Bar Stool Economics

[veritas]

Well Erchess

Don't laugh but I am a mix of libertarian,conservatism with a healthy portion of radicalsim. For economics I like Milton Friedman but sometimes his views are too liberal, like school vouchers. To me that is still the state putting a gun to peoples heads and giving money to others.

[Bees Knees]

To me that is still the state putting a gun to peoples heads and giving money to others.

Actually, the government cannot put a gun to your head, take your money, and give it to others.

What the government can do is tax you on anything it wants. If you refuse to pay your taxes, they can take whatever property they can get their hands on and take it from you, plus throw you in jail.

Say for example you earn $20 million and put it in a Swiss bank account. Say the government taxes you $10 million on it. You refuse to pay the tax. The government can’t get to the cash because it is in a foreign bank. They put you in jail for 10 years for tax evasion. You decide spending time in club fed with free room and board is worth $1 million per year. When you get out, you have paid your debt to society.

They cannot hold a gun to your head and force you to write out that $10 million check from your Swiss bank account. It is yours to keep as long as you don’t bring it back into a US bank account.

[erchess]

Bees

If someone were willing to spend ten years in jail to protect their money from taxation would they not be more likely to move overseas and sell or give away any protperty they did not take with them? If necessary they could move to a country that does not have an extradition treaty with the US. Assuming they took the additional step of writing to the Secretary of State to renounce their citizenship by the filing deadline, would the government even try to go after them?

Also, when you speak of what the government can do, you are speaking only of our government. It is possible for a government, if it gets its hands on you, to keep you in a vermin infested cell for ten years after you write the check or even explain to you that unless you write the check right now you will be tortured until you either die or agree to write the check. I realize that the US Constitution is interpreted to forbid such but I personally would favor an amendment to allow at the very least the provision that time in prison does not count toward your sentence unless you are current on your tax obligations.

[Bees Knees]

The illustration was meant to counter the argument that taxation is the same as the government holding a gun to our head and giving our money to someone else. Some governments may very well do that. Our government currently has no law allowing officials to hold a gun to our head threatening to shoot us if we refuse to write them a check.

[DTS]

??????????

I don't know if these rates are still in force and I don't know if the rate was for all income or merely income above a certain amount but at one point according to media reports I saw some very rich people in the UK were paying a rate of 110%. When I saw that on the TV I was uneducated enough that I asked some adult if that really meant that the tax was greater than the taxed income. I could not yet conceive of such a tax.

On Saturday night on TV I saw someone propose a maximum annual salary for anyone of $10 Million with anything above that being instantly confiscated. I think that would be great. I would set a higher limit or maybe have none at all on people who own their own businesses alone or with some small number of other people. I would also allow funds greater than ten million to be set into a fund that pays for the eventual retirement of the CEO Pro Athlete or other highly compensated employee. In the case of a pro athlete I would want receipt of the retirement check conditioned upon behavior that would not result in sanctions if he or she were still playing. In the case of a business executive I would want the retirement checks to be paid if and only if the business remained current with its creditors and paid dividends to the owners. I would like to stop so called golden parachute payments except to people who joined the business within five years of its beginning.

I want to confess something that I don't often confess.. My views on economics are an odd and internally inconsistent mixture of traditional conservatism, libertarian conservatism, and socialism that never got sorted out in a college level economics course but did survive one college course in Politics.

Why set the bar so high by starting at $10M? Let's all get warm and fuzzy and decide to bring this WAY down, let's say $20,000. After that, it's jail time!

Yes, I would gladly support any move to take what I have worked so hard for and pass it around to some idiots that like to sit on their butts all day, watching TV and complain about how unfair the world is to them. Everyone, but themselves. Yes, you betcha, let's do that.

The Communists would be so proud of us and we could all get along just peachy.

[veritas]

Everything one must know for life

was learned in kindergarten.

First economics lesson was "Little Red Hen".

[DTS]

I forgot about her!

was learned in kindergarten.

First economics lesson was "Little Red Hen".

Veritas,

Thank you for making my point better than I could!

http://www.bres.boothbay.k12.me.us/wq/nnash/WebQuest/little_red_hen.htm

[JohnH]

No need for a gun when the thief has the power of the lvey.