By Christopher Hayes. Lessig is now determined to fight the influence of money in politics, a possibly Quixotic quest. Whether you think his program is either possible or desirable is a major question of politics. Excerpt:
"There’s a speech that Reagan gives in
1965," Lessig says, "where he talks about how democracy always fails
because once the people recognize they can vote themselves largess, they
just vote themselves largess and the fiscal policy is destroyed. Well,
Reagan had it half-right. It’s not as if it’s the poor out there who
have figured out how to suck the money out of the rich. It’s exactly the
other way around."
Umm, I hate to make the obvious point, but what about Social Security and Medicare? Together they involve nearly 50% of our federal budget, and are a nearly untouchable third rail of American politics. And if you want a prime example of overfunded lobby groups, look no further than AARP.
So the bottom 50% pay <1% of income taxes, and he claims the poor are not sucking money from everyone else?
For the next ten years, he said, he would be focusing on a new problem: fighting corruption in politics.
Reminds me of this C.S. Lewis quote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
And ditto what v81 said.
Government operates via supply and demand. We get more government when taxes are cut.
Why did the rich acquiesce to the expansion of government under Bush? Because their taxes were cut and so they could buy more government. The rich sent the government into Iraq, purchased a new education program and re-assigned their pension costs of drugs to the government.
The rich are the main purchasers of government because they want to lower overhead and pass that function to the feds. If all that government were paid for by corporations, then their profit levels would reduce and their tax payments drop proportionally.
Under a progressive tax system big business would see a greater reduction in taxes from taking on these functions as part of their employee negotiations. Under a proportional tax system, the rich gain more than the middle class whenever an overhead function is assigned to government.
As long as the rich can get an apparently better deal by assigning costs to government, they will do so. But I say apparently because government moves toward equilibrium just like any other industry, and government eventually, one way or another, ends up making the rich pay for the government they bought.
Shouldn’t Lessig be attributing that quote to Ben Franklin? (http://mises.org/story/1144)
Why would rational people compare an involuntary transaction to a voluntary one?
That statement is divorced from anyone’s actual experience in the world. People who make a lot of money pay an absurd amount of that money in taxes, and what exactly do they get from that beyond what people who make less money get? Does he offer anything more concrete?
I gotta hand it to you Randy – that is one of the stupidest posts I’ve read in a long while.
Just to get you started, Rich, consider the sales tax. The checks to state and local government agencies for the payment of sales tax are all signed by the business owners that send the checks in. So shall we conclude that the business owners “pay” all the sales taxes?
“The thing you are missing is that SS is an intergenerational transfer, from the relatively richer next generation to the somewhat poorer previous generation, hence it’s progressivity.”
Almost. For one thing, taxes aren’t paid by a generation en masse, they are paid by individuals. SS hits younger people harder relative to income at a time when they have little income and no wealth, and is paid to older people who have relatively much more wealth. Wealth and income are different things; it is the lack of wealth that makes a person poor.
For another thing, it isn’t yet clear to me that each generation will be successively wealthier than the last.
Why did he quote Reagan instead of de Toqueville who initially wrote this sentiment?
By the way, if it will always be true that “SS is an intergenerational transfer, from the relatively richer next generation to the somewhat poorer previous generation,” then why should we spend our money to fight global warming when our great-great-grandchildren will be so much better positioned to do it?
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