New research from Harvard University reveals that moral actions increase people's capacity for willpower and physical endurance. Study participants who did good deeds — or even just imagined themselves helping others — were better able to perform a subsequent task of physical endurance. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Kurt Gray explains these effects as a self-fulfilling prophecy in morality. People perceive those who do good and evil to have more efficacy, more willpower, and less sensitivity to discomfort. By perceiving themselves as good or evil, people embody these perceptions, actually becoming more capable of physical endurance.
Gray's findings run counter to the notion that only those blessed with heightened willpower or self-control are capable of heroism, suggesting instead that simply attempting heroic deeds can confer personal power.
Attempting the heroic deed of tax evasion can confer you personal power! Taxes, especially VAT, feed the underground economy. It is your patriotic duty to evade taxes, especially VAT, all the way! Taxation causes an enormous and unnecessary dead-weight loss to the economic system.
The sheer cost and time burden of businesses and individuals trying to comply with the tax system, let alone the cost of myriad bureaucrats who claim to be administrating it, waste hundreds of billions of euros.
This waste of resources unnecessarily reduces economic growth and job creation. A major reason this obscenity persists is that few kleptocrats think seriously about the consequences of what they have done and are doing, or just don't care. http://venitism.blogspot.com
The income tax has become much more progressive in the past thirty years, resulting in a situation in which a relatively small minority of taxpayers pay the bulk of the taxes, while most citizens pay little or any income tax. This is causing an increasing disconnect between benefits from government and what most citizens pay for. One result is a greater polarization in the political realm where a majority of citizens increasingly demand more government benefits for which they want others to pay.
It makes no sense to tax corporations at all, because only people pay taxes, not legal entities. The corporate tax is paid by customers in terms of higher prices, by suppliers in terms of lower volumes of business, by employees in terms of lower wages, and by stockholders in terms of lower returns.
All other persons and groups in society, except for acknowledged and sporadic
criminals such as thieves and bank robbers, obtain their income voluntarily:
either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary
gift. Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire
penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as
taxation. Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a
grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It
is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects.
There was no permanent income tax in the United States for 125 years. Can anyone
possibly say that the government didn't have enough revenue to function during
that time? It wasn't until the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 that
the redistributionist road was paved for an income tax. And what benefits has
the increased government revenue from the income tax given us? It is the income
tax that has made possible World War I, the New Deal, World War II, the Great
Society, the Vietnam War, and our current welfare-warfare state.
Every penny of our money that the government allows us to keep is a good thing,
whether it results from a decrease in the tax rates, the lowering of tax
brackets, or an increase in deductions, loopholes, exemptions, and credits.
The income tax system is a vast income redistribution and social engineering
scheme. The income tax code doesn't need to be simplified, shortened, fairer, or
less intrusive. The income tax rates don't need to be made lower, flatter,
equal, or less progressive. The income tax doesn't need more or larger
deductions, loopholes, credits, or exemptions. The whole rotten system needs to
be eliminated if we are to starve the beast that is the state leviathan and
strictly limit government spending to only what is constitutionally authorized.
When an economy suffers from erectile dysfunction, via-grab does not work, but
only via-cut. The via recommended is to cut taxes, not grab more taxes. There
are limits to how much government can tax before it kills the host. Even worse,
when government attempts to subsidize prices, it has the net effect of inflating
them instead. The economic reality is that you cannot distort natural market
pressures without unintended consequences. Market forces would drive prices
down. Government meddling negates these pressures, adds regulatory compliance
costs and layers of bureaucracy, and in the end, drives prices up.
Millions of innocent people have died of hypertension caused by agony on taxes.
Millions of concerned citizens are joining modern day tea parties of the Global
Tax Revolt, named after the Boston Tea Party of 1773. They are protesting
governments that, in the wake of today's financial crisis, are rapidly
strangling their freedom, with endless bailouts, mounting regulations, reckless
spending, and the promise of a crippling tax burden. Correctly sensing that
freedom is being discarded, they seek to battle this trend by taking to the
streets to register their outrage. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Government does not trickle the money down or up. Government simply spends it,
almost always wastefully. There's a simple moral and psychological explanation
for this. When you're given money, or seize money by force, in the case of taxes
it's legalized plunder, then you don't handle that money as responsibly as you
would if it were your own. There's no way to control wasteful government
spending because government spending will always, by its nature, be largely
wasteful and irresponsible. The only solution to this is to severely limit the
role of government as much as possible. Lower taxes are a good thing not only
because they leave wealth in the hands of the more productive; low taxes are
also good, because the government has less to do.
