NationStates Jolt Archive

We urge all regional delegates to kindly vote for the following proposal, "Tax on Excessive Income."

Thank you.

-Eduardo Booker-Yolekagabansta, Associate Receptionist, Office of Forumal and Floral Considerations, United Nations Delegation, Most Serene Republic of Etanistan

"Tax on Excessive Income

Article 1: Finding the income disparity between the wealthiest and least wealthy individuals to be alarmingly large, all individuals with yearly incomes of more than 1,000 times the poverty rate of their nation shall be taxed at a rate of 100% for all income above 1,000 times the poverty rate.

Article 2: Each member government of the United Nations shall retain the right to define, with the exception stipulated by Article 5, for their own nation, the poverty rate to be used. Should the government currently not define any poverty rate, they will be required to do so when this resolution is passed.

Article 3: The monies collected by this tax shall be put into a fund at the United Nations entitled "Income Distribution Fund," which shall be administered by a body of 100 administrators from 100 different nations elected by all UN Regional Delegates.

Article 4: The purposes of this fund shall be the following: 1. Aid given to both member and non-member governments for humanitarian purposes, 2. Aid given to the poorest individuals of each member nation. The governmental aid shall be awarded at the discretion of the administrative body created by Article 3 above. The general body of the United Nations shall retain the right to veto any use of the governmental aid it deems to be insufficiently humanitarian via United Nations Resolutions, which shall be proposed and voted on in the same manner currently used. The individual aid shall be given to any individuals of member governments that currently have yearly incomes below the poverty line of their nation. The amount of aid to be given to individuals shall be exactly the amount to bring their yearly income up to the poverty line for their nation.

Article 5: Should any member government define a poverty rate that is either too high or too low for one or more of the articles of this resolution to be effectively enforced as judged by the administration body defined in Article 3, a new poverty rate for the nation will be created by the administration body for purposes of the enforcement of this resolution."

I'm sorry, but I can't approve it. Actually I'm not sorry, I'm morally opposed. If they make the money by their own will and wit, it's theirs to keep. Everyone can earn money, but they have to try. Not everyone can earn millions, but everyone can raise their income, they just prefer to be lazy.
If the rich decide they want to give money to the poor, they will tell you, if not, it's their right.

Why is there no option in the poll to tax everyone to the hilt?

No one deserves to be exempt from crippling taxes except me and all of my closest friends, family and advisors

Much as I favour the redistribution of wealth, I'm afraid Article 3 appears to be in breech of the UN resolution "UN taxation ban" (Jan 13 2003), which states "The UN shall not be allowed to collect taxes directly from the citizens of any member state for any purpose."

I'm afraid that as a nation that currently has a 100% tax rate we too would be highly reluctant to give tax income to a UN body that we do not control.

Whilst I agree with some income redistribution, and said so in the poll, I don't like this. Taxation does need to depend on individual nations - you can't really standardize it globally - and there are comparatively so few people that actually have that much money, that it wouldn't make that much of a difference to anything when spread out across all the needy people of a world containing over 100,000 nations.

However, to the point about the Taxation ban resolution, there's nothing to stop us breaking those rules - we aren't repealing it, we're just ignoring it. Additionally, someone older and wiser correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember being told that the resolutions of that period, many of which were game mechanics resolutions like the taxation ban (which would have required mods to start deleting any proposal which proposed a programme requiring funds), were passed before the mods started deleting inappropriate proposals - so we would be even more justified in ignoring them.

While the basic idea of placing a far greater tax on the rich is appealing, this is far better carried out on a national level and is already done by many. The United Nations has no reason to be burrowing into individual countries economic positions.

Just out of curiosity, why do you all believe that those who produce most are least entitled to their salaries? The principle behind what you call, "income redistribution" is that the wealthy are all making their money due to sheer luck and genetics and that it is not the poor's fault that they are not rich. However, most of the wealthy did not start out that way! My parents, many of my friends' parents, and many hundreds of thousands of people, I'm sure, started quite poor and worked their way up to making hefty salaries. Anyone can support themselves quite well if they are willing to work for it. Some will make less than others, obviously, but anyone can earn enough to live off of if they work diligently. Sure, some cannot work due to physical handicaps, and of course they would receive charity. However, the charity they recieve must be given VOLUNTARILY. Mandatory charity, enforced at the point of a gun, is not just nor moral. The government has no right to strip the able of the fruits of their labor. Just as it is wrong for the weak to be enslaved by the strong, so too should the strong not be enslaved by the weak.

Again, I made a triple post. I really have to start ignoring my computer...

:x

Catholic Europe's tax rate on the super-rich is one of the highest. However, we do not support this proposal because we believe that the economy should be up to the individual nation to manage - not the UN or any other nation(s).

We support your proposal... in principle. We believe in social justice and the money that would be used would go to many great causes. However, we believe 100% is too much of a tax on anyone. You would create poverty in a sense by making the wealthiest bankrupt. Had you written 99% or any number lower we would have voted.

We will not vote for this resolution and if it reaches the floor we will vote against it.

Confederacy of the Isles Region UN Delegate
Hung Tony

It is up to each country to decide taxes, not the UN. The UN is not Robin Hood.

:arrow: This Catholic nation of Dictators agrees with the Anti-Commi clan and all the ppl who share a similar position because the Dictators don't like taxes. We just don't.

Plus, the government is force by its nature. The Dictators are morally opposed to using this force to acheive their own goals for society in such a drastic way. And if there is so much taxation, where will the incentive be to work hard and to make money. Its better to have a lot of money in one place than no money nowhere.

:?: And how is the government to decide who is poor? Or in need of this money. Some poor people have college educations that they could use and are only in a temporary slump. Other people choose to be poor (a small fraction, but they are there). What do you do with those people? And if there are amazing benefits for the poor, I know that I'd just be poor because its great to get stuff for free.

:?: Some rich people work hard for their money and others are born into it. Does hard work or luck need to be penalized? Should we hate people because they were born under some damn fine star constellations. Fortune treats some people beter than others. Is it the government's job to fix this??

All questions that we pose to ourselves.

:idea: The Current Catholic Dictator believes that such a measure to equalize economic classes would do a few things.

1) divide our territory and create more disputation than there already is. We beleive this would happen because the rich ppl would feel they are being targeted unfaily and get upset with the Dictators and the lower classes of the country. The lower classes would feel as if they had been victimized by the upper classes and begin to hate the rich people. The Dictators don't want any class warfare. we fight each other enough in our little rubber and foam arenas.

2) this measure would damage our economy because the gambling industry must be taken into consideration. If we tax too much then there may not be the incentive to go gamble and get rich, which would hurt that industry. Then the Gambling bosss would be upset with us. Plus, we'd be in more trouble with the bosses because we'd be taxing them too bc. they are so rich. We don't want that because you never kno what kind of heat those bosses are packing.

3.) This measure would send us into Aristotle's definition of a democracy. In appealing to either end of the economic/social/political spectrm we would leave the middle road and become a nation that only serves one class. That is bad. It would mean our society had deteriorated beyond repair because the sense of community with all people would have been dissolved, and we would only be a shadow of the former ideal- the polity.

4) the dictators feel this measure would give us too much power and would lead to our dethronement. Dictators love powr, but we don't want to give ourselves too much because then other people will want it and try to take it away from us. If the government had the kind of power to tax people that much then we beleive our seat as head of this great nation would be in jeoprady.

:arrow: Instead- we propose the following measures for later debate and consideration

1) We recognize that people should not be left in the snow to starve.
2) Foster Catholic feelings within our nation (could be changed depending on the nation implementing similar policies) to encourage young men and women to become monks and nuns and priests to spread charity and good will throughout the world
3) provide for more tax benefits for those people who contribute extensively to community service or give money to charities
4) create some sort of community building programs to be determined at a later time
5) Resolve NOT to build homeless shelters or public housing that would quickly deteriorate in the inner city. Instead, spread around the poor people in the inner city and suburban areas so that the area where they concentrate doesn't become more run down.

My parents, many of my friends' parents, and many hundreds of thousands of people, I'm sure, started quite poor and worked their way up to making hefty salaries.

A few examples does not prove, or even suggest with any degree of likelihood, a general trend. The majority of rich people were born into rich families, got a good education (often at a private school, or at least at a good state school in a middle-class area), and were thus better equipped, through no necessary additional effort on their part, to earn more and thus continue the cycle. To get to the top or middle from the bottom requires far more ability, luck, and effort than it takes to remain in those privileged positions if you're born there.

Anyone can support themselves quite well if they are willing to work for it. Some will make less than others, obviously, but anyone can earn enough to live off of if they work diligently.

That's true, at least in advanced, rich societies, but mere survival is not enough. Even if you dispute the right to a fairly good quality of life, don't the children of the poor, born into an underprivileged position through sheer bad luck, deserve a good education to give them a better chance of climbing the social ladder? Obviously, the rich can better afford to fund this, which is why the rich are taxed more.

Sure, some cannot work due to physical handicaps, and of course they would receive charity. However, the charity they recieve must be given VOLUNTARILY.

Rich people, and people in general, are not charitable enough to provide enough money to support all the disabled and seriously ill people who cannot afford to do so themselves. IMO, a person's right to life, and perhaps even their right to a decent quality of life, takes precedence over anyone's right to their property - whether people automatically deserve a good standard of living is probably the fundamental point over which we disagree, so I doubt that either will persuade the other.

Mandatory charity, enforced at the point of a gun, is not just nor moral.

It is not enforced at the point of a gun. You are not threatened with death if you don't pay taxes, you are threatened with fines (effectively more taxes), and perhaps then imprisonment. Again, the right to a decent standard of living takes precedence.

The government has no right to strip the able of the fruits of their labor. Just as it is wrong for the weak to be enslaved by the strong, so too should the strong not be enslaved by the weak.

This is the right to strip the lucky (whether in the lottery of social position at birth, the genetic lottery, or the simple lottery of life) of the products of their luck. Not nearly so much a matter of strength as of luck - the way I see it, the order of influence on success is luck, ability, effort.

We are extremely satisfied with the comments given by various nations in this forum. Thank you all. We have four comments:

1. It did occur to us to change the 100% tax figure to 95% and we may modify the proposal and submit it again.

2. It is our state policy that income can only be "earned" up to a certain amount - roughly 1,000 times the poverty rate. After that, income is not "earned" but is acquired through manipulation of the labor of other people. We would ask the Anti-Commi Clan and other such nations why it is that the labor of a janitor is worth less than the labor of a corporate executive. Janitors probably work harder and longer hours. They spend less time playing golf and having lunches on company money. They put in honest hard work day after day for little reward. It is not hard work that creates wealth or even the amount of work, it is where the work fits into the political system and the economic system that sprouts from it. No one deserves more than 1,000 times the poverty rate. No individual needs that much money. Hence, money past that should be redistributed to those in less advantageous political positions.

3. We recognize the sovereignty of member nations, which is why the administration of the tax is done by 100 nations, elected by all regional delegates. We plan on adding term limits to these positions. Also, the UN may disagree with any action of the administrators through UN resolutions.

4. We feel that this proposal is no less "radical" than other proposals that have passed before, especially the "Rights of Labor Unions" Resolution. We assumed that many of the nations that voted for that resolution might favor this one as well.

- Villejo Garbanzo-Lukatz, Interior Minister of Interior Decorating and Ministerial Approval, Etanistan

A few examples does not prove, or even suggest with any degree of likelihood, a general trend. The majority of rich people were born into rich families,

Incorrect. Not a single American billionaire inherited his fortune.

And mathematically speaking, the average American with no college education makes $35,000 a year for 45 years. That's almost $1.6 million. With proper management, just about anyone can be a millionaire.

got a good education (often at a private school,

Going to Andover Prep helps, but the fact remains that at Ivy League schools 60% to two-thirds of the students graduated from public schools.

or at least at a good state school in a middle-class area),

Actually, in my state, inner-city kids almost always win the state-level science competitions. I have friends at an inner-city school (not a bad one, but not a suburban one either) who all have equal or better shots than me (from a Catholic school) of getting into the Ivies.

and were thus better equipped, through no necessary additional effort on their part, to earn more and thus continue the cycle.

Wealth is certainly a factor. You'd have to be crazy to think that a university would turn down a new library to accept a slightly better student. But when it comes down to it, wealth is not the decisive factor.

And the underrepresentation of poor families is more due to the parents' emphasis on education rather than wealth. Many extremely poor first-generation Chinese immigrants (My family is a first-generation Chinese immigrant family) send their kids off to the best schools even though they are very poor... simply because the parents place education above all else.

To get to the top or middle from the bottom requires far more ability, luck, and effort than it takes to remain in those privileged positions if you're born there.

Possibly. But as I said earlier, those are relatively easily defeated obstacles. If you get leukemia and die when you're 12, that's a hard to beat obstacle. Poverty often is not. In fact, of the richest dozen or so Americans in history, I don't think any of them were born into privilege, and many (Carnegie, Addams, Weyerhauser, etc.) were in fact the sons of extremely poor men.

Besides, that's irrelevant to whether or not we should tax people 100%.

Anyone can support themselves quite well if they are willing to work for it. Some will make less than others, obviously, but anyone can earn enough to live off of if they work diligently.

That's true, at least in advanced, rich societies, but mere survival is not enough. Even if you dispute the right to a fairly good quality of life, don't the children of the poor, born into an underprivileged position through sheer bad luck, deserve a good education to give them a better chance of climbing the social ladder?

Sure. If they can get one without violating the rights of others.

Obviously, the rich can better afford to fund this, which is why the rich are taxed more.

"They can afford being robbed, so it only makes sense to rob them."?

Sure, some cannot work due to physical handicaps, and of course they would receive charity. However, the charity they recieve must be given VOLUNTARILY.

Rich people, and people in general, are not charitable enough to provide enough money to support all the disabled and seriously ill people who cannot afford to do so themselves.

Maybe taxes are the REASON for that? The average American donates 8 times more money to charitable causes than the average Norwegian. This is because Norway has twice as much taxes.

I realize that it will not work out perfectly, but if charitable contributions multiply eightfold in turn for a 50% tax cut (remember that most taxes are bureaucratically wasted anyway), that would help the poor and the rich.

IMO, a person's right to life, and perhaps even their right to a decent quality of life,

Which ties in intrinsically with the right to property. Any of your rights do not extend to your right to take away the rights of others.

takes precedence over anyone's right to their property - whether people automatically deserve a good standard of living is probably the fundamental point over which we disagree, so I doubt that either will persuade the other.

The right to property is inexorable from the right to life.

If you have the right to life, it follows that you must own your body.
If you own your body, then you have the right to the products thereof.

People automatically deserve as high of a quality of life as they can achieve without infringing on the right of other people to enjoy as high of a quality of life as they can achieve.

Mandatory charity, enforced at the point of a gun, is not just nor moral.

It is not enforced at the point of a gun. You are not threatened with death if you don't pay taxes, you are threatened with fines (effectively more taxes), and perhaps then imprisonment. Again, the right to a decent standard of living takes precedence.

No. If you don't pay taxes, you get a fine. If you don't pay the fine, you get jail time. If you try to escape from jail, you will be shot.

QED taxes are the result of putting a gun to someone's head.

The government has no right to strip the able of the fruits of their labor. Just as it is wrong for the weak to be enslaved by the strong, so too should the strong not be enslaved by the weak.

This is the right to strip the lucky (whether in the lottery of social position at birth, the genetic lottery, or the simple lottery of life) of the products of their luck. Not nearly so much a matter of strength as of luck - the way I see it, the order of influence on success is luck, ability, effort.[/quote]

Whether you're lucky or not is irrelevant.

When you acquire property, you must make a difference to somebody... regardless of whether you are the richest or the poorest man in the world.

Luck is something that is not a major influence on 99% of the population. If your dad is Bill Gates, of course you're luck plays a major role. If you die of leukemia when you're 9, of course you're luck plays a bigger role than ability or effort.

But for most of us -- who's parents make between $5,000 and $1,000,000,000 a year and don't have some crippling disease -- the order is hard to tell. Sometimes luck plays a major role. Other times it doesn't.

The overall order is hard to tell, though I would certainly put ability as first.

Luck is something that only impacts on the extreme ends of the spectrum. Ability impacts on the far, though not extreme ends of hte spectrum. Effort is what differentiates mediocre men between each other.

A few examples does not prove, or even suggest with any degree of likelihood, a general trend. The majority of rich people were born into rich families,

Incorrect. Not a single American billionaire inherited his fortune.

I'd say it was farily likely that they were mostly born into at least middle-class families.

And mathematically speaking, the average American with no college education makes $35,000 a year for 45 years. That's almost $1.6 million. With proper management, just about anyone can be a millionaire.

So proper management means not eating, clothing yourself, paying healthcare insurance, and living in the street?

got a good education (often at a private school,

Going to Andover Prep helps, but the fact remains that at Ivy League schools 60% to two-thirds of the students graduated from public schools.

That statistic is meaningless unless accompanied by the proportion of people in general who go to private schools in America. If 10% of the population is privately educated, and 40% of Ivy League students were privately educated, that's a pretty heavy bias.

or at least at a good state school in a middle-class area),

Actually, in my state, inner-city kids almost always win the state-level science competitions. I have friends at an inner-city school (not a bad one, but not a suburban one either) who all have equal or better shots than me (from a Catholic school) of getting into the Ivies.

