Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Progressive Tax on Consumption

The Age of Ruin is brought on by self absorbed, simpleton clowns to the left and sociopathic simplistic jokers to the right. Self interest (crony money) tends to be a root of evil (lack of responsible empathy), Who speaks for the sustenance of a decent republic?

Nearly everyone apprehends that our universe would avail little meaning were it somehow able to consist only of matter or energy, but not both. The relationship between matter and energy is complex, not simple. For a civilization, much the same may be said of that which is private versus governmental. It's hard to think of a decent and meaningful society that would have no government. Even in a company town removed to a wilderness, the town would have rules that it enforced, i.e., government. The fairie idea of a government without law makers elected as representatives by their constituents tends to reduce to a government by the quickest and strongest, That is, a government of the most competent and likeable sociopaths.

It's almost breathtaking how blithely apologists for oligarchs will use government to increase private crony power, then tell their dupes we need to privatize government even more! What hoodwinkers! Our government is already largely privatized to corporatists! Why else would our government be moving quickly and steadily towards drowning our borders and the people at large (in the name of fairness, yet!) with a foreign tsunami of illiterate and easily exploited laborers? The bait and switch techniques used by oligarchs to fake and hoodwink the masses into perpetual debt servitude! Our children are indoctrinated that they need to remain in indoctrination for extended times. Even take out loans and go into deep debt to pay for their own indoctrination! Then watch as jobs and industries are funneled to distant and desperate workers.

The idea that the wealth of topmost oligarchs tends to churn, therefore is not a danger to a republic, is an insult to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. "It's the oligarchic meme, stupid!" It's the indoctrination to accept the conversion of all institutions for the purpose of ruling the people in fine detail, while misdirecting the people with circus barkers on oligarchic-owned media. Ask: Is that insult to the freedom and dignity of the people at large increasing, despite the churning of oligarchs? Why, yes, it is.

Our real problem is: Who should run government, and who should government serve? A few corporatists? Or the thinking class of productive, responsible, republic-minded citizens? Wherever there abides a decent civilization, there will abide a process for making and enforcing social rules -- more so than a process for merely making suggestions. So the problem for those who wish to establish and preserve decent civilization for themselves and their progeny is accompanied with many sub-problems. Among such problems is this: How can checks and balances be established that will tend to prevent oligarchic accumulators of wealth and power from taking over the governance, to all practical effects? How can the society defend itself from the acquisition among sociopathic oligarchists of power to buy, sell, and determine the government? Stated differently, how can decent people at large limit wannabe despots from succeeding in oligarchically collectivizing the people of a republic?

That goal tends not to be well served by an income tax, nor by a flat tax. Enterprise tends not to be well served by taxing businesses that provide employment. What is needed is to tax individuals, not businesses, in a way that allows them to spend their earnings without being able to convert such expenditures into crony investments for buying political influence as if it were a wholesale commodity. That necessitates a tax on consumption that is not limited to a flat tax. That is, non-business consumption should be imputed to individuals and taxed progressively, perhaps even logarithmically.

As to mechanics, there is no great challenge. If a retailer or credit card company is able to preserve and report information concerning particular retail exchanges, there is little reason why each such consumptive use of credit could not simultaneously be tallied as part of an accumulating total for each consumer, for each taxable year. Yes, let domestic corporations engage in domestic political lobbying, even when not directly related to producing non-crony business income. Just require that all such crony expenditures be imputed to particular corporate individuals, as part of their yearly running tally of taxable consumption. What would be unfair in a tax system that would at least tax attempts to buy progressive advantages, progressively?

Life is too complex and absurd to admit of any system that could reasonably constitute a final solution. However, a society that wants to preserve a decent republic that seeks to serve the freedom and dignity of its citizens will not do so by restricting itself to flat taxes on sociopathic oligarchs who scheme to buy and sell progressive advantages.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

How Texaco collects retail sales taxes has nothing to do with collection of a progressive consumption tax. The only way to tax wealth, rather than income, without harming business is to tax personal consumption progressively. To fail to brake the buy up of politicians and governments is to render the question about equal treatment under the law farcical and moot. There can be little equal treatment under law when cronies are in practical effect able to buy the law. They buy the law wholesale, then reap rewards oligarchically. If nothing is done, instead of asking about whatever happened to equal treatment under the law, people will be asking (if not intimidated otherwise), "Whatever happened to the republic/country/America?" You can't have a republic with equal treatment under the law when some have means to buy the law, while most must obey the law that others buy. It has become depressingly obvious that oligarchs hedge with both parties, and that both parties serve established interests that want to erase the borders and sell out the nation. The nation is being eaten alive, from the inside out, and people are worried about flat tax fairness for oligarchs, lest their consumptive hollowing out of America be slowed.

