I'm feeling very John Galt here. 10% of the country is getting unemployment. N% additionally is getting subsidized rent, subsidized farmland, subsidized food, subsidized corporations and banks.

I'm an Entrepreneur and I need every penny. Every penny I keep is reinvested into a business that creates value for the world. HFT doesn't create value for the world. Food Stamps. I don't get bailed out when the weather is bad and my garden dies. I don't have any debt. I don't have a car payment or a house payment.

I'm responsible -- and I'm starting to wonder, really, what's in it for me? We are in a drought and our city has banned outside water usage. We can't fill pools, wash cars, or even water our garden, yet, last night, I go for a walk with my wife and what do I see? Two little kids playing in a big pool of fresh clean city drinking water. People don't care enough.

How are we going to fix our society? It's broken fundamentally. It's like people have disconnected from their role in a larger group of people around them. We get food from a store sold by someone we only know by a plastic name tag. We don't grow anything. We don't know anyone except those who work in the next cube and our family and friends who we don't really depend on unless we are a struggling recent college grad who can't find a job and moves home and those stories are mostly not enjoyable tales told by the disgruntled.

The banks have caused immeasurable suffering to millions, tens, no HUNDREDS of millions of people, perhaps even BILLIONS of people -- and the only banking employee arrested or tried or even simply just stopped from doing what they did to cause that pain is a programmer who took some code from Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs itself was cleared of ANY wrong doing in this mess: http://www.keyc.tv/story/19239634/goldman-sachs-cleared-in-s...

We have to fix it. It has to be fixed. We can't keep going down this road, but I don't see anything really changing. Why isn't anything really changing? Why aren't we having serious existential conversations that really deeply change our society to one that will not collapse?

Do we really think telling the banks to do it will work? Do we really still trust them?

I'm really dismayed by all this.

If you're an "entrepreneur"... you didn't build that. Your employees are the result of subsidized education. Your customers get to your location driving on subsidized roads. Your electricity, water, sewage, etc, is all subsidized infrastructure. You depend on subsidized legal infrastructure to mediate your interactions with other businesses and customers. If you're a tech business, then 90% of the theoretical foundations of your business are the product of subsidized research.

You can't create wealth without community. The only real "John Galt's" in the world are primitive hunter/gatherers. Romanticized portrayals aside, these people have no wealth--they constantly live at the edge of death. You're not John Galt. You're privileged to live in a sophisticated, organized, interdependent community.

Those roads exist because people had to get somewhere. In the beginning, those somewheres were private Trading Posts that were often setup at the crossroads of Indian trails or the confluences of rivers. The successful Trading Posts gradually attracted more settlers and those settlers subsidized the construction and maintenance of the roads to and from the Trading Posts.

You have the cause and effect reversed. The successful entrepreneurs don't exist because of subsidized infrastructure. Subsidized infrastructure exists because of successful entrepreneurs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

The end points of I-80 are New York City and San Francisco. Both cities predate the Interstate system by a good margin. Both started off as Trading Posts that gradually became more successful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City#Early_History, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_San_Francisco_de_As%C3%...). I-80 connects the two cities because that is where the people were. The people were there because of successful entrepreneurship. Furthermore, through tolls and fuel taxes, the people in those areas continue to subsidize the maintenance of the nearby sections of I-80.

*Edited for spelling & grammar.

And public infrastructure predates them both.

> "You have the cause and effect reversed. The successful entrepreneurs don't exist because of subsidized infrastructure. Subsidized infrastructure exists because of successful entrepreneurs."

This is a false dichotomy. Successful entrepreneurs and subsidized infrastructure exist because of each other. Without economic activity infrastructure would be unaffordable and unjustifiable. Without a baseline level of infrastructure new economic activity cannot develop.

This is also why bootstrapping a city is the hardest thing ever, and all of these planned cities never work out. They either build a bunch of infrastructure nobody needs and it ends up rotting, or they shove a lot of aspiring businesses into a place without the necessary infrastructure and economic base and watch it all collapse.

I won't argue that follow-on entrpreneurs don't use subsidized infrastructure. But, subsidized infrastructure cannot exist without the presence of successful entrepreneurs while entrepreneurial activities can exist without subsidized infrastructure.

