It's a subtle but important distinction: money of any kind is a tool, existing for a valid purpose; otherwise inert.
Accumulating money in a manner viewing it as a score versus others easily leads to looking down on those who have less, and to practices that optimize return over anything else. This can dehumanize others in the eyes of a money lover.
Jesus proclaimed Jewish leaders of the day as hypocrites for telling people to do as they said while not following their own preaching; in other words: committing sin.
Likewise, there is a great deal of biblical interpretation that goes off the rails and opposes Jesus' teachings as well as Old Testament (Torah/Tanakh) precedent.
As for historicity - the Bible has been repeatedly found to be accurate on many issues. Parts of Leviticus even read like a survival guide for a species[1] which includes what today would be considered food safety standards, quarantine procedures, etc. Highly effective practices for a nascent culture.
I was surprised when I read the Old Testament myself, since it was nothing like what I had previously thought. Unless a person reads it himself, it's effectively impossible to understand the impact - it is no normal book, no simple collection of poetry or wisdom.
Western civilization is build upon a Judeo-Christian value foundation, yet we hardly have a conscious connection to it anymore - many only have a vague notion of all religiouns having some element of truth. Even the scientific method is a magnificent tool that is described biblically: we are to test everything! Regardless of which translation is read, the core message comes through powerfully - it is easier to accept when we admit to not knowing everything; humanity as a superorganism is like an overly-confident teenager.
I have found no other teaching that denies its followers any humanly-possible way to enter heaven/paradise/transcendence - I am not aware of anyplace in the Old Testament that describes a process for getting there, only atonement; Jesus explicitly stated that it is impossible for man to get there on his own[2]. Other beliefs put a balancing scale in the mix, where doing more good than bad is what gains entry.
Judaism & Christianity focus on relationship, not religion. This grace is also what gets a person into heaven, since nobody can buy or work their way in - it is a gift for anyone who accepts God[3]. This is different from mercy - being lenient when another is due punishment. Mercy is reducing a fine; grace is opening a door for a child who is struggling to do so himself - God gives us both since we're guilty and yet still children as a whole.
Additionally, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob pursues humanity[4] instead of the other way around elsewhere. What other god serves rather than demands, only asking us to do the same?
[1] If it is a white bright spot on the skin of his body, but it does not appear to be deeper than the skin, and the hair has not turned white, then the priest is to quarantine the person with the infection for seven days. ~Leviticus 13:4
[2] Jesus looked at them and replied, “This is impossible for mere humans, but not for God; all things are possible for God.” ~Mark 10:27
[3] For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God ~Ephesians 2:8
[4] What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine and go to the mountains to seek the one that is straying? ~Matthew 18:12
I find it even more interesting that my comment, which is factually correct, has been flagged.
The Yellow Vest movement started in France and has been prominent in the countries listed within the article. The governments of those countries have also been defying popular wishes, particularly regarding Brexit.
So I am curious as to why my comment should be flagged instead of replied to. Interesting indeed - hit a nerve?
It's funny that you immediately jump to an assumption that I am not doing well.
The reality is that I'm doing fine in my career and managed to escape poverty for many reasons I've illustrated in the past. However what I saw and what I was trying to explain is that I saw my parents destroy their body (and in one case, lose their life) trying to improve their situation in a country that hardly gave a shit. I recall vividly the troubles my family had after my mother had a stroke because insurance companies decided that a stroke was a pre-existing condition despite her being in otherwise good condition.
Maybe you should stop making assumptions about people based on our animosity towards people that have actively made our lives worse in the past.
The other part of that is doing something about it. No action, no success.
Of course, by the time you figure it out you'll realize that most wealthy people are not the evil sleaze we expect them to be and you'll take the same actions they do to protect yourself against destructive governments and financial regulations. It's sad that the perspective of those with scarcity mentality regarding wealth are often their own worst enemies.
The benefits are not purely monetary - raising the quality of an area due to investment that otherwise would never come in is an enormous benefit for people already living there.
That isn't too say throwing money at a bad neighborhood is guaranteed to succeed but it gives a far better shot than letting the area simmer in stagnation.
I don’t think most people living in these “opportunity zones” are going to be happy with people basically being tax incentivized to make housing more expensive in the area in which they live, thus making life harder for them.
If you improve a mansion to be a fancier mansion, you don't increase the supply of housing.