As to the mechanics for imposing a progressive consumption tax: I don't know. The notion is a mind experiment. I suspect, in this day and age, it would not be that hard to keep a tally on taxable annual consumption. Surely, keeping a tally on annual carbon footprints would be far more difficult.

I suspect the real challenge has far less to do with mechanics than with will, secondary to self interest. Neither party would support a progressive consumption tax because the oligarchs that run both parties would never support it. As I said, we have a moneyocracy. So long as cronies keep the people confused and divided, the people will never have the power and will to do anything that can turn back the erasure of America and re-feudalism of the masses. A flat tax on buying political influence, in the name of "fairness" yet! Indeed.

Anonymous said...

Tax consumption, not income. And tax it progressively. There is no perfect line between government and private enterprise. Some oligarchists want big government. Big government is how you get big utilities is how you get big crony oligarchists. Oligarchists want collectivization, and oligarchical collectivism is a twin of big brother socialism. The erasure of borders and race to the bottom one-world open-society are the spawn of oligarchists. They correctly point out the problem with taxing income, but their "solution" equates to a flat tax on consumption. That "solution" will do nothing to loosen the strangulation of republicanism by the NWO oligarchy and the conversion to a moneyocracy. Dims and Repubs alike represent the moneyocracy. Everything else is running-through-the-streets perversion gone wild. Perversion posing as principle.

Anonymous said...

There's money to be made while sitting on the side, stirring up war and selling ammunition. After the desolation, the suppliers pick up the desperate and cheap labor and sell rebuilding materials. They seed and sow crisis so they can reap from it and reap from it. When you're farming crisis, what's a few million casualties? Western pols enrich Islamist despots so Islamist despots can line the pockets of Western pols. After all, if they don't "earn" the right to enrich enemies in order to profit by selling out the republic, someone else will. Alas, the enemy at home has become the greater pestilence. Regardless of whether these subhumans wear the clothes of rinos or dinos, they remain subhumans. In terms of subhumanness, what't the difference between the troglodyte Islamists and the Western Pols who arm and enrich them? And then tell us what a religion of peace they are. We need less toleration. And the first ones we need to be less tolerant of are the apologists for Islam that we have at home, who are malignantly joyous in their ignorance.

Anonymous said...

Indeed, we should embrace the means availed for measuring that which is measurable. Everything that is measured is communicated or recorded for communication. What is thereby appreciatively signed is the reconciling logos among our disparate perspectives of God. The sign-ificatiions of the Signifier. The Word made substantive.

Anonymous said...

Of course, my reference is not to "my" mind, but to the mind of God. To mortal minds, you are right, that the mind of God seems absurd, in the sense that it is beyond our measure or reduction. Some take it that reference thereto is therefore irrelevant, impractical, misleading, wasteful, and often as much destructive as helpful. Even so, we cannot avoid choices, and we rationalize our choices. Some try to rationalize choices in science, as if to derive oughts from empiricism. I agree we can derive techniques pertinent to our contexts with empiricism, but I do not agree that we can derive one true consensus from empiricism with regard to the direction to which civilization "should" be guided. Nor would I agree that all that cannot be falsified is without moral value. I suspect that a "standard model" could be as well explicated by reference to the math of computer logic and bits as by reference to interpretations of "substances." That would not be to prove it, but to show that it would suffice as well, for empirical purposes, but without so hubristically discounting an innate, empathetic, humble, intuitive respect for a reconciling Source of moral guidance. I think a sense of moral purposefulness is enhanced by coming together in humble respect of an Holistic Reconciler. I think trying to scientifically or statistically prove the substantive reality of bits of dogma is what is the mistake and the waste. When we humble ourselves to come together in respect of the Reconciler, without the baggage of absolutist human authorities and their hired enforcers and beheaders, that is when I think we tend to find figurative meaning and worthwhile, moral purposefulness. I agree we should be humble in all that we do. I don't agree we can or should "only" be humble. There is still the problem that we have to make choices.

Anonymous said...