For example, take the village of Egavik, Alaska (http://www.flickr.com/photos/vallaura/3039481881/). It has no subsidized infrastructure because no one lives there on a year-round full-time basis. But, it is used as a base for private fishing operations, which is an entrepreneurial activity.

Now, I imagine that you'll tell me that those fishermen come from somewhere else and use subsidized infrastructure in the process. But, if you go all the way down to the bottom turtle, you have a caveman ancestor of fishermen who made a spear out of a pointy stick and a hollowed tree as a canoe. He is the independent successful entrepreneur who subsidized infrastructure that later fishermen used.

... So what? It's academic trivia that tickles to the brain to think about, but it has no bearing on society today.

The origin of this thread is someone (unsurprisingly, given that this community is biased towards me-first people who think they're better than the plebes) decrying the "moochers" and acting like they are entirely self-made. I think we both agree that train of thought is a load of bull.

This whole argument, every time it comes up, is really just moralizing and brow-beating in the guise of economics. Worse, it's moralizing and brow-beating by the gross and unsubstantiable assumption that the bulk of the world are lazy no-goodniks.

But, the danger I'm concerned with (and the reason for me going on and on about the relationship of entrepreneurship and subsidized infrastructure) is that the "you didn't build that" rhetoric, even though it falsely characterizes the relationship, is being used to justify the confiscation of my personal treasure for their infrastructure projects. That rhetoric is telling me that I need their infrastructure for business success while in reality their infrastructure needs me in order to exist.

An alternative to subsidized infrastructure is private infrastructure. For example, my great-grandfather was a self-taught engineer who built a small Pennsylvanian town's first sewer and water system. He literally designed and built the water pumps and clay pipe molds and other technologies himself and he and his employees laid the lines and hooked-up customers themselves. The town council later bought him out and turned it into a public utility they fund to this day through taxes. (I imagine it was an easy sell. "Guten tag! We have water inside the house now. Do you want that too?" "Yes! How much will you charge me?" "Not much, but I will need to bury some pipes through your yard.")

Note: And when I say self-taught I am being quite literal. His parents were immigrants from Germany and he learned to read from the Bible at home. He bought books on advanced mathematics and engineering principles from his savings as a farm-hand on his uncle's cattle farm. I have a few of them that were passed-down. One of his inch-thick pocket books on engineering from 1890 covers the same material that about half of my college courses did. I wish I had gotten it before University because it makes me highly suspicious of the quality and necessity of modern education. But, that's another topic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community

Many of them were started by entrepreneurs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Finan...

> The federal contribution comes overwhelmingly from motor vehicle and fuel taxes (93.5 percent in 2007), and it makes up about 60 percent of the contributions by the states.

...

> The portion of the user fees spent on highways themselves covers about 57 percent of their costs, with about one-sixth of the user fees being sent to other programs, including the mass transit systems in large cities.

So the driver on the highway is subsidizing mass transit.

And by doing so, directly benefits the driver on the highway by keeping mass transit users off the highway.

There is no such thing as a "cause" and an "effect" here. There is a highly interdependent system, which, I guess, was the OP's point.

If the people in a community stops subsidizing infrastructure, what happens to the infrastructure? It crumbles away.

If a community doesn't have subsidized infrastructure does entrepreneurship there die? Nope. Case in point - the show "Flying Wild Alaska" from the Discovery Channel. I used to live in that village. Its only transportation links to the outside world is a private airport and private barge services in the summer. If a local fisherman or craftsman wants to ship his goods to customers outside the village, he doesn't use public, subsidized routes.

Moreover, that little community only thrives because of commerce with the big, complicated and wealthy external world, with its subsidized roads and so on...

People have lived in Unalakleet long before contact with the "big, complicated and wealthy external world" and its subsidized infrastructure like law enforcement. Before whites came with army and police, the eskimos preferred banishment as the way of enforcing societal norms.

[1] http://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDF...

This isn't an argument. It's rhetoric. If it were an argument, it would attempt to establish the criteria for deciding whether a particular set of government programs and the means for paying for them were ideal. Surely there must be some level of democratically ordained wealth redistribution that would qualify as "mooching", no?

That doesn't logically follow. You can make an argument that a particular set of conditions exists without making the argument the particular set of conditions is the ideal balance of conditions.

> Surely there must be some level of democratically ordained wealth redistribution that would qualify as "mooching", no?

