State House needs to get real
about local government — and taxes
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
A MEMBER of my Rotary club last week asked new House Speaker Bobby Harrell a question about property taxes.
Unfortunately, in answering the question, he did not say anything that sounded like "comprehensive tax reform."
This is worrisome, because after a buildup of two or three years in which it has looked constantly as though lawmakers were on the verge of getting serious about tackling the entire problem of how we fund essential services in this state, I’m starting to hear a lot of talk that sounds disturbingly like we’re in for another populist, Band-Aid round of property tax cutting without regard for anything else. (See above editorial.)
Take, for instance, what Mr. Harrell’s Senate counterpart had to say on our July 17 op-ed page.
This column, by the way, will make more sense if you read that column, from Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell. For stark contrast, also check out the July 26 piece by the Municipal Association‘s Howard Duvall.
Mr. McConnell’s piece is remarkable for its lack of grounding in reality; Mr. Duvall’s for the precise opposite.
In case you don’t have access to the Web at the moment, let me offer a few excerpts from Mr. McConnell’s piece, with a little commentary of my own:
"As long as we have property taxes, we are in effect paying rent to the government for the use of our property…." No, we’re not. What we are doing is paying our fair share for services that benefit us enormously as property owners. Those of us who own property are ultimately the greatest beneficiaries of services that make our communities worth living in: police and fire protection, libraries and, yes, public schools.
"Local governments can charge us as much as they want and feed their need to spend our money like they have a blank check." Local governments are run by officials who are elected with just as much legitimacy as Mr. McConnell, and who are caught between their mandate to provide everyday, essential services in their communities; state and federal mandates that they do certain things whether they want to or not; and the state Legislature’s never-ending efforts to prevent them from paying what it costs to do these things. If legislators, in their callous disregard , force local governments to raise property taxes beyond what voters find tolerable, it is the local officials who get voted out of office.
"Their (local governments’) presumption for reform has always been more sources of revenue but fewer and fewer restriction on how and how much they can spend." Well, duh. When costs are increasing, and everybody’s beating you up over the property tax, of course you’re going to seek other sources of revenue. And where in the world do state legislators get off placing restrictions on how local council members spend the revenues that they take full responsibility (and the political risk) for raising? Here’s how this works: When lawmakers passed a bill spelling out how local governments could charge impact fees for new residential development, they forbade the locals to spend the money on the one greatest cost such development generates — public schools. So the locals have to go back to the property tax, and they — not the guilty parties up in the State House — get strung up at the polls for it.
"Reform must be fair and, at the very least, must not produce a net increase for government in collected taxes." Oh, no. We wouldn’t want to provide rural kids with the same quality education that city kids get, or put enough troopers on the road, or make our prisons secure, or get the mentally ill out of jails and emergency rooms, or any of those other frills we can’t seem to afford with the present tax structure.
"I hope that then the voices of the people from the mountains to the coast can drown out those of the paid lobbyists." Translation: I hope that rising dissatisfaction with the problem the Legislature created gives me the political license I need to utterly ignore the realistic counsel of the governments closest to the people.
Local governments deal with the public at the most intimate level, where basic services are provided. They know what the public really wants from government because the public lets them know immediately when they’re failing to provide it. And they know what it costs, and they know what it’s like to be caught between the people they live among and the ideologues in Columbia who keep trying to make their jobs harder.
I finally understand why Mark Sanford is the first governor I’ve seen Sen. McConnell get along with: Both are passionately, pedantically libertarian. And neither of them allows the reality of what happens at the business end of government — where essential services are provided to real people — interfere with them as they sit in the State House and endlessly spin their anti-government theories.
Both of them starkly displayed this disconnect on the seat belt issue. But it matters so much more when the governor maligns public schools, or the senator trashes local government, with no regard for what’s actually happening out here in the world.
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Brad, I think the term anti-government, as you described Sanford and McConnell, is a form of subtle slander that those who love big government use to denigrate others. I would describe Sanford as an advocate of the free market place and the constitution. The governmental appetite for more money is insatiable. Clemson has raised tuition 146% since about 2000 and I guarantee you that the university administration would claim today that they don’t have enough money. What next after forced seat belt usage? How about outlawing eating or drinking while driving, that may be as dangerous or more dangerous as cell phone use while driving. Oops, another set of laws on the way from the do gooders of our society. As for the funding of schools, I would posit that giving the public schools (not all of them) across the board increased funding is an example of money down the drain. I find it interesting that No Child Left Behind is beginning to demonstrate quantitative results of success but this program was attacked by the entrenched educators in this state.
