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FrankRep
05-18-2011, 04:58 AM
http://www.thenewamerican.com/images/stories2011/00columnists/walter_williams.jpg



The liberal vision of government is easily understood and makes perfect sense if one acknowledges their misunderstanding and implied assumptions about the sources of income.


Understanding Liberals (http://www.thenewamerican.com/opinion/walter-williams/7518-understanding-liberals)

Walter Williams | The New American (http://www.thenewamerican.com/)
18 May 2011


The liberal vision of government is easily understood and makes perfect sense if one acknowledges their misunderstanding and implied assumptions about the sources of income. Their vision helps explain the language they use and policies they support, such as income redistribution and calls for the rich to give something back.

Suppose the true source of income was a gigantic pile of money meant to be shared equally amongst Americans. The reason some people have more money than others is because they got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. That being the case, justice requires that the rich give something back, and if they won't do so voluntarily, Congress should confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners.

A competing liberal implied assumption about the sources of income is that income is distributed, as in distribution of income. There might be a dealer of dollars. The reason why some people have more dollars than others is because the dollar dealer is a racist, a sexist, a multinationalist, or a conservative. The only right thing to do, for those to whom the dollar dealer unfairly dealt too many dollars, is to give back their ill-gotten gains. If they refuse to do so, then it's the job of Congress to use their agents at the IRS to confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners. In a word, there must be a re-dealing of the dollars or what some people call income redistribution.

The sane among us recognize that in a free society, income is neither taken nor distributed; for the most part, it is earned. Income is earned by pleasing one's fellow man. The greater one's ability to please his fellow man, the greater is his claim on what his fellow man produces. Those claims are represented by the number of dollars received from his fellow man.

Say I mow your lawn. For doing so, you pay me $20. I go to my grocer and demand, "Give me 2 pounds of steak and a six-pack of beer that my fellow man produced." In effect, the grocer asks, "Williams, you're asking your fellow man to serve you. Did you serve him?" I reply, "Yes." The grocer says, "Prove it."

That's when I pull out the $20 I earned from serving my fellow man. We can think of that $20 as "certificates of performance." They stand as proof that I served my fellow man. It would be no different if I were an orthopedic doctor, with a large clientele, earning $500,000 per year by serving my fellow man. By the way, having mowed my fellow man's lawn or set his fractured fibula, what else do I owe him or anyone else? What's the case for being forced to give anything back? If one wishes to be charitable, that's an entirely different matter.

Contrast the morality of having to serve one's fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces with congressional handouts. In effect, Congress says, "You don't have to serve your fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces. We'll take what he produces and give it to you. Just vote for me."

Who should give back? Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart, Bill Gates founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer. Which one of these billionaires acquired their wealth by coercing us to purchase their product? Which has taken the property of anyone?

Each of these examples, and thousands more, is a person who served his fellow men by producing products and services that made life easier. What else do they owe? They've already given.

If anyone is obliged to give something back, they are the thieves and recipients of legalized theft, namely people who've used Congress, including America's corporate welfare queens, to live at the expense of others. When a nation vilifies the productive and makes mascots of the unproductive, it doesn't bode well for its future.


Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.


SOURCE:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/opinion/walter-williams/7518-understanding-liberals

Uncle Emanuel Watkins
05-18-2011, 05:25 AM
http://www.thenewamerican.com/images/stories2011/00columnists/walter_williams.jpg



The liberal vision of government is easily understood and makes perfect sense if one acknowledges their misunderstanding and implied assumptions about the sources of income.


Understanding Liberals (http://www.thenewamerican.com/opinion/walter-williams/7518-understanding-liberals)

Walter Williams | The New American (http://www.thenewamerican.com/)
18 May 2011


The liberal vision of government is easily understood and makes perfect sense if one acknowledges their misunderstanding and implied assumptions about the sources of income. Their vision helps explain the language they use and policies they support, such as income redistribution and calls for the rich to give something back.

