@ non-italian followers
ilzolende:
dagny-hashtaggart:
eversolewd:
yxoque:
pirozhok-s-kapustoj:
myshipsailson:
pirozhok-s-kapustoj:
pix3lsqu1d:
do you have a “religion” class in your school system
germany:
youp, though it becomes nonmandatory at some point pretty early on (i wouldn’t know when because i went to a catholic school with religion classes all the way) and you can elect sth like “ethics” or “philosophy” instead.
In Bavaria it’s mandatory until you graduate. There’s an “ethics” class if you’re not catholic or protestant and some schools offer an islam class as well.
Well, it is the same here, it is also ethics/philosophy or catholic/protestant/sometimes muslim religious classes, you have to go to one of these.
Yes. Belgium has this. Technically not mandatory, but I went to a Catholic school that offered no other options.
Nope to American public schools. Not even as an elective for my (poor, small, and rural) school.
Public schools (usually the wealthier ones) will occasionally have religious studies/history of religion classes, but the law frowns pretty seriously on anything that appears to be favoring or attacking any particular religion. In private schools it’s pretty much anything goes as long as they meet certain basic educational standards.
I had one in Denmark. It was mostly Protestant, IIRC? I was in the 6th whatever and it seemed mandatory.
Finland, yes, it’s either religion or ethics and members of the Church aren’t allowed to take ethics instead of religion even though it’s way more Actually Useful.
In addition, iirc they’re going to make it so that in high school the only class of a certain category that must be offered to people is religion; everything else is optional. Yes, screw things like history, psychology, economics and government, etc. because ~religion~ is the one that’s vital to know!
(via ilzolende)
9 hours ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #finland is swastika country · 29 notes · source: pix3lsqu1d · .permalink
So you still believe you are ruling the World?
lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:
socialjusticemunchkin:
What if Brexit is the true end of the 20th century? What if instead of a resurgence of atavistic nationalism, this was the beginning of its final death throes?
Imagine Brexit tearing apart Britain as Scotland and Ireland separate into their own countries, London turns into a city-state like a (marginally less totalitarian) Singapore of Europe, hopefully also taking Oxford and Cambridge with it out of the rotten husk of an empire England has turned into.
It would suck horribly for innocent people in England, but it would have a certain spiteful sense of justice and vindication; the R tribe tried to impose its values on tribe U, but instead only managed to destroy its country in the name of making it great again. Nationalism dealing the killing blow to the empire which once ruled half the world. The R tribe relies on looting U regions with its “democracy” to fund the imposition of its reactionary worldview and there could be nothing better than for tribe U to turn R’s tricks against it by showing that exit is a two-way street.
Scotland becoming independent seems like almost a given; Irish unification is promising but London is the truly interesting one. If London were to secede, it would show that the nation-state is powerless in the face of global power. The old borders wouldn’t be safe anymore. If the City’s loyalty lies with the rest of the world instead of people sharing some superficial genetic and cultural characteristics, it might open the floodgates everywhere else as well and slay the 19-20th century leviathan for good.
A lot of people have expressed worry that this would be the resurgence of the nation-state and the end of the internationalist project.
I think this might just as well be the end of the nation-state instead.
The age of the nation-state began at the end of the medieval free cities, as cannons allowed kings of the countryside to enforce their rule on cities as well. The social-cultural construct of the nation-state happened in earnest when the nations began shedding their kings and unifying themselves, and it’s easy to see why people might then conclude that the nation-state is the natural endpoint of history to which things will always revert…
Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
There is no inherent reason why nation-states would be the natural division of people.
Sure, when one looks at the maps, one can clearly see how Scotland is a naturally different polity than England and trying to forcibly keep them together is just asking for trouble.
But London is naturally different too. What does Sadiq Khan’s city have in common with the English UKIP-voting hordes who were willing to ruin their country because they hate brown people? A language, but San Francisco speaks the same language as London. Geographical location, but Ulster managed to stay separate from Ireland for a long time, and Singapore hasn’t been annexed by Malaysia. Political entity, but brexit has shown that polities can be reshaped by the will of the people constituting them.
Nation-states haven’t been a constant in history, but cities have. Every time it has been technologically and societally possible, humans have flocked together and increased each other’s prosperity with trade and cooperation. Democratic nation-states are economically artificial, kept together by barely disguised force; the Paris Commune was brought down by the king’s cannons, not by its own economic infeasibility. The history of the nation-state can be seen as the countryside gaining a capability to loot the cities, and constructing fictions to support this; now what happens if that capability is gone?
When one looks at the data, cities are clearly a different animal from the countryside. Wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist. London has far more things in common with Amsterdam and New York than with the English countryside, and in a sense the relationship between the city and the countryside leeching off it via the nation-state is always inherently under a certain tension; now what happens if this is the last straw?
Why should London be loyal to England, when England has shown itself able and willing to only ever take and take? When Scotland tears apart from the union, London’s northern ally in internationalism will be gone and it will be ever more isolated, surrounded by people who are all too willing to enjoy the fruits of London’s prosperity yet completely unwilling to contribute to it, even the bare minimum amount of not actively sabotaging the things that make such prosperity possible in the first place. The story of Atlas Shrugged is naive in its individualistic hero-worship, but replace the few greater-than-life personalities with millions of people, and Galt’s Gulch with London and it starts making a strange amount of sense.
If London were to leave England to the mess of its own making, it would deal a humiliating blow to the countryside, itself grown fat off the loot from the cities and fearful of immigrants and foreigners, the exact people who created the riches the countryside has for so long been stealing through the ballot box. And it’s not like the cities are even unwilling to share their riches; and it certainly might be different if all the countryside asked for was some money so it doesn’t starve, but the countryside is not satisfied with material sharing; what it truly wants is submission.
Like a classical abusive partner, the countryside has always been telling the city it cannot survive alone, yet in reality only the threat of violence is the only thing maintaining the relationship. The countryside stays at home, growing ever more unemployed and useless, while the city is working hard to feed them both. The countryside continuously stalks the city whenever it leaves the house, suspicious of everything the city is doing with foreigners, prone to jealous fits of anger whenever the city doesn’t submit sufficiently to its will. “What are you doing with those foreigners and immigrants? Do you not love me? I am your only one, nobody else may have you!”
