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Tax Reform

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...e-and-social-security/?utm_term=.c07ca62d4cf9

This bill adds to the deficit, and Ryan wants to fix that hole by scaling back Medicare and Medicaid. Yeah, why in the world would the Democrats react poorly to this bill?

Ryan has wanted to scale back Medicare and Medicaid ever since he entered Congress, and hasn't had the votes. Democrats could easily have voted for this bill, and voted against/opposed any future bill to cut entitlements.

As to the deficit, you wouldn't have gotten unanimous opposition and refusal to try to amend it more in their favor from Democrats, based solely on the deficit.

And it's that unanimity that's the point. We sometimes see unanimous opposition on votes that turn on a major principle, but that's never happened with tax cut bills before, even when they added to the deficit.

The difference this time is "The Resistance" will not tolerate anything that gives Trump a win. Might cost someone like Joe Manchin his seat.
 
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FEDEX DELIVERS THANKS TO TRUMP FOR TAX CUT

It’s not the biggest company in the world, but with more than $60 billion in annual revenue, FedEx isn’t a mom-and-pop shop either.

And now it’s released a formal statement thanking President Trump and Congress for their work on the nation’s tax code.

“We applaud Congress for passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and thank the president for signing this legislation, which will modernize the U.S. tax code and increase America’s competitiveness,” the company said in a weekend statement after its busiest weeks of the year.

“FedEx has long supported tax reform efforts which offer pro-growth, pro-business solutions that will power the economy, increase business investment and expand job opportunities,”

BizJournals.com reported the company’s founder has repeatedly pushed for tax reform this year.

In June, a company statement labeled the nation’s tax system “broken.”

FedEx CEO Fred Smith later joined with David Abney of UPS to author an August op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Business Rivals Agree on Policy.”

The piece touched on a variety of topics including the simplification of taxes, the report said.

FedEx already had announced that any benefit it sees from tax reform would be used for “capital acceleration” and for “equipment, technology and pension funds.”

The company, with 400,000 employees , ordinarily handles 13 million shipments per business day.


http://www.wnd.com/2017/12/fedex-delivers-thanks-to-trump-for-tax-cut/
 
Ryan has wanted to scale back Medicare and Medicaid ever since he entered Congress, and hasn't had the votes. Democrats could easily have voted for this bill, and voted against/opposed any future bill to cut entitlements.

As to the deficit, you wouldn't have gotten unanimous opposition and refusal to try to amend it more in their favor from Democrats, based solely on the deficit.

And it's that unanimity that's the point. We sometimes see unanimous opposition on votes that turn on a major principle, but that's never happened with tax cut bills before, even when they added to the deficit.

The difference this time is "The Resistance" will not tolerate anything that gives Trump a win. Might cost someone like Joe Manchin his seat.

So you’re going to pretend that “starving the beast” isn’t a dedicated GOP strategy since Reagan?

The tax cut and attempts to scale back Medicare and Medicaid are inextricably linked. Its completely disingenuous to argue otherwise, and you know it. A big selling point to attempting to cut them will be the deficit, and the GOP showed that card in their hand before they even were sure they had the votes. It was actually the more important goal, but it would be a lot more difficult to sell without the tax cut.

Meanwhile, the whining that people don’t want to see Trump getting a “win” is really fucking rich. The group complaining about resistance now had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the Obama years. They spent years griping about the ACA, mis-naming it to try to drum up “resistance” to it, and saying they had a much better plan. When their turn came around to showing their plan, they tripped over their own shoelaces. They never actually had a plan other than “resistance”.

So I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when these people see the other side say that no, that plan won’t work, they just assume that, like they did before, the other side has nothing but bitching and moaning, and no real plan for governance.
 
I wasn't quite sure the best place to put this, figured this thread was the closest:


After I Lived in Norway, America Felt Backward. Here’s Why.

Some years ago, I faced up to the futility of reporting truths about America’s disastrous wars, and so I left Afghanistan for another mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family.

