Obama, Warren, Krauthammer and the rich paying their fair share

First, Sen. Elizabeth Warren:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

And then-president Obama:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.) 

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

And now Krauthammer, laying the smackdown on the pretentious redistributionist crap above:

"Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he created the Mac and the iPad."

(column reproduced and read by yours truly in his magisterial collection Things That Matter)

The rich already pay a greater share of their income in taxes than the non-rich.  That means they're already paying a greater share of their income for the same public services available to everyone else, i.e., they're already paying more outright for the same services.  They just made better use of it than the others did, using their brainpower.  But that's not enough for the "progressives."  (About the only thing "progressive" about leftists is how steeply progressive a tax structure they support.)  The above arguments from Warren and Obama purport to show how paying a lot in taxes is merely giving back for the support one has received, but they're actually disguised arguments for redistribution (the sine qua non of distinctively Democratic tax policy).  What they should do is explain to everyone in straightforward and plain terms, in light of Krauthammer's point, how Steve Jobs' wealth should be forcibly transferred to other people who didn't create the Mac and the iPad.

If they want to get advanced in their arguments, they should explain how Rawls trumps Rand (the intellectual who more than any other dramatized and explained the role of the mind/intellect in wealth creation) on this point.  Perhaps in the process they can apply Rawls' point (from section 17 of A Theory of Justice -- do a search on "superior character" at https://genius.com/John-rawls-a-theory-of-justice-excerpts-annotated ) about not deserving a superior character that "depends in good part upon fortunate family and circumstances in early life," and see how far they get with that with the American people.  (Compare/contrast with Rand on character.)

(A person less intellectually corrupt and less full-of-himself than today's "progressives" might bring up the following: The rich have more wealth to protect from would-be criminals or foreign invaders, so it only makes sense that they pay a commensurate amount in taxes.  That would justify a flat tax, at best, not a progressive tax structure.  Moreover, it's quite reasonable to ask whether it takes a thousand times as much money to protect a billionaire's wealth than to protect a millionaire's wealth.  What if the billionaire could get a better wealth-protection package from a private provider than what he can get from the state?  Supposedly that isn't an option given that the state provides protection as a 'public good' (and assuming that no voluntary funding mechanisms for public goods are available).  But under libertarian justice this hypothetical private alternative serves as a proper baseline against which to determine whether the person whose wealth is being protected is getting a fair return on taxes paid, i.e., isn't being made to pay more than what is necessary to cover the wealth-protection costs.  Just because a person's wealth is vulnerable to predation in a state of nature, doesn't make it okay for the state to take part in some measure or other of functionally-unnecessary predation itself under the guise of protection.)

Obama: Weak

The tax cut extension was a good idea, but Obama's rationale and rhetoric are quite telling. No one forced his hand on this, but he caved on his campaign pledges and (ridiculously) likened the GOP leadership to hostage-takers with whom he wouldn't negotiate . . . unless . . . always an "unless" with this guy . . . unless refusing to negotiate would bring harm to the hostage.

Great. Wonderful way to telegraph weakness to the Terrorists, innit?

[ADDENDUM: I guess strength in the Obama paradigm, when it comes to the Terrorists, is to continue the Cheney-era lawbreaking. If he wants to equate strength with cheating - this is what our political system today has come to, isn't it - he should just say so.]

[ADDENDUM #2: Ever the Machiavellian mentality, Obama played politics on these tax cut extensions. He waited for the November election returns before deciding on the issue. In the 2008 primaries, he told his left-wing DailyKos/reddit/ThinkProgress/Soros base what it wanted to hear, and now he screws them over. All the while, Obama's Machiavellianism seems to go over really well on the increasingly boring, short-term-oriented, small-fry-focused Daily Dish - an insidious effect of adopting a Hayekian over a Randian paradigm. WEAK!]

More from the Facepalm Dept.

By way of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter's highly bigoted America-hating blog, a link to this more or less typical anti-capitalist, anti-rights whining. A perceptive reader notices the following failures of cognition:

(1) The zero-sum, fixed-pie mentality.

(2) No attempt to identify the underlying cause of increased inequality in the United States. Part of this has to do with how to measure income (more income is being taken in the form of benefits, particularly health insurance). Ask an economist, and the answer is more likely to be that globalization has caused a shifting in incomes. From the global vantage point, speaking of increasing inequality in one country is a massive context-drop. So, we have here a failure to identify cause and context.