Why doesn’t the city just leave?
As usual, the immediate reason is that the dangers of leaving are greater than the dangers of staying. “Sure, the countryside is under a lot of stress but deep down it loves me and after all, it’s not that bad, at least compared to what it would do to me if I tried to dump it; remember what happened to poor Paris?” But if the countryside grows abusive enough, its threats empty enough, the city’s allies strong enough to protect it from its ex, would the city still stay?
I hope the answer is no, and I hope the last straw will be here and now.
If the countryside is so blatantly willing to impose its rottenness on the cities, let it rot away. If democracy creates reactionary atavistic nation-states, to hell with democratic states then. Tribe R doesn’t create the wealth, yet it will always demand its share. “Buy American!” “Britain first!” “Auslander raus!” “Rajat kiinni!” Tribe R will happily take tribe U’s money, but it will reject its values and seek to impose its own. Via the democratic majority rule of the nation-state this strategy has always seen a degree of success; the amount of liberty that’s legal in cities has always been constrained by the conservative countryside. This is clearly an abusive relationship, now what if the cannon marriage of city and country were finally broken?
If London said “no”, would 2016 idly watch by like 1871? What rhetorical pretzels would the nationalists tie themselves into as “fellow brits” rejected their nightmarish utopia? “But you were supposed to be one of us” they would say, and London would whisper “no”. What if the reactionary populism was shown to be the blatant robbery it is? What if England was left to its own devices, without London’s money and influence? The populists could not make Britain great again; they would trash their own country and come begging for foreign aid at London’s doorstep. Without tribe U, tribe R is nothing but a raving bunch of barbarians. A country made solely of Clinton’s voters would still be a global power; a country made solely of Trump’s voters would be a backwards hellhole.
And if tribe R is willing to tear apart political structures at its whims, I say let them have a taste of their own medicine. If they would split the “artificial fiction” of the EU, let us split the artificial fiction of Britain! Let us leave them to their own devices, wallowing in a misery of their own creation. They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of the IWW or Adam Smith. Decent people who believed in the common good of international cooperation without borders. Instead they followed the droppings of demagogues and populists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole Europe stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell, all those reactionaries and nationalists and rabble-rousers… and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.
Call their bluff. Show them what they are made of. Show them that the world has new rules now, and new rules. That the mob of the nation-state cannot impose its terms upon the cities any longer. That we would’ve been willing to share our riches if that had been the only thing they asked for, but of course it never truly was about the riches in the first place; no, it was jealousy and fear over our way of life, something they wanted to extinguish just as much as to simply loot.
Let this be the end of the EU, but not the new dawn of the nation-state. Instead…
The end of the nation-state and the new dawn of the free city.
London, be our Lucifer, our morningstar, to bear the light to a brighter future free from the oppression of democratic nationalism, nationalistic democracy!
So you still believe you are superior?
What odds do you put on Scotland getting independence within the next five years?
What’s your distribution over the GDP of the UK in the next ten years?
Also I think you are massively mischaracterizing Tribe R, in a totally unfair and honestly kind of mean-spirited way. I’ve met Trump voters. I don’t think they would turn the country into a backwards hellhole. Trump might, but whether his voters would is less obvious. You seem to think that everyone who might vote for Trump (or BREXIT) must be as bad a Trump or Nigel Farage. Tribe R is not made of evil mutants! They’re not going around, scheming about how to mug cities! They’re scared, and frustrated, and maybe ignorant, but they aren’t evil.
Sure, you pay lip service to the “innocent” ones, but then you spend a dozen paragraphs talking about how awful the countryside is. It’s like when SJs go on a long rant about how all men are dangerous and uncontrolled, but they add a little note saying “Oh, but if you’re not like this then you’re fine and this doesn’t apply to you, teehee.”
This whole thing is just… really vindictive. I’m not sure I even disagree with your policy proposals (I have no idea what would happen if London seceded). But, like, the point of London leaving isn’t to punish those stupid poor people for daring to stand up for themselves.
I know I’m being totally mean and petty and vindictive in this; if I hadn’t been totally fed up with nation-state democracy already Brexit would’ve been a pretty clear last straw. National democracy doesn’t work. This is what happens when you put people of starkly different tribes together and tell them the majority gets to decide. You get populists, looting, reactionaries, cronyism, and all kinds of bullshit.
I’m not from the UK, but Finland has a similar situation with tribe R as well. Why the fuck are they voting on my life? Why the fuck are a bunch of poor people from the provinces voting on my cosmopolitan urbanist opportunities? I’m not against sharing some of the wealth (although even in that department there’s way too much misspending; Finland could literally completely eradicate poverty with UBI and still cut its public sector by 6% of GDP) but I will not. fucking. submit.
The “poor people standing up for themselves” are doing it in a really shitty way. Trump might ruin the country, and he’s exactly the guy those people voted for, so “trump voters would ruin the country” is imo relatively justified considering that they’re voting for the guy who might ruin the country. They want protectionism, they want to reduce immigration, they want subsidies, they want all kinds of evil things.
Why would I owe them anything I don’t owe to a fruit peddler in Accra, or an assembly-line worker in Shenzen? Why would I owe them submission to their parochial values in addition to a huge share of the money they wouldn’t even allow me to make? Why would I owe them my life?
They protest that they are my compatriots, yet I am not anyone’s patriot. They yell that I’m from the same town; yes, they are the people who made a living hell of my childhood. I’m not even seeking to collect reparations for that; all I want is my freedom. All I want is for one country on this polished turd of a planet to not fall for the reactionary horde. One place where I could live free, among people who are not hostile to my very existence. I’m immigrants, I’m foreigners, I’m degenerates and queers and decadence and international trade and unregulated everything and all the things tribe R stands against everywhere. They would be so much happier amongst themselves, and so would I. Why on earth must everyone be locked into these nonconsensual hellholes of nation-states. The language is interesting but in the same way Quenya is; nothing that would entitle anyone to a piece of me. I’m expunging the names and places from my life; and even the accent I want to lose. Any ties they wish to enforce I’m willing to cut as soon as I can. Why would I owe them my life?