Sure. But "mooching" is a value-judgment that only makes sense in the context of some moral framework. There exist more sensible instantiations of that moral framework than I think the popular discourse is willing to admit to.

For example, why should the rules of society not be structured so the wealth created by this joint work is distributed proportionally to the number of hours of our finite and more or less equal-length lives we dedicate to that work? Sure, some people are much smarter than others, and their contributions far more valuable per hour, but people are more or less born with the intelligence they have, so why should they get credit or be penalized for that?

I'm not endorsing that particular distribution, but rather pointing out that it's a logically-defensible one. The point is that because of the structure of our society, it is impossible to precisely determine the value of each person's contribution to the net production (taking into account the whole spectrum of variables such as social stability, etc, over the infinite time horizon). Many people act as if the market equilibrium gives us a precise definition of that value, from which we can derive a definition of "mooching" but it gives us no such thing.

And at the end of the day, once we have labored mightily to determine who is mooching and who is not, what does that buy us? How much more efficient would our society be if nobody was mooching? The conservative Heritage foundation estimates the value of federal welfare spending to be about $175 billion, or 1.3% of GDP. The net social value of that spending is almost certainly more than that (how much would you pay to not live in a society like my native Bangladesh where poor children beg for food in the streets?). "Mooching" is something that has far more value in justifying moral indignation amongst conservatives than it does in any quantifiable economic sense.

You need to spend less effort to train your employees because they enjoyed a certain level of schooling (which, chances are, you enjoyed too). If you don't need to build your own roads it's because everyone paid for a shared road system. You don't need to enforce laws yourself because your taxes support law enforcement. Of course, people who pay less taxes have (or should have) the same enforcement as you do but that's because of one other thing - that the law applies equally (or, again, should apply equally) to everyone. As it should, John Galt or not.

"John Galt" is about self-entitlement. Is about ideas without regard who actually executes them.

This community, I thought, understands the fact that ideas, without execution, are worthless. And execution, without employees out of a vastly interdependent society, is a whole lot harder.

It's a tradeoff, and claiming "you wouldn't be able to do it without government!" doesn't provide any help in determining whether how we're making that tradeoff today is right. You wouldn't be able to do it without other entrepreneurs as well.

"Steve Jobs built (and then re-built) Apple" is a completely accurate thing to say. Do you really want to claim it's false?

Do they really? What I hear is them complaining that every cent they are taxed is the government taking "their money". If they were willing to acknowledge that they are the primary, not sole, contributor, wouldn't they acknowledge that some part of their income is not an imposition by the government, but rather a collection of something the government is entitled to in the first place by virtue of its contribution?

You're trying to scientifically and objectively measure "mooching", which itself is entirely an unscientific and subjective concept.

This doesn't work.

A friend of mine likes to throw out the assertion that 50% of the population doesn't pay taxes. A gross misrepresentation of reality. 50% don't pay income taxes, but if they have a job they pay payroll taxes. If they purchase anything they pay sales tax. If they rent or own a home or apartment they pay property taxes. If they have a vehicle they pay property taxes. How about the companies making record profits that reduce their income tax burden to 0%? In what world is it reasonable to expect the bottom 80% of the population, with about 16% of the country's wealth, to provide a greater percentage of their individual wealth so that the top 20%, owning or controlling 84% of the country's wealth, can pay a lower percentage?

There are lots of "artists" that live off of welfare. Some of theme are mooches, some of them are just developing their craft and will later make millions doing it. How do you tell one from the other? You can't.

I don't get food stamps, nor welfare, but I did enjoy substantial government subsidies on education (odds are, so did you). I also drive on government-subsidized roads, and enjoy government services such as the police and fire departments. My drinking water comes from a vast infrastructure built by government funds - not all of which was taxed locally. My electricity comes from similar government-subsidized infrastructure, and wouldn't even exist if the federal government hadn't poured enormous amounts of cash into the research of power generation and transmission technologies.

In short, my life story is one gigantic government subsidy, and odds are, so is yours. So is everyone's, to various degrees - nobody is even close to "clean" in this respect, unless you grew up in a monastery on a mountain top.

Also, it's funny that you mention health care, because by that definition every single person in Western Europe, Canada, and Japan is a moocher.

Ability is also a tricky notion because it is hard to separate from potential. Are we strictly talking about productivity, period, or are we talking about productivity commensurate with one's potential?

