Top income brackets should be taxed at 99%.

Provided we have the secure housing and income to be able to do that...

Unfortunately you are displaying a high degree of ideological blindness caused by lack of awareness of the fallacy of composition:

namely: In a neoliberal economy, the whole economy (macroeconomy) will not prosper when individuals choose frugality in their own best interests, because the resulting lack of 'effective demand' (ie purchasing power spent into the economy) in the (junk consumer- based) neoliberal economy will cause a recession....and increasing unemployment, causing a downward spiral in economic activity.

 

Despicable apologist for privilege, injustice and evil: "The abolitionists want to take your slaves from you!"
Despicable, evil privilege owner: "They can buy their own."

 

Blatant self-contradiction. If it's "their" land, they own it. To be clear, Plank #1 of the Communist Manifesto calls for nationalization of land and the application of all rents of land to public purposes. But unsurprisingly, that is impossible under communism because the rent of land can only be determined in a market of for-profit private users, and only paid by the most productive prospective private users of each parcel. So what socialists actually end up implementing is state control and use of land, which is so inefficient that it never comes close to yielding the rent it would under private, for-profit use.

True. Like capitalists, socialists/communists/Marxists don't understand the difference between production and appropriation, or that true ownership originates only in the former.

Yeah, they have this weird mental twist they do where they figure that just attacking the capitalist class somehow makes them workers, and gives them the same right to a share of the product as the people who actually did the work to make it.

 

What an eloquent concession of defeat.

 

Yes of course it is, BY DEFINITION. I realize that you hate and fear the actual definitions of common English words, because they enable those words to be used to identify facts, which you also hate and fear.

No, that is just more false, absurd and disingenuous garbage from you. Poverty is by definition lack of material means, not lack of consumption. There are well-known cases of misers who gave every appearance of being poor, but were not.

For no one.

Of course. So can $4000/week in earned wages. So what?

SO WHAT??

What nonsense. I recommended before that you read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, and at least minimally inform yourself of the facts. Have you read it yet?

More nonsense. The genuinely poor didn't get that way by being shrewd financial planners with the self-discipline of professional athletes. They got that way by being stripped of their rights without just compensation, and not knowing how to defend themselves (your kind helped a lot with that part, by telling them no one was doing anything to them, sort of like a boxing coach telling beginners no one else in the ring was hitting them, they must have been clumsily bumping into things to get all those bruises).

No, that's just more false, absurd, and disingenuous garbage from you. Poor people can be responsible or not, just as rich people can. Obviously, the poor tend not to be very bright, which can look like irresponsibility but is actually just inability to understand processes that are subtle, indirect, and eventual.

Better than feting the privileged who are making the poor starve.

 

But that's not a choice any of us can make as individuals, so it's nothing but an absurd and disingenuous evasion, a way of repudiating responsibility for how you behave as a citizen of your community by blaming others for not doing better by their children.

What a sheltered life you must lead.

Except that when everyone on the treadmill runs faster, the treadmill just goes faster. So the only ones who benefit from the additional exertions of those consigned to the treadmill are the privileged, riding up at their leisure on the escalator the treadmill powers.

Sorry, I already refuted that claim by the example of China. Remember?

No, there bloody well is NOT.

No, I want everyone's rights secured and respected, and you know it.

More absurd and disingenuous fabrications unrelated to anything I said. It is the privileged of both "First World" and poor countries who rob the hard working poor of both poor and "First World" countries. And you rationalize and justify their privilege by blaming its victims.

Yep. I'm not afraid to use that word because I know what it means.

 

I repeat: what, exactly, makes it "your" land?

 

Weren't you postulating a society in which people don't demand anything causing industry to plummet?

 

So the state should own all the land? Sounds like commie stuff to me. Didn't we fight a cold war to beat that?

 

What makes it the state's land?

 

No. I have told you explicitly dozens of times that no one can rightly own land. Your continued pretense of ignorance of that fact is disingenuous, despicable and disgraceful. The state always administers possession and use of land in any case because that is what the state IS: the sovereign authority over a specific area of land. The only question is whether the state will discharge that duty in the interests of and to secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all its citizens, as I advocate, or only in the narrow financial interests of a wealthy, greedy, privileged, parasitic landowning elite, as you advocate.

