jbeshir:
socialjusticemunchkin:
jeysiec:
1. There are certain services and infrastructure required to have the sort of modern conditions that Westerners typically expect from their countries.
2. To not use those services/infrastructure you’d basically have to go live like the Amish, and that’s a best-case scenario.
3. If it wasn’t the government providing that services and infrastructure, it would just be private companies instead.
4. Those services and infrastructure cost labor and resources to perform/create/maintain.
5. Ergo any organization providing the services and infrastructure needs to be able to procure the necessary labor and resources.
6. If a private company provided those things instead of the government, it would almost certainly use money to procure the labor and resources and then demand payment for the resulting services and infrastructure, which would be identical to how the government procures using money and expects payment in the form of taxes.
6.5. In fact, it would probably cost you more money to get the services from the private company, since you’d be a captive audience, and a company would want to make a profit, and you would be less able to hold them accountable for bad service than you can government officials, since opting out would either be impossible or cause you great hardship. See for example: The US commercial internet providers and the outrageous prices and bad service they provide because they hold a monopoly over the proceedings, and how municipal internet is often better and cheaper.
7. If we instead provided the labor and resources via everyone making regular donations/volunteering in the required amounts, you’d essentially end up with a less-efficient tax system.
So when we consider all of the above, there is literally no way it makes logical and self-consistent sense to claim “taxes are theft” unless you think everyone both private worker or public worker is obligated to provide you with everything for free.
And then you run into logical problems anyway, because there’s no way in hell any organization can procure enough resources to provide you with free services without soliciting so many donations that you, like I said, effectively end up recreating the tax system less efficiently anyway.
(You’d also run into social problems, since there’s obviously no way in hell any business is going to accept the attitude that they’re obligated to give you free stuff.)
So the ancaps/libertarians/economic conservatives can stop projecting their own stupidity, insanity, and inability to understand basic economics onto everyone else, thanks.
If only the government stuck to providing those services, instead of shoving all kinds of “services” down my throat just because other people have decided I must have them.
Those vital services and infrastructure are a relatively small fraction of the total taxation. I wouldn’t object to them, what I object to is tax money being spent on kidnapping, ransom, and other kinds of banditry upon (mostly poor and black) people who are just trying to make ends meet in the totally legitimate businesses of sex work, drug dealing and braiding hair; tax money being used to “create jobs” for people in illegitimate businesses such as privatized prisons; tax money being spent on delivering barrels of pork to politically connected cronies; tax money being used to dictate my food in the form of agricultural subsidies; tax money being used to subsidize inefficient infrastructure in non-toll highways, fossil fuels and fucking alfalfa farming in fucking California; tax money being used to murder people whose only crime was being muslim in a region where some people are bad guys; tax money being used to prop up a bloated imperialist military that wastes ridiculous amounts of resources due to political gridlock; tax money being used to paternalize, degrade and humiliate poor people as a condition for being allowed to exist; tax money being used to prop up the privileges of the already privileged; tax money being used to keep brown people out and unable to make a honest living in a place where they want to make it, etc…
I would never pay a private company for about half of the things the government does, but thanks to the idea of democratic legitimacy combined with the inherent monopolies/oligopolies (at best) of states, I don’t have a choice.
I wouldn’t mind paying taxes to fund a sufficient basic income to somewhat consensualize the economy, provide basic (genuine) security for everyone, internalize externalities, handle natural monopolies, and do the important investments the private sector is bad at doing (basic science, basic healthcare research etc.) and [the things I’ve forgotten to mention but belong here]; especially if taxed from economically efficient sources like land, usage of natural resources (”privatize” the aquifers and the atmosphere, sell the water/pollution rights to the highest bidders and share the profits to everyone to solve so many problems simultaneously!) and the government’s services (there’s an argument to be made that since the police and military ultimately protect mostly property, the owners of said property should be the ones who pay for the system that protects them from people who would rather see the property in their own possession), etc.
Everything else is waste though, robbed at gunpoint (indirectly; I pay my taxes without guns being involved because I don’t want to get guns involved but the threat of violence is always upholding all state actions and that’s why we don’t do state actions except where it’s actually genuinely necessary and important) without consent. Those I am well within my moral rights to protest.
PS. Can we agree on a compromise that taxation is theft the same way property is?
(Also seriously, the war on drugs is basically such a perfect example of how utterly fucked-up the state is. It robs taxpayers so it can give money to people whose job it is to basically kidnap black men who do something some other people don’t like even if they hurt nobody in doing it, and deliver them to other people who are paid to hold black men in captivity, because the ~democracy~ has decided that such things are right and just and proper. Then when marijuana is legalized the state regulates it so that poor black people can’t make a legal and legitimate living off it because barriers to entry shut them outside the business.)
