From: Wayne E Baisley (baisley@alumni.rice.edu)
Date: Sat Oct 14 2000 - 21:41:06 PDT
> For example, from Herbert Hoover until the present, most people of
> good intention have believed that it's a good thing to tax large
> inheritances, because too much inherited wealth, we figure, leads to
> Versailles and we all know what THAT led to.
Yeah, all the water on Mars evaporated. Tom, you know this argument is
entirely specious (however true it may be of some good sheeple). Sure,
nobody wants a revolution. But it's not bloody likely. Our situation
is and has been utterly different from France's. Living under an
absolute monarchy tends to make people lose their heads, as it were.
Even England had unlimited inheritances with its tendency to produce a
self-serving, indolent, decadent peerage, and featured high taxes for
the lower classes. But they didn't collapse into a frog-stomping
revolution. Having a monarchy with limited power certainly helped in
that respect. The key is limited governmental powers, non?
This place was designed for that exact end. Sure, inheriting wealth can
make for spoiled offspring, but it's not the state's place to address
that issue, in this country. There is simply no justification for this
confiscation of wealth, not to mention the fact that it's lame social
policy. Besides which, it doesn't work, does it? It clearly misses
that putative "good thing" it supposedly aims at, at least at the top
end, where it would "do the most good". Or have the Rockefellers been
taking over the world from scratch in every generation? Are Gates' kids
going to have to work? Hardly, and that doesn't bother me in the
slightest. They'll be able to buy the finest politicians. (Maybe even
an Attorney General? %-)
This evil tax policy forces bogus financial decisions and causes misery
for a significant fraction of the people with medium inheritances. If
you feel that the state has unreasonably stayed its hand in exacting
tribute from *your* inheritance, by all means, send more to the
treasury. Or send it to the people in Houston so they can shut down the
refineries and breathe again. But, include me out. "Trust me."
But you are absolutely correct, Tom, that we keep voting clowns into
Congress who will bring home the bacon they most recently cut from us.
Cheers,
Wayne
Completely unnecessary quote triple-play!
Is it just or reasonable, that most voices against the main end of
government should enslave the less number that would be free? More just
it is, doubtless, if it come to force, that a less number compel a
greater to retain, which can be no wrong to them, their liberty, than
that a greater number, for the pleasure of their baseness, compel a less
most injuriously to be their fellow slaves. They who seek nothing but
their own liberty, have always the right to win it, whenever they have
the power, be the voices never so numerous that oppose it.
John Milton
We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed
by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must
become.
Benito Mussolini
Foul Ole Ron [is] a member of the Beggars' Guild. He is a Mutterer - he
walks behind people muttering in his own private language, until they
give him money not to. His familiar phrases include "Bug'r'em",
"Bugrit", and "Millennium Hand and Shrimp". People assume that Foul Ole
Ron has no grasp on reality, but this is not true. He holds very
tightly indeed onto reality, but it is not the one shared by most of the
rest of the world.
Terry Pratchett
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