Why do we have to get along on pain of violence instead of going our own ways peacefully?
I might say that I’m triggered, if it wasn’t such a massive trivialization of triggers. I’m content-ed, perhaps. This shit. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and their demands will not stop. They will never be satisfied until everything that makes my life possible is destroyed. They will pile on with endless demands that I must buy domestic pork instead of bolivian beans; that I should stay in my own country; that I owe everything to them; that they should be given the final say in everything about my life; that I have to beg them for mercy and permission alike for the sin of being different; the shadow over finnsmouth is hanging on my life and I’m afraid I can’t escape it before I can get off this planet altogether. Even then the leeches and moochers and bucketcrabs and poppycutters and redwashed rentiers might try to hang on, imposing space regulations from their strongholds on the old planet. And although I’m complaining about leeches and moochers I’d be more than thrilled to give them half of all the money I’ll ever make if that was the only thing they asked for in exchange for my freedom but they are never satisfied with just money no it’s my life they want and freedom must be extinguished.
If the world is so willing to hurt me, why would I owe it anything? My slytherin primary is flaring up really strongly and I’m in full self-defense panic mode. Me and Mine; destroy everything that tries to hurt these. Nothing personal that’s just the way it is just like everyone else “oh you’re harmed so massively by our well-meaning rules well too bad sucks to be you then it’s for the Greater Good and we know what it is not you” and I don’t even seek to destroy them all I want is to escape or fight with the viciousness of a cornered beast until I can yet I can’t because they control the whole world and they have the guns and the ballot boxes and the airwaves and the wiretaps in the backbone and they will keep coming and coming always demanding for more never satisfied while anything is still escaping their grasp and people are lucky to only lose their money for their only sin is having some but no such luck for my kind we are abominations and we must be eradicated for god and country and make everything great again
so yes I’m petty and vindictive because I’m fucking afraid of the normies and there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide
(via lisp-case-is-why-it-failed)
1 week ago · tagged #this goddamn continent #bitching about the country of birth · 59 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
unknought asked: I suspect that your anon is taking Promethea's views (which they've described as trying to bridge the gap between ancoms and ancaps, among other things) as more representative of rationalism as a whole than they actually are. Anon, I think most of us are boring liberal statists, when it comes down to it.
sigmaleph:
What she said, anon.
actually, you probably shouldn’t assume any object-level belief strongly advocated by a rationalist is representative of the community without asking around.
Oh no you made me geek out on the history of libertarianism
Because anon was actually more correct than the explanation that it would be just about me
“Libertarian” in the 19th century meant just as laissez-faire as it means now, but the political alliances were reversed; they used to call us “voluntary socialists” because we considered ourselves allies of the labor movement and free enterprise against the state-supported capitalists and thought that a free society would be less inequal and oppressive.
(And that’s totally 100% true; without the Inclosure Acts and other such shit the dark satanic mills couldn’t have happened and the 18-19th century industrial capitalists were amazingly honest about how the entire point was to use the state to create a proletariat stripped of property so they could be forced into the mines and factories for a miserable living enriching others. (Every sin begins from treating people as product and so on…) Sometimes child labor was effectively legally mandated as parents weren’t allowed to work in the neighboring parish (or whatever they were called) so they had to send children instead even though there were unemployed adults who would’ve been willing to accept the jobs. And even during the Napoleonic wars the British army had more men keeping order in the industrial communities than fighting the French (anyone who’s played Civilization knows that thing where you put soldiers in a city so it stops rioting and that’s exactly what Britain did).)
Then Lenin happened, and everyone who was not a statist soon concluded that it was a terrible thing and the libertarian movement kind of split into two.
One part allied with right-wing statist capitalism against statist communism and the New Deal as it saw it as the lesser of two evils and over time mostly forgot that it was evil at all. That’s where the “points out every single law that favors the poor, and ignores every single law that props up the rich” type of “libertarian” comes from, or the type that triumphantly touts the $50B workers steal from bosses and disregards the $50B bosses steal from workers. Laissez-faire is not “pro-business”, laissez-faire is not “anti-business”, laissez-faire is “none of our business”.
(And real freedom in employment contracts inevitably implies at least a bare minimum of pro-union stance, and the absence of state intrusion in bargaining the details would make labor struggles meaningful as employers would need to give workers a deal worth taking but it would also simultaneously prevent redwashed rentiers from looting others. All in all I’d expect a freer market with fewer distortions to deliver everyone a money which is closer to the value they create than currently, and if workers are getting less than their true worth then they obviously would get more. Even if capital isn’t redistributed, one would expect its accumulation to lower its value over time as labor would become more of the limiting factor (there are some issues around automation and the control of human-displacing capital but “everyone who is not a robot loses their job and gets fired (upon)” is a very massive market failure). This line of thinking seems to be utterly alien to many non-libertarians, although I must say that those right-libertarians who are very R first with a really small l aren’t helping at all.)
Another part decided to go against both of them and usually got stomped every time (Ukraine, Kronstadt, Catalonia, etc.) and also lost its free-market laissez-faire ideals because those were now right-wing in the Big Ideology Fuckup of the 20th Century.
There were a few attempts at reconciliation eg. in the 60s when Vietnam made right-libertarians notice that the capitalist state was an oppressive piece of shit as well (eg. Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter Karl Hess switched sides to Emma Goldman because her writings were like Ayn Rand’s but with the boring parts stripped out; something that might appear completely incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t understand libertarianism), but Murray Rothbard decided that he wanted to appeal to “tight-assed conformists, who
want to stamp out drugs in their vicinity, kick out people with strange
dress habits, etc.” instead of the weirdos and founded “paleolibertarianism”. (As a weirdo, I decided that Rothbard was a total asshole.) And during the previous half-century the left got way too enarmored with social democracy and statism and when dissolving that system in the late 70s began opposing anything smelling of laissez-faire turned into a tribal symbol and an Important Hill To Die On. (You wouldn’t believe how frustrating it is to be surrounded by 5 million socdems who make Bernie Sanders look like Ron Paul in comparison. (By that I mean that he isn’t that socially liberal but he does propose low taxes. Yes, that’s Finland for you; where Bernie would be the low-tax candidate.))
