shempmcgurk wrote: > > Oh, Bhai-Bhai, you're so cute when you're baiting me! > > What I can't stand are policies that use the tool of government to > redistribute wealth for the purpose of -- as you put it -- splitting > things up "more evenly". You think it's some sort of just and > humanitarian thing but experience has shown that these attempts do > precisely the opposite: such policies make the lot of the poorest > worse and puts, disproportionately, power and money into the hands of > the few. > History proves you wrong. > The great irony is that capitalism and free markets do precisely the > OPPOSITE of what one intuitively thinks they'll do. Capitalism > distributes wealth the MOST evenly and brings up the lot of the > poorest better than any other system. And socialist principles do > the opposite of what socialists want it to do: they put the poor > down, discourages them, and makes slaves out of them...while putting > money in the hands of those that least deserve it: the elites. > Well you apparently missed this article I posted a link to: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2008/200808/20080811/article_370020_0.htm Love the cartoon at the top which says the whole thing. Your ideology has failed and unfortunately the pendulum is about to swing the other way, probably too far the other way. The US was founded on a principle of using socialism where appropriate: things that need to be in the commons stay that way and not privatized. But big business since the inception of this country has fought against it. It is the war of the selfish against the selfless. Nobody's saying that you can't run a business. Indeed one of the failures of Russia's state capitalism (no it wasn't communism) was that it tried to run everything including small businesses. That's foolish as the bureaucracy to do the is way too large. Instead they should have just run the things that needed to stay in the commons and let the citizens run the small shops. They failed and would up with an oligarchy as they have now. Do you think that oligarchies are good?
> That's why I support free markets and minimizing of governmental > interference...and I especially oppose governmental plans > to "redistribute" wealth. Doesn't work...we've had a century of > experiments on this very thing and we should have learnt from it. > That's why it is so disheartening to see people like Bhairitu come > around and spout these principles. If a smart person like that > doesn't get it, where is the hope for the rest of us? Government shouldn't redistribute wealth but instead discourage the hoarding of wealth through high taxes on the wealthy. It worked very well when we had such tax rates. We didn't have billionaires making insane judgments and blowing society off course. But maybe you want to live under feudalism?