If you improve a small lot to be a duplex or an apartment complex, you increase the supply of housing.
The latter wouldn't raise the net price of housing, but would still be a worthwhile investment. It depends on what local policy is, namely if building new housing is illegal or not.
Making one house fancier definitely increases rents on neighboring properties. If I live in a rundown house in a nice neighborhood and fix it up, everyone else's house increases in value. Same goes for making 1 house really nice in a bad area.
It is complex and there are many "it depends". If they own a house and want to move [for some personal reason] they will be happy that they can get more for their house. If they have lived there for years and watched the neighborhood go downhill they may be happy that things are improving again. Of course the other side is if they are happy with cheap rent they will be unhappy if rent increases because there is now more demand.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use a calculator without a $5,000 license and six months of training. Sounds absurd? Welcome to the financial world, where outsiders are frowned upon.
The market is highly regulated in large part due to the notion that "manipulation" occurs (spoiler: it does, but manipulation always fails on its own eventually and the crash is typically made worse by regulators). Restrictions are made on who can invest, when and how much to the point where it's not a surprise that average wage earners avoid doing so - most of the worthwhile options are only for millionaires or higher. No wonder so many think the markets don't work - they can scarcely be considered markets!
Allow people to be educated and learn how to handle their finances rather than being protected from all danger to the point of being locked out, and you'll have informed individuals capable of handling their own affairs. Let Johnny touch the stove to see that it's hot and he'll learn right quick!
Socialism just wants to save everyone from themselves without looking in the mirror and realizing how dysfunctional it is itself. Forced collectives self destruct; voluntary cooperation survives and thrives, but it takes effort and time instead of a quick fix.
>>Allow people to be educated and learn how to handle their finances rather than being protected from all danger to the point of being locked out, and you'll have informed individuals capable of handling their own affairs. Let Johnny touch the stove to see that it's hot and he'll learn right quick!
This is some extreme oversimplification of 1-human behavior and 2- how easy is it to teach people immediate need denial for long term benefit. No matter how many times you tell people the parable of the ant and the grasshopper, it's still just a story. It's not how the human mind works (generally).
On the inverse end, I could point out how every "self made man who didn't need help from nobody and just smarted his way to the top" was likely helped in countless circumstances that have nearly nothing to do with his direct actions. Humans are great at creating narratives, regardless of whether there is actual causality.
Socialism wants to save everyone from a biased, unfair, inequitable system, understanding that a herd is stronger than an individual and that spreading risk across the board means fewer catastrophic events for the individual. The goal is to lower the upper limit and raise the lower limit. It's not an attempt to pander to poor foolish baby people who can't do a finances for themselves, it's saying that there's no reason for a civil society to allow some to suffer debilitating hardships at the hands of a system they were forced into through circumstance alone while others reap unjust rewards. It's not perfect, but leaving "the free market (tm)" alone and not regulating leads to slavery and child labor and private paramilitaries protecting corporate kings as the past has shown.
Human behavior is quite simple - it's the magnitude of interactions that that make it appear more complex than it is.
I do agree that it is easier to be lazy and obtain instant gratification than delay it for great reward but it can be learned by anyone if the cushy safety net of socialism is removed. Everyone has something that motivates him to become greater than what he is now; it's just a matter of discovering what that is - often he has to find it himself. One-size-fits-all socialism destroys this freedom.
>every "self made man who didn't need help from nobody and just smarted his way to the top" was likely helped in countless circumstances that have nearly nothing to do with his direct actions
Correct: nothing happens in isolation. However, mindset greatly changes the likelihood of an outcome. Without being able to cultivate and learn outside of indoctrination institutions, the world would be static and soulless.
>The goal is to lower the upper limit and raise the lower limit.
This is the core: give those whom are lazy a cushy retirement and shackle people who dream big so they can no longer fly.
Slavery and child labor comes from power vacuums that are created by control freak communists/Marxists/socialists who keep things from changing and improving. The rest go along because change can be scary and we all want stability. A face of true evil is the deception that we all must be equal - we are not. We have borders, both conceptual and physical - doors on our homes and personal space that we want respected; yet socialism cries that borders are bad and we need to take care of everyone regardless of our own situation... and let's use other peoples' money to do it since we don't have any. Crabs in a bucket.
