5:27 pm February 15, 2010, by Jay
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
– Abraham Lincoln,
Message to Congress, Dec. 3, 1861
I wonder what our first Republican president would say about laws that tax capital gains at a much lower rate than they tax a person’s labor.
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352 comments Add your comment
josef nix
February 15th, 2010
10:21 pm
Hillbilly–
We’ve passed comments previously on the “spiritual” end of all this pre-capitalist “in harmony with nature” Indigenous American…Unmentionable says. “turn that thermostat up. My a$$ is freezing!”
Bruno
February 15th, 2010
10:21 pm
“It wouldn’t be impossible but it’d be a mighty hard life.”
Gotta admit, HD, your stories of hardship and roughing it put any of mine to shame!
getalife
February 15th, 2010
10:21 pm
RW,
How much for the hoe?
Unshackled Loyalty
February 15th, 2010
10:23 pm
Use rocks to shape quartz arrowheads and knives. Make spears and arrows and hunt for deer. Kill deer and skin for food. Eat it raw if you are hungry enough. Make clothing from skin. Look for cave to sleep in. Ugh. Life is hard without capital one financing.
Jay
February 15th, 2010
10:24 pm
Can’t say I was pleased to be wrong like that, Thomas.
But I was engaging, as you say, even before that. It’s how I got into trouble in the first place … :>)
The Story of my Life
February 15th, 2010
10:24 pm
How much for the hoe?
She’s not for sale but I’ll rent it to ya cheap.
RW-(the original)
February 15th, 2010
10:25 pm
getalife,
As long as you keep the “e” on the end it’s about twenty bucks, but take the “e” off and it could range from a rock of crack to a few grand an hour.
josef nix
February 15th, 2010
10:25 pm
getalife—
How much for the hoe, or how much for the ho?
Bruno–
Funny, and I’m not trying to be a smart a$$ here, but I don’t see HD’s stories as ones of “hardship,” but quite the opposite…
Brakeman
February 15th, 2010
10:26 pm
Doggone/GA:
History (and people’s attitudes, etc.) must be judged from the time in which they lived. By today’s standards Lincoln was a racist. At the end of the war, most norhtern states passed laws forbidding blacks to vote or their immigration into the state without posting a “bond”. In Ohio, I think the bond was $1,000.
The “slavery” in or nation continued up into the early 1900’s in the form of child slave labor in northern coal mines, factories and southern cotton mills. No one is innocent.
I was raised as a small child in the late 40’s/early 50’s in a “holler” in W.Va. where my Dad worked in the coal mines (with very little safety regulations), rented a “company” house (no inside plumbing) and bought our food at the “company” store. And by the way, he played first base on the (you guessed it) “company” baseball team. This wasn’t “slavery” but it was close to it.
Bruno:
The study of history past is very useful to us. I suggest you give it more weight in you deliberations.
“If we can help sustain an independent South Vietnam, free to determine its own future, then our prospects, and the prospects for free men throughout Asia, will be bright indeed.” Democrat Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Addressing West Point Cadets, June 8, 1966.
I wonder if Obama read that before he made his speech at West Point on December 1st unveilling plans to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan ?
josef nix
February 15th, 2010
10:27 pm
RW
Beat me to it and should’ve known you’d have the better line, too!
The Story of my Life
February 15th, 2010
10:30 pm
but I don’t see HD’s stories as ones of “hardship,” but quite the opposite…
What!
RW-(the original)
February 15th, 2010
10:30 pm
josef,
If Jay B would change the time stamp option to show us the seconds we could see just how much I beat you by.
Hillbilly Deluxe
February 15th, 2010
10:30 pm
Josef @ 10:21
If burning wood was so great, people would have kept doing it.
Bruno @ 10:21
I haven’t lived that life myself but I’m the first generation who never had to. A while back I was walking through one of the old fields with Daddy and I looked to the other end, 200-300 yards away, and I said, “That’s far (have to break this word to get past the moderator) ther, than it looks”. He says, “You ought to have seen how far it looked when it was 90 degrees and you were staring at the mule’s @ss”.