What is the morality of someone who, after receiving substantial government subsidization getting an education, who gets a dead end job? He's not on welfare or food stamps, but he sure as hell isn't the high-earning tax payer we hoped he would be, based on the considerable investment made. Is he a moocher of the system? After all, he failed to "pay us back" for the extra investment we made in him (sending him to college, say).

What is the morality of someone who, possessing a substantial intelligence, chooses not to apply himself in school, and ends up in the lowest rung of tax payers? Has he mooched off of us for failing to live up to his potential, or does he get a free pass? Does he have the "ability" to do higher level work?

What about people whose failure to realize their full potential is due to external factors?

This issue is anything but simple.

But let's simplify this grossly: you're referring to people who choose not to work (period) and whose existences require the constant intervention of government above and beyond what government does for "everyone else" (that itself is a tricky notion, but bear with me).

It turns out, we actually track these people, and they are an extremely small part of our society. The vast majority of people in our society work. The ones who do not actively seek to work. The percentage of people in our society who can work but choose not to, and lean on the government as a result is a rounding error. It's amazing how much libertarians and conservatives are willing to magnify this demographic by a thousandfold just to make their point.

We need to enable and reward the creators and punish the consumers. Our society is currently set up in the reverse manner.

This is an extraordinary claim that demands substantiation. Everything we know about US labor statistics suggests that the long-term unemployed are a tiny portion of the population (6.16 million as of last month, out of a labor force of 239 million). That's roughly 2.5% of the work force, or 1.98% of the total overall population.

Note also that people who receive unemployment benefits (including food stamps) are required to be part of the work force (i.e., they are not lumped into the substantial out-of-work-force bucket).

There's also the question of just how much these benefits are, and why anyone of sound mind would voluntarily, permanently go on them (even if they could sit on these benefits in perpetuity, which they can't): a single person is only eligible for $200 in food stamp benefits a month, scaling down to $668 for a family of 4. How many people who are on this benefit do you think are there voluntarily, because they're too lazy and $200 a month is such a strong incentive to stay out of work?

There are so many crazy, absurd leaps in logic required for a person to conclude that a large portion of the population is too lazy to get work and just leeching off society. The reality is a hell of a lot more reasonable.

> "We need to enable and reward the creators and punish the consumers."

This is counterproductive and absurd. We don't need to punish the "consumers", we need to help them become creators. This is my problem with libertarian types - you assume the world's problems can be solved by puritanical moralizing, and that people need to be beaten, not led, to productive behavior.

Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, this is moralizing in the guise of economics. Your punitive measures will have no positive effect besides making you feel better about having wrought vengeance upon those you perceive to have wronged creators. There is no rational basis for believing that punitive measures will make net-negative-value people into net-positive-values.

So yeah, if we did things your way the world will go to hell in a hand basket. But that's okay, so long as "justice" is served, and those icky no-goodniks are properly flogged for their icky laziness.

> We need to enable and reward the creators and punish the consumers. Our society is currently set up in the reverse manner.

I believe you mean those lowdown, dirty, rotten moochers to be the consumers. I disagree with you, being on food stamps is a pretty lousy reward. The projects as the only affordable residency option is pretty lousy. Being constantly looked down upon by those with more is pretty lousy. Seems like a lousy reward all around.

However, you may want to reword it anyways. Another reading of it suggests: Consumers can die from our products, they can waste away from our terribly unhealthy foods, in the end we want all the wealth for ourselves regardless of the fact that they're the one's needed for us to have a sustainable future.

Sounds like a lot of companies. Those Facebook users are clearly moochers, they aren't paying anything to Facebook for the privilege of using their services. So Facebook is in the right to punish them by completely breaking down any conventional notion of privacy.</sarcasm> (Because in text form it's never clear).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

Yes, we are "privileged to live in a sophisticated, organized, interdependent community". Does the rest of the community know this? No, and they're not demonstrating that at all. Just look over the past 100 years and tell me which generations knew they had it good and strived to continue that effort.

Only dead societies can tell the tales we're starting to.

And what exactly do you think will happen to entrepreneurs who continue to build more infrastructure for future generations as the cost of working within our system begins to outweigh its benefits?

Exactly. The roads didn't get built using magic money - it was from taxes extracted from those that were getting things done!

That's all find and dandy, but the fact is that there are millions out there sitting on their collective assess while the few of us are doing the work.

