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[personal profile] daveon
[profile] pmcray has often said that you see bumper stickers saying things like "the market works" on the worst cars imagineable.  It is almost as if there is a contradiction at the heart of many of the modern brand of libertarians.  I've been having an online discussion with one of them about billionaires.  Essentially, the libertarian in question, who admits to being poor which he blames in part on taxation, takes issue with the things that new billionaires spend their money on unlike, for example, the billionaires of a generation ago.

How dare, for example, Bill Gates, spend his money on charity works?

I see a couple of interesting things here.  One is a recurring theme I see from many libertarians, that they'd be better off if they paid less tax and the reason they don't have enough money is that the government takes too much. The government, at least that of the UK and US don't take all that much in tax.  The problem is they tend to take a disproportiate amount of the income of the lower paid than from the richer.  The issue for the libertarian chap here is that he doesn't earn enough money in the first place.  The government could drop his tax to a 20% flat rate (favoured in these circles I understand) and he'd still have very little money relatively speaking.

At the crux of this is the reason I got out of engineering work.  I knew exactly what I could be earning for the rest of my career and it depressed me.  

The second interesting thing is the idea that somehow billionaires used to be somehow more honourable than they are now doesn't really bear all that much scrutiny unless you pretend that some of the most famous examples of the 1980s super rich didn't actually exist.  Not to mention that there were fewer off them back then, but you don't hear about Bill Gates doing the things that used to make Tiny Rowland's days happy.
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