Archive for August 20th, 2011

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Penn Jillette doesn’t know

August 20, 2011

There’s lots of good stuff in this opinion piece by Penn Jillette, especially for those who had trouble with Epistemology 101.

I’ve always thought that people shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit ignorance. I’d much rather hear that you don’t know than to hear some face-saving claim to knowledge that you don’t have. I’m reminded of the aphorism, "It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so."

Here’s a snippet from Jillette’s op-ed.

My friend Richard Feynman said, “I don’t know.” I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill’s Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

“I don’t know” is not an apology. There’s no shame. It’s a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn’t know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn’t know, he said, “I don’t know.”

When I found Jillette’s piece linked in a Samizdata post, this was ‘graph it quoted.

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

Posted in Whys & wherefores | Leave a Comment »

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An excellent choice of adjective

August 20, 2011

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection described the Democrats and Obama as having a voracious appetite for class warfare. I thought that was a great description and that voracious was an excellent choice of adjective.

The Legal Insurrection post quotes (and links) a post at The Tax Foundation blog. Here’s a snippet from that Tax Foundation post. But go RTWT; it’s brief.

The Facts Contradict Obama’s Calls for Higher Taxes on the Rich and Corporations

During his attempt to calm the markets yesterday, President Obama once again signaled his belief that America needs higher, not lower taxes. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Obama’s remarks had “included a call for tax changes that would boost payments from ‘wealthy Americans and corporations,’ but this phrase was taken out at the last minute. None the less, Mr. Obama seems obsessed with the notion that wealthy Americans and corporations are not paying enough taxes.

The President’s notions are not, however, grounded in fact. Let’s review the data on individual taxpayers first:

Recently released IRS data for 2009, shows that taxpayers earning over $200,000 paid 50 percent of the $866 billion in total income taxes paid that year, or $434 billion. Skeptics will say, “That’s because they earn the majority of the income in America”. Not so. These taxpayers earned 25 percent of the $7.6 trillion in total adjusted gross income in the country that year.

And the Obama administration just can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong with the economy (link to another Legal Insurrection post).

One would think they’d never heard of regime uncertainty, eh?

Posted in Political economy, US politics | Leave a Comment »