Suppose the true source of income was a gigantic pile of money meant to be shared equally amongst Americans. The reason some people have more money than others is because they got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. That being the case, justice requires that the rich give something back, and if they won't do so voluntarily, Congress should confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners.

A competing liberal implied assumption about the sources of income is that income is distributed, as in distribution of income. There might be a dealer of dollars. The reason why some people have more dollars than others is because the dollar dealer is a racist, a sexist, a multinationalist, or a conservative. The only right thing to do, for those to whom the dollar dealer unfairly dealt too many dollars, is to give back their ill-gotten gains. If they refuse to do so, then it's the job of Congress to use their agents at the IRS to confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners. In a word, there must be a re-dealing of the dollars or what some people call income redistribution.

The sane among us recognize that in a free society, income is neither taken nor distributed; for the most part, it is earned. Income is earned by pleasing one's fellow man. The greater one's ability to please his fellow man, the greater is his claim on what his fellow man produces. Those claims are represented by the number of dollars received from his fellow man.

Say I mow your lawn. For doing so, you pay me $20. I go to my grocer and demand, "Give me 2 pounds of steak and a six-pack of beer that my fellow man produced." In effect, the grocer asks, "Williams, you're asking your fellow man to serve you. Did you serve him?" I reply, "Yes." The grocer says, "Prove it."

That's when I pull out the $20 I earned from serving my fellow man. We can think of that $20 as "certificates of performance." They stand as proof that I served my fellow man. It would be no different if I were an orthopedic doctor, with a large clientele, earning $500,000 per year by serving my fellow man. By the way, having mowed my fellow man's lawn or set his fractured fibula, what else do I owe him or anyone else? What's the case for being forced to give anything back? If one wishes to be charitable, that's an entirely different matter.

Contrast the morality of having to serve one's fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces with congressional handouts. In effect, Congress says, "You don't have to serve your fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces. We'll take what he produces and give it to you. Just vote for me."

Who should give back? Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart, Bill Gates founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer. Which one of these billionaires acquired their wealth by coercing us to purchase their product? Which has taken the property of anyone?

Each of these examples, and thousands more, is a person who served his fellow men by producing products and services that made life easier. What else do they owe? They've already given.

If anyone is obliged to give something back, they are the thieves and recipients of legalized theft, namely people who've used Congress, including America's corporate welfare queens, to live at the expense of others. When a nation vilifies the productive and makes mascots of the unproductive, it doesn't bode well for its future.


Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.


SOURCE:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/opinion/walter-williams/7518-understanding-liberals

[1] The golden mean of measuring politics was invented by the philosopher Aristotle in ancient Greece. He did not do this with the intentions of creating political disparity; but, paradoxically, he did this to help swing an extremist Greece back towards moderacy, politically speaking. As Europe has corrupted away from this original intention of Aristotle's golden mean, the United States has corrupted two steps away from it.
[2] While the two party system was an advancement by the "more perfect union" (necessary tyranny) established by our Founding Fathers in The U.S. Constitution, with this being the U.S. government itself, the American Movement was an advancement by the people (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Mark Twain) in order to return them to their original Civil Purpose established by our Founders in The Declaration of Independence.
[3] The natural law declared by our Founding Fathers is the only self evident truths easily understood and the only ones to make crystal clear sense as they reduce unalienably not to each individual partisan mind, but to the collective bipartisan soul, heart, or conscience of every American.

If I live under a bridge, leave me alone. By natural law (right), I, the people, own all the property and wealth. If you bother me, if you make any legislations (laws), adminstrations (prosecutions), or judgements (persecutions) against this Civil Purpose of the people, you will be held to a higher penalty under God's judgement.

In understanding this, you have no excuse for acting irresponsibly.

Now, why do you behave yourself as a tyrant? You do so because of your conscience regardless of your faith or religious belief.

In other words, the greatest power is not in evil-doing as in a movement towards doing something, but the supreme power is the Truth with its solid foundation being sufficient.