It’s true that they didn’t work much–not by American standards, anyway. In the United States, full-time salaried workers supposedly laboring 40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20 percent clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand, worked only about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the workday, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three during the summer), they had time to enjoy a hike in the forest, a swim with the kids, or a beer with friends—which helps explain why, unlike so many Americans, they are pleased with their jobs.

Often I was invited to go along. I found it refreshing to hike and ski in a country with no land mines, and to hang out in cafés unlikely to be bombed. Gradually, my war-zone jitters subsided and I settled into the slow, calm, pleasantly uneventful stream of life there.

Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent, impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what America’s wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the homeland, there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either overworked or hurting for jobs; the housing is overpriced, the hospitals crowded and understaffed, the schools largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or heroin overdose is a popular form of death, and men in the street threaten women wearing hijabs. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know they were fighting for this?

DUCKING THE SUBJECT

One night I tuned in to the Democrats’ presidential debate to see if they had any plans to restore the America I used to know. To my amazement, I heard the name of my peaceful mountain hideaway: Norway. Bernie Sanders was denouncing America’s crooked version of “casino capitalism” that floats the already-rich ever higher and flushes the working class. He said that we ought to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”




He believes, he added, in “a society where all people do well. Not just a handful of billionaires.” That certainly sounds like Norway. For ages, they’ve worked at producing things for the use of everyone—not the profit of a few—so I was all ears, waiting for Sanders to spell it out for Americans.

But Hillary Clinton quickly countered, “We are not Denmark.” Smiling, she said, “I love Denmark,” and then delivered a patriotic punch line: “We are the United States of America.” (Well, there’s no denying that.) She also praised capitalism and “all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families.” She didn’t seem to know that Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians do that too, and with much higher rates of success.

The truth is that almost a quarter of American start-ups are not founded on brilliant new ideas, but on the desperation of men or women who can’t get a decent job. The majority of all American enterprises are solo ventures having zero payrolls, employing no one but the entrepreneur, and often quickly wasting away. Sanders said that he was all for small business too, but that meant nothing “if all of the new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent.” (As George Carlin said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”)

In that debate, no more was heard of Denmark, Sweden, or Norway. The audience was left in the dark. Later, in a speech at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Sanders tried to clarify his identity as a democratic socialist. He said he’s not the kind of socialist (with a capital S) who favors state ownership of the means of production. The Norwegian government, on the other hand, owns the means of producing lots of public assets and is the major stockholder in many a vital private enterprise.

I was dumbfounded. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden practice variations of a system that works much better than ours. Yet even the Democratic presidential candidates, who say they love or want to learn from those countries, don’t seem know how they actually work.

WHY WE’RE NOT DENMARK

Proof that they do work is delivered every year in data-rich evaluations by the United Nations and other international bodies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual report on international well-being, for example, measures 11 factors, ranging from material conditions such as affordable housing and employment to quality-of-life matters like education, health, life expectancy, voter participation, and overall citizen satisfaction. Year after year, all the Nordic countries cluster at the top, while the United States lags far behind. In addition, Norway has ranked first on the UN Development Program’s Human Development Index for 12 of the last 15 years, and it consistently tops international comparisons in such areas as democracy, civil and political rights, and freedom of expression and the press.

The Nordic model starts with a deep commitment to equality and democracy, because you can’t have one without the other.

What is it, though, that makes the Scandinavians so different? Since the Democrats can’t tell you and the Republicans wouldn’t want you to know, let me offer you a quick introduction. What Scandinavians call the Nordic model is a smart and simple system that starts with a deep commitment to equality and democracy. That’s two concepts combined in a single goal because, as far as they’re concerned, you can’t have one without the other.

Right there, they part company with capitalist America, now the most unequal of all the developed nations, and consequently a democracy no more. Political scientists say it has become an oligarchy, run at the expense of its citizenry by and for the superrich. Perhaps you’ve noticed that.