I think your blog is a nice improvement and I enjoy the comments posted, agree or disagree.
That’s a pretty good op-ed.
I’m going to make a few statements about the nature of capitalism, so before people get all wound up, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to start a fight with you here, and there is a real mathematical and statistical basis for what I am saying. I don’t have a lot of time today, but this subject is too important to ignore. My argument says that the capital investment process itself creates an exponential distribution of wealth-even among statistically equal people. Also, Capitalism rewards those with the most to begin with. In my mind, it’s crucial to understand these ideas, because SC is a poor state, and we don’t have many wealthy people or corporations to tax. To me, it makes sense to tax wealthy multinational corporations rather than middle class property owners. The only way to accomplish this is on the federal level. Over the past forty years, there has been a big shift in wealth from the middle and working classes to the rich (in the 60’s, the top 1% owned 19% of the wealth, today it’s closer to 40% of wealth).
If you give say, ten people, an equal amount of money and then they invest it, and then multiply the money by a random variable for each person, and do over and over again, and then rank the people in order of wealth from richest to poorest, over time you’ll get a Pareto distribution of wealth. This is an incredibly skewed distribution, so much so that if log of wealth was represented on the y axis, and of the log the number of people was represented x axis, then you’d have a straight line sloping downwards.
The wealth distribution at the top end for both individuals and corporations is a Pareto distribution, and according to Moshe Levy, the distribution implies that success in capital investment is independent of differential ability, and that the market is efficient.
If you simulate the experiment described above using a computer program, you’ll find that once the order of wealth is established, that it doesn’t change that much, even after very many investment rounds. Even among rich people, who make most of their money via investment, the next richest people above them tend to remain exponentially richer.
Ordinary people make their money through labor income and exchanges, and the real kicker here is that in income, this also creates a skewed distribution (specifically, the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution). The big difference however is that with exchanges, even though the income distribution is skewed, that money tends to flow from person to person.
So, if in the lower classes if money tends to shift from person to person, why do so few people cross over from being relatively poor to being rich? Easy-the rich just cut of the money supply be reducing or eliminating labor income, without which, exchanges are impossible. Also, since investors gave the laborer the money to begin with, they get the bulk of profit based on investment return. Regular Joe is probably going to stay broke.
I do this sort of thing all the time (I’m a fairly accomplished programmer-I use a graphical programming language). One of my best programs is called IER (Invest Exchange Return). It uses statistically equal entities and sets them up investing, making exchanges, and receiving returns. It gives near perfect wealth distributions. I use a lot of stock market data. Give the program total market cap, and the total number of companies, and it will produce a very realistic market cap distribution (the same is true for individual wealth also). A crucial point is that the wealth distribution is darn near rock solid. The amounts of market cap may change, but the way the market cap is distributed changes little.
Without progressive taxation, eventually personal wealth will be distributed in an even more skewed fashion than it currently is (similar to the stock market). Do we really want this to happen?
DEAR BRAD,IF IT NOT FOR LIBERAL EDITORS LIKE YOU US LEVEL MINDED COMON PEOPLE WOULD HAVE MUCH LESS TO LAUGH ABOUT.
Earlier today, I hurriedly wrote a sentence that does not make sense. Please forgive my typing errors. Here is the corrected version:
“This is an incredibly skewed distribution, so much so that if the log of wealth was represented on the y axis, and the log of the number of people was represented on the x axis, then you would have a straight line sloping downwards.”
Thanks,
Mark Whittington
Brad – I’ll get to you in a minute.
Mark – Your investment program is great for one-time analyses at specific points in time but suffers from the faux-precision of equations in that it does not explain the reality of the known and the unknown over time.
You write “My argument says that the capital investment process itself creates an exponential distribution of wealth-even among statistically equal people. Also, Capitalism rewards those with the most to begin with.”
The first part does not explain a Bill Gates or a Larry Ellison or either Buffet (Warren and Jimmy) or any other wealth-creator. The second ignores the fact that capitalism rewards those who offer desirable goods or services the market. Care to name a fairer system?