Well as much as I hate to endorse religion-based schooling, A catholic school probably has a better work ethic and more funding (from the church) than the average state school. I don't know much about what an american science competition entails, or the attitudes of state and private schools towards them, so I'm not equipped to respond properly to your other point, though I would point out that what the best of two samples show is not representative of what you might get if you compared the entire samples.

and were thus better equipped, through no necessary additional effort on their part, to earn more and thus continue the cycle.

Wealth is certainly a factor. You'd have to be crazy to think that a university would turn down a new library to accept a slightly better student. But when it comes down to it, wealth is not the decisive factor.

But, at least in Britain, your performance at lower levels of education determines your entry into higher education, and your A-level marks (end of secondary school at 18) will depend quite a bit on your school, etc etc. By university level, the more able pupils are going to tend to be the ones from richer backgrounds, because they have had better educational prospects all the way through. There are proven and accepted links between social class and education, though I can't give you studies etc.

And the underrepresentation of poor families is more due to the parents' emphasis on education rather than wealth. Many extremely poor first-generation Chinese immigrants (My family is a first-generation Chinese immigrant family) send their kids off to the best schools even though they are very poor... simply because the parents place education above all else.

Sorry, don't follow what you mean. Surely if the poor place more emphasis on education, wouldn't that lead to the poor being better represented in good schools?

To get to the top or middle from the bottom requires far more ability, luck, and effort than it takes to remain in those privileged positions if you're born there.

Possibly. But as I said earlier, those are relatively easily defeated obstacles. If you get leukemia and die when you're 12, that's a hard to beat obstacle. Poverty often is not. In fact, of the richest dozen or so Americans in history, I don't think any of them were born into privilege, and many (Carnegie, Addams, Weyerhauser, etc.) were in fact the sons of extremely poor men.

Well I would suppose that if you have the talent etc to pull yourself from the working class to the middle-class, you're really going to shine among the more complacent people there, so from the middle-class it's much easier to reach the top. If you see what I'm trying to get at.

Besides, that's irrelevant to whether or not we should tax people 100%.

Of course. I agree that we shouldn't be taxing 100%.

Anyone can support themselves quite well if they are willing to work for it. Some will make less than others, obviously, but anyone can earn enough to live off of if they work diligently.

That's true, at least in advanced, rich societies, but mere survival is not enough. Even if you dispute the right to a fairly good quality of life, don't the children of the poor, born into an underprivileged position through sheer bad luck, deserve a good education to give them a better chance of climbing the social ladder?

Sure. If they can get one without violating the rights of others.

Now this is the fundamental point on which we differ, and on which we build everything else. I believe that the right to equal opportunities takes precedence over the right to property - thus it is morally correct in my book to violate the lesser rights and tax those with money in order to give people the greater right of a fair start - i.e. a good education. The child has no control over their education. Clearly, some poor families are prepared to sacrifice a great deal so that their kids can get a good education, but others aren't - why should the child be punished for the parents' decision?

Obviously, the rich can better afford to fund this, which is why the rich are taxed more.

"They can afford being robbed, so it only makes sense to rob them."?

If you insist on calling taxation robbery (robbery is something being illegally taken), then I must phrase it like this for you: "someone has to be robbed, so we may as well rob those who can afford it to a greater extent than we rob those who can't afford it as much". I don't believe in total redistribution, I just believe in shortening the range of wealth on a sliding scale, so that everyone is brought a little closer to the average - thus pulling people up below the bottom line I believe people shouldn't have to live below necessitates pulling other people down a bit.

Sure, some cannot work due to physical handicaps, and of course they would receive charity. However, the charity they recieve must be given VOLUNTARILY.

Rich people, and people in general, are not charitable enough to provide enough money to support all the disabled and seriously ill people who cannot afford to do so themselves.

Maybe taxes are the REASON for that? The average American donates 8 times more money to charitable causes than the average Norwegian. This is because Norway has twice as much taxes.

First of all, what charitable causes? Because some charitable causes don't really help the needy, and I imagine there are a lot more of these in the US than in Norway - like money donated to church crusades to campaign against gay rights etc. I mean, some places in the US you even find people collecting funds for the IRA (although I admit those donations probably don't count under that survey). Second, taxes are probably a more efficient way to help the needy, because it's one organisation dealing with everything so you don't have the limitations that one charity would have with funds (could a single charity fund and run a school system for a whole country? And if each charity dealt with education in different areas, that would lead to total disorganisation - differing standards as some would aim for quantity and some for quality, and so many types of qualification that would all have to be meticulously compared), and liberal democratic governments are forced to be fairly just, whereas charities would have far more free rein to discriminate.

I realize that it will not work out perfectly, but if charitable contributions multiply eightfold in turn for a 50% tax cut (remember that most taxes are bureaucratically wasted anyway), that would help the poor and the rich.

"Most" tax money goes to bureacracy? Over 50%? Sweeping statement there. Sure you're not generalising just a little bit? :lol:

The difference in donation rates is probably not solely due to the difference in taxes (see above about the possible causes they m,ight be donating to). And the thing is, for some reason the rich don't tend to be as keen on individual civil rights so much as the rest. I don't know why, but generally in politics in western democracy, the parties appealing to the rich are pro-economic "freedom" but anti-personal freedom - the conservative party in Britain and the Republicans in the US are two main examples. So if the rich were left to donate to what they wanted, you might see a sharp drop in the money going to help the poor, and a rise in donations to organisations opposing the social freedoms that I know you also support.

IMO, a person's right to life, and perhaps even their right to a decent quality of life,

Which ties in intrinsically with the right to property. Any of your rights do not extend to your right to take away the rights of others.

takes precedence over anyone's right to their property - whether people automatically deserve a good standard of living is probably the fundamental point over which we disagree, so I doubt that either will persuade the other.

The right to property is inexorable from the right to life.

If you have the right to life, it follows that you must own your body.
If you own your body, then you have the right to the products thereof.

I don't think that that link means that the two rights are equal in importance, even if it does follow. And actually, although I support both, the right to life doesn't lead to the right to sovereignty over your body (the right to life means you shouldn't be killed, or IMO allowed to die against your will if it is reasonably possible to save you, but it doesn't mean that you can do what you like with your body or even that others can't do what they want to your body, up to the point of death, whereas that is exactly what sovereignty over one's body entails - if you see what I mean, sorry I'm very tired)

Mandatory charity, enforced at the point of a gun, is not just nor moral.

It is not enforced at the point of a gun. You are not threatened with death if you don't pay taxes, you are threatened with fines (effectively more taxes), and perhaps then imprisonment. Again, the right to a decent standard of living takes precedence.

No. If you don't pay taxes, you get a fine. If you don't pay the fine, you get jail time. If you try to escape from jail, you will be shot.

QED taxes are the result of putting a gun to someone's head.

Erm... not all escapees are shot, I'd imagine that in fact few are, especially in the UK where guns are mostly illegal so most (many?) police aren't armed (they don't need to be). But anyway, really, the prison sentence is for defying the court's order to pay the fine - it's a punishment for not accepting the punishment. subtle difference I know, but it is perfectly possible not to pay taxes without getting shot.

The government has no right to strip the able of the fruits of their labor. Just as it is wrong for the weak to be enslaved by the strong, so too should the strong not be enslaved by the weak.

This is the right to strip the lucky (whether in the lottery of social position at birth, the genetic lottery, or the simple lottery of life) of the products of their luck. Not nearly so much a matter of strength as of luck - the way I see it, the order of influence on success is luck, ability, effort.

Whether you're lucky or not is irrelevant.

When you acquire property, you must make a difference to somebody... regardless of whether you are the richest or the poorest man in the world.

Luck is something that is not a major influence on 99% of the population. If your dad is Bill Gates, of course you're luck plays a major role. If you die of leukemia when you're 9, of course you're luck plays a bigger role than ability or effort.

But for most of us -- who's parents make between $5,000 and $1,000,000,000 a year and don't have some crippling disease -- the order is hard to tell. Sometimes luck plays a major role. Other times it doesn't.

The overall order is hard to tell, though I would certainly put ability as first.

Luck is something that only impacts on the extreme ends of the spectrum. Ability impacts on the far, though not extreme ends of hte spectrum. Effort is what differentiates mediocre men between each other.

I disagree. Luck determines what class your parents are in, which has been shown to be a major factor in what class you end up in (can't exactly when, but I remember reading in the newspaper about a study concerning social mobility which compared the income of adults with that of their parents at the same age, or perhaps that of their parents when the child was born, not sure - though I believe it demonstrated there was greater opportunity for social mobility in the UK than the US, and the UK has more comprehensive social welfare, doesn't it? - but it showed surprisingly few people moving between social classes).

Many of the examples usually given by economic rightists of poor people rising right to the top are, I believe, quite probably down to this idea, which I suggested earlier: It takes much more effort to rise from the wroking class to the middle class than to move from the middle class to the upper class and positions of power, so if an individual has the ability and puts in the extreme effort to do the former (which is fairly rare), it is more likely that they will make the next leap than that a randomly selected member of the rest of the middle class will do the same (because these have not been whittled down to the very best and most able).

BTW, TGM could you have a look at something I think we might agree on: http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=112865&highlight= I've suggested a better euthanasia proposal and I need feedback before I submit it to rival the unclear effort by Grande

A few examples does not prove, or even suggest with any degree of likelihood, a general trend. The majority of rich people were born into rich families,

Incorrect. Not a single American billionaire inherited his fortune.

I'd say it was farily likely that they were mostly born into at least middle-class families.

Five out of six Americans are middle-class. So yes, in all likeliness, most billionaries were born middle class.

But there are plenty of extremely poor-born billionaries too. Carnegie? Addams? Weyerhauser?

There's an old Chinese proverb: "Every Emperor has a family member who wears straw sandles."

And mathematically speaking, the average American with no college education makes $35,000 a year for 45 years. That's almost $1.6 million. With proper management, just about anyone can be a millionaire.

So proper management means not eating, clothing yourself, paying healthcare insurance, and living in the street?

No. The University of Berkeley states on its website that living expenses in the California Bay Area are about $6,000 a year. And that's one of the most expensive parts of the country. Chicago and Penn tell their students to plan $2,000 to $3,000 in personal expenses.

So let's say $6,000 x 45 years = $270,000
At the same time, you're making $35,000 x 45 years = $1.6 million

You still break a million. And you don't even have to graduate college.

got a good education (often at a private school,

Going to Andover Prep helps, but the fact remains that at Ivy League schools 60% to two-thirds of the students graduated from public schools.

That statistic is meaningless unless accompanied by the proportion of people in general who go to private schools in America. If 10% of the population is privately educated, and 40% of Ivy League students were privately educated, that's a pretty heavy bias.

About 15-20% is privately educated. You're damn right that colleges favor private schools... but reform schools are often private schools too.

As I said before, it's more a factor of how much the parents care rather than wealth. I go to a private school (though not an elite one, tuition is about $6,500) and I know kids there for welfare families that either manage to pay for it or get some sort of charity.

or at least at a good state school in a middle-class area),

Actually, in my state, inner-city kids almost always win the state-level science competitions. I have friends at an inner-city school (not a bad one, but not a suburban one either) who all have equal or better shots than me (from a Catholic school) of getting into the Ivies.

Well as much as I hate to endorse religion-based schooling, A catholic school probably has a better work ethic and more funding (from the church) than the average state school. I don't know much about what an american science competition entails, or the attitudes of state and private schools towards them, so I'm not equipped to respond properly to your other point, though I would point out that what the best of two samples show is not representative of what you might get if you compared the entire samples.

Exactly. But what the best samples do show is that the obstacles of poor birth are NOT by any means insurmountable.

I personally perfer Catholic schools simply because they are more efficient. Washington DC has some of America's worst public schools and they are funded $10,000 to $11,000 per student per year. My Catholic school probably doesn't recieve much more than $7,000 or $8,000 per student per year and is able to provide much better schooling.

and were thus better equipped, through no necessary additional effort on their part, to earn more and thus continue the cycle.

Wealth is certainly a factor. You'd have to be crazy to think that a university would turn down a new library to accept a slightly better student. But when it comes down to it, wealth is not the decisive factor.

But, at least in Britain, your performance at lower levels of education determines your entry into higher education, and your A-level marks (end of secondary school at 18) will depend quite a bit on your school, etc etc. By university level, the more able pupils are going to tend to be the ones from richer backgrounds, because they have had better educational prospects all the way through. There are proven and accepted links between social class and education, though I can't give you studies etc.

I'm not denying that rich people tend to get better education than poor people. But my point is that getting a better education is NOT a direct factor of wealth, rather it is a direct factor of how much emphasis parents put on education.

And parents who put a great deal of emphasis tend to (though not always) be educated themselves. And educated people tend to be rich.

Wealth is a side-effect. THe main cause is education-to-education transfer.

This doesn't always work, however. In fact, the famous African-American brain surgeon who worked on the two conjoined Iranian adult twins in Singapore said that if he came from a rich, well-educated background, he would never have been able to achieve success. He told NPR in an interview that basically his mother was illiterate but would force him to read. Even though he went to crappy schools, the fact that there was great family emphasis on education is what made him a success.

There are plentiful counterexamples to the wealth-education link. The education-education link is much more solid.

And the underrepresentation of poor families is more due to the parents' emphasis on education rather than wealth. Many extremely poor first-generation Chinese immigrants (My family is a first-generation Chinese immigrant family) send their kids off to the best schools even though they are very poor... simply because the parents place education above all else.

Sorry, don't follow what you mean. Surely if the poor place more emphasis on education, wouldn't that lead to the poor being better represented in good schools?

I'm not generalizing. The rich tend to put more emphasis on education, I was demonstrating that among the poor, those that do put more emphasis on education tend to succeed just as well as rich kids, if not more.

Immigrants, however, are the exception. Most poor people in America are poor bceause they never bothered with getting themselves educated. And 95% of those people aren't going to teach their kids that education is what makes or breaks you in modern society. That's why many, or even most, poor families remain poor. And no amount of governemnt aid will fix that. The poor people who break the cycle are the ones like Carnegie, who realize the importance of getting educated, even against the odds. Working against such odds only strenghtens the commitment to education and work in strong-willed people.

The most successful people in society often start out as the poorest for this reason.

To get to the top or middle from the bottom requires far more ability, luck, and effort than it takes to remain in those privileged positions if you're born there.

Possibly. But as I said earlier, those are relatively easily defeated obstacles. If you get leukemia and die when you're 12, that's a hard to beat obstacle. Poverty often is not. In fact, of the richest dozen or so Americans in history, I don't think any of them were born into privilege, and many (Carnegie, Addams, Weyerhauser, etc.) were in fact the sons of extremely poor men.

Well I would suppose that if you have the talent etc to pull yourself from the working class to the middle-class, you're really going to shine among the more complacent people there, so from the middle-class it's much easier to reach the top. If you see what I'm trying to get at.

Yes. But if you are born middle-class, you do not have the experience of getting to the middle-class. Thus much of your advantage is negated.

Besides, that's irrelevant to whether or not we should tax people 100%.

Of course. I agree that we shouldn't be taxing 100%.

Anyone can support themselves quite well if they are willing to work for it. Some will make less than others, obviously, but anyone can earn enough to live off of if they work diligently.

That's true, at least in advanced, rich societies, but mere survival is not enough. Even if you dispute the right to a fairly good quality of life, don't the children of the poor, born into an underprivileged position through sheer bad luck, deserve a good education to give them a better chance of climbing the social ladder?

Sure. If they can get one without violating the rights of others.

Now this is the fundamental point on which we differ, and on which we build everything else. I believe that the right to equal opportunities takes precedence over the right to property - thus it is morally correct in my book to violate the lesser rights and tax those with money in order to give people the greater right of a fair start - i.e. a good education. The child has no control over their education. Clearly, some poor families are prepared to sacrifice a great deal so that their kids can get a good education, but others aren't - why should the child be punished for the parents' decision?

The child can always put greater emphasis on education himself. And parents raise their children however they wish. I know it's unfair, but if it is unfair that children should be punished for what their parents did, isn't it far more unfair for children to be punished for what OTHER children's parents did as these sort of resolutions propose?

The biggest problem among the poor is that hte parents just don't care about education. No amount of aid will fix that.

I don't have a solution. But that doesn't mean I should accept yours. In fact, that just means that yours has a high probability of being wrong.

Obviously, the rich can better afford to fund this, which is why the rich are taxed more.

"They can afford being robbed, so it only makes sense to rob them."?

If you insist on calling taxation robbery (robbery is something being illegally taken),

So the Holocaust wasn't murder?

then I must phrase it like this for you: "someone has to be robbed,

Why?

so we may as well rob those who can afford it to a greater extent than we rob those who can't afford it as much".

I agree. Insofar as taxation IS necessary, the rich and the poor should pay the same percentage of their income.

I don't believe in total redistribution, I just believe in shortening the range of wealth on a sliding scale, so that everyone is brought a little closer to the average - thus pulling people up below the bottom line I believe people shouldn't have to live below necessitates pulling other people down a bit.

Here's a nice article about how that kind of thinking failed miserably in the last 10,000 years of human civilization:

http://perspicuity.net/politics/poorlogic-a.html

The author is a noted Game Theorist. I wish to point out that he does NOT provide a solution to the problem of poverty -- that's because there isn't one. He merely points out that the current ones (welfare) aren't working.

