Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Bababooyee
I'm not talking about just taxation. If you truly feel that we need to start paying back for Iraq or whatever, put your money where your mouth is. You are able donate money to the government, fyi.
Please. Enough with the strawman-type bull$hit - it's just rude (and I know rude when I see it, pot-kettle, yeah yeah, I know  ). I was talking about what making the "common good" paramount can lead to (even if the rich are the ones taking it on the chin...for now). The issue is the underlying philosophy. Why don't you ask your stepmom the right questions: what does putting the good of the nation, the "common good" (or any other such collectivist term) above the individual lead to? |
Explain to me how the rich are taking it on the chin? They pay less of their income in taxation than at any time in the past 50 years. Where do you get that? How on earth are they taking it on the chin? The gap between the rich and poor is approaching gilded age levels. If anyone is taking it on the chin, it's the middle class, not the rich. Where do you get the idea the rich are suffering?
Working for the common good leads to the end of slavery, women's suffrage, labor rights and minimum wages. Along with national health care, though we're not there yet.
Having been in Cambodia a few years back, the divide between rich and poor is very great- there's no progressive taxation, you see. The rich run the government and are as corrupt as can be. We went to lunch with a very wealthy lady-- she was very nice-- and she has full-time bodyguards to protect her because, as a wealthy person in a very poor country, she's not safe walking by herself. It's not a nice feeling, eating lunch with armed bodyguards standing near you. That's the flip side not believing society owes something to the poor, B. Their fellow citizens are starving and their lives are at risk from said starving people. Some of us don't think gated communities are an ideal living circumstance, you know. But then maybe you favor aristocracies, which is what the kind of economic system you want leads to. Worked out very well for the Tsar, didn't it?
So you're claiming that religion and ethnicity had nothing to do with the genocide in Cambodia? Is that what you're claiming?