Over at Paul Kedrosky's blog, he's got a post that elicited this portion of a comment about the dangers of raising taxes:
"It's just rich people trying to spend more of their discretionary on another boat, or an Aspen ski trip. Get over it. We need that money for useful investments you can't be bothered to make: health care, education, the environment"It dawned on me that the commenter is sowing the seeds of his own failure. The problem with building better schools and infrastructure is that some people will make use of them to improve themselves and then they might get rich! Either this is recursive failure or recursive success.
On the one hand, the commenter despises the rich. More people buying boats and taking ski trips? How disgusting! Perhaps steps can be taken to improve education and infrastructure, but prevent people from getting rich. Maybe we could do it with a Special Master of Compensation.
On the other hand, this could be recursive success. The new rich people provide the commenter with both targets of hate and vast amounts of tax money. Outstanding!
Hmm. Which is it?
How many "poor" people's families does a "rich" person feed when he orders a new multi-million dollar boat?
ReplyDeleteEverybody from the salesman to the widget maker is my guess.
*morons*
I can't help but think that what you illustrate is the true insidious nature of statism.
ReplyDeleteThere is really no desire to raise the level of all boats rather just a perverse sense of wanting to punish the successful as if being successful was some sort of exhibited moral flaw.
Very Nice Blog.
ReplyDelete