SteveWolfer

Objectivist political theory says what ought to be. Reality is where we are. The entire purpose of knowing where we ought to be is so we can adopt the proper goals. One hopes that people use their reason, and rational standards, to formulate goals in their lives that will let them flourish. The same principles apply to being purposeful about our government. Philosophy matters because ideas matter. Ideas are the product of reason and human flourishing without reason isn't possible. Right now, politically, things suck. And it is likely to get worse. But it has been far worse in the past, and it is possible for it to become much better.... if reason, and objectivist ideas and philosophy prevail. I try to be realistic about the present, am somewhat pessimistic about the near future, but feel optimistic about the more distant future. Each of those arise, for me, from reasoning and it is reasoning from Objectivist principles.

I agree. But government should have a budget. And a budget should specify a total revenue stream that is adequate to meet that primary function's costs. And to create that total revenue stream there are some tax rates that are better than others. And government has an obligation to tax as little as possible (so long as they fulfil that primary function). You don't know what tax rate to choose without knowing what is the relationship between tax rate and total revenues.

I know lots of people who don't like Trump but liked Mohamed Ali - even back when he a loud-mouth Cassius Clay. But that is the same way that heroes are often portrayed: American-style unapologetic alpha-males. I like the style. I want some one that projects strength. I liked it when Reagan got angry (or faked it) on that debate. A president needs to be strong and needs to be confident. I have nothing against swagger unless it from someone who can't back it up in any way. There may be some strong culture/psychology tie in, but I don't think this formulation describes it.

Not if paying attention to this simple concept means people pay less of their own money to the government, yet the government ends up with more revenues overall. Wouldn't you rather give 28 out of every 100 dollars to the government, than given them say, 58 out of every 100 dollars? What is important is that tax rates could be lowered without diminishing government's total revenues.

It is funny that democrats would choose to interpret (or pretend to interpret) Trump as ASKING Russia to hack Hillary's email. That is so insane. It was clear that he was talking about the 30,000 she deleted. That is taking dishonesty to such a high level in order to deflect from Hillary deleting, Hillary putting stuff on an unsecure server, and the likelihood that foreign powers have already hacked that server, that they are willing to pretend they don't understand what was said, and turn their misunderstanding into an attack on Trump for what he DIDN'T say.

It must really gall Obama that he alone is the greatest promoter of new gun sales.

Good point!

Just the basic political philosophy principles that form the nature of government (without a bunch of footnotes or references). And the 56 pages is the paperback. The Kindle version is zero dead trees - and the number of 'pages' is variable - depends on the type-size chosen and the device in use.

Thanks.... done.

Yep. And they want to do more than just watch. They say, "Why should someone on a terrorist 'No-Fly' list be able to buy a gun?" We should ask, "Who puts someone on that list?" And, "Is a judicial process involved in taking away the right to fly or own a gun?"

It has always been held that ignorance of the law is no excuse. For commonsense reasons. Can't have a criminal defense of, "I didn't know it wasn't okay to kill someone". "Ignorance is no excuse" makes possible a key element of crime - mensa re (guilty mind). But this only makes sense when there aren't too many laws. And when most of the laws that exist prohibit acts that are obviously wrong in themselves (malum in se), such as rape, murder, and theft. There were other things the state decided to prohibit (malum prohibitum), but they were very few in the past. Today, we often haven’t the least idea whether we have broken a law. So many things have become federal crimes that it is impossible to keep track of them. (To say nothing of the state and local laws). Much of this is material I pulled from Charles Murray's book "By the People": At the turn of the century nearly all criminal laws were at the state level and fewer than a dozen were federal (treason, bribery of a federal official, etc.) By WWI there were about 500. As of 2007 there were 4,450. The increase from 1980 to 2007 was over 50%. RCO doctrine is the Responsible Corporate Officer doctrine which now has been taken to mean that the officer doesn’t need mensa re (no knowledge of wrong-doing) but also no overt action – it could now be interpreted a crime of omission. A corporate officer could be found guilty of a crime for not doing something he knew nothing of. And this is happening more and more. Civil law that is sufficiently arbitrary and capricious is indistinguishable from lawlessness. Sarbanes-Oxley Act is 810 pages long, ObamaCare is 1,024 pages long, Dodd-Frank is 2,300 pages long, the Tax Code is almost 4,000,000 words long. All of this applies to soldiers and law enforcement officers. They can't refuse to carry out an act because it is unlawful without knowing the laws. But if there are too many laws, or they are too poorly written to understand or apply, that becomes an unresolvable problem. I have a section in my book on the nature of government: "Lawlessness obtains when the laws are so poorly constructed ... they [aren't] understandable or when laws are impossible to follow or ... [are] so many that nearly everything is illegal or when the enforcement of the laws is unequal, undependable or arbitrary. ...there [can be] many ways that bad laws and/or bad enforcement is the same as lawlessness." The more corrupt the State, the more numerous the laws. ~~~~~~~~ Tacitus It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood. ~~~~~~~~~~ James Madison

