Come on folks didn't you realize rich people created all that is from nothing, they are gawds to the right wingnut conservatives and libertarians. Place a rich person in a vacuum and soon the earth and heavens, highways and trains, technology and education, appear from nowhere, from nothing. It is such a magical thing to see that only the wingnuts appreciate the creation from nothing economy.
"Core morality tells us that people have a right to what they earn by their own efforts freely exercised. It is this part of core morality that Ayn Rand objectivists, libertarians, and other right wingers tap into when they insist that taxation is slavery... The trouble with such arguments is that nothing is earned, nothing is deserved. Even if there really were moral rights to the fruit of our freely exercised abilities and talents, these talents and abilities are never freely acquired or exercised. Just as your innate and acquired intelligence and abilities are unearned, so also are your ambitions, along with the discipline, the willingness to train, and other traits that have to be combined with your talents and abilities to produce anything worthwhile at all.... We don't earn our inborn (excuse the expression "God given") talents and abilities. We had nothing to do with whether these traits were conferred on us or not. Similarly, we didn't earn the acquired character traits needed to convert these talents into achievements. They, too, were the result of deterministic processes (genetic and cultural) that were set in motion long before we were born. That is what excludes the possibility that we earned or deserve them. We were just lucky to have the combination of hardwired abilities and learned ambitions that resulted in the world beating a path to our door....No one ever earned or deserved the traits that resulted in the inequalities we enjoy - greater income and wealth, better health and longer life, admiration and social distinction, comfort, and leisure. Therefore, no one, including us, has a moral right to those inequalities. Core morality may permit unearned inequalities, but it is certainly not going to require them without some further moral reason to do so." Alex Rosenberg
Conservatives, republicans and libertarians worship of the rich is such an odd phenomena. Today the right looks up to money as in the past people worshiped totems. And if you question how they got all this money you are labeled with some stock word that only has meaning in the world of money worship. No longer is America the 'can do' place, today it is the look to big money place and they will save us. Salvation now resides with the rich. Eighty years of propaganda has so modified the circuits in the minds of the right wingnuts, say something negative about the power of money and the winguts all scream in unison.
"On moral grounds, then, we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent to return that wealth to its real owners. In the United States, even a flat tax of 70 percent would support all governmental programs (about half the total tax) and allow payment, with the remainder, of a patrimony of about $8,000 per annum per inhabitant, or $25,000 for a family of three. This would generously leave with the original recipients of the income about three times what, according to my rough guess, they had earned."
UBI and the Flat Tax