In the last century, Scandinavians, aiming for their egalitarian goal, refused to settle solely for any of the ideologies competing for power—not capitalism or fascism, not Marxist socialism or communism. Geographically stuck between powerful nations waging hot and cold wars for such doctrines, Scandinavians set out to find a middle path. That path was contested—by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand, and by capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other—but in the end, it led to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce. Struggles like this took place around the world in the 20th century, but the Scandinavians alone managed to combine the best ideas of both camps while chucking out the worst.

In 1936, the popular US journalist Marquis Childs first described the result to Americans in the book Sweden: The Middle Way. Since then, all the Scandinavian countries, and their Nordic neighbors Finland and Iceland, have been improving upon that hybrid system. Today in Norway, negotiations between the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions and the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise determine the wages and working conditions of most capitalist enterprises, public and private, that create wealth, while high but fair progressive income taxes fund the state’s universal welfare system, benefiting everyone. In addition, those confederations work together to minimize the disparity between high-wage and lower-wage jobs. As a result, Norway ranks with Sweden, Denmark, and Finland as among the most income-equal countries in the world, and its standard of living tops the charts.

Nordic countries give their populations freedom from the market by using capitalism as a tool to benefit everyone.

So here’s the big difference: In Norway, capitalism serves the people. The government, elected by the people, sees to that. All eight of the parties that won parliamentary seats in the last national election—including the conservative Høyre party now leading the government—are committed to maintaining the welfare state. In the United States, however, neoliberal politics puts the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and capitalists have used the wealth generated by their enterprises (as well as financial and political manipulations) to capture the state and pluck the chickens.

They’ve done a masterful job of chewing up organized labor. Today, only 11 percent of American workers belong to a union. In Norway, that number is 52 percent; in Denmark, 67 percent; in Sweden, 70 percent. Thus, in the United States, oligarchs maximize their wealth and keep it, using the “democratically elected” government to shape policies and laws favorable to the interests of their foxy class. They bamboozle the people by insisting, as Hillary Clinton did at that debate, that all of us have the “freedom” to create a business in the “free” marketplace, which implies that being hard up is our own fault.

In the Nordic countries, on the other hand, democratically elected governments give their populations freedom from the market by using capitalism as a tool to benefit everyone. That liberates their people from the tyranny of the mighty profit motive that warps so many American lives, leaving them freer to follow their own dreams—to become poets or philosophers, bartenders or business owners, as they please.

FAMILY MATTERS

Maybe our politicians don’t want to talk about the Nordic model because it shows so clearly that capitalism can be put to work for the many, not just the few.

Consider the Norwegian welfare state. It’s universal. In other words, aid to the sick or the elderly is not charity, grudgingly donated by elites to those in need. It is the right of every individual citizen. That includes every woman, whether or not she is somebody’s wife, and every child, no matter its parentage. Treating every person as a citizen frees each one from being legally possessed by another—a husband, for example, or a tyrannical father.

Which brings us to the heart of Scandinavian democracy: the equality of women and men. In the 1970s, Norwegian feminists marched into politics and picked up the pace of democratic change. Norway needed a larger labor force, and women were the answer. Housewives moved into paid work on equal footing with men, nearly doubling the tax base. That has, in fact, meant more to Norwegian prosperity than the coincidental discovery of North Atlantic oil reserves. The Ministry of Finance recently calculated that those additional working mothers add to Norway’s net national wealth a value equivalent to its “total petroleum wealth”—currently held in the world’s largest sovereign-wealth fund, worth over $873 billion. By 1981, women were sitting in parliament, in the prime minister’s chair, and in her cabinet.

