Behind Big Sister
Share this article
ADVERTISEMENT
(comments below)
Comments
Comments
-
Well, you sure got one thing right ….
“They want to make sure that we all can make whatever personal choices we can while paying no taxes and not having to deal with regulation.”.
I’ve also seen that many libertarians are “born” on the day they stop working full time – usually in their late forties or early fifties. Some simply quit working altogether while others go to part-time status. Once this happens, you hear a lot of things like “user pays”. This particular term was never in their vocabulary until they retired early , wanted the full benefits of society but don’t want to pay for those benefits.
These “libertarians” would have been first in line with a throaty cry against sky-high tolls while they were working full time, commuting and paying taxes. However, the day they retire or semi-retire (and stop commuting) they find the religion of “user pays”.
The French have an answer to the “idle rich” – a wealth tax. It’s pretty simple. If you have a reasonably high net worth (a million Euros or so) then you have to pay a percentage of that net worth in taxes. You can work, pay income taxes and meet your obligation. However, if you retire early or semi-retire then you must liquidate a small percentage of your net worth and send it to the government each year.
The French philosophy makes sense – even the “idle rich” consume societal services. Therefore, they should pay for those services even if they have decided to retire or semi-retire.
-
If anyone thinks the job market is “tough” right now, it’s near impossible for those over 60 … unless you have an established slot that you own or have a unique position that requires more than being young and smart.
So you end up volunteering… which is very useful and very needed work also, just not for monetary rewards. Older workers are a lot more capable and cheaper than younger workers but having been around the block a time or two… they are a lot less tolerant of the foolish office politics often practiced.
In terms of tolls/subsidies.. I spent more than 30 years in a 4-person carpool and never ever expected that the commute that I chose – should be subsidized by anyone else.
we do make choices and we do bear responsibility for those choices. No one else “owes” us anything for a ‘terrible” commute that we ourselves chose.
it’s just one excuse after another with these kinds of folks.
If too many people insist on a commute instead of working around the corner for 1/4 the money – it STILL is a choice made and a personal responsibility – not an excuse for others to pay for your commute.
It is with that mindset that I say if you choose to drive at rush hour every day solo in a car and that road runs out of capacity and congestion tolls are implemented to better manage the load – then you are part of that – you are one of the ones that caused it to happen and that cost is yours not someone who lives elsewhere or is retired or chose to work locally for less money.
It’s your responsibility – not someone elses.
in terms of “paying” for services, most retired pay – their pro-rata share of the costs of providing services. the only ones that I know who do not are below the poverty threshold and get a break on their taxes. Everyone else pays full boat on their real estate and personal property taxes.
and I agree fully that whether you have kids or not, that schools are a responsibility of all of us whether you are retired or not….but that does not mean that any/all costs associated with any/all education offered …carte blanche is reasonable or needed.
we spend way too much on schools COMPARED to our European/Asian competitors and our results compared to them …just plain SUCK.
It’s not about “fault”. It’s about choices that we make that have consequences, financial and otherwise and when you make those choices, you do own the consequences and blaming it on others is just flat irresponsible blame gaming.
Finally on DC schools.
You could give every single kid in DC a voucher and I guarantee you that it won’t change the problem. In fact, what it will do is attract a panoply of for-profit fly-by-night operators much like we see now with such schools scooping up the military education stipends…
If we were truly serious about the issues involving education, we’d admit that voucher schools alone is not going to solve anything.
An at-risk kid in a voucher school is going to be the same challenge that he was in public school and likely the outcome will be little different.
Equating voucher schools as equivalent quality Private Schools for the Poor is laughable. You’re going to do little more than proliferate scam schools that exist solely to grab that voucher money.
but we have to go through this silly drill because folks just refuse to recognize that the program is not “bad” teachers but a bad system…
-
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Arooooga! Reality alert!
Peter does a creditable job of describing left-wing thinking, but never, never, NEVER accept his characterization of conservative or libertarian thinking as anything more than a cartoonish rendering of the real thing. In fact you can read this entire post without learning the first thing about what Ayn Rand taught, except for the fact that it bore some vague similarity to libertarianism.
You do learn from Peter that Rand was a “whack job,” “cult leader,” a sexual libertine and a “pint-size Stalin.” You learn that she hated libertarians, but you never learn why. You learn that the people who follow her thinking these days include “gun nuts” and “cornball” patriots.
I think Peter spent too much time in the Soviet Union — without realizing it, he absorbed the Soviets’ habit for agitprop. Cast enough aspersions on someone and you never have to deal with the substance of their ideas!
To address one of the few substantive points in Peter’s post: Rand differed from libertarians by asserting a need for government. She insisted that government maintain a monopoly on force as a guard against anarchy. Government should use that force to protect the country from outside threats (defense) and to enforce the law (justice). Otherwise, according to Rand’s Objectivist theory, there are very few legitimate functions for government. By contrast, utopian libertarians (as opposed to temperamental libertarians such as myself), believe that it’s possible for human society to function without government, which, of course, it cannot. It’s a fundamental distinction.
While Rand did preach “the virtue of selfishness,” you have to understand what she meant by selfishness. In Objectivism, selfishness is not a philosophy of “me, me, me.” Rand regarded selfishness as the opposite of altruism, which provided the justification for religions, collectivists and social engineers of all stripes who imposed their own values upon others, and in the name of which hundreds of millions of people throughout human history have been slaughtered, subjugated and oppressed.
So, before you heed Peter’s advice to read Gary Weiss’ book about Rand and the Objectivists, innoculate yourself by reading the original source material first. Otherwise, you run the risk of swallowing a representation of Rand as interpreted by Weiss, someone (whom I presume) is hostile to her ideas. Peter might as well urge readers to learn about the Civil War and the horror of reconstruction by reading “Gone with the Wind.”
-
“Utopians?” “Tempermantls?” “Objectivists?”
This is getting really hysterical!
-
“Justice” in a 3rd world country means those of means live in heavily-armed walled compounds and travel with heavily-armed bodyguards outside of their compounds.
JimB says that he is not a “no government” temperamental libertarian.
I should learn more about this as I have no clue how to characterize such a person with respect to the purpose and role of government and regulation.
-
“but we have to go through this silly drill because folks just refuse to recognize that the program is not “bad” teachers but a bad system…”.
A big part of the bad system is bad teachers’ unions that revolt against change and accountability at every turn. These unions are funded by and their leaders are elected by teachers. So, in the case of the the teachers’ unions, teachers are bad for continuing to fund and support those unions.
-
re: “bad teachers” – IMHO this is more blame game to avoid dealing with the real issues.
If you take the kids in a “bad” school and send them to Voucher schools, you’re going to see “bad” teachers at the voucher schools also because we are essentially blaming teachers for a problem that is not of their making nor something they can fix without fundamental changes in the ways that schools deal with the demographically at-risk population.
Teachers will gravitate toward schools where the students are motivated to learn and they run from schools that have large numbers of at risk kids and other corrosive problems.
You can replace the “bad” teachers in those schools but all you are going to get is more “bad” teachers. No teacher in their right mind with other options is going to take a position at these troubled schools in the first place and that includes creating a voucher school (where you can fire teachers easily).. the voucher school is going to end up with a turnover problem similar to fast food restaurants..
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.