You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller #BTC
@insiderlauren I went through Heathrow airport about 10 years ago. They made me take my 8 month old baby’s nappy off. Then the wouldn’t even let me put it back on. We were hurried out of the screening area.
Absolutely sick people. They treated us like cattle.
@DotaMasterPro@financedystop Because a builder will charge you 30% on top of the cost of the subbies, for his services.
Plus, this guy obviously did some of the work himself.
@DotaMasterPro@financedystop I’m a tradesman, and pretty handy. I’ve learnt how to do many things.
And if I had to I could build a house myself. But it often is not worth it. I can may more money in the time it takes to learn to do it.
@DotaMasterPro@financedystop Depends. Different in different countries.
In the USA, it’s easier to build a house yourself, with two people. Mostly your houses are timber.
Ours are mostly brick. Also, people that build their own house don’t pour concrete slab, they don’t do plumbing and electrical.
@ProudSocialist No. Capitalism created the structure to build the phone ussing available Labor.
You need both. This has been proven over and over again.
@kevinnbass As the movie Fightclub says
“we are a generation of men, raised by women”.
This all started decades ago. You can barely even find a male primary school teacher anymore.
Private property rights were surrendered the moment we accepted the first exceptions.
The government taxes what you own and it seizes it through eminent domain whenever officials decide your land serves a “higher purpose.”
And the instant we treated those takings as legitimate, property stopped being a right the state exists to protect and became a privilege the state grants and can revoke at will.
The truth is governments have always confiscated more wealth through taxation, regulation, and legal plunder than private thieves could ever manage.
But that’s not even the core problem.
The deeper issue is what happens when rights cease to be sacred boundaries and become subject to majority vote.
If 51% can vote to rob the 49%, nothing in principle stops them from voting to do worse.
They can authorize killing, torture, enslavement, or any other violation and call it legitimate because “democracy.”
And no, that’s not a slippery slope. It’s the logical endpoint and the consistent application of treating rights as collective permissions rather than individual moral claims that no majority may override.
America was founded on the opposite moral premise that natural rights were understood as existing prior to government and independent of popular approval.
They were the fixed limit on power, not up for negotiation.
Every exception we normalized since then has eaten away at that foundation. And the result is exactly what the founders warned against, and that’s a system in which rights are whatever the majority, the bureaucracy, or the latest coalition decides they should be.
But rights do not come from society and they do not bend to majority will.
They supersede it.
The laws, institutions, and precedents that turned them into revocable privileges must be repealed and dismantled.
Anything less leaves us as subjects to a tyranny more total and arbitrary than anything history has yet produced.
Inheritance tax (death taxes) is a socialist/ communist idea.
The money that was used to buy the house was already taxed. You don’t get to tax someone’s dwelling.
If I leave something to me kids, something I worked hard for and already paid taxes on, you don’t get to steal it.
Rory Sutherland nails a quiet injustice that’s growing fast.
You can work insanely hard for 30 years, climb to the top… yet still live in mediocrity because your parents never owned a house in a good area.
Meanwhile, your junior colleagues inherit property from parents in Kensington or Surbiton and cruise through life with houses, wealth, and freedom.
The system taxes earned income heavily but barely touches inherited wealth, property gains, and pensions.
Economic models hide the problem, they use one “average” person, so inequality vanishes in the math (hello, Bill Gates effect).
This isn’t just unfair. It’s building a new class system based on inheritance, not effort.
What do you see as the biggest driver of unfairness between generations today?
@newstart_2024 Inheritance tax (death taxes) is a socialist/ communist idea.
The money that was used to buy the house was already taxed. You don’t get to tax someone’s dwelling.
If I leave something to me kids, something I worked hard for and already paid taxes on, you don’t get to steal it.