AllMenAreIslands wrote:
Obama is openly declaring his intention to expropriate the wealth of the very rich in order to appease the very many middle, lower and poverty-stricken few.

That is an overt attack by Communists (a.k.a. Socialists to those who have a problem with the similarity of the words "communion" and "communism.")

In other words, the final nail in the coffin on the American Dream of Capitalism and the never really discovered promise of democracy. Voting for "stuff" is something we were to be doing every day, every time we spent the product of our labors, exchanging our effort in the form of money for the efforts of a great deal of others. Witness the development of the department store and the great wealth of goods we have all helped to make possible just by having wishes and dreams and putting our imaginations to work to create so much wealth and sources of contentment.

We ought to all be able to do something creative and make money at it. To my mind, that's just one of the many things we have lost by losing our true rights to the property we earned via our hard work each week. With so much taken in taxes, and spent by others on others, we have lost connections with each other. It is not you meeting with the people doing breast cancer research, because you're not actually going out of your way to find those people, and make sure they know you want to contribute. It's not me building an empire of roadways and looking into methods of paving that finds terrific uses for recycled materials to increase strength and durability without making the surface too slick.

Each of us should be having dreams and the wherewithal to pursue them in our spare time, hopefully finding a workable solution and making a full-time job of a favorite interest/hobby.

The freedom to pursue dreams comes of having control over all our earnings. Taking care to secure safety nets long term and short is also the way to pay for proper government, by means of buying contract insurance for every transaction you enter into, or just some of them, or very few. Selecting a method to have insurance to cover the cost of suing, or of being sued, is something that will appeal to most of us. Actuarial tables of different events would tend to become standard, but people could and probably would insure all sorts of bizarre things, providing they can find someone to underwrite the desired policy. Coming up with a scenario that one wants to insure, and then shopping the idea to insurance firms could become a great way to protect oneself and one's loved ones in case a risky venture ends in disaster, and at the same time puts money in the government coffers.

When you think of the number of contracts the "rich people" enter into, where they'd be insuring for "need to sue" coverage as much as "provision for being sued" - you can see a lot of money being paid by the rich. Much more than if you use force, which tends to make the rich people take their money out of the system completely and move to The Bahamas, Switzerland, or one of many other lesser known tax havens. Taking money from companies already leveraged and on the edge would bankrupt them and leave lots of workers stranded without jobs or pensions. That is what the increased government intervention in the economy has accomplished: the whole country is virtually bankrupt, with those who worked hard and paid taxes on their every working hour and their every purchase - the government has taken the money from those people to give to the ones who took on too much, who lent recklessly - who failed at the business of being a prudent investor. What kind of system is that, if not one that kills incentive and makes people unhappy. That is not freedom: it is slavery.

Get rid of coercion and get control of your lives.

The real change that is needed is to rediscover the true meaning of individual rights, reward and responsibility, the proper limiting of government to the protection of inalienable individual rights and a group of human beings committed to achieving the environment capable of promoting wealth and prosperity: a land that is free of coercion.

In our economic relationships, we need freedom from coercion in order to make deals with each other to provide each other with goods and services.

Freedom AND protection are both supplied by a government paying attention to its tasks. The greater the demand for the government's services, the more money can be earned by government. Setting up a Contract Insurance Program means amassing a great deal of money much of which is capable of earning interest income off of which to run the necessary government functions in actually pretty fine style when things are being done in the most efficient manner possible.

The insurance premiums get divvied up right away, part going into trust to earn interest which by itself may provide the actual funds to finance the insured-against risk. After all, what is being insured are the hopes and dreams of all of us, by all of us, each us for our own sakes and reasons.

Freedom accomplishes prosperity. Slavery and coercion accomplish poverty, bankruptcy and starvation.

. That is the proper role of government: to secure peace by protecting rights and settling disputes by means of reason, not armaments.
sing it, sista!