On Mon, 21 Nov 2016 12:11:28 -0800 Steven Schear wrote:

The U.S. founders were quite clear in prohibiting income-like distributive taxes. The saw the peril for what it was: a means to use to pit one group/clsss against another.

Right. They were very interested in not having any class conflict, so that their class, the class of Slave Owners, could rule the planet unchallenged. And their plan is still working rather well.

Warrant Canary creator

On Nov 21, 2016 8:38 AM, "jim bell" wrote:

*From:* Razer On 11/20/2016 09:49 PM, jim bell wrote:

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Oh! I see you are justifying robbing people based on the mere assertion that they can 'afford' it.

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No. I justify it on the fact that they're the criminals and taxes appropriately applied are really a form of restitution. If they don't like it they can hire an army. They can afford it. After all that's how they robbed the rest of us in the first place.

You have not qualified the term, "they". Are you saying that all income must necessarily be theft? I would have thought people like you would have taken the position, something like "All income over $100,000 per year is theft". Or, you know, limit the number of people who are called thieves to, perhaps, the famous "1%".

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Thing is taxes aren't appropriately applied. That 50% tax on the wealthy you speak of doesn't really exist after deductions and writedowns nd donations of high-heeled shoes to the Haiti relief fund. Right? Some wealthy people pay less taxes than that guy living in a box in a field. Actually most wealthy people pay almost nothing percentage-wise after all the bennies their plutocrat friends write into tax codes compared to their UNEARNED (as in they didn't actually work or produce anything useful to society) income.

Do you have specific statistics to back up your claims? I have read, elsewhere, that the total Federal government expenditures, as a portion of GDP, tends to remain relatively constant at approximately 20%. Why should there be any tax rate dramatically greater than that?

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And then there's sales tax, which rips workers off way out of proportion to the wealthy.

What's wrong with what amounts to a flat tax based on what you spend? (arguendo; I'm a libertarian, but I can still argue these issues). A person who makes $1 million per year doesn't use 100x the food, transportation, housing, manufactured goods as a person who makes $10K per year. It sure sounds like you are, at least, assuming that taxes should be proportional to income. Why?

Also, you still haven't addressed the issue about the specific person cited in the article, the guy who claimed to have been a libertarian. After all, the thread is titled, "What % of the so-called alt-right were just plain ol' libertarians before?"

The entire relevance of your reference is based on what so far is unprovable: Was that guy actually ever a "libertarian" as most other libertarians would recognize. Now, I can't prove that he wasn't a libertarian, but I find your focus on libertarians here to be misleading. The way I see it, "alt-right" (what does that actually mean?!?) people probably 'came from' a lot of different political philosophies. Why do you point solely to libertarians?

I should also add that this guy may STILL be libertarian: He may not believe in the "initiation of force or fraud" against his fellow person, the "non-initiation of force or fraud principle". (NIOFF). That he may have other identifiable beliefs might be interesting, but at the same time wouldn't have to be damning of him. For instance, hypothetically an "alt-right" person might believe that American government has been used, for many years, to allow certain groups to sponge off the rest of the population. Merely believing that, or saying that out loud, doesn't make him non-libertarian, does it? In fact, he is objecting to the way the government itself has initiated force, threatening people into paying "taxes", and them disbursing those taxes in order to obtain political advantage. (votes.) If anything, his making this argument would make him a consistent libertarian.

Now, you may object to libertarians for precisely this reason: You may believe that it's okey-dokey for government to threaten people to pay "taxes", so the government can use that money for political-benefit reasons. But taking that position merely identifies you as being non-libertarian.

Jim Bell