I know you mean well because I was in your shoes after the dot-com collapse. The difference is that I've seen the hypocrisy - there is no perfect system but socialism is a slow, agonizing death.
Any tax decrease "disproportionately" benefits the wealthy because they have more.
A 1% decrease on $50,000 income is going to be less than the same percentage decrease on $500,000.
Of course, you could argue that "progressive" tax take care of that, but it only serves to drive away a portion of high meet with individuals to the point where tax revenue generally doesn't change much anyway while it can actually increase the overall burden on lower income earners.
Better solution: goodbye income tax.
Much like open source software where individual usage is free, only consumption/sales and corporate taxation has any legitimacy now.
Businesses need a commerce-positive, safe environment for such activity. In order to attract that, no income tax is an excellent incentive. Businesses, which are fictitious entities, support the services needed to entice localized growth; as population grows, so does business activity and revenue, thus tax revenue for services as well.
Of course, any system is prone to corruption filling the power vacuum so eventually it would fail. However, so long as individuals are as
unencumbered as possible, people can opt out rather than continue to be abused.
Additionally, taxes serve as a psychological leash and intellectual substitute. Financial/investment education is virtually non-existent in the US and it's generally misguided or even wrong in some instances. If individuals are coddled and promised to be taken care of, they become unprepared for difficult situations.
Let a dog be a dog and let a person be a person, not a slave.
> Any tax decrease "disproportionately" benefits the wealthy because they have more.
Untrue; consider, e.g., the adoption of EITC if it didn't already exist. It's a pre tax decrease, but wouldn't benefit the wealthy (in first order effects) at all.
Or abolishing payroll tax and transferring equivalent amounts into the various trust funds out of general revenue, a pre tax decrease that would slightly benefit the wealthy (because Medicare tax), but disproportionately benefit those whose income was primarily from labor, which isn't the wealthy.
Or more simply, a reduction in the amount paid in the first few tax brackets. That is a tax decrease that would benefit everyone but proportionally benefit more those to whom the upper tax margins are irrelevant.
So complicate the tax issue which increases costs elsewhere and contribute to government managed funds that prove inept? Taking funds from a farmer growing crops successfully and giving them to the one nextdoor who still hasn't been able to get a seed to sprout is a textbook definition of idiocy, not to mention theft.
None of that changes the fact that tax breaks will be greater in absolute numbers for wealthier individuals than for those earning less. Play games to fudge numbers so all is not equal as much as you want - those with resources avoid participating in socialistic wealth redistribution.
No income tax is far simpler. Do you know what the cost for enforcement of individual income tax is? Hint: think astronomical.
Go after about 140 million individuals vs working with approximately 28 million businesses? Do you think business or individuals are more professional? Who had the bright idea to create such a logistical nightmare?
You can keep working with an insane system if you want but people with resources do what people without resources would eventually do in the face of direct taxation, whether financially or physically - leave.
> No income tax is far simpler. Do you know what the cost for enforcement of individual income tax is? Hint: think astronomical.
I do know what the cost of enforcement of individual income tax is, at least in a sane system with effective witholding and most people not submitting stupid tax returns every year: about 1.25% of money raised (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmtr..., table 7).
And the simpler you make the system the cheaper it is (this is NOT flat rates - calculating graduated taxes on income is basically free) - you can see this from the "National Insurance Contributions" line on the same table, which is an effectively zero-complexity additional income tax which costs a third of a percentage point of money raised.
They're actually getting even better at it - 1.12% in 2009-10!
I like how you've pointed out the amount relative how much theft^H^H^H^H^H "tax" revenue is brought in rather than the absolute amount of:
£3,673,797,000
That's pretty astronomical to me. I'm sure you'll find other ways to break it down and try to refute but it still doesn't change the waste of time taxation incurs.
My stance will not change from the perspective that income tax is more destructive to low-income earners than it is to the wealthy, and that it drives away wealth.
Let's just settle this as "we won't agree" since I have more productive things to spend my time on than arguing over what shouldn't exist in the first place. Pray for Brexit or go down with socialist Europe.
It's a subtle but important distinction: money of any kind is a tool, existing for a valid purpose; otherwise inert.
Accumulating money in a manner viewing it as a score versus others easily leads to looking down on those who have less, and to practices that optimize return over anything else. This can dehumanize others in the eyes of a money lover.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_of_money