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The Bald and The Bountiful

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APM

COLLAPSING EUTOPIA-DISASTERS OF A WELFARE STATE

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Posts: 5

(08/29/09 02:48:39)

We are supposed to be looking up to Europe, aren't we? It is the Eutopia-the ideal welfare state or closest to the ideal, because ideal is supposed to be the communism. Free health care, free housing for the needy, old age pension, fantastic unemployment benefits. To be emulated, to be replicated.

But no, wait. Something catastrophic is brewing in the Eutopia. It is collapsing and collapsing in a heap. Just have a look at the birth rates in Europe-Germany and Austria 1.3, Russia and Italy 1.2, Spain 1.1. Out of six lowest birth rates in the world are the five former communist countries- Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Russia and Ukraine. Seventeen countries in Europe have fertility rates below 1.5. According to the demographers, the birth rate for a constant population has to be 2.1 For the Europe as a whole the birth rate is 1.46.

Compare this with the US birth rate of 2.11-just at the replacement level. In the US also, the Red states (Conservatives) are having a higher birth rate than the Blue states (Democrats). The USA has the highest birth rate in the developed world. (Ref: America Alone by Mark Steyn).

By 2050 Italy's population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria's by 36 percent, Estonia's by 52 percent. Seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call lowest low fertility rate of 1.3 births per woman. These countries will find their population halving every 35 years. In practice it will be quicker than this because the young would find it idiotic to take care of old age homes and would flee across the Atlantic. So the governments would discover that not enough taxpayers are around to fund their grand welfare states.

As they say-A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything that you have, including your capacity to reproduce.

But there is an intermediate stage also, a government big enough to give you everything you want is not big enough to get you to give any of it back. That is the position in Europe, the citizens have become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programmes which in the end will put those countries out of business Projected public pension liabilities in 2040 in the US would be around 6.8 percent of the GDP. In Greece the figure is 25 percent that is total societal collapse. . So what, shrug the voters, I paid my taxes, I want my benefits. This is the paradox of the social democracy. When you demand lower taxes and less government you are damned by the Left as "Selfish". The Left on its part offers an appeal to moral virtue: it is better to pay taxes and to share the burden as a community. It is kinder, gentler, more compassionate, and more equitable. However as Europe shows nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow is enjoying the fruits of government healthcare and all the rest he couldn't give a damn about the general societal interest, he has got his and if it is going to bankrupt the state a generation hence well as long as they can keep the cheques coming till he is dead, it is fine by him. Social democracy it turns out is explicitly anti social. Some where along the way these countries redefined the relationship between government and citizen into something closer to that between a drug peddler and the addict. And once you have done that it is very hard to persuade the addict to cut back his habit. Thus the general acceptance everywhere except the US is that the state should run health care. A socialist is the most selfish creature.

Anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing. Once you give the individual responsibility go by, once you accept that the achievement is not an individual responsibility but it is the state's duty to make everybody rich, this is what you have. People start thinking that even producing and raising babies is the responsibility of the state. Or they find it unaffordable to produce and raise babies because of very high taxes which border on extortion. Taxes in Europe are above 50 percent in general. It costs a lot to run a welfare state. They could survive this long because at least they were allowing people to earn freely unlike in -say- India. Of course once you earn you are supposed to give much of it to state for its grand welfare schemes.

The lowest GDP in the world is of North Korea, lower than that of Ghana. It is alleged to be so because of US sanctions. A pet explanations of the communists and also quoted above by Kartic in reference to Cuba. But they don't tell us why a lovely commie state should have anything to do with the profiteering bloodsucking capitalists traders of the satan US? In fact it should be the other way round -the commie states themselves should not have anything to do with US. They should trade among themselves. But always it is like this- communist countries are not doing well because of the sanctions by the US. That too if it somehow becomes known that they are not doing well. Otherwise they remain heaven on earth-workers' paradise.

All of us have been science students at least till VIII class. It is the inviolable rule of the science that theory has to withstand the experimental proof. Otherwise theory is wrong. But when it comes to communism/socialism, this cardinal rule is trumped- whatever are the practical results so readily observable in the commie/socialist states, the theory propounded by the thug named Marx in the Nineteenth century is not to be questioned, not to be reexamined not to be junked.

Seems not even God can save us from the welfare state.

One more point before I finish-in all the nonsense about equitable distribution, it is never specified who will be the distributors and what will be the share of the distributors. So soon the animals discover that the pigs have not only assumed the responsibility to redistribute but have retained milk and the apples also. Some animals are always going to remain more equal than others. Whether it is those who are holding the guns or those who really work hard and take all the risks is the difference between communism/socialism and capitalism.

APM

karticc

Capitalist utopia....Freefall, do u read this?

