Given that John McCain is actively pursuing Bush's oligarchy-building tax cuts and because he is using the same laissez-faire rhetoric we've been hearing for a decade now, we need to hear clear arguments showing why this spirit is bad for the United States. A nice article with two data charts showing relative incomes since 1947 helps make the necessary arguments in a simple fashion, linked below. If the highest good in politics for the founders of the US was moderation, since 1980 the Republicans have been guilty of a serious sin in the context of American political-economic culture:  the selling of radical free market policies, hidden behind the rhetoric of freedom.  Tax and regulatory policies are not either/or, and there is not "the individual" vs. "the government. Rather, there are kinds of individuals, and there are degrees of taxation on different levels of income. The questions then are not, "are taxes bad"; "is regulation bad", and "should there be limits on imports from China", but "how much taxation" and "how much and which regulations" are good, and "in what cases should we allow and prohibit imports, from China in particular"? American civilization since the 1980s, in over-valuing the freedom to pursue self-interest and undervaluing those ways and means to a common good, harms itself in ways that will only become obvious when our children are adults. T. Hoyt, Summer 2008

Link:

2 Candidates, Two Fortunes, Two Views of Wealth

Note the radical change in relative income at the upper levels since 1973 . This situation suggests the continuation of current Republican policies make the US more of an oligarchy than a democracy.

Below, I give a short list of claims made by those who argue against higher taxes; against regulation; against limits on imports from China in particular, with responses

1) The individual earns the money so should be able to keep all or almost all of it.
Response: None of us could earn more than a few hundred dollars if we were on an island all alone, and tried to make products to sell to a market. While the able individual is necessary to his own material sucess in any given culture, he is not sufficient. In other words, everyone is dependent on everyone else in their society, in some non-trivial sense.

2) The individual is the only reality. The group or collective or society is an abstraction and is not real. As such, the individual is the only unit deserving of moral respect.
Response: While the individual is the unit of society and deserves rights and respect, "no man is an island". In modern times, American individualism ceased being a good philosophy and became unhealthy during Regan's time. Individualism in its current form has declined to being a way of making those who are best at marketing and wealth creation able to gain materially at the expense of everyone else. There is no claim that these individuals have selfish motives. The objective policies are the issue.

3) The entrepreneur and businessman should have the right to sell as he wishes.
Response: The citizens of a particular country have the right to set the terms of sales and trade in their culture and country. Selling and marketing are privileges, and not rights. The Constitution does not make the way property is earned a right. It simply protects property from arbitrary takings. Participation in an economy is a privilege, and the society as a whole has a moral right and obligation to regulate it reasonably. This is not "socialism", a term which has been indiscriminately used to define any decision made by citizens acting in concert. Such decision making is good government exercised by citizens who are conscious of a common good. Just because an individual or firm excells at the skill of marketing does not give them the right to sell whatever they want at terms they want at tax rates they want. Such a claim should be viewed as absurd at face value.

4) Those who argue for higher taxes on upper incomes are just envious.
Response: This does not address the arguments put forth.

5) Those who argue for higher taxes and more regulation have a pessimistic view of human nature and are negative. Americans dislike negativity.
Same response as (4)

6) America is a free-market culture. Also, we can't expect a country like the US - made up of immigrants from diverse backgrounds who have little in common - to care about the society as a whole in the way other Westerners care about their society as a whole.
Response: This is the only partially valid response in this list, but does not respond to the most important part of my claim: That the issue of taxation, regulation and trade policy is a matter of degree, and not either-or. Moreover, the fact that the US does not have any indigenous culture and the diversity of American backgrounds points to a need that American society has more than other Western countries: A need for a public philosophy which promotes the common good, one which is not simply a Hobbesian-Lockean stress on the narrow good of wealth aquisition. Conservatives get emotionally as well as intellectually confused by easily assuming that the Lockean stress on private property and material well being is supposed to be about a morally good thing. The truth is more sober - the stress in American foundations on material well being was viewed by the founders as well as Locke himself as more simply a practical requirement for a smoothly running political-economy. Any public philosophy must include more than efficiency in its lists of moral goods. Saying this does not contradict the ideas of the founders, it supplements them.

