Re: Income tax...do away with it....sounds good to me
Egon:
<font color="blue">Don'r really know what all this TAX fuss is about. Live below the poverty level and no problems! </font>
Amen. (Oops, sorry to bring up religion). The problem, of course, is that many human beings want to better themselves. This requires work. Work is punished. So lots of people say what the heck. So those that don't want to work want to live off those that do. If they steal it directly (like sticking up filling stations) they get themselves into trouble (the victims fight back). So they hire politicians who pass laws which are enforced at the point of a gun so they can live without competing. And all the good citizens say, well, we had elections.
Using the money system makes it easier. They get folks looking at "tax rates" and "poverty levels" and "inflation" and "low interest rates" and "goods vs services" and so on. If you want to know what's REALLY going on count up the people who are actually producing things and those that are not. You will find the ratio of unproductive to productive has been getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger and bigger. You got all those folks out there eating and all the other stuff they do. But they're not putting anything into the pot. Everybody else is working, working and working, producing more, but they're not getting very far. To get ahead anymore you have to produce FASTER than they can steal it. Difficult to do.
Bob_Surka: In one sense everything is labor (ie. the source of all goods). But in an ECONOMIC sense, labor HAS NO VALUE. No one, I repeat no one, pays anything for labor in and of itself. They pay for the consequences of labor, ie. the end result of applied labor. I hate to tell you this, but, in spite of what you may have learned in college, Karl Marx had it totally backwards. Labor is worthless in and of itself. You pay for manipulation of material (to assemble it, move it, machine it, dig it out of the ground, etc. etc.), NOT the labor used. You pay for the end product. So, "services" as distinct from "goods" is nonsense.
JEH
