US study lays bare extreme pay-ratio problem

Great post.

It puzzles me to this day when people conflate government with society. It goes to show just how ignorant (or delusional) they are.

 

It's like the inability to distinguish the human body from cancer cells.

 

Your comment addressed nothing I wrote in my post. Your comment was a simple ad hom. Typical.

 

The state and all its attendant trappings - taxation, bureaucracy, standing armies, etc. - were invented by ancient dictators in the Fertile Crescent, particularly Egypt. The state was literally portrayed as a divine power. In that regard, nothing much has changed since then except the dialectic. The state is one of the world's oldest religions and certainly the most deadly.

 

And yet despite their guns and clubs and their stranglehold on the rest of us, they still seek approval. They and their supporters try to argue that we've actually agreed to their thuggery. Some sort of 'social contract' nonsense.

 

And you forget its importance for the creation, and maintenance of capitalism? Must be an oops moment

 

Religious extremists cannot stand the thought of someone rejecting their religion. The heretics must be converted or destroyed.

 

They really can't abide by those who don't follow their statist religion.

 

The sheep talk about religion...

 

They can't explain how or why certain people have the legitimate authority to put their peaceful neighbor in a cage.

It's faith-based. Total religion.

 

Taxes really aren't my concern. Given a state that is small, taxes would also be small and hardly worth being concerned about. However, the leviathan state exercises ultimate power over every human within its jurisdiction and wages war upon every citizen through it's prohibition programs.
You'll obediently pay taxes, believing that it's your moral obligation, even as your beloved rulers destroy lives around you. All I ask is that you prove that it's objective moral obligation. You can't. Your belief in authority comes from quasi-religious faith. You gladly pay for evil in the hopes that you'll get some good out of it. So complain about libertarians all you want, at least we don't agree with funding evil and violence so that we can get our own ends enshrined in law.

Ours is far more developed than yours. We don't need a bunch of corrupt sociopaths to inform us of our rights and obligations, nor do we believe they have authority to do so. You are stuck in a medieval faith in authority, and libertarians are the atheists and heretics you despise for not believing as you do. You'd burn us at the stake were you whipped up by a mob caught in a religious fervor to protect your almighty government.

 

Sounds like a typical religious argument. "If you don't believe in God, you can't have any morals!" cries the religionist. If capitalism cannot work without violence against innocent people, then it, too, must go. However, I doubt that's the case. Religiostatists such as yourself believe that government is the source of all civilization, and primitivism would be the result of no longer being ruled by sociopathic dictators and winners of popularity contests. I chalk it up to fear of the unknown.

 

Prove it.

 

Who deems when terms are contrary to the public interest and how did they come by the rightful authority to interfere in the transfer of property between two private parties?

The threat is implicit in the interference and requirement to accept terms that can change at any time at the whim of politicians. You know this; the state exists by violence, it cannot act without that threat of it behind every command it makes.

That justifies the unreasonable terms? I can pay a security company to do that for me and it will cost a great deal less than what the state demands. If discussions like these bore you, maybe you should go to an echo chamber where everyone is obedient and uncritical. Or, maybe, it's your pathetic and paternalistic attempt at ad hominem. It's hard to tell, though it seems a pattern with you.

This is an argument from consequences. It does justify their authority. If a service is valuable, people will pay for it and it will be negotiated based on the value of that service.

 

There's a thin line between being governed and being ruled, and we fought the revolutionary war to end being ruled from a centralized source, allowing the inhabitants of each State the fundamental freedom to govern themselves, while forming a Union to ensure the protection of the newly acquired freedom of all individuals collectively.
The fundamental changes to our form of government Obama referred to began in 1913.

 

Yet another vacuous post!

 

Thus spake the true believer in the bizarre cult of the Almighty Libertarianism Utopia!

 

Ever read the Preamble to the Constitution?

Apparently not!

 

When confronted with economic history, fake libertarianism will tend to rant...

 

You still haven't told us what a fake libertarian is.

 

It's vacuous terminology he throws out in hopes to get a rise out of the people he aims that ad hom attack towards. It's meaninglessness, I doubt he could definitely it.

It's playground mentality name calling designed to deflect from his horribly flawed arguments.

 

Deadliest religion in history.

 

"The people" is just a nebulous abstraction tossed around by authoritarians in an attempt to manufacture consent where none exists.

 

The "union" was and is a farce. The States are not and never were "united" in any meaningful sense. Many Americans at the time the constitution was being debated rightfully characterized the process as a conspiracy among aristocratic elements to consolidate the States into an empire. Can there be any doubt whatsoever that's what happened? The so-called "anti-federalists" were the real prophets, not the eloquent sophists who argued in favor of the constitution.

 

Libertarianism is just the modern iteration of the classical liberalism that started the enlightenment and ushered in the era of representative democracy that you claim to love so much. Everything modern libertarians say can be traced directly back to the ideology of philosophers like Montesquieu, Smith, Locke, etc. America's independence was expressly based on the libertarian principle of inalienable rights, particularly liberty. The American revolution was fought largely over resistance to taxation. People like you are basically modern-day Tories who worship power and authority above all else.