Greeks Bearing Gifts....

[j_b]

another weak attempt at derailing the discussion

[ivan]

more frequent now? uh...hell no - here's wikipedia's list:

Panic of 17961797

Panic of 1819

Panic of 1825

Panic of 1826

Panic of 1837

Panic of 1857

Panic of 1866

Panic of 1873

Panic of 1884

Panic of 1890

Panic of 1893

Panic of 1896

pretty shocking regularity of course - looks like the typical 40 year old then would have lived through more than a half dozen in his time, whereas i only recall 2 in my own (the savings and loan bullshit of the late eighties and the recent shitstorm - am i missign somethign?)

 

the 19th century through the 29 crash was the age of unregulated capitalism like today. Financial regulations were put in place to prevent boom-bust cycles of speculation, which was successful until these same regulations were dismantled by the new age robber barons.

 

yes, you are missing the dotcom bubble crash in 2001.

ah yes, how could i forget the dotcom thang - paid for no small number of nice things for me, thanks to my investing father

 

so, to make a comparision, what is the time period in our enlghtened history when we had sane regulations? 1930-1980? several recessions in that period, i recall, though that's not exactly what we're talking about.

[j_b]

Tax avoidance and tax evasion threaten government revenues. The US Senate estimates revenue losses from tax evasion by U.S.-based firms and individuals at around 100 billion dollars a year. In many other countries, the sums run into billions of euros. This means fewer resources for infrastructure and services such as education and health, lowering standards of living in both developed and developing economies.

 

Fighting tax evasion

 

Just imagine, even the OECD talks about the cost of tax evasion and how it undermines our ability to finance projects, yet JayB never heard of it.

Edited June 16, 2011 by j_b

[j_b]

so, to make a comparision, what is the time period in our enlghtened history when we had sane regulations? 1930-1980? several recessions in that period, i recall, though that's not exactly what we're talking about.

 

Right, that ~50 years to compare. The first 20 years resulted much from 1929. Then, the economy hit peak oil in the US in the 70's, which took away our ability to control oil prices and made the empire even more necessary according to some people's logic.

Edited June 16, 2011 by j_b

[rob]

Imperialism isn't too bad, it brought us the double IPA, after all.

[j_b]

there, you are talking!

[prole]

"Funny how that happens when those factions capture state power..."

 

I trust that you are not "Shocked...shocked" by the above. I can see how the above quote would support an argument for limiting the state's power, but struggle to see how that would work with the opposite argument.

 

That's one more thing that goes back thousands of years. As long as the state has had the power to influence the distribution of rewards in society and divert the gains from commerce on behalf of the favored - that's what has tended to happen. There are literally clay tablets associated with feuds over who got their hands on the frankincense franchise, etc.

 

When there's a gajillion dollars at stake from using the government to rig the game on your behalf of course the interests with the most to gain will pursue that pile of cash, and of course the most powerful monkeys will get their hands on the big bananna. There's libraries full of dense tracts on political economy around the world and throughout history that testify to this fact.

 

How about getting rid of some of the levers the big monkeys are most likely to reach for - like tariffs, subsidies, tax exemptions, etc? A flat tax is a long shot, but I'm not sure it's more utopian than assuming that you can leave those levers in place, much less multiply them and make them bigger, and not have lots more monkey-hands grabbing for them.

 

We've covered this ground before in the campaign finance reform thread. The issue isn't "limiting state power", it's dealing with the huge disparity in access to it. It's not about tariffs, subsidies, and tax-exemptions on principle (at various times and places they've been the cornerstone of economic development), it's about who they benefit. As long as there is a need to enact and enforce laws, whether it's through a nation-state or the PTA, there will be incentive to rig the game. Since, at this point in human evolution it's obvious we still need laws and organizational mechanisms to express our collective will, promote our interests, and resolve conflicts, in other words engage in politics, we need government. Sorry, your market utopia is a pipe-dream.

