[mostertoaster]

The fact that people think, capital owners who actually provide employment and produce useful things and do better the better they serve the consumer even when their motives aren’t altruistic (and when they are altruistic it is even better) should be taxed more so the giant government corporation can make bureaucrats pockets fatter and waste a bunch of money doing inefficient things is more of a fundamental problem.

[int_19h]

Capital owners don't produce useful things. Their workers do.

And so you can easily turn that argument around: the workers who actually produce the useful things are, for some reason, taxed higher than the owner who didn't lift a finger to produce anything, but is entitled to all the profits by virtue of being the capital owner.

[asgraham]

I was so with you the first half of that. But the notion that everything should be capitalism is just as wrong as the notion that nothing should be capitalism (or, that capitalism only leads to bad things; obviously wrong but somehow a broadly accepted truism).

Capitalism works when a market works; capitalism fails when a market fails. Healthcare is a great example, because there’s an obvious and inherent imbalance in demand vs supply. Firefighting is another great example. These also have externalities to the community as a whole that everyone gets, even when you don’t pay/need the service; so it makes sense to make everyone pay (taxes). Even if you never have a child, even if you send your kids to private school, you live in a society that could only exist because of a (formerly, relatively) high standard of public education. So everyone pays for schools.

The idea of government bureaucrats lining their pockets is also (formerly, relatively) ridiculous: who would get into US government bureaucracy to make money? They are all (formerly, relatively) doing it almost uniformly because they believe in the mission, because they would almost all make more money going private.

[hyperjeff]

i haven’t had my coffee yet, but i’m going to need to see this sentence diagrammed out.