There are about seven million people making $150k or better, most of them in the top two tax brackets (and the rest in the high end of the 28% bracket). Only about 1.5 million of them are making the sort of money that would let you go without a job or retire after only a few years and still live comfortably for the rest of your life (~$400k or better). The rest of those people are well-off, certainly, but they still have to keep getting up and going to work every day to support themselves; even if you saved diligently on $150k a year, it takes a long time and wise financial decisions to reach the point where they could give up that annual income. So your ultra-wealthy make up less than 25% of the top tax brackets.

Now why don't you go back and document your own claims, before calling out someone else. Your statement comparing the chances of reaching the top 5% from low income roots is not sufficient. Yes, it's easier for a person who grows up with moderate means to reach the top 5% than it is for someone who grows up in poverty. But EASIER is not the same as EASY. Kids in middle class homes who slack off through high school and college and don't learn to do anything useful might have more to fall back on when they fail, but bumming around unemployed all day long isn't going to be enough for them to live anything more than a meager existence, certainly not to become one of the wealthy "modern aristocracy" you're opposing.

You're arguing against a completely different problem. Yeah, publicly available education in the US sucks (relative to other first-world countries, at least). There are a whole host of reasons for this. And low-income families don't usually place enough importance on education, so children grow up unmotivated and miss any opportunity they had to break into a well-paying career. But that's not what I'm talking about.

There's a huge difference between the children of the mega-rich (who can lead a life of luxury purely on money handed down by their parents) and the children of middle-class families (who may have an easier path to a college degree, but are still going to have to work for a living). I'm talking about the latter. That's who makes up the majority of the higher tax brackets.

"Which is more likely to work, all workers and no capitalists or all capitalists and no workers?"

What a dumb argument you two are having. The question is meaningless. Both arrangements will work equally well, which is to say, not at all. It's impossible to produce goods without both capital and workers. If you had all workers, they would by default be the capitalists, as they would have to own their own capital (or sit idle, unable to produce). If you had all capitalists, they would also sit idle, unable to produce, until one or more of them started to do work. It's a false choice.

The fallacy in the mind of the asker of that question is believing that the workers are somehow more important than the capitalists because one capitalist can support many workers, while situations where many capitalists support a single worker are much rarer and harder to define. The system still falls apart with the absence of either side.

Why is it that when people want to disparage the upper class, they always go after people who have their fortunes handed down through generations, and ignore the large percentage of people who became doctors, lawyers, business leaders, or athletes/entertainers through their own hard efforts? Of course there are people who have plenty of money that they did nothing to earn, on account of their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors. But they're only a small part of the total picture, and if you had that sort of money you'd want to be able to secure your family's future too.

I'm not going to side with the poster claiming that the rich are somehow "better" than the rest of the country, but in the vast majority of cases, those who are pulling in significant salaries and paying into the highest tax brackets are doing so because they nourished some trade or talent that allows them to command a high price for their time and efforts. To pretend that all people with money have it because of an accident of birth is pure sophistry.

Oh. Well then by all means, tell us what percentage of all the taxes you paid last year went towards your public utility company.

Just because you know how much tax money in total is going towards a utility doesn't mean you know how much of your own tax money is going towards it, to be able to perform the appropriate comparison. And it wouldn't be as simple as looking at your state income tax bill and then discovering the total amount your state collected in taxes; you'd have to keep track of how much you've paid in sales tax and other taxes to get an appropriate picture of just how much you've paid in to the system. Even if doing that math were possible, it would be too time-consuming for any sane person to do.

Except that you don't necessarily pay more, you just see a higher cost on your monthly bills. The amount you pay towards the public utility is obscured from you, because you will never know how much of your taxes are going towards supporting that utility. Government can use this convenient sleight of hand to make it appear that government control of industry is a good thing to the uninformed consumer.

It's not that each copy has a near-zero cost, it's that producing each additional copy has a near-zero cost. All of the things you mentioned are important, but their costs don't scale significantly as more people acquire the game.

I don't think "pay what you want", in most cases, will be sufficient to recoup the initial costs of a game's development. But I do believe that after a game has been out for several months, and initially excited buyers have already dropped their money on the game, moving to a pay-what-you-want model at that point to squeeze out cash from any who remain interested but didn't believe the game was worth the initial price might be viable.

First off, the right to refuse service to someone in your place of business extends far further than "blacks". Don't make this an issue of racism; at its core, it isn't. Just because some idiots use this to justify some form of their own bigotry doesn't change the fundamental principle at work.