Sure, some cannot work due to physical handicaps, and of course they would receive charity. However, the charity they recieve must be given VOLUNTARILY.

Rich people, and people in general, are not charitable enough to provide enough money to support all the disabled and seriously ill people who cannot afford to do so themselves.

Maybe taxes are the REASON for that? The average American donates 8 times more money to charitable causes than the average Norwegian. This is because Norway has twice as much taxes.

First of all, what charitable causes? Because some charitable causes don't really help the needy, and I imagine there are a lot more of these in the US than in Norway - like money donated to church crusades to campaign against gay rights etc. I mean, some places in the US you even find people collecting funds for the IRA (although I admit those donations probably don't count under that survey).

Perhaps. I didn't take that into account. Still, an 8-1 discrepancy does override that.

Second, taxes are probably a more efficient way to help the needy, because it's one organisation dealing with everything so you don't have the limitations that one charity would have with funds

The question isn't whether it's efficient or not, the problem is that it's robbery.

But your contention about efficiency is also wrong. We spend almost $400 billion on welfare a year. Mathematically speaking, that's enough to raise every poor American to the poverty line twice, and still have some left over. Yet we still have poverty. This is because of the 80-20 rule. For every $100 the government taxes, $80 of it is wasted.

(could a single charity fund and run a school system for a whole country? And if each charity dealt with education in different areas, that would lead to total disorganisation - differing standards as some would aim for quantity and some for quality, and so many types of qualification that would all have to be meticulously compared),

That's called a diverse and liberal arts education. Face it, kids are different. If's actually better for some schools to specialize and others to just be good all around.

Besides, when all schools teach the same thing, aren't you at least the slightest bit worried about the propaganda potential?

Schools are supposed to be places of light, liberty, and learning. You need a diversity of viewpoints -- even the silly ones -- for that.

and liberal democratic governments are forced to be fairly just, whereas charities would have far more free rein to discriminate.

What forces them to be fairly just? How is it fairly just to rob Peter to pay Paul?

As the twentieth century has demonstrated, no matter how well-intentioned and democratic a government is, it is never truly voluntary.

I realize that it will not work out perfectly, but if charitable contributions multiply eightfold in turn for a 50% tax cut (remember that most taxes are bureaucratically wasted anyway), that would help the poor and the rich.

"Most" tax money goes to bureacracy? Over 50%? Sweeping statement there. Sure you're not generalising just a little bit? :lol:

I'd say about two thirds to 80% goes to administrative costs.

The difference in donation rates is probably not solely due to the difference in taxes (see above about the possible causes they m,ight be donating to). And the thing is, for some reason the rich don't tend to be as keen on individual civil rights so much as the rest.

Incorrect. History's liberal revolutions such as the American and (initially) the French were all started by well-to-do the merchant bourgeoisie class.

I don't know why, but generally in politics in western democracy, the parties appealing to the rich are pro-economic "freedom" but anti-personal freedom - the conservative party in Britain and the Republicans in the US are two main examples.

That's because the Republicans in the US are way too influenced by the religious right. When you cut out the cancer of bible fundies, you get a much more libertarian Republicanism, that does uphold personal rights.

So if the rich were left to donate to what they wanted, you might see a sharp drop in the money going to help the poor, and a rise in donations to organisations opposing the social freedoms that I know you also support.

Or ... not. Even the ACLU's donors are primarily well-off (upper middle class and upper class) people. And so are Cato's sponsors.

IMO, a person's right to life, and perhaps even their right to a decent quality of life,

Which ties in intrinsically with the right to property. Any of your rights do not extend to your right to take away the rights of others.

takes precedence over anyone's right to their property - whether people automatically deserve a good standard of living is probably the fundamental point over which we disagree, so I doubt that either will persuade the other.

The right to property is inexorable from the right to life.

If you have the right to life, it follows that you must own your body.
If you own your body, then you have the right to the products thereof.

I don't think that that link means that the two rights are equal in importance, even if it does follow. And actually, although I support both, the right to life doesn't lead to the right to sovereignty over your body (the right to life means you shouldn't be killed, or IMO allowed to die against your will if it is reasonably possible to save you, but it doesn't mean that you can do what you like with your body or even that others can't do what they want to your body, up to the point of death, whereas that is exactly what sovereignty over one's body entails - if you see what I mean, sorry I'm very tired)

The body is the biological means by which you sustain life. All "rights" are a claim of some sort (i.e. the right to life means "I own my life"). If you own your life, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that you can do what you want with it. Life is manifested in your body. QED you own your body and can dispose of it as you please.

Mandatory charity, enforced at the point of a gun, is not just nor moral.

It is not enforced at the point of a gun. You are not threatened with death if you don't pay taxes, you are threatened with fines (effectively more taxes), and perhaps then imprisonment. Again, the right to a decent standard of living takes precedence.

No. If you don't pay taxes, you get a fine. If you don't pay the fine, you get jail time. If you try to escape from jail, you will be shot.

QED taxes are the result of putting a gun to someone's head.

Erm... not all escapees are shot, I'd imagine that in fact few are, especially in the UK where guns are mostly illegal so most (many?) police aren't armed (they don't need to be). But anyway, really, the prison sentence is for defying the court's order to pay the fine - it's a punishment for not accepting the punishment. subtle difference I know, but it is perfectly possible not to pay taxes without getting shot.

When you are thrown in jail, you are done so at the point of a gun.

The government has no right to strip the able of the fruits of their labor. Just as it is wrong for the weak to be enslaved by the strong, so too should the strong not be enslaved by the weak.

This is the right to strip the lucky (whether in the lottery of social position at birth, the genetic lottery, or the simple lottery of life) of the products of their luck. Not nearly so much a matter of strength as of luck - the way I see it, the order of influence on success is luck, ability, effort.

Whether you're lucky or not is irrelevant.

When you acquire property, you must make a difference to somebody... regardless of whether you are the richest or the poorest man in the world.

Luck is something that is not a major influence on 99% of the population. If your dad is Bill Gates, of course you're luck plays a major role. If you die of leukemia when you're 9, of course you're luck plays a bigger role than ability or effort.

But for most of us -- who's parents make between $5,000 and $1,000,000,000 a year and don't have some crippling disease -- the order is hard to tell. Sometimes luck plays a major role. Other times it doesn't.

The overall order is hard to tell, though I would certainly put ability as first.

Luck is something that only impacts on the extreme ends of the spectrum. Ability impacts on the far, though not extreme ends of hte spectrum. Effort is what differentiates mediocre men between each other.

I disagree. Luck determines what class your parents are in, which has been shown to be a major factor in what class you end up in (can't exactly when, but I remember reading in the newspaper about a study concerning social mobility which compared the income of adults with that of their parents at the same age, or perhaps that of their parents when the child was born, not sure - though I believe it demonstrated there was greater opportunity for social mobility in the UK than the US, and the UK has more comprehensive social welfare, doesn't it? - but it showed surprisingly few people moving between social classes).

I would like to see that. The immigration rates are a good indicator of social mobility. And the US has much more immigrants than the UK does.

Luck determines the emphasis that your parents place on education. Granted. But the child must like learning as well if he is to succeed.

I believe that you are defining luck to be so braod that it encompasses "genetic luck" (i.e. ability and capacity for hard work). In that sense, EVERYTHING is 100% pure luck, since by luck you get DNA that makes you smart or something. So the point is moot.

Many of the examples usually given by economic rightists of poor people rising right to the top are, I believe, quite probably down to this idea, which I suggested earlier: It takes much more effort to rise from the wroking class to the middle class than to move from the middle class to the upper class and positions of power,

But you need the ambition and the drive to move up... something that middle-class people often lack whereas hard-working poor possess.

so if an individual has the ability and puts in the extreme effort to do the former (which is fairly rare), it is more likely that they will make the next leap than that a randomly selected member of the rest of the middle class will do the same (because these have not been whittled down to the very best and most able).

It isn't that rare for poor to go to middle-class. Even if a really poor person goes to a two-year, basically free, community college, he can graduate and find a middle-class job very easily.

BTW, TGM could you have a look at something I think we might agree on: http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=112865&highlight= I've suggested a better euthanasia proposal and I need feedback before I submit it to rival the unclear effort by Grande[/quote]

Yessir.

A few examples does not prove, or even suggest with any degree of likelihood, a general trend. The majority of rich people were born into rich families,

Incorrect. Not a single American billionaire inherited his fortune.

I'd say it was farily likely that they were mostly born into at least middle-class families.

Five out of six Americans are middle-class. So yes, in all likeliness, most billionaries were born middle class.

But there are plenty of extremely poor-born billionaries too. Carnegie? Addams? Weyerhauser?

There's an old Chinese proverb: "Every Emperor has a family member who wears straw sandles."

And mathematically speaking, the average American with no college education makes $35,000 a year for 45 years. That's almost $1.6 million. With proper management, just about anyone can be a millionaire.

So proper management means not eating, clothing yourself, paying healthcare insurance, and living in the street?

No. The University of Berkeley states on its website that living expenses in the California Bay Area are about $6,000 a year. And that's one of the most expensive parts of the country. Chicago and Penn tell their students to plan $2,000 to $3,000 in personal expenses.

So let's say $6,000 x 45 years = $270,000
At the same time, you're making $35,000 x 45 years = $1.6 million

You still break a million. And you don't even have to graduate college.

got a good education (often at a private school,

Going to Andover Prep helps, but the fact remains that at Ivy League schools 60% to two-thirds of the students graduated from public schools.

That statistic is meaningless unless accompanied by the proportion of people in general who go to private schools in America. If 10% of the population is privately educated, and 40% of Ivy League students were privately educated, that's a pretty heavy bias.

About 15-20% is privately educated. You're damn right that colleges favor private schools... but reform schools are often private schools too.

As I said before, it's more a factor of how much the parents care rather than wealth. I go to a private school (though not an elite one, tuition is about $6,500) and I know kids there for welfare families that either manage to pay for it or get some sort of charity.

or at least at a good state school in a middle-class area),

Actually, in my state, inner-city kids almost always win the state-level science competitions. I have friends at an inner-city school (not a bad one, but not a suburban one either) who all have equal or better shots than me (from a Catholic school) of getting into the Ivies.

Well as much as I hate to endorse religion-based schooling, A catholic school probably has a better work ethic and more funding (from the church) than the average state school. I don't know much about what an american science competition entails, or the attitudes of state and private schools towards them, so I'm not equipped to respond properly to your other point, though I would point out that what the best of two samples show is not representative of what you might get if you compared the entire samples.

Exactly. But what the best samples do show is that the obstacles of poor birth are NOT by any means insurmountable.

I personally perfer Catholic schools simply because they are more efficient. Washington DC has some of America's worst public schools and they are funded $10,000 to $11,000 per student per year. My Catholic school probably doesn't recieve much more than $7,000 or $8,000 per student per year and is able to provide much better schooling.

and were thus better equipped, through no necessary additional effort on their part, to earn more and thus continue the cycle.

Wealth is certainly a factor. You'd have to be crazy to think that a university would turn down a new library to accept a slightly better student. But when it comes down to it, wealth is not the decisive factor.

But, at least in Britain, your performance at lower levels of education determines your entry into higher education, and your A-level marks (end of secondary school at 18) will depend quite a bit on your school, etc etc. By university level, the more able pupils are going to tend to be the ones from richer backgrounds, because they have had better educational prospects all the way through. There are proven and accepted links between social class and education, though I can't give you studies etc.

I'm not denying that rich people tend to get better education than poor people. But my point is that getting a better education is NOT a direct factor of wealth, rather it is a direct factor of how much emphasis parents put on education.

And parents who put a great deal of emphasis tend to (though not always) be educated themselves. And educated people tend to be rich.

Wealth is a side-effect. THe main cause is education-to-education transfer.

This doesn't always work, however. In fact, the famous African-American brain surgeon who worked on the two conjoined Iranian adult twins in Singapore said that if he came from a rich, well-educated background, he would never have been able to achieve success. He told NPR in an interview that basically his mother was illiterate but would force him to read. Even though he went to crappy schools, the fact that there was great family emphasis on education is what made him a success.

There are plentiful counterexamples to the wealth-education link. The education-education link is much more solid.

And the underrepresentation of poor families is more due to the parents' emphasis on education rather than wealth. Many extremely poor first-generation Chinese immigrants (My family is a first-generation Chinese immigrant family) send their kids off to the best schools even though they are very poor... simply because the parents place education above all else.

Sorry, don't follow what you mean. Surely if the poor place more emphasis on education, wouldn't that lead to the poor being better represented in good schools?

I'm not generalizing. The rich tend to put more emphasis on education, I was demonstrating that among the poor, those that do put more emphasis on education tend to succeed just as well as rich kids, if not more.

Immigrants, however, are the exception. Most poor people in America are poor bceause they never bothered with getting themselves educated. And 95% of those people aren't going to teach their kids that education is what makes or breaks you in modern society. That's why many, or even most, poor families remain poor. And no amount of governemnt aid will fix that. The poor people who break the cycle are the ones like Carnegie, who realize the importance of getting educated, even against the odds. Working against such odds only strenghtens the commitment to education and work in strong-willed people.

The most successful people in society often start out as the poorest for this reason.

To get to the top or middle from the bottom requires far more ability, luck, and effort than it takes to remain in those privileged positions if you're born there.

Possibly. But as I said earlier, those are relatively easily defeated obstacles. If you get leukemia and die when you're 12, that's a hard to beat obstacle. Poverty often is not. In fact, of the richest dozen or so Americans in history, I don't think any of them were born into privilege, and many (Carnegie, Addams, Weyerhauser, etc.) were in fact the sons of extremely poor men.

Well I would suppose that if you have the talent etc to pull yourself from the working class to the middle-class, you're really going to shine among the more complacent people there, so from the middle-class it's much easier to reach the top. If you see what I'm trying to get at.

Yes. But if you are born middle-class, you do not have the experience of getting to the middle-class. Thus much of your advantage is negated.

Besides, that's irrelevant to whether or not we should tax people 100%.

Of course. I agree that we shouldn't be taxing 100%.

Anyone can support themselves quite well if they are willing to work for it. Some will make less than others, obviously, but anyone can earn enough to live off of if they work diligently.

That's true, at least in advanced, rich societies, but mere survival is not enough. Even if you dispute the right to a fairly good quality of life, don't the children of the poor, born into an underprivileged position through sheer bad luck, deserve a good education to give them a better chance of climbing the social ladder?

Sure. If they can get one without violating the rights of others.

Now this is the fundamental point on which we differ, and on which we build everything else. I believe that the right to equal opportunities takes precedence over the right to property - thus it is morally correct in my book to violate the lesser rights and tax those with money in order to give people the greater right of a fair start - i.e. a good education. The child has no control over their education. Clearly, some poor families are prepared to sacrifice a great deal so that their kids can get a good education, but others aren't - why should the child be punished for the parents' decision?

The child can always put greater emphasis on education himself. And parents raise their children however they wish. I know it's unfair, but if it is unfair that children should be punished for what their parents did, isn't it far more unfair for children to be punished for what OTHER children's parents did as these sort of resolutions propose?

The biggest problem among the poor is that hte parents just don't care about education. No amount of aid will fix that.

I don't have a solution. But that doesn't mean I should accept yours. In fact, that just means that yours has a high probability of being wrong.

Obviously, the rich can better afford to fund this, which is why the rich are taxed more.

"They can afford being robbed, so it only makes sense to rob them."?

If you insist on calling taxation robbery (robbery is something being illegally taken),

So the Holocaust wasn't murder?

then I must phrase it like this for you: "someone has to be robbed,

Why?

so we may as well rob those who can afford it to a greater extent than we rob those who can't afford it as much".

I agree. Insofar as taxation IS necessary, the rich and the poor should pay the same percentage of their income.

I don't believe in total redistribution, I just believe in shortening the range of wealth on a sliding scale, so that everyone is brought a little closer to the average - thus pulling people up below the bottom line I believe people shouldn't have to live below necessitates pulling other people down a bit.

Here's a nice article about how that kind of thinking failed miserably in the last 10,000 years of human civilization:

http://perspicuity.net/politics/poorlogic-a.html

The author is a noted Game Theorist. I wish to point out that he does NOT provide a solution to the problem of poverty -- that's because there isn't one. He merely points out that the current ones (welfare) aren't working.

Sure, some cannot work due to physical handicaps, and of course they would receive charity. However, the charity they recieve must be given VOLUNTARILY.

Rich people, and people in general, are not charitable enough to provide enough money to support all the disabled and seriously ill people who cannot afford to do so themselves.

Maybe taxes are the REASON for that? The average American donates 8 times more money to charitable causes than the average Norwegian. This is because Norway has twice as much taxes.

First of all, what charitable causes? Because some charitable causes don't really help the needy, and I imagine there are a lot more of these in the US than in Norway - like money donated to church crusades to campaign against gay rights etc. I mean, some places in the US you even find people collecting funds for the IRA (although I admit those donations probably don't count under that survey).

Perhaps. I didn't take that into account. Still, an 8-1 discrepancy does override that.

Second, taxes are probably a more efficient way to help the needy, because it's one organisation dealing with everything so you don't have the limitations that one charity would have with funds

The question isn't whether it's efficient or not, the problem is that it's robbery.