 

Power will exist regardless of the instruments through which it is exercised. Doing away with the modern liberal democratic state doesn't do away with power, it does away with the citizenry's capacity to curb it. Liberal democracies within capitalism at least offer the potential to limit the exercise of power by the economically powerful over the less powerful through oversight, regulation, etc. Drowning our government in the bathtub doesn't dispel power, it abdicates it to those who already have power in society. That our own government has been highjacked by capital doesn't mean government is essentially corrupt in principle, it means that greater balance need to be brought to the political field.

 

But really, what did happen to the role of democracy in liberal thought, Jay? Are so cynical to think that the dysfunctional American system is proof of the corruption of any form of governance or are you so dazzled by the mathematical certainty of your models or convinced by the pure visions of wizened little Austrians that you're incapable of seeing how spectacularly free-market fundamentalism is failing us?

 

[ivan]

? Are so cynical to think that the dysfunctional American system is proof of the corruption of any form of governance or are you so dazzled by the mathematical certainty of your models or convinced by the pure visions of wizened little Austrians that you're incapable of seeing how spectacularly free-market fundamentalism is failing us?

think i agree w/ all what you said but the "dysfunctional" bit - like all living things, our society is a shit-to-shoe-level one, just good enough to get by w/ predators and prey and hazy natural laws governing it all - its functioning they way it always has been - still, no reason to not want to change it and make it better, as you see the meaning of better, and i agree government regulation is a big part of that

 

[JayB]

"Funny how that happens when those factions capture state power..."

 

I trust that you are not "Shocked...shocked" by the above. I can see how the above quote would support an argument for limiting the state's power, but struggle to see how that would work with the opposite argument.

 

That's one more thing that goes back thousands of years. As long as the state has had the power to influence the distribution of rewards in society and divert the gains from commerce on behalf of the favored - that's what has tended to happen. There are literally clay tablets associated with feuds over who got their hands on the frankincense franchise, etc.

 

When there's a gajillion dollars at stake from using the government to rig the game on your behalf of course the interests with the most to gain will pursue that pile of cash, and of course the most powerful monkeys will get their hands on the big bananna. There's libraries full of dense tracts on political economy around the world and throughout history that testify to this fact.

 

How about getting rid of some of the levers the big monkeys are most likely to reach for - like tariffs, subsidies, tax exemptions, etc? A flat tax is a long shot, but I'm not sure it's more utopian than assuming that you can leave those levers in place, much less multiply them and make them bigger, and not have lots more monkey-hands grabbing for them.

 

We've covered this ground before in the campaign finance reform thread. The issue isn't "limiting state power", it's dealing with the huge disparity in access to it. It's not about tariffs, subsidies, and tax-exemptions on principle (at various times and places they've been the cornerstone of economic development), it's about who they benefit. As long as there is a need to enact and enforce laws, whether it's through a nation-state or the PTA, there will be incentive to rig the game. Since, at this point in human evolution it's obvious we still need laws and organizational mechanisms to express our collective will, promote our interests, and resolve conflicts, in other words engage in politics, we need government. Sorry, your market utopia is a pipe-dream.

 

Power will exist regardless of the instruments through which it is exercised. Doing away with the modern liberal democratic state doesn't do away with power, it does away with the citizenry's capacity to curb it. Liberal democracies within capitalism at least offer the potential to limit the exercise of power by the economically powerful over the less powerful through oversight, regulation, etc. Drowning our government in the bathtub doesn't dispel power, it abdicates it to those who already have power in society. That our own government has been highjacked by capital doesn't mean government is essentially corrupt in principle, it means that greater balance need to be brought to the political field.

 

But really, what did happen to the role of democracy in liberal thought, Jay? Are so cynical to think that the dysfunctional American system is proof of the corruption of any form of governance or are you so dazzled by the mathematical certainty of your models or convinced by the pure visions of wizened little Austrians that you're incapable of seeing how spectacularly free-market fundamentalism is failing us?

 

I'd be the last guy to argue for dismantling the legal architecture of liberalism/liberal-democracy - it's good stuff.

 

All I'm arguing for is getting rid of or minimizing as many of the instruments that the big monkeys "the powerful" can get their hands on to run to manipulate the market and/or society in a manner that's to their liking.

