yes, i agree that sometimes no matter how hard you try, you still can fail. i hope that jd7.62's point was to keep working hard, never give up. when you start blaming others for your position in life, it tends to mean that you're giving up.
Occupy Wall Street?
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yes, i agree that sometimes no matter how hard you try, you still can fail. i hope that jd7.62's point was to keep working hard, never give up. when you start blaming others for your position in life, it tends to mean that you're giving up.
I agree, I've never understood how people can throw around the word 'fair tax' without meaning the same % for everyone.
For me it's means if I pay 8% on the dollar a millionaire pays 8% on the dollar.
Bingo. Inglorious, I know times are tough but I am confident that if you keep your goal in mind while being happy with what you have vs what you dont have, you WILL succeed. I cant tell you how many friends of mine had much cooler phones, fancier cars, bigger TVs, premium cable packages, etc etc than my wife and I did. It was easy to get jealous but most of those same people are so far in debt its unreal.
Whats wrong with Ayn Rand? I think she for the most part got it right. There is nothing wrong with looking out for yourself. The individual is what this country was built around. That means individual responsibility for you life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The more and more Ive opened up my eyes to what is happening around me, the more and more Im looking for Galt's Gulch.
well, you asked so.......
Ayn Rand was a Fascist.
She was a writer of rhetoric, not an economist or a sociologist , and all her theories were really about attacking the former soviet union style of communism, from which she was an exile ( she was Russian, not American, which seems to be a big argument in politics these days)
She believed that helping others, altruism, was illicit.
she declared selfishness to be a virtue
She actually formulated that when helping another you should first only consider what profit there is in it for you.
She totally failed to understand ( as do her latter-day adherents) that: (as Adam Smith wrote) "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."
She was an amoral sociopath by any of todays moral ethical or even ( perhaps especially) Christian moral standards.
John Galt was her fictional character from Atlas Shrugged.
i don't want to hijack this thread with a discussion of ayn rand, but she has some very valid points that no amount of mud slinging or red herrings can change. while you might disagree with her ideas of morality, you shouldn't let that jade you to her other contributions. that's throwing the baby out with the bath water.
the baby was metaphorically drowned already, and what you call mud-slinging are verifiable facts.
are you implying that ayn rand's ideas about government and human rights are "drowned"? what do you mean by "drowned"?
and what you call mud-slinging are verifiable facts.
you brought up her views on an entirely different topic in an attempt to poison the conversation and you had no legitimate criticism of the facts in the papers i linked. i call that mud slinging, so you're wrong.
that's on par with someone throwing out charles darwin's theory of evolution because they have a different opinion of god. it doesn't make his theory any less valid.
I find the line that is drawn (99% vs 1%) interesting because it's isn't 99 to 1. It's 53 vs 4747% of Americans don't pay taxes AND receive some sort of government assistance. Pleas note that I make no comment on that issue, but I do wonder where the 99% comes from.
Also, the end goal of Occupy Wall Street is what? End Capitalism?
Yes, the 53% vs. 47% in the case of paying taxes and receiving benefits from the government is what really needs addressed; it needs to be a simple and firm "You pay taxes; you reap the benefits. No taxes; no benefits. Deal with it."
Approximately 34.5% of all privately held wealth is owned by the top 1%, and approximately 50.5% of all privately held wealth is owned by the next 19%. You figure that 85% of all wealth in the U.S. is owned by 20% of the people; only 15% is left for the remaining 80% (and rightly so in some cases). I'm pretty sure that the whole "99% vs. 1%" thing is made-up since it blows things greatly out of proportion thereby getting people angry/excited/etc. and getting them to act upon it.
Ron Paul...
Exactly; that's what I'd call fair. No one should feel cheated if everyone is required to pay the same percentage.
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