Moreover when you write that “in the 60’s, the top 1% owned 19% of the wealth, today it’s closer to 40% of wealth” you overlook the fact that they are different people. Gates and Ellison were just out of diapers and Rupert Murdoch wasn’t an American in the 1960s. The 2004 list of Forbes 400 richest Americans had 45 new folks on the list; 48 from the 2003 list failed to make the cut for the 2004 list. We can talks some other time about wealth and income and mobility, but it still exists; we just do a poor job of depicting it.
Your “ten people fixed amount of money” model may be helpful for closed systems, but it does not explain the open systems of the local, national, or international economies. Take the textile industry. Ooops, sorry, the foreigners already have. Despite political muscle and its own investments, the domestic industry the south “stole” from the northeast is shrinking.
Why would you want “near perfect wealth distributions”? The market values some work higher than other work. Why is it not okay for a hard-working physician to earn more than a Wal-Mart clerk? Isn’t this a classic supply-and-demand situation? It is, and the preference for progressive taxation is in one sense a preference for punishing success.
Finally, the only thing wrong with shifting the tax burden to multinational corporations can be found in the label “multinational” – the can move, no? Yes. Since US corporate rates are higher than those of most foreign countries, one objective of the US Jobs Creation Act of 2004 was to allow corporations to repatriate subsidiaries’ profits sheltered overseas, an amount estimated at $200B.
Brad – You and Howard Duvall make powerful cases for tax rationalization. Earlier in the week you again made the case for restructuring state government. The range, scope, and conflicting turf of commissions and agencies are astounding. (I wish you’d put “Power Failure” back on line.)
What Sanford and others are wrestling with and what you overlook is the need to provide a governing infrastructure in the context that Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman identified: government officials aren’t spending their own money. Their motivations are mixed, their spending plans are driven by various constituencies, and nobody really wants to pay for what they get. Moreover, as The State has documented time and time again, cronyism exerts a powerful influence in maintaining the composition and existence of some governmental units.
While the same is true in any enterprise, businesses do face the daily discipline of the market and competition. The larger a business gets, the greater the challenge becomes to get the incentives right so that managers at all levels meet the objectives of both the owners (shareholders) and customers.
What frustrates me, as you pointed out two weeks ago, is that the state found a promising way to alter incentives and redirect the focus of at least one group of government employees through the Education Accountability Act. By measuring progress and rating schools — producing a report card — the EAA focused the attention of school administrators more narrowly. Like No Child Left Behind it’s a management tool to provide essential information to consumers. Yet it’s not widely viewed as a good start and potential example for other agencies at the local and state levels. Heck, NCLB is pretty much hated by a lot of folks, labeled as intrusive and an under-funded mandate.
Aside from the politics and inertia, there’s probably a good reason for that – public units aren’t used to being evaluated and few have the systems necessary to permit evaluations. I work for a good-sized publicly held company and am accustomed to providing information that feeds corporate systems, a task that’s increased significantly with Sarbanes-Oxley. We have pretty efficient systems (employees have access to a wealth of financial and performance information) and when something starts moving beyond accepted thresholds, I know that the pressure to get cost or schedule or other variables back in line will increase, and that beatings will continue until morale improves.
When EAA came in (and nationwide, the NCLB), teacher friends told me of the stress and strain – they had to spend considerable extra time in creating, gathering, structuring, and passing on a wealth of information they’d never touched before. There were no systems, there were some false starts, and there was real pain because it was the teachers who had to add this task to their already packed schedule. (I should note here that by “system” I don’t mean a super-duper computer system, but rather articulated processes and procedures for the collection and processing of key data and definition of the structure that initiates, approves, and manages enterprise operations.) Schools and districts did have systems, but they were established to serve other purposes, not management information on student and school performance.
So while I applaud EAA, I continue to support school privatization incentives as the simplest way to improve the education delivered to SC children because the competition will also improve public education. It’s more the ideological with me, it’s informational. Consider this: the legislature had to pass a law to get educrats to measure and compare their efforts. The cry that NCLB was under-funded tells me that the folks in charge did not put management information on student and school performance too near the top of the “things to do” list, and for a very good reason: school administration and school boards are political, they must first satisfy diverse interest groups and the very idea of comparing one district with another is as abhorrent as comparing one school with another – someone’s feelings might get hurt. Education is secondary, although most teachers do try their best to make it number one.
While there may be many reasons to bash Sanford, I’ll argue that getting the best education for the most kids is his primary motive.