 

Getting rid of prohibition, various exemptions from competition, and handouts of public money to private economic interests in whatever form would be a good start. I think that the key difference in our perspective is that I don't exclude people who get paid via tax revenues from the list of private economic interests who have an incentive to funnel as much of the public dough as possible into their own hands. Anyone who can look at a legislative session in California and conclude that, say, the Prison Guards Union is any less self interested than ExxonMobil has a primitive innocence about them that would make Rousseau do a double take.

 

Is it *really* surprising that programs that ostensibly started out to help the little guy (in the dubious conventional narrative) - like farm subsidies - wound up being gorged on by massive agribusiness cartels? That programs intended to promote things like "home ownership" metastasized into a financial/construction cartel that siphoned off public money transferred the risk back onto the public till? Etc, etc, etc.

 

Add "Energy Independence," "Home Ownership," "The Children," etc to the list of nostrums that scoundrels hide behind.

 

On a slightly off-topic note, I listened to Thaddeus Russel's "A Renegade History of the United States" on a recent road trip and thought that there were parts that both you and Ivan would really enjoy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[j_b]

in the meantime, JayB still doesn't want to discuss how the $100 billion/yr in tax evasion/avoidance in the US alone, the beyond bloated war budget, the abysmal marginal tax rate, the huge inequalities in wealth and wages, etc debunk his assertion there is no money to pay for services and public employees.

Edited June 17, 2011 by j_b

[j_b]

JayB talks a lot about the power of the peons to earn a decent living but it is uncanny how most of the positions he defends are exactly the same defended by financial/political/media elites who decide policy and benefit greatly from it. For example, the corporate media too behaves as if there didn't exist the People's Budget (raising taxes on wealthy, cut war budget, clamp on tax evasion, ..and much more) put forward by the progressive caucus in the house.

[JayB]

Quite a laundry list there. Seems like they've all been hashed over and over. And over. And over. Many a time.

 

Seems like the key to minimizing tax evasion and avoidance is simplifying the rules, keeping the rates reasonable, and making sure they're used as efficiently as possible.

 

Go too far in the other direction in any of the above parameters - make more complex rules that make it easier to evade or minimize taxes, escalate rates to the point that you maximize the incentives for doing so, and allow the whole enterprise to turn into a grand patronage scheme and you're a long way down the road to Greece.

 

 

 

[ivan]

JayB talks a lot about the power of the peons to earn a decent living but it is uncanny how most of the positions he defends are exactly the same defended by financial/political/media elites who decide policy and benefit greatly from it. For example, the corporate media too behaves as if there didn't exist the People's Budget (raising taxes on wealthy, cut war budget, clamp on tax evasion, ..and much more) put forward by the progressive caucus in the house.

jay's monkey scenario is apt enough - the people's budget gets nowhere b/c they have no party - there are only 2 parties, and ultimately they differ on very little - dem monkies are in league w/ each other, and they'll be goddamned if any other monkies gonna hone in our their bananas - even the genuine good ones among them are overwhelmed by the scale of it all

[JayB]

"Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things."

 

-Adam Smith.

 

The converse is also true.

[JayB]

Thought Ivan might enjoy this one;

 

"Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience."

~Adam Smith

 

 

 

[ivan]

"Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things."

 

-Adam Smith.

if only the "tolerable administration of justice" didn't cover slavery in all its many forms

[ivan]

Thought Ivan might enjoy this one;

 

"Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience."

~Adam Smith

 

 

i'm sure i've heard virtue well spoken of, and of vice, the rumors about me are so very overstated:)

[ivan]

i've always admired adam smith, and practically all economists, for embracing that age-old mantra of social studies teachers: if ya can't dazzle them brilliance, baffle them with bullshit!

[JayB]

"Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things."

 

-Adam Smith.

if only the "tolerable administration of justice" didn't cover slavery in all its many forms

 

"From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves. Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own."

 

" * There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished."

 

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship , the rich and powerful, and to despise , or , at least neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."

 

~same guy.

 

I think you'd enjoy reading his stuff if you haven't already.

[prole]

"Funny how that happens when those factions capture state power..."

 

I trust that you are not "Shocked...shocked" by the above. I can see how the above quote would support an argument for limiting the state's power, but struggle to see how that would work with the opposite argument.

