Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Representation Without Taxation is Tyranny

As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish you will feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don't teach people to fish, they teach activists how to steal their neighbors' fish. That is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice.--Vadum


Ned went back last night.


"The hardest thing for Westerners to understand is... the nature of the enemy's ultimate goal... to apply the Islamic law (Sharia) globally. In U.S. terms, it intends to replace the Constitution with the Qur'an.... Now, it has become widely accepted that, in Bernard Lewis's words, "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century." — Daniel Pipes, "The Islamic States of America?", FrontPageMagazine.com

Dr. Leana Wen was fired from her position as president of Planned Parenthood after just eight months on the job. Reports indicated that Wen and the board had "philosophical differences over the direction" of the organization.
Evidently those philosophical differences were significant. According to the  BuzzFeed
, "Two sources [said] that Wen also refused to use 'trans-inclusive' language." 

Japan and Singapore: Citizens of these countries can travel to 189 countries without needing a visa. 

Millions of first-time internet consumers are connecting to the web on a new breed of device that only costs about $25. These smart feature phones make up one of the industry’s fastest-growing and least-known segments. (wsj)

Justice demands that all participants in the trans-Atlantic slave trade make compensatory reparation payments to slaves. However, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. That means compensation would have to be paid by Africans and Arabs who captured and sold slaves to Europeans in addition to the people who bought and used slaves. 95% of slaves brought to the New World went to the Caribbean and South America. It is only reasonable we start collecting from the major offenders first.

There are so many things we, as a people, take for granted. But that is changing.
On average, sixty percent of students when asked directly if hate speech should be protected by the First Amendment agree, but this positive outcome is driven by white and Asian men, and by Christians.  There is an overwhelming rejection of the First Amendment by gender non-binary and homosexual students.  A slim majority of black students reject the First Amendment.  Hispanics join Asians and whites by a slim margin in supporting the First Amendment.

Since 1998 wages have increased by more (+83.2%) than the overall price level (57.6%) reflecting an increase in real wages over the last several decades of more than 25%.

On July 23, 1996, at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, the U.S. women’s gymnastics team won its first-ever team gold medal.


          Representation Without Taxation is Tyranny


"...the core function of a democratic government is to tax its citizens for the common good of everyone; that is what a democratic government is for. Essentially, with the consent of the governed, it taxes its citizens, and then it uses that money for everyone's good.
If a class of society is able to opt out of that contract, if they will essentially enjoy the privileges of citizenship without any of the obligations of citizenship, then they are opting out of democracy. And if they are ruling the country, then that means that a democracy falls; that's why it's anti-democratic. Because the governments of these countries are unable to tax their wealth, they're unable to essentially impose any obligations on them as citizens, and instead, they get to enjoy all the benefits of citizens without any of the, you know, what might be termed the downsides.
It's estimated by Global Financial Integrity, which is a think tank in Washington, D.C., that a trillion U.S. dollars - slightly more than a trillion U.S. dollars - is stolen every year from the world's poorest countries and stashed in the richest ones."

This absurd article attempts to justify some international tribunal or process to hunt down political criminals and tax evaders not because they are criminals but in order to tax them. The justification for this bizarre idea is an almost laughable generality:  "...the core function of a democratic government is to tax its citizens for the common good of everyone; that is what a democratic government is for." 


Of all the noble aims of democracy, taxation is the "core function?" And  being taxed is the main qualification for citizenship? Well, we should really turn some attention to the lowest three quintiles in the Western democracies because they do not pay taxes at all. They certainly must be poor citizens in every way because of that and some mechanism should be made to make sure they fully participate in the democracy. Countries where the lower income citizens do not pay taxes are surely anti-democratic.

Now, if you pay more taxes are you a better citizen? And, as a better citizen, should you have more of a say in how the democracy is run?

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