On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 15:28:08 -0800
Shawn Gordon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The "wealthy" pay the lions share of taxes regardless of any cuts.
This is simply not the case. The vast majority of taxes collected by
any state are not income taxes but direct and indirect levies on
economic transactions and accumulated assets. The ability to bear
these types of taxes is inverse in proportion to income or
accumulated wealth as there exists a minimal level of consumption
necessary for life in a cash based economy. There are far more
poor than wealthy, thus in the total the less well-off pay more in
both absolute and relative terms than the wealthy, who in any case
pay their taxes from a surplus (by definition) rather than from a
simple sufficiency or even insufficiency for the poorest levels.
Further, deficit spending by government is itself a form of income
transfer from the poor, who pay the taxes necessary to service the
resulting debt from their sufficiency or insufficiency, to the wealthy,
who lend from their surplus to the government and subsequently
collect the rents therefrom. When one considers that much
government spending is paid directly into the coffers of this same
group (the owners of defence industries, pharmaceutical
companies, large industrial sectors, transportation concerns,
resource extraction industries, financial markets, etc.) then the
situation is even more starkly revealed.
One of the most distressing things about political discussions is that
complex issues are frequently asserted by partisans to have only
one, obviously deficient, premise or viewpoint worthy of discussion.
Governments are not mandated from heaven but are complex
social organizations that gradually come into being to service the
majority of the governed; who realize from bitter experience that co-
operation provides a better payoff than competition, on average.
However, there exists within all biological collectives a residual
group who see exploitation of their own as being beneficial to
themselves, and be damned to the rest. In humans we call these
creatures psychopaths.
There is an evolutionary explanation for this, any perverse survival
strategy has worth if it is sufficiently rare. The concentration of
power, material resources, and opportunity that government
represents apparently proves to be an irresistible attractor for those
whose personal survival strategy is narrow self-interest and
exploitation.
The tendency to avoid looking directly at these unpleasant
observations and attempting to systematically deal with them
makes up a great deal of the art and artifice that we call politics, in
no small measure due to the actions of the psychopaths themselves
who employ mimicry and diversion as tactical measures to further
their own agenda. This in not to claim that all, or even the majority,
of those that seek public office are psychopaths, but it is delusional
to believe that our present political systems select against such
creatures.
Real politics is the art of identifying and collectively mitigating the
effects of these inherent and irreducible flaws in human nature so
that, on average, the benefits of co-operation can be realized by the
majority; and those who would have it otherwise are prevented from
exerting their baleful and malign effects over the rest of us. This
struggle is eternal while improvements are small, infrequent, and
often transient. Yet humans persist since the potential benefits
from even small successes are enormous.
--
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