on Ron Paul and simplified politics of class taxation

(For this essay, I’m leaving behind a practical focus to interface with the types of intellectual, speculative conversations that are more familiar to some of you- more like you would see in the mainstream media for instance, but with my own distinctive content and context).

What tax system would encourage investment, innovation, competition, and productivity?

Yes, as Ron promotes I think, first would be a repeal of the income tax, which taxes productive earnings. First would be to stop penalizing productivity. This would also remove the immense tax favoritism toward real estate with mortgage interest write-offs and depreciation deductions on property that is not even really depreciating.

Second would be to rocket property taxes. Ron probably does not promote that. This would mean that billionaires who collect millions per month in rent without working would have the current system interrupted. They would be penalized for sitting on huge accumulations of wealth. They would be more willing to sell real estate (of course, at rates that would be drastically reduced because of these two tax system interventions) and invest instead in companies that would be subject to free market competition in a global marketplace.

All this means that rather than the primary tax burden being on the working classes, the primary tax burden would be on the owner class. Can you see the obvious problem already?

In other words, can you see how this platform would be quickly opposed not only by even the modestly wealthy but also by the mafia? A candidate openly promoting this platform even on a local level might not live to election day.

In fact, the advancing of a candidate openly disclosing this platform would predictably result in the wealthy dumping US assets and fleeing to other countries that provide tax regulations more in line with Karl Marx’s communist manifesto- like that of the US currently. Consider that we currently have the perfect system for an elitist lender: a civil religion promoting naive pride in consumer debt- which is already shifting however toward caution, but which is also ripe to wipe out the eager gamblers of the middle classes, plus a tax system burdening the working classes (which to me includes even the upper middle class) and charging them for the repression of the lowest classes. (I think that the prison population in the US is currently 9.7 million, which is several million more than the population of the state of Arizona or New York City).

So, the middle classes or working classes pay for the repression of the lowest classes, protecting the wealthy from the lowest classes and also providing them reliable rent revenues of millions per month plus lots of cheap stuff. Again, I propose that the burden is on any of you to show me that what we already have is not the perfect system of taxation, at least for those who designed and maintain it with their immense campaign contributions and so forth.

People may ask related questions like “why is the US medical culture so far behind science?” “Why are MDs not trained in developmental nutrition and health promotion, but only in half-assed disease prevention and mostly disease management?

The simple answer is profit. Healthy people are just not very profitable.

The more complex answer, though, is power. Unhealthy people are much easier to deceive and manipulate and entice with socialist entitlements and free education for their children and so on. Consider that when a government offers something for free, that something may be the most costly in the long run of all government offerings, yes I mean costly to those who agree to receive the hand-outs and bail-outs….

So, why does the current system punish middle class earnings and favor real estate ownership? Perhaps because the people who set it up already owned much of the real estate and were concerned with creating an impassable barrier (of progressive income taxes) between them and the masses of middle class and lower class humans.

That is of course the “cynical model” of systemic analysis. It is a reasonably logical one though.

Consider that income taxes have been around in the US for LESS THAN 100 YEARS! Does anyone ever ask how governments operated prior to that time?

By the way, you might keep in mind my definition of governments: operations of governing, specifically those operations of governing that utilize organized coercion so effectively that they nearly or actually monopolize any systematic large-scale organized coercion within a certain geographical jurisdiction. Note that mass media is also a governing operation, as are churches, but the use of large-scale organized coercion (AKA intimidation rackets AKA terrorism) is distinctive.

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