It pays to coast in Pennsylvania, where, if you earn $29K, the government taxes others in order to give you $28K worth of welfare.
Err on the side of ambition and aim to earn $55K—and you’ll end up paying $5K in taxes, netting $50K. Work out which pay grade “pays” better!
Coming to your state or to a state near you. The plague of living parasitically is spreading.
Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Justice, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Reason
For a libertarian, it is “highly problematic to insist that by virtue of her fertility, a woman loses a title in her body.” It is equally wrong to tell a dope-head (or a fat-head, for that matter) what not to ingest, inject or smoke.
In libertarian law, the legislator has no place in a voluntary exchange between adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these may be (like dwarf tossing).
Ever selective, and never principled, about the freedoms they champion, left-liberals (as opposed to classical liberals) believe that the right to have an abortion (at the public’s expense) is sacred. Nobody should come between a woman seeking such a procedure and her doctor. (Agreed, so long as she and not me pays for the termination.)
Forget about the right of the same woman to work for whomever she wants to without the intervention of a third party (a union). Freedom of association holds no sway with liberals when it comes to labor law. Pinko pukes religiously believe that it is good and just to compel an employee to join a union and remit union dues.
The Michigan Statehouse has changed this sorry state of affairs. “Organized crime” is outraged.
Predictably, CNN reporters and anchors have utterly ignored individual rights in their coverage of the Michigan vote, focusing the network’s collective bias on the fact that wages in right-to-work states are freer to adjust with the market (read lower):
The House approved two bills, which the Senate already passed last week. Both chambers are dominated by Republicans.
On Tuesday evening. Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, signed the legislation, which allows workers at union-represented employers to forgo paying dues.
Thousands of people, many of them union workers, gathered outside the statehouse, chanting and holding signs as snow fell. At least three school districts were closed as teachers traveled to Lansing to protest.
There are 23 states which have right-to-work laws, mostly in the South and western plains states, where union membership is relatively weak. Nationwide, union membership stands at 11.8%. …”
UPDATE: BHO Agrees. The language of rights doesn’t belong in the “escalating fight over changing Michigan into a right-to-work state.” Rights are about things like publicly sponsored abortion, welfare, and so on.
The ass with ears (AWE) said that “the State Legislature’s move to ban the required paying of union dues was all about politics.”
That’s a non sequitur, professa. For even if the Michigan Legislature’s vote were political, whatever that means—everything politicians do, by definition, is political—it does not make it wrong.
Logic was never “The Ass With Ears'” strong suit.
Business, Europe, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Private Property, Regulation, Welfare
Permanently tethered to the welfare state, Europeans are unwilling to make the connections between the regulatory state and steep prices, high unemployment, and a declining standard of living. It would seem obvious that the greater the cost of doing business, the less business will be done. But not to the individual who is motivated to keep the gravy train chugging along.
He wants to get that free lunch, even if it is his Last Supper.
Via John Stossel:
In Europe …workers … get “vacation do-overs”- if they are sick on vacation, they get additional paid time off to make up for it. In Spain, employers must give 24 months of severance pay after they fire someone. No wonder companies don’t hire. [Unemployment among youth there is 50 percent.]
America doesn’t have mandatory vacation time, but we still have 170,000 pages of rules.
Want to expand your business? The costs to a proprietor of adding new workers will be prohibitive, often in excess of the workers’ productivity.
In Italy, it is near impossible to fire an employee once he has been hired. If he steals and worse; the onus is on the business owner to prove his case before he can fire the offender. Bad work habits and low productivity don’t constitute cause for dismissal.
In all, a European business is better off staying small. Don’t reach for the sky. Limp along below the regulator’s radar.
Great American enterprises like Amazon, Starbucks and Google have braved Britain’s (UK, England, whatever is the politically correct term for that nation of shopkeepers) punitive labor laws and onerous regulations; invested capital in that place—only to have British ingrates complain bitterly.
What is the “tax shaming” public protesting, NOW?
These businesses have found creative ways of keeping more of what is rightfully theirs: their private property, their profits. It is just and good that property remain privately owned. Efficiency is secondary to the issue of natural justice. Still, more private property in the hands of its owners means greater prosperity for all.
When Brit Mike Buckhurst wails that he feels “very passionate about this because at one point in my life I was a top rate tax payer and I paid my tax in full,” he is expressing envy, nothing else—envy that The Other Guy is keeping more of what belongs to him, when he is not.
A good person would be glad about any private property that remains with those who rightfully own it.
(Btw, in loserville—where the US is headed—you are in the “higher” tax bracket when you earn £34,371!)
Yes, British protesters, with their unbounded enthusiasm for state power, prefer that their omnivorous state own what belongs to Amazon, Starbucks and Google.
Tax havens are just that: havens. Laws regulating how people use their rightful capital are unjust laws. The official line always omits, moreover, that wealth in the hands of its rightful owners enriches all sectors of the population more than funds in the sticky paws of officials. Keeping more of one’s income is not “harmful” to the rightful owners of capital, or to the beneficiaries of its investment, which include any and all bar the taxman.
The junta of high-tax governments is always leaning on jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the Isle of Man. If the junta has its way, not only will there be no place left to run to, but by eliminating what tax havens offer, these governments will have eliminated tax competition, and with it the imperative to downsize their fiefdoms.
MORE @ “The War on Tax Havens.”
Could her British subjects be making the Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) sick? They sure make me sick.