You claim to be a humanitarian, you claim to care for the 'common man' yet all your premises are based on your hatred, and lack of respect for them.

What is wrong is an ever-expanding ability to take a large portion of what someone makes and give it to someone else.

Taking under the threat of force is not right. This is common sense, not part of outdated "Reagan mantra'.

I love the human race- which means allowing the best in people to come out, allowing excellence to run free. It means admitting that you admire Einstein more than the lazy. You would have us all staring out at crumbling buildings, in bovine bliss, as government takes our money, punishes the excellent and enforces "equality".

You hate mankind.

@Uncle Marty:

You seem to have a really unhealthy relationship to money if you think the biggest threat to mankind is "an ever-expanding ability to take a large portion of what someone makes and give it to someone else."

If you live in such perpetual paranoid fear of someone taking your money and giving it to "lazy" (i.e., of course, non-white) people, then stop making it. You might feel better. Even bovine blissful!

Oh, PS: the Internet is run by the "big government" using "your tax money" which is "given to someone else" -- so you may want to get off that, too.

Progressive taxation and economic growth have co-existed just fine since the dawn of capitalism, Uncle Marty. The argument that they are somehow mutually exclusive is a relatively recent one, pushed by greedy and selfish people who don't really share your professed love for humanity (which I really don't think you do, given your obvious disdain for the lazy and poor).
But if really admire Einstein -- a solid humanist and pacifist -- then you'd know his values are far closer to mine than yours.
Among his quotations relevant to this discussion:
"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

i love the downsizing of government; big government means more nazies; get a clue. who wants more nazies.

I think 'Uncle Marty' is nothing more than a troll. Don't take the bait.

The most entertaining thing about Steve's ongoing "progressive taxation" jingo is that there is never enough.

There will never be enough to feed the governmental beast that the progressives have created at the local level, just as like at the national level with military spending and the right.

If you don't agree with Steve's "progressive taxation" mantra you are "greedy" for wanting to keep the money you worked for. While the public employee unions and non proffit's who lobby for all this progressive spending are victims, of not getting enough of the "greedy" tax payers money.

It's a strange world that SF "progressives" have created, they absolutely hate the government when things don't go their way (prop 8 which I voted against) and want to run roughshod over the rest of us when they think it will go their way (taxing the shit out of people, banning guns).

Like neo conservatives the progressives survive much of the time on the hypocrisy of their enemies, cramming government down our throats is good when they do it, bad when other people do it. The ultimate hypocrits.

I'd watched an episode of political philosophy from Michael Sandel at Hahavahd, http://www.justiceharvard.org/ , and happened upon his discussion of libertarianism.

I'd never looked under the hood of that philosophy, having watched its practice and been turned off.

But the basis for it is this notion of self-possession further refined into a concept of self-ownership. I don't think that most of us would have a problem with individual autonomy, but to frame it in terms of ownership, that one is one's own chattel, or that one even views human beings as chattel is most disturbing to those of us who think that what a person owns has nothing to do with what being human.

Libertarianism is a creature of its time, arising with Locke who was present at the original sin of capitalism, of the enclosures of the commons which drove the rural English populations into the city as fodder for factories. Of course, libertarianism dances around the notion of original sin, of coerced expropriation of the formerly common into private hands. We see the same thing going on in rural Mexico, where NAFTA fucked with the corn market, allowing GMO US corn to out-compete centuries old sustainable agriculture, and driving a generation of now rootless youth into the urban centers to serve as fodder for the drug gangs who are only in the killing fields for business, nothing personal.

But libertarianism's brilliance is to equate the holding of personal property, of the stuff you have in your house, with private property, of capital, and to assert that an attack on one is an attack on all. Further, the libs would have working folks pay taxes to protect private property. I wonder how long that would last.

This way, the concept of taxation as slavery appeals to conservative working stiffs even though that which is taxed from those with productive capital are the crystallized wages of others, not their own wages because they are not wage laborers.

There are plenty of positive examples of how high tax industrial states provide stability and the conditions for a reasonable amount of economic and social progress. The US in the 1950s taxed up past 70% and that was the golden era of the golden state, that was the basis for the astounding progress in the 1960s.

Conversely, were libertarians to prevail and we had a government that would fit into a thimble, then the stability required for capitalism to function, and it is on the razor's edge in many places, would be relieved and they'd find that the real costs to do business are way too high to be financed any other way. But to get buy in from that would require some sort of social contract.