But your contention about efficiency is also wrong. We spend almost $400 billion on welfare a year. Mathematically speaking, that's enough to raise every poor American to the poverty line twice, and still have some left over. Yet we still have poverty. This is because of the 80-20 rule. For every $100 the government taxes, $80 of it is wasted.

(could a single charity fund and run a school system for a whole country? And if each charity dealt with education in different areas, that would lead to total disorganisation - differing standards as some would aim for quantity and some for quality, and so many types of qualification that would all have to be meticulously compared),

That's called a diverse and liberal arts education. Face it, kids are different. If's actually better for some schools to specialize and others to just be good all around.

Besides, when all schools teach the same thing, aren't you at least the slightest bit worried about the propaganda potential?

Schools are supposed to be places of light, liberty, and learning. You need a diversity of viewpoints -- even the silly ones -- for that.

and liberal democratic governments are forced to be fairly just, whereas charities would have far more free rein to discriminate.

What forces them to be fairly just? How is it fairly just to rob Peter to pay Paul?

As the twentieth century has demonstrated, no matter how well-intentioned and democratic a government is, it is never truly voluntary.

I realize that it will not work out perfectly, but if charitable contributions multiply eightfold in turn for a 50% tax cut (remember that most taxes are bureaucratically wasted anyway), that would help the poor and the rich.

"Most" tax money goes to bureacracy? Over 50%? Sweeping statement there. Sure you're not generalising just a little bit? :lol:

I'd say about two thirds to 80% goes to administrative costs.

The difference in donation rates is probably not solely due to the difference in taxes (see above about the possible causes they m,ight be donating to). And the thing is, for some reason the rich don't tend to be as keen on individual civil rights so much as the rest.

Incorrect. History's liberal revolutions such as the American and (initially) the French were all started by well-to-do the merchant bourgeoisie class.

I don't know why, but generally in politics in western democracy, the parties appealing to the rich are pro-economic "freedom" but anti-personal freedom - the conservative party in Britain and the Republicans in the US are two main examples.

That's because the Republicans in the US are way too influenced by the religious right. When you cut out the cancer of bible fundies, you get a much more libertarian Republicanism, that does uphold personal rights.

So if the rich were left to donate to what they wanted, you might see a sharp drop in the money going to help the poor, and a rise in donations to organisations opposing the social freedoms that I know you also support.

Or ... not. Even the ACLU's donors are primarily well-off (upper middle class and upper class) people. And so are Cato's sponsors.

IMO, a person's right to life, and perhaps even their right to a decent quality of life,

Which ties in intrinsically with the right to property. Any of your rights do not extend to your right to take away the rights of others.

takes precedence over anyone's right to their property - whether people automatically deserve a good standard of living is probably the fundamental point over which we disagree, so I doubt that either will persuade the other.

The right to property is inexorable from the right to life.

If you have the right to life, it follows that you must own your body.
If you own your body, then you have the right to the products thereof.

I don't think that that link means that the two rights are equal in importance, even if it does follow. And actually, although I support both, the right to life doesn't lead to the right to sovereignty over your body (the right to life means you shouldn't be killed, or IMO allowed to die against your will if it is reasonably possible to save you, but it doesn't mean that you can do what you like with your body or even that others can't do what they want to your body, up to the point of death, whereas that is exactly what sovereignty over one's body entails - if you see what I mean, sorry I'm very tired)

The body is the biological means by which you sustain life. All "rights" are a claim of some sort (i.e. the right to life means "I own my life"). If you own your life, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that you can do what you want with it. Life is manifested in your body. QED you own your body and can dispose of it as you please.

Mandatory charity, enforced at the point of a gun, is not just nor moral.

It is not enforced at the point of a gun. You are not threatened with death if you don't pay taxes, you are threatened with fines (effectively more taxes), and perhaps then imprisonment. Again, the right to a decent standard of living takes precedence.

No. If you don't pay taxes, you get a fine. If you don't pay the fine, you get jail time. If you try to escape from jail, you will be shot.

QED taxes are the result of putting a gun to someone's head.

Erm... not all escapees are shot, I'd imagine that in fact few are, especially in the UK where guns are mostly illegal so most (many?) police aren't armed (they don't need to be). But anyway, really, the prison sentence is for defying the court's order to pay the fine - it's a punishment for not accepting the punishment. subtle difference I know, but it is perfectly possible not to pay taxes without getting shot.

When you are thrown in jail, you are done so at the point of a gun.

The government has no right to strip the able of the fruits of their labor. Just as it is wrong for the weak to be enslaved by the strong, so too should the strong not be enslaved by the weak.

This is the right to strip the lucky (whether in the lottery of social position at birth, the genetic lottery, or the simple lottery of life) of the products of their luck. Not nearly so much a matter of strength as of luck - the way I see it, the order of influence on success is luck, ability, effort.

Whether you're lucky or not is irrelevant.

When you acquire property, you must make a difference to somebody... regardless of whether you are the richest or the poorest man in the world.

Luck is something that is not a major influence on 99% of the population. If your dad is Bill Gates, of course you're luck plays a major role. If you die of leukemia when you're 9, of course you're luck plays a bigger role than ability or effort.

But for most of us -- who's parents make between $5,000 and $1,000,000,000 a year and don't have some crippling disease -- the order is hard to tell. Sometimes luck plays a major role. Other times it doesn't.

The overall order is hard to tell, though I would certainly put ability as first.

Luck is something that only impacts on the extreme ends of the spectrum. Ability impacts on the far, though not extreme ends of hte spectrum. Effort is what differentiates mediocre men between each other.

I disagree. Luck determines what class your parents are in, which has been shown to be a major factor in what class you end up in (can't exactly when, but I remember reading in the newspaper about a study concerning social mobility which compared the income of adults with that of their parents at the same age, or perhaps that of their parents when the child was born, not sure - though I believe it demonstrated there was greater opportunity for social mobility in the UK than the US, and the UK has more comprehensive social welfare, doesn't it? - but it showed surprisingly few people moving between social classes).

I would like to see that. The immigration rates are a good indicator of social mobility. And the US has much more immigrants than the UK does.

Luck determines the emphasis that your parents place on education. Granted. But the child must like learning as well if he is to succeed.

I believe that you are defining luck to be so braod that it encompasses "genetic luck" (i.e. ability and capacity for hard work). In that sense, EVERYTHING is 100% pure luck, since by luck you get DNA that makes you smart or something. So the point is moot.

Many of the examples usually given by economic rightists of poor people rising right to the top are, I believe, quite probably down to this idea, which I suggested earlier: It takes much more effort to rise from the wroking class to the middle class than to move from the middle class to the upper class and positions of power,

But you need the ambition and the drive to move up... something that middle-class people often lack whereas hard-working poor possess.

so if an individual has the ability and puts in the extreme effort to do the former (which is fairly rare), it is more likely that they will make the next leap than that a randomly selected member of the rest of the middle class will do the same (because these have not been whittled down to the very best and most able).

It isn't that rare for poor to go to middle-class. Even if a really poor person goes to a two-year, basically free, community college, he can graduate and find a middle-class job very easily.

BTW, TGM could you have a look at something I think we might agree on: http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=112865&highlight= I've suggested a better euthanasia proposal and I need feedback before I submit it to rival the unclear effort by Grande[/quote]

Yessir.

Anyone that would support, much less propose, such a notion as this proposal has very little knowledge on the workings of the Capitalist economy in a free society. This proposal is based on the wrongful assumption that wealth is a "zero sum" game, in other words "There is only so much money and if they have more it means that I can't get more unless we take it from them." This belief is simply wrong. In a Capitalist economy the amount of wealth created is dependent only upon the initiative of the individuals that constructively contribute to the market place.

A few examples does not prove, or even suggest with any degree of likelihood, a general trend. The majority of rich people were born into rich families,

Incorrect. Not a single American billionaire inherited his fortune.

I'd say it was farily likely that they were mostly born into at least middle-class families.

Five out of six Americans are middle-class. So yes, in all likeliness, most billionaries were born middle class.

But there are plenty of extremely poor-born billionaries too. Carnegie? Addams? Weyerhauser?

There's an old Chinese proverb: "Every Emperor has a family member who wears straw sandles."

See my point about the difference between the jumps from class to class.

No. The University of Berkeley states on its website that living expenses in the California Bay Area are about $6,000 a year. And that's one of the most expensive parts of the country. Chicago and Penn tell their students to plan $2,000 to $3,000 in personal expenses.

So let's say $6,000 x 45 years = $270,000
At the same time, you're making $35,000 x 45 years = $1.6 million

You still break a million. And you don't even have to graduate college.

That presumes that you will maintain a single student lifestyle throughout your working life. Also, there may be a hole which I can't find, not knowing enough about the US, or money management in life generally, because otherwise there would be far more millionaires. :D


About 15-20% is privately educated. You're damn right that colleges favor private schools... but reform schools are often private schools too.

As I said before, it's more a factor of how much the parents care rather than wealth. I go to a private school (though not an elite one, tuition is about $6,500) and I know kids there for welfare families that either manage to pay for it or get some sort of charity.

The child can always put greater emphasis on education himself. And parents raise their children however they wish. I know it's unfair, but if it is unfair that children should be punished for what their parents did, isn't it far more unfair for children to be punished for what OTHER children's parents did as these sort of resolutions propose?

The biggest problem among the poor is that hte parents just don't care about education. No amount of aid will fix that.

I don't have a solution. But that doesn't mean I should accept yours. In fact, that just means that yours has a high probability of being wrong.

Exactly. But what the best samples do show is that the obstacles of poor birth are NOT by any means insurmountable.

I'm not denying that rich people tend to get better education than poor people. But my point is that getting a better education is NOT a direct factor of wealth, rather it is a direct factor of how much emphasis parents put on education.

And parents who put a great deal of emphasis tend to (though not always) be educated themselves. And educated people tend to be rich.

Wealth is a side-effect. THe main cause is education-to-education transfer.

This doesn't always work, however. In fact, the famous African-American brain surgeon who worked on the two conjoined Iranian adult twins in Singapore said that if he came from a rich, well-educated background, he would never have been able to achieve success. He told NPR in an interview that basically his mother was illiterate but would force him to read. Even though he went to crappy schools, the fact that there was great family emphasis on education is what made him a success.

There are plentiful counterexamples to the wealth-education link. The education-education link is much more solid.

I'm not generalizing. The rich tend to put more emphasis on education, I was demonstrating that among the poor, those that do put more emphasis on education tend to succeed just as well as rich kids, if not more.

Immigrants, however, are the exception. Most poor people in America are poor bceause they never bothered with getting themselves educated. And 95% of those people aren't going to teach their kids that education is what makes or breaks you in modern society. That's why many, or even most, poor families remain poor. And no amount of governemnt aid will fix that. The poor people who break the cycle are the ones like Carnegie, who realize the importance of getting educated, even against the odds. Working against such odds only strenghtens the commitment to education and work in strong-willed people.

The most successful people in society often start out as the poorest for this reason.

So, taking it as common sense that to succeed, you usually need a good education, I think we both agree that generally people get a good education by having one of the following:

- money (i.e. lucky birth)
- parents devoted to your education
- ability significantly above average and hard work
- luck in being near, and being able to get into, a good free school (either by being in the catchment area of a state school, or by being the right religion for a good religious school, but you could lose out by getting a very biased education - for a child entering school at 5, both where you live and your religion generally depend on your parents)

So these are mostly all down to luck. Whilst it is possible to succeed through hard work, for that to work you will need ability, which again depends partially on how well your parents have brought you up educated you before you enter school, (most likely to a much lesser extent) genetics.

We can argue into eternity about wealth redistribution, and you will probably win the argument because you can back up what you say with far more knowledge of economics than I have, whereas I don't know much about leftist economics. But I think that there is still one important thing which should definetely be taxed for. I think that it should be one of government's main aims to improve state schooling systems, to the extent that everybody has an equal start in life, thus getting rid of the unfairnesses of the random lottery of who your parents are. Then perhaps capitalists can argue with some justification that their system results in a race where everyone starts in the same place - what I mean is that equality of opportunity is worth taxing for, and taxing heavily if necessary.

You've said that no amount of aid to poorer parents will fix the widespread negative attitudes, and perhaps you're right. But improving the state school system will do a lot to solve the problems without requiring any change on the part of the parents.


Yes. But if you are born middle-class, you do not have the experience of getting to the middle-class. Thus much of your advantage is negated.

Negated in comparison to those who manage to rise from relative poverty to the middle-class, but not necessarily in comparison to those born into relative poverty who don't have the out-of-the-ordinary luck in ability or parenting.






If you insist on calling taxation robbery (robbery is something being illegally taken),

So the Holocaust wasn't murder?

Ok perhaps it is robbery, but it's justified robbery, and the more the "victim" can afford it, the more justified it is.

then I must phrase it like this for you: "someone has to be robbed,

Why?

To finance the state school system, if nothing else.

so we may as well rob those who can afford it to a greater extent than we rob those who can't afford it as much".

I agree. Insofar as taxation IS necessary, the rich and the poor should pay the same percentage of their income.

You know very well that I mean taxing a greater proportion.


Here's a nice article about how that kind of thinking failed miserably in the last 10,000 years of human civilization:

http://perspicuity.net/politics/poorlogic-a.html

The author is a noted Game Theorist. I wish to point out that he does NOT provide a solution to the problem of poverty -- that's because there isn't one. He merely points out that the current ones (welfare) aren't working.

I'm sorry I don't have the time to devote to it that it needs, because I ought to be revising for exams right now. But does it show that improving state education won't solve the problem? (I've given up trying to argue anything else with you, because I don't have the economics knowledge to do it.)


The question isn't whether it's efficient or not, the problem is that it's robbery.

See my point above about justification.

But your contention about efficiency is also wrong. We spend almost $400 billion on welfare a year. Mathematically speaking, that's enough to raise every poor American to the poverty line twice, and still have some left over. Yet we still have poverty. This is because of the 80-20 rule. For every $100 the government taxes, $80 of it is wasted.

I'd say about two thirds to 80% goes to administrative costs.

That's a reason to improve government systems and get rid of bureacracy, not a reason to stop trying to help.


That's called a diverse and liberal arts education. Face it, kids are different. If's actually better for some schools to specialize and others to just be good all around.

Besides, when all schools teach the same thing, aren't you at least the slightest bit worried about the propaganda potential?

Schools are supposed to be places of light, liberty, and learning. You need a diversity of viewpoints -- even the silly ones -- for that.

Diversity in bias is ok to an extent (though there are limits - I'm very uncomfortable about children being educated in a staunchly religious way, even if that's what the parents want). But diversity in quality isn't. Some charities might try to educate more at lower standards, to try and make limited funds go further.

and liberal democratic governments are forced to be fairly just, whereas charities would have far more free rein to discriminate.

What forces them to be fairly just? How is it fairly just to rob Peter to pay Paul?

The electorate should force them to be just - and in the sense of racial or sexual discrimination, democracy has done fairly well (it just takes time, and is hurt by the fact that if you aren't giving the vote to the people you're oppressing, it isn't really democracy, so relies on the support of the rest of the unoppressed, who take time to come around to the idea of equal rights). Charities aren't restrained by this, because there are enough bigots to support a bigoted charity.

Ok sorry I can't reply to the rest of what you've said - have to go.

Incorrect. History's liberal revolutions such as the American and (initially) the French were all started by well-to-do the merchant bourgeoisie class

......

That's because the Republicans in the US are way too influenced by the religious right. When you cut out the cancer of bible fundies, you get a much more libertarian Republicanism, that does uphold personal rights.

......

Or ... not. Even the ACLU's donors are primarily well-off (upper middle class and upper class) people. And so are Cato's sponsors.

I'm not disputing that there are some rich people out there who support both civil and economic freedom, but that they are in the minority. You can't cut the cancer of bible fundamentalists, bigots and anti-civil rights people from the Republican Party because that's what makes up most of the party - likewise with the UK conservative party (although less so - they aren't so much influenced by religion, and there isn't quite the same problem of open discrimination - or maybe that's just my biased view of American politics).

And those with some power have to start the revolutions, because its very difficult for the underclasses to organise and equal the power of a lesser number of more powerful people.


The body is the biological means by which you sustain life. All "rights" are a claim of some sort (i.e. the right to life means "I own my life"). If you own your life, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that you can do what you want with it. Life is manifested in your body. QED you own your body and can dispose of it as you please.

Ok there's no point in arguing about this, since we agree on the end result of having the right to sovereignty over your body


When you are thrown in jail, you are done so at the point of a gun.

It's still possible to live and not pay your taxes - this is a silly thing to be arguing anyway, so this is the last I'll say on this.


I would like to see that. The immigration rates are a good indicator of social mobility. And the US has much more immigrants than the UK does.

Luck determines the emphasis that your parents place on education. Granted. But the child must like learning as well if he is to succeed.

I believe that you are defining luck to be so braod that it encompasses "genetic luck" (i.e. ability and capacity for hard work). In that sense, EVERYTHING is 100% pure luck, since by luck you get DNA that makes you smart or something. So the point is moot.

