformatted my resume to 52 character width
today, too. In for a dime, in for a dollar. 

-- 
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Quantcast