But we can’t even get a consensus to privatize Santee Cooper, a/k/a the South Carolina Public Service Authority. It creates economic distortions yet provides the politically appealing benefits of cheap power to its service area and jobs for the well-connected. Why not eliminate the distortions by holding an auction? Or is that another of the anti-government theories?
I understand that you’re taking what you to believe is a pragmatic approach within the existing framework. It looks to me that the existing framework needs to be replaced entirely – if every politician’s ox is gored, perhaps dramatic change will be viewed as easier to stomach.
Mike,
Many thanks for your thoughtful response and great questions. It’s late, so I’ll get back with you tomorrow with some answers.
Thanks,
Mark
The mantra of big government supporters is always “more, more, more”. And where does the “more” come from? My pocket. We have a broken taxation system (at all levels of government) that defines “fairness” as taking from one person to give to another -. A system that allows me to pay more property taxes than my next door neighbors simply because my home
costs more — and yet we receive exactly the same services. I pay twice as much
property tax for one car as the other based
on age yet I’m driving both down the same
roads. The lunacy of the existing taxation system is beyond comprehension.
You want to fix the taxation problem? Go to a sales tax and income tax model only and base this year’s budget on last year’s
revenues. Let the politicians fight over
a known quantity rather than just going back to the well for another dip out of the taxpayer’s wallet.
And, regarding rural schools having the
same opportunities as others, why doesn’t
The State FOR ONCE take a stand against the wasteful spending that occurs in our supposed “wealthy” districts. The amount of money thrown away on technology in classrooms would build schools and pay for teachers all over the state.
Crooked politicians and their lobbyists like Duvall could not be so successfull without the enablers like Brad Warthen.
“Comprehensive tax reform” is the last thing they want. It is an all-or-nothing stalling tactic to block reforms that we know need to be done today. These people never have any solutions, only objections to the imposition of controls on their profligate spending.
Another phony argument repeated by Warthen is that local government is closer to the people and more responsive to them.
All government is inherently corrupt, and needs constitutional restrictions on power. Most local officials are elected by small turnouts, and they fall into a few categories:
* Power elites: rich people and their appointees who seek to protect their wealth and take more from the taxpayers. Kit Smith is the best example in Columbia. In Charlotte, it would be Lynn Wheeler, of the family which owns NASCAR.
* Balkan racists – these representatives of little fiefdoms who stay in office by promising to rob the rest of the taxpayers for their constituents. Bernice Scott is a good example. The blacks of Fulton County, GA are her model, opening promising to “tax whitey”.
* Well-meaning weaklings, who can be led around by the Power Elites.
* A few good honest representatives, like Eddie Weaver an Irene Neuffer. The press hates them because they are not full-time politicians, and do intend to be, so they don’t play games.
Mike,
I did not finish writing a response tonight. I should finish the response tomorrow. I enjoy answering your perspicacious questions.
Thanks,
Mark
Your investment program is great for one-time analyses at specific points in time but suffers from the faux-precision of equations in that it does not explain the reality of the known and the unknown over time.
Good point. I’ve thought about this many times in the past, and you are partially right. The known and unknown are really philosophical concepts, and they lead inevitably to cognitions. I reject Locke’s notion that all knowledge is derived from experience. Also, I don’t believe Bertrand Russell’s assertion that a priori knowledge is basically limited to mathematics. I believe that much useful knowledge is created by the human mind alone, and that the knowledge created within the mind combines with new ideas to create new knowledge. I suppose that in modern parlance, I believe that the synthetic cognition is just as important as the analytic cognition.
In my Monte Carlo programs, I use both cognitions. There is a timeless element to all of this though- If rational entities use capital investment to fund labor income with an agreed upon return, where the object for all is to maximize their relative wealth, and if all the rational entities agree to free monetary exchanges, then a particular time averaged distribution of wealth necessarily has to develop. It is possible, however, to flatten the wealth distribution via progressive taxation. Different capitalist countries have different percentage amounts of wealth inequality, but they all share the same basic distribution of wealth. All capitalist countries would have the same percentage amounts of wealth inequality (time averaged) if they had the same rate of re-distributive taxation.
A big problem has been that no one has ever been able to accurately describe the entire distribution of wealth with a single analytic equation (Until now! I found the real distribution about two months ago!). I wish I could share the name of the distribution with you, but I’m not finished with what I’ve set out to accomplish. I’ll probably be finished in the winter or spring of next year-then I’ll publish it.
