I didn't have the patience to watch the text drip so slowly onto the screen, but from flipping around in the video it looks like it follows the fallacy of perfect property. Capital-L libertarians pretend that all wealth is fairly gotten and ignore the ways by which wealth adversely affects the lives of others. But the blueprint of the Declaration of Independence is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, reflecting that the quite modest improvements in personal privacy and self-determination achieved when the rich are left to themselves without taxation must be weighed against the right of all people to survive and to have the opportunity to get ahead and advance themselves.

To make a simple comparison, consider all the ways people are supposed to surrender free speech, the purest and most absolute and reliable of all the rights. They're expected to give it up within a few blocks of a national nominating convention, and when it comes to joking about bombs at the airport, and when it comes to broadcasting anything in the radio spectrum because that right is all "owned" by somebody else, and on private property, and when it comes to "obscenity"... to save space I'll stop here through I've barely gotten started. I think we could do a whole lot better with free speech, but the right of the wealthy to keep every penny of their wealth is not more fundamental than that, and in the real world we should not expect it to be implemented any more cleanly. Taxing the wealthy heavily for redistribution to the poor may not be philosophically perfect, but until the various forms of lobbying, influence peddling, market domination and manipulation and insider trading and money laundering and racketeering are gotten under control, no solution can be perfect.

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[-] 1 points by Dutchess (499) 13 years ago

Actually Capitalism cannot exist in a vacuum. It HAS to go hand in hand with solid judicial system and sound monetary policies! Unless you know and understand these requirements ( which we have neither today) can Capitalism not exist!