And speaking of tribal symbols, the question of private property had alwas been divisive but I see that
as kind of a ??? thing because there’s no way to enforce private
property on a voluntary collectivist community without violence, nor is
there a way to non-violently expropriate a community which
maintains consensual private property, and neither side could destroy the other so making some kind of peace in the form of “agree to disagree, each side
goes its own way and doesn’t fuck with the other’s stuff” is the only
stable outcome anyway unless the entire world was instantaneously
brainwashed into one or the other.
(And the division of that stuff would end up being such that ancoms would actually have some to begin with. For pragmatic reasons. By pragmatic reasons I mean that letting ancoms expropriate enough to have their ancommunities be actually economically viable is more economically efficient than dealing with a lot of disgruntled ancoms. Disgruntled ancoms with guns and a special interest in expropriating things, specifically. Even Murray Rothbard thought that capital owned by the state or businesses that receive enough tax money is a legitimate target for homesteading and thus there is a clear win-win solution in expropriating the state and its monopolist cronies for the ancommunities so ancoms can get a real job building their vision of a good society without bothering others or being bothered, while ancaps can run their own society instead of whining on reddit. And mutalists and other inbetweeners can inbetween freely.)
Ancaps usually recognize that there
is nothing stopping ancoms from having ancommunities in ancapistan while
ancoms tend to be vaguely uncomfortable around the opposite equivalent,
usually evading the question with something like “but nobody would want
it”; my opinion is that if a bunch of people want to live on a ship among themselves, bothering nobody, stopping them with violence makes one the bad guy. At that point I don’t care about lofty proclamations about how “that ship is made from materials that belong to everyone” or the other usual justifications some (but fortunately not all) ancoms give for why they would do violence to stop those people and take their ship; I’d be there, protecting their right to do whatever the fuck they want amongst themselves without bothering anyone else, with whatever amount of violence I need, and I’d probably go on the ship with them because if land is filled with people who won’t let people do some consensual thing among themselves because it would be immoral, I don’t want to live there. (this is totally going to end up misquoted in a call-out post some day as “promethea is an ancap” but do I look like I give a shit)
More abstractly, I can sidestep the issue of the morality of private property by looking at it with cynical pragmatism: in most of the possible outcomes, ancaps won’t, or more importantly can’t, prevent ancommunities; and ancoms can’t prevent ancapistan existing somewhere, so both could and should be happy with the deal of “let’s build a new society where we both can do our thing without bothering the other side”. What I think about the morality of property doesn’t matter for my anarchism because I wouldn’t impose my views on non-consenting people anyway, and I’m willing to ally with anyone who agrees with that.
(Intellectual property is an exception; when it comes to things like copyright and patents I’m 100% pirate and in favor of expropriating everything; people could obviously keep trade secrets and use DRM and make license contracts and that’s fair game, but breaking DRM and using cracked licensed software is totally fair game too.)
And about the word “libertarian”? I’ll let Murray Rothbard explain: “One gratifying aspect of our
rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we,
‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy…
'Libertarians’… had long been simply a polite word for left-wing
anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the
communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over…”
And my response is that Rothbard is once again being a massive dickbag of an asshole and I’m not letting assholes monopolize that word.
But yeah, even right-libertarianism actually has its roots in the same soil as communism and the history is fascinating and people should learn it. (And Lenin and Stalin are assholes.)
1 week ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #this is a social democracy hateblog #this is an emma goldman fanblog #still bitter for '36 #i _may_ have a special interest in this topic #at least based on the word count #bitching about the country of birth #laissez-faire used to mean _stop trying to help us_ · 14 notes · source: sigmaleph · .permalink
multiheaded1793:
thirqual:
neoliberalism-nightly:
thirqual:
multiheaded1793:
“It’s not only undesirable but *literally impossible* to afford basic social infrastructure or redistribute basically anything, so suck it up” is perhaps the most amazing article of faith I’ve seen among US-style libertarians.
Yup, it’s like Western Europe does not exist.
What if EU implodes and Western EU except Germany just go into full crisis?
You have to admit that the fiscal situation in most of Western Europe is not pretty and Brexit, Greece and peripherals really could be ticking time bombs. You can say money are just numbers on paper, but they really do reflect something fundamental even if non-obvious and distorted.
Like I don’t think I need to say that it’s entirely plausible that by making today nice it could make the future a lot worse, since that’s what more or less Greece did. In this case whoever they imported stuff that they can’t make easily stopped giving them imports because they can’t come up with those numbers in their bank account.
It’s easy to say pretty words, and I’m sure rich people as a whole are incredibly good at that. But if they are really less charitable than the average person, from that article I saw floating around, then probably you (idk what’s your objective, but just a reasonable guess xD) need to be careful there. Since we also can agree they are probably very good at dodging bills too. And just let you know I want those skills too for obvious reasons because I believe with good faith and careful consideration that it’s in my best interest to do so.
“We” might not be able to resist completely, but we are really good at it!!! And our resistance makes us less productive and also incidentally salt the earth for the rest of you as well. And who knows, I feel maybe, just maybe you people here actually will be pursuing your objective better if you kept us around and just tried to focus on structuring things better than to trying to take more and more blindly without focusing on the logistics. But then again this is like the whole strategy from a subgroup of us who’s politically connected. Because I’m pretty sure bureaucratic power must stroke someone’s fetish out there as well.
