Breaking America's Trickle-Down Stockholm Syndrome
Mark Cuban: A Galtian Overlord who believes in society.Back in 1981 Republicans might not have liked a proposal to tax millionaires to at least the same extent that we tax mere mortals, but they would have been reluctant to oppose it on the grounds that our economy depends entirely on rich people maximizing their incomes. You could believe that, but you couldn't say it out loud. This inhibition no longer burdens the GOP. "When you are raising these top tax rates," Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) said on Fox News Sunday, "you're raising taxes on these job creators where more than half of Americans get their jobs from in this country."
The most frustrating aspect of modern political life is the fact that the American public has internalized the (false) idea that magical self-made rich supermen don't owe anything to the society that nurtured them because they've earned every dime of their fortunes all by themselves without any help from the government. The reality, of course, is just the opposite.
Let's take a well-known Galtian Overlord such as Steve Jobs, truly one of the most inventive CEOs of our generation. Contrary to what you may have heard, Jobs did not, in fact, teach himself how to read and do math. Rather, he attended a public high school, just like the vast majority of looters American children. The young Jobs was able to attend school in the first place because of government regulations that barred child labor and mandated schooling. Added to this, the young Jobs benefited from having publicly-funded police and fire departments that ensured that he survived until he was rich enough to afford his own private security detail. If Rick Perry had been governor of California and had dramatically slashed funds to first responders, then our budding young Galtian Overlord might have died in a wildfire instead of inventing the iPhone.
And of course there are other ways Jobs has benefited from the government, from a legal system that protects his company's intellectual property to a military that prevents the Queen of England from coming into his home and bossing him around to a social safety net that insured that even if he had never been a success, he wouldn't have died destitute in the street and unable to pay his medical bills in his old age. And that's not to mention that Steve and his fellow Galtians also used to benefit from now-repealed banking regulations such as Glass-Steagall that ensured financial stability and dramatically lessened the chances that a financial crisis would cripple the economy.
So yes, I would say that Steve Jobs and his fellow Galtians owe a lot to an American government that offers some of the lowest personal income tax rates in the industrialized world and that produces educated workers to help them build their companies. Mark Cuban, of all people, seemed to understand this in a blog post today where he implored his fellow Galtians to recognize that there is such a thing as society and that having a lot of money doesn't separate you from it:
So be Patriotic. Go out there and get rich. Get so obnoxiously rich that when that tax bill comes , your first thought will be to choke on how big a check you have to write. Your 2nd thought will be “what a great problem to have”, and your 3rd should be a recognition that in paying your taxes you are helping to support millions of Americans that are not as fortunate as you.
In these times of “The Great Recession” we shouldn’t be trying to shift the benefits of wealth behind some curtain. We should be celebrating and encouraging people to make as much money as they can. Profits equal tax money. While some people might find it distasteful to pay taxes. I don’t. I find it Patriotic.
I’m not saying that the government’s use of tax money is the most efficient use of our hard-earned capital. It obviously is not. In a perfect world, there would be a better option. We don’t live in a perfect world. We don’t live in a perfect time. We live in a time where the government plays a big role in an effort to help lead us out this Great Recession. That’s reality.
Cuban's attitude is certainly the right one. It would be nice if more of his fellow Galtians decided to adopt it.
If Rick Perry had been governor of California and had dramatically slashed funds to first responders, then our budding young Galtian Overlord might have died in a wildfire instead of inventing the iPhone.
Damn, we should have gone Galt sooner.
Vote GOP and move forward to the 18th Century.
Funny!
But stone cold!!!
I haven't found a single Republican who can answer one question: The hugh Bush tax cuts of the early 2000's should have release the job creators to create millions of jobs. Where are they? Bush created only a net of 3 million because so many were lost. Clinton with his high taxes and regulation created 23 million.
