The Peoples' Soviet Of Eighth Avenue

"The expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2010 could be a moment of opportunity:

• To recast the tax system so that it raises needed revenue with the burden distributed progressively throughout the income scale.
  
  
• To create a system that does not disproportionately favor investment income over income from work.
  
  
• To consider new taxes that both raise revenue and distribute the overall burden even wider, including value-added taxes that have worked well in Europe."

The New York Times

It's been fifteen years since the appalling twit Francis Fukuyama declared that the ideological struggle was over. Whole massing herds took him seriously. And still: the spectre walks the earth.

It's been forty-two years since That Woman wrote this:

"Political economists -- including the advocates of capitalism -- defined their science as the study of the management or direction or organization or manipulation of a 'community's' or a nation's 'resources'. The nature of these 'resources' was not defined; their communal ownership was taken for granted -- and the goal of political economy was assumed to be the study of how to utilize these 'resources' for 'the common good'.

The fact that the principal 'resource' involved was man himself, that he was an entity of a specific nature with specific capacities and requirements, was given the most superficial attention, if any. Man was regarded simply as one of the factors of production, along with land, forests, or mines -- as one of the less significant factors, since more study was devoted to the influence and quality of these others than his role or quality.

Political economy was, in effect, a science starting in midstream: it observed that men were producing and trading, it took for granted that they had always done so and always would -- it accepted this fact as the given, requiring no further consideration -- and it addressed itself to the problem of how to devise the best way for the 'community' to dispose of human effort."

An enduring mystery to me: I do not understand why anyone in this country stacks so much as one brick on top of another. Observe:

"The Bush tax cuts, more than any other policy, are crippling the government financially."

Sometimes, dear reader, the FNORDs blow away and you can see right through the clear sky to the naked, evil premise. The Comfy Commissariat is not concerned with you. Take them at their words.

I can't wait until those rotten bastards go out of existence.

Not that that's going to solve the problem.