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America's "Inevitable" Revolution & The Redistribution Fallacy
Here’s the good news: The chaos and upheaval we see all around us have historical precedents and yet America survived.
The bad news: Everything likely will get worse before it gets better again.
That’s NYPost.com's Michael Goodwin's chief takeaway from “Shattered Consensus,” a meticulously argued analysis of the growing disorder. Author James Piereson persuasively makes the case there is an inevitable “revolution” coming because our politics, culture, education, economics and even philanthropy are so polarized that the country can no longer resolve its differences.
To my knowledge, no current book makes more sense about the great unraveling we see in each day’s headlines. Piereson captures and explains the alienation arising from the sense that something important in American life is ending, but that nothing better has emerged to replace it.
The impact is not restricted by our borders. Growing global conflict is related to America’s failure to agree on how we should govern ourselves and relate to the world.
Piereson describes the endgame this way: “The problems will mount to a point of crisis where either they will be addressed through a ‘fourth revolution’ or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”
He identifies two previous eras where a general consensus prevailed, and collapsed. Each lasted about as long as an individual’s lifetime, was dominated by a single political party and ended dramatically.
First came the era that stretched from 1800 until slavery and sectionalism led to the Civil War.
The second consensus, which he calls the capitalist-industrial era, lasted from the end of the Civil War until the Great Depression.
It is the third consensus, which grew out of the depression and World War II, which is now shattering. Because the nation is unable to solve economic stagnation, political dysfunction and the resulting public discontent, Piereson thinks the consensus “cannot be resurrected.”
That’s not to say he’s pessimistic — he thinks a new era could usher in dynamic growth, as happened after the previous eras finally reached general agreement on national norms. But first we must weather a crisis that may involve an economic and stock-market collapse, a terror attack, or simply a prolonged and bitter stalemate.
...
Piereson also considers possible elements of the next national consensus, including a renewed focus on growth instead of redistribution and a bid to depoliticize government.
But he is ultimately uncertain what will come next because we are far from reaching a consensus on almost anything. There are so many fault lines that the nation seems consumed by a conflict of all against all... and as James Piereson most recently detailed at commentarymagazine.com, the Fallacy of Rediustribution remains among the highly divisive of all...
Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring by venturing from New York to Iowa to rail against income inequality and to propose new spending programs and higher taxes on the wealthy as remedies for it. She again emphasized these dual themes of inequality and redistribution in the “re-launch” of her campaign in June and in the campaign speeches she delivered over the course of the summer. Clinton's campaign strategy has been interpreted as a concession to influential progressive spokesmen, such as Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have loudly pressed these redistributionist themes for several years in response to the financial meltdown in 2008 and out of a longstanding wish to reverse the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. In view of Clinton's embrace of the progressive agenda, there can be little doubt that inequality, higher taxes, and proposals for new spending programs will be central themes in the Democratic presidential campaign in 2016.
The intellectual case for redistribution has been outlined in impressive detail in recent years by a phalanx of progressive economists, including Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman, who have called for redistributive tax-and-spending policies to address the challenge of growing inequalities in income and wealth. Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, of MIT, put the matter bluntly last year in a debate with Harvard's Gregory Mankiw, saying that he is in favor of dealing with inequality by “taking a dollar from a random rich person and giving it to a random poor person.”
Public-opinion polls over the years have consistently shown that voters overwhelmingly reject programs of redistribution in favor of policies designed to promote overall economic growth and job creation. More recent polls suggest that while voters are increasingly concerned about inequality and question the high salaries paid to executives and bankers, they nevertheless reject redistributive remedies such as higher taxes on the wealthy. While voters are worried about inequality, they are far more skeptical of the capacity of governments to do anything about it without making matters worse for everyone.
As is often the case, there is more wisdom in the public's outlook than in the campaign speeches of Democratic presidential candidates and in the books and opinion columns of progressive economists. Leaving aside the morality of redistribution, the progressive case is based upon a significant fallacy. It assumes that the U.S. government is actually capable of redistributing income from the wealthy to the poor. For reasons of policy, tradition, and institutional design, this is not the case. Whatever one may think of inequality, redistributive fiscal policies are unlikely to do much to reduce it, a point that the voters seem instinctively to understand.
One need only look at the effects of federal tax-and-spending programs over the past three and a half decades to see that this is so. The chart below, based on data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office, displays the national shares of before- and after-tax income for the top 1 and 10 percent of the income distribution from 1979 through 2011, along with the corresponding figures for the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. For purposes of this study, the Congressional Budget Office defined income as market income plus government transfers, including cash payments and the value of in-kind services such as health care (Medicare and Medicaid) and cash substitutes such as food stamps. The chart thus represents a comprehensive portrait of the degree to which federal tax-and-spending policies redistribute income from the wealthiest to the poorest groups and to households in between.
The chart illustrates two broad points. First, the wealthiest groups gradually increased their share of national income (both in pre- and after-tax and transfer income) over this period of more than three decades. Second, and more notable for our purposes, federal tax and spending policies had little effect on the overall distribution of income.
Across this period, the top 1 percent of the income distribution nearly doubled its share of (pre-tax and transfer) national income, from about 9 percent in 1979 to more than 18 percent in 2007 and 2008, before falling back after the financial crisis to 15 percent in 2010 and 2011 (some studies suggest that by 2014 it was back up to 18 percent). Meanwhile, the top 10 percent increased its share by one-third, from about 30 percent in 1979 to 40 percent in 2007 and 2008, before it fell to 37 percent in 2011. Through all this, the bottom quintile maintained a fairly consistent share of national income.
Many will be surprised to learn that the federal fiscal system—taxes and spending—does not do more to reduce inequalities in income arising from the free-market system. Yet there are perfectly obvious reasons on both the tax and the spending side as to why redistribution does not succeed in the American system—and probably cannot be made to succeed.
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A 2008 study published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the United States had the most progressive income-tax system among all 24 OECD countries measured in terms of the share of the tax burden paid by the wealthiest households. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 1 percent of earners paid 39 percent of the personal income taxes in 2010 (while earning 15 percent of the country's overall before-tax income) compared with just 17 percent in 1980 and 24 percent in 1990. The top 20 percent of earners paid 93 percent of the federal income taxes in 2010 even though they claimed 52 percent of before-tax income. Meanwhile, the bottom 40 percent paid zero net income taxes—zero. For all practical purposes, those in the highest brackets already bear the overwhelming burden of federal income tax, while those below the median income have been taken out of the income-tax system altogether.
