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Entry: Greenspan's Gambits Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/greenspans_gambits#6051 Post contents: JP, you are again following your usual pattern of ignoring the points I make and going on to address others that I didn't. By the way, an estate tax at marginal rates of up to 55% on estates exceeding $2 million did not prevent the existence of a frivolous heiress like Paris Hilton. How much do you think should be confiscated? Need I remind you that elimination of inheritance was one of Marx's platform points in the Communist Manifesto - along with steeply graduated income taxes? You will probably complain again that I'm calling you a Marxist. I don't think you really know enough about Marxism to be a Marxist. But, like so many people, you repeat his ideas without being fully aware of their source. We see this also with feminists who, wittingly or not, frame their arguments in terms used years ago by Marx, Engels, and Marcuse. Since you claim to be a former student of Russell Kirk, it seems appropriate to conclude with a quotation from "The Conservative Mind": First, from the chapter on Legal and Historical Conservatism - "Civilized societies are competitive societies. Their competition is economic and civil: another kind of competition is found even among the most savage peoples living in a condition of status, but it it a terrible competition. The study of primitive societies refutes the notion that all men are brothers, and that all men are equal... The idyllic fantasies of Rousseau are exploded by the sober historian... It is quite true that joint ownership, by community or family, is older than private ownership of land; but this only demonstrates that private proprietorship is part of progres. Ferocious though competition is between groups in a primitive condition of life, in their domestic transactions competition is feeble. Economic competition - in exchange and in the acquisition of property - is relatively modern in origin; and what is more, in its complete form it is distinctively Western. It is a mighty benefit, essential to the higher forms of progress." And from his chapter on Babbitt, More, and Santayana - "In a century when the aristocratic principle, the classical idea of justice, and the institution of property all are menaced, what effective stand can conservatives take? Great advantages are with the radicals - the seductions of flattery, the opportunism which deals with immediate material needs to the exclusion of distant considerations, the force of humanitarian sympathieds. ... Humanitarianism, usurping the place of the Church, endeavors to ignore the existence of Sin and to erect sympathy into a social theory, leaving individual responsibility out of account. Sympathy and justice are confounded." What good was studying at the master's knee when you have evidently either ignored or forgotten what he taught? Sent at: 2008 11 22