From: Timothy Bates <tbates@bunyip.bhs.mq.edu.au>
>>... I find it is fair to steal money [to]
>>"Making the rich 2% unhappier to make the poor 200% happier"
>Take a miniature country like NZ or Denmark. They are both 100 Billion
>dollar economies. Bill gates could give us a holiday for 180 days, then
>all his money is gone.
I have never said that you should take all the money away from the reich. The rich are no longer as important as they once where. As you say B.Gates can give us a nice long vacation but that is all.
He certainly does a better job investing his money than my current government would :-)
I was arguing whether it was fair to tax at all to help the "poor."
>Add up all the other rich people and your sentence becomes
>
>"take all the wealth form the rich and make everyone happy for about 1
>day."
only if you are stupid enough to take it all.
>>taking money away from the wealthy and
>>investing them in other peoples education/helping the poor can eventually
>>make the wealthier even wealthier.
>
>Nope. It just makes people stop work. Galt's Gulch. There are quite nice
>equations for this now. In New Zealand the Treasury suggests that the
>optimal tax rate to maximise GNP and government income is in the mid 20s.
That would be a nice tax rate yes. About a third of my current one.
>>btw. I am considdered to be right wing here in Denmark :-)
>I guess that is because people forget that Denmark had an explicit
>eugenics program to enhance the IQ of its population ;-) Skin heads
>keeping out "inferior" colours of immigrant is also suggests
well there certainly are some (a few) Nazi's in Denmark and they are called right wings, but politically they are far from what I considder "right wing."
>In truth, Denmark has little to fear from socialism. Your people are so
>honest and intelligent that the whole system is highly self organising. I
>thoroughly enjoyed both my trips to Copenhagen and Aarhus for that
>reason. I recognised immediately why Denmark's Jewish population mostly
>survived the Nazis: Danes are decent human beings.
Actually I have heard that Astraliens and Danes has the same dark humour ... :-)
Hilsen/regards
Max M Rasmussen
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