Wrong. It tells you that there may be an optimal tax rate. That is the first step. They proved that the lower rate that Reagan got passed generated greater tax revenues. That was a fantastic use of this simple little graphic that illustrated a simple economic principle. Did you so badly misread my post as to think that I was advocating a zero tax rate? That's alright, I'm guessing that your response to them would underwhelm him.

And being totally disarmed would be more effective in overthrowing a modern well armed tyranny? And would a populace that is totally disarmed encourage a would-be tyrant more than an armed populace? Guns are a political issue and it is a significant portion of the populace that rally behind a significant number of liberty type of issues that stop a government from moving towards tyranny. The NRA is an effective political lobbying force in the gun issue. If people don't object where liberty is threatened, liberty isn't likely to last very long.

Not really. The Laffer Curve is the relationship between the rate of taxation and total tax revenues. It starts very simply. If you tax at a rate of zero, your returns will be zero. Also, if you tax at 100%, your total tax returns will start heading for zero since there will be little economic activity when there can be no profit. That means that somewhere between zero and 100% there will a point where you get the maximum total returns. From that, one can ask the question of whether the ideal tax rate is less than or more than the current rate. As a curve, or graph, it is simply a graphic to illustrate the relationship between rate and total returns. It doesn't have the factors included that would say what that ideal rate is. You've been listening to progressives, haven't you? That is what they think. Here are some thoughts on this. 1.) No one has done a serious job of establishing that the costs of the interstate highway has resulted in a net economic growth. We don't know what those funds would have done if they hadn't been taxed away into government spending. 2.) The spending on the Interstate system was done by Ike and it was for emergency military transport - he had seen what the Germans did the advantages they had from it. 3.) All government expenditures, by their nature are inefficient. They should never be called "investments" because they are never assigned target profits, or measured later to see if they actually hit a target profit. If you could run a dollar though government and get more than a dollar out, we should just have 100% taxes and then redistribute the 100% plus profit. Only progressives would consider something like that, or fail to recognize how silly it is. No, that's not the way it went. He considered the Laffer Curve implication that tax rates were too high, and that revenues would increase if the tax rate was lowered. That was correct. The rate was lowered and the total revenues increased. The military spending was because of how far down Carter had let the military go and to meet the threat of the cold war. Also the increases in military spending were designed to force the USSR to spend itself to death trying to keep up. That too worked.

Maybe. Certainly frustrating.

Do you know what the Laffer curve is? You keep calling it a model.

This model demonstrated a principle. The principle it demonstrated was totally correct which made the model correct. You aren't being a stickler, you are construing things so narrowly as to miss the point entirely. What about the weather forecasting models? If you were planning to hold an outdoor event the next day wouldn't it be useful to check the output of these weather models? If you can get six sigma, fine. If you can't, you ask if the model will give you marginally better answers than any other method available at the time. You appear to think, at least in some areas, as if the world were made only of binary situations in which 100% confidence is attainable as to the answers. That is a fantasy, and when it is applied to reality with a claim that we live in world where all things expected to be known by hard science, then it is a bizarre example of hiding from actual reality inside a fantasy world using a pretense of science. Baal, I think you have inadvertently defined pseudo-epistemology.

