Radio hosts author/social activists Tavis Smiley and Cornel West are on anti-poverty tour, trying to draw attention to issues that are neglected in most political discussions–and all but absent in corporate media.
The good news, in theory, is that they’re getting some national TV attention. But this is one of those cases where you start off wishing there was more media coverage–until you see what kind of coverage you get. Then you’re wishing for something else.
Appearing on CNN‘s American Morning (8/8/11), host Carol Costello got off on the wrong foot, quoting from a letter from a CNN viewer:
This is from Stacy, she says welfare in theory was a good thing, but it’s become a way of life for generations. The poor actually have it better than the middle class.
Perhaps the intent was to ridicule that absurd point of view–that’s certainly how Smiley responded. But Costello seemed to be indicating that this viewer maybe had a point:
But, Cornel, put it this way, Cornel, the Heritage Foundation, this is conservative organization. They did this study. They say the poor in America today, are unlike the poor in America years ago. In fact, most of the poor in America live in a decent house. They have TVs. They have microwave ovens and they even have a refrigerator. What are they complaining about?
Those Heritage talking points, courtesy of analyst Robert Rector, have been a staple of media coverage of poverty–see Extra!, 1-2/99. Though I think Costello is going a little further than even Rector would–unless he, like her, really thinks there’s something weird about how the pampered poor “even have a refrigerator.”
When West begins talking about the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of us, Costello interrupts to say: “Those people pay the taxes in America and the poor don’t pay any.” That’s not true , though it’s the kind of thing you’re likely to hear on right-wing talk radio.
But perhaps the most revealing moment came after the interview had ended, when the CNN hosts were chatting among themselves. That’s when Costello said this:
And, frankly, I think to an extent the poor have been demonized because many people in America think they’re leeches on society. They’re just, you know, sucking everything out of us.
Like the question that started off the interview, a charitable interpretation is that Costello doesn’t agree with what she’s saying.
But given her attitude during the interview, it’s more likely that when she talks about how “many people” think the poor are “leeches…sucking everything out of us”–a sentiment that I doubt is all that widely shared–she’s talking about herself.
Update: Carol Costello responded on Twitter to our criticism:
@FAIRmediawatch and u r fair? Wow.
The poor will always be with us
As long as the rich – and the corpress – are, as well
I was half expecting a “let them eat cake” to slip out. That same rhetoric could just as easily be turned around on them. They are wealthy, they already enjoy huge tax breaks, what are they complaining about?
Poverty is caused by lack of job opportunities. This is due to low demand for goods and this is caused by the prices and costs of manufacture and production being too high. Costs are due to the rent, wages and interest (dividends) paid by the producer for the use of land labour and durable capital. It is the rent that needs to be lowered since less wages would not help poverty nor would less return on the use of tools, buildings vehicles etc., most of which are minimum and cover depreciation and inflation and not much more.
The rent goes to land-lords for access to their sites. The rent that is taken is high due to the competition for the limited number of sites available (ask any entrepreneur). But many sites are unused and are being held out of use by speculators in their values, who expect to sell these sites when the prices for them rise. (This was the basic cause of the present and past economics crisis).
By taxing land-values instead of incomes, purchases, capital gains etc., the speculation in land would no longer be worthwhile and more land would become available at lower prices. Thus by logic land value speculation is the cause of poverty and land value taxation is how to reduce poverty.
The first proposals to tax land values came from the U.S. American economist henry George whose 1897 seminal book “Progress and Poverty” sold about 3 million copies and is still in print. (see http://www.progress.org ) This proposal has a large number of advantages for the macroeconomic community in general and a few draw-backs for the small number of selfish speculators in land.
14 ASPECTS of LAND-VALUE TAXATION affecting Government, Land Owners, Community and Ethics
3 aspects for GOVERNMENT
1. Most of the ground-rent being collected as LVT, adds to the national income. It allows the other taxes on earnings, purchases and family/corporate ownership of buildings to be reduced and eventually to be eliminated.
2. The ownership of each land parcel is registered. Then the cost of collecting the LVT is much smaller than for income tax and other production-related taxes. Using regularly updated maps, the rental value of each site (as if without buildings) is public knowledge. Then the LVT is simple to understand, the amount of tax is easily found and its payment by the land owner is impossible to avoid.
3. With LVT, the national economy stabilizes and no longer experiences the 18 year housing boom and bust cycle, which was due to the changing prices that arose from speculation in land-values during town expansion.
