(Wherein I stomp all over the I-love-socialist-Europe crappola.)
The US is still the champ, A-#1, in relative purchasing-power. Scandinavians are taxed about 50% of their annual income, compared to about 30% for Americans. That's an extra 20% income that you and I get to enjoy shopping for goodies that increase our standard of living -- such as 800-channel TV and cheapo internet that Swedes would *liquidate* for.
Ah yes, that highly effective socialist health-care in which aspirins are free and so are ambulance rides (such that people treat them like free taxis) and in Sweden 10% of the workforce is loafing away "sick" at any given time -- but God help you if you need anything serious done to your furry little body, because if you lack fare to a country where wait times are less than six months, you're f***ed up the butt with an ungreased telephone pole.
Sweden has a higher dissolution *and* a higher liquidate rate than the US.
What does the phrase "out wealthy" *mean*?
Do you, like, somehow *own* these people the way feudal monarchs de-facto owned serfs?
Is their property yours instead of theirs?
Are you familiar with the ambiguous-collective fallacy?
What moral arguments do they to make regarding the plunder of other people's property? Or is it all pragmatic necessity-illogic? Or are they just trying to grease the palms of the politically powerful?
"Intelligent voter" is an oxymoron.
I lead myself. People who want leaders appointed over them are slaves or animals who've eschewed the "sapien" part of homo-sapien.
You're using the words "we" and "our" again to describe things that aren't yours.
Unions to tackle Walmart 695We agree to disagree. I consider my arguments relatively irrefutable with the buttumption you are enlightened or you likely would not...
Well, that's the price of socialism jammed through the legislature. Did you know that medicare will cost $44 TRILLION by 2030? The only question is whether the government itself will (inevitably) hyperinflate the currency, or whether it will occur de-facto when foreign currency-holding insbreastutions decide that dollars are no longer are commodity worth keeping.
There hasn't been a "totally free capital market" in this country for nearly one hundred years, and which such a critical false-premise identified, I doubt much can be learned from that source.
Why should they pay high dividends in a recession when profits are down? That would deplete their resources and depress their stock value by a measure equal to dividends paid out, meaning the shareholders suffer a double-whammy of reduced margin collateral on their portfolio, and an IRS hit for "capital gains".
And: "Should have" according to whom? If you don't own the property in question, it's none of your business. Literally. If you want to control a corporation, found one and develop it.
You're confusing effects with causes. Stingy corporations are not the causes of recessions, they are the result of them. Governments are the causes of recessions in fiat-currency monetary systems.
You should take it up with Alan Greenspan; he's the one who orchastrated the late-90s inflationary boom which bloated the stock market, and the subsequent Crash of 2000.
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By "the Asians" you mean the "economic tigers" following the Hong Kong high-octane pure-capitalist model of turning a fetid, malarial swamp into a super-metropolis in less than one-hundred years, while, comparitively, New York City's skyline halted into stasis in the mid-30's thanks to Roosevelt's socialism (the one notable addition being the government-funded WTTs which took twenty years to pay for themselves and only made a profit at all by eschewing their original purpose)?
But then your use of "world leadership" is an undefined arbitrary.
Having a strong economy is not "leadership", since "leadership" is usually just a euphemism for bossing other people around.
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"An election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods." -- Ambrose Bierce