The article that you referenced is hostile concerning mathematics. I’m certainly not a mathematician, but I’m deeply indebted to mathematicians and physicists.
You write “My argument says that the capital investment process itself creates an exponential distribution of wealth-even among statistically equal people. Also, Capitalism rewards those with the most to begin with.”
The first part does not explain a Bill Gates or a Larry Ellison or either Buffet (Warren and Jimmy) or any other wealth-creator. The second ignores the fact that capitalism rewards those who offer desirable goods or services to the market. Care to name a fairer system?
I’ll pick on Gates here. Is Gates smart? Yes. Was he one of the first people to understand that computer programs would eventually be more important than the electronics that processed the programs? Yes. Did he understand that his operating system would become a ubiquitous standard if bundled with IBM PCs? Yes. Does he deserve the wealth equivalent of the combined bottom 40% of the American population? No. Do we need Windows to monopolize the operating system market? No. Does capitalism necessarily lead to monopolies? Yes.
Is Windows a desirable product? I’d much rather use Linux, but I’m pretty much forced to use Windows (for obvious reasons). Today we could easily ascertain desirability and value by statistical methods using small samples without the usual huge economic upheaval.
I’m biased, but for me, Social Democracy proves to be a better system. The system that I want doesn’t yet exist, however Social Democracy would be a good starting point.
Moreover when you write that “in the 60’s, the top 1% owned 19% of the wealth, today it’s closer to 40% of wealth” you overlook the fact that they are different people. Gates and Ellison were just out of diapers and Rupert Murdoch wasn’t an American in the 1960s. The 2004 list of Forbes 400 richest Americans had 45 new folks on the list; 48 from the 2003 list failed to make the cut for the 2004 list. We can talk some other time about wealth and income and mobility, but it still exists; we just do a poor job of depicting it.
You are right that we do a poor job of depicting wealth and income mobility. The US is the most class stratified major Western country on the planet. We have the highest levels of wealth and income inequality, the most child poverty, the highest percentage of uninsured people, the most regressive tax system, and the lowest rate of union membership of any major Western industrialized country. We also work more hours and have less vacation than our Western European counterparts.
Of course, Gates, Ellison, and Murdoch were once not on the scene, but you can bet that the same basic distribution of wealth existed then, as it does now. The big difference between then and now is that now our tax system is more regressive. Also, free trade undermines the wages of American workers. Today, outsourcing is killing good paying jobs big time-comparative advantage at work! That’s what happens when you take 150 million American workers who make $15/hr on average, and pit them in competition with billions of people who make $0.69/hr on average. It’s great for investors, yet terrible for workers (most of us). Did I mention that CEO pay was about 45 times average pay back in the sixties, vs. about 400 times average pay today?
Your “ten people fixed amount of money” model may be helpful for closed systems, but it does not explain the open systems of the local, national, or international economies. Take the textile industry. Ooops, sorry, the foreigners already have. Despite political muscle and its own investments, the domestic industry the south “stole” from the northeast is shrinking.
Why would you want “near perfect wealth distributions”? The market values some work higher than other work. Why is it not okay for a hard-working physician to earn more than a Wal-Mart clerk? Isn’t this a classic supply-and-demand situation? It is, and the preference for progressive taxation is in one sense a preference for punishing success.
Here is my favorite observation/question of yours-Is the economy an open system or a closed system? My answer: the economy is open in the long term because new products, services, and ideas of value will be introduced over time. In the short term however, the economy can be treated as a closed system. As far as the distribution of wealth goes though, the time averaged distribution will always be the same, given the same tax structure.
Is money conserved? Concerning income-mostly yes. That’s why you can describe the bottom 95% of a population’s income with a Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution.
Is wealth conserved? For the most part, no. Wealth doesn’t follow a conservation law (that’s why currency values always change-to compensate).
The trick is to give anything that can be converted to money a monetary value in the short term, and if you follow the rules of capital investment and allow free exchanges, and if you constantly normalize the total amount of money in the system, and then average the short term distributions of money, then you’ll get the right long term distribution of wealth.