Second, the two scenarios are mutually exclusive; there's nothing about "prioritizing" here. I'm not asking you to be the cop trying to decide which situation to respond to. I am saying that you're using fallacious logic (enacting a law >> more law enforcement required to enforce it == bigger government, so opposers of bigger government should oppose all laws) to try to support your argument.

Your original assertion is also wrong. The "amount" of government IS a quantity. It can be quantified in the number of laws that need to be enforced, in the number of people it employs, in the amount of money it demands from its citizens, and probably by several other metrics as well. Most people, whether libertarian, commie, fascist, or other, believe that SOME amount of government is necessary; they just disagree on how much, and which specific parts of the government are required. But it can definitely be quantified.

I agree that the other poster's statement of "the larger the government is, the fewer choices people have" is incorrect, but mostly on the grounds of being incomplete, not for being fundamentally misguided. A better way to phrase it would be this: each person begins with total freedom, and every law the government enacts restricts that freedom in some way. Some of these laws are clearly beneficial (e.g. a law against killing another person, properly enforced, ensures a level of safety and trust that is critical for advanced society to exist at all). But at some point, government can enact too many laws and infringe upon too many freedoms (e.g. Prohibition). And it's much harder to get a law repealed than it is to get one enacted, unfortunately. That's really the point of the Constitution: a safeguard against laws being passed that infringe upon our most sacred freedoms. Unfortunately, that safeguard is only as strong as the people enforcing it (the judiciary, in this case). And letting the judiciary be chosen by one of the two branches in charge of making the laws (don't act like the executive branch hasn't swerved into law-making territory), the whole system threatens to fall apart.

That's a pretty ridiculous argument to use. You can apply the exact same logic to the following statements:

1. Person X walks into my house and takes all my possessions.
2. To prevent this from happening, I'm relying on the government to enforce my property rights.
3. If enough people act like Person X, my house would require a constant police presence to protect it.
4. Therefore, people who oppose big government should support a system in which anyone can walk into any house and take all its possessions, because it would require less government to enforce.

Lunacy.

...Cher?

This isn't an "alternate universe" question.

Do they often let you open the windows of the planes you're flying in?

That's what they want you to think.

All wrong. Jurors should be a professional class.

1. The average person off the street has only a cursory understanding of the law at best. Professional jurors would be subject to regular testing to prove their qualifications. People who are ignorant of the way laws work wouldn't qualify.

2. Right now we yank people away from their regular professions and tell them that they have to do this whole other job for a week or two before getting to go back. Not only does this have a huge negative impact on the economy, it's thoroughly idiotic. In no other situation does this make sense. Would you grab 12 random people and stick them in a room to fix your car? To teach a second-grade class? To audit accounting records? To cook a meal? No, of course not. You'd find a mechanic, a teacher, a CPA, a chef. Can an average person fix a car, or teach a class, or do taxes, or cook food? Usually, probably, maybe. But are you going to get the same level of consistent performance and accuracy that you would from a trained professional? Nope. So why do this for jurors?

3. Boom, instant jobs. Sure, we'd probably have to pay a meaningful wage for these people instead of the peanuts that jurors currently get as compensation, but the net benefit on the economy as a whole would be huge. I'm 100% libertarian and I'd still support the taxes necessary to make jurors into a professional class; the courts are one of the few legitimate functions of the government and it's worth paying the money to make sure they work properly.

Downsides? Well, it would be harder for people who break the law to get off without punishment by playing on the emotions of the jury. I don't believe that's a negative. It would be important to ensure unbiased hiring and selection; if the juror class was 90% white men there would be a lot of legitimate appeals. But with comparatively little training required to enter the profession, I doubt that would prove to be an issue.

Jury of my peers? I'd much rather have a jury of people who know what the hell they're doing.

This is NOT a true statement. If it were true, we would be held at the mercy of whichever viewer were the most easily offended on all matters. I'm certain I could find people who are still offended by the sight of a man and a woman sleeping fully clothed in the same bed. Or those who are offended by the sight of black people, or gays, or Muslims, etc. etc.

There will never be an agreed-upon definition of how much is "too little" or "too much". There are too many people to ever come to such agreement in a way that satisfies everybody. The "most prudent" decision would be for people who are offended by something to simply TURN IT OFF, whether on behalf of yourself or your children.

I am disturbed by the fact that you don't want your kids growing up thinking that nudity is normal behavior. Nudity is the natural human state. By your own words you are equating it with profanity and violence; you are teaching your children that nudity is wrong and shameful on the same level as harming or insulting another person. This is NOT healthy.