Ha ha…I’m not one of these guys that says there should not be an income tax…wise guy. But the inheritance tax is insane.
Firstly, forgive me, but I can tell you don’t really understand Reagan or Trump.
There is no proof that Trump is “buddy-buddy” with Russia. This came from the Obama administration intelligence agencies. You know agencies like the Justice Department that refused to call a Grand Jury on their pal Hillary. If ever there was a need for a GJ it was for Hillary. But as I have pointed out before Bill Clinton appointed Loretta Lynch to a lower court in the 90’s so the fix was in. Yeah…I’m not buying anything from Obama’s folks. It’s a non-issue. Straight political attacks to discredit his Presidency. And may I add very nice work on the part of the Dems!
Reagan was against higher taxes. You can call him a democrat all you want, it’s actually funny. He lead the charge to reduce high taxes.
And I suggest you stop sounding like Bernie Sanders. With statements like this: “I am arguing that one is not the sole owner of the pre-tax value that accrues from one’s labor”
It only worked for him because he basically had as his constituency mindless 20 something’s, hold over hippies from the 70’s and most of the lazy in the US.
But at the time they said he was mindless. They called him an idiot, a crazy cowboy who would get us in a nuclear war and someone who wanted to take away women’s rights.
ED, I have this image of you running from an office where you just looked into someone’s eyeballs to jot off a quick post. And running back and forth like that all day.
I know you said you taught as well but I can’t get that picture out of my mind.
In fact, there has not been a republican elected to the highest office in the land where the press did not try to discredit him early on.
Reagan, Bush HW Bush W now Trump.
Of course they have doubled down on Trump simply because he’s Trump. But the press has always run far left, at least in my lifetime.
Throw Obama in the works (a pure political animal) and …no I don’t trust anything he says or anything any of his departments came up with. Again, look at the Hillary Clinton case. Lynch was in the bag for her the entire time.
“Taxation is theft becuz if I don’t pay teh taxes I go to teh prizun” is something that seems incisive to teenagers who are struggling with the intellectually and morally syphilitic oeuvre of Paul Ryan’s favorite Dickensian/abortion-loving/atheist soap-operatist – and that’s fine. But you’re supposed to grow out of it as the addled phantasmagoria of adolescence fades into the realism of normal adulthood. So for example it’s supposed to occur to you – perhaps when you get your first job and car and begin to interact with big-kid stuff in a meaningful way for the first time – that the concept of theft is meaningless without things like law (and therefore without government, and therefore without taxation). The idea of theft is contingent upon the idea of belonging, of ownership, and, as the mechanics of the natural world definitively demonstrate, there is no operative theory of ownership beyond that generated by society. Whether the hungry snake or the mother bird owns the egg is irrelevant to the point that speaking of it is quite literally absurd. One of them will have it in the end, and that’ll be that. If you care to consult a history book (or, indeed, a current newspaper), you will find that in the absence of law, human individuals and groups treat ownership as the snake and bird do. This is why ancap juveniles never win arguments – because their philosophy is riddled with tripwires of internal logical contradiction. It self-destructs. Always.
So yeah, we live in the real world, where the very notion of a right to property is paid for in tank battalions and SLBMs and police cars and courts. As go the latter, so goes the former.
But enough of the middle-school social studies lesson. The real reason I’m here is to pay homage this:
…I simply couldn’t let such a momentous event as this pass unremarked-upon. We have here a meeting of two intellectual titans. You will fly so high together.