Progressive Taxation: Cementing Aristocracy
Progressive taxation has first and foremost the effect of cementing the existing wealthy into an unassailable aristocracy. It's sold, of course, as somehow benefiting the poor. But its actual intent is to make it difficult - in time, impossible - to rise in economic status, by making it difficult to accrue wealth. Thus the Old Rich, who already have theirs, protect their positions of privilege and power from arrivistes, and in time transform themselves into a nobility in everything but name.
That's not the narrative we're taught, of course. Nor what most of us believe. Even "libertarians" and other believers in the real free market tend to accept that progressive taxation is meant to ensure more equal outcomes ... when the truth is the very opposite.
Why? Habit. Time to break it.
The simple singular fact of politics is that anything government does, it does for the primary purpose of increasing the wealth and power of its proprietors. Who, by the way, are never "the people" at large - the very fact democracy is designed to hide.
What "everything" means here is everything. If taxes are raised - and if taxes are lowered. If regulations are imposed - or abolished. All of these actions, apparently contradictory as they are, represent at the most the temporary ascendancy of one or another faction of the ruling class.
More usually, it's a shell game: mountains of paper designed to do nothing but hide business as usual. If it's not meant to cover another ruling class grab at power and wealth.
Here is the Big Truth, that I'll repeat over and over - a million times, if need to - until it actually enters your awareness:
The only purpose of government is to centralize benefit and socialize cost.
Anything else is a lie.
Both houses are a pox on us all
How can anybody with any sense can take seriously the ravings of the Republican candidate for the lucrative and flashy position of front-man for the oligarchy? He's a lifelong sleaze and champion of the almighty State. One expects his raddled raving head to poke out of the Alien’s chest.
Election '08: Any way you look at it, we lose.
The “election,” such as it is, hearkens back to 1996, when the rulers couldn’t be bothered to run a credible opponent to a highly vulnerable, overt charlatan of an incumbent, with the manner and sexual tastes of a televangelist, running instead another superannuated “war hero,” as unsightly in person as was his political record of serving Leviathan in the most persistent, and persistently self-serving, manner possible. (And if you’re excited by war-heroes, even authentic ones, as rulers, why not study some history – such as that of this man who won the Iron Cross First Class the hard way in World War I? How'd that work out?)
His rival will win the popularity contest, and frankly should – his appearance is at least not something to frighten naughty children with (and the true terror of the Republican’s face isn’t its age, it’s the overt evil and madness shining through.) Unless Israel attacks Iran, and the US’s rulers treasonously join in. Which will be the end of the election, the US, and quite possibly what we laughingly call civilization. As well as, likely, most of us.
But what’s exasperating is that his opponent is being marketed - seriously - as representing “change.” Yes: a brand shiny new wrapper for the same old maggot-writhing shit we've been fed throughout our lifetimes.