Why unfortunate? Fetish? So have baseball card, or Football, or model planes, or stamp collecting. Who cares? True... up to a point. But Progressives are NOT agitating for more and more gun control because of any of the reasons that they spout. Nope, it is some kind of primal fear they feel. Somewhere in their mind they are afraid that the people they know they are trying to control might get upset and they want them helpless. Nothing else really makes sense. So, that being the case, I like it that they are nervous. It might even make them move slower in their drive to have total control over everyone. And it is a fallacy to imagine that things go from just like they are right now, to huge numbers of armed citizens fighting the full might of American military forces. Imagine all kinds of intermediate stages - like one where a group of citizens wearing pistols in holsters go to a town meeting and express anger and outrage over some regulation. They never touch or threaten to use their guns. It is a situation where a government official is going to use laws to threaten citizens in a subtle way, and the citizens make an implicit statement they too have access to force. In that kind of exchange there is no military buffer for the official to hide behind. I'm not advocating that kind of thing. I'm just staying that having guns inhibits tyranny at least a little and that constant movement towards tyranny will generate increased levels of threat from the populace. It is a process, a reaction.

I don't believe I said otherwise. In my book on Progressivism I get into the history and show how it arose from the drive for collective salvation in the Protestant Millennialism movement, but that it merged with the nascent socialist and populist movements. The strong anti-religious nature of modern progressivism owes more to what developed form the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory that saw its debut in America at Columbia University in the late 1930s (Cultural Marxism).

No, it was right - it said that if the tax rate was reduced the total tax returns would increase - that happened, but the degree of its effect was overestimated. It was, and is, a good model but it need to be calibrated and it doesn't operate in a vacuum - there are other factors at work. We have three or four commonly used weather models and they are reasonably accurate, but only for a few days out. Other factors effect them, they are tweaked and refined year after year. And they were awful when they were first put into use.

I grew up in Wyoming. There were five us in the family. I remember there being about 6, maybe 7 guns. One was the 45 caliber pistol that Dad brought home after WWII. Not because he had any fondness for pistols, or any use for a pistol. He never shot it, and it was just stored away. He kept it because all through the war he had photos of Mom in a bathing suit under the clear plastic pistol grips. One gun was an ancient 22 caliber rifle that Grandfather had given to Dad. The other guns were used every year. They were for hunting. Shotguns for ducks, geese, sage chicken, and pheasant. Rifles for deer, antelope and elk. We weren't nuts about hunting as if it was a hobby or life-style. It was just a normal thing to do at the proper seasons. It occupied maybe 7 or 8 days spread out during the year. This was the normal thing in Wyoming families. There was almost no thought of using guns as tools of self-defense - we didn't even lock the doors back then. And they weren't used much for target practice or any kind of competitive shooting. What do you think they are hunting in D.C.? My guess is that they lock their doors. Guns are tools so it makes sense to ask what do the tool-owners use them for, and is that different from state to state. The Western states, to a large degree, have different traditions. And, things also change with time. The current fervor for self-defense and the fondness for military style weapons weren't prevalent a couple of decades ago - not like today. Pistols are rarely ever part of hunting, so it would be interesting to see the stats for them separately.

Actually, Evangelicals had a lot to do with starting the Republican party. The Abolitionists were mostly Evangelicals and this goes back to before the Civil War. And in the late forties and the fifties William F. Buckley brought religion into the Republican party where he saw Conservatism as free markets and faith standing in opposition to Communism and atheism. Evangelicals became political to fight "Godless Communism." All politicians seek the votes of any religious folk they think they can win over. Evangelicals aren't just on the right. They played a part in laying the ground work for progressivism. The Protestant Millennialism movement decided to take their drive for collective salvation into politics and ended up giving us Prohibition. That form of moral activism used to gain government power was adopted by Socialists and Populists and Progressives in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was also a migration of Evangelical voters out of the Democrat party as it moved to the left, went secular, and adopted the pro-choice position. And there was a period where Evangelicals left the Democrat party in opposition to segregation. It wasn't Reagan that created this religious right. He was just a conservative who happened to be religious and in the right place when a number of things were generating angst among the Evangelicals. Roe v Wade was still annoying them. Carter, who had converted, and that attracted many, ended up governing more as a liberal than an Evangelical. Organization as such was underway before Reagan ran (Bob Jones University, Falwell, Television evangelists, etc. The bottom line is that Evangelicals got started in 1800s, had a resurgence due to opposition to Communism in the forties, and acquired new life as Democrats became more secular and the Evangelical movement acquired more structure with TV and organizations.

That's true. There were at least three key factors: 1.) The effect behind the Laffer Curve worked, but not as much as they anticipated, 2.) The military had to be rebuilt after the massive neglect by Carter, 3.) Reagan wasn't the only one at work here. He had to deal with Congress and couldn't get all that he wanted. He said later that the failure to reduce spending was his biggest regret. That's true. I have no intention of defending the Republicans, not even the conservative wing. Only a few of the conservatives take a libertarian view of government.