There are roads, bridges, education, internet, all accessible to them as well, yet they do nothing.

What it feels like and what it is are often at odds with each other. Emotional appeals allow for very sloppy reasoning. We can, and should, do much better than that especially on a forum like this.

50% of the population doesn't pay income tax. The vast majority of them still pay sales and property taxes (even renters pay property tax, though indirectly). If they drive they pay fuel taxes. The majority of that bottom 50% still works. They are contributing to society. They are contirbuting to companies by doing the jobs the companies want them to do. They spend their money on consumer goods and to various service industries. Companies, outside a few industries, don't exist without those customers.

To say that the government needs to keep handing out entitlements because otherwise companies will run out of customers is such an awful argument - and one that I have heard often. If the government would get out of the way the market would respond like it is supposed to -- and prices would come down. Would some companies go out of business? Possibly. But only the companies that were unsustainable without government propping them up to begin with.

I didn't say the entitlements (Medicaid, unemployment, and other forms of welfare) permitted them to be customers. If that's what you got from my statement, reread it.

The majority of them aren't freeloaders. The majority of them work - they provide benefits to companies by making things or performing other services. The majority of them pay other taxes (including payroll taxes, the part funding SS and Medicaid). They spend money on goods and services, which inherently means they're supporting the economy as a whole. To disregard this 50% as a bunch of freeloading losers does not make sense.

Payroll taxes are federal taxes. If you're working and not exempt (certain state employees, the Amish and some others), you pay payroll taxes. Since 50% of the population isn't unemployed, that means most of them are still paying payroll taxes, therefore they're paying federal taxes.

My point is, what about the people that are doing nothing? They have the same access to the roads, bridges, internet, but they do nothing. Don't they owe some sort of debt to society to go try to work instead of just collecting from others?

What I meant is the federal income tax ... which is what funds a majority of this country's expenditures.

I work. I pay my taxes. I donate money to non-profit organizations. I'm a good citizen. And I'm sick of being told by a bunch of redistributionist minded people that I owe more back to the collective good of society just because I have been successful and someone else hasn't.

42% of federal revenue is from income tax. 42% from social security and Medicare taxes.

50% pays no federal income tax due to unemployment or low wages placing them below the poverty line or the use of various deductions. I have not disputed that. You draw a false conclusion that that indicates they contribute nothing. You have expressed a belief based on a feeling rather than fact that 50% of the population is worthless.

I didn't say they were worthless, just not contributing.

Just because I said earlier "that's how it feels" doesn't mean that I am trying to argue everything from an emotional standpoint ... I'm very well read on the subject - as I'm sure you are ... we just happen to disagree.

It certainly doesn't seem this way. You started this whole argument by stating a ridiculous falsehood: that the majority of America "sits on their asses" while the few "do all the work". Furthermore, you state that every resource has been granted to them "yet they do nothing".

Jtsummers then explained quite clearly that characterizing the middle class "doing nothing" and "sitting on their asses" is grossly false.

You started this thing with an incredibly disingenuous framing and appeal to emotion, going so far as to state an obvious falsehood.

Then you, incredulously, claim that you weren't trying to argue things from an emotional perspective. Right, because the claim that most people "sit on their asses" while the few, the honorable (like yourself, presumably) "do all the work" and that these people "do nothing"... that's not an attempt at emotional argument at all!

After Jtsummer continues on his journey of reasoning, you now make one more concession and try to gloss it over by insisting that you never meant to claim these people were "worthless". Your emotional framing failed, so now you're ducking behind the excuse that you never meant any value judgment with your claims - because "sitting on their ass" is totally not a value judgment at all!

If there's one thing I cannot abide in arguments/debates its disingenuousness. If you try to frame an argument purely emotionally and get caught in it, own it.

Where did I ever say anything about the "middle class" doing nothing or sitting on their asses? The middle class is not the problem -- they are not the takers of America.

"Sitting on their ass" is a value judgement. Sure. And there are millons of Americans who are doing nothing but taking. Period. They aren't trying. They aren't taking the opportunity that sits before them. They are existing because government pays for everything for them. How is that even deniable?

Instead of saying "the few of us" it would have been better if I had said "the rest of us".

If you want to get hung up on that, go for it.