There is a more basic reason that the tax system does not do more to redistribute income: The income tax is not the primary source of revenue for the national government. In 2010, the federal government raised $2.144 trillion in taxes, with only 42 percent coming from the individual income tax. Forty percent came from payroll taxes, 9 percent from corporate taxes, and the rest from a mix of estate and excise taxes. Since the early 1950s, the national government has consistently relied upon the income tax for between 40 and 50 percent of its revenues, with precise proportions varying from year to year due to economic conditions. For several generations, progressive reformers have looked to the income tax as the instrument through which they aimed to take resources from the rich and deliver them to the poor. But in reality, in the United States at least, the income tax is not a sufficiently large revenue source for the national government to do the job that the redistributionists want it to do.
And here's the rub: Payroll taxes fall more heavily upon working- and middle-class wage and salary income earners than upon the wealthy, whose incomes come disproportionately from capital gains or whose salaries far exceed the maximum earnings subject to those taxes. In 2010, the wealthiest 1 percent paid 39 percent of income taxes but just 4 percent of payroll taxes. The top 20 percent of earners paid 93 percent of the nation's income taxes but just 45 percent of payroll taxes. Meanwhile, the middle quintile paid 15 percent of all payroll taxes—but just 3 percent of income taxes. In other words, the more widely shared burdens of the payroll tax tend to mitigate the progressive effects of the income tax.
An increase in the top marginal tax rate from 39.6 to, say, 50 percent might have yielded around $100 billion in additional revenue in 2010.(This assumes no corresponding changes in tax and income strategies on the part of wealthy households and no negative effects on investment and economic growth, which are risky assumptions.)
That would have been real money, to be sure, but it would have represented only about one half of 1 percent of GDP (using 2010 figures) or less than 3 percent of total federal spending. This would not have been enough to permit much in the way of redistribution to the roughly 60 million households in the bottom half of the income scale.
Turning to the spending side of fiscal policy, we encounter a murkier situation because of the sheer number and complexity of federal spending programs. The House of Representatives Budget Committee estimated in 2012 that the federal government spent nearly $800 billion on 92 separate anti-poverty programs that provided cash assistance, medical care, housing assistance, food stamps, and tax credits to the poor and near-poor. The number of people drawing benefits from anti-poverty programs has more than doubled since the 1980s, from 42 million in 1983 to 108 million in 2011. The redistributive effects of these programs are limited, however, because most funds are spent on services to assist the poor and only a small fraction of these expenditures are distributed in the form of cash or income.
As it turns out, most of the money goes not to poor or near-poor households but to providers of services. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once tartly described this as “feeding the horses to feed the sparrows.” This country pays exorbitant fees to middle-class and upper-middle-class providers to deliver services to the poor.
Why have matters devolved in this way? The American welfare state was built to deliver services rather than incomes in part because the American people have long viewed poverty as a condition to be overcome rather than one to be subsidized with cash. Many also believe that the poor would squander or misspend cash payments and so are better off receiving services and in-kind benefits such as food stamps, health care, and tuition assistance. With regard to aid to the poor, Americans have built a social-service state, not a redistribution state.
...
And so, of the $800 billion spent on poverty programs in 2012, less than $150 billion was distributed in cash income, if one includes as cash benefit the tax rebate under the EITC. That is a grand total of 18 percent of the whole. The rest was spent on services and in-kind benefits, with the money paid to providers of various kinds, most of whom have incomes well above the poverty line.
With respect to the recipients of federal transfers, the CBO study reveals a surprising fact: Households in the bottom quintile of the income distribution receive less in federal payments than those in the higher income quintiles. Households in the bottom quintile of the income distribution (below $24,000 in income per year) received on average $8,600 in cash and in-kind transfers. But households in the middle quintile received about $16,000 in such transfers. And households in the highest quintile received about $11,000. Even households in the top 1 percent of the distribution received more in dollar transfers than those in the bottom quintile. The federal transfer system may move income around and through the economy—but it does not redistribute it from the rich to the poor or near-poor.
It is well known in Washington that the people and groups lobbying for federal programs are generally those who receive the salaries and income rather than those who get the services. They, as Senator Moynihan observed decades ago, are the direct beneficiaries of most of these programs, and they have the strongest interest in keeping them in place. The nation's capital is home to countless trade associations, companies seeking government contracts, hospital and medical associations lobbying for Medicare and Medicaid expenditures, agricultural groups, college and university lobbyists, and advocacy organizations for the environment, the elderly, and the poor, all of them seeking a share of federal grants and contracts or some form of subsidy, tax break, or tariff.
This is one reason that five of the seven wealthiest counties in the nation are on the outskirts of Washington D.C. and that the average income for the District of Columbia's top 5 percent of households exceeds $500,000, the highest among major American cities.
Washington is among the nation's most unequal cities as measured by the income gap between the wealthy and everyone else. Those wealthy individuals did not descend upon the nation's capital in order to redistribute income to the poor but to secure some benefit to their institutions, industries, and, incidentally, to themselves.
They understand a basic principle that has so far eluded progressives: The federal government is an effective engine for dispensing patronage, encouraging rent-seeking, and circulating money to important voting blocs and well-connected constituencies. It is not an effective engine for the redistribution of income.
James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that the possession of different degrees and kinds of property is the most durable source of faction under a popularly elected government. Madison especially feared the rise of a redistributive politics under which the poor might seize the reins of government in order to plunder the wealthy by imposing heavy taxes. He and his colleagues introduced various political mechanisms—the intricate system of checks and balances in the Constitution, federalism, and the dispersion of interests across an extended republic—to forestall a division between the rich and poor in America and to deflect political conflict into other channels.
While Madison's design did not succeed in holding back the tide of “big government” in the 20th century, it nevertheless proved sufficiently robust to frustrate the aims of redistributionists by promoting a national establishment open to a boundless variety of crisscrossing interests.
The ingrained character of the American state is unlikely to change fundamentally any time soon, which is why those worried about inequality should abandon the failed cause of redistribution and turn their attention instead to broad-based economic growth as the only practical remedy for the sagging incomes of too many Americans.
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How about NO redistribution at all? You keep what you earn, I'll keep mine.
Only if you end the usury
"Leaving aside the morality of redistribution...."
