Jamie White
speaker
57 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2010
last heard Apr 2011
Jamie White’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Basic notion of fairness, until at least socialism got going, was equal treatment.
So it's fair to treat people equally.
And it's very clear that progressive taxation violates that general principle.
So in the case of income tax, the more you earn, the higher rate of tax you pay, which seems clearly unfair.
You haven't done anything wrong by earning a lot of money.
Why should you be punished?
It's not unfair in the sense of treating individuals.
It doesn't pick on individuals.
You're right, it picks on people who have certain characteristics.
So, for example, if we taxed all black people a bit more, on your account that would be fair because all blacks get treated the same.
We're not picking on you as an individual black person, just as a black person.
So the question about whether it's fair is whether the feature that's being picked on is rightly picked on.
Now, you, I assume, would think it was wrong to tax people more because they're black.
You don't think it's wrong to tax people more because they have high incomes.
It seems to me arbitrary.
To think that somebody's done something wrong by earning a lot of money and ought to be punished seems almost as odd to me as the idea that they've done something wrong by being black.
Whether it's intended as a punishment or not is irrelevant.
It is a punishment.
That's to say, if I pay double the rate of tax that you do, that's unpleasant for me, that's painful, that's a punishment.
Whether it's a value judgment or not, it doesn't make any difference.
Showing 1–20 of 57 · page 1 of 3
Next →