How do we truly become a richer nation? We do so by holding our leaders to a higher penalty under God's judgement.

fisharmor
05-18-2011, 06:07 AM
In other words, the greatest power is not in evil-doing as in a movement towards doing something, but the supreme power is the Truth with its solid foundation being sufficient.

Supreme, yes. Final, certainly. There are an awful lot of powerful lies between now and supremacy.
The "pile of money" lie is powerful, but indicative of a greater lie.
The most powerful lie is this: that the state can be an agent of betterment.
Scripture starts the state as a curse from God, describes it as pretty invariably bad for the middle sections, and ends up speaking in terms of it being an agent of retribution, not betterment.
And if we're examining self-evident truths, we ought to spend time examining the self-evident fact that our experiment has failed and can do naught but continue to fail.
Our tyranny is not necessary. Is this a fallacy? Perhaps, but no greater than that of "limited government".

Uncle Emanuel Watkins
05-18-2011, 08:15 AM
Supreme, yes. Final, certainly. There are an awful lot of powerful lies between now and supremacy.
The "pile of money" lie is powerful, but indicative of a greater lie.
The most powerful lie is this: that the state can be an agent of betterment.
Scripture starts the state as a curse from God, describes it as pretty invariably bad for the middle sections, and ends up speaking in terms of it being an agent of retribution, not betterment.
And if we're examining self-evident truths, we ought to spend time examining the self-evident fact that our experiment has failed and can do naught but continue to fail.
Our tyranny is not necessary. Is this a fallacy? Perhaps, but no greater than that of "limited government".

As I do understand all of this, it is difficult to piece it together. Here goes:
Our government wasn't established by legal precedence. Our Founding Fathers utlized the scientific method of natural law to establish certain truths unalienably with these slicing through to supercede every past tradition and every future event yet to occur. This scheme by our Founders established a "Civil Purpose" for the people.
Okay, let me give an example. Let's say you are the Almighty and desire life. Being Who you are, you see the deception immediately. And what is that? Well, in creating life, one only needs the Truth. Being fallen in comparison, deception leads people into thinking that some kind of action is required.
However, as the Truth was unapprochable as a goal for our Founding Fathers, they couldn't utilize that in their arguments. So, they did the next best thing by, instead, utilizing the science of natural law to establish certain truths as both self evident (tautological) and unalienable (analysis).
However, in establishing a natural law, it was necessary for a natural philosopher (scientist) to present the conclusion on both the tautological and the analytical levels (In other words, our Founding Fathers weren't stupid).
Why was this a requirement?
Well, 1) this was needed as a result of fall-out from Gallileo when he proved Aristotle's scientific use of logic as faulty while at the same time the Catholic Church had adopted the ancient philosopher's works as scripture (as God's Holy natural laws). 2) After these problems in rational thinking were exposed, science (natural philosophy) didn't know what to do with itself and was ready to scrap the use of the rational process of logic altogether. 3) This led to Descartes attempting to recover the use of rational thought not by the use of logic, mind you, but by utilizing a classic platonic best-principled kind of statement concluding *"I think, therefore I am (corgito ergo sum). 4) This led to the science of natural law which forumlated conclusions by requiring one to reduce to pure undeniable tautological terms. 5) In order to explain these tautological terms, an analysis of the conclusion was also necessary which led to the development of the field of linguistics (I told you our Founding Fathers weren't stupid).
In other words, after reducing to their natural law and declaring it to the king in tautological terms, the tyrant could have just pretended to misinterpret, misconstrue, or misunderstand it. So, our founders had to pin him down unalienably somehow which, in the end, they did an excellent job of doing. Whether the king ignored the natural law outright on the tautological level or failed to see the analysis of it unalienably with his conscience, he could still be judged inhumane and divorced as the rightful ruler over the American people.
*"I think, therefore I am" is not logical. It is, in fact, a best-principled statement.