Here's the problem with this author's thesis -- wealth has already been redistributed, only it's not from the wealthy to the poor -- it's from everyone to the mega wealthy. It makes no sense to talk about a change in the basic systems of this country without first taking back what has been stolen from the 99.9%. Otherwise, these oligarchs will continue to march around and control everything.
I am sick and tired of being told that there is something immoral or wrong about taking from the rich (which I define as those few hundred families who control half of the world's wealth), when our entire society for the last 50+ years has been about a tiny elite acting parasitically on the productive population and becoming obscenely wealthy and powerful as a result of doing nothing more than rent seeking.
Hillary will find the middle ground: She will continue the social programs AND fully fund the wars and police state!!! EVERYBODY WINS!!!
please, people, please. the 85 people that own 60% of the planet earned it fair and square.
(..capitalism is one thing. unbridled kleptomania and enslavement is another)
LTER- the problem with your thesis is that it won't be limited to that. WHat people like clinton and sanders don't tell you is that the 'rich' includes everyone who makes more than 75k or so. They should be prepared to bend over and grab their ankles if any of that kind of stuff comes to pass. The key to this is to abolish the fed and fiat money, which is the engine they use to steal from everyone else.
And I can't get behind anything that gives more money to the govt. It won't do anything good with the money. Most of it is spent on wars i disagree with, 'anti-poverty' programs that encourage and perpetuate poverty, ponzi scheme medical and retirment scams, and interest on the debt I don't believe is even legitimate. GIve the govt more money, they will just do more of those things. Govt and central banking are the means the oligarchy has used to secure their ill goten gains. Removing power from those entities will remove their ability to steal on such a grand scale
I understand and agree with your point. The thing is that no one on the national stage is remotely talking about taking back the money from the oligarchs. Sanders et al just want to move the deck chairs around, while keeping ownership of the Titanic squarely in the same hands. The oligarchs have convinced the large majority of the serfs that this is how it must be, and certainly no politician on the national stage is questioning it. My point really has to do with my disgust over the fact that so many people are blinded by this idea that taking money back from these few hundred families would be some kind of crime, and that it's an either/or proposition that we cannot have freedom of person and freedom from oligarchs. As the poster above said, I guess everyone is convinced the oligarchs stole our wealth fair and square.
My issue isn't that I don't think it was outright theft- it is. Is there a morale issue with re-claiming stolen property? No, there isn't. The problem is- who does the confiscation? A govt- i already outlined my problem with that. My other issue is- where does it stop- I know what you mean about a few hundred families that control almost everything- I get that, and no, Im not OK with how they got their wealth. but how exactly does one determine what exactly constitutes the 'stolen wealth'. You start down that line of thinking, and its a slippery slope. Pretty soon, anyone successful business owner who has built up a million in wealth is now an evil thief who has 'stolen the workers labor'. (just to be clear, Im not accusing YOU of that kind of thinking, Im just saying thats where it would lead if some kind of mass movement with that goal got underway). Then you wind up in a "workers paradise" thats really a shithole since all the people who know how to run a foctory or farm have been killed off or exiled for their 'theft'.
I just don't think any kind of confiscation is viable. I return to my original proposition- sound money, end the fed. Doing so would cause a lot of the ficticious 'paper wealth' in the world to evaporate, which is a good thing. No more central bank(who is owned by who exactly?) printing up money out of thin air to buy assets, or loaning a country its own currency at interest. Doing that would rid the world of the primary means of theft these people have. While it isn't perfect it is a solid step in the right direction. It may not right all the wrongs, but it would help prevent the wrongs from being repeated.
Why not bring out the old Sherman Anti Trust act and break these big holdings int smaller competing bits? That's what happened to Ma Bell back in the day. No organization should exist when its size threatens national exisistence.
How did that work out for Lyndon Johnson? Guns AND butter indeed!
I am sick and tired of parasites running amuck, stealing middle class savings while fraudulently claiming they are taxing the rich.
I am sick and tired of arrogant politicians who can't manage their own lives claiming that they know what is best for everyone else.
I am sick and tired of religious extremists raping, committing pedophilia, avoiding taxes, and hoarding multi-billion dollar art collections -- claiming that they are looking out for the poor.
And I am sick and tired of socialists like yourself lying and claiming that being robbed by corrupt politicians is any different from being robbed by private sector. Just because the thief wears a badge or has secret service protection doesn't make their actions morally right.
But LTER is a self-declared libertarian, not a socialist! /s
Yes, taking stolen money back is socialism. My bad.
That's too deep for ZH.
Two wrongs to make it right?
Is that also part of the libertarian mindset, according to you.
Not to mention the plans to use "carbon taxes" on the "carbon debt" built up by "white privilege" to parasitize white people into the ground forever.
Interestingly you do not mention "beheading" or "burning alive" or "female genital mutilation" as abuses by religious extremists that you are sick of... these just didn't occur to you?
Oh look, something shiny!
what about male genital mutulation - i.e. circumcision
OK...I forgot to mention: I am sick of all the tactics Obama has his boys in ISIS using too.
Doesn't change my argument that I am sick of all the central planning "leadership" who are individually a bunch of screw ups, yet they feel qualified to run everyone else's lives into a sewer.
I think all right thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired.
I'm certainly not! And I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.
Paying usury is voluntary. Paying taxes is not.
we are far from reaching a consensus on almost anything.
I'm fucking sick of consensus. The consensus is that I get to work like a fucking slave for the MIC, the banks, and the "voters". Fuck that. Here's my new normal: Fuck Off.
An amusing succinct statement
of the “Shattering Consensus!”
yep the new motto of my company, and I told all my employees of the revision, is...
go fuck yourself
Wouldn't a flat tax help the US get there ?
First, kill all the lawyers... then the bankers, politicians and board members of every multi-state or multinational corporation. Then the rest will sort itself out.
that would never end. They would keep getting replaced. Also good luck killing them. private military and absolute surveillance
I upvoted you based on raw emotion. They all so deserve it.
But killing has side-effects, causes chaos. The transition will be hard enough without us doing the killing.
We can expect a lot of killing from their side in false flags and continuous cop killings of complete innocents. Those latter aren't planned, but the cop psychology that produces them was intended because it keeps the populace cowed, on edge, distracted.
They are losing the propaganda war. We are going to take back our government and put it back inside the constitution. Then repeal laws back to 1776, let things settle for 20 years or so to see what should be done before passing the first law.
If our wonderful rulers would just step aside, we would have to kill them, tho many would stand trial for civil fraud.
@Demdere - Exactly how do you think we are going to take control back with all of those criminals in place?