Unshackled
If you’re gonna pan for gold, better make sure you own the mineral rights. In Georgia, on all non-navigable streams (that means commercial navigation, not kayaks), the stream bed belongs to the property owner. If the stream is the property line, each owner owns to the middle of the stream. It takes a lot of chickens and vegetables to pay for lawyers.
getalife
February 15th, 2010
10:32 pm
Well, if we are sharing hoes, I will need to visit the ATM.
Bruno
February 15th, 2010
10:33 pm
“Pan for gold.”
A few weeks ago, I swallowed a gold crown. Gave new meaning to the phrase^^^^^^^
josef nix
February 15th, 2010
10:36 pm
Hillbilly–
Know what a “lighter knot” is?
Bruno
February 15th, 2010
10:36 pm
“The study of history past is very useful to us. I suggest you give it more weight in you deliberations.”
Studying and learning from it is one thing, using it as an excuse to carry forward old grudges is quite another.
josef nix
February 15th, 2010
10:37 pm
RW–
He’d still put you in in front of me. He don’t like me tonight!
Bruno
February 15th, 2010
10:39 pm
Here’s a tribute to your pop, HD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ohn4aNGVds
Bruno
February 15th, 2010
10:42 pm
On the old blog score card, I have to rate it as follows for tonight:
Reporter–1 Jay–0
Good work, Reporter! Gotta keep Jay honest!
RW-(the original)
February 15th, 2010
10:44 pm
josef,
Well you said I had a better line so maybe the moderator uses that same basis for posting order, but enough about this blog or topic. Olympic skating scoring is still just as squirrely as ever. It seems the more you biff the better your scores all of a sudden.
Brakeman
February 15th, 2010
10:46 pm
Bruno:
Then we are in agreement. Thank you sir.
Hillbilly Deluxe
February 15th, 2010
10:47 pm
Know what a “lighter knot” is?
Yes, I do. We just call them pine knots here though and what’s called “lighter wood” in other places is called “rich pine” here. I’ve seen my Grandpa start a brush fire in the rain, with them, many times.
Bruno
Thanks for the tune. Daddy prefers this one, says it reminds him of growing up. I’ve got a picture of him when he was about 6 or so years old, standing in front of the one room school house, shirt, overalls, no shoes, and holding his lunch in a lard bucket.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr4GT4ltvBk
Bruno
February 15th, 2010
10:54 pm
“Daddy prefers this one, says it reminds him of growing up.”
I’ve always liked Dolly. She plays like a dumb blonde sometimes in interviews, but she’s one smart cookie.
Bruno
February 15th, 2010
10:56 pm
Gotta run, take it easy fellows.
Hillbilly Deluxe
February 15th, 2010
11:03 pm
And Dolly does for her people too.
http://www.northeaststate.edu/library/imagination/index.shtml
josef nix
February 15th, 2010
11:04 pm
Hillbilly–
I am slow on the uptake tonight…I had that pulled up ready to send to you!
My mom was a product of the rural South in the Depression when the cash economy was all but nonexistant. She says you couldn’t find shoes and cloth to handsew clothes was hard to come by. Food, though, there was in abundance. She says “we the fattest bunch of little barefoot, ragged-a$$ kids you ever saw!”
Lighter knots? Whenever I’m back home I go up in the woods and gather a few, bring ‘em back and start a fire in the fireplace at Granny and Granddaddy’s old place. I gather strength there, too. Granddaddy was just retiring when the crash came. He lost all his capital. He had the four acres on which he had planned to put up “Miss Georgia’s” dream house. Well, so much for all that, right? Nope, he, she and the boys built the house from wood, much of which he cut and planed himself, built the fireplace himself and made sure that the inside was a work of art…he had already put in the fruit orchards…there he spent the next 40 some odd years with Miss Georgia, working on the house abd the gardens as his fortune recovered and today it is a beauty with each and every board and plank a story, not of hardship, but of love and perserverance in the face of adversity…
Brakeman
February 15th, 2010
11:10 pm
I can think of a good use for this ……….. send it to me !
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100215/ap_on_re_as/as_indonesia_obama_statue
Brakeman
February 15th, 2010
11:11 pm
P.S.
