Reply #155: Thanks, Dove. We've only (ttbomk) had one serious disagreement. [View All]

[TahitiNut]

Needless to say, my personal, direct experience will always trump any allegation or inference that it didn't even happen. No matter how agreeable I'd like to be, or accepting of other viewpoints, I can't see moving on that. :shrug: (But that's old news and hopefully will remain old.)

On questions of justice and fairness in governance, which includes the plethora of contrivances and mechanisms of our 'economic system,' I've not seen material differences. I don't, however, keep much track of who says what ... since I'm far, far more 'what-focused' than 'who-focused,' especially when on-line.

I dare say there aren't very many 'liberals' who don't see that we, as a nation, have gotten farther and farther away from achieving the kind of equity we'd call 'just' or 'fair' -- and that there've been few, if any, more reliably WRONG, both morally and factually, administrations in the history of this nation, if not the world(!), than the Bushoilini Regime.

From what I've read on DU, it appears that one of the most difficult things to break through is the perceptions (unstated assumptions) that some people have that "that's the (natural) way things are" when it comes to economics and taxation. We're so embedded in essentially superficial notions of investing, saving, earning, and owning -- even at the undergraduate curriculum level -- that we fail to see how arbitrary and artificial the systems truly are. We treat these things like Acts of God and make statements like "investing in stock has risk" in the same way we say "the sky is blue" and "fish swim." For example, few actually realize how very little of the money used to buy stock ever reaches the business -- or even what the implications are. Few are even actively conscious of what kind of business Enron was -- thinking business is business and Enron is like any other. Say "derivative" and most folks' eyes glaze over. The rhetoric of "estates" is so overwhelmed by the myth of some family farm that few realize that such estates are virtually nonexistent. I have NEVER seen the media describe the unrealized capital gains in a typical multimillion dollar estate's list of assets - and the tax implications vis-a-vis the common working person's experience of never even seeing most of what they pay in income taxes, let alone benefiting from the compounding of gains on those monies by delaying payment of taxes on the appreciation. The terms 'realized' and 'unrealized' just aren't part of the average person's active economic vocabulary.

The poor wage slave must accumulate wealth (under the mattress?) after paying taxes, but the capitalist gets to accumulate wealth until (s)he dies without ever paying taxes on the monthly/annual increase in accumulation (equity value) -- effectively using what would be the government's money (taxes) for free if it was their life's labor that was "unrealized."


On edit: Here's a little mental exercise I just thought up. I think very few people would approve of "loan sharking." I think very few people would think that someone was right in charging 50% or 100% interest on money loaned to another person, usually in dire need. None of us would want to be the borrower. I doubt many would admit to wanting to be the lender, even if they did. Then why is it that so many think it's OK (and even admirable) to collect a 100%, 500% or even 1000% "profit" selling a stock in a company ... one in which we had absolutely nothing to do with earning, where somebody else did all the work? I think there's something very, very bizarre in our sense of right and wrong as corrupted by our "economic system." What's particularly bizarre is the fact that the money loaned by the loan shark actually went to the person who earned, and paid, the interest. On the other hand, the money paid for a stock was not likely to have ever gone to the person(s) whose labor caused its value to increase. Strange.