Making political contributions to drivers to bus favored voters to the polls is free speech. Making political contributions to Black Panthers to strike intimidating poses is free speech. Promising to buy politicians to vote for amnesty is free speech. Promising tax giveaways and government "investments" in green energy is free speech. Promising relaxation of regulations against foreign investments in our political system is free speech. Financing groups that mean to replace our representative republic with despotism, whether under fascism or socialism or oligarchy, is free speech. Actions are symbolic forms of speech. If we can do nothing to preserve a balance, so that all citizens will be entitled to free speech and reasonable representation, then we, as a republic, are toast. Given what the flat tax, two headed, forked tongue, open-bordered, free-trade oligarchy is doing to our borders, our republic is probably already toast. The representative republic is probably already dead. The country and most institutions of governance have already been "privatized," in that they are already, for most purposes, owned. This idea that increasing the disproportionate rule of the oligarchy over everyone else will somehow lead to a reduction in regulatory rules is insane. A company owned town is no less governed than any other town. As to regulations, I suspect most of them are advanced to favor some oligarchic contenders over others. The problem is less one of reducing regulations than of enhancing the quality of the participation in the regulation by the class of decent and responsible citizens. That, however, is something that must be taken, for the established powers will never agree to it. They are motivated far less by moral vision or human empathy than by personal gain. That's just who they are. Yes, Hitler and Stalin were awful. But so were the oligarchs who invested in them.

Anonymous said...

The idea is not to tax wealth just to tax wealth, or for "fairness." The idea is to tax wealth that is "consumed" for the purpose of buying political influence. If Bill Gates limits his personal consumption to a million, fine. If he "consumes" via political lobbying in the multi millions, then tax that, progressively. Free speech cannot be rightly prohibited, but lobbying expenditures can be taxed. What alternative is there, to restore any semblance of political balance?

The main problem in America is the imbalance in political influence, which is slanted towards those who can buy politicians and farm gullibles who believe in communism, socialism, and good big government.

Anonymous said...

Oligarchs believe they have found a way to pull out of the cycle. Let the voters vote for representatives who promise largesse, but then control the representatives so that the largesse that is actually distributed is covered in red tape that is cheaply diverting, physically exhausting, and mind numbing. Let the idiot voters think they are being served, even as the real wealth and power is being parlayed out the back door. Dumbify the masses with enough diversionary dope and dopamine enhancers, mal-educate them with enough bs politically correct school indoctrination, stun dissenters with accusations of racism, and increase the gap in power that is shared among oligarchs and their back scratching gov hacks. With that technique, the people can be entertained indefinitely with crap promises, while the oligarchy consolidates power. When the masks fall and the system collapses, just replace cheap promises with brute abuse. Thus, the cycle from cheap labor to serfdom to enslavement.

Thus, rulers preserve their rule, and the spiritually and morally divided masses are kept powerless to resist. That is, until the rulers begin fighting and slaying one another. Then, they exhaust their pawns, fall from power, and hard and desperate clans begin to claw back. If there is a meaningful way to break this cycle, it will have to entail an assimilative and practical moral vision.

Anonymous said...

There is always the potential for the bubbling out of oligarchs. The problem is to keep the bubbling checked and controlled, so it does not eat the society from which it bubbled. That requires a moral, intelligent, and vigilant electorate. There is no final system of government that is perfect for all societies and situations. In America, we may have a chance to extend decent freedom and dignity if we repair a three legged foundation: Restore good faith spiritual respect for a moral reconciler; restore respect for the traditional family; invent and respect procedural checks that are adequate to defend the nation's borders and culture from being undermined by disloyal international oligarchs of corporations that are bent on a race to sell us out to the cheapest and most ignorant and corrupt pools of worldwide labor.

Anonymous said...

There is always the potential for the bubbling out of oligarchs. The problem is to keep the bubbling checked and controlled, so it does not eat the society from which it bubbled. That requires a moral, intelligent, and vigilant electorate. There is no final system of government that is perfect for all societies and situations. In America, we may have a chance to extend decent freedom and dignity if we repair a three legged foundation: Restore good faith spiritual respect for a moral reconciler; restore respect for the traditional family; invent and respect procedural checks that are adequate to defend the nation's borders and culture from being undermined by disloyal international oligarchs of corporations that are bent on a race to sell us out to the cheapest and most ignorant and corrupt pools of worldwide labor.

Anonymous said...

For those who mean to rule by all means necessary, even at cost of hoodwinking those who are ruled, to fool them into converting to serfs, there will always be inventions and addendums of isms. They go by different labels. Marxism. Anarchism. Oligarchism. Despotism. Fascism. But they are all little more than inventive rationalizations for elites to rule fools in two class, predator-prey societies.

Anonymous said...

We can't put al Qaeda on the run by importing Muslims, tolerating Islamic bs, enriching oil sheiks, and letting them buy our politicians and infrastructure. Sociopathic Oligarchs are still playing the double game they have played in numerous wars: Divide and sell arms and technologies to all sides. To the idiot masses, they give us their idiot figureheads. Exhibit A: Obama.