6 aspects affecting LAND OWNERS
4. LVT is progressive, the owners of the most potentially productive sites pay the most tax. None is paid on marginally productive sites, since their owners cannot claim ground-rent from possible tenants.
5. The land owner pays his LVT regardless of how the land is used. When the land is leased to tenants most or all of the resulting ground-rent is the tax.
6. LVT stops the speculation in land prices because any withholding of land from proper use is too costly.
7. The introduction of LVT reduces the sales price of sites even though their value (or potential usefullness) may continue to grow.
8. With LVT, land owners are unable to pass the tax on to their tenant renters, due to the competition for land use. The users of (untaxed) marginal sites price their produce according to the costs of their labour, the use of the durable capital and the added transport needs. Owners/occupiers who access more productive land pay LVT/ground-rent and compete in their production, so this tax cannot be added to what buyers willingly pay.
9. With the introduction of LVT, land prices will drop. Speculators in land values will tend to foreclose on their mortgages and to withdraw their money for reinvestment. Depending on the rate of these changes, bankrupcies can result. Then LVT should be introduced gradually to allow the investors sufficient time to transfer money to company-shares in durable capital goods, where their greater use will meet the increased demand for produce (see below).
3 aspects regarding our COMMUNITY
10. With LVT, there is an incentive to use land for production, rather than it laying idle or being partly used. An optimum amount of urban land is brought into use, which reduces the spread of suburbs onto rural land and avoids vacant city centers.
11. With LVT, greater working opportunities exist due to cheaper land and a greater number of available sites. Consumer goods become cheaper because entrepreneurs have less difficulty in starting-up and running their businesses. Demand grows, unemployment decreases and with it a reduction in the polarization of our class-society and its degree of poverty.
12. As LVT is introduced, investment money is withdrawn from land and placed in durable capital goods. The investors in company shares tend to be wage-earners (as well as banks and monopolists). Their decisions favour more competition and cheaper local production without heavy transport costs, whilst the monopolists have less control of prices and the unavailability of alternative goods. This is a natural trend of our free-marketing social system.
2 aspects about ETHICS
13. The collection of taxes directly from productive effort and commerce is socially unjust. The associated philosophy favours coercive robbery and is â┚¬Ã…“Robin Hoodâ┚¬Ã‚ in style. LVT replaces this form of extortion by gathering the surplus rental income which comes without exertion. Consequently LVT is a natural system of money-gathering, which avoids the present-day distortion of business economics.
14. Bribery and corruption cease with LVT. Before, this was due to the leaking of news of municipal plans for housing development. However, the speculation in land values is no longer worthwhile after LVT is in place.
First of all, Cornel West and Tavis Smiley are … what can I say without appearing racist. They are so dedicated to being “Black,” and in Cornel’s case to parading his ego, that it’s pretty much unbearable to listen to them. I don’t. Same with CNN. They’ve become ever more right-wing. At this point I have to just turn away â┚¬“ even listening for “research” is too exasperating. “The Situation Room” – poo!!! And the ultra-rude John King. Who the heck is he patterning himself after anyway? Just painful, too painful.
i’m going to say something that is guaranteed to get a rcord breaking number of thumbs down and maybe even a death threat. i know its very ‘unliberal’ of me to criticize public welfare programs, but it seems to me that taking a hard line attitude against REFORMING them doesnt help liberals any more than saying no to a dime of increased taxes for millionaires helps the conservatives. i’ve worked with social services and the courts and, as i’m sure anyone knows, there is a lot of waste, inefficiency, incompetence, bureaucracy, and pretty much a revolving door system. tho i dont assume everyone is like this, none of the families i worked with had any desire to get off welfare. i cant say i blame them either. had they gotten jobs, they wd have been worse off than before. they offer free job training programs that r generally useless. they offer free housing which may not be in everyone’s favorite neighborhood, but-except in the event of a shooting- is pretty fun and friendly. the welfare system actually makes it a rational choice not to work. and there is generally as much fraud as ppl can get away with. its actually a point of pride to know how to manipulate the system just as much as it is on wall st to know how to wheel and deal. i dont know how to do it, but welfare needs to motivate ppl to get off the system and the system needs to be less bloated with expensive waste.
Well Lazy boy, would you mandate corporate welfare as needing to motivate million dollar and billion dollar corporations to get off the system? After all, oil depletion allowances, farm subsidies, foreign aid, no-bid military contracts to contractors, and other forms of public corporate welfare, are way more than welfare given to the poor. Plus if those rich, greedy companies were to give up their welfare, they woulkd be NO worse off than before! – a win-win for the taxpayers and for themselves!