Lest there be any confusion, I have some squirrels I need to scare away.
Hillbilly Deluxe
February 15th, 2010
11:17 pm
Josef
That’s what I take from my people too. No matter what life threw at them, they just kept on pressing on, because that’s what you do. And no matter how little they had at a given time, if somebody got sick or their house burned down or whatever, they were always there to help them out. I think one thing a lot of people in today’s world have lost sight of is “there but for the Grace of God, go I”. It can happen to anybody at anytime, no matter how in control somebody might think they are.
Well, enough fun and frivolity for one night. Sleep well, everybody.
josef nix
February 15th, 2010
11:20 pm
I, too, shall call it a day…g’night all…
Dusty
February 15th, 2010
11:40 pm
Well, I stopped by before turning out the lights
Josef, you were not the loser tonight. Hillbilly lost no points either. I love honest reliability and a fairness in presentation. And there are those who would change history and viewpoints because some CONTEMPORARY decided his views were better than the originals who often had shared the experience. Which brings us to Bookman…sadly.
Anbody running a blog and then comparing contributors to people like Timothy McVegh does not have the self control, integrity or character to deal with the public. Bookman is everything a journalist should not be, domineering, rude, inflexible and self important. He uses the same tactics and namecalling for which he bans other posters.
Yes, Bookman can bring on a crowd of folks.. So can a big dogfight. But neither does anything for the enhancement of anybody. What has happened to the standards of journalism these days? Have they too been changed by contemporaries? That is the way it seems here.
Now good night. Turn out the lights when you leave.
I Report (-: You Whine )-: mmm, mmmm, mmmmm!
February 16th, 2010
5:14 am
Alarms ranging from “overpopulation” to “global warming” and crusades ranging from “affordable housing” to “universal health care” have been among the distractions of political magicians. But few distractions have had such a long and impressive political track record as getting people to resent and, if necessary, hate other people.
Another dangerous power toward which we are moving, bit by bit, on the installment plan, is the power of politicians to tell people what their incomes can and cannot be. Here the resentment is being directed against “the rich.”
The distracting phrases here include “obscene” wealth and “unconscionable” profits.
You can see the agenda behind the rhetoric when profits are called “unconscionable” but taxes never are, even when taxes take more than half of what someone has earned, or add much more to the prices we have to pay than profits do.-Thomas Sowell
Just sayin….
I Report (-: You Whine )-: mmm, mmmm, mmmmm!
February 16th, 2010
5:17 am
‘Tea party’ activists filter into GOP at ground level
“That’s where it all starts. That’s where the process of picking candidates begins. It’s not from [GOP leader] Michael Steele’s office down. It’s from the ground up,” said Philip Glass, whose National Precinct Alliance is among the groups advocating the strategy. “The party is over for the old guard.”
Out wit duh RINOs!
TnGelding
February 16th, 2010
5:25 am
Capital gains? What’s that?
Wonder what he would say about GOP policies eliminating capital gains?
That said, I refused to rejoin the union after I was called back from being layed off in the late ’60s. I only joined when I was hired because I knew Dad would kick my butt if I didn’t.
We need to make sure neither side gets too much power. We’re in this together and need to make sure we have jobs, althought they might not pay as much or have as many benefits as we would like.
TnGelding
February 16th, 2010
5:28 am
Anyone that doesn’t understand there are too many people on this planet doesn’t have a clue. We certainly took the “go forth and multiply” command to heart.
Joel Edge
February 16th, 2010
5:41 am
“would say about laws that tax capital gains at a much lower rate than they tax a person’s labor.”
Here’s a suggestion for you. Let’s drop the taxes on both. Oh, I forgot, that wouldn’t fit into the us-versus-them theme of this blog would it.
jt
February 16th, 2010
6:30 am
A quick search lists the following Democrats who have bailed out over the last couple of months in order to pursue “other interests” or “spend more time with their families”.
• Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN)
• Rep. Patrick (Patches) Kennedy (D-RI)
• Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT)
• Rep. Vern Tincher (D-IN)
• Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
• Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA)
• Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL)
Which presumably means they’ve found other ways to fleece taxpayers.