Of course, when pressed, libertarians are revealed as fascists as they tend to believe that democracy is an impediment to the productive deployment of capital because democracy can challenge the divine right to control your capital because it springs into existence whole and requires no social support to function.

These latter day Galts believe that they don't need us. But without us, who's gonna make and buy their products or protect their capital? Abandon your factories and we'll take them over as autonomous anarcho syndicalist collectives.

As the tax whiners began to prevail in the 1970s, the plug was pulled on that, and combined with the outsourcing of middle class jobs, we've seen the band leave the building as far as the US goes. Hopefully, with the tea baggers as the avatars for the tax whiners, their position will be revealed to be short sighted and selfish, and that the next generation, not steeped in the cold war rhetoric, will adopt a pragmatic approach to public finance.

-marc

While I agree with you, Steve, that taxes should be higher, I wish that city government could run more efficiently.

Case in point:
The server at city hall crashed during Michael Jackson's funeral because virtually everyone at city hall was sitting at his desk watching it on his computer screen (according to the Chron), and the city had to issue an email warning to all its employees to get back to work.

The city runs on an employee seniority system with no competitive bidding, no employee scrutiny, no possibility of getting fired.

I grew up here in SF, and every other pencil-pushing mediocracy-crat I went to high school with was pining for a city job immediatly upon graduation, knowing full well that he/she would be set up with full benefits and a cushy public-sector job until death do him part if so desired.

The result: government by paper-pushing. The police and fire departments are the most egregious gluttons of them all.

Marc, As we now live in a global economy, something I neither created or endorse, the tax rates of the 50's would lead to further job losses in the USA.

If the "progressives" wanted to drive up tax income and wages they should be for everyone obeying this nations immigration laws.

I find it entertaining that people owe progressives more and more money because of the progressives self appointed moral superiority, to get this money the progressive wants the government to raise and enforce tax laws, yet the progressive thinks that its OK to ignore a host of other laws. Picking and choosing their way through the laws of this nation is OK for the progressive, but no one else.

The pragmatic approach to government is to spend what you get.

@Barton
I'm sure there is waste in city government, just like there is a ton of waste in the private sector, with its duplicate products and predatory pursuits. And I'm certainly willing to have a conversation about how to make government more efficient, although we should acknowledge the result won't be perfect (after all, I know public sector employees aren't the only ones who waste time on the Internet).
But for that conversation to even begin, we need the two sides to come together in good faith on a more or less level negotiating table to discuss creating the right balance between the public and private sectors. And I would submit that powerful public employee unions haven't been the main hindrance to that kind of honest debate -- it's been generations of capitalist assault on and demonization of government that's really prevents that.
There's also one more point that I think is relevant here, and that's the one word that everyone seems to think is so important: jobs. We all need them, particularly with how we've structured our economy (see Marc's wage slave argument above). Job creation is the most frequent and effective argument that the Right makes for keeping taxes low. But they never seem to acknowledge all the public sector job loss that has resulted from their ideology, and that hurts the economy just as much as private sector layoffs (actually moreso, given that public sector jobs often have better pay and benefits).
Personally, if given the choice between a lazy city employee who spends too much time on the Internet, and an insurance company employee whose job is to look for ways to deny people's medical benefits, I'd choose the former. Jobs aren't just about the function they perform, they're also about providing a livelihood for those who hold them.

Since public employee union leadership is progressive and demands more and more progressive entitlements and expects raises for their employees they are part of the problem.

With that sense of entitlement and to other peoples money because of their values there is no way there could be a "conversation."

Who in the world would you have a "conversation" with by the way? No one wants inept government, strawman aside.

Public sector job loss? This city employ's something like twice the people it did 30 years ago while we still have roughly the same population and it rakes in money well ahead of any economic indicator over the years.

What do we have to show for it? The money that should be going to the schools and roads gets diverted into paying off the NRA over idiotic unconstitutional laws, suing the state, dozens of ridiculous city panels, make work programs in the DA's office, sending criminals to boys camp, a green Czar, etc...

The liberals burn through all sorts of money for no good reason and then beg for more?

Selling naming rights for Candlestick Park was not regressive taxation. Recent suggestions for new taxes out of city hall have been for regressive taxes. Don't try to say that passage of that revenue raising measure means folks are going to vote for more regressive taxation - especially those still burning from Muni fare (tax) hike.

Mark

Selling naming rights for Candlestick Park was not regressive taxation. Recent suggestions for new taxes out of city hall have been for regressive taxes. Don't try to say that passage of that revenue raising measure means folks are going to vote for more regressive taxation - especially those still burning from Muni fare (tax) hike.

Mark