Peter, to be polite, your view is irrationally anti-civilization. It is so irrational that it gives a bad name to anarchists.
You are irrational because you cannot seem to grasp that degrees of inequality -- degrees graphically illustrated in that video for those otherwise ignorant of the actual numbers (such as yourself) -- those degrees matter as a symptom of an underlying disease in society if not the disease itself. Look, its simple: Civilization enables accumulation of property beyond the homestead -- the accumulation of what might be called "artificial" property. Artificial property rights are therefore the proper tax base. Basing your taxes on economic activity is crazy and leads to run-away centralization of wealth. It is an obvious failure mode of civilization as the wealthy are prone to institutional capture in order to shift the tax base from wealth to economic activity. I laid all this out, including macroeconomic as well as microeconomic aspects in a white paper over 2 decades ago but the current short story is as follows: Tax the liquid value of artificial property rights at the risk free interest rate of modern portfolio theory. Establish liquid value via escrowed bids. The high escrowed bid for a property right receives interest at the risk free interest rate. Other bids do not. This gets rid of what might be called "private sector economic rent" as a corrupting influence on civilization. However, it leaves public sector rent seeking as a moral hazard. This is best dealt with by distributing revenues as a citizen's dividend -- equally to all citizens -- and requiring national defense to be decentralized as it is with the Swiss. On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Peter Gluck <[email protected]> wrote: > Inequality is a law of Nature. Now, when we are living in Moneytheism, it > is applied to wealth, in the dawn of the human societies it was already > applied to power. (who has invented kings, emperors, dictators?) Re-read > please the chapter about Mediocristan and Extremistan in the "Black Swan" > by N.N. Taleb a great book to be read by LENR workers of all ages,too. > Democracy can scratch a bit at the surface of Inequality but cannot change > the situation much. > Peter > > > On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 5:02 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]>wrote: > >> That is depressing. The facts described in it have been widely known for >> decades. It is like the extreme cost variations of healthcare described in >> Time magazine the other day. Educated people know about it but it is not >> considered politically correct to discuss it in the mass media or during >> political campaigns. >> >> - Jed >> >> > > > -- > Dr. Peter Gluck > Cluj, Romania > http://egooutpeters.blogspot.com >
