Economic Eugenics
Last week Sam Harris gave his tip on how to lose blog readers. What the hell, I’ll give it a shot. He said that the best way to lose blog reader is to advocate for higher taxes on the rich (which actually seems like a pretty reasonable and obvious idea). Today, I want to talk about the libertarian plot of economic eugenics.
I coined this phrase to describe what I think must be the end goal of the Right and Libertarian Wing. The idea seems to be to kill all the poor people. The method for this type of eugenics isn’t as in-your-face as ovens, but it is much worse. Poor people need to suffer first.
By shifting the tax burden from the people who can afford it without even noticing to those who feel every penny, the Right/Libertarian Wing is slowing torturing and murdering the lower classes. This is the idea behind the so called “fair tax.”
The rhetoric is that taxing the rich is a punishment on success. But if the rich don’t even notice except on paper, how are they really being punished? On the other hand, each penny in taxes on the lower classes is felt profoundly. Still, most people on the lower economic spectrum understand that they are being asked to contribute to the general society and even though they suffer from every penny, they are happy to pitch in and pay their fair share.
They see the services that taxes pay for and while they often disagree with some of what their tax dollars are being spent on, they often consider taxes as dues paid to live, work, and remain safe in this nation. But it seems that the rich (who consider taxes as a punishment) want to punish everyone else. Their view is that if you are not successful, you are a failure and ought to be punished. If they punish the poor for being poor, this will either encourage the poor to success or it will kill them. Those who can’t make millions of dollars don’t deserve to live. This is economic eugenics in the nutshell, a sort of survival of the richest. More than merely describing a fact about the world, these people have taken it to a social/economic philosophy of how the world ought to be.
Related articles
- Sterilizing the Poor: Eugenics in the U.S. (abcnews.go.com)
Filed under: Alternative Worldview, Capitalism, communism, culture war, Government, humanism, morality