The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.
And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.
And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.
This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process.
Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.
Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.
And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.
If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).
But in practice left-libertarianism seems to be basically an economic equivalent of the people grousing about the evils of foreigners who admit when asked that they think anyone who wants to work in the country should be allowed to; people whose action’s consequences are wildly different to what they claim to want, but who don’t think about that or act differently because they don’t have to live with those consequences. And I think it maintains the presence of a lot of harm in much the same way.
(I’m only talking about my own libertarianism, not claiming that others’ views would be the same)
The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.
And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.
I think a big part of this is the way the right has a stranglehold on downsizing the state. Deregulatory capture happens because left-statists are too much in love with the state so the only ones willing to make it smaller are disproportionately on the right, and thus deregulation is done on the right’s terms.
There’s also this idea that there are two kinds of services: the bad ones, and the popular ones. A lot of what the electorate wants is terrible, and pork delivers votes reliably. One could take this fatalistic approach all the way, and conclude that what happens will happen anyway (in which case there would be no need to do left-statist advocacy for not downsizing), or try to find ways around it.
And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.
This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process.
Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.
#notmylibertarianism
Narrowing services may make the state superficially smaller when measured in money, but it also makes it a lot more intrusive. A decently-sized basic income with a flat 40% marginal tax rate (or even better, no income tax at all, but simply taxing land, resources, consumption and pollution etc.) is superficially more expensive than a horrible bloated bureaucracy delivering a million different programs to people who pass the checks, but in reality it “governs” and distorts the economy far less (which is the *real* problem with taxes; if we could have a 90% tax rate which delivered exactly the things that “should” be delivered it would not be a problem at all, but because the state can’t allocate most things as well as the market, it’s better to just give people money/not take away too much of their money).
Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.
As an ex-recipient of european welfare, I can say that your view of this continent’s ability to be horrible and degrading to poor people is an underestimate. Left-libertarianism is basically unheard-of here, yet the system still sucks for poor people.
And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.
That’s not libertarianism. That’s banditry. Cops should not be authorized to rob and kidnap citizens. This is non-negotiable. Incentive systems that enable robbing and kidnapping citizens violate people’s autonomy and basic rights and this is economic conservatism combined with unchallenged state authority.
If I were running the prisons, I’d do it the nordic way because it’s so much better in every way. Short sentences, minimize the harm to everyone instead of looting the coffers of the public to lock other parts of the public to satisfy the rest of the public. The american “justice” system is exactly the kind of a travesty that unrestrained democracy produces; two wolves and a sheep (guess the color) voting on what to have for dinner.
Compare that with the cost-effective, freedom-preserving nordic system which gives no fucks about what the public thinks because screw democracy, we’re doing what works, and we don’t let the mob vote on judges and prosecutors and what the fuck, but simply install them based on competence and tell them to try to keep the prisons empty. One of these systems respects people’s freedom, another sacrifices their liberty to the whims of the vox populi; the fact that the superior system is also cheaper to the taxpayer is a nice bonus. There are other kinds of freedom than just economic freedom.
(And if I were to privatize prisons altogether, I think it’s rather obvious that it’s the prisoners who are the customers and who get to choose which prison they want to spend time in, if they need to be imprisoned at all. Assuming such thorough abolition of the state (which I don’t necessarily support) the natural system would be that people sign to a security provider, which then negotiates with others’ security providers and delivers justice to its own members. The Black Panthers would probably do a much better job protecting black people than the cops of Ferguson; and if I were a shopkeeper dealing with a cigarette theft I’d be a lot more comfortable handing the teenage miscreant to them, instead of bandits whose loyalties lie with white savages with no concern for the actual welfare of the people their actions affect. Fucking yay democracy!)
If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).
I don’t want to dismantle welfare, I want to radically simplify it so that instead of the unholy bloated festering mess we have now, we’d simply give money to people who don’t have enough money, defined with the amazingly simple method of giving everyone money and taking back some of their income and letting the market, aka. poor people themselves, decide what the poor really need.
And instead of establishing an unholy bloated festering mess of subsidies, ill-considered efficiency standards, terrible regulations, and cap-and-trade aka. delivering windfall profits to cronies, I want to prevent global warming with the amazingly simple method of putting a price on greenhouse emissions and letting the market, aka. people who actually know whether implementation X is a good idea or not, decide how to cut emissions.