American feminists also marched for such goals in the 1970s, but the big boys, busy with their own White House intrigues, initiated a war on women that set the country back and still rages today in brutal attacks on women’s basic civil rights, healthcare, and reproductive freedom. In 1971, thanks to the hard work of organized feminists, Congress passed the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Bill to establish a multibillion-dollar national daycare system for the children of working parents. In 1972, President Richard Nixon vetoed it, and that was that. In 1972, Congress also passed a bill (first proposed in 1923) to amend the Constitution to grant equal rights of citizenship to women. Ratified by only 35 states—three short of the required 38—that Equal Rights Amendment was declared dead in 1982, leaving American women in legal limbo. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, obliterating six decades of US social-welfare policy “as we know it,” ending federal cash payments to the nation’s poor, and consigning millions of female heads of household and their children to poverty, where many still dwell 20 years later. Today, even privileged women, torn between their underpaid work and their kids, are overwhelmed.

Things happened very differently in Norway. There, feminists and sociologists pushed hard against the biggest obstacle still standing in the path to full democracy: the nuclear family. In the 1950s, the world-famous American sociologist Talcott Parsons had pronounced that arrangement—with the hubby at work and the little wife at home—the ideal setup in which to socialize children. But in the 1970s, the Norwegian state began to deconstruct that undemocratic ideal by taking upon itself the traditional, unpaid household duties of women. Caring for children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled became the basic responsibilities of the universal welfare state, freeing women in the workforce to enjoy both their jobs and their families.

Paradoxically, setting women free made family life more genuine. Many in Norway say it has made both men and women more themselves and more alike: more understanding and happier. It also helped kids slip from the shadow of helicopter parents. In Norway, both mother and father in turn take paid parental leave from work during the child’s first year or longer. At age 1, however, children start attending a neighborhood barnehage(kindergarten) for schooling spent largely outdoors. By the time kids enter free primary school at age 6, they are remarkably self-sufficient, confident, and good-natured. They know their way around town, and if caught in a snowstorm in the forest, how to build a fire and find the makings of a meal. (One kindergarten teacher explained, “We teach them early to use an ax so they understand it’s a tool, not a weapon.”)

To Americans, the notion of a school “taking away” your child to make her an ax wielder is monstrous. Yet though it’s hard to measure, it’s likely that Scandinavian children actually spend more quality time with their non-work-obsessed parents than does a typical middle-class American child being driven by a stressed-out mother from music lessons to karate. For all these reasons and more, the international organization Save the Children cites Norway as the best country on earth in which to raise kids, while the United States finishes far down the list, in 33rd place.

DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT

This little summary just scratches the surface of Scandinavia, so I urge curious readers to Google away. But be forewarned: You’ll find much criticism of all the Nordic-model countries. Worse, neoliberal pundits, especially the Brits, are always beating up on the Scandinavians, predicting the imminent demise of their social democracies. Self-styled experts still in thrall to Margaret Thatcher tell Norwegians they must liberalize their economy and privatize everything short of the royal palace. Mostly, the Norwegian government does the opposite—or nothing at all—and social democracy keeps on ticking.

It’s not perfect, of course. It has always been a carefully considered work in progress. Governance by consensus takes time and effort. You might think of it as slow democracy. Even so, it’s light-years ahead of us.

https://www.thenation.com/article/after-i-lived-in-norway-america-felt-backward-heres-why/
 
Yeah, he lost me on the "you can't have democracy without equality". Sure you can, as long as everyone gets one vote.

Anyway, I've never liked the progressive version of supposedly "moving forward". To me, "forward" has meant moving towards more individual liberty, and lessening the power of the state. Ceding power and authority to the state has always struck me as moving backwards.
 
More positive fallout from the tax bill

Apple to hire 20,000, open second headquarters and pay $38 billion tax bill on overseas profits

$350 Billion Contribution to US Economy Over Next Five Years

Cupertino, California — Apple today announced a new set of investments to build on its commitment to support the American economy and its workforce, concentrated in three areas where Apple has had the greatest impact on job creation: direct employment by Apple, spending and investment with Apple’s domestic suppliers and manufacturers, and fueling the fast-growing app economy which Apple created with iPhone and the App Store. Apple is already responsible for creating and supporting over 2 million jobs across the United States and expects to generate even more jobs as a result of the initiatives being announced today.
Combining new investments and Apple’s current pace of spending with domestic suppliers and manufacturers — an estimated $55 billion for 2018 — Apple’s direct contribution to the US economy will be more than $350 billion over the next five years, not including Apple’s ongoing tax payments, the tax revenues generated from employees’ wages and the sale of Apple products.

