Darwin's Theories - Politics category

Less taking is not Giving

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 14:20:00 GMT

I've heard this fallacy a number of times in political discourse this year. People accuse one or another politician of wanting to "take money from medical care and give it to the rich", meaning, to give "the rich" a tax cut. Now the last time I looked, taxation consisted of taking away money that belongs to a person or company, by threat of force ("you no pay, we take your house and/or put you in jail"). So: raising the tax rate means taking more money away from people in the targetted tax bracket. And lowering the rate does not mean "giving them money", it means letting them keep what they have!

The only scenario in which a tax cut would mean "giving money" to the tax-reduced bracket would be a country in which the country legally owned everything within it. The name for this system is communism. If you really want to write about politics from a communist (or Marxist) point of view, well, why not move to North Korea for a year and see how well it works for you?

If you really want to stop "giving to the rich", you need to stop subsidies, corporate handouts, enforced monopolies, and all the other forms of corruption that absolute power has absolutely corrupted our legislatures with. But we all know that won't happen, as these are the channels though which some of the rich get funded by the taxes paid by the poor and middle class. Let's be charitable and call these the less productive rich, the ones who subsist at the public trough. Also, part of this funding goes into the election coffers of both halves of what Sheldon Richman calls "the Uniparty" (Dems and GOP in the USA, by extension, Liberal and Conservative in Canada). Thus we know this stream of money from the poor and middle-class to the less-productive rich is unassailable. So it's far easier to rally votes by claiming to "soak the rich", and that's what is happening now.

Top Ten for 2011

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:03:00 GMT

Happy {New,Gnu,Blue,Pneu} Year Everybody! As usual there may be less than 10 items.

Sheldon Richman's Why WikiLeaks Matters
Fred Branfman on WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us
CBS news on How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010
Martha Rosenberg with some interesting (but unsubstantiated) claims that US government agencies kill millions (literally) of blackbirds, 1000 times more than the 1000 that died in Arkansas
John McWhorter on Getting Darnell Off The Corners: Why America Should Ride The Anti-Drug Wave (alternate title: Why Legalizing Drugs—All Of Them—Is The Only Path To A New Black America)
Cambridge University refuses to bend over to the "house of cards" and censor a students research into pin-chip card insecurity. Professor Ross Anderson's response is a delight.
Eliezer Yudkowsky on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate (where "our kinds" is defined as computer geeks, libertarians, rationalists, etc.)
Kyung Hee Kim on the precipitous decline of productivity among American schoolchildren
Bradford Schmidt on expected sub-$100 Android smartphones (no-contract price). Maybe this will be the death knell of smartphone subsidies; why lock into a 3-year contract at $60/month when you can buy the phone for $100 and get service at $10 or $20/month?

Another Top 10

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:29:00 GMT

Here we go again:

Security Theatre, Part n

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:35:00 GMT

According to a BBC report on the latest security theatre, airline customers are now to be subject to the following indignities for in-flight entertainment:

Customers to remain seated during final hour of flight;
No access to hand luggage and a ban on leaving possessions or blankets on laps during this hour.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't find this very comforting. The thought of being forced to sit still is inculcated in obedient citizens from kindergarten (a German word meaning roughly "vegetable garden to grow kids"). But at a certain point things like bladder pressure will win out. And what happens if you're in mid-whiz at the one-hour mark? Do you get shot by the air marshall while trying to return to your seat? (Watch the news for this one, folks). The entire process is utterly ridiculous. If the bomber had tried to light his fuse at the 45 minute mark into the flight, who can doubt that they'd ban visiting the toilet between 37 and 52 minutes after takeoff?

Remember the shoe bomber and how airport security made everybody take their shoes off before flight? Didn't stop the next religious fanatic with a fuse to light, did it?

The notion of an allegedly civilized nation dancing its "security" policies in the wind every time there's a real or perceived threat, to so vastly inconvenience its population while at the same time making no difference to the actual terrorists, is so laughable it's earned the term "security theater" - putting on a big show, but doing nothing for actual security.

It's not just me saying so. See Bruce Schnier's many writings on this topic, and his essay The Psychology of Security. Bruce is a well-known cryptology and security researcher; he knows whereof he speaks. TSA, not so much.

Truly Frightening

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:09:00 GMT

South of the border, Glenn Greenwald has been doing a pretty good job of showing how mainstream US journalists not only no longer expose law- and constitution-breaking by upper-echelon politicians, but actively support, encourage, condone and support it in their writings. And, about that country's vicious two-tier justice system.

Meanwhile, north of the border, we have a new federal budget. Today on the news, one of our darling Opposition critics was complaining about the Prime Minister's "tax gimmicks" - Harper plans to cut taxes as part of a package to get people spending. Calling this a "tax gimmick" is vicious - money collected by taxes does not originally and automatically belong to the Almighty State - it is taken by force of law from the people that own it. A personal income tax cut, for example, leaves more money in the hands of middle class and working poor. The "gimmick" is in taking this money away from them, then giving it to failing multi-nationals that are probably going down anyway (both because they have totally failed to renew and revitalize their business processes and their products, and because they're being bled out by the labour unions). These are the same multi-nationals whose US CEOs flew to Washington to beg... each in their own private executive jet. A gimmick like that, we don't need. In either country.