And honestly my charitable mood from my childhood over the years gradually turned sour from seeing how entitled people can be, so who knows. I don’t think I’m the only one here who might put up extra effort into resisting just because ~feelings~ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Greece? You want to invoke Greece in the last 6 years to caution against the successes of Western Europe since 1950 (arguably, since Bismark in the German Empire) ?
A crisis which was in part due to corruption, widespread tax evasion and financial advisors from Goldman Sachs advising the Greek government to misreport their level of debt ?
Where did the economic crisis began by the way¹ ? Oh yeah, a boom-and-bust cycle in the USA.
And then you want to argue why it is desirable for you to acquire those ‘skills’ ?
“Take more and more blindly” does not represent the reality. Increasing volumes of tax evasion, weaker enforcement of tax laws, greater sophistication of tax avoidance, on the other hand…
Nice veiled threats too and spite against the “entitled”. Thanks for reminding me why I am for very large punitive damages for tax evasion.
(note: even the IMF says that only in extreme cases redistribution lead to bad growth outcomes)
¹not that the Greek situation was stable, mind you.
Yep, the veiled threats and the laughable… petulant tone really got me as well. Also, nice passive-aggressive essay in the tags there…. Pretty words this ain’t.
Tagged with: politicsreference for discussioni honestly think with existing revenue you people already can do a lotyou also can reform god dam corporate tax and stuffand that will raise revenue and growthand you can reform welfareand bite the fking bullet and end protectionismmaybe if you people even did a bit rather than exacerbating it more I wouldn’t have gone to the other campbut I’m deep in there now and you won’t ever get me back except make me disinterested in topics like thiswhich is what I’m trying to do because I want $$$$$$$$$$
Okay seriously, I do agree with NN on a lot of this. The socialdemocracies of Western Europe are not in trouble because of the inaffordability of redistribution, they are in trouble because of the inaffordability of all the bullshit they’ve tacked onto the redistribution.
Finland could pay every single person a basic income of 15 000€ a year without increasing taxes a single cent. That’s almost double the minimum pension, nearly three times the spending money people on welfare get (along with rent, and significantly more than the highest amount welfare pays out even with rent included), and more than what tens of thousands of working poor earn. And as a result poor people’s effective marginal tax rate would go way down from the 50-100% it’s now.
And this includes children. Right now the state pays, at most, 4000€ per child; free education, healthcare and childcare would end but the extra 11 000€ a year would go a long way in letting poor families access the services they need. Or if we want to account for the fact that not all families would know to purchase the right insurance etc. and spend 5000€ per child per year in providing vital services to them we would “only” up the money children directly get to 10 000€ a year.
And obviously this massive basic income would render pretty much any tax scheme progressive, so we could drastically simplify the tax code. I don’t even know what the true transparent flat tax level would be because the system is so complicated with all kinds of hidden fees and multi-level taxes, but it would make things simpler. If one assumes that, after privatizing all other forms of social security (15k€ is already more than a lot of people make even from the income-dependent benefits) the income tax level would end up a transparent 40%, someone earning another nominal 15k€ on top of the basic income would get to keep 24k€ to themselves. Easy, simple, not hard to calculate. (And if it sounds ridiculously high, one should note that currently around 25% of people’s wages goes straight to pensions but it’s hidden so they only see 7% as “”“the employer pays”“” the rest (they buy it because most people cannot into math))
But the tax system itself could use some (and by “some” I mean “an awful lot of”) change; property taxes should be replaced with land value taxes, income taxes could be shifted onto consumption, a revenue-neutral carbon tax should be instituted, corporate taxes taken only from dividends to owners, etc.
And we could end so many laws. Who needs regulations on working hours, minimum wages and benefits when one has the 15k€ option to simply tell the boss to screw themselves if a job offer is unacceptable? (only statists) Ending corporatism and freeing both employers and unions to negotiate without external coercive intervention would make the economy a lot more responsive to changes, and everyone has that 15k a year to fall back on even if they end up without work (and a lot of bureaucrats rightfully would), along with any savings they have. That’s a lot more than what most working-class people currently would get from unemployment insurance.
Privatizing public services and state-owned corporations would be most naturally done by handing ownership to their users and workers; so schools would be owned by parents and teachers, universities by students and professors, buses by drivers, etc.; this would prevent a massive transfer of wealth and capital from the state to cronyist oligarchs while allowing all service providers to participate equally on the markets. Finland is one of the per capita richest countries in the world because of its absolutely bloated pension funds (in fact, to such an extent that the national debt is effectively -80% of its nominal value) and this money could be either used as the basis of a post-labor universal capital fund, or immediately redistributed to everyone as an investment account of 15 000€ while keeping enough in reserve to cover the national debt (of course, paying out the debt would be folly when the interest rates are around zero but the return on investments is several percent; any sane corporation would borrow and invest on such terms).
Furthermore, this would completely decimate the non-productive parts of the economy, freeing both labor (which is not desperate and exploitable because remember that 15k€ a year?) and money to productive things (of course, ex-bureaucrats would be so pissed at having to learn how to do good things to people, but you know what scorn dem).
The private sector would be almost as dramatically rearranged as the previously public sector, as artificial industries such as agriculture (where something like 50% [fucken sic] of revenue comes from subsidies instead of selling things people want to buy) and exploitation of forced labor (the current welfare system is inhumane and there are basically sweatshops where disabled people work for 1,5€/h [fucken sic] making scarves rich ~designer~ assholes sell for 300€ a piece, pocketing the difference) would be flattened into the economic equivalent of a glowing glass parking lot. The ensuing stimulus of domestic demand and the abolition of many cumbersome regulations would open up massive opportunity for people to make a value-creating living while reducing the economy’s dependence on big businesses. The abolition of regional subsidies and artificial limits on the housing supply of Helsinki would trigger a significant movement into the big cities where jobs are available, workers productive, and services cost-efficient.
And if one wants to get really hardcore, abolishing patents and copyrights would be a pretty huge move. Suddenly obscene barriers on innovation would be wiped away and people wouldn’t need to waste time figuring out whether they need to push lots of paper just because someone else “owns” a number, and drugs and many other things would get dramatically cheaper.