We’re focusing on the wrong part of capitalism. We need to be focusing on creating good divisions of labor rather than capital investment. We need to focus on creating low variation, high quality processes. Unfortunately, the cornerstone of capital investment is hierarchy, and hierarchies militate against good divisions of labor. We’ll never solve our problems using empiricism and inductive thinking alone.
The Wal-Mart clerk in some instances may have better ideas than the hard-working physician. The clerk’s ideas will probably never be heard, and will probably never be implemented. The clerk’s ideas will never be rewarded to the same level as the physician’s ideas. That is what class stratification does-it often keeps the best ideas from being implemented, and then adequately rewarded.
Finally, the only thing wrong with shifting the tax burden to multinational corporations can be found in the label “multinational” – the can move, no? Yes. Since US corporate rates are higher than those of most foreign countries, one objective of the US Jobs Creation Act of 2004 was to allow corporations to repatriate subsidiaries’ profits sheltered overseas, an amount estimated at $200B.
Let them move on. If congress had any guts then they would make sure that the multinationals that moved on would never do business in the US. High tax rates don’t mean anything unless they are enforced. Loopholes have to be closed.
Thanks,
Mark
Mark –
First, I look forward to your description of the entire distribution of wealth with a single analytic equation. The Kling article I cited was an economist’s critique of math bigotry among old-school economists; it described and welcomed the emergence of greater emphasis on other analytic tools.
I cited Bill Gates and others to counter your argument that wealth in the US economy is static and “rewards those with the most to begin with.” I concluded that segment with a request that you name a fairer system than capitalism, and you do: Social Democracy as the first step to some ideal that you’re also still working on. I’ll return to that below.
But first I think you take my point that the people occupying the various wealth strata of our society change over time when you write “Of course, Gates, Ellison, and Murdoch were once not on the scene [in 1960], but you can bet that the same basic distribution of wealth existed then, as it does now.” If you mean that our society has few very rich folks and a lot of not-so-rich folks, we do agree. But over time folks move up and down through the income quintiles – poor students become successful and increase their earnings during their working years, then retire and earn less. That is life in a free society, as is the fact that some folks become quite successful and earn a lot of money for a while. How about a kid who’s lived with parents in government housing for a lifetime, but goes to college, gets a scholarship, then goes on to get a six-figure job? Ask Chelsea Clinton!
Thus the onus should be on you to substantiate (with links) your assertion that the “US is the most class stratified major Western country on the planet.” Social stratification is a phenomenon that persists through generations. So perhaps you can describe the prevailing caste systems you find in America. Do you mean, for example, the high salaries of the few in the NBA, NFL, or MLB?
You have a laundry list of complaints that I will cover in their entirety someday at my soon to be open blog. Some I neither understand nor find relevant, such as union membership, mainly because this chart shows data like this: US – 13%, France – 9%, Germany – 26%, Sweden – 82%. We’re above France, but lower than Germany and Sweden. All of those other countries have median income levels less than 75% of the US. What’s the point about unions? Do you mean the players’ unions in the NBA, NFL, or MLB?
Child poverty is bad, but what’s the cause? Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch? Perhaps you can help me with this issue, because among ethnic groups child poverty is inversely related to the percentage of intact families. Asians have little child poverty and the greatest percentage of two-parent households, whites more and less, etc. Is there a correlation?
Health insurance is one of my favorite topics, mainly because I really, really, want to get rid of mine and set up a health savings account. Health insurance is regulated by the states with coverage often mandated by legislatures. Mandated health insurance benefits like acupuncture, marriage counseling, hairpieces, and so forth drive the price of premiums way up in some states, as do other screwy provisions. Do I exaggerate? The average Joe in New Jersey pays $4,044 annually in health insurance premiums. Pennsylvanians – next door to New Jersey, pay just $1,488. Here’s some background.
Finally, a very real problem with health insurance is that young single males who can afford it tend not to buy it, while young single women who can afford it do, because they use it. So if we can find a way to force the young guys to buy something they don’t need, we’ll be in much better shape as their coerced “contributions” offset the costs of others in the insurance pool. Ideas?
You don’t like the fact that we Americans take less vacation and work more hours than folks in Old Europe do. In software lingo, you see that as a bug, I see that as a feature in that it may be one reason why the US has enjoyed such robust economic growth over the past thirty years.
I think I can respond to the rest of your response by looking at Social Democracy as a good starting point for moving away from capitalism. But first, a warning: Be careful when you write “We’ll never solve our problems using empiricism and inductive thinking alone.” We’re not talking substances, the possession of which is a crime everywhere but the Netherlands, are we?
