Comments by "Mat Broomfield" (@matbroomfield) on "Stossel: The Philly Soda Tax Scam" video.

"land owners as a prerequisite to actual citizenship" Riiight. So the people who are governed should have no say in how they are governed? And then you end up with a plutocracy, with the wealthy making decisions solely based upon what is in THEIR interests. It would be fine if you could assume perfect benevolence by those in power, but greed is a sickness, and they almost NEVER do their duty to the citizens. As for IQ tests, I agree, it sounds incredibly appealing, but then you end up with intellectual masturbators leading to the kind of destructive communism that caused so much death in Russia and China. I despise the kind of stupidity that brought Trump to power, but as someone once said, "Democracy is the worst system of government except all the others."
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Hear hear!
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"they're programmed to be parasites" Nonsense. YOU'RE programmed by the politicians to see them that way. In fact, it is corporations and the wealthy who are taking far more of your income. Income disparity is at the highest it's ever been in our lifetimes. The middle class is getting poorer, the working class are working two even three jobs to survive, and some people simply cannot afford to survive. Meanwhile corrupt judges are conspiring to imprison people for debt and non-violent offences, serving only to condemn families to inescapable poverty.
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In Europe, we are big on health education, yet healthcare is provided to everyone. You can live healthy and still get cancer or be involved in a traffic accident. That said, I would quite happily tell smokers that they are responsible for their own cancer medication, obese people that they are on their own when it comes to heart treatment, and alcoholics that liver transplants are not available to them.
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If you believe in value added taxes in the first place, then taxing the things that will most contribute to subsequent drains on the healthcare budget makes perfect sense. But as Bernie says, value added taxes are regressive. A tax on life's essentials: food, fuel, power, has a disproportionate effect on the poorest, for whom these things represent a higher proportion of their income. But I don't know ANY politician, including Bernie, who has a solution to the revenue deficit that arises if you terminated sales tax.
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As a motorcycle owner, I have always thought it was logical that you reward the least polluting vehicles on the road. But I agree 100% with the weapons taxation.
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I'm all up for anything that makes taxation fairer.
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"you leftist idiots keep voting for big government over and over again" And the choice is are what? The Right? The Tea Party? The right has already demonstrated that it LOOOOVES big government when they get in power. And if you seriously think that any flavour of libertarianism would would in an era of mega-communities, I suspect that you haven't reasoned the pros and cons through very thoroughly. Society NEEDS taxes to run. Whether that tax is acquired as sales taxes or income taxes, it has to come from somewhere. How do you think any major nation would exist without tax dollars? I don't know how to acquire those dollars in the fairest way, and there will always be selfish people who claim to want to opt out - right up to the moment they need the benefits of the community, be it roads, the police, a military, the fire service, or whatever. Personally, I'd be exceedingly willing to see all Libertarians dumped somewhere, say Texas, and left to live their delusional utopia. Perhaps they'd even make it work, as the only libertarians I know who would do that are naive college kids or rich people.
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"We need more libertarianism in America" No you don't. Americans are already selfish enough. Look at the way that the rich shit on everybody else. That's libertarianism ultra lite. Libertarianism is the fever dream of naive college kids and rich ass holes. Everybody else recognises that a mega community cannot exist on those principles.
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That's about as simplistic as saying "America is a nation because people came here." It hides a wealth of complexity and evils. And what about people who buy companies only to disband them for profit? What about shareholders - what are they producing?
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You know that a lot of stock trading is not based upon anything actually produced right? The futures market is gambling on nothing more than the predicted rise and FALL of prices in the future. If a company issues 1000 shares, once they've been bought, future trading of those shares injects no additional value or capital into that company. A shareholder may own a part of that company but they haven't HELPED the company.
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"Production (economics) - Production is a process of combining various material inputs and immaterial inputs (plans, know-how) in order to make something for consumption (the output)." please tell me what plans or know how or ,aterial inputs are being combined to make consumption?
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