And instead of regulating the number of taxis and pharmacies (yes, the number of pharmacies is centrally planned in Finland), or mandating that housing must screw over the poor to subsidize car-owning families with parking requirements and mean apartment size regulations (yes, in Finland there are rules that condominiums must build more parking spots and big apartments that the market would deliver on its own, effectively redistributing upwards by making rich people’s housing artificially cheaper at the expense of poor people’s smaller apartments and non-car-owningness; and then builders evade the regulations by building one huge useless apartment so the rest can be smaller and that’s why the top floor of every other building in Finland has a square footage georg that should not be counted), etc. I want the state to simply fucking not do such things, with the amazingly simple method of just fucking not doing it.
And instead of having the state regulate my gender, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of regulating relationships and voting on whether or not gay and poly marriage is okay, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of deciding what substances people are allowed to put into their bodies and in which situations and kidnapping those who don’t obey, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of having the state decide what terms I may sell my labor with, or to be more specific it’s not even the state but the employers’ union (yes, we do have an employers’ union) negotiating with the labor unions but this is corporatism and they are an accessory of the state, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of trying to “create jobs” and looting Peter to pay Paul to push paper instead of creating value, it could just fucking not do it.
Over half of what the state currently does can be solved with two amazingly simple heuristics:
1. Just fucking don’t do it
2. Give cash to everyone instead so they can buy it if they really want it
and the corollary
3. Always prefer the simpler and more general option with less loopholes and less risk of terrible side-effects to poor people: give money instead of services unless you’re really exceptionally certain that this one service is worth it; regulate instead of banning, or just don’t; tax instead of regulating, or just don’t; tax generarly and broadly and avoid specificity because people are smart and will find ridiculous ways around your bullshit; let the market sort itself out; just fucking trust the market don’t fuck with it; if you think the market is screwing over the poor don’t fuck with the market just give the poor more money so they can afford to vote with their feet/wallets; and never ever let anyone do anything that would make someone say “vote for X because they care about the interests of group Y”
I’d agree with (or like to see tried, anyway) the goals here, I think, and in particular your third heuristic, which seems to contain a more nuanced version of the other two if I understand correctly. I might disagree on whether particular services qualify as ‘worth it’ or not (although I understand this is more about whether there is some particular reason the market can’t do them than about how important they are to life), but that doesn’t need resolving.
But I think the method employed, basically delegitimising the state until politicians fix everything, is a bad one. I don’t think narrow, invasive systems come from anyone *wanting* them, I think they fall out of the incentives that a sizeable mass of people who view the state as illegitimate create.
Specifically, I think they come from the natural political midpoint between “people who view state involvement in anything as morally heinous” and “people who don’t want poor people to starve on the street” that garners the most votes being to pander to the first group by cutting all services which normalize state involvement in/redistribution to normal people’s lives, and to pander to the second group by promising to save the people who *really* need it through these narrow targeted things that people in the former group can’t get strong feelings about.
And I think the louder the first group gets the more you see that happen. The more illegitimate the government taxing and spending money to help people is in the eyes of the electorate, the more people regard taxation as theft, the more it’s going to be narrowly targeted at the cases where it’s harder and harder to disagree with, meaning more and more complicated and expensive and invasive and impossible to navigate eligibility testing and holes that people fall through and lack of proper support and similar.
Similar for civil forfeiture and prison phone systems; I don’t think anyone’s ideology demanded those. I think they just fell out of being able to say you were cutting taxes playing to the popular attitude that taxation was theft (plus the all-holy “localism” which is the cause of so much NIMBYism, incompetence, and efforts by local governments to shove their problems onto each other, including when those “problems” are people).
More generally, I think there is a failure mode in lots of political ideologies working towards goals which boil down to “build new system for supporting people, destroy old inferior one” where because building is hard and has no coalition and destroying is easy and there’s all kinds of people to join up with, they run an effective campaign for crippling the existing system while making zero progress on the replacement. And no one notices or cares, because there’s no direct incentive on them to.
And I think the only solution here is to be very strict on the replacement being built first or enacted at the same time or with transitionary arrangements, and making it a part of proper incrementalism that nothing should be supported that hurts people now on the basis that it’ll be part of a complete improved system as soon as everyone else comes around on the rest of the plan.
Edit: Also I more specifically agree with the Nordic prisons bit, I think most everywhere else has an abominable prison system that I hope future generations regard as monstrous, and don’t have any objection to the prisoner being allowed to choose their prison in principle; we might find that the market goes too far towards comfort, especially for those with friends with money on the outside, but we can risk that and adjust when we see signs if we need to.