No death threats, just asking for fairness when you talk about welfare – compare the size of corporate welfare compared to social welfare, and the needs of each sector receiving it. You get the point….
Frank,
Don’t worry about appearing racist. Your words speak for themselves.
You say that you don’t listen to them, but you know that “they are so dedicated to being ‘Black.'”
You then add your distaste for what you call Cornel’s parading of his ego. Did you forget to use “uppity?”
Without any discussion of what they’ve said or the purpose and/or efficacy of their tour, you discount them because they’re black and show ego.
Don’t worry, you really are a racist.
I would also state for the record that many elderly and disabled folks who worked all their lives and paid into these programs have no choice but to resort to some form of welfare along the line. Also when people with families lose their jobs, they have no recourse. In my county, people on welfare have to pay it back to the county. So the idea it is a free ride is an absolute falsehood, not unlike the Reagan welfare queen driving Cadillac’s propaganda. And the gentleman who asked people to compare corporate welfare to social welfare is on the mark. Corporations, who outsource our jobs overseas and are rewarded for that, collect a thousand times more in welfare(tax breaks, loopholes, subsidies) than the many folks who to no fault of their own have to depend upon social welfare to simply survive. As for CNN, all one can say is how disgraceful!
I think its time for the poor to sell their refrigerators and air conditioners so that they can buy as the most guns and ammunition that they can afford.
They should try being poor, hopeless and desperate and find out how great it is. People working on television have empathy and compassion or they don’t and this is great example of CNN having people on who have no decency or understanding about what poor people face when jobless and out of options.
‘Having” refrigerators and air conditioners doesn’t mean that they own them. Most apartments come with these appliances, but it doesn’t mean you can sell them.
Implying that you are not poor because your apartment contains these things is specious, at best.
That’s right, Vicki and Woodrow. And thanks, Peter Hart, for mentioning Robert Rector–a truly vile character, who’d (thankfully) gone down the memory hole for me, but his statistical legerdermain and just plain old bullshit are part and parcel the building blocks of every bad journalist’s ideas about the luxurious lifestyles of the down and out.* (Those bad journalists would include the God-awful Carol Costello.) Honestly, it unnerves me to hear (about) these assholes like Costello make fools of themselves, and it speaks directly to the awfulness of our major media. No doubt Costello makes a six-figure income, and not one fuckin’ penny of it is earned in any kind of honest way.
*Rector and Charles Murray have this thing about poor black people. I mean, they need professional help, but will not get the help they need. The absolute bottom of the right-wing reactionary racist barrel–and that’s saying something, eh?
P.S.: You know what, lazyboy? I call bullshit–you wrote this, for instance: ” i dont know how to do it, but welfare needs to motivate ppl to get off the system and the system needs to be less bloated with expensive waste. (sic, sic, sic–Are you an administrator? No wonder people take pride in gaming your system.) Wellfare doesn’t exist to “motivate” people to get off it. It’s not therapeutic. Typically, you desire that “welfare” be difficult or downright impossible to get or deal with, so that folks will eventually stop trying. You make your own case against people rationally choosing dead-end jobs over welfare, and then throw your hands up in the air and freak out when they rationally do just that. And that’s assuming, with very very great optimism, that even dead-end jobs are available.
Right -wing politicians don’t give a damn about “reforming” anything–they want to stamp it out completely, whether it’s a union, or “welfare as we know it” or the post office or the FAA or the EPA oranything that they consider to be big government in action. That’s it. It really is that simple. Good luck at your soon-to-be-terminated job in our exciting new future.
It is so sad that folks either don’t see the set up, or are complicit. I know a lot of poor folks and a few rich folks, and they are mostly hard workers. The thing a lot of people don’t realize is that everybody wants to do something…. the system we live in has devolved into the present situation where too many who work do not get a living wage. Remember the story that the saying “Pay the piper” comes from, and the loss that occurs when the piper is not paid. Or the one about killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Well, Americas workers have been the source of all the wealth. The present rite wing is driven by multinational corporations that have no skin in our game and don’t care if we become a nation of serfs as long as they make their profit. Corporations are not people. They have no soul. It is time to tax the wealthy 2% and corporations at the post WWII level and give them tax breaks only when they invest back in the commons that they have used to create wealth for themselves. All of us, all 100% are the source of jobs and wealth. It is important to see that we all have what we need to do our best. In the Declaration, the aim of what the government should be is very clear. Read it sometime and consider what it says.