Rats.
jt
February 16th, 2010
6:45 am
Here is another one.
Senator Babs Mikulski (D, Ma.)
Thank you Obama.
I Report :-) You Whine :-( mmm, mmmm, mmmmm!
February 16th, 2010
6:47 am
The Mount Vernon Statement specifically calls for a new “fusion provided by American principles” through “constitutional conservatism.” “In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics,” the document reads. “The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.”
“The conservatism of the Declaration asserts self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God,” the platform reads. “It defends life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It traces authority to the consent of the governed. It recognizes man’s self-interest but also his capacity for virtue.” -AmSpec
Now that’s what I’m sayin….
PotMedal
February 16th, 2010
7:19 am
The medal is certainly in sight for the Republicans. They’re coming into the home stretch. They’ve already shown that they have the endurance. Over a year of doing nothing but just saying no to anything and everything that would help the American people and focusing on helping no one but themselves. That’s the GOP. Real weiners. Deserving of a most befitting medal.
Granny Godzilla
February 16th, 2010
7:51 am
The Mount Vernon Statement….I just can’t wait to read it!
O boy! Tony Perkins and Brent Bozell and Ed Meese……
I wonder if it will talk about Republican “purity”?
mmmmm,mmmmm, tee hee hee, mmmmm
PotMedal
February 16th, 2010
7:52 am
Republican Purity. Is that the name of a new colon cleanser.
Granny Godzilla
February 16th, 2010
7:57 am
PotMedal
Can I call you pot?
I think it’s just an oxymoron.
NJ
February 16th, 2010
10:01 am
Lincoln hated corporations. He did NOT view them in the same way as one would view a small business, where the owner actually DOES take risks and do much of the work that earns his money.
It was Lincoln who started the political acceptance of the first NATIONAL workers Union.
Lincoln would be quite opposed to what is today called “wage slavery” he did not approve of the idea of any one man earning money off of the labor of others.
Two related Lincoln quotes:
“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?” Lincoln’s Cooper Institute Address, February 27, 1860.
“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name – liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume VII, “Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland” (April 18, 1864), p. 301-302.
Of course most people know that Lincoln considered corporations more dangerous to America than foreign nations and foreign armies.
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
– U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
NJ
February 16th, 2010
10:15 am
I report, in order to go back to “constitutional conservatism” EVERY legal decision that protects corporations as well as inherited wealth would have to be undone. The original document is written in such a manner that would make all interstate corporations illegal, and inheritance of ones parents wealth virtually impossible. When you check out the founders interpretations of what the constitution means, the concept of forming corporations to shelter wealth would be impossible (which is why there was a case in the Supreme Court in the late 19th Century with regard to making laws that made corporations LEGAL…they were NOT legal in any sense before hand, except in extremely limited circumstances…one might say that Republicans and conservatives are far more responsible for discarding the original constitutional principals and setting the standard that the constitution was no longer relevant by making the changes that gave corporations unlimited rights…It was over the issue of corporations where Republicans argued that changing times and conditions required changes in the law and the constitution and how it is interpreted by the Supreme Court” the huge expansion of government is largely the result of late 19th, early 20th Century Republican ideology, not Democratic. The Democrats merely started using the same concepts that Republicans applied to big business, and saying that the people in GENERAL also had those same rights to have the law and constitution change as times change.”
The same principle used to justify the “personhood” of corporations was used in the argument that determined that government social services were completely constitutional. In order to get rid of the idea that the government CAN regulate health care and even make it mandatory for all employers, you have to eliminate the idea of the “corporation”. They are both based on similar “protections”. That is they are used to protect INDIVIDUALS from the consequences of actions that take with their corporations. This same law allow the government to protect individuals from the actions of corporations, such as loss of health insurance with loss of job.
