Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
The things you find in the New York Times letters section:
Robert H. Frank’s article (“Taxing the Rich: It’s All Relative,” Economic View, Nov. 28), on the rationale for allowing tax cuts to expire for families’ income over $250,000, is focused on the wrong issue. It’s our spending that’s a problem, not the ability of the wealthiest to pay even more.
I want the wealthy to keep doing what they’re doing. Personally, I am happy I have spreadsheets (thank you, Bill Gates) and can order all my holiday gifts in 15 minutes (thank you, Jeff Bezos). The richest of the rich, in most cases, provide more value to the world via the items they create than any charity or government organization could dream of. Their wealth is an exact measure of the value they have provided to society.
J. Todd Larson
Bainbridge Island, Wash.,
Nov. 29
The writer is the president of Citium Wealth Management and an adjunct professor in the M.B.A. program at Seattle University.
The Frank article is here.
Hat tip to Michelle Malkin’s page on the Hello-Kitty-of-blogging.
Blogger friend Phil has thoughts on this issue too.
But it’s really not about “fair shares”. It’s about people wanting something, seeing someone who has the means to give them what they want, and getting their grubby hands on the levers of government power to force those other people to cough up more of their dough. Not only are they already giving more dough, they’re giving a bigger percentage of their dough for the cause. At what point will it become “fair” if it is not “fair” now?
The answer is never.
We seem to be caught up in a big national debate about socialism. I notice the socialists are lately deploying an argument that could be expressed as “if you think a socialist is what I am then you obviously don’t know what socialism is.” I hear lots of people begin this argument but then they don’t complete it — they don’t say what exactly it is a socialist does, that they are not doing.
I would expect we can all agree that if your vision is one where everyone has the same amount of stuff, that would make you a socialist. So from this, I infer the quibbling is about matters of degree. I am interpreting the socialists to say “I would be a socialist if I wanted everyone to be left with the same amount of stuff, but I do not want that goal. I just want to use our tax code to sort of trot out in that general direction, a little bit.” I think they rationalize their non-socialism by insisting they’d stop at some point.
That’s what I think when I take them seriously — and maybe that’s a mistake.
But my point is: How come it falls to the rest of us to figure out where they’d stop? How come it isn’t up to them to tell us? They use numbers like “wealthiest one percent” and “those who make $250,000 or more” to assure us that they only want to bring pain to those other guys — we don’t need to worry about it. And if we keep worrying about it it shows how dumb we are.
To be a smarty-pants, I guess you just need to tune out and not absorb any information about anything.
But if we do this tuning out, to show how smart and unconcerned we are…then how far does it go? It goes toward complete entropy but doesn’t actually reach it because they’re not socialists. So how much equalization gets done? When the dust settles, how much loot is the most productive, wealthiest person left with, and how well off is the laziest person? How come they don’t spec it out? Wouldn’t it be to their political benefit to do so?
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Euphemism, obfuscation, and sundry other forms of diversionary bullshit are indispensable parts of leftism. The “if you think a socialist is what I am then you obviously don’t know what socialism is” canard has been used to justify the left’s juvenile utopianism since at least Robespierre (and look how well that one worked out).
This is why the graybeards among ’em continue to argue that “communism has never really been tried” in re: Stalin, Mao, etc. Even though those guys declared themselves to be communists (and shot everyone who disagreed with communism) that doesn’t matter, because…ummmm…shut up, that’s why. And the fact that professional media types overwhelmingly self-identify as Democrats, and vote Democrat at a 9 to 1 clip, and give lots and lots of money to Democrats, somehow isn’t probative of the media’s overwhelming bias in favor of the left to these people…
I think there are three things going on here. One is garden-variety hypocrisy: “socialism” remains a bad word in our culture, so even people who advocate openly socialist means to nakedly socialist ends will claim to be working for “social justice” or some such. Much in the same way, I imagine, as all but the richest of the rich-for-generations bluebloods will call themselves “upper middle class” instead of “rich” (I’d bet even a dude like Bill Gates would, if pressed, offer some pabulum about being “a middle-class guy at heart” or some such). Honestly, I can’t really blame them for this. I wouldn’t self-identify as “poor white trash” even if I objectively were poor white trash (and given my income level and taste in beer, I’m disturbingly close already).
The second thing is much more insidious. I think a small but highly influential group of folks actually don’t believe that Obama is a socialist, because for them, a real socialist would be out there expropriating the expropriators. For instance: I have a friend who argues in all sincerity that the New York Times doesn’t have a liberal bias, because a paper with a real liberal bias would publish nothing but American atrocity stories 24/7. He doesn’t phrase it quite like that, but he explicitly believes that the NYT gave George W. Bush a pass on the whole WMD thing, on orders from their corporate masters in the advertising department. Seriously. So until our very own Dear Leader starts acting like, well, that other Dear Leader, he’s not a socialist.
That’s why slippery-slope arguments like yours don’t faze people like that. Since Obama’s not actually going to go around setting up workers’ soviets on the production floor at GM, he’s effectively just another tool of Big Business. And since the NYT isn’t reprinting (and distributing gratis) the Daily Worker, there’s really no difference between them and Fox News.
The last thing going on is grotesque hypocrisy. Unlike the garden variety stuff above, this is the real deal. If they spelled out exactly how much money is “too much money,” they’d have to squarely face up to the fact that most of them are, in fact, “the Rich,” functionally if not on their W-2s. I’ve hung out in a fair number of honest-to-God blue collar establishments in my time, and for the most part actual workingmen are conservative enough to give Glenn Beck a chubby. Class warfare as preached by Olbermann and the Kos Kiddies comes straight from academia, where the average annual salary for a tenured prof hovers just below $100K. I’ve never met a person who used the phrase “redistribution” un-ironically who wasn’t quite well-heeled. And, of course, they don’t want to give up any of their money — they just want you to give up yours, and are quite happy to pose and preen and stroke themselves self-righteously until you do.
- Severian | 12/07/2010 @ 11:36Things I (Phil) Know #27 is: “27. Vehement protests that someone is not a socialist are almost invariably followed by a spirited defense of socialism.”
The wealthiest 5% pay 58% of the taxes. The wealthiest 1% pay 38% of the taxes! “They” have it. “We” want it. Or “We” want to use it to buy votes. Ergo, taking even more from them is justified. That’s pretty much the underlying foundation of the argument.
- philmon | 12/10/2010 @ 09:20