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Posts: 125

(09/18/09 06:10:43)

Study links 45,000 US deaths to lack of insurance Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday. "We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters. Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage. The findings come amid a fierce debate over Democrats' efforts to reform the nation's $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry by expanding coverage and reducing healthcare costs. President Barack Obama's has made the overhaul a top domestic policy priority, but his plan has been besieged by critics and slowed by intense political battles in Congress, with the insurance and healthcare industries fighting some parts of the plan. The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors government-backed or "single-payer" health insurance. http://economictimes.indi.../articleshow/5027869.cms Kartic Chauhan

pkatre

The martians (read communists) are coming

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Posts: 144

(09/24/09 02:47:58)

APM has fallen for the boogey raising technique used by threatened Capitalists. A state which provides a basic minimum social security is only doing its duty of providing "Right to life and liberty". The free marketeers like our investment bankers want the 'Right to prosperous life and obscene bonuses' at the expense of the State but raise the boogie of communism when the a fraction of that amount is spent on those who are not yet empowered or too weak (like elderly ) to participate in the market process. A welfare state does not interfere with individuals right of choice. It only ensures that the citizen will be taken care of if he/she falls by the wayside in the mad rush for making money. There will be freeloaders in every system. Afterall not all bankers deserved their bonuses.

Parag.

APM

IF ONLY THE POOR COULD EVER COME TO KNOW WHAT IS BEING WROUGHT IN THEIR NAME AND FOR THEIR WELFARE

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Posts: 6

(11/13/09 22:43:06)

I invite colleagues, socialists included of course, to munch on the following over the weekend. Article in the original can be read by clicking on the link at the end of it.

November 13, 2009

The Income Tax and Government Spending

By Gene Schwimmer

Unleashed appetites can ruin a personal life. So also with government.

Why do we have an income tax? The obvious answer would seem to be "for the government to get the funds it needs to run itself." But if that's true, then how does one explain this:

Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits

(in millions of dollars)

Year	Receipts	Outlays	Surplus/ (Deficit)
1907	666	572	87
1912	693	690	3
Source: The Budget for Fiscal Year 2009, Historical Tables, p. 21

Note the fourth column, "Surplus/(Deficit)." As can be seen, the numbers in 1907 and 1912 are positive, meaning that they represent federal budget surpluses. But is there anything else notable about those particular years?

There is. 1907 is the year that President Theodore Roosevelt said this:

When our tax laws are revised, the question of an income tax and an inheritance tax should receive the careful attention of our legislators. In my judgment, both of these taxes should be part of our system of Federal taxation.

And 1912? That's the last year before 1913, the year in which the 16^th Amendment established a nationwide income tax.

But in the previous year, 1912 -- and in 1907, when Theodore Roosevelt advocated an income tax -- the federal budget was in surplus. It didn't need the money.

So again: Why a new tax at a time when the federal government was running surpluses? And why an income tax?

Brian Domitrovic, in his important new book Econoclasts, finds the answer in Theodore Roosevelt's famous "Man in the Arena" speech, delivered three years later at the Sorbonne in Paris. In it, as Domitrovic notes, "Roosevelt acknowledged that civilization generally benefited from its rich inhabitants," but that "there were also the idle, spendthrift, and avaricious rich":

But the man who, having far surpassed the limit of providing for [his], then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should ... be made to feel ... unworthy ...

Here, Roosevelt anticipates the Keynesian fallacy that savers do not contribute "to the benefit of the nation as a whole," but what matters more, when considered in light of T.R.'s earlier advocacy of an income tax, is his apparent belief (inspired by guilt over having been born into wealth?) that the "wealthy" have no right to their wealth, that such wealth is "idle" and "wasted" when left in their hands, and that other people, through their government, have the right -- indeed, the duty -- to seize it for their own use.

The Bible, however, has something quite different to say on the subject:

And God spoke all these words: ... "You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."

To that list, I think we can safely add wealth. When God commanded us not to covet our neighbor's goods, he commanded us not to covet our neighbor's goods for a reason: because it's wrong. And evil leads not to good, but only to more and greater evil. When it comes to taxes, and especially income taxes, Reagan described that evil clearly: "Government does not tax to get the money it needs; government always finds a need for the money it gets."

In 1913, We the People amended the Constitution to allow the federal government to punish "the rich" by seizing from them wealth the government did not need. The government, as Reagan said, quickly found a way to spend that wealth on its priorities, without the consent of those who actually created it. And so it has gone, from that day to this, with ever more spending, ever more taxing, and an ever-growing national debt.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_income_tax_and_government.html

scmitra

Capitalism!

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Posts: 590

(11/14/09 07:22:08)

When banks started crumbling the world over, capitalists the world over shouted their lungs out for a bailout and governments did oblige-afterall it threatened the world financial systems! So when the wag described capitalism as "Privatisation of Profits and Nationalisation of Losses", I could not but agree!
Yet I dont know which side of the fence I am sitting!
scm

APM

LET THE THUGS SINK

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Posts: 7

(11/14/09 08:07:09)

It is saturday evening. Bacchus has taken over me. But it is Saurabh. I can't help but reply. If spellings are not correct so what? Will you sue me? I am barely able to recognize the keys on the keyboard but I will post reply. It is Saurabh after all after a long time.
The stimulus package was a fraud. It only helped the govt take over private businesses-see we are funding you so we decide everything, From salaries to your production targets. The bureaucrats who can't set up up a Paan shop and run it successfully start controlling companies worth billions, The thugs should have been allowed to sink so that real entrepreneurs could take over. No true capitalist demanded the stimulous package. It was all the handiwork of trade unions and the pseudo-capitalists. You calculate the cost of every job saved by the so-called stimulous package. It is about $250000 per job(and counting). Government must never interfere in the market. Never. We must have true separation of the State and the Economics.

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