First, social democracy is usually defined as a transitional stage:
So it’s a gradual move from private ownership to state- or collectively-owned property. From what you’ve written I surmise that you favor:
You need to acknowledge that any move to socialism (communism) inevitably requires that folks surrender whatever personal liberty they have left.
Think about that. When you take wealth at death and raise taxes to confiscatory levels, you bring out the worst in people. Human nature, being what it is, means that folks will seek personal advantage. You want to eliminate inequalities, so you’ll have to be coercive. Few socialist political theorists openly or readily acknowledge that socialism requires a MFWIC (Main Figure Who Insures Conformity) to establish and enforce the rules. In practice you produce what you decry, an elite that controls the economy, means of production, education, science — everything, no? Even the NBA, NFL, and MLB.
You would introduce the features that you seem to find objectionable. For example,
I can see the path you would set us on in England and Old Europe. Tony Blair – I like the guy – belongs to a party that agrees with you. It looks like their attempt to end jury trials in Britain and Wales has stalled for a bit or just been weakened. Maybe all they can do is allowing the defense and the prosecution to appeal “perverse” jury verdicts, rendering moot a verdict of “not guilty.”
How about eliminating guns, but also restricting the right to self-defense (PDF file) in general? Blair and crew have enacted severe restrictions.
Kind of a brave new world, no? No fox-hunting for the country folks, either.
Gotta cut out hate speech, especially that directed at the MFWIC (free registration requried) – can’t slow progress, can we.
The Internet has gotten out of hand too, gotta put some controls in. We can process violators more quickly through the legal system without the juries.
Doth I inferest too much? We have a fundamental difference, such as when you write:
The clerk may have great ideas, but they have less value in the context of a clerk’s area of responsibility that any good ideas a physician may have in the physician’s area of responsibility. I happen to know that Wal-Mart does solicit, reward, and broadcast ideas its personnel have, but a physician deals with a more valuable set of variables – health and life. Because of greater training, dedication, and smarts required, we are willing to pay the physician more. Why is that not fair? Let’s put it another way: there are fewer folks who can do the physician job than can do the clerk job, and the former is more critical to our well-being than the latter, although I do seem to have more trouble than most finding what I’m after in any store. Supply and demand, no? I must add that there is value in all jobs and we should not belittle those who perform any of them.
Your direction is to create a closed economic system, one that you and yours control for the betterment of all. By preventing a Bill Gates’ unwarranted — in your view – wealth, you’re preventing the emergence of new ideas that allow us to prosper. I will grant the fact that you’d be able to equalize economic factors for everyone, but you’d be equalizing misery by restricting liberty and denying folks the pursuit of happiness.
We’ve gone some way from Brad’s point, exploring more ground than he meant to cover. What I may not have been clear on is that I agree that taxes require rationalization and a preliminary is the restructuring of state agencies, commissions, and governing structure. I want something like my credit care bill so I can see what I’m paying for. I also know that I don’t want to pay for some legislator’s relative to serve on some commission in violation of state law.
The Truth About Growth
A person’s body actively grows until he reaches the age of 21, where further growth, although not impossible, may not be as visible as before. During puberty, a person’s body is at its height to produce growth hormones. The growth is astoundingly fast, you can almost measure the changes every week.
However, at the age of 21, the body begins to produce less and less of growth hormones, drastically slowing down the speed at which we grow. The growth is very minimal; you can hardly see any difference from the past year and today.
Because the body’s hormones reach a balance state during this age and beyond, there is almost no hope of improving one’s height, unless the growth hormones are again released. Now this is the point where experts tried to figure out how to release the growth hormones that are either being produced too few or are hardly being produced at all. Visit here to get more about this, http://www.growth-flex.com/ .
This is where human growth hormone releasers take the stage. Since the problem of many small people is that their glands produce very few growth hormones, it is only logical to have something to trigger it. Many products that trigger the release of growth hormones are now being developed and produced in the market. One example is the Growth Flex V Pro System.
Of course, these products also require that a person become physically active. This way, the bones and muscles will slowly adapt to the increasing level of growth hormone production in the body. Some exercise techniques are being taught to maximize growth levels. Take tour here at, http://www.growth-flex.com/ .
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vanjoshep