Anonymous said...



A large part of the American citizenry needs to recognize a reality: That it lacks skills to produce what people want. It needs to wake up from unearned self esteem. It needs not to be coddled by metrosexuals in unearned self esteem. As it grows up to earn its own way, it will feel less need to lash out in counterproductive rap crap and violent flame outs. It needs to call out the Dim Prog Academics who have taught bs social science to the ruin of generations. It also needs to call out the crony oligarchs who have fostered this farce, as an excuse for ruining America's borders, eating the country out from within, forfeiting pensions, and subjecting professionals to having to compete with a worldwide lowest common denominator for the favor of cronies who have invested in owning government favors and undermining the republic.

Oligarchs believe they have found a way to re-establish and preserve corporate fiefdoms: Let the voters vote for representatives who promise largesse, but then control the representatives so that the largesse that is actually distributed is covered in red tape that is cheaply diverting, physically exhausting, and mind numbing. Let the voters think they are being served, even as the real wealth and power is parlayed out the back door. Dumbify the masses with diversionary dope and sex and dopamine enhancers, mal-educate them with politically correct school indoctrination, stun dissenters with accusations of racism, and increase the gap in power that is shared among oligarchs and their back-scratching gov hacks. With that technique, the people can be entertained indefinitely with crap promises, while the oligarchy consolidates power. When the masks fall and the system collapses, just replace cheap promises with brute abuse. Thus, the cycle from cheap labor to serfdom to enslavement to war to collapse to claw back.

Rulers preserve their rule by keeping the masses spiritually and morally divided and powerless to resist. That is, until the rulers begin fighting and slaying one another. Then, they exhaust their pawns, fall from power, and hard and desperate clans begin to claw back. If there is a meaningful way to break this cycle, it will have to entail (1) an assimilative and practical moral vision, (2) restoration of the family, and (3) a citizenry that is educated and vigilant enough to establish and enforce checks and balances against corporate termites at the borders. The electorate will have to understand that wannabe communist dictators of the proletariat and oligarchical collectivists are sociopathic dino-rino twins, bent on the use and abuse of underlings -- as if they were impersonal widgets, unworthy of individual responsibility, freedom, or dignity.

Anonymous said...

Most minorities do not want to get ahead. They want to get equal. Orientals are an exception, probably because they are willing to take affirmative action gifts so long as the weight of them on the establishment helps them pull ahead. Perhaps also because they tend to respect authority. The problem with settling for getting equal is that civilization is not static. If you're not working to get ahead, then you are falling behind. If our non-oriental minorities succeed in making America settle for getting equal, then we will be overcome. In most cultures, people who settle for getting equal are marginalized or directed into manual labor. In America, we have put such people in charge. Welcome to Obungoland. At least as figureheads. Figureheads for something that will use them, and use us through them, and will not settle for merely being equal. We have arrived at the two class NWO. Now, we are just in a phase of consolidation.

Anonymous said...

What we have is centralized drone indoctrination. We are preparing each generation to want to perpetuate a two class society. It's about centralization towards a hierarchical establishment. It's not about some contrived distinction between private and government. It's about centralization of hive mind. The centralizing apparatus needs to be broken.

Anonymous said...

The connection between the people and the Field that participates with them in availing their pursuits of meaningfulnesss has been polluted by intervening sociopaths. The connection needs to be reestablished. The pollution needs to be cleansed. Why did it, seemingly overnight, become conventional wisdom that our rulers should be given tax revenues by which not just to tolerate but actually to celebrate and encourage the teaching of our children that it is normal to have two daddies who engage in fecal sex? Why did it suddenly become enlightened to import and encourage Islamic cultures that brutalize and mutilate women and non-believers? Why did it become patriotic and charitable to erase our borders and redistribute wealth to tyrants who hide behind the people they brutalize? Why did churches accept being marginalized and having their charitable functions taken over by faux-charitable governments?

Who has blared such deviant messages from our schools and media? Who has made it economically punishable to resist such deviant messages? Answer: the people who hate middle class society, who hate the independence of middle classes who strive after their own happiness. Incompetents hate the independence of the middle class. Oligarchic sociopaths hate not being able to rule the middle class. Incompetents and oligarchs share a common interest in eliminating the middle class. The easiest way to do this is to destroy the family and marginalize respect for a caring God.

Anonymous said...

