Monday, December 13, 2010

Reasoned debate

This email just in, from someone called Joel Torison in the United States, just to give our readers an inkling of the kind of pushback we are quite accustomed to:

"I just read about you guys and all I can say is...Fuck You. The less tax, the better. Its been proven and you all can go to hell."

Charming!

3 Comments:

Blogger Sarah said...

Incisive wit and profound economic thinking from our friend Joel there.

Um.. no, actually.

If that's the best they can come up with, then we've won the intellectual and moral arguments - and I think we have.

We just have to win the political battles now. That's all.

*Sigh*

3:20 pm  
Blogger Robin Smith said...

He has a point, though not made in a way to win peoples hearts.

He is saying:

that less tax is better

This is true. And we are saying

that more tax is better?

That is clearly preposterous if we are free people.

But we have written him off and called for a political remedy to seal it all up!!!

How can that possibly show we have won the intellectual, moral or any other battle? We should be fighting a battle for the truth alone, not for our own political ends. Where will it all end?

So what are we saying exactly. How would we respond to him?

2:35 am  
Blogger TJN said...

Well, there are all sorts of ways to respond. Justice is one way of thinking about it: less tax for whom? For the wealthy? Our answer would generally be no - because the wealthy tend to capture political processes, and skew decisions away from what an electorate would want. Corruption is another way of thinking about it - why would we support a system (such as the offshore system) that gives insiders the cream and shifts the risks and costs onto everyone else?

And by no means has it all been proven. It's been repeated ad nauseam that tax cuts are a cost-free path to Nirvana. It ain't true. Some tax cuts are good, sometimes, but often they are not.

5:01 am  

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