I'll never comprehend this tendency to take a subject applicable to many millions of people, and make it personal. I'll never comprehend it because it makes no sense.

You see, my own education _was_ pretty good. I still didn't trust anything so important to random strangers like the school system, so I also made a serious effort to educate myself. It's what I did with time that others spent chasing after footballs and things like that which I found to be meaningless.

Precisely because I know that my personal experience is only anecdotal and not universal, I did not mention my own education in any way. Re-read my prior post and you will see that yourself.

Then take a hard look at the world around you, the kind of politicians who get elected and why, the kind of decisions that are made at the highest levels, the way most people are too busy conforming or running themselves ragged with their burn-out lifestyles to seriously question how things got to be this way, the way this nation is beginning to collapse not because of a foreign enemy, but because of simple mismanagement. You will then see that the general public does not understand the principles you were talking about. That is a problem that the public school system is nominally supposed to have prevented. That is what I was talking about.

The media is simply too powerful and benefits too much from the status quo for this to readily change. The average person is not going to review the methodology of a survey, or try to independently confirm what the talking heads tell them, or assume that advertisements are the most biased source of information imaginable, or assume that people with power are inherently untrustworthy. They'd rather believe that the guy they elect is their buddy who wants to make their life better. It's a sad state of affairs.

What is this modern obsession with how much of one's total income is spent? I certainly spend a higher percentage of my income to survive and make ends meet than anyone remotely "rich". And I don't care -- or rather, I feel no reason to charge them more in taxes as a response to it. That wouldn't put more money in my pocket because federal tax policy has had little to do with funding government for a very long time now.

What I want is to balance the federal budget, stop enforcing victimless-crime laws such as those concerning drug use, stop trying to be the world's police, stop enforcing at the federal level laws that did not involve crossing state boundaries and laws that otherwise local and state governments are able to handle, and to dissolve the Federal Reserve so we can issue interest-free currency. That would make everyone's burden easier, particularly in non-material terms of freedom.

And if, after all of that, a rich person gets to save more money than I do, good for them. I personally value time with loved ones more than 80-hour workweeks. I get what I want. If rich people value material possessions more than time with loved ones, well, to me they're getting the short end of the stick, but it's not my job to decide that for them. This idea that someone must be punished for being more fortunate (inheritance) or more successful (hard work) than I am is so fucking childish. Even if we somehow could make life perfectly fair for everyone, and we cannot, government is the very least trustworthy entity to bring this about.

This obsession with what somebody else makes and how much more than you they can save up tells me something. It tells me that you have more in common with rich people than you might care to admit. Both of you have an extremely materialistic point of view. You're like two denominations of the same basic faith.

Can you tell me how that would be worse than the current income tax system, with all the information the government must collect to implement it, and all the carrot-and-stick methods it enables? That's the part I am missing. "It's un-American" is rather nebulous.

If you think the federal government involved in commerce is bad, consider how much the IRS knows about your personal life. How much I spent making a transaction at a department store is small fry, especially when you consider that my name need not be recorded at all to implement a sales tax.

That's cute, I mentioned cherry-picking so you will show your superiority by using my term against me. With this you self-identify as one of the lemmings.

Now then, my comment was about how and why those programs are run and who benefits the most by keeping them the way they are. How you would construe that as an argument against the existence of such programs is mind-boggling, but I suppose you'd have less to rail against if you didn't.

Make no mistake, this is by design. The politicians who designed it and refuse to change it benefit, because the recipients overwhelmingly tend to vote for those who promise more of the same (that's the carrot). When a family comes to depend on these benefits and wouldn't be able to make ends meet without them, they fear the possibility that they might be taken away (that's the stick).

With dependency comes power. You can be absolutely certain of one thing: politicians understand this. They have every incentive to keep people in the system.

I really wish the "mechanics" of power were universally taught in the public schools, along with propaganda techniques, particularly the myriad ways you can mislead someone by carefully crafting your message, all without ever making a single false statement. Framing, cherry-picking your facts, characterization, emotional appeals, bandwagon appeals, just to name a few, should be universally taught and understood. Of course, this is unrealistic. The government funds and operates those schools, and there is no way the government is going to sponsor that. It would be like asking Microsoft to recommend OSX.

Yes but this calm, rational, mature, objective point of view doesn't provide the visceral "satisfaction" of punishing people who are easily demonized and easy (often with reason) to hate. So politically, it doesn't sell very well. It doesn't appeal at a base level to the masses who vote emotionally instead of taking the time to recognize certain cause-and-effect relationships.

Politics should be about how to best manage a nation, not what it's become now, which is how to ineffectively resolve one's discontentment with life by trusting liars who don't give a damn about you.

How then do you explain someone like Bill Gates, who for some strange reason continued to work for a long time after having acquired enough wealth to secure the financial future of his great-great-great-great-etc grandchildren?

For some, it's a way of life. I think it's a shallow, hollow, materialistic, empty, and ultimately unsatisfying way of life that can appear glamorous for a while. But it is a way of life. Some people do live to work instead of working in order to live.

You avoid all these problems by taxing consumption instead of income. Not to mention, rich people consume quite a bit more than poor people so this nebulously-defined "fair share" would be achieved. The Fair Tax Act would take care of all of this neatly without burdening the poor, since those at or below the poverty level would pay no net taxes.

Of course, like any proposal that would drastically reduce the government's control over us, the Fair Tax Act gets demagogued left and right by two major groups of people: political forces that love the carrot-and-stick methods of behavior control that an income tax provides, and those who have never seriously researched it and have no knowledge of it beyond hearsay.

And, being a True Believer, he didn't let a little implementation detail like that stop him. No, sir!

That's the problem with True Believers. They tend to think that the ends justify the means.

How to take away their guns?

1) Start a database or "registry" so you know who has the guns and what kind of guns they have.
2) Claim that the registry is totally not for purposes of future confiscation

Just like the US federal income tax was a "temporary wartime measure" and the Social Security Number was never, ever to be used as a form of ID.

Pretty soon the word "racism" will be devoid of all meaning, due to being constantly diluted and trivialized by constantly being used where it does not apply.

Here in the USA, we call them "lobbyists".

I don't know, it may distract them from serious matters, thereby limiting the damage they can do.

I realize that crazy people subjectively believe themselves to be sane. That's why so few of them want to change. The sign of such people is that they get angry and insulting when asked to explain their views. But you would hardly rely on people like this to derive your standard of sanity, unless of course you found them useful for providing a contrast.

In a nation which has the First Amendment, punishing someone for expressing an opinion is objectively crazy. If these people would like to make an attempt to amend the Constitution and remove such First Amendment protections, there is a process for doing so. Until then, not only would deporting someone for a mere view be both crazy and illegal, it is also the classic sign of insecurity shown by small-minded people who feel threatened by opposing points of view. These are not individuals who can stand on the merits of their own reason. These are sheep who must be part of a like-minded flock, to give themselves the illusion of legitimacy by the numbers of other sheep, else they feel alone, isolated, and threatened by the prospect of thinking for themselves.

No one who has sensible views based on solid principles feels a need to persecute and materially harm the lives of others merely for disagreeing. Those who are secure in their well-founded beliefs never deal with dissent by lashing out in such an infantile manner.

That is one reason, among several good reasons, why we have a secret ballot.

Be assured that anyone wishing to change that has malicious intentions, no matter what excuse they provide.