Planned capital expenditures in the US, investments in American manufacturing over five years and a record tax payment upon repatriation of overseas profits will account for approximately $75 billion of Apple’s direct contribution.
“Apple is a success story that could only have happened in America, and we are proud to build on our long history of support for the US economy,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We believe deeply in the power of American ingenuity, and we are focusing our investments in areas where we can have a direct impact on job creation and job preparedness. We have a deep sense of responsibility to give back to our country and the people who help make our success possible.”
Apple, already the largest US taxpayer, anticipates repatriation tax payments of approximately $38 billion as required by recent changes to the tax law. A payment of that size would likely be the largest of its kind ever made.

Apple will spend an estimated $55 billion with US suppliers and manufacturers in 2018.

Growing Apple’s US Operations
Apple expects to invest over $30 billion in capital expenditures in the US over the next five years and create over 20,000 new jobs through hiring at existing campuses and opening a new one. Apple already employs 84,000 people in all 50 states.
The company plans to establish an Apple campus in a new location, which will initially house technical support for customers. The location of this new facility will be announced later in the year.
Over $10 billion of Apple’s expanded capital expenditures will be investments in data centers across the US. Over the last decade, Apple has invested billions of dollars in data centers and co-located facilities in seven US states, including North Carolina, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona and a recently announced project in Iowa.
Today, Apple is breaking ground on a new facility in downtown Reno, which will support its existing Nevada facilities.
All of Apple’s US facilities, including offices, retail stores and data centers, are powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources like solar, wind and micro-hydro power, which Apple generates or purchases from local projects. The new campus announced today will also be powered entirely by green energy.

Investing in Apple’s Domestic Suppliers and Manufacturing Partners

Building on the initial success of the Advanced Manufacturing Fund announced last spring, Apple is increasing the size of the fund from $1 billion to $5 billion. The fund was established to support innovation among American manufacturers and help others establish a presence in the US. It is already backing projects with leading manufacturers in Kentucky and rural Texas.
Apple works with over 9,000 American suppliers — large and small businesses in all 50 states — and each of Apple’s core products relies on parts or materials made in the US or provided by US-based suppliers.

Preparing Students for the App Economy

Apple, which has a 40-year history in education, also plans to accelerate its efforts across the US in support of coding education as well as programs focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (STEAM).
The iOS app economy has created more than 1.6 million jobs in the US and generated $5 billion in revenue for American app developers in 2017. With demand for coding skills stronger than ever, today there are more than 500,000 unfilled programming-related positions across the country, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2020 there will be 1.4 million more software development jobs than applicants qualified to fill them.1
To address the coding skills gap and help prepare more people for jobs in software development, Apple created a powerful yet easy-to-learn coding language called Swift, the free Swift Playgrounds app and a free curriculum, App Development with Swift, which are available to anyone and are already being used by millions of students at K-12 schools, summer camps and leading community colleges across the country. Over 100,000 students and teachers have also attended coding classes at Apple retail stores.
Apple will expand these initiatives and add new programs to support teachers and teacher training. The company is also increasing funding for its ConnectED program, so students in historically underserved communities have a chance to learn app coding skills and enjoy other benefits of technology in the classroom.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/01/apple-accelerates-us-investment-and-job-creation/
 
Ceding power and authority to the state has always struck me as moving backwards.