7) Higher taxes on business profits will hurt productivity.
Response: The obvious response to this claim is that it is a manipulation on the part of business to avoid taxation. Since taxes are lower today than they have been for a long time on businesses and higher incomes, and since the US has become quite wealthy even when marginal taxes were abot 60% (prior to 1973), this is empirically false.

8) Higher taxes on investment income will lower investment. Same response as prior.

9) Higher taxes on high incomes will decrease the motive of the able to work. Same response as prior. This is empirically false, and probably only becomes an issue when an individual must pay higher than 50% marginal tax rates. Right now marginal federal rates are around 30% - compared to 70% prior to 1973 on income above a certain level.

10) Who's to decide what is moral and what is not? Who's to make decisions about what is good and what is bad? Such a line of thought, dominant since around 1973, imply that good and reasonable people should just be quiet. But another cliche tells us that "when good men are silent, evil results". Such is the consequence of the relativism dominant since 1973. American pragmatism and/or true spirituality are real solutions to the trendy nihilism of the "who am I to say what's good and bad" mentality spouted by so many today. This is a task for educators in particular.

A few empirical/concrete consequences of laisser-faire marketing philosophy dominant since 1980 are:
- unregulated amount of commercials on TV - Prior to 1985 there was a 6 minute per hour limit.  It is not "socialism" to limit commercials. Unreasonably high levels of advertising trivialize the social space that we all live in by being in a particular culture.
-The US is the only industrialized country in the world that allows drug companies to advertize.
-Harmful products coming in particularly from China. No one can do anything about it, so we are told.
-Low tech/low wage jobs being exported. Since by definition there is no gain in productivity to be earned from trade in low tech goods, there is no rationale for allowing low tech goods into the country when this policy harms American workers. Our current import policies primarily benefit those who are motivated and good at setting up import-export businesses.
- The morally scizophrenic situation in which individual Americans start businesses whose purpose is to bring jobs outside the US, referred to as "outsourcing". In the process their actions have a harmful effect on other Americans. This should not be morally okay, even as it is legal. Only individuals who do not claim to be moral as well as bad citizens should be engaged in such activities. There is something wrong with a culture that says it is okay to do this kind of thing. Note that this policy is supported in spirit by both the extreme left and right.
- Doing away with the estate tax (extreme), rather than more moderately increasing the amount exempted from the tax.
- Confiscatory and generally unreasonable credit-card late-charge fees and interest-rates.
- Failure to enact tax policies to discourage oil consumption, as every other Western nation does.

-The most significant consequence of the short-sighted, selfish public philosophy sold as a virtue by certain elements on the American right is our becoming indebted to foreigners. No other modern culture lets its affairs be managed for the benefit of the few in the way the US has been for a while now. If we don't have to pay for this practically, our children will. A nation can't keep importing more than it exports endlessly. A national government can't continue to not tax for necessary and useful public services. This refusal to tax adequately has been a ploy used by the right to try to defund the fedsweral government, which they see as bad. Those who pay the foreigners back who are financing this kind of behavior - a behavior that no business or individual would get away with - will not be the same individuals who benefited from the highly irresponsible tax and trade policies of the last 25 years.

Pass it on - let's wake as many people up as we each can for the next general election to the irrational and truly bad public policy that has been enacted in our name at the national level for almost 8 years now! It's much more negative and pessimistic to do nothing about real political, economic and cultural problems than it is to talk about it clearly and without hesitation, based on arguments which have passed the test of time. In their use of black-and-white moral language, Romney, Guiliani and Thompson are pandering, simply, and do not truly lead.

Here's the link to the article again.