Sorry, I think I read it a very long time ago, so I don't think I have much chance of digging it up. Not EVERYTHING is luck, because there's still the choice of whether you're going to put in the effort and make use of whatever opportunities are left open to you. But seriously, I was troubled when somebody more leftist than me posed the question, "Why should someone who happens to have lucked out and had genes making them intelligent deserve more money and thus a better quality of life?".


But you need the ambition and the drive to move up... something that middle-class people often lack whereas hard-working poor possess.

You need both ambition and ability.


It isn't that rare for poor to go to middle-class. Even if a really poor person goes to a two-year, basically free, community college, he can graduate and find a middle-class job very easily.

Please note I don't know much about the american system for adult education (and little about the British system too), but I'd imagine that that would require a good deal of stretching and organisation of time and money to take 2 years out of working if they have a poor salary (if they realise later on that they need more education), and (I don't know) are community colleges very good?

While the income is certainly excessive, taxes only solve the result and not the problem. Besides, we don't need the government getting even more powerful.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kûk‡xenisi n!ok‡x'osi xno-k‡xek‡emi.-The state only exists to serve itself.
"Oppose excessive military spending, yet believe in excessive spending on junk food and plastic surgery to make all your women look like LARDASSES!"-Sino, when I criticized excessive military spending.
http://www.sulucas.com/images/steatopygia.jpg
I'm male. Note the pic of attractive women.

There's no such thing as "excessive income". Only people who hate anyone who has a penny more than they do.

Taking money away from rich people and giving it to poor people is a waste. What really needs to happen is that money needs to go to a much better public school system.

The reason my family is wealthy is because my grandfather hopped the Iron Curtain when he was 15 with the clothes on his back and about 5 dollars in his pocket and went to Western Germany. There he lived off the streets and joined the US Army when he was 17 to become an American citizen. He started a plastic company in his basement which is now a major supplier of plastic to Asia. The American dream, like a legal version of Scarface.

And I suppose that happens often, johnistan. Now you're living off the hardwork of your grandfather.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kûk‡xenisi n!ok‡x'osi xno-k‡xek‡emi.-The state only exists to serve itself.
"Oppose excessive military spending, yet believe in excessive spending on junk food and plastic surgery to make all your women look like LARDASSES!"-Sino, when I criticized excessive military spending.
http://www.sulucas.com/images/steatopygia.jpg
I'm male. Note the pic of attractive women.

Taking money away from rich people and giving it to poor people is a waste. What really needs to happen is that money needs to go to a much better public school system.
Why? That is not true. It's the rich people who pay very low wages to the poor people taht keeps them poor. The rich should be made to give some money back to the community.

That presumes that you will maintain a single student lifestyle throughout your working life. Also, there may be a hole which I can't find, not knowing enough about the US, or money management in life generally, because otherwise there would be far more millionaires. :D

That's because most people can't manage their finances.


So, taking it as common sense that to succeed, you usually need a good education, I think we both agree that generally people get a good education by having one of the following:

- money (i.e. lucky birth)

Not necessarily. It helps, but I go to a Catholic school where a significant portion of the students recieve partial or full financial aid or work-study.

- parents devoted to your education

That's the most important factor and the hardest to overcome.

- ability significantly above average and hard work

If you're reducing everything to luck, we can reduce ability to luck too, since you were lucky to be born with good genes.

- luck in being near, and being able to get into, a good free school (either by being in the catchment area of a state school, or by being the right religion for a good religious school, but you could lose out by getting a very biased education - for a child entering school at 5, both where you live and your religion generally depend on your parents)

I'm not Catholic and I go to a Catholic school. *Most* (but not all) religious schools don't require you to be part of that religion. At most they give you a tuition discout if you are.

So these are mostly all down to luck. Whilst it is possible to succeed through hard work, for that to work you will need ability, which again depends partially on how well your parents have brought you up educated you before you enter school, (most likely to a much lesser extent) genetics.

Studies have shown that the nature-nurture link is 50-50. Genetics is just as important as being brought up well. Not much more, not much less.

We can argue into eternity about wealth redistribution, and you will probably win the argument because you can back up what you say with far more knowledge of economics than I have, whereas I don't know much about leftist economics. But I think that there is still one important thing which should definetely be taxed for. I think that it should be one of government's main aims to improve state schooling systems, to the extent that everybody has an equal start in life,

Which will never happen because of genetics. In addition, some kids are better in a certain area than others. If you only have one, equal state schooling system, how do you develop kids that are just good in one area? Only private schools can provide the flexibility and intiative that an education system need if it hopes to succeed.

thus getting rid of the unfairnesses of the random lottery of who your parents are.

What's next then? The random lottery of your genetics? Genes matter almost as much, if not just as much, as environment does.

Then perhaps capitalists can argue with some justification that their system results in a race where everyone starts in the same place - what I mean is that equality of opportunity is worth taxing for, and taxing heavily if necessary.

There will never be equality of opportunity because of, as you said, completely unpredictable luck. What if someone gets some odd disease and dies when he's nine?

Ignoring economics and my idea of morality completely, and arguing only from the standpoint of what's best for the schools, it's clear that private schools, while less equal, provide a better education than state schools.

This isn't always the case, but private schools tend to be better. In addition, they can more readily specialize when they are unbounded by the needs of 'equality' (which, in education, means sameness). Is a kid who goes to an art school disadvantaged compared to one who goes to a heavy-engineering school? But what if the kid is better at art?

Plus private schools can do more with less money, as is the case here.

You've said that no amount of aid to poorer parents will fix the widespread negative attitudes, and perhaps you're right. But improving the state school system will do a lot to solve the problems without requiring any change on the part of the parents.

Education mostly comes down to the parents. It's up to the parent to convince his child that doing your homework is good, etc. If the parents are absolutely nihilsitic about education, even the best school will not help 90% of those kids.

Negated in comparison to those who manage to rise from relative poverty to the middle-class, but not necessarily in comparison to those born into relative poverty who don't have the out-of-the-ordinary luck in ability or parenting.

Perhaps

Ok perhaps it is robbery, but it's justified robbery, and the more the "victim" can afford it, the more justified it is.

What is it justified though? Why rob Peter to pay Paul?

To finance the state school system, if nothing else.

Okay, I'll say that taxing for education is necessary. At least in the short term. That doesn't mean it's justified.

When something is necessary, it is good for practical reasons.
When something is justified, it is good in principle.

There's a significant difference.

I would support, however, a tax credit system and private schools simply because private schools are more efficient and more flexible.

You know very well that I mean taxing a greater proportion.

Why? It only seems fair that you pay the same percentage? How would you tax a greater proportion? Come up with some complex mathematical formula? Or use brackets? Brackets are miserable failures/

I'm sorry I don't have the time to devote to it that it needs, because I ought to be revising for exams right now.

I know. Midterms are next week for me. I really shouldn't be wasting time on Nationstates, but whatever :lol:.

But does it show that improving state education won't solve the problem? (I've given up trying to argue anything else with you, because I don't have the economics knowledge to do it.)

No it doesn't. In fact, if you want ot help the poor, education is the best and [perhaps only] way to go about it. Though I perfer private schools with government-backed aid for the poor, for reasons stated above. A omnipresent state school system is just too Orwellian for my tastes.

That's a reason to improve government systems and get rid of bureacracy, not a reason to stop trying to help.

And alot of hte bureaucracy is in teh school systems. We need to streamline into private schools. A public school district needs to pay a superintendent, a board of education, liaisons with obergovernments, a controller, etc., etc. A private school just needs a principal.

Diversity in bias is ok to an extent (though there are limits - I'm very uncomfortable about children being educated in a staunchly religious way, even if that's what the parents want).

Why not? I am against religion in public schools, but what's wrong with religious private schools? I go to one and I don't consider myself a Christian zealot by any standard.

But diversity in quality isn't. Some charities might try to educate more at lower standards, to try and make limited funds go further.

What if a kid can't compete at the higher standards? Then is it unfair to put smart kids in honors classes? After all, intelligence is random.

The electorate should force them to be just

We both know that doesn't work that way.

and in the sense of racial or sexual discrimination, democracy has done fairly well (it just takes time, and is hurt by the fact that if you aren't giving the vote to the people you're oppressing, it isn't really democracy, so relies on the support of the rest of the unoppressed, who take time to come around to the idea of equal rights). Charities aren't restrained by this, because there are enough bigots to support a bigoted charity.

And there are enough non-bigots to support a non-bigoted charity.

EDIT: Double Post

If people don't like the wage they are getting paid they should get another job. Plus, no one has the right to take money away from anyone without their consent. To do so would be fascist.

And that's the reason why they have minimum wage, to prevent people from "taking advantage of someone"

If people don't like the wage they are getting paid they should get another job. Plus, no one has the right to take money away from anyone without their consent. To do so would be fascist.

And that's the reason why they have minimum wage, to prevent people from "taking advantage of someone"

i do not like these proposals that try to give all power to the UN, nations should be able to help the poor as they please.

I know. Midterms are next week for me. I really shouldn't be wasting time on Nationstates, but whatever :lol:.

I'm halfway through my GCSE mocks and I'm doing this, when I ought to be memorising case studies on intensive wet rice farming in the philippines and reading lord of the flies. :lol:

That presumes that you will maintain a single student lifestyle throughout your working life. Also, there may be a hole which I can't find, not knowing enough about the US, or money management in life generally, because otherwise there would be far more millionaires. :D

That's because most people can't manage their finances.

I suppose you're right, although what you suggest would require people to sacrifice a lot of comfort and the chance to support a family.


Not necessarily. It helps, but I go to a Catholic school where a significant portion of the students recieve partial or full financial aid or work-study.

But that's comparatively rare, given that private schools are rare, and charitable ones even rarer.

- parents devoted to your education

That's the most important factor and the hardest to overcome.

Which is why good education at school is important to make up for these shortcomings.

If you're reducing everything to luck, we can reduce ability to luck too, since you were lucky to be born with good genes.

Yep - actually, I find it difficult to morally justify rewarding the genetic lottery's winners.

I'm not Catholic and I go to a Catholic school. *Most* (but not all) religious schools don't require you to be part of that religion. At most they give you a tuition discout if you are.

Ok point ceded. But why should people have to have a religious education in order to get a decent start in life?

Studies have shown that the nature-nurture link is 50-50. Genetics is just as important as being brought up well. Not much more, not much less.

No studies can have conclusively proven the nature nurture debate in the case of intelligence, because intelligence is so difficult to measure (IQ as a measure is not supported by most experts). Personally, I don't like to think that some people are born intellectually superior, but it's a moot point (it's still luck, whether from nature or nurture. In fact there's probably a better case for nature being unfair luck).

Which will never happen because of genetics. In addition, some kids are better in a certain area than others. If you only have one, equal state schooling system, how do you develop kids that are just good in one area? Only private schools can provide the flexibility and intiative that an education system need if it hopes to succeed.

To the matter of genetics etc., I'll amend my point of view to having equality such that all students are given the chance to reach their full potential. To specialisation, we have a system here where a state secondary school can apply for specialised status and receive funding towards that area in return for maintaining high standards in the subject - my school is a language college so the languages department gets extra funding and we all have to study a minimum of two languages at GCSE and get good marks (I'm not sure how much above average the marks and teaching have to be, but we easily achieve it).

What's next then? The random lottery of your genetics? Genes matter almost as much, if not just as much, as environment does.

I'm morally undecided on the matter of rewarding genes.

There will never be equality of opportunity because of, as you said, completely unpredictable luck. What if someone gets some odd disease and dies when he's nine?

That's where state healthcare services come in. But otherwise, we have to aim for equality of opportunity to reach potential, even if we can never quite get to perfection.

Ignoring economics and my idea of morality completely, and arguing only from the standpoint of what's best for the schools, it's clear that private schools, while less equal, provide a better education than state schools.

This isn't always the case, but private schools tend to be better. In addition, they can more readily specialize when they are unbounded by the needs of 'equality' (which, in education, means sameness). Is a kid who goes to an art school disadvantaged compared to one who goes to a heavy-engineering school? But what if the kid is better at art?

Plus private schools can do more with less money, as is the case here.

I mentioned the matter of specialisation above. If we work at it, I'm sure we can achieve fairly good efficiency in government without having to sacrifice a fair free schooling system.

Education mostly comes down to the parents. It's up to the parent to convince his child that doing your homework is good, etc. If the parents are absolutely nihilsitic about education, even the best school will not help 90% of those kids.

Some change is better than none at all. I would think that most caring parents would be enthusiastic about education if it cost nothing. However, at midnight I am incapable of devising a solution to the problem of uncaring parents. We just have to do our best.

What is it justified though? Why rob Peter to pay Paul?

It's actually robbing Peter to educate Paul. It's justified because Paul's right to equality of opportunity to fulfil his potential is more important than Peter's right to a proportion of his wealth that he can afford to lose.

When something is necessary, it is good for practical reasons.
When something is justified, it is good in principle.

There's a significant difference.

See above

Why? It only seems fair that you pay the same percentage? How would you tax a greater proportion? Come up with some complex mathematical formula? Or use brackets? Brackets are miserable failures/

Complex mathematical formulae are always fun :wink: . Seriously, that's the fairest way to have a variable tax rate. It wouldn't be too difficult for a team of expert economists, if they were given parameters (e.g. say to them "give us a formula that would tax this salary that much and this salary that much, but allows no tax rate higher than x").

No it doesn't. In fact, if you want ot help the poor, education is the best and [perhaps only] way to go about it. Though I perfer private schools with government-backed aid for the poor, for reasons stated above. A omnipresent state school system is just too Orwellian for my tastes.

A state school system can be flexible, and somewhat independent - ours was, before they tightened the national curriculum.

And alot of hte bureaucracy is in teh school systems. We need to streamline into private schools. A public school district needs to pay a superintendent, a board of education, liaisons with obergovernments, a controller, etc., etc. A private school just needs a principal.

I'm unsure about that, but the main principle is that this should be state-funded and that nobody has a significantly poorer chance than anyone else. I would guess that private schools would lead to poorer students with a grant of x amount of money to spend on any school (I assume this is what you're suggesting) would lose out in comparison to rich students, whose parents could pay as much as they needed to get into the top schools - so you'd have different classes of schools.

Why not? I am against religion in public schools, but what's wrong with religious private schools? I go to one and I don't consider myself a Christian zealot by any standard.

Well, if you want all schools privatized, then there are no state schools for you to oppose having religion in. Are you a moderate Christian then, or just not Christian at all, BTW? Anyway, attempts at religious indoctrination often have a tendency to close the mind to alternatives. To a young child, if the people you are brought up to trust and learn from (parents and teachers) tell you that Christianity is the one true way, it's quite possible that by the time you're old enough to think carefully about it, you'll be subconsciously biased.

What if a kid can't compete at the higher standards? Then is it unfair to put smart kids in honors classes? After all, intelligence is random.

Equality of opportunity to fulfil potential means that smart kids are given the treatment they need to get as smart as they can, and less smart kids are given the treatment they need to go as far as they can. So having different classes for different ability levels is fair, because then all the levels of students can get the teaching that will most benefit them.

The electorate should force them to be just

We both know that doesn't work that way.

Democracy forces progressive change at about the speed that society evolves, I guess. We just have to hope that attitudes continue to change and advance.


And there are enough non-bigots to support a non-bigoted charity.

Then you have some bigoted charities, and some non-bigoted ones. The non-bigoted ones don't have the resources to provide for everyone, so some areas are left to bigoted charities.

I know. Midterms are next week for me. I really shouldn't be wasting time on Nationstates, but whatever :lol:.

I'm halfway through my GCSE mocks and I'm doing this, when I ought to be memorising case studies on intensive wet rice farming in the philippines and reading lord of the flies. :lol:

What are GCSE mocks?

And don't feel bad, I just did a 20+ page rough draft paper on Chinese economic development over one week that I'm going to have to rewrite and resumbit as a final copy.

I suppose you're right, although what you suggest would require people to sacrifice a lot of comfort and the chance to support a family.

Well, when you have a family, there's two people working: double the income. And lower taxes. I know somebody who just got out of law school and is making about $100,000 a year as a single person with no house... it's not unreasonable to suggest he pays over 50% of that in taxes.


Not necessarily. It helps, but I go to a Catholic school where a significant portion of the students recieve partial or full financial aid or work-study.

But that's comparatively rare, given that private schools are rare, and charitable ones even rarer.

Hmm, where do you live? In Pittsburgh, there are many private schools, and all of them, especially the religious ones, provide at least some degree of financial assisstance if you're good enough.

- parents devoted to your education

That's the most important factor and the hardest to overcome.

Which is why good education at school is important to make up for these shortcomings.

Right. But once again getting a good school education is very difficult without the support of a family.

If you're reducing everything to luck, we can reduce ability to luck too, since you were lucky to be born with good genes.

Yep - actually, I find it difficult to morally justify rewarding the genetic lottery's winners.

So then what are you proposing? It's easy to justify -- they're the ones that will contribute the most to society and produe the most, it's only fair that they be allowed to consume what they produce.

I'm not Catholic and I go to a Catholic school. *Most* (but not all) religious schools don't require you to be part of that religion. At most they give you a tuition discount if you are.

Ok point ceded. But why should people have to have a religious education in order to get a decent start in life?

They don't. It's just something that you can do.

Studies have shown that the nature-nurture link is 50-50. Genetics is just as important as being brought up well. Not much more, not much less.

