[Apollia]

Originally Posted by jaamkie

interesting though all of your personal finances are...

Sorry about that. I wouldn't have gotten into so much detail about that if I wasn't asked.

#1- you are expecting everyone to personally know and invest in the businesses of people they can trust to voluntarily provide them with dividends from their investments- this is outrageous!!!

Yes, that's why I said somewhere in a previous post that investors would probably need some recourse to assure that unscrupulous business owners wouldn't withhold profits that rightfully belong to the investors.

The point of loans and interest and the accompanying laws is to advance capital to the individuals/businesses most able to use it to create the most value for society.

I doubt most lenders see it that way - I think most lenders lend money simply so they can make money, and the issue of whether or not what they're doing and how they're doing it is creating maximum value for society as a whole doesn't cross their minds nearly as often as it ought to.

I doubt most lenders (especially the most predatory lenders) think very much at all about how their unfair and excessively usurious policies harm society, or, if they do, they simply don't care as long as they're still making heaps of money.

I think both are culpable, you want to discourage both wasteful lending and wasteful borrowing- unfortunately due to lobbyists->laws I think we lean too hard on the borrowers (usually poor) to benefit the loaners (the rich); but I don't think you can say either is innocent!

I agree.

#2- You speak as if people have a right to unlimited money. But money is just a medium of exchange for general value to society- you seem to imply that people should be allowed to take and take without ever being required to give back.

I don't believe coercion is necessary to make people give back to society and create valuable new things. I also think a free society should involve as little coercion as possible.

If you allow everyone to take without giving back, well then everyone will rationally take all they can and give nothing back and soon there will be nothing of value at all!

I quite doubt that. There are lots of people who are wealthy enough to be able to do absolutely nothing productive at all for the rest of their lives, and yet they create great new stuff all the time without being forced to.

It is difficult to directly create money when/where value is created, so we try to set up systems like the Fed to indirectly create/inject money as it is justified by the economy. I agree the Fed is far from perfect, but the basic premise- releasing money into the economy while monitoring feedback (inflation), makes a lot of sense.

(...)

Taxes are necessary to fund government spending; some level of government spending is certainly in the average citizen's best interest- to pay for police and a judicial system, to build infrastructure, to educate all children (future workers)... the edges can be debated, the extent of government responsibility can be debated (healthcare? welfare? social security? "defense" policy?), but the basic fact that government must collect money from citizens to pay for projects of general concern is indisputable.

Well, I'm sure someone better-informed than I am will probably jump in here and explain exactly why these things are disputable, so, I'll just leave that task to them.

I do agree the tax code has all sorts of egregious special interest rules, but I don't have a simple answer to fix the tension between efficient and fair taxation and I doubt you do either.

"Fair income taxes" seems like an oxymoron to me. How is it fair for anyone to arbitrarily insist that they can forcibly take from you the money you rightfully earned? The only way I see to make income taxes fair is to get rid of them entirely - a simple, straightforward enough solution, though doubtless the implementation of it probably wouldn't be quite as simple and straightforward. (Oh, wait, come to think of it, another possibility besides getting rid of them would be to make income taxes truly voluntary).

I think Ron Paul may have explained in his book somewhere how ceasing the income tax could be safely done by cutting back on spending. (Not sure; I don't have his book on hand, unfortunately). If I recall correctly, he mentioned that America has a military presence in 130 countries, and cutting back on that would save a lot of money. There were tons of other good ideas in that book as well, I just don't recall them off-hand.

Thanks for your thought-provoking posts, jaamkie and schola.

Best wishes,
Apollia