[lbo-talk] going galt

[Alan Rudy]

It boggles the mind.  Many of my students, most of whom will soon be people
complaining about high taxes and getting nothing for them have absolutely no
idea what people get for their taxes.  They can't even bring to mind roads,
road maintenance and snow/flood/etc. clearance, airports, DMVs, truck and
rail transportation regulations, inspections and enforcement; parks,
recreation programs,  park maintenance and natural resources enforcement;
schools (K-6, 7-9, 10-12, community colleges, public universities, teachers,
faculty, administrators, building and grounds maintenance), libraries and
museums; police, fire, EMTs, public defense, judges, courts, jails, and
parole officers - much less army, navy, air force, marines, coast guard,
national guard, FBI, CIA, School of the Americas and veterans affairs (from
VA Hospitals to the GI Bill); public health responses, assessment,
anticipation, doctors, nurses, hospitals; water treatment and delivery,
sewage collection and treatment, electrical generation and/or regulation,
waste collection and disposal, and all manner of pollution testing and
enforcement; communications infrastructures, development and regulation;
labor law and occupational safety and health regulation and enforcement -
much less the bureaucracies and personnel that provide unemployment
insurance and welfare programs; (what was supposed to be) banking and
financial regulation, enforcement and insurance, much less savings and
checking account protections and, most important, all the ways these things
feed back on one another - when done properly - to produce the more or less
reliable and high standard of living comfortable people experience... AND,
they have no understanding of how hard working, understaffed and deserving
of decent salaries, benefits and better working conditions public employees
are (despite the fact that many of them are the children of such people -
though, to be honest, state workers in MI are often whiny about taxes and
point fingers at other lateral and lower (rather than higher-level) state
employees, too.

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 1:14 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:


>
> not that you are saying this but the concern about the tax burden on
> the middle class - I don't get it. I'm making a decent living now. I
> don't feel taxed hard at all. I was thinking about this earlier today
> or yesterday, how these people I work with bitch about taxes. And when
> I look at my income, how much fucking disposable income I have
> compared to when I made a fraction of what I now make, I just get
> pissed off at the fucking sheltered idiocy of these people.
>
> I wrote about this on the blog a couple of years ago, something
> related, not about taxes but about income and the audacity of people
> who make 6 figure incomes to ever DARE "sympathize" with someone
> scraping buy on, say, $30k. I always used to sympathize with wankers
> with uppermiddle class professional jobs who'd complain about money.
> They write me and tell me how Haaaaaaaaaaaard it was for them too,.
> They understood my plight.
>
> oh, fuck them with a football bat.
>
> I always figured it was just like my situation. I never once sat down
> and figured out what it was these people were actually making and how
> different their take home pay was from mine, not to mention the
> benefits they had compared to mine - which were ZERO. Why the fuck I
> thought that, I don't know. Why the fuck it didn't occur to me to
> consider the differences, I don't know. Egoism? Beats me.
>
> Well, then I started making money, money that wasn't even half of what
> some of these wankers made, and I wanted to puke on their shoes. They
> have no fucking idea and it's a fucking insult to tell someone who
> makes $30k a year that you get it when you make $150k a year - and I
> don't care if the cost of living's different. I've now lived in a low
> cost of living place and a high cost of living place. you're always
> much better off living in high cost of living - if you make a good
> income.
>
>
> > "curious about the bumper stickers that say, "atlas shrugged" with the
> > date of the 2008 election on them, I googled and found this:
> >
> > http://washingtonindependent.com/32772/battling-obama-by-going-galt"
> >
> > Yeah, well, the drift toward an underground economy is totally
> > comprehensible
> > given the degree of taxation the middle class is subject to and the
> > services they
> > derive from that -- not much.
> >
> > But, what no-one remembers about Atlas Shrugged is that, at the
> > end, when all the "creative" people are off to the hidden valleys
> > of Colorado, what enables them to survive is the discovery of an
> > infinite
> > supply of energy. So, the problem of actual drone work remains; Rand
> > simply produces an energia ex machina to supply what normal
> > workers would. That way the creative people can remain creative
> > without dirtying their hands.
> >
> > Endless cluelessness....
> >
> > Joanna
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
> --
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319