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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (92259)	10/28/2008 11:42:01 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 541598

<<<That creates all sorts of problems, because it is obvious that even if my view is true, individuals still have to take responsibility for their own lives>>> The overwhelming majority of mankind share that view. Every kid that goes to school get that pounded into their heads. Of course there are kids that fail to get it. The Sarah Palins in this world are afraid of the failures in life. They are afraid that authorities are going to come into their homes and confiscate their wealth and give it to the failures (the welfare queen who live in luxury). That is stuff the Sarah Palin's can understand. Excesses of Corporate greed is not anything Sarah Palin and her base are emotionally or intellectually capable of undestanding.

To: Sam who wrote (92259)	10/28/2008 12:43:48 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 541598

You seem to think that one's wealth can be seen simply as "the product of one's own efforts." (Re "wealth," I assume you mean "income" since at issue is the distribution of revenues from income tax and will proceed accordingly.) I don't mean to. I recognize the contribution of infrastructure--people, institutions, facilities, whatever to one's income. I ignored that because it wasn't relevant to the argument. Were the issue income tax and I were I arguing against the taking of income, in general, you'd have a point. But I'm not balking at paying income tax that supports infrastructure. Sure, one's income, that upon which one pays income tax, is not solely the product of one's own efforts. But it isn't remotely the product of the effort of the people who are on the receiving end of the redistribution. And it wouldn't exist at all if one didn't exert the effort. it is obvious that even if my view is true, individuals still have to take responsibility for their own lives. Indeed. Should the executives/management of these companies that are now eligible to receive federal aid be considered to have "earned" their money by "their own efforts"? I'm going to ignore the part of the sentence about the corporation receiving federal aid. (Ain't that something? Pass one law and get something quite different...) If it's your intent to get into that topic, we can do it separately. Corporations are different from citizens. Corporations are, by definition, legal entities separate from the people in them. Whole different set of rules. So I don't see how that's part of the ongoing discussion. As for whether the earnings of the executives are by "their own efforts," well, sure, to the same extent as anyone else who has a job. Their earnings are a matter of contract between them and their employers. We don't know what those contracts specify but I think we can presume that they performed in accordance with them or they would have been removed. It might be nice if contracts included penalties for screwing up that badly or if there were laws against screwing up that badly. Maybe there will turn out to be malfeasance in there somewhere and there will be some penalty.