Baal, it is hard to tell where you are coming from. That last post would be well designed as the bait for trolling if someone wanted to make people upset, and stir the pot. It also seems to be filled with anger - the kind of anger that progressives hold towards Reagan. And, the ideological content is what would come from a progressive. What is missing are facts (and I thought you were big on facts.) === Some Tax History ==== Woodrow Wilson gives us the Income Tax - Raises the top rate from 7% to almost 80% Warren G. Harding - Lowers it from 73% to 58% Calvin Coolidge - Lowers it from 58% to 25% Herbert Hoover starts a depression with his taxes and tariffs - Raises it from 25% to 63% FDR - Raises top rate to 94% Truman - Keeps the taxes high Ike - Keeps the taxes high, but pays off the war debt JFK promises lower taxes, but is killed LBJ forced to implement JFK's promise - First lowers them to 70% - Later raises them to about 77% Nixon gave us inflation when he killed off the remains of the gold standard - Lowered taxes back to 70% Ford - Left the top rate at 70% Carter - Left the top rate at 70% Reagan - Lowers the top rate from 70% to 28% ----------------- === Some Reagan History === During Reagan's time in office: In the personal income tax code the top marginal individual income tax rate fell from 70% to 28% He lifted the remaining price controls that existed on oil He lowered the oil windfall profits He reduced federal spending as a share of GDP from 20.2% to 19.2% Under Reagan, the U.S. Congress passed the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA) (Pub.L. 99-514, 100 Stat. 2085 - simplified the tax code, decreased the top tax rate was lowered from 50% to 28% while the bottom rate was raised from 11% to 15% (Reagan wanted a flat tax of 28% but couldn't get it passed.) It increased the mortgage deduction. Total tax revenues increased in absolute terms because it stimulated the economy (the average person paid less) The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (Pub.L. 97-34), also known as the ERTA or "Kemp-Roth Tax Cut," was a federal law enacted in the United States in 1981. The top rate went from 70% to 50% and the bottom rate went from 14% to 11%. Estate taxes started at $600k instead of $175k. Allowed all working taxpayers to establish IRAs. Also put in accelerated depreciation. Created 10% exclusion on income for two earner couples. Capital gains tax was reduced from 28% to 20%. After peaking in 1986 at $221 billion the deficit fell to $152 billion by 1989 and the the government's total tax receipts did rise despite the lower tax rates. Individual income tax revenues rose from $244 billion in 1980 to $446 billion in 1989

Sneaky Clinton Campaign. To beat Trump they need to break free of the sense of a continuation of the Obama presidency. But they can't do this very much at all because they NEED to keep Obama - without him the minority vote will be diminished. What to do? Can't stay with Obama, and can't leave him. Have to move to the middle more, but how to hold onto the left? Also, they need break free of the establishment mantle. And they need to make her "young" at least in the sense of focusing on the future. And people are really unhappy with the way things are, so they need to promise change. But how can they promise change without dissing Obama? They also need to make her more lovable. So, they are casting Hillary as a change agent. They painted her as a tireless worker who went out and helped people. And the message is that she really cares, that she was extremely effective in changing peoples lives and that changes she started are still having effect today. She was the lone person, the outsider, who was going into the hills of Arkansas to help poor children. She bucked the system, convinced the establishment, got them to implement programs. Obama ran on Hope and Change. Here goes Hillary, remaking that change in a way that skips around the issue of being Obama's third term, goes right around it to the individual people and says I'll be your change agent. She goes around the problem of noticing that none of the programs and policies proposed have been tried, are old, and failed. The locus of wonderfulness is inside of Hillary - who should have a cape that says "Change Agent." She is painted as energetic, a problem solver, her experience is about getting things done - change things - and suddenly she gets all lovable. Obama's policies and legacy aren't threatened. --------------- They are also going with the statement that the Hillary that the GOP talk about is just made up, and that it isn't the real Hillary. What we (the Hillary campaign) tell you about Hillary, that's the real Hillary. This is a real big lie - just a blanket disavowal - and it will work really well with those that want her to not be a really bad choice. It is like saying, "No one could be that corrupt, that unlikable, that dishonest, and that incompetent.... so, it must be all made up."