(3) No recognition of any principle whatsoever, such as the absolute right of private property; perhaps the only principle involved is, "More equality good, greater inequality bad." Good luck in trying to ground any such principle. The highest court of appeal in this screwed-up mindset is Rawls's Theory of Justice, which is ultimately against groundings (since Rawls's theory is consensus-obsessed, and it's a given in such an approach that people cannot agree on groundings, such as the absolute human requirement to be free to create, earn and keep the product of one's own efforts).

(4) Focused on solutions that don't promote growth and initiative and expanding the pie, but rather on how to redistribute the pie. This follows more or less naturally from point (1). The fucking "liberal" socialists don't have any idea how to expand the pie, which has approximately 100 percent to do with individual initiative. Any policy should therefore be oriented towards actualizing individual initiative, and punishing success through force doesn't seem like a good way of doing that. Then again, I'm not a pragmatism-eaten economist, so I don't usually analyze policies in terms of "desirable" (read: consensus-wanted) results.

(5) A (quasi-?) Keynesian tenet whereby tax cuts going to the wealthy don't stimulate growth because "they don't go out and spend the money" the way the poor do. So whether or not you deserve to keep the products of your own talents, efforts and initiative depends on whether some fucking coercive policymaker in Washington determines whether you're going to "spend" the money rightly. Do keep in mind Keynes's axiomatic dictum for the pragmatism-eaten mindset: "In the long run we are all dead." Apparently, tax reductions for the wealthy just go into some unproductive bank account. Of course, then again, maybe those extra funds go into productive investments where the highest return is going to be had. Apparently those higher returns come from various developing countries with higher rates of economic growth. That would "exacerbate" the inequality right here at home, since these investments benefit the businesses and workers abroad, less so here at home. But this concerns underlying causes that the fucking liberals with their pragmatistic refusal to deal with underlying causes (that's "metaphysics" and nonsense) rarely if ever get into. That would require consulting the economists, and the economists have had this tendency to be a lot more pro-capitalist than the fucking liberals and socialists have been. I wonder why?

(6) Apparently, it's better to let fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and all their ilk decide how economic resources are to be directed, than to leave those decisions to the Evil Rich who got that way by . . . you guessed it, doing a better job deciding how economic resources are to be directed than everyone else did. But as we all realize by now, success in directing economic resources to their most profitable and productive lines is something that should be punished so that the fucking politicians can redistribute things more evenly and the American economy can stagnate more relative to the rest of the world.

(7) Stagnationism, not growth, as the basis for policy. This more or less sums up all the previous points. See also Nathaniel Branden's article, "The Divine Right of Stagnation," in The Virtue of Selfishness.

(8) America is a rotten place according to the fucking "liberal" socialists, so much so that people must be miserable living here. That's why so many immigrants come here to work, save, and invest. By the way, poor immigrants coming here just adds to the percentage of poor here in the country, which is Bad. Also, see point (7), where the basic mindset is that of stasis and stagnation. The poor immigrants coming here must be the same poor that come here five years from now.

Fact is, America is amazingly rich on average (or median); the only real issue here is how we Americans capitalize upon this great advantage. Sitting around like a bunch of whiny defeatists complaining about people making a lot of wealth is just not going to cut it here. What we absolutely need to do here, is to adopt the mentality of growth, i.e., of capitalism. What this entails is a rather new, scary, and initially-disorienting perspective: that Americans could become a huge rich capitalistic "class" (do please keep in mind how the term "class" is totally abused, applied totally out of context, basically undefined, etc. by the fucking Marxism-eaten "liberal" socialists) for the whole world. That would require a lot of Americans taking on the mentality of ownership rather than of stagnation in its various manifestations. Now, if we're defeatists, and pragmatists, and traditionalists, the argument is that "this can't be done." Why? Because it would be hard? Would it be too hard? Perhaps it would be too hard for people deeply embedded and devoted to a mentality of stagnation and weakness, e.g., many in the Democrat voting base.

But (a) we shouldn't tailor policy or rights-theory to that mentality and (b) it really isn't that hopeless a situation. Growth can happen in many amazing and unexpected ways if you just foster the right conditions for it. Fostering a zero-sum, fixed-pie, envy-eaten, whiner mentality is not the way to do it. Fostering a radically capitalistic, individualistic, pro-strength, pro-independent-thought mindset is the key. Likening the United States of America to a banana republic is such a failure of cognition that it's, sadly, telling how it receives prominence of place in our leading news outlets.