I think that the Elizabeth Warren / Obama speeches about "giving your fair share" are getting a little old. The point is that all Americans have fairly equal access to the same roads, bridges, and other things the government provides -- yet there are millions that are squandering their own opportunities. That's not my fault and I don't feel like I owe them something for it.

It's easy to vilify a straw man you've never met.

> "They aren't trying. They aren't taking the opportunity that sits before them. They are existing because government pays for everything for them. How is that even deniable?"

This is an extraordinary claim that requires substantial evidence. You are making a very serious accusation against a very large group of people, the least you can do is back it up.

A family of 4 on food stamps gets $688 a month to feed themselves. Do you serious think government "pays for everything" for them? Do you think anyone of sound mind would voluntary put themselves in that situation permanently? How many people do you think receive food stamps and think to themselves "score! This paltry sum that probably won't cover my barest expenses is a strong incentive not to seek work!".

Have you met someone on welfare or food stamps? I have. A whole lot of them actually. It's an extremely rough life - rest assured no one in their right mind is enjoying it. Those who stay in it long-term are unable to get away from it, not unwilling. This is a critical difference.

Your argument makes about as much sense as claiming the homeless are homeless voluntarily (sadly, a common argument amongst conservatives) - it comes from a complete ignorance of just how tough life is when you've stripped away the basics.

Your mythical American, who is lazy, good-for-nothing, and sits around doing nothing because the government is magically covering all of his expenses, I'm sorry to say, doesn't really exist. To be fair, it is possible for this person to exist in extremely small numbers as edge cases of the system.

But, just to humor you, let's assume this mythical creature does exist. How many of them are there?

Welp, there are 6.16 million Americans on long-term unemployment as of last month (there are actually more people unemployed than that, but they're not eligible to receive benefits, so for the purposes of identifying "leeches", they're not relevant). This is 2.5% of the total work force.

Only a portion of these people are actually lazy and idle though - naturally part of this 6.16 million are actually looking for work, but are unable to find anything. They are, by any reasonable measure, not leeches. There is also another portion which is simply no longer eligible for benefits (despite what you seem to think, they do expire, making the long-term plan of "sitting on my ass while the gov't bankrolls my life" a really poor one).

Let's be incredibly cynical, pessimistic, and presumptuous about our fellow man (that is your theme, it seems), and assume that a whopping half of all long-term unemployed folks are there voluntarily. Disregard the fact that a large portion of them would have lapsed benefits by this point.

So, maximally, assuming the absolute worst about everything, about 1.25% of the total work force is a lazy-ass sonofabitch that's getting benefits from the government (shitty benefits that in no way funds a comfortable lifestyle, but whatever, assume these people have third-world expectations for themselves).

You're getting your panties in a bunch, balking at taxation in general, and yammering on about the government stealing your treasures to fuel undeserving people... because 1.25% of the work force (0.96% of the overall population) fits that description?

"Unsustainable" indeed! You decry taxation in general as "redistributionist" because, maximally, 0.96% of the population is a lazy bastard? You balk at the public funding of roads, bridges, and public utilities because, heaven forbid, 0.96% of the population (maximally!) doesn't deserve access to it?

Oh my.

Allow me to dig a little deeper. You dislike taxation, you dislike the government forcing you to pay for things. So you take a tired, old stereotype to justify not paying into the public good, out of some notion that there are hordes of malicious people at the gates just waiting to take advantage of you. You play up and exaggerate this stereotype to make it seems like a bigger deal than it actually is - even though in reality this stereotype hardly exists at all, and certainly not in great enough numbers to justify the moral panic you're suggesting.

You started this argument by moralizing against these supposed malicious freeloaders, but when your emotional appeals are deconstructed, you try to twist your argument in the "public good" direction - by insisting (without basis) that the funding of said ill-defined freeloaders is unsustainable and will break us all, even though it doesn't stand a chance in hell of doing that.

I'm not talking about the world. I'm talking about the US. Our poor don't hold a candle to the rest of the world - if you are poor in the US you are better off than most globally.

Unemployment numbers are just one part of it. We have over 46 million Americans on food stamps. We have programs that give benefits for housing, health care, mobile phones and all sorts of other "entitlements" ... unemployment is just one piece of the ever growing entitlement pie.

If you consider my opinion that we should not support those that are sitting on their ass as "moralizing" then I suppose I am guilty of that. That you think that the lazy, good-for-nothing, sits-around-doing-nothing American is mythical is laughable.

