Subsidies & Taxes

There are subsidies because there are taxes. Or, put it the other way round, because there are taxes, therefore there must also be subsidies. After all, there are the opposites of each other and both are needed to strike a balance.

Of course, the current debate in public in our part of the world is that there should be an increase in taxes and there should absolutely be no subsidies.

The major argument against subsidies is that subsidies lead to economic inefficiency. This is from the argument that the economy, left it itself, is efficient. Or, rather, will be efficient. This is not a statement of fact; it is a value judgement from laissez faire economics. The statement may be less incorrect if we were to say that subsidies, if improperly introduced and implemented, may leave to economic inefficiency or make the economy less efficient or more inefficient. We do not know that; we have to find out.

But the economy, as it is, is not without interference - not least, taxes from the government. Why is it not argued that because the government taxes people for working through the income tax, the income tax is making the economy less efficient by making people less inclined to work harder. There is also the tax on consumption and this discourages people from consuming because they have to give a portion of their little income to the government (and what is the government going to do with that extra revenue) which the people would have spent feeding their families.

There are also taxes on imports so that imports which we cannot produce ourselves will be more expensive - if the hope (?) that we can make those imports ourselves. The best example must be cars and we are paying good money to drive lousily-made local cars. Whereas, there are things that we have - for example, oil and gas, which we would put to good use ourselves are exported so that we, the producers of oil and gas, have to pay for oil and gas just like other people in the world who do not have oil and gas in their backyard.

If we study the direction of the various taxes, we can see that they are piled up haphazardly by the government as a form of getting more and more revenue because they have been advised by some mediocre economists that the best way for the government to stimulate (whatever this means) the economy is for the government to spend more and more. But taking more and more money from the general public for the government to spend does not encourage the people to want to invest in their future here. They want to get out of the way of the government before the government steamrolled them to death. The government seems to have a life of its own, and it will try to survive at the expense of the people.

There is a need for subsidies. Subsidies are needed in areas which protect the traditional livelihood of the society which defines our traditional culture. As the economy advances, it is inevitable that land and resource based activities will be unable to catch up technologically compared with the other sectors. But the traditional sectors are the food sectors, the agriculture, which are the soul of the society. We are not an island economy which is confined by its size to be super efficient in a small space. We are big enough to have sufficient space for every person who want to continue with our traditional activities. It is something else to argue whether things like cars are essential to the livelihood of society, or that they are mere toys which contribute to the ego of certain leaders of ours - and cars are now the bane of our society.

Robin Williams: Comedy - Life Is Not A Joke

Robin Williams, being the greatest comedian the world has seen, may have been the saddest man on earth.

He joked about cocaine was God's way of saying that you had too much money. But success has a way of isolating one from the rest of mankind. And out of that loneliness, one becomes an individual. When an individual connects with every individual at the same time, it is as if he could connect with the whole world, even when the whole world is not at one with itself.

No comedian ever intends to be funny. The comedian merely presents the world as it is not what everybody sees it to be, and as a result the situation seems funny to everybody - but not to the comedian. The comedian is dead serious in making a point about the reality of the world, and that reality is disbelieved and hence the comedian seems funny to the audience. Being laughed at, the comedian takes a bow and happily accepts the cash as the applause and duly blow that cash on cocaine. It completes the cycle of the madness of the world, and when the laughing stops, the comedian does not seem that funny anymore. Comedy is dead serious, and life is not a joke.

The world relishes comedy because the world is a sad place. That we can all laugh despite the meaninglessness of everything is that laughter is the only sane response to nervousness, to uncertainty, to ignore, to not knowing what is going to come next. Bit by bit, things happen all the time, sometimes to us but most of the time to everywhere else. Things are happening all the time and we don't know what they are. That's when we try to make sense of life. And when we can't make any sense of the life, that is when we think that life is a joke.

But to go on living, we cannot think that life is a joke. The next level down is that we think that life is funny. And we laugh life off and after the laughter, we get on with the drudgery of life again. And that is called living life.

It is therefore moment by moment that we prod along and when the next moment does not come, that is the end of the game for us.

The blip then goes on elsewhere, and life goes on regardless of us.

RIP, Robin Williams.

Extremism & Its Shades

The current fashion in social networking is to attack the extremism of the current Israeli government which is ultra-right in the sense that it is strongly in defense of the existence of the Israeli state and will do everything it can to eliminate its enemies, real or perceived.

The real culprit, in this case, is the current Israeli government. If they change government, then it may be an entirely different kettle of fish - we do not know yet.

The perceived culprits, in so far as the current fashion of the social network is concerned, is now everything that is Israeli or Jewish. This is a very dangerous generalisation - so dangerous that it is, in fact, the biggest plague in the current flash of human civilisation. So now, everything Jewish or Jewish-related is under attack - even companies doing business in Israel.

I do not agree with the editor of a local newspaper who said for once the local extreme racist group has got it right by shouting abuse, burning the Israeli flag and then went home - for they did not do stupid things like some neitizens who abused local workers of a targeted company by the extreme anti-Isreali gang. It is extreme groups with their mentality in holding to their own special need for survival at the expense of others not of their kind that is the root of social troubles which may simply boil over at the right time for violence against fellow human beings not of their kind to take place.

We cannot support extremism of any kind or in any shade.