 

That's one more thing that goes back thousands of years. As long as the state has had the power to influence the distribution of rewards in society and divert the gains from commerce on behalf of the favored - that's what has tended to happen. There are literally clay tablets associated with feuds over who got their hands on the frankincense franchise, etc.

 

When there's a gajillion dollars at stake from using the government to rig the game on your behalf of course the interests with the most to gain will pursue that pile of cash, and of course the most powerful monkeys will get their hands on the big bananna. There's libraries full of dense tracts on political economy around the world and throughout history that testify to this fact.

 

How about getting rid of some of the levers the big monkeys are most likely to reach for - like tariffs, subsidies, tax exemptions, etc? A flat tax is a long shot, but I'm not sure it's more utopian than assuming that you can leave those levers in place, much less multiply them and make them bigger, and not have lots more monkey-hands grabbing for them.

 

We've covered this ground before in the campaign finance reform thread. The issue isn't "limiting state power", it's dealing with the huge disparity in access to it. It's not about tariffs, subsidies, and tax-exemptions on principle (at various times and places they've been the cornerstone of economic development), it's about who they benefit. As long as there is a need to enact and enforce laws, whether it's through a nation-state or the PTA, there will be incentive to rig the game. Since, at this point in human evolution it's obvious we still need laws and organizational mechanisms to express our collective will, promote our interests, and resolve conflicts, in other words engage in politics, we need government. Sorry, your market utopia is a pipe-dream.

 

Power will exist regardless of the instruments through which it is exercised. Doing away with the modern liberal democratic state doesn't do away with power, it does away with the citizenry's capacity to curb it. Liberal democracies within capitalism at least offer the potential to limit the exercise of power by the economically powerful over the less powerful through oversight, regulation, etc. Drowning our government in the bathtub doesn't dispel power, it abdicates it to those who already have power in society. That our own government has been highjacked by capital doesn't mean government is essentially corrupt in principle, it means that greater balance need to be brought to the political field.

 

But really, what did happen to the role of democracy in liberal thought, Jay? Are so cynical to think that the dysfunctional American system is proof of the corruption of any form of governance or are you so dazzled by the mathematical certainty of your models or convinced by the pure visions of wizened little Austrians that you're incapable of seeing how spectacularly free-market fundamentalism is failing us?

 

I'd be the last guy to argue for dismantling the legal architecture of liberalism/liberal-democracy - it's good stuff.

 

All I'm arguing for is getting rid of or minimizing as many of the instruments that the big monkeys "the powerful" can get their hands on to run to manipulate the market and/or society in a manner that's to their liking.

 

Getting rid of prohibition, various exemptions from competition, and handouts of public money to private economic interests in whatever form would be a good start. I think that the key difference in our perspective is that I don't exclude people who get paid via tax revenues from the list of private economic interests who have an incentive to funnel as much of the public dough as possible into their own hands. Anyone who can look at a legislative session in California and conclude that, say, the Prison Guards Union is any less self interested than ExxonMobil has a primitive innocence about them that would make Rousseau do a double take.

 

Is it *really* surprising that programs that ostensibly started out to help the little guy (in the dubious conventional narrative) - like farm subsidies - wound up being gorged on by massive agribusiness cartels? That programs intended to promote things like "home ownership" metastasized into a financial/construction cartel that siphoned off public money transferred the risk back onto the public till? Etc, etc, etc.

 

Add "Energy Independence," "Home Ownership," "The Children," etc to the list of nostrums that scoundrels hide behind.

 

Large concentrations of economic power can and will manipulate the levers within the political sphere as long as they have access to the control room. As I said, I don't have a problem with subsidies and other forms of protection on principle. No modern nation-state ever successfully industrialized without them. There are any number of fledgling industries and projects that could use the breaks currently turning into money shoveled into Exxon shareholders' pockets. How the money is used is a matter of transparency, oversight, and enforcement. None of these have been high priorities for a government captured, at least partially through campaign financing, by the very industries its supposed to regulate. Why assume the historical inevitability of a wind cartel or an electric car cartel because our oil companies have used policy to their advantage in the past? Look instead of the vast gains those industries made, recognize those resources could be better used elsewhere, limit fraud, abuse, and undue access to the political system, and get this fucking show on the road.

