Thread: Car sales

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This is not the first time the boating industry has been a harbinger. In late 1990 the then Congress did one of it's "tax the rich" schemes (sound familiar?), imposing a "luxury" tax on "yachts", furs, jewelry, high end autos and private aircraft. The people targeted by this tax did what any logical person should guess, they quit buying so they wouldn't have to pay the tax. It almost crushed the boating and light aircraft industries, of course ending up costing those "working people" employed there.

Brings to mind the Santayana quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And that sentence is actually part of a larger quote that, ironically, deals with the notion of change; "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience." The "rich" in the Robin Hood tales were the self annointed aristocrats and their lackeys of the time. They believed themselves to be the smart people destined to lead the "citizens". Actually they overtaxed the people who did productive things for their own benefit all the while telling the serfs what was best for them. I wonder if they called it change?