And they should totally build the hyperloop between Turku and Stockholm.
Without an increase of a single cent in taxes.
Yeah, it would be quite a drastic shock doctrine. A glorious, magnificent shock doctrine leaving behind only the ashes of the old system. Ashes which the seeds of freedom and poor people finally not being treated shittily could blossom from. A beautiful, terrifying cataclysm of creative destruction. The value-destroyers and parasites would feel the pain of righteous vengeance, a pain which would be far less than what they had previously imposed on others because 15k€ a year.
But instead, we have some “”“engineer”“” who got lucky and became a millionaire prime minister despite having no economic or political savvy whatsoever, and whose dream seems to be to become the Thatcher of Finland; a dream he pursues mainly by trying to become as widely hated as Thatcher was/is, and assuming the rest follows on its own.
1 month ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #i am worst capitalist #win-win is my superpower #this is a social democracy hateblog · 37 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink
Tumblr:
Behold, I've made an American!
Finland:
Ruined a perfectly good Nordic is what you've done. Look at it, it's got Ambitions.
1 month ago · tagged #shitposting #bitching about the country of birth #future precariat billionaire · 9 notes · .permalink
collapsedsquid:
socialjusticemunchkin:
collapsedsquid:
socialjusticemunchkin:
ozymandias271:
maxiesatanofficial:
maxiesatanofficial:
Wait a goddamn second political alignment charts are literally the same exact thing as D&D alignment grids. What the shit
- Lawful Good: True State Socialism
- Lawful Neutral: Left-leaning liberals
- Lawful Evil: “moderate” liberals, neocons
- Neutral Good: [Impossible due to the nature of politics?]
- True Neutral: South Park libertarians, Legal Weed Capitalists
- Neutral Evil: people obsessed with “states’ rights”
- Chaotic Good: Anarcho-communists, the Yippies
- Chaotic Neutral: Vermin Supreme
- Chaotic Evil: militia groups and anarcho-capitalists
tag yourself I’m true neutral
I’m seeing that Neutral Good is unoccupied territory and seizing it to be the refuge of all “I don’t really know the specifics but we should have post-scarcity and freedom and niceness and 3d-printers for all and nobody voting on anyone’s body” people
I thought given it’s between between state socialism and
Anarcho-communists, “Social Democracy“ was the obvious idea to slot there.
No, socdems are LN in this one; NG is a continuation from “states’ rights” to “weed capitalists” to X so it’s some kind of egalitarian minarchism which is close enough for these purposes.
But that doesn’t include the idea that we are obligated to help each other, which joins state socialism and anarcho-communism.
Curses, maybe OP was right.
“We are obligated to help each other, so the state should get out of the way and stop hindering it by trying to micromanage human interaction, but it should ensure a sufficient basic income because that’s very important and can’t be left to chance”
The axes are perfectly coherent: Lawful = big government, Neutral = small government, Chaotic = no government; Good = equality, Neutral = (as Vermin Supreme puts it) “letting shit fall where it may”, Evil = hierarchy.
Thus the Neutral Evil/Neutral/Good becomes:
small government for purposes of hierarchy
(“states’ rights” is often basically a very transparent euphemism for “the federal government shouldn’t be able to stop us from reinstating slavery”)
small government for purposes of letting shit fall where it may
(soft libertarianism)
small government for purposes of equality
(which some kind of welfare minarchism would be pretty much exactly;
(arguably a post-scarcity society might be closer to “letting shit fall where it may” and I personally might be actually closer to Chaotic Neutral in this chart
(except quite pragmatic about it and thus approaching True Neutral most of the time or something)
but I wanted to impose my desire of not allowing impossibilities on this one and the politics of niceness and helping each other were a good fit with neutral good
(as I said I don’t really know the specifics and we just should have a good society with no poverty or voting on people’s bodies and I’m not lawful enough to let the letter of the chart override the spirit of neutral good)))
In comparison: Lawfuls are:
big government for hierarchy
(imperialism, authoritarianism)
big government for letting shit fall where it may
(social democracy is not exactly known for its anti-statist ideals; the people making “governmentisgood.com” websites about how the mortgage deduction is supposedly not an indirect way of robbing the poor to subsidize the homeowning middle class which is more well-off to begin with than those who don’t own homes, but instead “a good thing your tax moneys pay for”
(oh sure, it’s my tax moneys all right, paying for someone else’s McMansion because I’m the kind of a person who doesn’t want to get tied down to property and thus the state shall scorn me financially to punish my degenerate lifestyle
(I’m not a fan of landlords but they do create some value by enabling me to not own my own housing so I can move somewhere else really easily in pursuit of opportunities and/or cute people))
and defending things like “the state should regulate the opening hours of grocery stores” and doing all the big government apologia tend to disproportionately be socdems who don’t see all the harms they are causing with reckless applications of the State and PoliceMob; and it notably rejects the more aggressive leveling of Actual Socialism in favor of simply regulating the excesses of statist crony capitalism
(or less charitably, sweeping them under the rug by its tendency to be unwilling to address the root causes like dysfunctional markets which, combined with the absence of meaningful alternative ways of acquiring sustenance, together permit the existence of such abominations as “shitty jobs for poor people” in the first place)
thus it belongs here; of course it could be that “social democracy” means different things in different places, but I definitely live in one, am desperately trying to get away from there, and can tell that around here “social democracy” means Jantelaw, mind-bogglingly unnecessary regulation
(San Francisco is certainly trying though, but it’s a neophyte in comparison)
voting on people’s bodies, and “omfg you
(mostly)
americans aren’t going to believe how much of the value we create is seized by the state”
(in Finland 24% VAT on most things, up to ~35% progressive national income tax, ~16-23% municipal income tax depending on location
(with a flat deduction for the first few thousand euros a year)
~25% payroll tax for pensions, 20% corporate tax, ~30% capital gains tax, and extra taxes on specific things; and Sweden once taxed a childrens’ book author 102%[sic])))
big government for equality
(statist socialism)
And Chaotics:
no government for purposes of hierarchy
(basically “we have guns, you don’t, so we tell you what to do; should’ve gotten guns of your own if you didn’t want this to happen”)
no government for purposes of letting shit fall where it may
no government for purposes of equality
1 month ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #this is a social democracy hateblog #psa: do not tumblrpost in lisp please #be smart don't be like promethea who tumblrposts in lisp · 144 notes · source: maxiesatanofficial · .permalink
Why Taxes Being Theft is Obviously Total Bullshit
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”
(via jbeshir)
2 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #bitching about the country of birth #i can never rant enough about the evils of contracting prisons for profit · 29 notes · source: jeysiec · .permalink
theunmortalist:
eccentric-opinion:
theunmortalist:
eccentric-opinion:
argumate:
skulkingscavenger said: I personally like to draw a distinction between pointing out that [institution X] is theoretically morally impure according to some abstract epistomology and believing [institution X] is harming your practical interests to an extent that would justify spending the resources necessary to abolish [institution X]
Oh sure. But I’ve seen a few people say that it’s fine to benefit from taxation while still opposing it on principle, and I think that’s weak. Typically the same people will point out that welfare creates a constituency that benefits from it and will agitate against it being repealed. Yet they don’t apply that logic to their own use of government services!