That's the funny thing about it. Progressivism is regressive in reality. For most of written history, the king owned everything, including his subjects, and the peasants were granted whatever they got by the grace of the sovereign. Then you had the enlightenment and the ideas of private property and natural rights, and you had a couple centuries which moved away from the previous model. Then the progressive movement starting in the early 20th century looked to take us all back in time.
 
That's the funny thing about it. Progressivism is regressive in reality. For most of written history, the king owned everything, including his subjects, and the peasants were granted whatever they got by the grace of the sovereign. Then you had the enlightenment and the ideas of private property and natural rights, and you had a couple centuries which moved away from the previous model. Then the progressive movement starting in the early 20th century looked to take us all back in time.
Can you expand on how you see that?
 
Can you expand on how you see that?

See what exactly? How progressivism attempts to regress society back to the sovereign ruler and away from individual rights? I thought it was pretty self explanatory. Now, I'm not necessarily talking about cultural progressivism, like race relations and feminism. If these groups feel they are being treated unfairly in society, they have every right to bring attention to that. It's when you get the government involved in it that it becomes regressive.

And it all comes back to property rights, which I've talked about countless times already. In the old days, everything belonged to the king. You had no right to anything. You got what he wanted to give you. Then in the 1600s you had guys like Hobbes and Locke put forward the ideas of the rights of the individual. The right of the individual to own property led to the Industrial Revolution and allowed for the first real economic growth in history and a real increase in the standard of living of all people.

In the 1890s in the U.S., you had the rise of progressivism as a result of the perceived inequality of wealth, despite the fact that everyone was wealthier than they were before. They wanted to break up the trusts, even though most of them weren't monopolies anyway, and any of them that were only got that way because of government privileges. They wanted safety regulations in the workplace, which is admirable enough, but you don't need the government to accomplish that. But that's what they did. Suddenly it didn't matter who owned the property, because the government was going to control it. And tax it. Ownership literally means that you are sovereign authority over that property. So if the government controls it and taxes it, who owns it?

Then it was that gold and silver couldn't be money, because the wealthy would just horde it, even though it had never happened before. That economic illiteracy led to the creation of the Federal Reserve, which allows for easy theft by the government just printing money. And it takes even more economic ignorance to not see how that is. People think if they have money they have wealth. Money is what you exchange for wealth. So if the government prints money, they use it to take wealth that you and I can no longer buy or have to pay more money for.

And so on. FDR. LBJ. Nixon. Today, the idea that people own property is a joke. Your money is taxed. Your business is regulated. Via the printing press, the government has unlimited access to the wealth of society. You had dumbass Obama with his "you didn't build that." Because things like roads are so complicated, idiots like us never would have figured out how to move people and property around the Earth without government taking our money and doing it for us. People think things like health care are rights, as though you have the right to someone's labor to treat you if you're sick. No one understands what rights are, and the sovereign government owns everything again. Trump might as well wear a crown.
 
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See what exactly? How progressivism attempts to regress society back to the sovereign ruler and away from individual rights? I thought it was pretty self explanatory. Now, I'm not necessarily talking about cultural progressivism, like race relations and feminism. If these groups feel they are being treated unfairly in society, they have every right to bring attention to that. It's when you get the government involved in it that it becomes regressive.

And it all comes back to property rights, which I've talked about countless times already. In the old days, everything belonged to the king. You had no right to anything. You got what he wanted to give you. Then in the 1600s you had guys like Hobbes and Locke put forward the ideas of the rights of the individual. The right of the individual to own property led to the Industrial Revolution and allowed for the first real economic growth in history and a real increase in the standard of living of all people.

In the 1890s in the U.S., you had the rise of progressivism as a result of the perceived inequality of wealth, despite the fact that everyone was wealthier than they were before. They wanted to break up the trusts, even though most of them weren't monopolies anyway, and any of them that were only got that way because of government privileges. They wanted safety regulations in the workplace, which is admirable enough, but you don't need the government to accomplish that. But that's what they did. Suddenly it didn't matter who owned the property, because the government was going to control it. And tax it. Ownership literally means that you are sovereign authority over that property. So if the government controls it and taxes it, who owns it?

