Monday 11 April 2016

Fun Online Polls: Antonio Conte & The Panama Papers

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Will opposing fans be able to subtly mispronounce new Chelsea manager Antonio Conte's surname to turn it into an insult?

Yes - 81%
Yes - 19%


Pretty much a foregone conclusion then.
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Many column inches and broadcast minutes have been and will be wasted on this whole Panama Papers episode.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll:

Have you learned anything new from The Panama Papers?

Yes - I didn't realise how concentrated wealth is or how involved the wealthy are in tax evasion.

No - they merely confirm what I already knew or strongly suspected.

Other - please specify.


Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

(As ever, it's nothing that Land Value Tax wouldn't sort out; taxing land values instead of earned income would reduce inequality and be nigh impossible to avoid or evade.)

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

"is nothing that LVT woudln't sort out" is just your ideological opinion. You have no idea of the effect.

Sure if you limit the effects to the economic ones you're correct.

But in the real world that is a hugely limited world view. Much as is all ideology and dogma.

What your ideology will never accept, much like islamists, is that the world is more than just an economy. Think about what this means when you next notice how you love your children. And then tell me that is just economics or the genes. Hang on, dont tell me, tell them.

Mark Wadsworth said...

RS, I've got kids, you don't. Perhaps I should explain to you what it means caring about the next generation, in the narrower or wider sense?

Anonymous said...

"If people who say they love their children meant it, would there be war? And would there be division of nationalities – would there be these separations?" J Krishnamurti.

Are you getting the picture yet?

You have no idea what will happen with an LVT. IF, you are authentic about it instead of acutely ideological. That is, IF you factor in the whole of the world rather than the limited one your ideology creates. Think rosy tinted spectacles, or the film The Matrix.

We proved this time and again with the Location Value Covenant experiment. IT showed you were not really interested in the future of our children. Only your own.

On that note who is caring most for "our kids"?

Bayard said...

RS, OK, so we can all disagree about whether LVT will reduce inequality, but do you agree that, by being hard to avoid, nigh impossible to evade and completely impossible to offshore, LVT will go a long way to sorting out the shenanigans revealed in the Panama papers?

Anonymous said...

I agree with you totally in theory. Or ideologically. Think of the guy in the fully laden 767, GPS in hand, heading for the WTC at 500 knots. He's asking me the same question as you. But just with his own world view. A theory is limited by itself if the rest of the world is excluded.

In reality, that is, when the whole of the world is accounted for in the equation of the future outcome, or as much of it as we know about already, who can say? Things may now change in ways we never imagined. Because until now we never imagined.

The struggle is that things outside our comfy world views are largely unknown. That means fear. Which means a retreat back into our comfort zones. Nothing changes, we remain deluded and incoherent.

Why do you think no one listens when you propose LVT. They too are escaping back into comfort. Each KLN is scientific proof of this psychology in action. A repeat experiment. But then you go and do it too when your theory is placed under serious scrutiny of the same kind.

"A conditioned mind is not free because it can never go beyond its own borders, beyond the barriers it has built around itself; that is obvious. And it is very difficult for such a mind to free itself from its conditioning and go beyond, because this conditioning is imposed upon it, not only by society, but by itself. You like your conditioning because you dare not go beyond. You are frightened of what your father and mother would say, of what society and the priest would say; therefore you help to create the barriers which hold you. This is the prison in which most of us are caught, and that is why your parents are always telling you – as you in turn will tell your children – to do this and not do that."

Bayard said...

RS, yup, there's a lot of bias confirmation about. However, I have, I hope, a fairly open mind on LVT. I wouldn't claim that it was foolproof, nothing is, where politics is involved, but the advantages vis a vis avoidance and evasion are pretty watertight. Of course no-one knows what the social implications of such a tax would be, although history gives us plenty of clues, but that isn't really the point. A tax should be a way of collecting money for the state in an efficient manner, not an instrument of social engineering.

Anonymous said...

B. Only in theory. The reality is that we cannot possibly know much at all if we view the future through an ideological window. "Our Truth"

For example, say LVT was adopted. And the result was an almighty civil war. Because the vast majority wanted to keep their sweeties notwithstanding the law?

Would that be a success story for LVT?

Are you familiar with Location Value Covenants?

Bayard said...

"For example, say LVT was adopted. And the result was an almighty civil war."

I'd say that was very unlikely. The net result of a government adopting full-on LVT would probably be more like "A very British Coup".

"Are you familiar with Location Value Covenants?"

I am now, thanks to Google. They seem to suffer from the disadvantage that the beneficiary, not the "landowner" would benefit from the increase in value of the land. This would not be popular in the UK.

Anonymous said...

B

Than you for your considered response.

With all due respect, your 2 responses are reinforcing the psychology of 'planet saving' I'm investigating here using scientific method. Again, what you have said is all through an ideological looking glass.

So, my example is not what I predict, its just one of many things that might happen, which the ideology forbids from analysis. There are many more possibilities, but none are permitted scientific analysis thanks to the ideology.

The question is: can we look at this, FREE FROM IDEOLOGY? If not, all bets are off.

Likewise for LVC's. Wadsworth was our first experiment with them back in 2008 at St Pancras station. He dismissed them, immediately, and out of hand, before even understand what they were and how they work. Just like folks do to him when he proposes LVT. The KLN irony here is astonishing psychologically. He is a 'believer' too but is not aware of it. This is quite typical of a christian atheist.

So it doesn't matter what's being proposed, until, one has decided to free oneself from the ideology, be that religious or secular.

And I'm asking you if you are willing to stop believing and start looking at something for what it really is, in and of itself, prior to ideological judgement. You dont have to. But otherwise how will you ever know?