Sorry Chief. Assasination is the ONLY thing these psychopaths / socioppaths worry about. It ultimately may be the only soultion.
When you ignore the rule-of-law, eviscerate the Constitution, bail out corrupt and failed banks/corporations/insurers yet expect regular folks to work and pay their bills - revolution becomes the only solution.
Best summary I've recently read:
"To borrow another term from software development, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the American constitutional system simply does not “scale well”. An operating system that worked nicely for a nation of a few millions of self-reliant European Christians occupying a sparsely populated parcel of fertile territory is now looking increasingly brittle and “buggy” at continental, polylingual, and pan-ethnic scale.
If we are able to think clearly and dispassionately about this, we should not expect to find a political solution to what is at bottom a mismatch between our operating system and the hardware we’re now trying to run it on. The nation has simply gotten too big, too heterogeneous, too fractured and fissile in every way, for this increasingly centralized Federal government — indeed, perhaps, for any centralized government — to manage. It is no longer a matter of which side wins this or that election; we must understand that the problem is at a deeper level.
What will happen, I think, is that after a period of further strain and deterioration — lasting, perhaps, another decade or two, but possibly much less than that — the nation will begin to disaggregate, to break apart. If, starting now, we were all to begin to think hard about how to ease this passage, and what sort of arrangement we might like to see on the other side of it, we might spare ourselves, and our children, a great deal of suffering."
http://malcolmpollack.com/2015/10/13/a-functioning-nation-system-requirements/
We've already seen the split occurring with the big cities that cant balance their budgets and cater to the (endless) needs of the parasitic 'free shit army'. It is the flyover states that are most homogenous, and this is something the 'progressives' are vigorously attacking with all the sandnigger immigration. I welcome a split of the US, and look forward to being part of an elite Christian nation that believes in individual accountability, small .gov, and the rule of law. I will stand for freedom. All the way.
The thing in the article that stands out is that "The Poor" really isn't the true beneficiary of spending on poverty. The people making the real $$ are the upper middle class providers of services to the Poor. This is a surprise that should not be a surprise at all. It makes total and complete sense and beautifully explains all the shit we've been seeing over the last 50 years.
The fact is that all the do gooder Liberals are total hypocrites who are only interested in lining their own pockets. In the end, I doubt they really give a shit about "The Poor". Like vampires, they would probably suck the last ounce of blood out of the fuking poor if they thought there was profit there. And, in a sense, that is exactly what they do--all the while pretending to "help". To steal a quote from "There Will Be Blood": I Drink Your Milkshake.
Proggie city states versus the broad hinterlands!
No government nor society is too large or small for the U.S. Constitution, it's about INDIVIDUAL freedom and protection from legal plundering charlatans. Only autocrats believe anything else.
Did you even read the quote?
I like badrhino's comment about "scaling" and the "Constitution." From what I can see the only part of the Constitution that didn't scale well was the number of Senators and Congressmen. Have 535 leaders is an impossible situation. There is no accountability with numbers that high. Imagine a big corporation operating with 535 VPs?
We should scale back the Senate and Congress to perhaps 50 total. There would then be accountability, more concentration on running the country, and more visibility.
No, I think exactly the opposite. The 535 is the problem, they now represent districts far too large to allow their merely-human minds to balance constituent's interest, and the number is small enough they can easily be bribed or otherwise controlled by interests such as banksters and NSA's searchable database of blackmail information.
Not one of the senators or representatives is doing his job. Of course they have been bribed. If they have been threatened and not one has the courage to come forward, they are all gone rogue. We have no representative government or rule of law. Are you thinking about putting each one on trial for treason?
If we try to adopt new goals, we will delay victory for an indefinite time. We can agree on the Constitution, knowing we need to change it later, or supplant it entirely. But that is a discussion for after we have replaced our current rullers and driven them out of the country or put them in jail.
And we sure as hell no longer need a "representative" form of government. We did at the onset of the country before jet planes and the Internet. Now every voter can represent his/her self.
You Sir/Madam, need to read up on "The Tyranny of the Majority!"
I don't think "broad-based economic growth" will solve the problem addessed by this article.
First, inequality isn't inherently wrong.
Second, what's actually wrong is unilateral re-appropriation of wealth through taxes and regulation.
Accumulated wealth succumbs to entropy (living expenses, equipment repairs, capital depreciation), and it can only be accumulated by focus and skill. Government intervention and subsidies in the form of onerous regulations help stop the natural entropy and erosion of accumulated wealth, enabling the parasites at the top to not only stop the natural outflows, but redirect into their own pocket the wealth created by others.
Look at the great strides in computer technology achieved under very little government regulation. Then consider progress in other areas, like banking (even consumer banking is light-years behind Europe and some EM), insurance (we're ALL paying for those unnecessary dent- and cracked windshield- repairs), healthcare (enough said already)... It's a disaster. Everything the government touches is a disaster.
Some will fallaciously point to roads argue that we need a bird's-eye view to organize society, totally ignoring 1.) what private people left on their own could accomplish and 2.) that bringing in the unilateral threat of force somehow magically increases an entity's organizational efficiency and prowess.
"Accumulated wealth succumbs to entropy (living expenses, equipment repairs, capital depreciation), and it can only be accumulated by focus and skill."
Those concepts apply to ordinary accumulated wealth, like for example a businessman who accumulates a few million bucks. But do you think the princes of Saudi Arabia worry about maintenance on their jets? Do the Rothschild heirs worry about plumbing expenses in their estates? Do the Walton heirs worry about these things? Of course not. They make more passively on their billions than they could spend in several lifetimes, without touching the principal. And they did jack shit to earn it, but they sure as hell have power over the rest of us. Those are the guys who are ruining it for everyone else, and so long as we tolerate these unelected leaders having positions of global power, we will serfs.
That, and the money is funny.
Its a cash cow. Stop feeding it! Think barter. All these BS games are much harder to play without the gravy.
good luck getting your paycheck in the form of assets. good luck bartering for - house, car, healthcare, computers, phones. Yea maybe you can but at a huge inconvenience, that only a tiny minority of people will tolerate. convenient serfdom
Understand the means of trade are busted not trade itself.
A lot of difficult words but what he's saying is that a dictator will rise with words of redistribution like in Venezuela and where everybody will become poor and only a few elite will remain in power and profit greatly from it.
A lot will die and maybe in a generation or 3, there might be a uprising.
And there's a 50% chance it will succeed.
