Continuous Battle

I get so tired of everything being a battle.  So someone took a gander at my post that included the analogy about ten people going to dinner. The outrage!  The mean-spiritedness! The rebuttal is here.  The author argues that the dinner analogy is wrong as an argument against our progressive tax code.  Well, that may be true.  There certainly are a lot of people that believe in alternatives like the Flat Tax or the Fair Tax.  There are probably attributes of those alternatives, but it seems to me that we have a progressive tax system that for the most part works.  It seems right to me that some pay more than others.  After all, there is a spectrum of rich to poor.  Always has been.  Always will be.  

But I didn't include the analogy as an argument against the progressive tax code.  I included it as a simple story of fairness.  Many of the so called compassionate progressives continually argue that the rich should be made to pay more.  That the rich are greedy.  That the poor must have a handout.  That we can solve all our problems by taking money from the rich.  Forget about growing the economy.  Of course, I don't know who gets to decide who's rich and how much constitutes rich.  And I don't know why people who have worked very hard to be a success are automatically assumed to be greedy bastards.  To me the dinner analogy is pretty simple.  In our society, the poor appropriately don't pay much, if anything.  The rich carry the burden.  They don't mind doing that.  To a point.  But at some point it becomes onerous and they figure out a way to not get screwed by unfair practices.  They didn't get "rich" by being dumb.  

But, I thought I'd include the rebuttal for all you angry and cynical folks out there.  I just don't know when we evolved to the point that achievement is reviled.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the President's singular achievement was that he was a community organizer.  His experience tells him that the poor are helpless and exploited citizens who must be protected from the greedy rich by the government.  The folks who believe in him, reflect his views.  As for me, the emperor has no clothes...