Show me the jobs!!!
while you are certainly correct about how damaging those tax cuts were, and don't forget that's the reason we have s supposed "deficit issue", do not forget for one second, obama extended bush's expiring tax for no reason and extracted nothing in return, even though he was told it would exacerbate the deficit issue.
these are now the obama cuts for the wealthy and from everything I have seen he is playing for the other team, he is a corporatist and whether or not you like it, a "trickle down" economist
Your claim he extended the Bush tax for no reason and extracted nothing in return is erroneous. This occurred during the fight over extending unemployment insurance. It was the "trade off" demanded by the Republicans. Whether it was the right 'trade off" or not can be discussed, but to present it the way you did just, I assume, in order to trot out your final sentence is very disingenuous.
This was meant as a reply to the 10:14am comment of perris.
as pointed out before, I believe even on this blog, obama had no reason to worry about unemployment extension and even if he did, he "negotiated" up, he actually added to those bush cuts with additional inheritance tax cuts
had he not extended those cuts he could have just as easily created more jobs with the revenue,
he brought up the extension in the first place and there was no reason to use those obama cuts to get the ridiculous extension he got, he is using this "deficit" issue, an issue he himself created with his cuts, and he's cutting jobs
so we are not going to agree on the "reason" for extending that incredibly damaging redistribution of middle class assets marketed as "bush cuts for the wealthy", they are now obama's
believing jobs come from the wealthy is the same thing as believing the ocean comes from the rain, the reverse is true in both cases;
before there is a product or service there MUST be labor producing that product or service, before there is profit there MUST be product, before there is profit there must be profit
LABOR CREATES WEALTH, WEALTH DOES NOT CREATE LABOR
...wealth (money) creates wealth (money) which is why, I think, the wealthy and the congress-critters who roll over waiting for their bellies to be rubbed by their corporate masters could care less about the state of the middle and lower economic classes.
Mickey: "It was an epiphany. Do you know what an epipany is?"
Keoni: "NOT NOW MICKEY!"
wealth (money) does NOT create wealth (money), wealth gets steals their wealth from labor...and once they have it they want to make certain they can get as much more wealth from labor as possible
it's te other way around surfjac, wealth gets it from labor, labor does not get it from wealth
...from two fellows that might know a thing or two about capitalism:
"It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased"
Adam Smith - 'Wealth of Nations'
"Every thing in the world is purchased by labor"
David Hume - 'Of Commerce'
...Investments in commodities and stocks and whatever, make money for people without them getting their hands dirty. YES, someone works, someone labors, but not the investor/job creator who puts his money into a deal to make money out of the deal and the game is RIGGED in their favor by willing and complacent congress critters.
Mickey: "It was an epiphany. Do you know what an epipany is?"
Keoni: "NOT NOW MICKEY!"
What do their beloved Koch brothers (all blessings and peace be upon them) have to say, besides "The more there is for the likes of us, the less there is for the likes of you. Just like God planned it"
They may regret not voluntarily agreeing to helping out.
Or, the Galtians may find out someday that, unlike money, one thing that surely does trickle down, is blood.
Great article! Not that any of the mindless droids who are more tempted than not to vote Republican are likely to be convinced by it. And another point it misses is that those same plutocrats who've, through propaganda, managed to convince millions of working-class Americans that "trickle down" actually works certainly are capable of knowingly and willfully inflicting harm on the American economy, just as a garden-variety kidnapper or terrorist can willfully injure or kill innocent hostages. In fact, they're doing it right now!
I haven't a scrap of data to back up what I'm about to assert, but here goes anyway. Big Business, Big Money, and Big Pharma (in no particular order) are even now deliberately injuring (perhaps fatally) the US economy by simply refusing to create jobs. It isn't as though they haven't the money to do so. Big Business, thanks in large part to unprecedented bail-outs with taxpayer dollars, is sitting on piles of capital in record-shattering amounts. Why? Because it's in their political interest to do so. They're not about to take any chances such as putting people back to work while a Democrat is in the White House. After all, it's all too possible he just might do something they might not like.
So, as has happened many times before in history, the moneybags will gleefully accept any federal handouts which may come their way, and they'll continue to deliberately keep the economy depressed until their lapdogs, the Republican Party, are returned to power in Washington--preferably by means of a Republican sweep of both houses of Congress and the presidency. Then, and only then, they may perhaps deign to create a few jobs, if for no better reason than to provide a few more consumers for their products and services.
covered this quite well in Shock Doctrine. The plan is to reduce our workforce to the level of the 3rd world nation and loot whats left. Anyone think it's an accident that Jeb Bush is heading up a for profit disaster response company, at the same time the GOP is trying to gut FEMA?
