Quote of the Day
But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why?
Walter E. Williams
1988
All It Takes Is Guts: A Minority View
That works for me.
I now have a new book in my queue.
Well then, tell me how much of what you earn belongs to me. Zero? That’s fair. Works both ways. Looks like we’re even.
Walter Williams was one of my favorite guest hosts of The Rush Limbaugh Show. He received more hate from liberals and blacks than Rush ever did.
The unasked question being, how much do all of us pay in for minimal necessary government services. I like having a county fire department / rescue squad for when I will eventually need them. It’s like concealed carry or keeping a good emergency kit in your car. Hopefully you’ll never need it, but I take measures to ensure it’s there and ready when needed. Likewise I think an effective military is necessary in the 21st century. I wish ours did a lot less adventurism overseas and a lot more shooting everything crossing into US territory illegally, but I think it’s worth taxing me. So, how much? I propose zero income tax. Tax the $hit out of all imports. Eliminate public education. Eliminate the welfare state. Eliminate publicly funded healthcare except for preventing the spread of communicable diseases. And limit that to early 20th century style mosquito abatement and stopping epidemics
“Earn” is purposely deceptive. The only way you “earned” every dollar that went into your bank account is if you did so in a vacuum. In the real world, you’re dependent on others for all kinds of things, and their contributions have to be factored in.
The quote is basically old west thinking: I planted this field all by myself with no help from anybody so I should get all the profit from it. Fair enough. But you’re not in 1830 Colorado any more, and the probability that whatever job you work isn’t dependent on the effects of government and supply chains and transport infrastructure is pretty low.
In fact, the degree to which you’re concerned with government and corporate interference in your affairs should give you an idea as to how dependent you are on those systems. If you really were operating on an island where every dollar you made was from the sweat of your brow and your brow alone and nobody else had any claim to having contributed, you wouldn’t…well you wouldn’t be on the Internet arguing about it, for one thing….
You’re right, everything we do is only because the Minnesota Somalians worked so hard for no money. All that supposed work I thought I did was just a hallucination from that hashish oil I smoked a few times back when I was younger.
Bill Kristol is right that we should exterminate American workers and replace them with Third World servants who will rub lotion on his schlong, preparing it for the daily child trafficked to him by his beloved cartels.
American workers are so selfish, expecting you superior people to pay us for the work we do so you and Bill Kristol don’t have to lift your own forks to your mouths during your daily seven course meals.
Pay you for the work you do? What work is that, exactly? I run a fencing business, and when it comes time to hire crews, guess which group of folks don’t show up? White folks. I can hire Latinos, Russians, Serbs, even your favorite the Somalis until the cows come home, but can I get white folks to do that work? Hell no. They won’t do it for anything like a wage that makes sense within the market. So when you talk about “selfish American workers” and “superior people,” my assumption is you’ve never dug a hole or picked a crop, and that you’ve never tried to run a business in competition with low wage companies. (And if you say “well everybody’s wage should just be higher” I will ask to see your Democratic Party membership card, since clearly that’s the party you’re voting with.)
Tell us who can live in Seattle and live/work for what you pay?
How many of the people you hire have someone at home getting government largess? (If they’re not on it themselves.)
My wife and I, 25 years ago would refuse job offers simply because all we were going to be doing is paying for some landlord’s party bill.
Are white people lazy? Sure, some are, we’re paying them to do that to.
Are third-worlders better workers? Not on their best day.
Otherwise, their countries wouldn’t be shitholes, right?
My crews live in or around Seattle, and do fine with what I pay. None of them have anybody at home on welfare, their SO is either working or raising their kids.
As for third-worlders being better workers: since when are Mexico and Russia third world? Mexico is now an industrial powerhouse, and Russia is…Russia. Somalia…that’s third world. But regardless, the fact that white folks won’t even consider doing this kind of hard labor invalidates any argument you have about them being “better workers.”
“The best gun is the one you have with you when shit happens, not the one sitting at home in a safe.”
Wow, you paying ditch diggers $100,00.00 a year now?
Cause that’s what it would take to “do fine” in and around Seattle.
Mexico is an industrial powerhouse?
So, your crew guys just decided to crash the border, come up to a cold, wet, overcrowd, expensive city to find out what it’s like to dig ditches up north? What, the ground softer?
And how would you know what your hands got going on the side?
As for what type of workers they are? Here is the fundamental difference. Not that all people aren’t smart or hard workers. (Hard workers are generally in proportion to how desperate one is.)
