Category: Egoism in Action (page 15 of 26)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this last night in a comment to a post:

The United States is being run as a kleptocracy, but instead of plundering the treasury and the accumulated wealth of the nation in behalf of a small criminal conspiracy, we rob from a rapidly-diminishing productive sector in behalf of a vast and ever-burgeoning population of moochers — at all strata of society.

You can’t flip on the television without running across a cipher for your own grandmother proudly announcing how some politically-connected vendor has taught her how to rape the taxpayers — which is to say you and your kids, her own great-grandchildren — in her own behalf. This will be the real triumph of Obamacare — to turn every last resident of this once-proud nation into sniveling beggars, each one trying to snap up more benefits than his neighbor.

We don’t have to eat each others’ flesh to be cannibals, and it seems plausible to me that we will not be suffered to live a life of freedom and independence, in the very near future. The entitlement mentality is such a shameful thing that the people who use it as a means of enslaving each other will not suffer the contradiction of an objective renunciation of their creed. In any case, once you’ve eaten a meal taken by theft, you’re not as apt to make noises about law and order, property rights, all that sanctimonious nonsense. Who am I do judge, once I’ve drunk my neighbor’s blood?

That’s dour, but I’m afraid it’s much too exact. Yes, I know that things are always worse than they seem, that the doppler effect of the noise that is the news makes the onrushing crisis sound more ominous even as receding events seem to race away harmlessly. But I fear we are at a tipping point, a place where the grasshoppers so far outnumber the ants that there really is no hope, going forward, for a life based on self-reliance, on philosophical egoism, political individualism and economic free enterprise. The United States has resolved to resolve the contradiction of chattel slavery by making slaves of Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More from The Wall Street Journal: People in high-tax states are less satisfied with their lives than those in low-tax states.

Who knew?

That’s not a fair question. Everyone who can do math already knew this. But what’s interesting is that it points the way forward for all states, especially the ones currently losing their high-earning tax-slaves to less onerous tax-plantations: Cut taxes. Cut spending. Get rid of your kleptocratic union laws.

Or: In the words of John Galt, “Get the hell out of my way!”

The study suggests that quality of life heavily influences happiness. This may seem obvious, but until this study, social scientists have struggled to develop a model that supports this hypothesis. Now we know that people who say they’re satisfied with their lives aren’t just delusional or overly optimistic, and people who say they’re unsatisfied aren’t just pessimists. People have legitimate reasons to be happy or unhappy.

And well, high taxes seem to be a big reason — ostensibly an even bigger reason than weather given that California is one of the unhappiest states and inclement Louisiana is the happiest. Further, considering how much New York’s crime rate has dropped and schools have improved in the last decade, taxes seem to overwhelm even these two critical factors in the happiness equation. According to the Tax Foundation 2008 analysis, three of the top five unhappiest states—New York, Connecticut and New Jersey—have the highest state-local tax burdens. On the other hand, four of the top five happiest states—Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Arizona—are among the states with the lowest state-local tax burdens. True, correlation doesn’t prove causation, and high taxes alone don’t always make people miserable, but there’s something going on here.

In states with high property, income, and sales taxes like New York, people have less money to spend on other things that make them happy. They have less money to spend on vacations, hobbies, home improvements, eating out and child care. Another problem may be that people receive a low return on their tax dollars. The study’s authors note that people are least happy in states that impose high taxes but don’t provide Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve known for more than a year that I want to write a book about what we’re getting wrong.

As a species, that is.

Through all of human history.

Surely that’s a man-sized ambition — and perhaps also a new high-water mark for the abstract concept denoted by the word “hubris.”

That’s as may be. In truth, this is an undertaking I would rather not undertake. For one thing, I’m busy and, in consequence, I’m physically tired much of the time. For another, this is less a thankless job than it is a task for which I can reasonably expect to be punished. Not officially punished, one may hope, but it seems likely that I will be derided, hectored or hounded, as I proceed with this project. I don’t shun that sort of thing, not ever, but it’s not something I actively court.

But none of that matters. The ideas I want to talk about drive me wild — in the best of all possible senses. I abhor every form of the claim of unchosen duty, and yet I feel that I must go through all this, that I cannot live in peace, much less die in peace, until I have transcribed every bit of everything that races through my brain.

But I can laugh at myself, too, so much am I alike, in my incipient dotage, to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.” Saving the world is a madman’s obsession, after all, a belfry awaiting its loyal complement of bats.

[Continue reading here, if you like. This project is way off topic even for a blog as topically-liberated as BloodhoundBlog, so if you want to follow along at home, the main action will be at SplendorQuest.com.]