"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." -- Robert E. Howard
I don't think business is sitting on its hands hoping for a Republican president. Businessmen invest where they expect profits. I think the problem is lack of demand. Corporate profits have never been higher, but they've cut back on their workforce to a point where they can still handle the customers that walk in the door. Government needs to jump-start things by creating jobs like Obama's proposals for infrastructure improvements and repairs to schools. If more people are working, they are buying goods and services, and patronizing local businesses.
Businessmen have no patriotic obligation to "create jobs" if they can handle all the business they have and don't have more customers walking in. Would you hire more people or build another wing on your building when you're comfortably handling all the business you have? I wouldn't.
One other thing I forgot to mention -- for that very reason, tax cuts to the rich do not generate jobs in a poor economic climate. They're just sitting on what they have already; if you cut their taxes, they'll just save it. No incentive to expand or start a business.
the Galtians may find out someday that, unlike money, one thing that surely does trickle down, is blood.
Ayn Rand never completed the sequel to Atlas Shrugged. You know, the one where there was a tremendous earthquake in Galt's Gulch, killing a third of the population and the rest filed a petition for assistance with the federal government.
Vote GOP and move forward to the 18th Century.
Specifically, she wrote an accidental sequel, the novella 'Anthem', about exactly the kind of pre-industrial dystopia that would inevitably result from the state of the world at the end of Atlas Shrugged. There was a blog post to that effect floating about the Internet a few months back, wish I could find it again.
Mark Cuban is an extremely brave and courageous man. Very strong.
"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Too bad about Mark Cuban's HDNet. Otherwise, he seems like a good guy.
I know its a little off topic, but President Obama Proposes A Republican Plan To "Save" The USPS.
Election 2012: Be Educated! Be Active! Vote!
www.PhoenixJustice.com
and there are a lot of truly strange beliefs, a veritable buffet of weirdness, out there for people to choose from. I find it kind of odd that anyone thinks it strange that elected officials are exempt from holding the strange beliefs of the people that elected them.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
than they can spend or invested then every dollar pass than point is one less dollar of demand. There is a point were making the rich richer makes everybody including the rich poorer.
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-...
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/19/1018... http://wonkette.com/453437/survey-20-of-ameri...
Kinda like swimming back down to steerage on the Titanic, just to fetch John Jacob Astor up some ice?
I wish I had the problem of having to pay an extra $5 million on my $40 million yearly income. Oh me, oh my.
That delusion, usually based on nothing more than the desire to have money without talent, inventiveness, or even hard work is at the root of any shred of support these rich dudes have going for them.
The Thatcher/Reagan mantra, "Society Doesn't Exist" is the theoretical basis for the Randian thrust of our times.
It was not until the 18th century that people actually discovered 'society' to be not limited to a small circle of aristocrats. Society, Durkheim wrote in the following century, is a phenomenon sui generis. It exists as an entity quite apart from the individuals that compose it.
These dudes want that understanding to be destroyed, along with any sense of what society can do to empower the individual.
MyMy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)
Anthem
The odorous wet fart that follows the painful bout of diarrhea known as Atlas Shrugged.
Vote GOP and move forward to the 18th Century.
That should be the blurb on the cover.
There's a new chart circulating around Congress - I saw it also yesterday on MSNBC - that shows the relationship between top tax rates and economic growth, decade by decade.
It clearly shows that the GOP attempts to claim that "high top tax rates" stifle economic growth have absolutely no historical evidence to back them up. To the contrary, in fact.
Hope this chart will be available on some web site soon.
This probably fits in with the idea that ideologues instinctively believe whatever fits into their ideological view of reality.....
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) has admitted that she has no evidence backing her claim that half of job applicants at a local government facility flunked a drug test. She'd used the claim to push for requiring the jobless to pass a drug test to be eligible for benefits.
