RE European Socialists

Steve Clancy (stevie-c@technologist.com)
Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:33:04 +1000

Max M apparently wrote:
>>Therefore I find it is fair to steal money from those who has "wealth" and
"middle class wealth" to help those who has "powerty" or less.

"Making the rich 2% unhappier to make the poor 200% happier"

When that is done I also believe that ultimately those people should be able to feed themself. Therefore I find it to be a good idea to steal even more money from the more wealthy, to give the poor a free education. Then they will become a productive part of society and there will be an ROI that will benefit all of the society.

The educated mind is the greatest raw material there is.

Economics is a win win scenario, and taking money away from the wealthy and investing them in other peoples education/helping the poor can eventually make the wealthier even wealthier as society as a whole becomes wealthier and the newly rich start spending their money.<<

These comments seem very puzzling to me. Why do people become wealthy? Either by inheriting wealth, working and earning wealth, or by theft of wealth. We may or may not agree on the merits of taking money from those of us who inherit wealth or earn wealth, but we usually agree that increasing wealth by simply taking it from someone else is not right. So why would you propose to do just that - take from the rich to give to the poor, by coercion? You appear to be disregarding liberty and personal freedom in favour of some misguided socialist notion of equality.

OK, so I agree that the amount of poor may seem to be a great injustice. But why forcefully tax wealthy simple on the basis that they have more money than others?

I feel that we should start looking not at taxing the rich, but rather where does the rich's wealth come from and hence why are the poor in such a position.

Socialists would argue that capitalism's success lies on exploitation of workers. So one would assume that all capitalist businesses are greedy exploiters of the common worker. This argument is not true for all cases. Sure, there are some businesses run by selfish arseholes, but if the socialists are right then every business, to succeed, is run by selfish arseholes. But there are a myriad of businesses, small and large, which take people with little apparent capital and succeed in operating efficiently in our capitalist world while at the same time not exploiting the worker - actually improving the lot of him/her better than any government would do.

So we can now state that the capitalist system is currently being run by a mixture of decent business people and selfish arseholes. From this we could argue that some people are poor because;

  1. they want to be so.
  2. selfish arseholes effectively 'oppress' them.

Argument a. seems unlikely so we could assume that b. is true. So we can now argue that it is the selfish arseholes responsible for denying some their freedom they strive for. If this is the case (which I am inclined to believe is more often than not) then it is clear that rather than taxation on those who are rich, legal discourse be taken on those who oppress rights of freedom (the selfish arseholes in this case).

So we can still address the problems of the poor while not having to revert to authoritarian means of state 'redirection'.

PS. I live in Australia, but I'm not a left-wing, pinko' commie' bastard.....

ha, ha,

Thanks, Steve.