If you think the West has been productive and prosperous up to now, just imagine
how it would be if most of government as we know it went away. It's bad enough
that government takes income from the private sector and squanders it.
Government is making decisions that people should be making for themselves. If
something isn't going to happen without government funds, then it quite likely
should not happen in the first place. When people make decisions for themselves,
they generally do a better job. And when they make a mistake, or perhaps act
with deliberate irrationality, at least there are consequences for their
actions. When government does something badly, it gets rewarded with more power,
subsidies and control. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Gray points out Gandhi or Mother Teresa have not been born with extraordinary self-control, but came to possess it through trying to help others. Gray calls this effect moral transformation, because such deeds have the power to transform people from average to exceptional. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Moral transformation has many implications. For example, it suggests a new technique for enhancing self-control when dieting: Help others before being faced with temptation. Gray asserts the best way to resist the donuts at work is to donate your change in the morning to a worthy cause! The study brings new treatments for anxiety or depression, since helping others is a useful way of regaining control of your own life.
Gray's findings are based on two studies. In the first, participants were given $1, and were told either to keep it or to donate it to charity. They were then asked to hold up a 5-lb. weight for as long as they could. Those who donated to charity could hold the weight up for almost 10 seconds longer, on average.
In a second study, participants held a weight while writing fictional stories of themselves either helping another, harming another, or doing something that had no impact on others. As before, those who thought about doing good were significantly stronger than those whose actions didn't benefit other people. But surprisingly, the would-be malefactors were even stronger than those who envisioned doing good deeds.
Whether you're saintly or nefarious, there seems to be power in moral events. People often look at others who do great or evil deeds and think, `I could never do that,' or `I wouldn't have the strength to do that.' But in fact, this research suggests that physical strength may be an effect, not a cause, of moral acts. http://venitism.blogspot.com
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Iris Bohnet of Harvard points out that it's not always easy to do the right thing. And when she says the "right thing" she means choosing an apple over a chocolate bar, or putting your money into a savings account rather than buying new shoes. Bohnet is thinking of gender equality very much like she thinks about apples or putting your money into a savings account: Namely, many organizations now want to change, want to close gender gaps, partly because it is the right thing to do, but also because it increasingly is the smart thing to do. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Bohnet notes the talent pool is increasingly female, and therefore many companies look harder at their hiring and promotion practices, asking the question of where all these women graduates — who, in many countries, are more than their male counterparts — where do they go? And how do they climb up the ladder in our company, in our organization? And so that's where gender equality nudges come into play. We would argue that many of the decisions that are made are not made by people who want to actively discriminate. Rather, they're made because of how our minds work. There are implicit biases, which guide our judgments, not just related to gender but related to all kinds of decisions that we make every day. It's these implicit biases that we want to overcome with gender equality nudges.
Nudges change the environment ever so slightly — they change organizational practices, they change how we hire, how we promote people, creating a more equal playing field for men and women. Nudges change environments and organizational practices. Here's an example: Bohnet has looked at how companies typically hire and in particular how they promote. Promotion decisions are often made one at a time — a certain person does a great job and we try to decide whether he or she should be promoted.
In contrast, many hiring decisions are made comparatively, so we look at various candidates at the same time and compare their qualifications for a certain job. We would argue, based on a lot of research in social and cognitive psychology as well as behavioral economics, that how we evaluate affects how we decide. http://venitism.blogspot.com
So Bohnet asked herself, how can we change the environment ever so slightly so that the company or organization maximizes its performance by hiring the most qualified candidate rather than basing its hiring decisions on stereotypical gender norms in which men are generally hired for certain tasks while women are generally hired for others?
It turns out that comparative evaluation leads to very different outcomes than separate evaluation. In fact, in Bohnet's study, they completely erased stereotypes. When people examined one candidate at a time, they did tend to focus on stereotypes, but when they had comparison information available, performance information tended to prevail. That's a very easy way for companies to think about hiring and promotion decisions.
Bohnet is well aware that promotion decisions often can't wait until there is a slate of candidates available for comparisons, but there are other comparisons available. For example, the pool of people promoted in the prior year or over the last five years. So Bohnet is encouraging companies to think creatively about the decisions they make and to build on insights from behavioral decision research to restructure their environments. http://venitism.blogspot.com
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