NJ
February 16th, 2010
10:36 am
Or to put it simply, the role of the expansion of government was largely a late 19th Century Republican creation. The Republican party split into two parts. The original midwestern populist party of Lincoln, and a new young batch of radical Eastern elite Republicans from Wall Street which gained ascension in the election where the Democrat won the popular vote, but the Republican won the electoral college.(1876) In this election the Republican was a pro corporation radical eastern non populist Republican who asserted that with changing times, the interpretation of the constitution had to change. Then he loaded the Supreme Court with like minded Republicans. In the next ten years the United States was radically altered by those Republican appointments to the courts by mandating that corporate personhood did not make corporations the EQUAL of individuals but SUPERIOR to individuals with GREATER rights than individuals.
Once this occurred the same argument could be applied to ANY group.
NJ
February 16th, 2010
10:49 am
The simplest examples in which the corporation is granted “special rights” is seen in the difference between the average person’s expenses that are tax deductible, and the “corporate persons” deductible expenses. I pay to have my carpet cleaned in my condo, not deductible….But an apartment building owner pays to have a similar apartment’s carpet cleaned….deductible as a “business expense”
The same changes applied to balancing the rights of labor with the rights of citizens when it comes to “social spending”. It is the labor of the worker that produces the wealth for the corporate person.
If errors on the part of the corporate person cause the individual laborer loss of the means to an income, this poverty is in fact, the outcome of the “special rights” granted to the “corporate person”..
If the real person loses his “health insurance” as a natural result of the use of those special corporate rights, there is some obligation on the part of the government which granted those corporations their “special personhood” to balance these off towards the “real person”
This was the basic argument that made Social Security and all other social programs legal.
The changing methods of doing business created the conditions that prevented a single person from doing business in a way that could COMPETE with large, capital based, businesses.
NJ
February 16th, 2010
11:08 am
Actually virtually everything that Republicans oppose being done by Democrats are in fact mirror images of what Republicans did to give power to corporations. The Republican argument is that “capital procedes labor” which is senseless. Property is created by labor. By work. The property created by ones OWN work, according to the constitution and the interpretation of “natural” property laws belongs 100 percent to the person who created that object or property.
With the rise of corporations and industrialization, a monkey wrench was thrown into the constitutional theory of “natural” property rights. It is the WORKER who is producing the “thing of value” the “property”. But the business owner is taking a PORTION of what belongs to the person who made it. The “fruit of his labor”, is being taken by the owners of the business.
Because this is the nature of corporate business in an industrial society, laws and protections on both sides of the equation were necessary. Something completely within the jurisdiction of government, constitutionally.
This imbalance went on for several decades, but it produced massive social problems when a small group of men lived very well off of the “property rights” of others. So the government made laws to “balance off” and remunerate the workers for that loss of what was their right. 100 percent of the value of what was produced through their labor.
NJ
February 16th, 2010
11:35 am
Simply put, in exchange for special privileges given to the wealthy, special obligations were also attached to them. The Republican opposition towards Social programs is an attempt to undo that balance, without taking away the “special privileges ” given to the “special personhood” of corporations.
What Lincoln foresaw has occurred. Special monied interests have much more power than the private person. About the most unconstitutional thing imaginable under the concept of a “conservative constitution”
This is the case of wanting the cake, and eating it too.
Craig Cobb
February 19th, 2010
4:03 am
JOE STACK TAX INSURGENT original content VIDEOS
http://podblanc.com
Bob
September 2nd, 2010
11:38 pm
“Well if he understood modern economics, he would know that cutting capital gains tax encourages folks to put their capital into the marketplace instead of just stockpiling cash. If the government is going to heavily tax the upside of an investment, folks would do better to stick on the sidelines.
Capitalism is based on risks and rewards. When you penalize the rewards, you minimize the desire to take risks.”
That’s the exact opposite of how it works. When capital gains are taxed at a very high rate, the money is reinvested in the business, expanding business and creating more jobs and thence more consumer dremand. When capital gains taxes are low, they are taken out of circulation or invested in useless (to the overall economy) things like stocks, or shipped overseas where it’s used to outsource our jobs.
To save the economy the best possible thing to do is to go back to the old top marginal rates we had under Eisenhower (91% over 3 million) or under Kennesy (70% with the loopholes removed) and treat outsourcing as treason. The “free market” is the cancerous form of capitalism and leads inexorably to oligarchy and/or Facism in every case.