"I've never felt like I had to back up what people tell me. You assume that you're given good information," Haley told Jim Davenport of the Associated Press. "And now I'm learning through you guys that I have to be careful before I say something."
Haley said two weeks ago she'd been told that of hundreds of job applicants at the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation owned by the U.S. Energy Department, half failed a drug test. But Jim Giusti, a spokesman for Energy Department, told HuffPost that of the workers hired over the past few years, less than 1 percent failed a test. Additionally, only new hires -- not applicants -- have to submit to testing in the first place.
Nikki Haley has had sex with 50% of the goats in S.C. i don't feel like i have to back that up since someone told me.
Funny how she has never denied having sex with 50% of the goats in South Carolina. Makes you wonder what else she is refusing to deny.
Election 2012: Be Educated! Be Active! Vote!
www.PhoenixJustice.com
Times like this I think we might have been better off if more of these 1%ers had watched more Loony Tunes..
More specifically this great episode that encourages investing in America rather than just collecting a big heap of money to roll around in.
http://www.cartoonlair.com/sylvester/heir-con...
What a load of self-serving nonsense.
"...don't owe anything to the society that nurtured them because they've earned every dime..."
Really? Please bring this "society" to me. I want to ask him/her why so many murderers and corrupt people exist.
"....Jobs was able to attend school....."
He was forced into school. Therefore, denied better choices.
"....publicly-funded police and fire departments that ensured that he survived...."
Really? Ensured? How on earth did humanity make it through the times where police & fire departments didn't exist?
"Cuban's attitude is certainly the right one."
Yes indeed, go out there and pay as much as you can to that death cult that you call the "U.S. government".
How on earth did humanity make it through the times where police & fire departments didn't exist?
i don't know, with mob rule with a lot of things burning?
what is the correct answer? or, is there no correct answer, as an answer implies some sort of social construct to deem what is right and wrong? in fact, why are you even here? shouldn't you be in a individualistic paradise somewhere mocking those that choose to live amongst others?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-vBJ8cS08U
Election 2012: Be Educated! Be Active! Vote!
www.PhoenixJustice.com
You don't know that humans are still here despite the fact that police & fire departments weren't always here?
i think humans have always lived fire and police departments.
human invention/discovery starting soon after eve bit that friggin apple: fire, fire department, language, wheel, police department, agriculture--in that order
"....Jobs was able to attend school....."
He was forced into school. Therefore, denied better choices.
He had lots of better choices. All he was required to do was attend school, not necessarily public school. Even with that, he could choose with one to go to.
Why do you make up lies, when the truth is so f**king obvious?
Where is the lie? You said yourself that he was "required". Required = forced.
We should stop giving people the choice to homeschool their kids. The result, as seen above, is an affront to education and an abortion of what could be a bright human mind.
Here's another GOP myth: I often hear republicans/conservatives ask why should those who work hard and achieve be "punished?"
This makes me so angry. I have worked very hard in my career. I have made decent money, but I have never made millions.
This line of thinking implies that if you do not make enough money to be in the highest tax bracket, then you are not a hard worker. This is complete and utter BS.
This line of thinking goes hand in hand with the idiot pundits and guests I have seen on Faux News who say that teachers "only" work 9 months out of the year, so they are not working as hard as those bankers on Wall Street who work 12 months a year and make millions. BS. Most teachers work very hard.
I submit that many people who make only, say, $50,000 a year, work harder than those who make 6 and 7 figures. People who make that much money can afford to pay someone to mow their lawns. They can afford to hire private nannies to take care of their kids during the day. They can afford to eat out much more often and therefore not waste time preparing meals and washing dishes. They can hire someone to manage their finances.
O'Reilly used this line of thinking last night when he talked about "punishing" people who work hard and make a lot of money. This afternoon, I heard a local conservative radio host say basically the same thing. I hear it a lot, and it really irks me.
there was a rollins spoken word performance from back in the 90s when he went off, as only rollins can, on the idea that blue collar/service workers aren't hard workers. and i would challenge any executive to try working on a road crew, or working in a kitchen, or anything that requires them to actually do something other than call their financial planner to check on their investments
easy work: living off of dividends
hard work: doing the shit that creates the dividends
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