so taxes are government coercion and doubleplusungood right?
what about the fact the way Apple takes a 30% cut of any transaction you make on the App Store and their newly announced subscription system takes 15% for subscriptions older than 12 months?
sales tax in Australia is only 10% and credit card processors take less than 5% so Apple is absolutely gouging repeatedly for something that takes them no ongoing investment, nor are they using the revenue to fund development of the platform because the hardware is already sold at a profit, and in the past they even charged developers for access to the tools! (and of course they still prohibit any development activity on non-Apple hardware, so in a sense you still have to pay to play anyway).
App Store policy prevents you from using a competing payment processor or makes it extremely awkward to do so, so competition is squashed.
sure you could design your own competing ecosystem from scratch, but that would take billions in capital, and is completely out of reach of even the largest app developers (besides those that are trying to establish similar monopolies).
a principled boycott of Apple appears unlikely to get off the ground.
now Apple won’t send the canonical men with guns to your house if you refuse to pay: they don’t have to! they deduct their cut before they pay you! so no force is involved and it’s entirely okay, right? bleurgh.
I mean, I can understand the voluntary/nonvoluntary distinction not mattering to you, but surely you can see that there is a distinction there? I don’t have to participate in Apple’s market or buy their phones.
Considering the sheer number of companies that you need to interact with that are switching to this model, not really.
All phone companies do this and you can’t honestly opt out of cell phones these days.
I mean on a factual level I think you’re wrong here, I have a flip phone and many Android phones allow you to install whatever apps you want from whatever source.
But setting that aside, and reiterating that I can understand why this distinction isn’t important to you especially given the huge startup costs, do you really not see a distinction between the case where you won’t go to jail if you use an alternative and one where you will?
To some minor extent? But like that’s just one example. Not even the best one.
But to give a better example of why I don’t sees meaningful distinction between taxes and private companies providing services that are necessary: You would die if you could not eat food, and that is pretty much impossible for the average person to acquire without paying for it in any practical way. Dying is very equivalent to legal ramifications from not paying taxes.
Maybe you can live without a phone (although you cannot get a job without phone service or a address in most cases, and those do need money, so I think that’s super debatable) but there’s plenty of other things you need to survive that you do have to pay more for, and why aren’t those just as coercive?
The distinction here is not whether you can forgo the service altogether, but whether you can use or create an alternative without risking imprisonment. I can go to Walmart, or Target, or plant in my yard to get food. I can’t set up my own home market and not pay income tax on what I make.
Again, it’s a reasonable stance to say that this difference doesn’t actually matter that much. Especially in cases where creating an alternative is impossible due to lack of resources and no meaningful alternatives already exist. But I still think there is a difference between “you can’t choose differently because you don’t have the resources to set up a different choice” and “you can’t choose differently because if you do you will go to jail”, even if that difference is often irrelevant to any given political analysis.
Also, intellectual property monopolies etc. are helping a lot of those rentseekers. The costs of creating alternatives are artificially high because the companies can send PoliceMob to hunt down those who don’t respect patents and other such silly things.
And telecoms in most western countries are incredibly regulated with excessive barriers to entry; Romania has some of the best internet in the world thanks to its anarchistic origins and Somalia seems to have way more competition (and probably better customer experience too) in telecoms than the US. If it was easy enough, you would most likely have a free-as-in-speech alternative for your phone service. It might not have the same UX as corp alternatives that can extract maximum money to maintain their services (eg. a macbook is a lot easier to deal with than a custom linux laptop), but I’d be highly surprised if it didn’t exist.
Then there’s the difference between “not forbidden” and “actually a commendable thing to do”. In pure perfect info-anarchy, Apple could manufacture phones with self-destruct switches if one tries to jailbreak them, and publish software with DRM that prevents people from using it without paying whatever rents Apple asks, and they would be perfectly free to do so. I wouldn’t like it, and would strongly prefer that things be done differently, and I would be there to break the DRM, pirate the phones etc., but even then I wouldn’t want to establish a precedent of authorizing men with guns who can mess with your business in if their boss thinks you charge too much.
I don’t think Apple could get away with such things in a free society, but if they did, I would limit my objections to non-violent forms.
3 weeks ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist · 100 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from metagorgon and added:The ILA had bought off the politicians. That’s exactly what I’m talking about; good government is a public good, bad...
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- metagorgon said: it is not well-embedded in my brain, but of course i agree
gcu-sovereign reblogged this from metagorgon and added:Point of diction: I thought the preferred term was ancapistan?
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peopleneedaplacetogo said: The trouble with railways is they compete with hugely subsidised roads; funding them entirely out of user willingness to pay only makes sense in general if roads are funded the same way.
xhxhxhx liked this- argumate reblogged this from xhxhxhx and added:
I’m always eager for your bullshit! :)It’s certainly easy to point to examples of successful deregulation and...
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Railways and postal services are meant to ship goods and people efficiently. Efficiency means that services are provided...
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rock-a-la-carte said: In the US there are (or at least have been) restrictions on growing certain things for your own consumption (famously, wheat) justified on the theory that to take yourself out of the market also affects interstate commerce, so can be regulated- Show more notes