It is unreal that this tripe about society supporting these leeches for generations still gets passed on. Does no one remember the ending of “welfare as we know it”-AFDC and its replacement with TEMPORARY Assistance for Needy Families-TANF-a program that comes with strict time limits. This sort of leech talk is nothing more than bigotry towards people who are guilty of being at the bottom of the pile and having the entire systme stacked against them.
With her questions loaded with so many right wing talking points, Ms Costello would undoubtedly feel right at home if she worked for Fox News.
Creating and maintaining a healthy society is an art that is now being entrusted or perhaps has been usurped by bean counters who are interested in short term profit only and who have convinced many of the rest of us who have a distorted idea of an American dream that those less blessed should just play by the rules that are stacked against them. When the big boys hold ALL the cards, its hard to make a go of it. I don’t resent someone getting rich, but I resent the hell out of them using their money to destroy democracy, i.e. Koch Brothers. Read Dale Maharidge’s “Someplace Like America.” Stop stereotyping the poor! It’s the last thing they want to be, and it’s the last thing you would ever want. Be aware that most of us are a few months away from it if this big house of cards slips.
This morning I read an article which stated that the percentage of people living in poverty today in the United States was between 23% and 30%. In real numbers that would be between 74,000,000 and 96,000,000 people living in poverty. With those numbers how can anyone dispute we don’t have a problem?
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread,” Anatole France commented a century ago.
“America is like a melting pot. The scum floats to the top, and the people
on the bottom get burned.” Charlie King
Where EXACTLY are those on Welfare suppposed to go:
Wednesday’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey provided further evidence that for most of these job seekers there are no jobs to be found. June’s ratio of unemployed workers to job openings was 4.5-to-1, a slight decline from May’s ratio of 4.6-to-1 but still far too high. Putting the numbers into context, Shierholz noted that the job seeker’s ratio has been above 4-to-1 for two-andâ┚¬“a-half years.
From the November, 1999, issue of No More Jobs, the newsletter of The Employment Project:
â┚¬Ã…“The global quantity of available work is shrinking â┚¬“ this beingâ┚¬Ã‚¦a STRUCTURAL (emphasis mine) problem related directly to the passing of control over crucial economic factors from the representative institutions of government to the free play of market forces. There is, therefore, little thatâ┚¬Ã‚¦the state may do to combat itâ┚¬Ã‚¦Hans Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, economic experts of Der Spiegel, calculate that if the present trend continues unabated, 20 percent of the global (potential) workforce will suffice â┚¬Ã‹Å“to keep the economy going’ (whatever that means) which will leave the other 80% of the able-bodied population of the world economically redundant. One can thinkâ┚¬Ã‚¦of ways to reverse, arrest or at least slow down the trend, but the major issue today is no longer what is to be done, but who has the power and the resolve to do it. Behind the expanding insecurity of the millions dependent on selling their labour, lurks the absence of a potent and effective agency which could, with will and resolve, make their plight less insecureâ┚¬Ã‚¦
â┚¬Ã‚¦Insecurity of livelihood, compounded with the absence of a trustworthy and reliable agency capable of making it less secureâ┚¬Ã‚¦strikes a severe blow at the heart of life politics, â┚¬Ã‚¦
â┚¬Ã‚¦There is less and less paid work aroundâ┚¬Ã‚¦Unemployment looks more sinister than ever beforeâ┚¬Ã‚¦.We learn for instanceâ┚¬Ã‚¦that in France the volume of work available in 1991 was just 57 percent of that on offer in 1891: 34.1 billion hours instead of 60 billion. During that period the GNP multiplied by ten, hourly productivity by eighteen, while the total number of people at work increased in a hundred years from only 19 million to 22 million. Roughly similar trends have been recorded in all countries which began industrialization in the nineteenth century. The figures speak volumes about the reasons to feel insecure even in the most stable and regular jobs.â┚¬Ã‚Â
Another option is to fast track the poor into the prison system where they can be used as slave labor for the benefit of corporations! Don’t even have to globalize capital now to exploit slave labor! You can just get your slave labor right here in the good ‘ol USA. The EVIL GENIUS of capitalism at play. Criminal Justice laws are what helped incarcerate 2.4 million Americans since ALEC began introducing their “Model Legislation” in 1980 to both incarcerate and privatize prisons for the benefit of their corporate members.
