Posted on 01/23/2003 8:55:27 PM PST by ConservativeMan55
Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone, and thought about the best way to defend your own argument an hour later after the debate was over?
This was my experience today with my left wing, socialistic, kool-aid drinking, communist, rat of a professor.
He made a comment about taxing the rich because they have all the money, and him and I started debating.
First I said that I am personally not in favor of taxing the rich because when you tax wealthy people (Whatever you definition of wealthy may be) Whenever you tax something you get less of it.
So if you tax the wealthy, they are going to put off spending. When they put off spending, the manufacturers of the products they buy lose money, and cut jobs. Lower Income Jobs are cut and the Middle Class are hurt.
He responded by saying that if
"If I owned a video store, and you owned a video store, and I got money from my rich daddy, and you had worked your way up to owning a video store what would happen? I would slash prices, and because I had more money, I would keep slashing prices until you went out of business. Is that fair people? No its not fair! Its what capitalism is all about! Thats not right!"
This is where I should have responded by saying that competition is good, and would have brought in more customers from other places. But I was too busy trying to decipher his riddle about video stores.
I did tell him that I do not believe you can tax a society into prosperity. He then asked me if I knew which country was taxed the most in the history of countries, and then he told me America was.
This is where I should have responded by saying that America wasn't taxed into prosperity, but gained prosperity from free markets, private property ownership,individual rights, etc. Once the wealth was gained from those factors, you had jealous people called "liberals" promote class warfare and say that the rich stole the money. Liberals like himself are fueled by emotion rather than logic itself.
Then he went on a diatribe about Roe vs Wade. He went on his long speil about how he wastes lives when he master....bates again. Then he asked us what we thought would happen if Roe v Wade was overturned.
"He said that if it were overturned in Oklahoma there would be other states that would still allow it. Then you would have rich people protesting against it until their daughters got pregnant. Then the rich people would fly their daughters into states that allowed it, while poor people would be screwed because they coudn't afford to fly to another state to have an abortion. All he claims because they made a little mistake. He thinks having kids is a little mistake!"
He believes that conservatives love to see people suffer.
He believes that people are prone to failure, and will do so without the governments help.
He talked about how conservative judges will use judical restraint while liberal judges will use judical activism.
He said that Roe vs Wade was a result of judicial review.
He believes that your Miranda rights were obtained through 1960's activism.
He then went on another diatribe about abortion saying that conservatives don't want the government to meddle in our lives until its a conservative cause such as the election in 2000 or abortion.
He said that he believes people go to church, and pick out the parts that they want to believe. Because as he puts it, no 200 people can get together and agree together.
He also said we should have no male cops, and that only women should be allowed to be cops.
Either the professor was ignorant or a stone-faced liar. America has much less taxation than a lot of other countries today.
What exactly were the tax rates in all the failed communist states that killed millions of their citizens and impoverished those that survived?
Oh wait, there aren't any taxes in utopia. The glorious leftist government owns everything.
The appropriate rebuttal to this is that his premise is false, therefore his conclusion (that we should tax the rich) cannot be logically reasoned from it.
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of the income generated in America is in the middle class, not the rich. If you were to impose 100% tax rates on everyone who makes over a million dollars per year, it would generate enough money to fund the Federal Government for no more than 30 days. It is also true that something like the top 20% of taxpayers are already paying something like 80% of the entire tax burden borne by individual taxpayers. So, your professor doesn't know what he's talking about.
As for his argument regarding the video store slashing prices, his analysis ignores the benefit accruing to the customers who can then spend the money they save at his store on OTHER goods and services ELSEWHERE, stimulating the economy. Additionally, his implicit assumption is that a free market economy is subject to what is called "market failure." This concept, popular back when the Keynsian economists held sway, has pretty much been debunked by modern economists of the Austrian School, for example.
Sooner or later, the video store owner has to sell his product at a rate at which he gets a reasonable return of his investment, or else he'd dump it and invest his money in something else that had a better return. If he continues to sell at a loss, he's losing money. If he drives you out of business, and raises his rates to 10 times what you were charging, 10 more video stores will pop up to compete with him. If he continues to sell at a loss (for reasons that I can't imagine) he is effectively subsidizing his customers so they can spend the money they save elsewhere.
This, by the way, is identical to Japan subsidizing it's auto industry and selling low priced cars in America. The protectionists howl about this, but Milton Friedman points out that in effect, the Japanese taxpayers are enabling Americans to drive Japanese cars at a lower price, so that Americans can use the money they save to buy OTHER goods and services (or even SAVE for the future!) In short, it is GOOD for our economy, not bad.
>>>...Isn't this a Business Law course?
You should get your money back if this guy is teaching business law. It is a violation of the anti-trust laws to sell below cost so as to damage a competitor.
It is restraint of trade.
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