The common interests of rinos and dinos determines what are the politically correct talking points. Dinos and Rinos war on each other, but not on the hedging oligarchs who fund and benefit from such wars. Rinos and Dinos never take notice that their wars are instigated by oligarchs. Or, if they do, they never notice the oligarchs who fund their own mind prisons. Bush and Clinton are as friendly as Frog and Toad. Nor do they consider that the only way to stop such instigations is to impose ways to check and limit oligarchic consumptions of political power. That is, to impose pain on oligarchs who consume people in wars. Likely, such failure is attributable to feelings of relative powerlessness. In any event, no one, Rinos and Dinos alike, makes the least effort to address the crux of the problem that drives political angst: the buy out of the governance of the republic by oligarchs. Our politics is filled with sock puppets and powerless prostitutes, mouthing inanities, stirring juices, devoid of effective or principled philosophy.

Anonymous said...

A large part of the American citizenry needs to recognize a reality: That it lacks skills to produce what people want. It needs to wake up from unearned self esteem. It needs not to be coddled by metrosexuals in unearned self esteem. As it grows up to earn its own way, it will feel less need to lash out in counterproductive rap crap and violent flame outs. It needs to call out the Dim Prog Academics who have taught bs social science to the ruin of generations. It also needs to call out the crony oligarchs who have fostered this farce, as an excuse for ruining America's borders, eating the country out from within, forfeiting pensions, and subjecting professionals to having to compete with a worldwide lowest common denominator for the favor of cronies who have invested in owning government favors and undermining the republic.

Oligarchs believe they have found a way to re-establish and preserve corporate fiefdoms: Let the voters vote for representatives who promise largesse, but then control the representatives so that the largesse that is actually distributed is covered in red tape that is cheaply diverting, physically exhausting, and mind numbing. Let the voters think they are being served, even as the real wealth and power is parlayed out the back door. Dumbify the masses with diversionary dope and sex and dopamine enhancers, mal-educate them with politically correct school indoctrination, stun dissenters with accusations of racism, and increase the gap in power that is shared among oligarchs and their back-scratching gov hacks. With that technique, the people can be entertained indefinitely with crap promises, while the oligarchy consolidates power. When the masks fall and the system collapses, just replace cheap promises with brute abuse. Thus, the cycle from cheap labor to serfdom to enslavement to war to collapse to claw back.

Rulers preserve their rule by keeping the masses spiritually and morally divided and powerless to resist. That is, until the rulers begin fighting and slaying one another. Then, they exhaust their pawns, fall from power, and hard and desperate clans begin to claw back. If there is a meaningful way to break this cycle, it will have to entail (1) an assimilative and practical moral vision, (2) restoration of the family, and (3) a citizenry that is educated and vigilant enough to establish and enforce checks and balances against corporate termites at the borders. The electorate will have to understand that wannabe communist dictators of the proletariat and oligarchical collectivists are sociopathic dino-rino twins, bent on the use and abuse of underlings -- as if they were impersonal widgets, unworthy of individual responsibility, freedom, or dignity.

Anonymous said...



I care less that a person manages to make big bucks than that he spends his big bucks to diminish the republic. To say that the more money one has the more he should be entitled to influence government favors is to advocate for "one dollar one vote" -- i.e., a moneyocracy. When a person makes his money in the US and sends it overseas or uses it to influence political favors, why shouldn't he pay proportionately more in taxes?

Things are fundamentally upside down, and the moneocracy seems to be at the root of it. Why are our borders, families, and morals being dissolved before our eyes? I don't think it is primarily due to a lot of unorganized idiots. It is due to the devils who organize the idiots. If nothing is done to slow this, how can any thinking person expect that the republic can be saved? Does anyone of any sense really believe the way to sustain the republic is to give more hugs and kisses to international oligarchs? If we continue in this vein, we can hardly complain that the republic is being flushed, for we will have deserved it.

Medieval physics was well regarded at the time. Since then, we have learned that most laws of physics bend to an arching law of curved space-time. Beginning economics pertained to the production and sale of commodities. Supply and demand. Since then, oligarchs have learned how to turn government favors into commodities, much as water is turned into ice. I have the utmost respect for thoughtful, spiritual based religion. For medieval religious fundyism, not so much. Some economic analysis is like that. It depends on what your arching principle is. If your arching principle is that people are like widgets, then you bend your thoughts to one result. If your principle is that people should aspire to a decent and sustainable representative republic, you bend to another.

We have learned how to organize certain materials to turn them into frictionless superconductors. Similar devices have been applied regarding money. When you have a little money, you encounter friction when you use it. You have negotiation expenses. When you have enough money and power, the friction tends to be much reduced. That's when you can corrrupt, buy, and sale politicians, governance, and favors -- as if they were commodities. IMO, to fail to apprehend as much is to dwell in a dark place. A place that inevitably destroys republics. The NWO.