Yes, well, you are wrong about that, too. The Communist Manifesto called for nationalization of land, but so had non-communists like Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers before, as well as others who have not been communists since, such as Leon Walras and Herbert Spencer. Moreover, the Communist Manifesto also called for public education, old age pensions, and an end to child factory labor. But obviously, only a stupid, evil, lying sack of $#!+ would claim that such policies are communist, as they are now universal in all advanced capitalist nations.

All land has been state-owned in Hong Kong for over 160 years, and again, obviously, only a stupid, evil, lying sack of $#!+ would claim that HK has been communist all that time. Indeed, it has often topped lists of the freest and most prosperous private market economies in the world. I know you can't be just another stupid, evil, lying sack of $#!+, so you will now be agreeing with me that state ownership of land is not communist, and will never again pretend not to know that fact.

Nope. Wrong again. The Cold War was fought against revolutionary socialism on the Soviet model, in which producer goods are state owned. All land is state owned in Hong Kong and China (where revolutionary socialism had been defeated politically a decade before its defeat in the USSR), as well as legally in Britain and former British Empire nations like Canada, where all privately held land is under license of its technical owner, the Crown. State ownership of all land combined with private ownership of producer goods -- i.e., the geoist model used with such success in HK for 160 years -- is what has enabled China to completely outclass the USA and other countries of the capitalist West in economic performance for the last 40 years.

 

That is what the state is: the sovereign authority over a specific area of land. The state is also the only agency competent to secure and reconcile the equal individual rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor, and it cannot perform that function if it does not administer possession and use of land.

 

Commies want the state to administer all the land. I'm not on board with that commie claptrap.

 

Yeah, I don't buy your commie bull. I don't agree that the state should own...oh wait, sorry...administer all the land. I don't like monopolies.

 

You have been comprehensively and conclusively refuted, you know it, and you have no answers. Simple.

Then you want to reduce the earth's human population by ~99% through starvation and violence, an evil that would make the Holocaust look like Wounded Knee. Thought so.

Then you don't like private landowning, because landowning is always inherently a monopoly.

 

So does everyone who is not an anarchist, because that is what the state is. If you do not want the state to administer all the land, then you want to reduce the earth's human population by ~99% through starvation and violence, an evil that would make the Holocaust look like Wounded Knee.

If you are against everything communists advocate purely because communists advocate it, that means you are in favor of child factory labor.

 

I repeat: what, exactly, makes it "your" land?

 

Wowsers! That is some harsh lang, bro, for which i will forthwith report thee unto said moderators.

The language, my friend. If you can't express yourself without expletives, what manner of man truly are you?

I'm saying that the state should not "administer" all the land, because that's what the cold war was fought to prevent.

 

I'm reducing the worlds population how? Why can't we just keep on what we're currently doing?

 

Mine? I have no land. But my neighbor purchased his land from the prior owner, which would make it his land. Unless the state is going to confiscate it from him.

 

What makes it your land?

 

So you think ordinary people in advanced capitalist countries opposing privilege and injustice in those countries is "vile." Is that why you tell the victims of privilege, in essence, to shut up and get back on the treadmill? You actually think privilege is better than liberty, injustice is better than justice, evil is better than good? That certainly explains a lot.

Everyone who is not totally paralyzed has choices. But whether they are in advanced capitalist countries or poor ones, most of their choices have been forcibly removed by privilege.

Oh, really? Is that how you imagine the reasonable people who support BLM think about protests against "First World" privilege?

You need to wake up and smell the coffee.

What an absurd and disingenuous load of $#!+. No one is complaining about "being born into a First World nation." Honest, humane people -- i.e., not lying apologists for privilege, injustice and evil -- oppose privilege, injustice and evil everywhere.

 

I don't think you should have the "privilege" of owning all the land

 

They why do you lick and kiss your fetters?

No, that would only work if it was validly owned by the prior owner.

So what, exactly, made the land owned by the prior owner, or the owner before him, etc.?

He has already confiscated it from all who would otherwise have been at liberty to use it. That is kinda the point.

 

Yeah, I'm not into your commie sturff. I think land should be owned by individuals not by the state.