If George Mason University takes government funds, then it will hire more researchers and administrators with that money (presumably, hopefully). Then reducing government redistribution will require getting rid of people and scaling back their research programs, something they will bitterly oppose.
The only principled course of action in this case would be for them to subsist entirely on free market fees and donations, which they claim would lead to better outcomes for society as a whole anyway.
Unless they think Bryan Caplan is full of shit, in which case why are they putting him in front of students…
The principles they endorse imply the elimination of many government programs (and the ancaps among them want to eliminate all of them), something that would eventually lead to at least cuts to GMU, and presumably they’re smart enough to understand that, so that implies that they wouldn’t oppose cuts when they come.
As for the more general principle of benefiting from taxation while opposing it in principle, the question is what the baseline is. I benefit from taxation in the sense that I’m better off if I use some government services than if I don’t, but I’d be even better off if there were no taxes and no government services altogether. So as long as taxes exist, I’m going to use some of what they go to, but there’s no contradiction in doing that while calling for their abolition.
Wait, wait, wait. If people benefit from some taxation, then that taxation in particular is resulting in something good for them. Why oppose it? Because it’s TAXES? Do people seriously just castle every chess game and hope that strategy does something regardless of the consequences?
What’s the higher principle at work, here? What is worth giving up on the benefit to oneself and others, even in theory?
They benefit relative to not using the service but still paying the taxes, but not relative to neither the tax nor the government-provided service existing at all. So the preference ranking is: no tax and no service > tax and I use the service > tax and I don’t use the service.
Ah! Makes a ton of sense. However, it is really lousy for showing one’s displeasure with an arrangement. Proving one can manage without government assistance and management alters the way the debate works, I’m sure. “Taxes and I don’t use the service” option avoids accusations of hypocrisy, as well, since no one’s position is improved on the government penny while the benefit is phased out.
My brain has this ethical æsthetic. Taking government money feels disgusting, filthy and impure, the same way I’d expect stealing things from an independent food cart vendor might, even though I’d only be taking what the system should give me anyway (I want the state to basically tax people for a reasonable UBI and not much else; if I use corporate welfare to get less money than the UBI I’d want to implement there logically should be no problem, but it’s still yucky).
Then there’s the fact that I’m poor (YGM) and thus don’t really have that much of a choice; I’d love to survive without getting in bed with the state but it’s not really a realistic option because the state also makes surviving artificially expensive by eg. limiting the housing supply and banning contracts with which I could borrow money from future-me with less risk of getting in inescapable debt if future-me doesn’t end up as wealthy as I’m expecting. And it’s also caused me a lot of psychological harm from being terminally dependent on a thoroughly abusive system for years, and in any just world it would owe me big reparations for that.
But I’m totally planning to make a big deal of calculating all the services I’ve received from the state and spitefully paying them back to the penny once I can afford it, just for the sake of a grand gesture, and then I’m going to whine massively about how they are still going to try to impose bullshit and mob rule on me.
2 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 89 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
leighalanna:
clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:
Uber and Lyft and this new women only drivers service are all equally bad. I get that people are excited but let me just toss a few concepts out there:
Cab drivers, as employees (when they are employees which is not all the time luckily in pdx we have radio cab) are held to certain standards. If a cab driver harasses you, you can report him.
Cabs have to be ADA compliant.
Cab drivers have to make minimum wage.
There is a REASON cabs are more expensive and that reason, in Oregon at least, is that your cabby is making minimum wage.
This is not true of your uber driver, your Lyft driver, or your fancy new all woman driver but male owned service.
They are abusing the independent contractor system, as strip club owners are! to be falsely competitive in a market place they could never otherwise survive in and they are doing it at the expense of poor, vulnerable people, at the expense of cabbies, and at the expense of every other marginalised and misclassified worker because we are ALL in the same boat.
So no, I’m not excited that some man saw an opportunity to capitalize on the frequency of sexual harassment into making a niche for himself in an already exploitative market.
I’m not excited that he is donating 2% of his profits to charity–this serves the exact same purpose as a pink yoplait top: if you want to do good, do good; don’t disguise your consumerism and liking for a product behind false altruism.
I’m not excited that in a city already drowning in literally tens of thousands of underpaid drivers, there will now be one more.
And if you think women can’t be oppressive, shitty, hate on strippers and sex workers, and otherwise totally unpleasant, you’re dreaming. Especially once these women realise what a ferociously competitive starving market they’ve entered.
You better fucking tip 30%, is all I’m saying. And at that point, you might as well have taken a cab.
And there ARE alternatives, in more and more places – if you need to hail via your phone or pay with your card you can still support drivers that have to have accessible cars and have unions and are further down the road of creating reasonable working conditions and compensation for their drivers, you can use Way2Ride and Arro and quite a few others at this point, depending on where you are. And they don’t have fucking surge pricing.