Then it was that gold and silver couldn't be money, because the wealthy would just horde it, even though it had never happened before. That economic illiteracy led to the creation of the Federal Reserve, which allows for easy theft by the government just printing money. And it takes even more economic ignorance to not see how that is. People think if they have money they have wealth. Money is what you exchange for wealth. So if the government prints money, they use it to take wealth that you and I can no longer buy or have to pay more money for.

And so on. FDR. LBJ. Nixon. Today, the idea that people own property is a joke. Your money is taxed. Your business is regulated. Via the printing press, the government has unlimited access to the wealth of society. You had dumbass Obama with his "you didn't build that." Because things like roads are so complicated, idiots like us never would have figured out how to move people and property around the Earth without government's help. People think things like health care are rights, as though you have the right to someone's labor to treat you if you're sick. No one understands what rights are, and the sovereign government owns everything again. Trump might as well wear a crown.
OK. I thought you were implying we had a single ruler. Seemed odd.
 
Yeah, he lost me on the "you can't have democracy without equality". Sure you can, as long as everyone gets one vote.

I think the use of the term "democracy" here is referring to "liberal democracy." That's because I don't think this is true if we wouldn't consider states like China or Saddam's Iraq as democracies, even though they have universally available democratic voting rights just as America does. In fact, most countries on Earth consider themselves democracies even though most wouldn't be considered as such by Western standards.

So with that in mind, I think the quote here comes from the philosophical derivation of the ideal democracy as a moral consequence of a free and equal society where citizens have agency of action, form consensus opinions, and abide by a social contract wherein all persons have equal liberty, and opportunity within society.

Within such a framework, for a free democratic state to exist, it's citizens must have, of course, both freedom and equality; and any such society where there is freedom, equality, and consensus to form a state governed by the people is both an egalitarian society as well as a "liberal democracy."

Now, again, one could argue that the overall concept of democracy is broader than this, and that places like China or the USSR are/were, in fact, democracies in their own right - and that'd be true. However, I think by simply adding the adjective "liberal" to "democracy" resolves the confusion.

Anyway, I've never liked the progressive version of supposedly "moving forward". To me, "forward" has meant moving towards more individual liberty, and lessening the power of the state. Ceding power and authority to the state has always struck me as moving backwards.

In some ways and not others, right?

I mean, you could change the United States rather radically; greatly expanding citizen protections and the social safety net, while maintaining or even expending individual freedoms, advancing education, research, technology and the arts... So, I don't think progressivism entails greater government authority relative to where we are today.
 
Progressivism is regressive in reality.

Well, for one, progressivism does not require the state as the means of moving reformational progress forward. Liberal progressivism is the ideology that state policy can be used for reform and advancement; and statism does not entail regressivism -- that makes no sense.

I also don't see how that would be "regressive," considering regressive and reactionary ideologies would want to call back to a time prior to the progress and reforms that were made; thus, in this context your comment here seems like somewhat of an contradiction in terms.
 
Well, for one, progressivism does not require the state as the means of moving reformational progress forward.

You're right, it doesn't. But progressivism today doesn't acknowledge that. It would be nice if they did.

Liberal progressivism is the ideology that state policy can be used for reform and advancement; and statism does not entail regressivism -- that makes no sense.

That's not what I said though. Western society wasn't stateless from roughly 1700-1900. It had progressed away from centralized ownership of society's wealth, however. Hence...

I also don't see how that would be "regressive," considering regressive and reactionary ideologies would want to call back to a time prior to the progress and reforms that were made; thus, in this context your comment here seems like somewhat of an contradiction in terms.

Progressive (at least in the usual context of the term) ideology does want to call back to the time prior to decentralized property ownership. And has succeeded in doing so. Now we don't have one tyrant on the throne, we have millions of tyrants empowering a select ruling class, but the effect is the same.
 

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