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Monday, May 03, 2010
Too Obvious to be
Provable?
C'mon,
Doc. A challenge.
THINKING ABOUT THINGS IS A TWO-EDGED SWORD. Okay. I was persuaded by Doctor Zero's argument that there is merit in applying advanced firepower to prove the obvious. But I ask, in all humility, how many obvious things do we have to prove and is it possible, in the end, to prove them to people who no longer reason, read, or ruminate?
So I'm posing a challenge to the Doc and to my own readers. What follows is a series of obvious truths (er, propositions). Tell me which ones you'd like to see me and/or the Doc try to prove and why. Because you think we can, because you think we can't, or because you'd just enjoy watching us twist ourselves into semantic pretzels trying. You're also encouraged to add to the list. You're allowed, as always, to comment on the idea of this post itself.
Herewith a list of Obvious Propositions:
Corporate taxes are paid by individual
taxpayers.
Rich capitalists do not take their riches from others. They create them. In the history of markets, their rising tide really does lift all boats. While their ebbing tide sinks all boats.
Profiling of various kinds is about seeking the people most likely to be breaking the law or planning harm; the argument should be about what constitutes an accurate profile, not whether it should be done. Opposing ALL profiling is a kind of death wish.
Lefty bias in the media is so prevalent that all its proofs have become too boring and repetitive to make, rendering them invisible, because tiresomely the same, in the public debate. One inevitably becomes more tiresome in the making of the argument than even the obvious evidence is.
Socialism suffocates individuals. Marxism kills them. Communism annihilates them, By the tens of millions.
In its whole history, religion has killed fewer people than the rationalist political philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Tell you anything?
Governments are always more inefficient and expensive than free enterprise. They succeed only when they can treat people like cannon fodder. Which they invariably do whenever they're in charge.
Governments do not care about people. Governments are made of politicians. Who care about maintaining and expanding their own wealth, power, and privilege. Period.
The greatest human injustices are always perpetrated by bureaucracies.
The founders did not see belief in God as a danger to freedom. They saw government as that. They separated government from religion so that governments could not make themselves into a religion and thereby eliminate freedom entirely.
Human language is the font of human consciousness. Political correctness is the destruction of language's ability to make fine distinctions because all distinctions offend somebody, usually the party that doesn't want to have to prove itself in equal competition. It therefore constitutes a reduction of consciousness, individuality, perception, reasoning, and good judgment.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So what does continuously expanding government power do?
Morality is not relative, nor can its gradations be eliminated by a process of rough equivalencies or carefully crafted metaphorical slippery slopes. There's such a thing as right and such a thing as wrong. It's possible to be more defensibly right than wrong without equating your worst errors with the unconscionable crimes of your most despicably vicious foe.
What you subsidize (give resources to), you get more of. What you starve (withhold resources from) you get less of. When you bail out failure and levy more taxes on success, what's going to happen?
The health care market is not and has not been a free market since the federal government passed Medicare and Medicaid. Costs have risen precipitously and uncontrollably since then because of government involvement more than any other factor. So MORE government involvement is obviously going to control and reduce costs in future. Right?
The utopia promised by the left is always a dystopia of some kind. One that leaves most of us with less freedom and prosperity and the smart ones who thought of it with more power over us. How do they reoncile that with their adamant egalitarianism?
Life begins at conception. That's the Occam's Razor answer they're so fond of in their constant judgments of racism, sexism, and ethnic prejudice of various kinds. Any other answer is NOT the simplest and easiest answer. What did Occam have against fetuses?
People on the left do not think. They pose, they preen, they presume, they polemicize, they piss on their putative enemies, but they do not ponder anything of import anymore. Since the last new progressive idea occurred to them a long human lifetime ago, they are, as a procreative power, suffering peripatetically from an enlarged pseudo-populist prostate gland. Their peeing is urgent, precise as a petunia watering can, and it pulverizes their peace of mind by keeping their little pee-pees problematic all night. Not to mention impotent. Like every pompous popinjay at the Puffington Post.
Rich capitalists do not take their riches from others. They create them. In the history of markets, their rising tide really does lift all boats. While their ebbing tide sinks all boats.
Profiling of various kinds is about seeking the people most likely to be breaking the law or planning harm; the argument should be about what constitutes an accurate profile, not whether it should be done. Opposing ALL profiling is a kind of death wish.
Lefty bias in the media is so prevalent that all its proofs have become too boring and repetitive to make, rendering them invisible, because tiresomely the same, in the public debate. One inevitably becomes more tiresome in the making of the argument than even the obvious evidence is.
