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kleinbl00  ·  4797 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Elizabeth Warren Quote about the Social Contract Implied in Success
Let's pick that comment apart and see who understands what, shall we?

"Besides philanthropy, another social practice is that parents take care of their children. Then, when the children become adults, they in turn take care of their offspring. This is exactly what Warren has in mind with her talk of "pay forward for the next kid who comes along." That's exactly what society expects of people, and that's what most of us do. Here again, we see Warren injecting the government into the mix, without any justification."

Now let's look at what Elizabeth Warren said:

"Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea -God bless! keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along"

Are you really trying to argue that Elizabeth Warren, Consumer Advocate, professor of Commercial Law, Special Advisor to the Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, meant "your biological children?"

Do you really believe this woman, who helped her parents pay the bills in High School by waitressing because her father couldn't meet ends meet because of a heart attack, who went to Northwestern on an academic scholarship, is making a de-facto argument against the Estate Tax?

Really?

That's not an analogy. That's a "rich people have kids, therefore they shouldn't have to pay taxes" argument. Which is exactly what I said it was. It goes along quite nicely with the "rich people might give money to charity, therefore they shouldn't have to pay taxes" argument and the "rich people were never given the choice to forego the roads, therefore they shouldn't have to pay taxes" argument that are quite clearly and quite lucidly (if quite idiotically) put forth in the response piece.

If you really stretch to make it an analogy, the analogy is "rich people have a paternal relationship with poor people, and without government intervention rich people have a history and tendency of promoting poor people to positions of power out of altruism."

Which is a silly analogy to make. Because they don't. And never have, and never will. Unless there's a tax break in it for them, of course.

As to "STFU & GTFO" - that's the exact same thing as saying "lemme invoke Princess Bride in order to misattribute a quote to someone in order to dismiss the whole argument." It just uses ruder language. Know how to discern whether the person you're talking to has the intellectual rigor to merit talking to? See if they can tell the difference between rude statements and rude language. Know who fails the test?

>I am neither a Conservative nor a Libertarian.

No, but you sure are butt-hurt. And devoid of intellectual rigor. And, I might add, unskilled at rhetoric - I have yet to insult you personally, yet so far you've accused me of straw-man arguments (without pointing out how or why they're straw man arguments), and called me a "holier-than-thou asshat."

Mostly what you've proven is that you're so offended by coarse language that you'll sling it willfully at anyone who dares to cross you.

I like it here just fine. And I will stick around, and I will continue to call a spade a spade, and I will continue to recognize that an attack against an idea is not the same as an attack against a person, even if everyone else has an extreme, pants-soiling inability to do the same.