And shit will get worse untill it goes totally apeshit.
Whats wrong with a consumption tax of around 10% and a salary, corporation, capitol gains tax of around 20%.
Then everyone pays a bit - we just need someone with balls enough to dump the tax code as well as many other programs.
The whole premise of a tax, flat, consumptive, fair, etc. is to do what? Feed the belly of a bloated leviathan?
Your idea just prolongs the inevitable. How about going back to the original premise of a small .gov who raises its meager existence from tariffs.
Just a thought...
DaddyO
And get rid of property taxes while we're at it. Allodial title FTW!
Couldn't agree more!
I know it won't fly but how about only property owners can vote, or at the very least stakeholders of some sort.
Implement some type of productivity means testing for voters.
DaddyO
But I don't dig that!
Winston Churchill reccommended making people pass the citizenship test before they can vote. Being a property owner doesn't ensure that you aren't a moron.
Hey, I was just thinking out loud.
The idea of a voting means test from my perspective is to create a mechanism that precludes the FSA from voting more largesse.
What the final means looks like I Ihaven't thought through yet.
My point is just to stop the voting for free shite so the vote buying stops.
Don't just down vote me, throw out your ideas so we can fling poo at them as well.
DaddyO
DaddyO I dig 'ya!
Judging from your secondary post above, the love was fleeting, eh?
DaddyO
Outlaw lobbying, jail both sides of the transgression, and eliminate taxes and regulations that give the chosen large corps the advantages and most of the ills will vanish. Nothing will work if the federal govt. isn't slimmed down to 10% of present. Implement Switzerlands Canton power arrangement. Eliminate the Fed, TODAY!!!!
All laudable reconmmendation. You will however have to take their power from their cold dead hands. They will not willingly give it you or others.
They may in fact try to pre empt you if they get a whif of what you and others are possibly planning. The Federa agencies and FEMA are waiting.
Actually Friedman's NIT ('62) would have saved me from repossession and foreclosure in '04. That is as long as NAFTA and GATT were not passed ..
At present, I'm living with my parents. I'll be 57 in Jan ..
There are few things that won't be fixed by hyperinflation
...paraphrasing FOFOA
Govt too strong? Lets see how big it feels when it can't pay stooges.
Govt does not listen to voters? They will when they have to live on tax receipts instead of borrowing.
Federalism dead? The states will tell the USG to fuck off when the Uncle Sugar isn't supporting all the 'federally mandated' programs.
Too much debt? poof...gone
Income inequality? poof gone when the .1% realize paper wealth is not real wealth...at least they will still have Balloon Dog Orange.
Much of the insanity we are seeing is the product of supporting a dying dollar system. When it goes, we may not have perfection but I'm betting it will at least make sense.
This kind of article does not account for the FUNDAMENTALS that the American and global economy became based upon making "money" out of nothing as debts, in order to "pay" for strip-mining the natural resources of North America and the world. Inside that context, the distribution of "wealth" was FUNDAMENTALLY based upon backing up lies with violence, with the most extremely important forms of that becoming the increasingly integrated, and sophisticated, systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, whereby governments ENFORCED FRAUDS by privately controlled banks.
The "wealth" of the plutocrats became primarily based upon capturing control over the political processes, in ways which relatively routinely provided roughly 100,000% returns from successfully corrupting the government, so that the governments' powers to rob and to kill to back up that robbery primarily served the interests of the most "wealthy," whose greatest source of "wealth" was to be able to create the public "money" supply out of nothing as debts, as FRAUDS ENFORCED by governments against everyone.
The DEEPER ISSUES were the ways that "money" made out nothing, based upon being able to back up lies with violence, enabled the natural resources of the planet to be strip-mined, while those FUNDAMENTALLY FRAUDULENT FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING SYSTEMS enabled vicious spirals of privatized profits and socialized losses, to be driven to become bigger and BIGGER. Both the American and global political economy more and more became based upon those vicious spirals through POLITICAL FUNDING ENFORCING FRAUDS.
The article above continues to indulge in relatively superficial notions regarding how human beings operated as entropic pumps of environmental energy flows. It is typically underestimating the degree to which the established political economy was controlled through governments ENFORCING FRAUDS, which required that people deliberately ignore the principle of the conservation of energy, as well as deliberately misunderstand the concept of entropy in the most absurdly backward ways possible.
All private property was based upon backing up claims with coercions. As the most abstract form of that, money became measurement backed by murder, whereby the debt controls were backed by the death controls. The established debt slavery systems have driven their numbers to have become debt insanities. However, those who only look at the social polarizations caused by that tend to discount the ways that those debt engines were treadmills based upon being able to strip-mine the natural resources of the planet at an exponentially accelerating rate.
Theoretically speaking, human beings and civilizations need to develop new systems, which integrate human, industrial and natural ecologies. However, the actually existing systems are based upon the long history of successful warfare backing up deceits with destruction, morphing to become successful finance based upon ENFORCING FRAUDS. The DEEPER LEVELS OF PROBLEMS that the American and global political economy face are how to operate the human murder systems, after the development of weapons of mass destruction, in order to back up the human monetary systems, after those became electronic, which both combined to facilitate ENFORCED FRAUDS to be astronomically amplified by many orders of magnitude. Since, at the same time, those frauds never stopped being false, no matter how much they were enforced, overall, civilization developed as excessively successful organized crime, becoming runaway criminal insanities.
The ESSENTIAL PROBLEMS are that political economy exists inside of human ecology, and the debt controls are backed by the death controls. As the consequences of having indulged in strip-mining the planet's natural resources become more blatantly obvious, and no longer so easily ignored, the only realistic resolutions of those real problems must necessarily be the development of different death controls, since, by definition, what stops growth will be some death control systems.
It was always painfully obvious that the established Neolithic Civilizations were based upon exponential growth, which was absolutely impossible to endlessly continue. However, the vicious spirals of the privatized profits, focused through the POLITICAL FUNDING ENFORCING FRAUDS, enabled the socialized losses to be discounted and disregarded, while only the privatized profits were respected and paid attention to, since those were in feedback loops through the funding of the political processes, in order to drive their systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, to get bigger and BIGGER, while at the same time, those also became more insane and MORE INSANE.