And, yes, I know people who have been on welfare, who have received government assistance. I know people who take unemployment. And in my experience I have seen these people make bad decision after bad decision. Is some of it out of their control? Sure. But many times they share in the responsibility for their financial situation. I've seen people that are struggling to make rent, but always have beer or liquor around. Those are the kind of stupid financial decisions that keep people where they are. I don't think it's incumbent on those of us that are working, paying taxes, and trying to be responsible citizens to have to keep funding those that aren't working, pay no/few taxes, and continue making irresponsible life choices.

They are there as some one is paying taxes.

People are worried about a middle class segment of crowd being taxed to teeth and every body else really leeching on their contributions. Look at it, corporations play every trick valid by the rule book to avoid paying taxes. Rich have their money parked in tax havens. Poor need social security.

The middle class is heavily burdened by taxes.

On top of this government wants to be in endless wars. Most of which makes zero sense. The rich at wall street- most of who are practically adding zero value. They earn the most, and demand the most financial security in case of economic collapses. They take zero responsibilities for their actions. If all this had happened with some ordinary citizens they would go to jail. When you look at all this, it looks like a cartel.

No wonder people are pissed.

Note: I am Indian, staying in Bangalore. I am not a US citizen.

If you run the numbers, this isn't really the case. The middle class is taxed lightly, relative to the benefits they receive. Anyone who's done their income taxes has seen how many tax benefits start dropping off past $60K or so. The top 10% or so pay the majority of income/Medicare/Medicaid taxes, and the way the Social Security benefits formula works, they're also heavily subsidizing the middle class through that program.

That makes some sense, of course: There are way more middle class voters than any other class!

The tax slabs you talk about apply only to probably 10% of most rich citizens in a country.

If you take all this into consideration. The rich still with their higher tax slabs don't contribute as much taxes as the middle class. As you mentioned that's because the middle class are larger in number.

Also note that I'm not just talking of the US. Throughout the world, the rich really find ways of getting away with taxes.

Ayn Rand was a very disturbed individual.

"In her notebooks Ayn Rand worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" she promoted in her more famous books."

"What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'" "

But more importantly;

"Entrepreneurs(with a big E) get subsidized security, roads, mail, water, food, electricity, education, health care, etc."

I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. The taxes levied on businesses and individuals pay for the (often shoddy and wasteful) infrastructure and services.

It's a giant, systemic feedback loop, one we try to make end up being positive in a good way.

Just because they get those things, doesn't mean it's the best way to get them, or that they wouldn't prefer to get them in some other way.

Inevitably it starts when someone complains about the "parasites", "moochers", or whatever the description of the day is. It's always "waaah! someone undeserving is getting my stuff!"

When the notion that nobody exists as an island is pointed out, and it becomes clear that those complaining about the "moochers" are in fact enormous beneficiaries of the system, the argument becomes "but the system isn't perfect!", as if that somehow justifies the "every man for himself" mentality that started the argument.

Objectivist arguments like this always start with the notion that greater good will arise from an objectivist society. When that stupid argument is thrashed good, the argument turns into one of personal freedoms. It's amazing how many about-faces people will make in order to hang onto the notion that everyone else is a useless good-for-nothing except themselves.

So do the bankers. After all, they have all that money, all those politicians they paid for and all the money investors gave them to gamble with and those regulators keep intruding into how they should reward themselves for all their initiative.

People not caring enough about the welfare of others, as the parents of those kids, is part of the problem. People feel entitled when, in reality, nobody is "more special" than anyone else. A wonderful quote comes to mind.

"Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others may receive your orders without being humiliated" -- Dag Hammarskjöld, then Secretary General of the United Nations

"Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came."

I used to be a fierce Libertarian and then I realized that Ayn Rand's Objectivist utopia ALREADY exists in Somalia and Sudan and many other nations in the world - none of which I would call civilized.

Now if you were to call out the massive corruption in the current system as the root cause, I would jump to your defense.

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All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

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That is where the problem begins. When a part of the society just refuses to contribute their share, but still expects that other absolutely must. You can't really justify contributing to "effect of the society".

Its difficult to understand why one should pay for economic troubles of HF traders, especially when they are known to cheat on taxes, when they take 0 responsibilities for their actions and above all don't add any value.