 

I am, admittedly, a partisan. I think we do, as a society, have the capacity and the information available to make good choices in certain areas about where we can make investments in our future and guide industrial policies that can provide broad benefits to our society. It's not necessary to invoke the screaming meemies (CENTRAL PLANNING!) every time someone says this. The Germans have essentially "beat" the race to the bottom by investing in and "protecting" their workers and doing the opposite of what free market utopians told them they had to do. It's hard not to think we got duped.

[JayB]

One more..

 

"I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

 

Same as it ever was.

 

[JayB]

"Funny how that happens when those factions capture state power..."

 

I trust that you are not "Shocked...shocked" by the above. I can see how the above quote would support an argument for limiting the state's power, but struggle to see how that would work with the opposite argument.

 

That's one more thing that goes back thousands of years. As long as the state has had the power to influence the distribution of rewards in society and divert the gains from commerce on behalf of the favored - that's what has tended to happen. There are literally clay tablets associated with feuds over who got their hands on the frankincense franchise, etc.

 

When there's a gajillion dollars at stake from using the government to rig the game on your behalf of course the interests with the most to gain will pursue that pile of cash, and of course the most powerful monkeys will get their hands on the big bananna. There's libraries full of dense tracts on political economy around the world and throughout history that testify to this fact.

 

How about getting rid of some of the levers the big monkeys are most likely to reach for - like tariffs, subsidies, tax exemptions, etc? A flat tax is a long shot, but I'm not sure it's more utopian than assuming that you can leave those levers in place, much less multiply them and make them bigger, and not have lots more monkey-hands grabbing for them.

 

We've covered this ground before in the campaign finance reform thread. The issue isn't "limiting state power", it's dealing with the huge disparity in access to it. It's not about tariffs, subsidies, and tax-exemptions on principle (at various times and places they've been the cornerstone of economic development), it's about who they benefit. As long as there is a need to enact and enforce laws, whether it's through a nation-state or the PTA, there will be incentive to rig the game. Since, at this point in human evolution it's obvious we still need laws and organizational mechanisms to express our collective will, promote our interests, and resolve conflicts, in other words engage in politics, we need government. Sorry, your market utopia is a pipe-dream.

 

Power will exist regardless of the instruments through which it is exercised. Doing away with the modern liberal democratic state doesn't do away with power, it does away with the citizenry's capacity to curb it. Liberal democracies within capitalism at least offer the potential to limit the exercise of power by the economically powerful over the less powerful through oversight, regulation, etc. Drowning our government in the bathtub doesn't dispel power, it abdicates it to those who already have power in society. That our own government has been highjacked by capital doesn't mean government is essentially corrupt in principle, it means that greater balance need to be brought to the political field.

 

But really, what did happen to the role of democracy in liberal thought, Jay? Are so cynical to think that the dysfunctional American system is proof of the corruption of any form of governance or are you so dazzled by the mathematical certainty of your models or convinced by the pure visions of wizened little Austrians that you're incapable of seeing how spectacularly free-market fundamentalism is failing us?

 

I'd be the last guy to argue for dismantling the legal architecture of liberalism/liberal-democracy - it's good stuff.

 

All I'm arguing for is getting rid of or minimizing as many of the instruments that the big monkeys "the powerful" can get their hands on to run to manipulate the market and/or society in a manner that's to their liking.

 

Getting rid of prohibition, various exemptions from competition, and handouts of public money to private economic interests in whatever form would be a good start. I think that the key difference in our perspective is that I don't exclude people who get paid via tax revenues from the list of private economic interests who have an incentive to funnel as much of the public dough as possible into their own hands. Anyone who can look at a legislative session in California and conclude that, say, the Prison Guards Union is any less self interested than ExxonMobil has a primitive innocence about them that would make Rousseau do a double take.

 

Is it *really* surprising that programs that ostensibly started out to help the little guy (in the dubious conventional narrative) - like farm subsidies - wound up being gorged on by massive agribusiness cartels? That programs intended to promote things like "home ownership" metastasized into a financial/construction cartel that siphoned off public money transferred the risk back onto the public till? Etc, etc, etc.