Of course, an article like the one above continues to indulge in the same old-fashioned political fantasies which recommend "broad-based economic growth as the only practical remedy for the sagging incomes of too many Americans." Unfortunately, that is ridiculously unrealistic. Rather, the only practical remedies for the real problems are the development of different death control systems, while the most realistic ways that will happen are through the runaway debt insanities provoking death insanities. Indeed, the main things that the ruling classes have actually done with respect to the American and global political economy were to engage in various inside job, false flag attacks, in order to start more genocidal wars, and prepare to impose democidal martial law.
My view is that we should go through series of intellectual scientific revolutions, which apply profound paradigm shifts to political science in general, and especially to the combined money/murder systems in particular. The BIG PROBLEMS are due to exponential progress in physical science, enabling the technologies of the industrial revolution to strip-mine the natural resources of a fresh planet, while political science became an oxymoronic scientific dictatorship, that primarily applied science and technologies through the established social pyramid systems, in order to become better at backing up lies with violence, which have become GLOBALIZED ELECTRONIC MONKEY MONEY FRAUDS, BACKED BY THE THREAT OF FORCE FROM APES WITH ATOMIC BOMBS.
Meanwhile, most of American and global politics continues to be dominated by various old-fashioned religions and ideologies, which adamantly refuse to adapt to the progress achieved in physical science through series of profound paradigm shifts. Therefore, it is politically impossible to change Neolithic Civilization to become Translithic Civilization in any coherent ways. Instead, the typical content on Zero Hedge presents relatively correct, but seriously superficial, analysis of the PROBLEMS, which understatements of the problems are then followed by gross overstatements of their versions of the superficial "solutions" to those problems. In the case of the article above, it continues to recommend the shibboleth of "economic growth" in ways which deliberately ignore the overall environmental ecologies that human beings and civilization actually operate within.
The INTENSE PARADOXES that we face are that natural selection pressures drove the human artificial selection systems to become based upon the maximum possible deceits and frauds. Therefore, all sociopolitical systems are currently being operated by the best available professional liars and immaculate hypocrites, who indulge in the dominate kinds of political fantasies. Ironically, my recommendations (oriented towards harder political science fiction) also practically default to being not much more than also political fantasies, due to the degree to which FANTASIES, based on the long history of social successes of ENFORCING FRAUDS, now almost totally dominate the ways that almost everyone thinks about everything.
... and I always believed cannabis affects straight thinking.
He means 'continue the kleptocracy', as the 'FDR consensus' has not produced anything like the promised effects.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/complex-systems-and-the-hu...
It is their last chance, they are pushing us to revolution, and they are going to lose their asses and their fortunes.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/why-patriots-can-win/
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/patriot-games/
They are losing the propaganda war. Nobody who understood what the net was going to do would have done 911. That is unraveling much faster than the standard historical coverup, and the web keeps every suspicion alive forever, fresh in people's minds, or at least enough people's minds that we are biased against their propaganda.
zh is very important in this.
We cannot resolve the problems because the fed gov is too big. It necessarily CREATES conflict. Neighbors with different desires and priorities an live in pease respecting one another's choices. When governmetn comes in and takes your resources and says let's vote on priorities it becomes I win you lose for everyone. Now we can't live in peace because on neighbor uses the government to take from the other to support what neighbor 1 wants. The only solution is the reduction of government. Of course, that will be uncomfortable for the parasites working for government.
Super-hyper-nonlinear levels of approving, applauding agreement.
The FED has become the financial backstop for the entire world. Sad to say, but nothing changes financially untill Fiat based credit is nullified or the wordwide monetary system collapses. The World Financial powers are not smart enough to make changes that would mitigate this coming financial pain.
Everything else is simply financial tinkering.
y: “The problems will mount to a point of crisis where either they will be addressed through a ‘fourth revolution’ or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”
The poor are on drugs and the middle class is brain washed or saturated. Who will revolt? And if there should be a break down of social order the herd will demand more "Homeland security" and government. The US, the EU and China disintegrating is the best we can hope for. Imagine how many prroblems will be solved if there would be 100 more Icelands and Switzerlands instead.
Yes. These giant empires are the creations of tyrants and they want to micromanage every aspect of every person's life from cradle to grave. I shouldn't have to worry about what's going on in fucking Syria of all fucking places. It should be irrelevant to me and my family forever. It's on the other side of the god damn planet full of alien people with an alien culture and religion that is incompatible with my people, culture, and beliefs. This NWO globalist shit needs to end now so we can go back to small communities of like minded people with TRUE diversity across the world (meaning, not everywhere is a hodgepodge of various brown people that all speak the same language with the same accent and watch the same TV and movies and listen to the same music and have heads full of the same propaganda from the schools).
Ah, the real cost of something for nothing; this commentary shows the price we pay.
https://archive.org/details/costofsomething00altg
There aren't enough white people left to prop up the civilization that their ancestors built. The ruling class thought they could replace freedom loving, hard working whites with government loving parasitic 3rd worlders but it isn't working out well.
It won't be a revolution, the remaining whites are simply withdrawing their consent and support from this current socialist anti-white civilization. It will collapse without whites for the parasites to feed off.
Current Western civilization is simply incompatible with what white people desire most of all - freedom and self determination.
Current western civilization is indeed incompatible with freedom and self-determination, but I don't see why you think that is only the goal of 'white' people. So far as I can see, everyone of Neanderthal heritage agrees.
No religious gov has been voted into power a 2nd time in centuries, as an example, and in the last 50 the first time was always a way of escaping a military dictatorship imposed from the outside.
You forget Islam. They are the greatest potential determiner of what happens to the world. One day non Islamists will have to face that FACT, in all its terrible implications and consequences.
I did not forget Islam. Show me the example. There have been no Islamic Brotherhood governments re-elected. The Iranians would through out their dictators in a moment, given a fair election.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/conserving-my-neanderthal-...
A wise posting. The issues you raise are not so much racial as they the stuff that Civilization is made of.
Western ideology no matter how flawed, is elastic in its ability to change and improve, although at times it has gone backwords.
Islamic Middle East, Africa and other small areas are inelastic in their thinking and consider sameness a virtue. The Historica record is clear. The ultimate goal of Islam is alleged religious sameness as well as Shia or Suni domination as a goal for the entire planet. Everthing flows from these societal and religious concepts.
The clash of civilizations is coming, for no other reason that there are more takers than there are producers. In many counties, for the takers to take, they must destroy the current Western Governments that exist now.
The US, Europe, including Russia and its former Republics, China and India will not go genty into the nihilistic night. Only after this "clash" occurs, will sanity return to the world, including the world of non collectivism,money, wealth, and commerce.