We used to be raised in a technological society. We had our heads under the hoods of cars half the time. We used math in our heads everyday. We had to be up on how to be the best at what we did, or you weren’t going to eat and date girls.
Society and culture gave us a natural leg up in almost every field.
My older friends and brothers taught me. Watch the other workers. If the laborers are packing two boards. You pack three. And walk faster.
Kids raised on video games, junk food, and high-tech, high paying job expectations. (Thanks for the lies, Bill Clinton.)
Ya, probably aren’t going to want to, or be able to compete at digging ditches with a hungry third-worlder.
But how many of them you just drop off on the job and expect it to just be done when you get back?
Plumbed, lined, and squared?
None from Somalia, and almost none from Mexico. Otherwise they would still be in their hometowns doing it.
Ya, John, and I paid for all that other crap/stuff too.
The facts are that if the government steals money from me, and gives it to some lazy asshole. Then they pay some sales tax. They ain’t taxpayers. Their just party to the extorsion racket.
Your welfare clowns didn’t do crap. never have and never will.
And if they could do it, think they might have tried it in their own countries, so they don’t need to come here looking for “asylum”?????
90% of them are here to game the system. And the system was set up to destroy itself and us with it. (Look up the Cloward-Piven strategy.)
38 trillion and counting’s worth. (We owe to whom, we don’t know) So were already cooked.
It’s just a matter of time before the rug gets pulled out from under us.
John, do you pay the people who work for you? If so, clearly you don’t believe they earned that money themselves. Who helped them? Why did you not pay those earners directly? Why make your employees pay those who contributed to their fence work? Perhaps what you paid to them reflects what their labor actually earned? But that fence made it easier for the rancher to raise his cattle! You deserve some of the ranchers money, because he didn’t earn that …. Wait. He did pay you. But you didn’t build the fence. You designed the installation and hired qualified workers, and paid them what they earned. Just as the people who built the roads were paid for their labor or project management or accounting services, ect.
If that’s not how it works, it quickly becomes impossible to figure out how much of other people’s income or wealth everyone else is entitled to. You may decide you are entitled to some of my wealth, but I decide that I deserve some of your wealth. Just imagine the overhead and red tape required to do that accounting!!! Imagine the rent seeking and corruption that will take place in that accounting.
No thank you. I’ll stick with the imperfect capitalism we have before heading down that collectivist road.
I’m confused. I took the OP as an argument against taxes. Most of your comment seems to argue against taxes, but then you talk about capitalism vs. collectivism at the end. So…do you think taxes are ok or no? And is any kind of taxation equal to “collectivism?” Help me understand your position.
“Earn” is purposely deceptive. The only way you “earned” every dollar that went into your bank account is if you did so in a vacuum. In the real world, you’re dependent on others for all kinds of things, and their contributions have to be factored in.”
In my view, you earn what somebody agrees to pay you for work/services you agree to do. No externalities. Those negotiations take place in the current context of existing or missing “externalities”
The externalities we choose to fund via taxes are independent of the millions of transactions that take place daily. If my road taxes fail to produce a Boeing, I don’t get my money back. If a Boeing uses the roads I paid taxes for to generate billions, Boeing doesn’t owe anybody anything extra. You can’t charge Boeing in arrears for the cost of the public services they use because they are successful any more than your business can get a refund if you believe missing infrastructure caused your business.to fail.
There are lots of economists who’ve made careers out of documenting the gazillion externalities that stem from every market transaction, in particular those created by taxation and the biases of politics that go into that, so I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. And then we have the problem of predation and corruption, which make it difficult to find a “pure” market where all the actors are treated fairly such that externalities are minimized.
But back to the OP, I’d assume folks in this group must hate the Trump administration given how much it’s taking their tax money and using it for their own gain.
Put another way, if you didn’t like Hunter Biden, you’ve gotta just *hate* Jared Kushner.
True. I’m not a huge fan of ANY administration that seeks to accumulate power at the Federal level. I’m not a fan of any Congress that passes laws enabling rent seeking or other forms of crony capitalism.
That said, I still prefer broken partial capitalism to broken partial socialism. (ref. North vs South Korea)
From the context of the quotation, I read the OP as a comment by Walter Williams about Transfer Payments, a sort of tax intended to even out income “Flaws” in the economy.
Not a word about paying government for services. He did not speak of government, he did not speak of taxes. The very use of “I” and “you” implies he was only speaking of Transfer Payments.
To really get them to sputter, you really need to reverse it. “Tell me how much of what YOU earn belongs to ME.”