A man definitely benefits a lot from the collective contributions of the society. But those benefits apply equally to everybody, yet please note not every one achieves the same things in life as everybody else. There fore to now say the sum total of a man's accomplishments is all due to society is wrong. That is why a man contributes back only as much as what he benefited.

Therefore, take responsibilities for both your successes and failures. Applies not just to individual but to every other entity like corporations and banks. Its difficult to understand why a common man should bail out a bank. While the common man has already contributed his fair share of taxes.

If I make a mistake or do well. I take responsibility for both my successes and failures. So should banks and corporations. Both should contribute their share of taxes. But you almost always see, that the rich and powerful cheat yet benefit from the taxes contributed by everybody else. Same with the poor.

Yet the middle class is always expected to pay up for every body Else's party.

How does that work, exactly? I mean were Amazon and Qualcomm and eBay responsible for the "suffering" of the dot com crash and the subsequent global recession?

A speculative bubble burst and the result was a serious, systemic credit crunch and a deep recession. That's not a crime.

I'll give you an example. Take a look at LIBOR (somebody should, 'cause the mean-stream media has hardly mentioned it):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal

From CNN: "Libor is the world's most important benchmark for interest rates. Roughly $10 trillion in loans -- including credit card rates, car loans, student loans and adjustable-rate mortgages -- as well as some $350 trillion in derivatives are tied to Libor."

There has been extensive coverage of this scandal - and widespread vilification of Barclays and their leadership - in the British mainstream media. It eventually led to the resignation of various senior people within the bank, including the media bête noire Bob Diamond.

Regardless, LIBOR, muni bond fixing and all these Taibbi-bait scandals (which of course should be pursued if there's evidence of fraud) are not what caused the credit crunch and subsequent recession and suffering, just as WorldCom's accounting shenanigans didn't cause the dot com crash.

Ok, let's assume they were set lower for argument's sake. Then cities, mutual funds, and pension plans would have earned less than they would have had the rate not been manipulated. Let's examine cities from that list - as you look around the the world today, there's not a lot of cities that seem flush with a surplus of cash. They've got a decreasing tax base as a result of a precarious economy and now they've got decreased investment returns as a result of LIBOR being manipulated down. As a result, they either cut services or raise taxes - both of which have a negative impact on the millions and billions living there.

Regardless, a mutual fund growing at a slightly lower rate isn't the "suffering" the original comment was talking about. If the economic crisis had just been about LIBOR fixing, no one would have noticed.

Do you honestly think the people on food stamps have it easy? You have your reward: happiness, self respect, accomplishment, etc..

The power of the banks is harder for people to understand, so banks have been very powerful, yet even less accountable than monarchs.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." -Thomas Jefferson

But there is a lot of give and take in the world, some easily observed and measured, some not. Some attributable, some not, and in proportions that vary over time.

Frankly, I don't know how much I take. Some dimensions are visible and quantified, but not all. So when I do give, I am happy--happy to be filling the well of life.

Please tell me how this benefits anybody.

The old guard was perfectly content with eighths and fought as hard as possible to prevent decimalization because they were ripping investors off for billions a year.

HFT doesn't create any value. You take already created wealth and based on demand supply equations some one looses and some one gains. Think of it like a kilogram of potatoes changing 100 hands in a day during some make money and some lose depending on how the demand for potatoes is in a city. The HF traders don't actually do anything to grow potatoes or help the process of growing potatoes.

Higher liquidity and lower spreads give an investor more confidence in their investment. They always have the option of getting out of the investment and at a lower cost. More confidence in an investment means the investor will pay a premium over the same investment that is less liquid and has higher transaction costs.

This premium means companies shares are valued more in the secondary market. This also means that companies can fetch a higher valuation and thus raise more capital in the primary market. Both of these are a win for investors and the companies themselves.

What do huge chaotic fluctuations in the price that have no connection whatsoever to anything that actually effects the economically correct price for the item do for investor confidence?

Absolute bollocks. If any of the major banks collapse, there will be a crash much, much worse than 2008. There is precisely zero chance of government sitting by and allowing that to happen - and the banks know it.

If false: the money has to be paid back, with interest. So a cash loss for the bank.

Too big to fail is the most obvious economic problem of our time. The real question is why current economic leaders (Bernanke, Geithner, and Obama) have been so slow to support or indeed demand resolution to this issue.