Let me think, who had the highest civilization in 900-1300? Who pioneered the silk road and profited? Who invented zero?
Go read some history. You cannot act in your own interest, given that you are in fact trying to think in your own interest and not representing some government or other, without getting the facts and the logic correct.
I do not know what History you are reading, but the highest civiliztions of the Middle East and the Miditeranian were the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. Specificalloy Byzantium from 400 to 1400 AD.
Muslim Empires have been parsitic emprires that would not have survived without the subjugated Muslim and non Muslim Populations who kept them going.
I think you have no idea just how far down the road we already are. It's too late to take the detour we passed 20 years ago. Nothing left but to bail out and hope to survive as this thing comes to a crashing halt. Soon.
There is a uprising already, and it is global.
There have been many surprising election results in the western world and they show a trend to move away from globalization and to restore more sensible values like sovereign rights of democratic nations.
In my view, the only intelligent system of government is democracy.
The current type of democracy we use is severely dysfunctional as everyone can see. So we need to re design the system.
The main weakness in the system is human nature. People tend to be greedy and deceitful. Some times they enter parliament or some other form of government with the best intentions, but the rotten system they become a part of corrupts them.
One way forward could be to create a system that is so well designed that it overrides faults in human nature.
That is something that can not be controlled by special interests groups of any sort.
Democracy is not a real thing anywhere on Earth as far as I know. Maybe Iceland and Switzerland.
Show me the "surprise" election result that actually meant anything? Did Scotland break away from the U.K? Did Catalonia break away from Spain? Did Greece end austerity? Did the limitless flood of 3rd world trash into Europe end? Did the U.S. government build a wall along the Mexican border, deport all the illegals, and their anchor babies and end the granting of citizenship to anybody shat on on U.S. soil?
No. The status quo is moving ahead full steam.
Scotland did not break away from UK, but the Scottish national party won a landslide victory not long after the referendum.
Something tells me that if a new referendum would be held today, the queen would not be purring after hearing the results.
Not many would have expected Corbyn's landslide victory in the British labor party elections a short while ago. A event that changes British politics considerably.
The parties that want to break away from Spain did get the majority in Catalonia parliament, and have said that they will do just that before 2017. In any case, they now have more political influence in Spain.
There is uncertainty in Swedish politics. This is mostly because of immigrant policy.
Not long ago Helle Thorning Schmidt, a very pro EU Danish prime minister lost her position. In Finland, true finns who won the last elections are under fire because of immigration policy.
As long as Greece lets the EU kick them around they will be down trodden slaves. Unfortunately corruption in Greece is on par wit the EU, so dont expect any miracles.
I dont see any trash coming into Europe, just ordinary people. And since Russia and allies are eliminating terrorists in Syria and surrounding territories, maybe some of those people can return to their homes in the near future.
About this Mexico wall, its just nonsense. Some idiot even proposed building a wall between USA and Canada.
If democracy can work in Iceland and Switzerland, then it can work anywhere in the world.
If its properly set up, and the citizens are interested and involved, then this can be extremely effective system of control for any society. Something that ensures justice and fair play in a healthy society.
In Iceland, we have now sent 26 bankers to prison for 74 years combined for various crimes, mostly market manipulation, and we are no where nearly finished.
http://ruv.is/frett/26-daemdir-i-samtals-74-ara-fangelsi
Iceland is a country of 330,000 people, so you guys in USA need to roll up your sleeves to catch up.
Yes, yes. Lets build a supercomputer and call it Skynet. Or the Architect. Or Matrix
Or we could write a clever constitution that is simple and fair, something that would help politicians remember what their purpose is.
The Founders took pains to keep factions from seizing control of the government (specifically detailed in Madison’s Federalist No. 10). And it was exactly these factions that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were appealing to in last week's Democrat Party primary debate.
James Madison argued and planned for a republic form of government because a democracy, he said, would enable special interest factions (gays, feminists, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, bankers, environmentalists…) to control the government with “improper or wicked projects” (and in this, he actually listed “a rage for paper money”).
With a republic, powerful factions would be less likely to gain control than in a democracy… “less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it...”
The Founders despised democracy as a form of government because a majority of the people, or factions that join together to comprise a majority – a faction such as Obama’s pro-welfare constituency aided by a Jewish media monopoly and by corrupted political parties giving the impression that the people as a whole favor their contrived-majority policies - could be misled to override the best interests of the common good.
Coupled with his distaste for democracy, Madison also issued a warning against corruptive dangers in a republic: “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the sufferages, and then betray the interests, of the people.” It was betrayal of the people's interests that gave us the Federal Reserve System with its political control over all credit--managed credit that dictates which buinesses and individuals get credit and which will not--that has given us the current tyranny.
Remember the Alamo! Remember the Massacre at Goliad (where twice as many Texans died than at the Alamo)!
The root cause of America’s next revolution, like the Texas revolution, will be its vast racial and cultural differences, slammed into gear by the 1965 Immigration Act, switching America’s future from a white European culture to a Third World destination. From that point, Mexico’s peasant population literally flooded every American locale. Culture was upended and open borders, abandonment of law, drivers licenses for illegal aliens, automatic voter registration for all and the rest are setting the stage for a middle-class backlash.
America’s next revolution can be likened to the Texas revolution in 1835.
It was a race war to exterminate all whites in Texas and the vast majority of Mexicans who had lived as neighbors with whites sided with General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Blood was thicker than friendship.
Elmer Kelton, great writers of the West, wrote:
“A good percentage of the Mexican people in Texas disliked President Santa Anna. But he had proclaimed this a holy war, Mexican against American. It was, he said, a racial war, dark skins against the light. Other matters of politics were put aside for the duration of this crusade. A great many of the Mexican people who otherwise opposed him accepted this at face value because they basically disliked Americans even more than they disliked the little Napoleon of the West. Now that Mexican troops were the in the country again {no white settler] could afford to trust any Mexican—civilian or soldier.”
General Santa Anna butchered his way through Texas, pitting his troops against Texians (early Texas setlers) who were protected under the Mexican government’s Constitution of 1824 based on the United States Constitution. Mexico had been freed from Spanish control in 1821 after 300 years as a Spanish colony and 11 years of revolution. The hope of the Constitution was to encourage settlement and economic growth in the remote Mexican land of Texas.
