No one is born equal. No one dies equal. Nothing will change this unless you find a test for intelligence and start executing smart babies after they are born to enforce a common level of stupidity. I'm personally sick of seeing either mass slaughter or mass poverty when some middle calls twat with soft hands decides they are going to cook up a grand scheme to change this. If you look at someone's hands who is banging on about the 'working class' it is always amusing. Whether man or woman someone who has really grafted at some stage in their lives manually will show it on their hands. People who wish to make decisions about other peoples money for the benefit of 'workers' and 'the poor' who have soft perfect unscarred, unwrinkled, un-calloused hands are liars and snakes. Middle class university educated would be che gueveras who day dream about telling everyone what to do and social revolution and even political violence who have never seen a corpse or just how cruel a war or revolt is really. If you want to help the poor get your money and go and do something for them and stop chatting about grand social schemes. This clip says it all [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAxJb1v-SnU[/youtube]
I've always thought that people should be allowed some say in what government programmes they support. Given the huge paperwork around taxes would it be so difficult to allow a discretionary choice for perhaps 50% - so pacifists could decline their discretionary choice to military spending or for example Roman Catholics decline to contribute to abortion programmes, vegetarians to beef farm subsidies etc. Equally those who felt environmental programmes were important could allocate their discretionary portion that that programme those who's parents were immigrants may choose to allocate to asylum relief programmes etc. The same amount of money is taxed but people have some say over how half of it is spent. A simple list of the 100 biggest governmental budget programs is all that is required....surely the state is able to compile that if it is able to tax and spend the money on them anyway? It is a simple idea but would be really democratic. There is no reason for the state to oppose such a scheme unless the state wishes to demonstrate it truly does not care about democracy. It would make taxation on income less odious because at least people could become involved directly in how their money is spent. It would actually resolve a lot of the most morally repugnant elements of the western liberal democracies and grant freedom in the most important area of all freedom of conscience. It is quite wrong people are forced to pay for things they morally disagree with. I do personally believe that it is an individuals moral duty to help those who truly need help but it may be someone disagrees. I support their right to disagree and spent their money how they see fit. Of course civil servants will always oppose such a scheme as it diminishes their power and returns it to those who actually financially pay for government - the tax paying public. To me it has always been an indicator that government is just the biggest extortion gang on a territory that such a thing does not already exist. I can see nothing in this that either 'right' or 'left' wing people should have cause to oppose.
Nope I am not in Australia however that does not sound very useful - the real change is making the decision not being told afterwards what happened without consent in the first place.
Sorry my comment was rude. I guess that you haven't read my posts on this forum. I dislike socialism intensely, I agree with a lot of your sentiments and I definitely agree that welfare is out of control, the point of my post is that I do feel that the genuinely sick and elderly deserve to be looked after by a civilised society. Being coerced to do so is of course unpleasant. Having money extracted to give to the merely lazy is another matter entirely.
With lines like 'I can see why someone would divorce you' I can see a divorce coming when you least expect it too. The illusion that people actually have rational reasons and not just selfish whims for randomly discarding the people they made profound promises at and taking a dump on their kids lives is a common one. I've seen it ruin more peoples lives (particularly men, occasionally women) than war or disease and be they man or woman good or bad it strikes it seems to me pretty much randomly.
Do you really think that divorces just happen randomly? I've never been through one but the ones that I have seen usually have underlying reasons that are ignored until it's too late. Mind you i'm no expert. I did apologise for that comment BTW, it was a cheap shot.
You're not going to let this one go Julie I can tell, you are having too much fun with it. I am going to have to be totally hard core from now on, every time I reveal any feelings of compassion for my fellow man on the forum I get eaten alive!
Pretty much randomly yup. Yes there are always reasons given but those same reasons exist in other relationships that never separate. Divorce is a vile institution largely acting as a financial benefit to the legal profession to the detriment of children, women and men. Nothing else has empowered the state so much to utterly strip the participants and their children of freedom and money.I actually don't know how many lives I've seen it ruin and I've never once seen it actually improve any of the involved parties lives in the long run. I can certainly pin at least couple of teenage suicides on it and a plethora of bankruptcies and impoverishment and mental ruination of a load of nice people, men and women. Just imagine being a kid and knowing some complete stranger in a court owns you.....the legal profession makes a fortune on it and does everything it can to make it as vile and open ended as possible. I know one couple who spend 20 years in court over bugger all until one of them died in a car accident.