No studies can have conclusively proven the nature nurture debate in the case of intelligence, because intelligence is so difficult to measure (IQ as a measure is not supported by most experts). Personally, I don't like to think that some people are born intellectually superior, but it's a moot point (it's still luck, whether from nature or nurture. In fact there's probably a better case for nature being unfair luck).

The general consensus is that nature and nurture play relatively equal parts. IQ is a way for psychiatrists to try to show that they are smarter than the rest of us. And its widespread acceptance seems to prove that fact :lol:. Nonetheless, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that yes, some people have higher intellecutal capacities than others.

Which will never happen because of genetics. In addition, some kids are better in a certain area than others. If you only have one, equal state schooling system, how do you develop kids that are just good in one area? Only private schools can provide the flexibility and intiative that an education system need if it hopes to succeed.

To the matter of genetics etc., I'll amend my point of view to having equality such that all students are given the chance to reach their full potential. To specialisation, we have a system here where a state secondary school can apply for specialised status and receive funding towards that area in return for maintaining high standards in the subject - my school is a language college so the languages department gets extra funding and we all have to study a minimum of two languages at GCSE and get good marks (I'm not sure how much above average the marks and teaching have to be, but we easily achieve it).

But what if it's something that only 50 kids in a city want to do? That would just expand bureaucracy tremendously.

What's next then? The random lottery of your genetics? Genes matter almost as much, if not just as much, as environment does.

I'm morally undecided on the matter of rewarding genes.

Genes alone won't make the reward. You are rewarded for what you produce and what others give to you. Genes help that.

There will never be equality of opportunity because of, as you said, completely unpredictable luck. What if someone gets some odd disease and dies when he's nine?

That's where state healthcare services come in. But otherwise, we have to aim for equality of opportunity to reach potential, even if we can never quite get to perfection.

The best healthcare in the world won't save you if your P-53 genes all go berserk at the same time.

Ignoring economics and my idea of morality completely, and arguing only from the standpoint of what's best for the schools, it's clear that private schools, while less equal, provide a better education than state schools.

This isn't always the case, but private schools tend to be better. In addition, they can more readily specialize when they are unbounded by the needs of 'equality' (which, in education, means sameness). Is a kid who goes to an art school disadvantaged compared to one who goes to a heavy-engineering school? But what if the kid is better at art?

Plus private schools can do more with less money, as is the case here.

I mentioned the matter of specialisation above. If we work at it, I'm sure we can achieve fairly good efficiency in government without having to sacrifice a fair free schooling system.

But we already have efficiency in flexibility in private schools. Why do we need to spend more money to institute a new program which MAY or MAY NOT be as efficient or flexible?

And what about kids who can't achieve well academically? Are honors classes discriminatory then?

Education mostly comes down to the parents. It's up to the parent to convince his child that doing your homework is good, etc. If the parents are absolutely nihilsitic about education, even the best school will not help 90% of those kids.

Some change is better than none at all. I would think that most caring parents would be enthusiastic about education if it cost nothing. However, at midnight I am incapable of devising a solution to the problem of uncaring parents. We just have to do our best.

That's because there is no solution.

What is it justified though? Why rob Peter to pay Paul?

It's actually robbing Peter to educate Paul. It's justified because Paul's right to equality of opportunity to fulfil his potential is more important than Peter's right to a proportion of his wealth that he can afford to lose.

Who determines what someone can afford to lose? What gives you the right to determine what someone else can and cannot afford?

Why? It only seems fair that you pay the same percentage? How would you tax a greater proportion? Come up with some complex mathematical formula? Or use brackets? Brackets are miserable failures/

Complex mathematical formulae are always fun :wink:.

You wouldn't say that after you met my Calc teacher :lol:.

Seriously, that's the fairest way to have a variable tax rate. It wouldn't be too difficult for a team of expert economists,

Yes that's what I do whenever I want to save money -- hire a team of Ivy League economists.

if they were given parameters (e.g. say to them "give us a formula that would tax this salary that much and this salary that much, but allows no tax rate higher than x").

You underestimate the absurdity of economists.

A state school system can be flexible, and somewhat independent - ours was, before they tightened the national curriculum.

But not nearly as flexible and independent as unbureaucratic private ones.

And alot of hte bureaucracy is in teh school systems. We need to streamline into private schools. A public school district needs to pay a superintendent, a board of education, liaisons with obergovernments, a controller, etc., etc. A private school just needs a principal.

I'm unsure about that, but the main principle is that this should be state-funded and that nobody has a significantly poorer chance than anyone else. I would guess that private schools would lead to poorer students with a grant of x amount of money to spend on any school (I assume this is what you're suggesting) would lose out in comparison to rich students, whose parents could pay as much as they needed to get into the top schools

That's not true. The tax credit should be high enough to cover 2/3 or more of private schools. That leaves it mostly merit (gene)-based.

- so you'd have different classes of schools.

You have those anyways. Unless you're opposed to gifted schools for especially talented people. And special education for untalented ones.

Why not? I am against religion in public schools, but what's wrong with religious private schools? I go to one and I don't consider myself a Christian zealot by any standard.

Well, if you want all schools privatized, then there are no state schools for you to oppose having religion in.

There are plenty of atheist and nondenominational private schools -- in fact, the best prep schools, like Andover, etc. -- rarely have religion.

Are you a moderate Christian then, or just not Christian at all, BTW?

I consider myself Deist/Humanist.

Anyway, attempts at religious indoctrination often have a tendency to close the mind to alternatives.

So do attempts at political indoctrination, as is the case with state schools.

To a young child, if the people you are brought up to trust and learn from (parents and teachers) tell you that Christianity is the one true way, it's quite possible that by the time you're old enough to think carefully about it, you'll be subconsciously biased.

So? If you're raised in a Jewish community, you'll be subconsciously biased against Jews. If you live in a rich communuity, you'll be subconciously biased against poor. Once again, no solution.

What if a kid can't compete at the higher standards? Then is it unfair to put smart kids in honors classes? After all, intelligence is random.

Equality of opportunity to fulfil potential means that smart kids are given the treatment they need to get as smart as they can, and less smart kids are given the treatment they need to go as far as they can. So having different classes for different ability levels is fair, because then all the levels of students can get the teaching that will most benefit them.

But what if a school only has like one student interested in a particular class? How would a state school system resolve that conflict?

The electorate should force them to be just

We both know that doesn't work that way.

Democracy forces progressive change at about the speed that society evolves, I guess. We just have to hope that attitudes continue to change and advance.

Perhaps. And the trend's been towards capitalism.


And there are enough non-bigots to support a non-bigoted charity.

Then you have some bigoted charities, and some non-bigoted ones. The non-bigoted ones don't have the resources to provide for everyone, so some areas are left to bigoted charities.[/quote]

And let bigots go to those.

an explantion of low taxes for the wealthy:

Its a simple fact that the worlds wealthy elite has more money then poorer citizens, that goes without saying. to further drive the point, they'll have more money to invest in stock markets. doing so will further create a thriving stable economy. furthermore, many wealthy elite own their buisness. they would most likely invest in their buisness creating a trickle down effect to the employees of the company. you may ask " well what if they dont and they just buy a new car or a tv etc.?" well, who makes the tv? most likely another company, who will benifit from an increase in sales. if none of these options are enacted, then the individual will put his money in a bank allowing other citizens to take out loans. Theres a very little chance of loss for the economy.

What are GCSE mocks?

They're a dry run (and a back-up in case you're ill on the day) 5 months before the real GCSEs in June. GCSEs are done in Year 11 (10th Grade? it's age 15/16) and they're the last things everyone does - after that, staying on for a-levels at school is optional. I have 15 minutes before I have to get back to revision.

And don't feel bad, I just did a 20+ page rough draft paper on Chinese economic development over one week that I'm going to have to rewrite and resumbit as a final copy.

Nasty. But it can't measure up to the geography coursework we had to do in the autumn - I did an 80 page (ish) piece about coastal geomorphology and sustainable tourism in a part of Dorset. Anyway...

Well, when you have a family, there's two people working: double the income. And lower taxes. I know somebody who just got out of law school and is making about $100,000 a year as a single person with no house... it's not unreasonable to suggest he pays over 50% of that in taxes.

By a family, I meant kids, who tend to use up a lot of money - supporting a kid probably costs substantially more than supporting an adult, plus the fact that they (obviously) can't earn, no?

Hmm, where do you live? In Pittsburgh, there are many private schools, and all of them, especially the religious ones, provide at least some degree of financial assisstance if you're good enough.

Suburbs of London. There are quite a lot of private schools, but I meant that there are far more state schools than private. I don't know about the extent of financial aid for them.

Right. But once again getting a good school education is very difficult without the support of a family.

Just because you can't perfect it, doesn't mean that making some improvements isn't worth it.

So then what are you proposing? It's easy to justify -- they're the ones that will contribute the most to society and produe the most, it's only fair that they be allowed to consume what they produce.

But I don't know that that's fair - after all, there's nothing to say that the less able wouldn't make just as big a contribution if it hadn't been for their bad luck in terms of both nature and nurture.

Ok point ceded. But why should people have to have a religious education in order to get a decent start in life?

They don't. It's just something that you can do.

But if the only decent, free school in the area is a religious one, you're basically forced to go to that one in order to get a decent education.

The general consensus is that nature and nurture play relatively equal parts. IQ is a way for psychiatrists to try to show that they are smarter than the rest of us. And its widespread acceptance seems to prove that fact :lol:. Nonetheless, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that yes, some people have higher intellecutal capacities than others.

Although now psychiatrists are trying to persuade us that they were wrong after all, and IQ isn't a good measure, but we won't listen (witness the excitement everyone got into when the BBC did a short nationwide IQ test on TV and over the web for fun, and had different groups come into the studio and take the tests to "prove" that those who volunteered to go in the blondes and bodybuilders groups were less intelligent than the other groups, which included tax collectors and lawyers :lol: ).

Anyway, I suppose you're right that intelligence is linked to genetics, but I don't like that being shouted too loud, because it can so easily lead to claims of superiority, whether racial or class or whatever.

But what if it's something that only 50 kids in a city want to do? That would just expand bureaucracy tremendously.

Why? One school can offer those classes as optional, and all those interested can go and choose that course.

The best healthcare in the world won't save you if your P-53 genes all go berserk at the same time.

P-53? Anyway, whatever they are, the fact that perfection is impossible isn't a reason to stop trying. And who knows, with a few years of science being allowed to do what it was meant to do, maybe we'll find a way to fix P-53 genes even before they go beserk.

But we already have efficiency in flexibility in private schools. Why do we need to spend more money to institute a new program which MAY or MAY NOT be as efficient or flexible?

It would require massive overhaul to privatize all schools too.

And what about kids who can't achieve well academically? Are honors classes discriminatory then?

I already said that higher ability classes are just a way to allow everyone to get the treatment they need to reach their own potential.

That's because there is no solution.[to the problem of uncaring parents]

Well we can try and make up at least some of the difference by making the schools better, so that people will grow up knowing the benefits of good education, and try to pass that on to their kids. It might take a generation or two, but I think we can make a difference.

Who determines what someone can afford to lose? What gives you the right to determine what someone else can and cannot afford?

It's plain commonsense that if you need £5 to be above the poverty line, and £10 to have a good standard of living, then the person with £50 can afford to give a greater proportion of his money to the people with less than £5 than can the person with £11.

Yes that's what I do whenever I want to save money -- hire a team of Ivy League economists.

:lol: But seriously, governments already employ expert economists, so you just set them to the task for a little while - no extra cost, because they're already there to organise the tax system.

You underestimate the absurdity of economists.

I don't think that it would be impossible. It might take them a while, but they could come up with something. Or perhaps if you asked mathematicians for the basic framework, and then got economists to work out values to put in.

That's not true. The tax credit should be high enough to cover 2/3 or more of private schools. That leaves it mostly merit (gene)-based.

How so? It would mean that the top 2/3 would have the most funds (and thus be likely to provide the best education) and be open only to the rich.

You have those anyways. Unless you're opposed to gifted schools for especially talented people. And special education for untalented ones.

But the division would be partially wealth-based.

I consider myself Deist/Humanist.

:?:

So do attempts at political indoctrination, as is the case with state schools.

I go to a state school, and I have never seen attempts at political indoctrination.

So? If you're raised in a Jewish community, you'll be subconsciously biased against Jews. If you live in a rich communuity, you'll be subconciously biased against poor. Once again, no solution.

But what biases we can get rid of, we should. And that means getting rid of education in schools, because we can do that.

But what if a school only has like one student interested in a particular class? How would a state school system resolve that conflict?

Sadly, as of now, they tend not to provide it (as I found when I and about 4 others applied for electronics GCSE). But you could introduce greater exchange between schools, so that one school in an area ran classes in one rare subject, and another ran classes in another rare subject, and kids would be encouraged to go to those schools, or perhaps go to another but attend classes at the other one day of the week. How would private schools deal with it? Surely it would be inefficient and thus uneconomical to prvide such a class.

Perhaps. And the trend's been towards capitalism.

Actually, in terms of economics, the trend is often towards self-interest. So capitalism when the going's good, and then they come running back to the left when it goes wrong - for instance, republicans were elected in the US in the boom of the 1920s, then the Crash and Depression came along, so they voted in FDR with fairly socialist policies for providing government jobs.


And there are enough non-bigots to support a non-bigoted charity.

Then you have some bigoted charities, and some non-bigoted ones. The non-bigoted ones don't have the resources to provide for everyone, so some areas are left to bigoted charities.

And let bigots go to those.

Yeah but if the charity providing for your area is a bigoted one, and you're one of the group that they discriminate against, then you might have a problem.

Anyway, I really have to stop participating in this discussion for now, and get on with my work.

I go to a state school, and I have never seen attempts at political indoctrination.

I see it all the time.

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Kûk‡xenisi n!ok‡x'osi xno-k‡xek‡emi.-The state only exists to serve itself.
"Oppose excessive military spending, yet believe in excessive spending on junk food and plastic surgery to make all your women look like LARDASSES!"-Sino, when I criticized excessive military spending.
http://www.sulucas.com/images/steatopygia.jpg
I'm male. Note the pic of attractive women.

I'm sorry, but I can't approve it. Actually I'm not sorry, I'm morally opposed. If they make the money by their own will and wit, it's theirs to keep. Everyone can earn money, but they have to try. Not everyone can earn millions, but everyone can raise their income, they just prefer to be lazy.
If the rich decide they want to give money to the poor, they will tell you, if not, it's their right.

This resolution is yet another example of the UN sticking its collective nose in matters that it does not belong. We will not be supporting this resolution.

The States of Stephenson

The u.n has no right to decide how a nation shall tax its citizens. That matter is one of domestic affairs, something the un needs to stay away from.

Despite the moderate and reformist nature of this proposal I skeptically voted "YES".

Myopia. It is the subtle nature of the massive levels of indoctrination that explains why you do not see it. Something as simple as "the democratic nature of the Weimar republic made it a success because it promoted freedom" (which would get the marks in a history exam) seems mundane but the uneven capital levels, the assassinations etc. suggect that maybe democracy alone is not synonymous with freedom. But do people even qustion it? no. Hence the success of indoctrination

They're a dry run (and a back-up in case you're ill on the day) 5 months before the real GCSEs in June. GCSEs are done in Year 11 (10th Grade? it's age 15/16) and they're the last things everyone does - after that, staying on for a-levels at school is optional. I have 15 minutes before I have to get back to revision.

I'm in 11th grade here. Are GCSEs then sort of like the SATs?

And don't feel bad, I just did a 20+ page rough draft paper on Chinese economic development over one week that I'm going to have to rewrite and resumbit as a final copy.

Nasty. But it can't measure up to the geography coursework we had to do in the autumn - I did an 80 page (ish) piece about coastal geomorphology and sustainable tourism in a part of Dorset. Anyway...

Hey, I have an independent research project next year that will probably turn out closer to 150 pages.

By a family, I meant kids, who tend to use up a lot of money - supporting a kid probably costs substantially more than supporting an adult, plus the fact that they (obviously) can't earn, no?

But my figure was for someone making $6,000 a year... welfare pays more than double that.

Suburbs of London. There are quite a lot of private schools, but I meant that there are far more state schools than private. I don't know about the extent of financial aid for them.

I'd say here we have equal number of state and private schools for middle school, but 2 or even 3 state schools for every private high school.

Just because you can't perfect it, doesn't mean that making some improvements isn't worth it.

If those improvements accomplish something, that is.

So then what are you proposing? It's easy to justify -- they're the ones that will contribute the most to society and produe the most, it's only fair that they be allowed to consume what they produce.

But I don't know that that's fair - after all, there's nothing to say that the less able wouldn't make just as big a contribution if it hadn't been for their bad luck in terms of both nature and nurture.

But the fact is, they aren't producing. You get paid based on what you produce, not what you could potentially produce if everything were in your favor.

Ok point ceded. But why should people have to have a religious education in order to get a decent start in life?

They don't. It's just something that you can do.

But if the only decent, free school in the area is a religious one, you're basically forced to go to that one in order to get a decent education.

Perhaps, but that would only apply if you live on a farm in, say, North Dakota.

The general consensus is that nature and nurture play relatively equal parts. IQ is a way for psychiatrists to try to show that they are smarter than the rest of us. And its widespread acceptance seems to prove that fact :lol:. Nonetheless, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that yes, some people have higher intellecutal capacities than others.