For more on this see “ALEC, For-Profit Criminal Justice, and Wisconsin” URL: http://www.prwatch.org/node/10902
And, of course, while Americas right wing media loves to demonize the poor who are poor for all sorts of reasons and economic policies that they had no say in, notice how LITTLE attention is focused on THIS:
Corporate Crime
Russel Mokhiber, editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter, estimates that white collar crime costs the nation’s businesses and individuals at least $100 billion EACH YEAR. (A sum incidentally that is more than 10 times greater then the combined total from larcenies, robberies, burglaries, and auto thefts committed by individuals.) If you count other corporate underhandedness, such as monopolistic price fixing and the sale of faulty goods, the price tag jumps about $200 billion more. And the Justice Department estimates that â┚¬Ã…“taxpayers lose $10 to $20 billion when corporations violate federal regulations.â┚¬Ã‚ Corporate Crime is so commonplace according to Mokhiber, that roughly two thirds of the country’s 500 largest companies were involved in some form of illegal behavior over a 10-year period. Despite such lawlessness, the white-collar detectives at the FBI do not track corporate crime regularly. â┚¬Ã…“The government can tell the public whether burglary is up or down in Los Angeles for any given month, but it cannot say the same about insider trading, midnight dumping, consumer defrauding, or illegal polluting.â┚¬Ã‚ (Dollars & Sense – Nov. 1989)
Externalized Corporate Costs Borne by Society
Ralph Estes is a professor of business administration at American University. He holds a doctorate in business administration from Indiana University. He wrote a book not too long ago called the Tyranny of the Bottom Line in which he estimates that the amount of annual costs that corporations and other businesses externalize and that must be borne by customers, employees, and society is $2,618 billion (TWO TRILLION SIX HUNDRED and EIGHTEEN BILLION DOLLARS – in 1991dollars and then adjusted to 1994 dollars.) This figure does NOT include special tax breaks corporations get or the direct subsidies that they receive. Compared to total corporate profits in the order of Five Hundred and Fifteen Billion Dollars, the estimated societal COSTS of corporations are five and one half times the amount of their benefits.
Please tell me again about how the poor are gaming the system. I can use a good laugh.
Wow. That’s breathtaking. Most poor people in America work, first of all. They are the working poor, not leeches. But there is a class of blood sucking leeches in America, the wealthy that pay little to no taxes, that own the media and control the debate, that have tax havens in the Caymans, Ireland or Switzerland, or run Multinational mega-corporations like GE that didn’t pay any Federal taxes, but still got a $2 Billion tax refund. And now they want to bring money from their foreign branches and subsidiaries back to the U.S. and pay 5% in taxes. Well, who wouldn’t?
Then there is the very special brand of blood sucking vampire leeches that make up Wall Street and the banks.
The analogy to leeches is innacurate. Leeches drop off after they are sated but the Wall Street variety will hold on until nothing is left!
Fantastic blogs.Great insights.But jeff above states a liberal issue that i see repeated over and over again that really is just looking for someone to blame.And who better than the big house on the hill?So lets look inside that big house on the hill shall we?Where i live i know a wonderful woman.Her father and mother came from Italy and could not read or write English.He a stone mason ,she a home maker.Three kids.My friend learned english(at 6yrs old)and did well in school.She won scholarships and went to med school.She is now a gifted surgeon.She put her money early on into other businesses ,and now owns 2 restaurants ,a B and B…hardware stores in the midwest, and several other(more than 30) enterprises.She is incorporated.She has invested well and is worth God knows how much.She employs tons of people and i have never heard a bad word said about her.She is the American dream.A dynamo.She hopes to someday run for the Senate.And you HATE her.Her brother and sister both own corporations and you hate them.Or is only those corporations that you have never looked into the window of their living rooms to see they are all real people?Faceless is easier to hate when you need someone to blame.That is the essence of class warfare.Just as the Germans blamed the jews the American liberals blame the “corporations”.That faceless evil boogeyman
The problem of poverty here is one of need.We must sadly come to the conclusion that some in our land simply cannot function, and must be “supported” by society .I believe the liberal system has made this reality 1000x worse by destroying peoples motivation and dreams with the systemic development of a nanny state.It is a game of inches that bursts like a blister upon us all.And be assured this is the true development of a modern day” plantation”(state).Where the poor are treated like children to be taken care of.I do believe that the biggest answer to this is the creation of jobs through an explosion of new work created by entrepreneurship.This is the game that will yield results.When there is a plethora of jobs everything will look better.And their is only one way to do that.And you liberals resist is like fat aunt Emma’s wet kisses.Create the landscape to make this the most hospitable land to business ever seen.And that means allow the recreation of wealth.Of course we should have a fairer tax system.All in due time.I would love a flat tax.But now the first step upward is the only step upward.You and YOUR elected government get the hell out of our way.
