Quote from: Mike Christ on October 09, 2017, 09:29:54 PM

I don't like the mindset of crabs in a bucket. Taxation wastes money hardcore, and more taxation wastes more money; whatever you're trying to pull off through taxation can be solved much more cheaply and cleanly through the market. It would be better to lower both taxes and governmental influence (can't have one without the other and expect fiscal health.) That the rich get tax breaks doesn't change the fact that they pay the most taxes, and also further pay politicians the most bribes to work for the rich, to make the rich richer. The state is basically a whore for the highest bidder and the highest bidder is typically the wealthiest around. The state is essentially a big gun that can be pointed at anyone to try to get them to do something. It was intended to be a big gun to point at our enemies but this was perverted into what it is now. You are paying for the wealthy to control you. The logical conclusion is a Soviet Russia or North Korea situation where the wealthy pretend to be the saviors of the proletariat (propaganda which they paid the state to feed to the kids so they'd grow up to accept it--we're seeing this manifest in our latest generation, esp. noticeable in college students who are just begging for it.) Whatever the rich pay, how much or how little, is ultimately irrelevant; in fact you would want them to pay nothing, and make the poor have to pay for the extreme levels of governmental expense, so that they would get pissed off and dismantle the state apparatus sooner to remove the most unfair advantage the rich get in society. In the opposite direction, if the rich wind up paying, say, 100% of taxes, then they wind up becoming the state (many already are; I first became aware of this watching the documentary Food Inc., which pointed out that many members of major corporations also serve as members of the federal government, the so-called "revolving door" phenomenon.) So what's the difference? Well, the state is the only organization in society with free reign to enforce law, and can do so while also breaking its own laws (simply by exempting itself)--especially problematic when the state has barred guns from society, which gives them no resistance at all. In other words the rich can do whatever they want without any oversight whatsoever (certainly not God, which they always remove immediately during such "revolutions"--wouldn't want anyone practicing a culture that may go against the new rulers and their vision.)

In short, the state enables to rich to weaponize their wealth against the rest of society, rather than make them do something useful to get more wealth like reinvesting or issuing loans (although some will say loans are evil, but those same people will say they have no money to pursue their dreams--well what do you think loans are for?) I could not care less about tax breaks for the rich, it's a red herring.

I will disagree with Imfinnabeon; I will argue that the pursuit of democracy is what got us into this position in the first place. First, you say that the public eats up propaganda willingly (though I don't think politicians are the only party here feeding propaganda, I think the mainstream media is the primary source of propaganda which is in turn owned by the wealthy.) In the very next sentence you want the public to be able to vote directly for what they want. Well, what do you think they're going to vote for?--what they were propagandized to vote for. They'll have some abstract notion of what they want--we all know what we want out of society--but what isn't clear is how those desires are manifested, and that's where the manipulation occurs. For example, many people are under the impression that by growing the welfare program, people will have a better safety net in life and will be able to worry less about their finances, enabling them to get out of poverty more easily and to soften the blow of hardships. In reality people wind up becoming addicted to welfare, and fail to develop skills and look for work since hey--they're already getting paid. This means less money for the rest of society to spend on useful things like entrepreneurship, which would create the jobs that the welfare recipients aren't taking. This is in a republic--in a more direct democracy, for example, people are inclined to vote for the easy life, without worrying about the fiscal end of the equation, because while everyone can show great concern over themselves, they typically don't express much concern (if any) over society as a whole.

The primary issue with democracy is that it pushes the average voter IQ to the national mean--that is to say, if your national IQ is 100, then your national leadership will be operating on an IQ of 100. Your nation will act as a whole only as intelligently as the average person. This is true also for a republic which has an egalitarian (i.e. democratic) voting system--no matter who smart, no matter how dumb, no matter how insane or evil, every single vote has the same exact value, and those people are going to opt for politicians who they like the most, whether or not those politicians are of good moral character or whether they are remotely intelligent. Because the poor can easily be manipulated to support the rich even against their own benefit, it's obvious that you wouldn't want a democratic system to prevent the chaos involved with the shortcomings of Joe & Jane Schmoe.

You'd want some kind of system which gives greater voting power to the smartest of society (although that may not be enough to stop weaponization of the state against one's own society, but it would at least put some caps on it, like, for example, a real budget due to a lack of a central bank which would mean a lack of inflation.) Democracy is antithetical to this: for the pursuit of equality in the value of man, we get mediocrity. This occurs everywhere egalitarianism is pursued, but as pointed out before, the Soviet Union is a great example of where absolute egalitarianism takes you: absolute mediocrity.

With all this said, I don't think the rich are necessarily trying to enslave the poor by the virtue of their being rich--of course, if you get rich through manipulating the state, then you'll want to pursue that more. Wealth is a great incentive to pushing people into work, and this is true both for the poor and the rich. When it no longer becomes profitable for the rich to manipulate the state, they will stop. Demanding the rich to stop without removing their incentive to do so is like demanding a river to stop without removing its source--it doesn't really matter what you want, it's going to happen.

Well, I was going to write something lengthy, although shorter, but this post pretty much sums it up anyways.

We, as a society, are asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking "is this tax break fair?" or "does this loophole only benefit the rich?" we should be asking "why exactly do we need so much useless and wasteful taxation to begin with? Can't we live in a less authoritarian society?"