Are you a domestic terrorist?

[Jester]

Yes, you describe the bars to a gilded cage. You are still telling me to enjoy my fluffy pillow.

Yeah, that's definitely the head-bang-against-wall Objectivist bit. You don't seem to care that you *have* a "fluffy pillow" - and that very few have ever had that privilege. It doesn't even seem to matter to you that you live in a democracy, with remarkable freedoms, more than were enjoyed by almost anyone, anywhere else, ever. The historical context of your situation as being in one of the freest, richest, healthiest societies ever is rendered irrelevant - because you can find reasons it's not yet your utopia.

And, how is that different than how we are treated?

QED. If the difference isn't immediately, shockingly obvious to you, then I think we have an irreconcilable difference in our beliefs.

For every year I have worked, my product has earned my masters millions of dollars, but I get a meager salary sufficient to get a house, buy food, and transport myself to my designated cubical.

I don't know what's going on here, but if you're producing over *one million dollars per year* in output, and yet are being paid a "meager salary", you're either a terrible negotiator, or you're an altruist of Dickensian proportions. If every working American produced that much, your GDP would be 155 quadrillion dollars.

Should I earn too much, your touted progressive taxation system steps in to keep the uppity worker in their place.

:blink:

I can't wrap my head around this, try as I might. If your notion is that progressive taxation is a method of keeping the working poor from improving their position, that is exactly backwards. How would paying a *higher* share of taxes help poorer working people? Flat taxation, consumption taxation, poll taxation... it would all have the same effect - to shift the balance of taxes downwards towards the poorer end of the income spectrum.

Uppity... sheesh.

Look around you.

Excellent advice. I see the richest, healthiest, most free, most technologically advanced society in history. I can speak my mind without fear of imprisonment, I have clean, heated running water and electricity. I have plentiful food, a room in a perfectly adequate house, and a health care system that would take care of me in my illness. I can practice my religion (or lack thereof, in my case) in peace, without being strung up, burned, or stoned to death. I elect my government, which responds to the public will (whim?) to a degree that would have been unheard of a century ago.

What do you see? Oh, right. A "gilded cage". All I can say is that pretty much anyone anywhere anytime would gladly trade their situation for your "cage".

-Jester