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.

They should ignore the petitions about "building Death Stars" and respond to the realistic ones, such as legalizing marijuana.

This is not difficult.

Thank you, as well. I don't write many multi-paragraph semi-rants like that anymore, but some things need to be said. I didn't exactly have to stand in line behind a bunch of others who were going to say it.

Relatively early in life one gets used to seldom (or never) feeling represented by the opinions of the majority. It's actually rather liberating, once you understand that (sadly) so few are choosing to think for themselves and look beyond the presented/suggested/marketed points of view.

I think you would understand.