Although now psychiatrists are trying to persuade us that they were wrong after all, and IQ isn't a good measure, but we won't listen (witness the excitement everyone got into when the BBC did a short nationwide IQ test on TV and over the web for fun, and had different groups come into the studio and take the tests to "prove" that those who volunteered to go in the blondes and bodybuilders groups were less intelligent than the other groups, which included tax collectors and lawyers :lol: ).

What? Blondes? Tax collectors?

Anyway, I suppose you're right that intelligence is linked to genetics, but I don't like that being shouted too loud, because it can so easily lead to claims of superiority, whether racial or class or whatever.

No, all that proves is people with superior intelligence genes are smarter.

This also helps explain why smart parents tend to have smart kids. Which is, once again, why educated (and thus probably smart) parents usually put emphasis on educating their kids. Which is why rich (and therefore probably educated, and thus probably smart) parents's kids tend also to be rich. It's a genetic aristocracy more than anything.

But what if it's something that only 50 kids in a city want to do? That would just expand bureaucracy tremendously.

Why? One school can offer those classes as optional, and all those interested can go and choose that course.

But that doesn't work if only 2 or 3 kids want to take it. It would cost way too much to hire another professor, another classroom, etc., especially for larger public schools.

The best healthcare in the world won't save you if your P-53 genes all go berserk at the same time.

P-53? Anyway, whatever they are, the fact that perfection is impossible isn't a reason to stop trying. And who knows, with a few years of science being allowed to do what it was meant to do, maybe we'll find a way to fix P-53 genes even before they go beserk.

P-53 genes are tumor-suppressors. If they don't function, you get cancer and die. Anyways, most modern medical advances have occured in private labs. Countries with state healthcare systems tend not to be on the brink of innovation. So that defeats your own argument really.

But we already have efficiency in flexibility in private schools. Why do we need to spend more money to institute a new program which MAY or MAY NOT be as efficient or flexible?

It would require massive overhaul to privatize all schools too.

Perhaps. But private schools have thusfar proven themselves.

And what about kids who can't achieve well academically? Are honors classes discriminatory then?

I already said that higher ability classes are just a way to allow everyone to get the treatment they need to reach their own potential.

But then you would basically have to give every student a private tutor, since really, no two students have the exact same ability.

That's because there is no solution.[to the problem of uncaring parents]

Well we can try and make up at least some of the difference by making the schools better, so that people will grow up knowing the benefits of good education, and try to pass that on to their kids. It might take a generation or two, but I think we can make a difference.

But if we tax the people so heavily that they are unable to reap the benefits of their education, dosen't that defeat the whole prupose?

Who determines what someone can afford to lose? What gives you the right to determine what someone else can and cannot afford?

It's plain commonsense that if you need £5 to be above the poverty line, and £10 to have a good standard of living, then the person with £50 can afford to give a greater proportion of his money to the people with less than £5 than can the person with £11.

Still... what if hte $50 makes him happier?

Yes that's what I do whenever I want to save money -- hire a team of Ivy League economists.

:lol: But seriously, governments already employ expert economists, so you just set them to the task for a little while - no extra cost, because they're already there to organise the tax system.

And look at what a good job they're doing!

"I believe in a complete overhaul of our income tax system. I feel it is a disgrace to the human race."
--Former President Jimmy Carter

This guy runs a whole institute for fixing human rights abuses, by the way.

You underestimate the absurdity of economists.

I don't think that it would be impossible. It might take them a while, but they could come up with something. Or perhaps if you asked mathematicians for the basic framework, and then got economists to work out values to put in.

Economics is basically applied math. For some great econ jokes,
http://netec.wustl.edu/JokEc.html

That's not true. The tax credit should be high enough to cover 2/3 or more of private schools. That leaves it mostly merit (gene)-based.

How so? It would mean that the top 2/3 would have the most funds (and thus be likely to provide the best education) and be open only to the rich.[/quote]

What I meant was this. Let's say there are 6 private schools:
School A: $24,000 (an Ivies prep school)
School B: $15,000
School C: $10,000
School D: $9,000 (an average private school)
School E: $7,000 (an average Catholic school)
School F: $6,000

A tax credit would probably cover $12,000. That means that A would cost $12,000, B would cost $3,000, everything else would be free.

That's discounting charity and financial aid completely, which do occur.

You have those anyways. Unless you're opposed to gifted schools for especially talented people. And special education for untalented ones.

But the division would be partially wealth-based.

As it is in real society. Educated people tend to have smart children. They also tend to be wealthy.

I consider myself Deist/Humanist.

:?:

It's a long story.

So do attempts at political indoctrination, as is the case with state schools.

I go to a state school, and I have never seen attempts at political indoctrination.

I used to go to a state school, and I found it that it has far less political freedom than my current Catholic school does. Good propaganda you can't tell. And even if there is no indoctrination... you have to admit, your typical private school allows for much more in the way of free speech than your typical public school does.

So? If you're raised in a Jewish community, you'll be subconsciously biased against Jews. If you live in a rich communuity, you'll be subconciously biased against poor. Once again, no solution.

But what biases we can get rid of, we should. And that means getting rid of education in schools, because we can do that.

How do you get rid of bias? You can't. And even if you could, quashing free expression is not an acceptable price to pay for it.

But what if a school only has like one student interested in a particular class? How would a state school system resolve that conflict?

Sadly, as of now, they tend not to provide it (as I found when I and about 4 others applied for electronics GCSE). But you could introduce greater exchange between schools, so that one school in an area ran classes in one rare subject, and another ran classes in another rare subject, and kids would be encouraged to go to those schools, or perhaps go to another but attend classes at the other one day of the week.

Yes. I had to do this at the state school I used to attend. I had to get up about an hour earlier and take a bus halfway across town.

How would private schools deal with it? Surely it would be inefficient and thus uneconomical to prvide such a class.

I'm in this situation now. I will walk across the street to another private school for Calc II. There's less bureaucracy and more communication, so unlike a state school, where you might be assigned to another school halfway across the city, a private school can pair itself much easier.

Perhaps. And the trend's been towards capitalism.

Actually, in terms of economics, the trend is often towards self-interest. So capitalism when the going's good, and then they come running back to the left when it goes wrong - for instance, republicans were elected in the US in the boom of the 1920s, then the Crash and Depression came along, so they voted in FDR with fairly socialist policies for providing government jobs.

That's because neither side was really capitalist. Hoover, it should be noted, was a bit of a socialist himself. He created the Department of Agriculture and instituted many subsidies that encouraged environmental destruction and ended in the Dust Bowl. He raised tariffs (America's highest tariff was passed in 1930) that most certainly aggravated the depression. And he had one of the most corrupt administrations ever.


And there are enough non-bigots to support a non-bigoted charity.

Then you have some bigoted charities, and some non-bigoted ones. The non-bigoted ones don't have the resources to provide for everyone, so some areas are left to bigoted charities.

And let bigots go to those.

Yeah but if the charity providing for your area is a bigoted one, and you're one of the group that they discriminate against, then you might have a problem.

Then make another charity.

Myopia. It is the subtle nature of the massive levels of indoctrination that explains why you do not see it. Something as simple as "the democratic nature of the Weimar republic made it a success because it promoted freedom" (which would get the marks in a history exam) seems mundane but the uneven capital levels, the assassinations etc. suggect that maybe democracy alone is not synonymous with freedom. But do people even qustion it? no. Hence the success of indoctrination

Correct. It's impossible to eliminate this sort of subliminal bias, which is why we need a large diversity of non-state viewpoints, which only private schools can provide.

Both public and private schools have their problems, but I have to wonder how the poor will get an education if they can't afford it?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kûk‡xenisi n!ok‡x'osi xno-k‡xek‡emi.-The state only exists to serve itself.
"Oppose excessive military spending, yet believe in excessive spending on junk food and plastic surgery to make all your women look like LARDASSES!"-Sino, when I criticized excessive military spending.
http://www.sulucas.com/images/steatopygia.jpg
I'm male. Note the pic of attractive women.

Both public and private schools have their problems, but I have to wonder how the poor will get an education if they can't afford it?


You obviously haven't been paying attention to the debate. My proposal was that the state gives people tax credits (direct vouchers to the extremely poor) so that they can go to private school free.

You obviously haven't been paying attention to the debate. My proposal was that the state gives people tax credits (direct vouchers to the extremely poor) so that they can go to private school free.

That doesn't seem very anti-state. I guess you have to compromise here and there, though.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kûk‡xenisi n!ok‡x'osi xno-k‡xek‡emi.-The state only exists to serve itself.
"Oppose excessive military spending, yet believe in excessive spending on junk food and plastic surgery to make all your women look like LARDASSES!"-Sino, when I criticized excessive military spending.
http://www.sulucas.com/images/steatopygia.jpg
I'm male. Note the pic of attractive women.

In prinicple, I'd support the complete separation of education and state... but then you'd complain that the poor people might not be able to afford school.

In prinicple, I'd support the complete separation of education and state... but then you'd complain that the poor people might not be able to afford school.

Might not be able to afford school? They would probably starve or die from disease before that became a problem, but they would definitely not be able to afford it at all.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kûk‡xenisi n!ok‡x'osi xno-k‡xek‡emi.-The state only exists to serve itself.
"Oppose excessive military spending, yet believe in excessive spending on junk food and plastic surgery to make all your women look like LARDASSES!"-Sino, when I criticized excessive military spending.
http://www.sulucas.com/images/steatopygia.jpg
I'm male. Note the pic of attractive women.

In prinicple, I'd support the complete separation of education and state... but then you'd complain that the poor people might not be able to afford school.

POSTING AS TGM AGAIN: I go to a private school and many of my classmates come from poor familise and are there on scholarships or work-study. Most of the poor would still be able to afford school even without government help. Government help just ensures it.

I'm in 11th grade here. Are GCSEs then sort of like the SATs?

Not knowing what SATs are in the American system, I couldn't tell you :D

Hey, I have an independent research project next year that will probably turn out closer to 150 pages.

Ouch.

I'd say here we have equal number of state and private schools for middle school, but 2 or even 3 state schools for every private high school.

Don't know what ages middle and high schools cover, but it sounds like you have more private schools than us. Although it might be that I never really researched it, because I didn't apply for any private secondary schools (ages 11-18), and I don't know many people at private schools in my area.

If those improvements accomplish something, that is.

How could properly improving the state school system fail to accomplish anything?

But I don't know that that's fair - after all, there's nothing to say that the less able wouldn't make just as big a contribution if it hadn't been for their bad luck in terms of both nature and nurture.

But the fact is, they aren't producing. You get paid based on what you produce, not what you could potentially produce if everything were in your favor.

That's the reason why it happens, not the reason why it should happen. Like I said, I'm still unsure about it.

Perhaps, but that would only apply if you live on a farm in, say, North Dakota.

Ok, well let's say you have an area where there are a few poor state schools, a couple of private schools which are too expensive and don't offer help to many people, and one religious school which is good and free. If you want a good schooling, and you aren't lucky enough to be one of the few accepted into the private schools on scholarships, you're going to have to go to the religious one, even if you aren't religious.

What? Blondes? Tax collectors?

Don't worry, it was a silly television thing that would take too long to explain. :)

No, all that proves is people with superior intelligence genes are smarter.

This also helps explain why smart parents tend to have smart kids. Which is, once again, why educated (and thus probably smart) parents usually put emphasis on educating their kids. Which is why rich (and therefore probably educated, and thus probably smart) parents's kids tend also to be rich. It's a genetic aristocracy more than anything.

You have those anyways. Unless you're opposed to gifted schools for especially talented people. And special education for untalented ones.

But the division would be partially wealth-based.

As it is in real society. Educated people tend to have smart children. They also tend to be wealthy.

Be careful - don't slip into Lamarck's mistaken theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics (see what revision does to you. start talking about obscure pointless rubbish for no reason...)

But what if it's something that only 50 kids in a city want to do? That would just expand bureaucracy tremendously.

Why? One school can offer those classes as optional, and all those interested can go and choose that course.

But that doesn't work if only 2 or 3 kids want to take it. It would cost way too much to hire another professor, another classroom, etc., especially for larger public schools.

I meant if one school in town offered it, and all the interested kids would be encouraged to go there.

P-53 genes are tumor-suppressors. If they don't function, you get cancer and die. Anyways, most modern medical advances have occured in private labs. Countries with state healthcare systems tend not to be on the brink of innovation. So that defeats your own argument really.

The UK has a (proper) state healthcare system - the NHS. The NHS provides care, it does not do research. Research is done by corporations or by academics at universities, the drugs get made by companies, and the health service buys them, no? So state healthcare systems have nothing to do with medical technological innovation.

Perhaps. But private schools have thusfar proven themselves.

So have state schools with decent funding and some independence. My school is state funded with a charitable fund attached to it (as far as I understand), that was set up by the founder of the school. When I got in, they had an entrance policy of 50% selected by tests, 50% by other factors (e.g. sibling of current pupil, live nearby etc.). Its a language speciality school, but with high standards across the board. The people in older years who came in under the same entrance policy as me have been doing their GCSEs and A-levels in recent years, and my school has been near or at the top of the state non-fully-selective newspaper league tables. Marks are comparable to many good private schools and there is (usually) a lot of choice and diversity.

But then you would basically have to give every student a private tutor, since really, no two students have the exact same ability.

No school, private or state (except the ridiculously overpriced ones) could ever do that. Ability based streaming goes some of the way to solving the problem.

That's because there is no solution.[to the problem of uncaring parents]

Well we can try and make up at least some of the difference by making the schools better, so that people will grow up knowing the benefits of good education, and try to pass that on to their kids. It might take a generation or two, but I think we can make a difference.

But if we tax the people so heavily that they are unable to reap the benefits of their education, dosen't that defeat the whole prupose?

I'm not talking about anything like that. I don't support 100% or near taxes (what's happened in my nation is an accident).

Who determines what someone can afford to lose? What gives you the right to determine what someone else can and cannot afford?

It's plain commonsense that if you need £5 to be above the poverty line, and £10 to have a good standard of living, then the person with £50 can afford to give a greater proportion of his money to the people with less than £5 than can the person with £11.

Still... what if hte $50 makes him happier?

I think that the minor loss of happiness is worth it to bring someone up above the poverty line

Yes that's what I do whenever I want to save money -- hire a team of Ivy League economists.

:lol: But seriously, governments already employ expert economists, so you just set them to the task for a little while - no extra cost, because they're already there to organise the tax system.

And look at what a good job they're doing!

"I believe in a complete overhaul of our income tax system. I feel it is a disgrace to the human race."
--Former President Jimmy Carter

This guy runs a whole institute for fixing human rights abuses, by the way.

Which way does he think they should overhaul? More? Less? Formulae not bands? Anyway, clearly there are some good economists out there, hire them to do it. And anyway when you're talking about a government of a large nation, there's little real difference in cost, especially if you're hiring only for a short period.

What I meant was this. Let's say there are 6 private schools:
School A: $24,000 (an Ivies prep school)
School B: $15,000
School C: $10,000
School D: $9,000 (an average private school)
School E: $7,000 (an average Catholic school)
School F: $6,000

A tax credit would probably cover $12,000. That means that A would cost $12,000, B would cost $3,000, everything else would be free.

That's discounting charity and financial aid completely, which do occur.

I think if the poor were given tax credits, you'd see a drop in the amount of charity given to help them get educated - the perception would be that they needed no help because the government was already dealing with it.

I consider myself Deist/Humanist.

:?:

It's a long story.

But what does it actually mean?

I used to go to a state school, and I found it that it has far less political freedom than my current Catholic school does. Good propaganda you can't tell. And even if there is no indoctrination... you have to admit, your typical private school allows for much more in the way of free speech than your typical public school does.

Wouldn't know - haven't been to a private school. But I have seen little restriction - only people being reprimanded for swearing. We've recently had an assembly where two of the sixth-formers (oldest 2 years in school) were given a free stage to make opposing speeches on a political topic.

How do you get rid of bias? You can't. And even if you could, quashing free expression is not an acceptable price to pay for it.

This was about bias from religious evangelism. IMO, there's a difference between free expression and trying to convert/preach to children before they can think it all over for themselves. It's wrong, and should be kept out of schools as much as possible.

How would private schools deal with it? Surely it would be inefficient and thus uneconomical to prvide such a class.

I'm in this situation now. I will walk across the street to another private school for Calc II. There's less bureaucracy and more communication, so unlike a state school, where you might be assigned to another school halfway across the city, a private school can pair itself much easier.

There's nothing to stop state schools being given more independence to do this kind of thing themselves.

That's because neither side was really capitalist. Hoover, it should be noted, was a bit of a socialist himself. He created the Department of Agriculture and instituted many subsidies that encouraged environmental destruction and ended in the Dust Bowl. He raised tariffs (America's highest tariff was passed in 1930) that most certainly aggravated the depression. And he had one of the most corrupt administrations ever.

I meant the comparatively laissez-faire policies of the 1920s in general, not just Hoover.


And there are enough non-bigots to support a non-bigoted charity.

Then you have some bigoted charities, and some non-bigoted ones. The non-bigoted ones don't have the resources to provide for everyone, so some areas are left to bigoted charities.

