Because the ignorant fuckwits over there won't allow me to respond, let me oblige here.MrJonno wrote:Old people in the 1st world are generally the richest part of the population, they may not have much of an income but have extremely large amount of assets normally property. It needs to become the norm that at least part of this should be used to pay for health and non-medical care rather than being left to children. A proper inheritance tax which the majority of people should pay not just the ultra rich. Currently its the poorer young subsidising the richer old people which isnt fair or sustainable.
Its less of an issue in the US but in the UK with a terrible housing shortage there is absolutely no way it have been justified for a elderly couple to live in a large 3 bedroom house and get state funding.
Really need Seth here to decide if this is a good idea or not (if he disagrees its a good idea) and there could be something I've missed
Only in a socialist society do "old people" with substantial property assets not have to liquidate those assets to pay for their own medical care as they age. Therefore, only in socialist societies are "old people" seen as leeches on the system as MrJonno implies above.
In a free market society (which doesn't use socialist redistribution schemes like "Social Security" or other welfare entitlement programs), "old people" do indeed build up "nest-eggs" precisely so that they can provide for themselves as they age. They buy houses and land and other assets, like stocks and bonds, that generate income or at least constitute a liquid or illiquid capital reserve that they can call upon to sustain themselves in their dotage at no one's expense other than their own.
The unlucky ones end up liquidating all their acquired capital to pay for their end-of-life care. The lucky ones don't get too sick before they drop dead, so they don't spend substantial amounts on end-of-life care, and they pass the remaining capital assets to their children, which improves the economic condition of their heirs and makes them less likely to require government largesse and therefore it makes them less likely to become members of the dependent class.
MrJonno's assertion, that inheritance taxes should take a substantial (by which I'm sure he means "all") of a person's assets, is just another Socialist redistrubutionist argument that suffers from the same defect as all socialist redistributionist arguments: it's just a class-warfare fallacy that ignores the fact that the assets of the deceased were both fully earned and fully taxed while the owner was alive, and passing those assets on to family members (or others, as designated) helps to improve the economic status of the recipients and thus costs the government less in the long term by way of social welfare entitlement spending, which is a good thing.
But Socialists like MrJonno are incapable of understanding such basic economic arguments because they are too blinded by class-based hatred, envy and jealousy to be able to comprehend the simple economic principles involved. Their desire is to simply steal the labor and capital of the dead and deny it to the heirs on the specious and fallacious basis that the Socialist government will make better choices on how to redistribute that wealth than will the person who created and earned that wealth in the first place. This, of course, is simple idiocy, because government never does a better job at redistributing wealth, not to mention the immoral and unethical practice of the government stealing one person's lifetime of labor simply to benefit some other, random person.
And then there's his implicit argument that an elderly couple living in a 3 bedroom house that they bought and paid for with decades of hard work, scrimping and saving, ought to be taken away from them by the government to help pay for their Socialist-mandated government-mismanaged public health care system that they have no real alternative but to patronize and that they have an absolute right to patronize because they paid taxes for their whole lifetime into the system (which is not something that can be said of the no-income dependent class leeches) precisely so that they would be able to enjoy those benefits when they need them.
MrJonno wants them to pay TWICE or more for the same services that a substantial contingent of the public pay nothing at all for, or who pay far less for overall. That's not merely unfair, it's egregiously evil and immoral, and only a greedy, selfish, ignorant, compassionless Socialist fuckwit would support such a gross injustice.
All this asinine argument does is dissuade people from creating or trying to save their wealth, which will inevitably be stripped from them by the jackbooted thugs of the Socialist welfare state to give to some dependent-class layabout.
That's the fundamental failure of Socialism. When the Socialist swine remove the incentive to work hard and save by stripping the fruits of one's labor away from them on the basis that the Socialist tyrants in government decide one has "too much" and others are entitled to enslave them to serve the needs of the dependent class, people quickly stop trying to create wealth and save up so that they can pay their own way and NOT be a burden on the government, and they just give up and become part of the ever-expanding dependent class.
Soon enough there's no one left to create the wealth that's required to support all the dependent-class leeches, and the whole system crumbles. And that's exactly what's happening in the UK...and Greece...and every other Socialist shithole in Europe right now. The chickens are coming home to roost, and the chaos, death and destruction that's about to take place is richly deserved, and no one should feel an ounce of pity or compassion for those who sold themselves in to Socialist slavery without understanding the inevitable, inescapable consequences of doing so.
Neither stupidity nor ignorance are an excuse, so, all you Socialists, welcome to the stew, I hope it's as bitter and unpalatable as I suspect it will be.
