Not a problem.

was too long for one PM...so i sent you 2 =)

i took addy today so i fear it might be too rambly or jumpy. if you green light it, ill post it.

thanks!

Why do I owe anything to the veterans of the revolutionary war or any other US war?

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet can only arise because of the society that has been built by previous generations provides an environment in which their talents can flourish. If Gates had been born in the Congo or Somalia he might simply be dead by now. Is it a great personal virtue to be born into a situation in which your particular talents are well suited?

And it is not just a matter of being lucky enough to be born into wealthy society with lots of freedoms, there is run good at choosing parents, cities and whether or not you die as a result of youthful stupidity (e.g. drunk driving).

Think of any wealthy black athlete in the US and what he owes to those who fought against slavery and later Jim Crow? Without those earlier generations struggles Michael Jordan could have been a show shine boy instead of a millionaire. Sure, he worked damn hard on his game but even as a free man, he could have been born into a century that had little use for his athletic gifts.

By helping to improve the lot of future generations we honor those who built the society that allowed us to flourish and respect those who through no fault of their own, have not run as well as we have.

Change a few starting conditions of Bill Gates life and maybe he ends up being a small time drug dealer.

I happen to be well above average in prosperity (according to the Mother Jones wealth and income stats recently posted) but I don't doubt there are people who are smarter and more virtuous than me but ran bad at life and did far worse.

Have you ever known a child with great potential that they never grow into? They ran bad at learning what inspired them. I don't believe Gates or Buffet have better work ethic than other less successful people. I believe that they found work that they loved and their generation happened to value.

Pick the most talented artist you can think of. They could just have easily been born into a century that disdained their gift and all the passion for their art that we admire would be seen as laziness.

wait, wait, wait. How does an alleged moral obligation to dead founders translate into shipping x% of my income to living people via the government?

How does bill gates' running good in parents (assuming he did) translate into being an obligation to allow government to confiscate his income?

Why do people who live now have any right to be repaid for the alleged benefits Gates derived from having had good parents or from being born in a U.S. created by dead people? What did they ever do for him to be entitled to a portion of his income?

kind of my thoughts as well. the whole "donate" thing sounded like Robert Kiyosaki's whole "you should donate when financially responsible to because X" (where X = some nonsense reason)

I don't buy that logic. If one were to base success failure off of parents, childhood, upbringing, schooling etc., I should be dead from a drug overdose not long after high school. In fact, I was a dog to graduate HS and favored to dropout. You're dealt what you're dealt. If it's AA and it holds, haters say, "Well yeah! You had AA wotevah!!!". If you win with a seven-deuce in the hole it's "WOW! What an amazing line!!!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

Chaos Theory inspired the tattoo i have on my thigh

/info you needed to know

uNL4Lyfe?

nope, that was starscream =)

(i got "beautiful chaos" written in irish on my thigh)

Fantastic dinner tonight courtesy of SammyG77 and his comrade. Wonderful food, music, wine, and company

FunkyJ invoking the laws of karma all over the thread

Why is anyone who has received millions for a patent or copyrighted work entitled to the millions they received? In another time and place your intellectual property could be used by others with out compensation and nobody would view this use as theft.

the concepts of money, physical property, intellectual property, the rule of law et cetera are all artificial man made constructs. Who is to say the current scheme of allocating the abstraction of money in exchange for certain behaviors is just?

Why is it not the case that the only thing considered your "property" is what you currently hold in your hand at this very moment?

I would hope that the rules of society are chosen with the aim of maximizing mutual benefit.

I get the impression that your view is that a particular scheme of societal organization is a priori correct regardless of what future outcome it may lead to. If this is a true reflection of your view then I disagree with it.

It is not my view that a lucky person's obligation is to the government (e.g. higher income taxes during his life) but to society. If you want to argue the exact size of this obligation or how it should be fulfilled I am happy to hear various ideas.

I guess your founding principle of societal organization could be that who ever happens to be lucky enough to have wealth/power has no obligation to society and should do what ever they want with their good fortune.

Imagine that I am a clever thief and I can steal your life savings (and everyone elses that is reading this forum) with 100% certainty of not getting caught? Is the option of stealing or not stealing better? Why? If property and money are artificial constructs, why am I, as a perfect thief, not entitled to these things? Luck/fate has put them there for me to do as I will (in this hypothetical).

There was so much in your post that made me think, "zomg, did he really just say that?" that I decided I would just address the point I quoted, because it cuts to the heart of our disagreement.

I believe that outcomes are irrelevant. A fair process is the only guarantee anybody should have.