And let bigots go to those.

Yeah but if the charity providing for your area is a bigoted one, and you're one of the group that they discriminate against, then you might have a problem.

Then make another charity.

What if the market for charities is full? People aren't willing to give any more money?

Oh, and I see you've voted for the current resolution. Although I too support the basic idea, that thing is so full of holes it's ridiculous. Have a look at some of the threads about it.

Ouch.

I know. Which is why I get pissed off when people say that kids that go to good colleges don't really work to go there.

Don't know what ages middle and high schools cover, but it sounds like you have more private schools than us. Although it might be that I never really researched it, because I didn't apply for any private secondary schools (ages 11-18), and I don't know many people at private schools in my area.

Elementary would be grades K-5 (4-10 years old)
Middle is grades 6-8 (11-13 years)
High [AKA Secondary] is grades 9-12 (14-17 years)

Elementary and middle schools are both called primary schools. I went to public primary schools and a private secondary school, so I know what it's like in btoh.

How could properly improving the state school system fail to accomplish anything?

If it costs too much, especially on a sliding-scale system, then it negates the benefits of a good education.
If it hurts private school intiatives, it leads to indoctrination and bogs down the system in bureaucracy.

Improving the state schools could potentially do some good, but just disbanding them and encouraging and subsidizing free and low-cost private schools is more liekly too.

But the fact is, they aren't producing. You get paid based on what you produce, not what you could potentially produce if everything were in your favor.

That's the reason why it happens, not the reason why it should happen. Like I said, I'm still unsure about it.

You aren't rewarded on your potential, you're rewarded on what you actually do. That's the way it should be ... the more you contribute, the more you get. What's immoral about that?

Ok, well let's say you have an area where there are a few poor state schools, a couple of private schools which are too expensive and don't offer help to many people, and one religious school which is good and free. If you want a good schooling, and you aren't lucky enough to be one of the few accepted into the private schools on scholarships, you're going to have to go to the religious one, even if you aren't religious.

As I said, this could only happen if you live in the middle of North Dakota. But even if this were true, what's wrong with going to a religious school? I go to a Catholic school and the only compulsory religious activity is a mass every two or three months. I don't think it has nearly as much indoctrination as state schools do.

Be careful - don't slip into Lamarck's mistaken theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics (see what revision does to you. start talking about obscure pointless rubbish for no reason...)

Nature and nurture play equal roles. Genetics aren't the only factor in intelligence, but it cannot be denied, that they are a very important factor.

I meant if one school in town offered it, and all the interested kids would be encouraged to go there.

... which means that they would often go halfway around town to do that. That costs money and is inconvenient for the students.

The UK has a (proper) state healthcare system - the NHS. The NHS provides care, it does not do research. Research is done by corporations or by academics at universities, the drugs get made by companies, and the health service buys them, no? So state healthcare systems have nothing to do with medical technological innovation.

However, the state is capable of coercing companies into providing drugs at lower-than-market-value or other methods. In addition, some companies gain political clout and become safe against competition. It does discourage competition, and thus innovation. Notice how most of the major medical advances in the last 50 years were American.

So have state schools with decent funding and some independence.

Incorrect. Washington DC has some of the worst state schools in the country, but they recieve $11,000 per student per year ... more than most good private schools recieve.

My school is state funded with a charitable fund attached to it (as far as I understand), that was set up by the founder of the school. When I got in, they had an entrance policy of 50% selected by tests, 50% by other factors (e.g. sibling of current pupil, live nearby etc.). Its a language speciality school, but with high standards across the board. The people in older years who came in under the same entrance policy as me have been doing their GCSEs and A-levels in recent years, and my school has been near or at the top of the state non-fully-selective newspaper league tables. Marks are comparable to many good private schools and there is (usually) a lot of choice and diversity.

And I bet your school costs much more per student than a comparable private school would. I don't know about England, but in America, it is extremely rare for a public school to outperform a private school that recieves the same amount of funding. My private school recieves less money per student than the local city schools do and consistently outperforms them on average test scores, college placement, etc.

No school, private or state (except the ridiculously overpriced ones) could ever do that. Ability based streaming goes some of the way to solving the problem.

Who determines ability?

I'm not talking about anything like that. I don't support 100% or near taxes (what's happened in my nation is an accident).

My point remains... a strongly sliding tax scale negates the benefits of education, and thus all of your improvements, if made perfectly, would still be moot.

I think that the minor loss of happiness is worth it to bring someone up above the poverty line

But once again ... who are you to say what someone else does and does not deserve?

Which way does he think they should overhaul? More? Less? Formulae not bands? Anyway, clearly there are some good economists out there, hire them to do it. And anyway when you're talking about a government of a large nation, there's little real difference in cost, especially if you're hiring only for a short period.

Our income tax is over 40,000 pages long. That might have something to do with it.

Pat Buchanan may be an all-around imbecile (he wants to build a wall around Mexico), but in 2000, he had the best tax plan ... flat 1/6 rate for everyone with special exceptions. I would perfer the Browne Tax, but Buchanan's was most realistic. As much as I hate to admit it.

What we need to do would be to scrap the income tax and replace it with a consumption tax. A nationwide consumption tax has many advantages:

- Efficiency: Income taxes cause hidden dead-weight costs. Consumption taxes have that same problem, but not to as high of a degree.
- Fairness: Gives people more flexibility in spending.
- Advancement: A consumption tax would be far more encouraging to small business than an income tax would.
- Simplicity: Fewer loopholes in it would prevent billionaires from getting away without paying any taxes. Also, the government wouldn't have to hire as many Harvard Economists and that would save some taxes.

I think if the poor were given tax credits, you'd see a drop in the amount of charity given to help them get educated - the perception would be that they needed no help because the government was already dealing with it.

Perhaps, but if hte credits cover their entire schooling, then...

But what does it actually mean?

A Deist is someone who believes in God as an absentee landlord. Basically he created the universe and then left it to its own devices. Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Locke, etc. were all Deists. Jefferson called it "Rational Christianity". Deism is close to, but not identical to, Unitarianism.

A Humanist is someone who believes that the fundamental goal of the human race is to improve itself. Likewise, this comes from the Renaissance and Empiricist traditions. Modern humanists are often called Transhumanists. For a good primer: www.aleph.se/Trans/

I'm not a strict Transhumanist. I consider them to be crazy. But I do share the same general optimistic outlook on the future.

Wouldn't know - haven't been to a private school. But I have seen little restriction - only people being reprimanded for swearing.

My private school doesn't even reprimand people for swearing when appropriate, whereas I was censured by the Dean at the public school I used to go to for speaking against affirmative action.

We've recently had an assembly where two of the sixth-formers (oldest 2 years in school) were given a free stage to make opposing speeches on a political topic.

Which occurs in both private and public schools here, but is more widespread in private schools.

This was about bias from religious evangelism. IMO, there's a difference between free expression and trying to convert/preach to children before they can think it all over for themselves. It's wrong, and should be kept out of schools as much as possible.

Then don't go to a religious school. But I don't see a problem with trying to convert people. It's still free expression.

There's nothing to stop state schools being given more independence to do this kind of thing themselves.

Rule #1 of Government: Bureaucrats don't like to give up power.

I meant the [i]comparatively laissez-faire policies of the 1920s in general, not just Hoover.

Notice that, even though Harding was a corrupt, incompetent fool, the economy did relatively well. Notice that, even though Coolidge as President in 1860 would undoubtedly destroyed the United States, the economy prospered tremendously.

Then you get to Hoover. He made the distinctly socialist promise of "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." He raise tariffs. He gave out business subsidies. He tried limited redistribution. In other words, he did too much.

Former Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin was asked by an American professor about why Mao's economic policies failed. Jiang was first at a loss of words, but then he summed up the entire failed history of governmental central economic planning: "He did too much."

What if the market for charities is full? People aren't willing to give any more money?

Then the bigoted charities would almost certainly run out first.

A few examples does not prove, or even suggest with any degree of likelihood, a general trend. The majority of rich people were born into rich families,

Incorrect. Not a single American billionaire inherited his fortune.

And mathematically speaking, the average American with no college education makes $35,000 a year for 45 years. That's almost $1.6 million. With proper management, just about anyone can be a millionaire.

The obvious flaw in your argument is that you have ignore the cost of living for 45 years.

A few examples does not prove, or even suggest with any degree of likelihood, a general trend. The majority of rich people were born into rich families,

Incorrect. Not a single American billionaire inherited his fortune.

And mathematically speaking, the average American with no college education makes $35,000 a year for 45 years. That's almost $1.6 million. With proper management, just about anyone can be a millionaire.

The obvious flaw in your argument is that you have ignore the cost of living for 45 years.

Uh... please pay attention to the debate. I posted somewhere that Berkeley University estimates the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area... one of the most expensive places to live in the US... is about $6,000 a year. That's still enough to make you a millionaire.

A few examples does not prove, or even suggest with any degree of likelihood, a general trend. The majority of rich people were born into rich families,

Incorrect. Not a single American billionaire inherited his fortune.

And mathematically speaking, the average American with no college education makes $35,000 a year for 45 years. That's almost $1.6 million. With proper management, just about anyone can be a millionaire.

The obvious flaw in your argument is that you have ignore the cost of living for 45 years.

Uh... please pay attention to the debate. I posted somewhere that Berkeley University estimates the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area... one of the most expensive places to live in the US... is about $6,000 a year. That's still enough to make you a millionaire.

Income tax is theft.

Income tax is theft.

No, theft implies use of trickery. Income tax uses physical force. It's robbery.

Interesting debate, indeed. Philosophically, I am generally on the same side of the issue as TGM, so I'll spare any further discussion on that issue other than to say that it is encouraging to see folks of both your (Myopia, TGM) ages carry on a reasoned dialog.

From the old man taxpayer - I'm 38 - perspective, there is also another pragmatic objection to what I would consider "excessive" taxation. If you tell me that I will be taxed at 100% (or 95%) on any income above a certain level, what exactly would be my motivation for working to earn anything above that amount? It appears to me that the desire for "goodness" (that is, more tax money to spend) is overriding the inherent badness in the proposition i.e. "If you take all my income in taxes, why should I bother to work?"

For myself, the current rate at which I am taxed here in the States is already enough to give me the same sort of thoughts. Especially when I know that a large portion of my taxes go to either Administration or some kind of give-away program (see the back of any recent IRS form 1040 - there is a pie chart that shows where the money goes. They aren't labeled "give-away" and they show up as separate "slices" but taken together it is a substantial amount.)

So the whole idea very much strikes me as a killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs.

In my nation that is meaningless. The tax rate is already 100%. I doubt it can go any higher.

Interesting debate, indeed. Philosophically, I am generally on the same side of the issue as TGM, so I'll spare any further discussion on that issue other than to say that it is encouraging to see folks of both your (Myopia, TGM) ages carry on a reasoned dialog.

From the old man taxpayer - I'm 38 - perspective, there is also another pragmatic objection to what I would consider "excessive" taxation. If you tell me that I will be taxed at 100% (or 95%) on any income above a certain level, what exactly would be my motivation for working to earn anything above that amount? It appears to me that the desire for "goodness" (that is, more tax money to spend) is overriding the inherent badness in the proposition i.e. "If you take all my income in taxes, why should I bother to work?"

For myself, the current rate at which I am taxed here in the States is already enough to give me the same sort of thoughts. Especially when I know that a large portion of my taxes go to either Administration or some kind of give-away program (see the back of any recent IRS form 1040 - there is a pie chart that shows where the money goes. They aren't labeled "give-away" and they show up as separate "slices" but taken together it is a substantial amount.)

So the whole idea very much strikes me as a killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Yeah, a reason I object to these insanely high tax rates is also very personal... my parents immigrated to the US from China with no money and litlte knowledge of English fifteen years ago. We never got government poverty benefits or anything. My mom had to work a minimum wage job as my dad got a higher education. Now my family had a combined gross income of probably around $200k, which disqualifies me for much-needed federal college aid, by the way. I find it unfair that we have to give upwards of 45% of our money to people who were born under much better circumstances than ourselves, which also significantly constrains my family budget, since we don't really have any savings since my parents worked low-paying jobs for most of the 90s and a good college without aid costs like what, $175,000 over 4 years? Plus during that time we have to pay another $300,000+ in taxes...

The fact that poor people who get educated can succeed in society without a government handout is testament to the fundamental justness of the capitalist society. I am willing to bet that at least two out of three adult welfare recipients can only blame themselves for their troubles, and the other one-third can easily be taken care of by private charities.

Interesting debate, indeed. Philosophically, I am generally on the same side of the issue as TGM, so I'll spare any further discussion on that issue other than to say that it is encouraging to see folks of both your (Myopia, TGM) ages carry on a reasoned dialog.

From the old man taxpayer - I'm 38 - perspective, there is also another pragmatic objection to what I would consider "excessive" taxation. If you tell me that I will be taxed at 100% (or 95%) on any income above a certain level, what exactly would be my motivation for working to earn anything above that amount? It appears to me that the desire for "goodness" (that is, more tax money to spend) is overriding the inherent badness in the proposition i.e. "If you take all my income in taxes, why should I bother to work?"

For myself, the current rate at which I am taxed here in the States is already enough to give me the same sort of thoughts. Especially when I know that a large portion of my taxes go to either Administration or some kind of give-away program (see the back of any recent IRS form 1040 - there is a pie chart that shows where the money goes. They aren't labeled "give-away" and they show up as separate "slices" but taken together it is a substantial amount.)

So the whole idea very much strikes me as a killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Exactly. Nevermind that the UN has absolutely no right to tell a country how to tax its citizens.

No, theft umplies use of trickery. Income tax uses physical force. It's robbery."

Oh so true. Worse yet, it's robbery committed (allegedly) on behalf of those worse off.

AAAARRGHH :tantrum: :tantrum: :tantrum: :tantrum: :tantrum: :tantrum: :tantrum:

You would not believe what happened. I just spent ages constructing a really long post answering everything everyone's said, and I click submit and it says "Invalid_session" so I click "back" and it's all gone!!!!!

Interesting debate, indeed. Philosophically, I am generally on the same side of the issue as TGM, so I'll spare any further discussion on that issue other than to say that it is encouraging to see folks of both your (Myopia, TGM) ages carry on a reasoned dialog.

From the old man taxpayer - I'm 38 - perspective, there is also another pragmatic objection to what I would consider "excessive" taxation. If you tell me that I will be taxed at 100% (or 95%) on any income above a certain level, what exactly would be my motivation for working to earn anything above that amount? It appears to me that the desire for "goodness" (that is, more tax money to spend) is overriding the inherent badness in the proposition i.e. "If you take all my income in taxes, why should I bother to work?"

For myself, the current rate at which I am taxed here in the States is already enough to give me the same sort of thoughts. Especially when I know that a large portion of my taxes go to either Administration or some kind of give-away program (see the back of any recent IRS form 1040 - there is a pie chart that shows where the money goes. They aren't labeled "give-away" and they show up as separate "slices" but taken together it is a substantial amount.)

So the whole idea very much strikes me as a killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Yeah, a reason I object to these insanely high tax rates is also very personal... my parents immigrated to the US from China with no money and litlte knowledge of English fifteen years ago. We never got government poverty benefits or anything. My mom had to work a minimum wage job as my dad got a higher education. Now my family had a combined gross income of probably around $200k, which disqualifies me for much-needed federal college aid, by the way. I find it unfair that we have to give upwards of 45% of our money to people who were born under much better circumstances than ourselves, which also significantly constrains my family budget, since we don't really have any savings since my parents worked low-paying jobs for most of the 90s and a good college without aid costs like what, $175,000 over 4 years? Plus during that time we have to pay another $300,000+ in taxes...

The fact that poor people who get educated can succeed in society without a government handout is testament to the fundamental justness of the capitalist society. I am willing to bet that at least two out of three adult welfare recipients can only blame themselves for their troubles, and the other one-third can easily be taken care of by private charities.
I likewise disagree-except my family came here from the (former) Soviet Union- before the Socialist government collapsed. Now living in a middle class family, I find that our social group has by far the hardest financially. The rich families send their kids to private schools, while the poor can get almost any scholarship they want and get accepted to a wide range of schools based on their "economical disadvantage". Why don't people understand that just because the household income exceeds the poverty level by quite a bit, doesn't mean that parents can afford to pay most of that for their children's college tuition (and other expenses such as camp and sports competitions)? The tax dollars earned by the middle and upper classes do not come from thin air (yes, executives and lawyers and businessmen don't get paid to sit around and read a newspaper all day), so why don't they deserve to keep the money they worked for. Because if they can't (as proved by the failures of the Chinese and Russian communist governments), why should people bother becoming doctors in the first place (kindly pointed out in an earlier post)?

The Government of Lumpy Nuts take great pride in NOT taxing our citizens. We are rich enough not to do it. We will not support the proposal in any form

What a STUPID proposal idea. To be taxed at 100% above a certain level. People will either a) move to another country, b) stop making more than a certain amount, or c) create massive amounts of money laundering, tax shelters, tax fraud and un-reported income.

Even if you were an honest person, think about it, if you knew you were going to lose everything past a certain dollar amount, would you even try to make more money? Why would you work even one minute longer than you had to so you could make more money, just to have it taken by the government in taxes.

Again, what a STUPID proposal idea.