Killing People

Killing People

Are you or someone you know dying? Do you have a debilitating disease? Perhaps all that troubles you is some dreaded task that you complain about by saying…they can put a man on the moon but they can’t (you fill in the blank). Almost certainly the person who might have innovated a cure or invented the device to take away your pain – has been murdered. Perhaps he died of a disease before he could help with your problem because the guy who might have cured his disease was murdered.

We could work backwards in time and kill some important people to demonstrate. We could go back and murder penicillin discoverers, DNA researchers, polio vaccinators and all the wondrous medical advances that have saved literally millions of people in total. Think about the transportation revolutions that whisk you to modern hospitals where 100 years ago they would just sent for the priest. Tyrants who enslave people and stop their productivity and force them to worry about getting their next meal also stopped innovation. Hitler might have won the war but he murdered and drove out millions of very bright people who the US exploited for science. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews may be the single biggest blunder of his reign.

Yes people like Fidel have an excellent chance to have actually killed or repressed the person that could have saved his life. It is fitting don’t you think? But truth be told, hundreds of millions of humans were exterminated by Twentieth Century tyrants like Fidel and Raul. That’s a tremendous amount of human intellectual capital gone to waste.

This is reason enough to implement an economic system that legally allows humans to create wealth which THEY are allowed to spend and not the rulers. Fund the government with land location taxes that prevents land hoarding but allow the poorest to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Come on people – we’ve been taxing income in one way or another, to one degree or another and the middle class barely hangs on while the poor live in the street.

You know as well as I do that the wealthiest always have the choice parcels of land on which to live and do business. But the poorest would live in the less valuable outlying areas where the location tax drops to zero. Therefore even the least skilled could earn enough to survive comfortably – just not on Park Avenue. Don’t underestimate the poor either. George Washington Carver started out a slave and look how far he got even in segregated America? Help me free Cubans with this economic approach that will legalize personal creation of wealth for use by the individual creator. Doing this will permit all but the most challenged to survive and thrive comfortably. It would be a tragedy to replace Fidel’s form of slavery with another economic system that also taxes the productive labor of the people even if it is done under a freer environment.

Tomás Estrada-Palma