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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (9090)	12/16/2010 1:46:35 PM
From: one_less	1 Recommendation Respond to of 10087

Thanks for responding, above and beyond as usual. It's a good question and it was just kind of sitting there.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (9090)	12/16/2010 2:34:56 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 10087

With Tradable Citizenship, there would be great incentive to vote to make things better. At present, the tragedy of the commons electoral systems is "I'd better vote to get my piece of the action before it's all over and the country is bankrupt". Interesting idea. Since I had never heard of it, I was going to post to you to ask if it was one of your originals but thought I'd first google to see if I had missed something. Lo and behold, I found my answer right at the top of the links returned... <g> Re the original question, I have been trading emails with a friend on the question. We had been talking about taxes and he was taking your basic "soak the rich" perspective. He had expressed concern about the growing wealth concentration and advocated higher taxes on the rich on the grounds that wealth concentration threatens democracy and that getting more taxes from the wealthy helps the middle class. Since that didn't compute, I questioned him about the basis for his two assumptions. I did so partly to find out what the thinking behind them might be and partly to see if he could explain himself, produce some rationale. As I posted earlier, I cannot connect the dots between concentrated wealth and democracy in the way he did. Nor can I connect the dots between taxing the rich and improvement in the lot of the middle class. Transferring money from the rich to the Treasury does not inherently change anything for the middle class. Where are the dots? We've been back and forth a few times and he has avoided an explanation for either. In his latest email, he sent me the article from yesterday's NYT that contained the subject quote. Perhaps an appeal to authority (a logical fallacy) is better than nothing, but it's well short of an explanation. Anyway, I googled the quote to find the context and see if there might be some explanation of what was behind Brandeis's thinking. Couldn't find it. But I did find an essay that referenced the quote that suggested that one of the dots might be plutocracy. But, since plutocracy and democracy can and co-exist, I need more dots to get from plutocracy to the demise of democracy. There it sits...