Excerpt from life:
“As my best friend, you get a star in your crown for being the BF of such a PITA.”
Ask Not…
…on whom the greedy socialistas prey; They prey on thee.
Elizabeth Warren suggests–nay! blatantly proclaims!–that the greedy capitalists OWE the proceeds of their labor and risk to society (as if, as a “class” [group] they do not already pay a larger share of taxes, both in gross amount and in percentage of income, than other classes).
Readers of Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor blog (and Pournelle himself) point out a few obvious flaws in Warren’s pronouncements on so-called “fairness”.
UPDATE: Although many other sites go into great detail demolishing the sugar-coated toxic proclamations Elizabeth Warren
is making, Roxeanne, over at Datechguy’s Blog has a very readable version of the major arguments. Good reading. A sample? Sure:
According to Elizabeth Warren, the moment you first flip a switch in that factory and start producing a good, you are an evil rich person who needs to “give back”, because building that factory just sort of happened, without effort, intellect, financial risk, or the employment of others. Had this chickie even run a lemonade stand, she would understand the fallacy in her thinking.
Glenn Reynolds suggests Elizabeth Warren do some remedial reading (below the fold)
I would suggest we start by confiscating all of Warren’s assets to go toward achieving the social ends she seeks. I mean, it’s not as if she’s ever done anything substantive to “give back” to society. Lawyer? Law professor? We have too many of those already.
And another UPDATE, this from Jerry Pournelle on 09/28/11:
As to Ms. Warren’s viral speech about how others paid for the roads and the schools and the police force, I would have thought those are mostly paid by local property taxes, and if the factory owner has got away with not paying those he’s pretty clever. I would have thought that factory owners paid a lot of property taxes. How much of that is fair is, I would presume, a matter for local communities. Raise them too much and the factory moves elsewhere, as Massachusetts has long ago discovered. Of course the remedy for that, according to liberals, is to eliminate competition – make the taxes national so they can’t be escaped. Oddly enough that was all debated as part of the Convention of 1787, but you’d never guess that from listening to this Harvard Professor, who doesn’t seem to have read The Federalist Papers or Tocqueville. But then that’s not too surprising.
Indeed. (BTW, you’re up pretty late, Jerry, “Get some rest. If you haven’t got your health, then you haven’t got anything.” ;-))
And do not neglect Ms. Warren’s remedial reading, below.
Continue reading “Ask Not…”
Dumping Time?
For some years I’ve been a member of a discussion group that has seriously deteriorated over time. Examples abound, but here’s a question from a guy–one of his most literate examples–that illustrates my growing frustration with the discussion group (slightly redacted to make it at least understandable out of context):
“[Do you] believe in the history as taught in school or revisionist history?”
First, what history? The author uses the definite article with the construction, “the history” but does not designate the history of place or period. Absent such designation, it should read, still goofily, “believe in history as taught…”
Next, what school? Where? What level of schooling? I could go on with that point, but perhaps you get my drift, eh?
And “revisionist history” as the “or” option in an “either/or” proposition? WHAT revisionist history? Many, many many revisions of history occur throughout the course of examining events of the past. Some represent particular points of view. Which “revisionist history” does the author refer to? Revision of what exactly?
The question itself reveals a particular POV–that of an historical/literary illiterate pretending to knowledge he does not have.
Irritating.
And such interlocutors are coming to dominate the discussions. Between them and the folks who know quite well how to use Google and how to cut and paste and use such “skilz” as a substitute for knowledge and reasoning to make dishonest arguments of misdirection, hand-waving, burning of straw men, etc., I begin to think it’s time to move on and leave the space to Ortega’s Mass Man.
*sigh*