To add to my earlier post, there are also 18,000,000 homeless children currently living in the United States.
Michael e, no one blames your Italian Dr. friend, who employs Americans (that is if the Dr. pays a decent wage), we blame Banksters who gamed the system and are the real leeches. We blame oil companies, big pharma, agri-biz and the US politicians that allowed most of our manufacturing to be off-shored, we blame corporations that pollute and profit. By get the “hell out of our way,’ do you mean you want to eat food that has not been deemed safe, or take drugs that are untested, or oil, due to substandard testing of parts can be allowed to spill into the Gulf? We’ve had it your way for years, and lack of regulations, tariffs and fair taxation has gotten us dead miners, dead fish, blighted neighborhoods and a growing number of people in poverty.
Ive never seen the government do any job(except the military that the private sector cant do better Paula.You believe that the government keeps your food safe,your drugs.Im sure they wish you to believe that there are a thousand things you cant do without their oversight.To much regulation(you mistake regulations with law by the way) has helped to crippled along with over taxation -our economy.We do you know have the highest corporate tax structure -not the lowest.It has made us non competitive and is the main cause of jobs leaping overseas.Tariffs?Maybe but to what end?No paula you are still blaming nameless faces on the hill.What did you think when the oil executives came to washington and answered back to their accusers,They said”this year we payed more in taxes than we took in profit”.You must of thought them liars.They told the truth.It does not fit the template that the largest corporation(Obama and comp) would have you believe of those who DON”T pay their fair share.But there it is.
So you blame corporations who pollute and profit.Well travel the world.That is the feeling people have of you.You are the part of the big nameless face called America .”The corporation America”.Will you agree to pay more to a world tax because of that feeling?Are you willing to be branded and downsize your life?If you mean to live your life tracking the unfairness that is part and parcel of any large corp entity fine….knock yourself out.I have hears Obama say “when is enough enough”.Well if we had forced BIll Gates to stop and cap it at a million think of all the world would have missed.I hate using the term banksters.Too close to Nazi Germanys hatred of jews and bankers.Again with nameless faces.I know a few bankers.Good men.Great families.Are they wealthy?Absolutely.I hope that is not the real crime.See the liberal mindset is simple really.They see the great inequity inherent in a free market system and bristle at the sight of it.It does create the highest hi’s,and some mighty low lows.What would you have instead?Socialism and communism are failed systems.I think you have bought into this anti American mindset.Start seeing how great this country is.It is all around you.Retrain your mind to see that.Then you will be like me.A recovering Democrat.
An Alternative to Capitalism (where everyone is middle class)
Several decades ago, Margaret Thatcher claimed: “There is no alternative”. She was referring to capitalism. Today, this negative attitude still persists.
I would like to offer an alternative to capitalism for the American people to consider. Please click on the following link. It will take you to an essay titled: “Home of the Brave?” which was published by the Athenaeum Library of Philosophy:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/steinsvold.htm
John Steinsvold
Perhaps in time the so-called dark ages will be thought of as including our own.
–Georg C. Lichtenberg
John I thought long and hard about your article.It is an interesting philosophical jump onto the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, but little more.In the end with no legal or worth tender to value anything above simple good hearted ‘sharing”- all land,business,homes,and everything else you can think of would be open for at best “sharing”and at worst forced redistribution.Communisms ideal had much of the same rhetoric.You also saw it in the sixties in small communes of Haight ashbury in the hippy communities.(Amazing how many of those guys own computer companies today.)Did they sell out or realize better than anyone what works and what does not?
As far as Thatcher she was anything but negative about capitalism.She and Reagan could talk for hours bringing crowds to their feet on the great things about it.Many of our problems are due to a very simple fact.We are a capitalist country.We are led by a president and a party that are a wet blanket on this form of government.They see mostly the faults.They do not understand it and mean to remake it.Our president and a good amount of his cabinet are academics.They have never had a proper job.Never balanced a budget.They have spent a lifetime being paid by and redistributing other peoples wealth.Also known as socialism.Would you want teachers to teach your children who hate teaching,have no experience, and don’t particularly care for children?That is a good comparison to our present predicament.