"Francois-Rene Rideau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>" wrote: > >>: "Sourav K. Mandal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >> I do not > >> see too many of the wealthy step up to bat against high tax rates. > >> Do they accept money in government coffers as currency for the > >> influential, i.e. limousine liberalism at its worst? > > >: Pierre Lemieux <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > Your hypothesis is intriguing, but I would think that a better way to > > explian why rich tax protestors are rare is simply that the opportunity > > cost of their time is high and, so, the cost of collective action is much > > higher for them. (It is true, though, that their expected benefits might be > > higher since, indeed, they are more likely to have an influence.) > > > My take is that once the principle of legal plunder is loose, > those who will decide to lobby will have an incentive to lobby > rather for _more_ taxes, not less taxes, albeit taxes that will > benefit _them_ as opposed to other people, in the form of > direct state subsidies, regulations that will prevent competition, > tax rebates and differential taxing according to criteria that would > specifically benefit them, etc. To once again quote Bryan Caplan's > Anarchist Theory FAQ, end of section 15, itself quoting David Friedman, > "Under governmental institutions, good law is a public good and > bad law is a private good". Yes, the classic negative sum game. > > A standard > > anomaly: people like Bill Gates, who supports all the PC causes espoused by > > the tyrant who persecutes him! > > Bill Gates is not an anomaly, at least, not in the way you think. > The tyrant persecutes him, but the tyrant also raised him to begin with; > it's really a story of the tyrant giving then taking away according to > his whims; a story of the arbitrary, of the lack of Rule of Law. Um, when was he raised by the "tyrant?" Bill Gates grew up as an ambitious middle class/upper-middle class kid. He certainly never received any direct support from the government, and if you mean copyright protection, then nearly every author ever is a similar Frankenstein monster. This is what is confounding about Bill Gates. He has achieved so much by his own hand, yet is a proponent of gov't policies that abrogate the rights of those like him in future generations. > Government grant monopolies in the form of copyrights and patents, > and then, they wonder why things go wrong as brilliant though immoral > businessmen milk these monopolies by aggregating them into bigger > and bigger monopolies! What marvels me is not the evil of it all, > but the capacity of evildoers to blank out their own evil. > Gotta re-read "Atlas Shrugged" (although poor Ayn Rand was misled > into believing that IP was actual property). Exclusive patents are stupid, and I think they should be abolished to make way for concurrent patents, "public good" be damned. Concurrent patents can be support by the same line of reasoning as copyrights -- IP is indeed property, owned by the creator. I could get into it here, but I am afraid we are veering sharply off-topic ... Sourav Mandal ------------------------------------------------------------ Sourav K. Mandal Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Physics http://web.mit.edu/smandal/www/ "In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse." -- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Poetic Principle" ------------------------------------------------------------ Sourav K. Mandal Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Physics http://web.mit.edu/smandal/www/ "In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse." -- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Poetic Principle"