Socialism suffocates individuals. Marxism kills them. Communism annihilates them, By the tens of millions.
In its whole history, religion has killed fewer people than the rationalist political philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Tell you anything?
Governments are always more inefficient and expensive than free enterprise. They succeed only when they can treat people like cannon fodder. Which they invariably do whenever they're in charge.
Governments do not care about people. Governments are made of politicians. Who care about maintaining and expanding their own wealth, power, and privilege. Period.
The greatest human injustices are always perpetrated by bureaucracies.
The founders did not see belief in God as a danger to freedom. They saw government as that. They separated government from religion so that governments could not make themselves into a religion and thereby eliminate freedom entirely.
Human language is the font of human consciousness. Political correctness is the destruction of language's ability to make fine distinctions because all distinctions offend somebody, usually the party that doesn't want to have to prove itself in equal competition. It therefore constitutes a reduction of consciousness, individuality, perception, reasoning, and good judgment.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So what does continuously expanding government power do?
Morality is not relative, nor can its gradations be eliminated by a process of rough equivalencies or carefully crafted metaphorical slippery slopes. There's such a thing as right and such a thing as wrong. It's possible to be more defensibly right than wrong without equating your worst errors with the unconscionable crimes of your most despicably vicious foe.
What you subsidize (give resources to), you get more of. What you starve (withhold resources from) you get less of. When you bail out failure and levy more taxes on success, what's going to happen?
The health care market is not and has not been a free market since the federal government passed Medicare and Medicaid. Costs have risen precipitously and uncontrollably since then because of government involvement more than any other factor. So MORE government involvement is obviously going to control and reduce costs in future. Right?
The utopia promised by the left is always a dystopia of some kind. One that leaves most of us with less freedom and prosperity and the smart ones who thought of it with more power over us. How do they reoncile that with their adamant egalitarianism?
Life begins at conception. That's the Occam's Razor answer they're so fond of in their constant judgments of racism, sexism, and ethnic prejudice of various kinds. Any other answer is NOT the simplest and easiest answer. What did Occam have against fetuses?
People on the left do not think. They pose, they preen, they presume, they polemicize, they piss on their putative enemies, but they do not ponder anything of import anymore. Since the last new progressive idea occurred to them a long human lifetime ago, they are, as a procreative power, suffering peripatetically from an enlarged pseudo-populist prostate gland. Their peeing is urgent, precise as a petunia watering can, and it pulverizes their peace of mind by keeping their little pee-pees problematic all night. Not to mention impotent. Like every pompous popinjay at the Puffington Post.
Preliminary, is it? Then flesh it out. (I apologize for any question marks. They're all rhetorical. Because the answers are, uh, obvious.)
By the way, everyone, it's not enough that the Doc or I have seemed to prove any of these propositions by inference or en passant in prior posts. The challenge is to prove them particularly, as obvious propositions. Just so you know.
UPDATE. Why none of this is academic:
Government is our friend, right? Wrong. Now prove it. Logically and mathematically. See the problem?
Some people can see it. Some people can't. Can Doctor Zero save the day? I doubt it. I could, of course, but I'm pretty busy with other stuff. Movies, TV, sports, bobbleheads, bunnies, and hummingbirds.
You
can quit after 03:00
Too bad for you. Maybe you should have put the bunny back in the box before things got to this state.
When
I was younger anyway. I always had a
thing about the bunny staying put in the box.
Back before I was Johnny Dodge in Punk City.
thing about the bunny staying put in the box.
Back before I was Johnny Dodge in Punk City.
Something to think about anyway.
UPDATE 2. Doctor Zero plans to respond. To the first obvious proposition. Stay tuned. This could take a while.
UPDATE 3. Now the doc has posted on the first proposition ("Corporate taxes are paid by individual taxpayers.") Fine essay, which is par for him, but he's a mite too philosophical for me on this one. I'm thinking in terms of basic arithmetic. Try this:
A company posts a profit for the year
and pays taxes on that profit. They still have money left over after
they pay their taxes, which is called net profit after taxes. The
income out of which they paid their taxes came from sales of their
products to consumers like you. Who paid their taxes? Consumers like
you. Does that make sense? Or am I getting into Occam trouble again?
uh, I don't think so. If corporate income taxes suddenly went away,
what would happen to their prices, do you think? Someone in their market would seize
the opportunity of lowering prices to increase demand and market share.
Others would have to follow suit. How markets work. Who was paying
their taxes before the income tax went away? Three guesses and the
first two don't count.
If you can't follow my logic, let me know. I've been called a simpleton before.