And men of good will such as Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas, had worked hard for understanding between Americans and Mexicans
But it was not to be. Just as the framers of the 1965 Immigration Act and the vast number of politicians and bureaucrats now in Washington, DC.,President Santa Anna was a vain and hopeless tyrant.
You mean the great white heros of Texas who were determined to bring black slaves with them, and thought Mexicans inferior people?
How could the Mexicans of Texas, being stolen from Mexico, possibly not side with those great white heros? Racists bastards, obviously.
It was a race war; it wasn’t a war over territory. The territorial question had been handled by the Constitution of 1824.
Stephen Austin had signed agreements; and then along came Santa Anna. Austin rode several long trips by horseback to Mexico City to reassure the authorities there that the Texans were loyal and to try to persuade them to take action against some of conditions which were causing grievances. He worked hard to maintain the Constitution of 1824.
But on his last effort in Mexico City to explain how precarious the settlers’ position was, it was two years before Texans would see him again:
“He would come home a shaken and disillusioned man, no longer inclined to soothe the restless ones. He would come home from a long and unjustified imprisonment, certain at last that Texas had no future tied to Mexico, where all life depended upon the whims of whatever one man happened to have his fist gripped tightly around the whip of government (Kelton).”
So no way the Mexicans could have wanted to reverse that Constitution, as it was a completely settled issue, for all times. Got it. It was a race war, no way to think the Mexican leaders appeal to 'brown people' wasn't like many of our politican's appeal to white, brown, ..., they were different politicans.
And no way the slave owner whites who stole Texas originally would have ever annoyed the Mexicans, or appealed to whites in racial terms, it was all the Mexican's fault.
Glad you explained it.
If we’re going down that road, how about Spain stealing Texas from the Comanches (incidentally, the population of Texas in 1830 was 20,000 so apparently there were very few stolees, period)? On the eve of the Texas revolution, in 1835, the population was about 35,000 people. The preeminent Indian nation in this vast territory was the Comanche, persistently hostile to the Spanish, the Mexicans, and, finally, the Texans. And the Mexicans had invited in American settlers in part to help withstand the Indians, while most old settlers just wanted to be left alone.
From S.C. Gwynne's best-seller "Empire of the Summer Moon": "It is one of history's great ironies that one of the main reasons Mexico had encouraged Americans to settle in Texas in the 1820s and the 1830s was because they wanted a buffer against Comanches, a sort of insurance policy on their border lands. In that sense, the Alamo, Goliad, San Jacinto, and the birth of the Texas republic were the product of a misguided scheme to stop the Comanches."
Gwynne wrote that few nations have ever progressed with such breathtaking speed from the status of a skulking to a dominant power as the Comanche nation that, from an alleged stronghold in Colorado, established supremcy throughout Texas and far into Mexico. "That meant," wrote Gwynne, "that a Spanish settler or soldier in San Antonio was in grave and immediate danger from a Comanche brave sitting before a fire in the equivalent of modern-day Oklahoma City." That was the scope of the Comanche nation.
You might be interested to know that at the time of the Texas revolution there were many venal Mexican officials “greedy for personal riches and hungry for power,” according to Kelton, “despotic not only with the Texians but also with their own people. Such men had a strong tendency to regard other people as little more than cattle, to be used for their own gain and driven and cast aside. Zacatecas and Monclova… were places deep down in Mexico, and angry revolts had leaped to flame there. … Santa Anna crushed those people with a red-smeared fist. Then his ruthless eyes turned northward [to northern Mexico and Texas]. He had taken off his smiling mask. The sense of absolute power had gone to his brain like the fire of bad tequila. Now he was a stalking wolf that had gotten a taste of blood and liked it.”
Not bullish. It is already priced in.
Kim Jung Un fed his uncle to starving dogs live. The one per cent of America, and Europe, are going to meet the same fate. Redistribution of the wealth transfer will take place while we collectively watch the one per cent being fed to starving dogs one at a time until they are all being digested in the guts of dogs, and defecated out one turd at a time. In brief, the one per cent are actually future dog turds, methinks.
A government "of the people, for the people, and by the people" needs to have people that are all do-ers. You can't have a government made up of people that need the government to help them. The people needing help are the government. The country was founded when the country was made up of 95% do-ers.
Maybe if the government policy is to export jobs and tax the living shit out of people and then give them ebt cards, then you will have a lot of people who depend on the state for many things in a spiritless zombie type way i guess.
How about bringing back the ancient, venerable custom of human sacrifice to appease the Gods? Every christmas, right after lighting the national christmas tree on the ellipse, the richest american is beheaded on a public guillotine on the mall in front of the Capitol, and all of his wealth redistributed to the poor? Plus, all the advertising for the tv shows which cover the event, that money would also go to the poor. Drastic perhaps, but it might just do the trick ....
Only two ways to live exist:
#1: predatory slavery.
#2: live and let live.
-----
I refuse to aid or subject myself to those who choose #1 and expect me to comply. My reply to them is simple. Drop dead.
honestann
Drop dead.
So not so hot on #2 either :-)
Strauss and Howe "Like," this.
Interesting read....
http://www.schiffradio.com/death-of-a-patriot/
"But my father was most known for his staunch opposition to the Federal Income Tax, for which the Federal Government labeled him a “tax protester.” But he had no objection to lawful, reasonable taxation. He was not an anarchist and believed that the state had an important, but limited role to play in market based economy. He opposed the Federal Government’s illegal and unconstitutional enforcement and collection of the income tax. His first book on this topic (he authored six books in total) How Anyone Can Stop Paying Income Taxes, published in 1982 became a New York Times best seller. His last, The Federal Mafia; How the Government Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully collects Income Taxes, the first of three editions published in 1992, became the only non-fiction, and second and last book to be banned in America. The only other book being Fanny Hill; Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, banned for obscenity in 1821 and 1963."
The game is rigged and the first thing you do in a rigged game is restablish the correct enforcement of the rules.
The redistribution you want is EARNED redistribution. What is wrong with the world is a ton of the redistribution now was not EARNED it was taken by regulatory and legislative capture.
So the first order of business is to uncapture the means of monitoring the game and once that is done the redistribution will again flow to the worthiest participants.
What I just outlined is essentially what made this country wealhty. The tax policy should be somewhat progressive but EVERYONE should pay something just so everyone has an incentive to understand that government is full of friction and it is NOT a source of wealth but a tax on it.
Too big to fail and bailouts are all symptoms of a hopelessly captured system. To get creative destruction you have to let dumb evil fuckers fail.
Dupe