 

Add "Energy Independence," "Home Ownership," "The Children," etc to the list of nostrums that scoundrels hide behind.

 

Large concentrations of economic power can and will manipulate the levers within the political sphere as long as they have access to the control room. As I said, I don't have a problem with subsidies and other forms of protection on principle. No modern nation-state ever successfully industrialized without them. There are any number of fledgling industries and projects that could use the breaks currently turning into money shoveled into Exxon shareholders' pockets. How the money is used is a matter of transparency, oversight, and enforcement. None of these have been high priorities for a government captured, at least partially through campaign financing, by the very industries its supposed to regulate. Why assume the historical inevitability of a wind cartel or an electric car cartel because our oil companies have used policy to their advantage in the past? Look instead of the vast gains those industries made, recognize those resources could be better used elsewhere, limit fraud, abuse, and undue access to the political system, and get this fucking show on the road.

 

I am, admittedly, a partisan. I think we do, as a society, have the capacity and the information available to make good choices in certain areas about where we can make investments in our future and guide industrial policies that can provide broad benefits to our society. It's not necessary to invoke the screaming meemies (CENTRAL PLANNING!) every time someone says this. The Germans have essentially "beat" the race to the bottom by investing in and "protecting" their workers and doing the opposite of what free market utopians told them they had to do. It's hard not to think we got duped.

 

I supposed I'd have to disagree on the chronology. I think that the way things normally happen is that industries normally get big and prosper in the teeth of opposition from entrenched interests and their water-carriers in government - then use the same tools to secure protection for themselves.

 

WRT to Germany - they're doing pretty well but that's generally being the case since the mid 19th century - the only exceptions being when they were busy waging war or happened to be stuck behind the iron curtain. They've cycled through a variety of economic regimes since the Iron Chancellor invented the welfare state as a mode of social control (think contemporary communists saw this for what it was more clearly than anyone else) back in the 1870's.

 

There's quite a bit more to "The Wealth of Nations" than formal economic policy, although there are plenty of examples where the policies are so bad that no collection of humans could ever prosper under them.

 

 

[ivan]

"Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things."

 

-Adam Smith.

if only the "tolerable administration of justice" didn't cover slavery in all its many forms

 

"From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves. Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own."

 

" * There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished."

 

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship , the rich and powerful, and to despise , or , at least neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."

 

~same guy.

 

I think you'd enjoy reading his stuff if you haven't already.

i like the enlightenment fellows just fine, damn near all of them, though their work makes poor night-time work for me i fear

 

smith and jefferson and those fine folk were torn by the systems they perpetuated, still they persisted in them - the slavery of today of course in most metrical ways is far more splendid, but it still has the stink of a slaveship - ahh, i'm content enough

Edited June 17, 2011 by ivan

[Buckaroo]

smith and jefferson and those fine folk were torn by the systems they perpetuated, still they persisted in them - the slavery of today of course in most metrical ways is far more splendid, but it still has the stink of a slaveship - ahh, i'm content enough

 

Yeah, know what you mean

 

J ail

O perating as a

B usiness

[j_b]

Quite a laundry list there. Seems like they've all been hashed over and over. And over. And over. Many a time.

 

Right, the same laundry list that debunks your poorly substantiated assertion regarding how much money is available to pay for necessary services and living wages

 

But it is interesting how you went from never having a look at tax evasion a few posts ago to having hashed it over, and over, and over many times. Hmmm

 

I certainly don’t remember you ever acknowledging it despite my constant reminder of reality.

 

Seems like the key to minimizing tax evasion and avoidance is simplifying the rules, keeping the rates reasonable, and making sure they're used as efficiently as possible.

 

Go too far in the other direction in any of the above parameters - make more complex rules that make it easier to evade or minimize taxes, escalate rates to the point that you maximize the incentives for doing so, and allow the whole enterprise to turn into a grand patronage scheme and you're a long way down the road to Greece.

 

Tax evasion/avoidance has become endemic with neoliberal globalization and financialisation of our economies.