I to believe in helping those that are incapacitated or otherwise unable to support themselves. I am against the FORCED nature in which i am made to do this. We all know that there are many thousands of people out there that rip off the system and the are literally taking from those in genuine need. We often make donations to many charities OF OUR CHOOSING and we are happy to do this. WE refuse to donate to anything that is not based in NZ and going directly to NZ needs. We do not give to any of the international charities and never will. I am disgusted at being forced to give a portion of our income to be dished out to all and sundry that claim hardship. I was once young and used to kick around with a bunch of pot smoking dole bludgers and sickness beneficiaries , so i know all to well my money is getting given to these idiots. If we were not robbed of all this tax to dish out to the useless i can tell you for a fact that i could help out more than we do now with this stolen money for idiots. I note that many of my old pothead friends are still doing the same thing , the only difference being they have moved onto the DPB( domestic purposes benfit) as they now have children. We cant blame the pot either, i continue to smoke yet have a beautiful family, cars , and properties.
There is no personal virtue or morality involved when one's income is taxed and redistributed by a bunch of career politicians. It's just theft under threat of violence from the state. Certain people may like to rationalise their action as other than compulsion by the state, but taxation has devolved into nothing more than the self-centred paying of dues to keep the violence of the state at bay. If there is doubt, consider for a moment not paying taxes and feel the fear that arises over the retribution that would be exacted by the state and their henchmen. Taxes, fees, fines for victimless crimes and everything else you are compelled to pay is nothing more than extortion and no different than protection money paid to the mafia or other stand-over group threatening violence. I feel it wasn't always so. Prior to the global hegemony, Australians laboured together for common purpose of improvement and development of the country and its social infrastructure. Today, our "leaders" do what they are told so they can align to the foreign core of power without regard to the longer term national benefit, as has happened in all vassal states throughout time. A sad reflection on ANZAC day, but I wonder if we haven't truly forgotten the significance of the sacrifice of the ANZACs. Was the significance of remembrance to recall with fondness the spirit of men fighting against insurmountable odds knowing that it was folly, or was it in recalling the cost of being duped into making such sacrifices? "Lest we forget", perhaps is more an admonishment that we be aware of the interests that lie waiting to betray us unto our very deaths if we are not vigilant.
The ANZACs would be turning in their graves if they knew corporate scum would flourish to steal their children's and their children children's future ... lest we forget .... the real war is by pen and paper ...
I updated my spreadsheet to allow an additional change: namely to divide people into groups who save at different rates. All other parameters w.r.t. incomes, interest rates etc are unchanged. For simplicity I created 3 groups of people: - Group 1 = 10% of the population who save just 1% of their annual income - Group 2 = 80% of the population who save 5% of their annual income (as per the initial example) - Group 3 = 10% of the population who save 10% of their annual income. The below figure shows the wealth distribution by quintile: Note I have also added a line showing the share of wealth owned by the top 10%. The numbers are summarised in the table below: So with this small change in savings rates (not incomes) by a small percentage of the population we have 50% of the total wealth controlled by just 10% of the population and approximately two-thirds controlled by 20% with the bottom 60% of people controlling just 16%. [And again, the top 10% is actually simply the oldest workers while the bottom is the youngest.]
That right there is far too communist for me. I think the real answer is education & income management from a young age.
Bord I think the solution to the income inequality issue is to break from Libertarian roots of non-aggression. Every time someone hears the words "Income Inequality" they should be legally allowed to punch the speaker in the face until their hand breaks. In all seriousness though this is a big issue. It is a central go to argument for socialists and it drives me mental. No one in a civilised society should give a flying rats arse about income inequality. It's a throwaway bullshit term that morons use to convince other morons that envy over the success of other people isn't a bad thing. All we should ever be gauging our society on is the living standards of our poorest people. If they are consistently going up, we are creating an environment where everyone can prosper and everyone has a chance to make it. No one is created equal and no one has the same circumstances in life so the results are not going to ever be the same. If we could just get everyone to concede that the 50+ age groups are ALWAYS going to own the lions share of the wealth it would be a good start. Even having the stupid arguments with these morons would be better if every time it was discussed, the income inequality purely focused on 50-60 and 61+ year old age groups.
Nah, I just think far more people should learn to save earlier. Time flies, and retirement isn't cheap. Being smart with money as opposed to careless.