A few additional items/clarifications after my previous wall of text

whether or not a societal obligation is best discharged via taxes paid to a government or through some other method is a separate question from whether the obligation exists and, if it exists, what the size of the obligation is.

I do not assert that paying taxes to any particularly organ of government (city, county, state, national, international, galactic) is the best mode of discharging a social obligation.

(1) I am claiming the existence of an inherent social contract which includes a debt of obligation to society. (2) I am further claiming that this debt is proportional (linearly? exponentially? logarithmically?) to the amount of good luck a person have experienced.

It seems silly to argue over the best mode of discharging an obligation if (1) and (2) are facts in dispute. It sounds to me as if you dispute both (1) and (2).

I don't expect you to have the time or energy for clarification but simply saying a "fair process" is rather nebulous.

Isn't the underlying question "what is fair"? I.e. claiming an obligation where none exists and insisting (e.g. via threat of force) that it be fulfilled is not fair, nor is failing to discharge a legitimate obligation.

perhaps "fair process" means "where no informed consent is given there is no obligation". E.g. a child has no obligation to his parents because he can not give his informed consent with regards to being born or raised through childhood.

Simply saying "fair process" leaves things too wide open for my imagination.

Sure, i dispute both.

as for 1: I don't see why the inherent social contract comes with an implied monetary obligation. I can see the existence of a service obligation, or a duty to act responsibly toward others. but why money?

as for 2: this is especially true for your luck tax. why should I incur a monetary obligation because of a random event of which i was arguably a beneficiary? Why should society, which did nothing to facilitate my good fortune, have a right to a portion of the proceeds of my windfall?

It doesn't make sense to me.

Also, to be perfectly candid: the notion that Bill Gates is Bill gates simply because of luck is insulting to people of achievement and laughably absurd. the guy had the stones, vision and ambition as a 19 year old student to start a business and pursue it ruthlessly. That's not luck; that's your garden variety working your ass off to succeed.

he was lucky to be born into a situation that provided for him to have the stones, vision, and ambition to start a business and pursue it ruthlessly.

That much we both agree on, it's obvious that the degree of luck v degree of skill/effort/his direct input is where there's a disagreement.

I happen to think i have done nothing in my life that is at all outstanding, i have simply done what i feel an average person that was given a very good toolbox, playground, and playmates would have done. (albeit, there is an obvious lack in "achievement" between myself and any of the referenced persons)

I don't have a developed opinion on how this thought affects my societal obligations, but i think it is very interesting to hear both sides of this argument. Why amongst even the most mature of you do we have to put disclaimers like:

"There was so much in your post that made me think, "zomg, did he really just say that?"" (not singling you out Mpethy, just the most recent example).

First off, I don't know nearly as much about this topic as you or Mpethy but I'll throw out my two cents.

Throwing lucky parents, birth country etc out of the window. It almost seems as if you are throwing work ethic/decisions out the window. Could it not go just the opposite direction? If Michael Jordan decided it was better to spend his nights sleeping with the HS cheerleader as opposed to working on his game he more than likely would not have grown to be the best basketball player ever. If he just lived a "regular" life would his debt to society change? MJ's decision making certainly played a part of what he earned, and there are millions of people in this world who choose the easy way out instead of achieving a whole lot more had they made different decisions. It seems that from what you are saying that those that did not achieve what they should have should therefore owe society for not giving back everything they could have.

this. the real question is how to do we weight that luck part of the equation versus the other side like work ethic, things learned along the way, natural intelligence, etc.

That seems to be the major point of contention, yes. I think the sample pool out of which you consider yourself is very important.

Depending on how big of a hippie you are, you could include yourself in the pool of all past/present/future sentient life, of which i'd consider myself very well equipped (by luck) to succeed in whatever it is i feel is worth my time. If you are to increase the pool size to something of that proportion, your % of success dependent on luck MUST be 99.9999999%.

I'd be willing to settle that the pool we should be considering is the pool of currently living human life, and i'm sure some people would like to further narrow it down, which creates the fundamental difference between the proportional weight luck/direct input plays that each side would like to attribute.

correct. i consider myself a massive luckbox (and thus why I got that tattooed on me) v the global population. i consider myself a large luckbox v the US. and i consider myself a decent luckbox v the people I place in my similar situation (age, health, ~background, and intelligence)

Precisely, and depending on what pool you associate yourself with, your social obligations will shrink. Whereas the hippie who considers himself one minuscule part of the universe may feel the need to re-distribute his luck to all beings that cross his path, the other person that only considers themselves part of, say, the USA human population has no such perceived social obligations to anything outside of that USA human group he limits himself to.

Interesting discussion. I don't have the energy to weigh in fully atm.

But I like this quote:

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
Michael Jordan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc


love those adds