C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics” read by Erick Vasconcelos and edited by Nick Ford.

But treating either the payment of taxes or receipt of government money as a proxy for where one stands on the Producer-Parasite spectrum is ridiculous. Commenter Kirsten Tynan points out the sheer absurdity of asserting that the bottom two-thirds of society literally produce nothing and live entirely on the output of the rest:

I’m still trying to understand if by “the bottom 2/3″ produces nothing, we mean that people like timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees, electronics assemblers, etc. could just disappear and the world would go on pretty much as normal. If all of those people suddenly disappeared, how would an Apple or Microsoft campus get built? How would its products get built? How would they get delivered? But they should if the bottom 2/3 really produces nothing, right?

It would be amusing indeed to see how a Galt’s Gulch society would organize all the logging, truck driving, mining, construction, etc., without that parasitic 67% holding back the geniuses on Wall Street and in the C-suites. The assertion that the 67% “produce nothing” is as pig-brained stupid as the claim three years ago that the 47% “pay no taxes.” As I wrote back then, the poor pay lots of taxes — they just take the form of payments to nominally private monopolists.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

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