11-25-2019, 09:12 AM
(11-09-2019, 05:52 PM)Anthony Wrote:(06-13-2019, 07:37 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(06-12-2019, 10:32 PM)Dutch Wrote: If the US was free, peaceful, had a booming economy, had a balanced budget, had sound money, had safe streets, had no minimum wage, and taxes imposed by all levels of government took less than 10% of our income in the past, are Americans happier now that the USA is a police state, at war, has a dead economy, is in debt, has a minimum wage, and high taxes?
A police state and a welfare state are two very different things. The Soviet Union was a police state without a welfare state; South Africa under Apartheid was a police state for non-whites but a welfare state for whites; Chile under Pinochet was a police state trying to gut a welfare state. It is possible to have a police state that is also a welfare state, as in Castro's Cuba.
Balanced budgets occurred as late as the 1990s in part because the federal government needed not spend so much money defending against the dreaded Soviet thrust through the Fulda Gap or across the North German Plain in a drive to Brittany and Gibraltar. Sound money? That was the euphemism for the gold standard that created a more capricious economy that had to contract when gold got exported. Safe streets? Back in the days of Irish immigrant gangs in America in the 1860s? No minimum wage? Just the thing you need for debt bondage on the Plantation.
Lower taxes? Those were possible when most people dropped out of school after 'solid eighth-grade educations' to be child labor, and when roads were two-lane blacktops also known as 'Blood Alley'. Do you know anyone who wants to return to the 1920s? That is how I interpret "Make America Great Again".
Actually MAGA seeks a return to the 1880s. To its devotees, the Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, was the first step on the way down.
Seemingly everyone has a distinct idea of who the 'right' and 'wrong' elites are and has politics to fit. I prefer elites who achieve and innovate (educated professionals and owners of small businesses) to those who profiteer by creating and exploiting scarcity and unequal opportunity. I prefer the software engineer to the landlord who gouges the software engineer for half of his income. It is best that we have low taxes on income earned the hard way (I see many small-business owners as genuinely proletarian) and high taxes on easy money. As such I am much closer to Henry George than to Karl Marx.
Donald Trump is an exponent of monopoly capitalism with a heaping helping of cronyism. America is at its best when
(1) capitalists are the only people getting rich, and
(2) small-scale enterprise is the norm.
Think about it: in the 1950's Americans endured some of the highest taxes on income from passive investments -- and such activities as restaurants, retail stores, banks, and even manufacturing could be cottage industries.The current federal tax code promotes monopolies or cartels -- and vertical integration. Such is excellent for promoting the most severe inequality of economic results possible.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.