Rideshare drivers could be held to the same standards if the rideshare companies wanted (aka. were forced by pressure from the public) to implement proper accountability. Cab companies can ignore reports that don’t have enough proof/social clout to get them in trouble with cops/social media, and at least Uber can reliably check who drove whom from its databases so abuses are inherently more investigable (and that’s why not taking sufficient action when they happen is even more damning).
Surge pricing is the best. I’m totally a fan of surge pricing, speaking as a person who has once hit a 3.1 multiplier. Supply and demand. I find it slightly ironic that a post simultaneously supports higher compensation for drivers and rejects it when it happens in its most natural form. Surge pricing gives the drivers extra compensation, to reward them for their work when their contribution is the most important. In fact, I get a slight joy from paying surge prices because it means that not only is the system working and probably making the waiting times a lot shorter, but also that I am paying the worker the fair price (some terms and conditions apply; “less unfair” is closer to reality) of the moment, not an unfair fixed rate that deprives them of the full value of their work. I ship free markets and economic fairness so hard.
Also, why has nobody mentioned the downsides of being an employee? Control over one’s means of production for example. Driving a cab is materially not that capital-intensive, so of course the System (I’m antropomorphizing it because this is one of the things that makes me angry enough to warrant it even if there probably isn’t such intentional malice involved) creates alternative barriers to entry to establish an owning class that can get free money from others’ work without needing to create any value (or comparable value) themselves. An assembly line worker can’t just save up a bit of cash and start their own factory, so they will remain bound to wage slavery and dependent on the local capitalist, but anyone with a car can start carrying people around unless something is done to stop it.
Enter regulation, to legislatively deprive people of the means of production even when they materially could control them pretty easily.
When one needs a medallion to drive a taxi, and the medallions are artificially scarce and thus expensive as fuck and thus probably owned by companies or rich people instead of the workers, the capitalists don’t need to fear competition. They just send the cops (their cops, it’s always the interests of the powerful that are protected and served first and foremost) to chase down anyone who doesn’t submit to vehicular serfdom in which the non-value-creating rentier class exploits the workers and slaps a little bit of socdem PR like minimum wages on top like a pink yoplait, and if challenged, fills the media with propaganda about how evil it is to only take 20% instead of $100 a day (yes, the taxi capitalists, propped up by the state apparatus of violence and nothing more, make the workers toil the equivalent of one and a half days of minimum wage before they get to keep a single cent to themselves; compared to that pure rent and exploitation, ridesharers’ 20% for something that actually creates value (as a customer, I’m willing to pay slightly more for the convenience etc.) seems downright saintly). When a permit to work costs a million dollars, the industry is inherently controlled by millionaires.
(Incidentally, this is also why I get immensely angry at anyone on the left who ever says the words “licensed brothels” because the rule #1 of communism is you never enclose the commons and licensed legalization is a fucking forcible enclosure act; decriminalization and deregulation is how one does not piss in the cereal of sex workers. Free sex workers are inherently in control of their own means of production, and only violence can take it away so why the fuck do so many leftists want to turn them from independent workers to brothel proletariat ausetdiuesideutoiuuhunao (that’s dvorak for “asdf…”))
As far as unions are concerned, my emotional reaction to them is quite… all over the place. Free unions make my brain go all solidarity! liberty! workers of the world unite! while the instant the state gets involved and enforces collective bargaining my brain does a 180 and starts screaming about leeches! and moochers! and redwashed rentiers! (”right to work” laws are just as terrible; I’m definitely not taking a knee-jerk “pro-business” stance); so I’m not exactly the most impartial observer to comment on them. But I’m not surprised that tomato pickers in Florida (left outside normal labor laws because redwashed rentiers always need a precariat beneath them to exploit) extracted concessions from even Walmart by voluntary organizing, using tactics that would be illegal for corporatist state-sanctioned unions; while stevedores in Finland get super-comfy wages and benefits because they can nuke the economy any time they want and labor regulations prevent them from being replaced with less extortionate and rentseeky laborers (and they still threw a hissy fit and nuked the economy a few years ago because they wanted their employers to pay them an entire years’ wages for zero work if they got laid off, despite being already entitled to 500 days [sic!] of state-mandated income-dependent unemployment insurance only the middle class gets because fuck the poor and precarious).
And obvious disclaimer: Uber is evil anyway. But it’s not evil because it competes with taxi capitalists, it’s evil despite competing with them. The obvious ideal solution is to cut out the middleman and create an independent, worker-owned-and-controlled system for tracking reputation, ensuring safety, processing payments and matching riders to passengers (and having surge pricing! surge pricing is important!), but even ridesharing corporations are actually doing a lot of things right and should be only fairly maligned, instead of unfairly.
(via thetransintransgenic)
2 months ago · tagged #free markets x fairness is my otp #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor #this is a social democracy hateblog #bitching about the country of birth · 1,618 notes · source: clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead · .permalink
metagorgon:
@osberend:
No, the subset of my tax dollars used for legitimate purposes are the price of my citizenship in society. The rest is stolen property, taken at gunpoint.
Please define ‘legitimate purposes’ in a way that doesn’t mean ‘only things that I approve of’.
An easy way to start would be “things that would not leave the world better off if the money was just burned instead of being spent on super-bad thing X” (my guess would be that a lot of super-long prison sentences for victimless crimes fail here).
If one wants to be more ambitious, “things that wouldn’t leave the world better off if the money was not collected in the first place” (this is the point where more ordinary ridiculous things such as spending all the money collected from corporate taxes on corporate welfare (Finland says hi!) become unjustifiable).
For a quite stringent category of legitimacy, try “things that wouldn’t leave the world better off if the money was just distributed evenly to the citizens as a UBI”, which leaves the properly beneficial stuff that doesn’t destroy value, such as effective, targeted programs for people that can be actually significantly helped by them (a very small subset of existing programs), and gives a reasonably good theory of justifiable governance when combined with the previous criterion.
(via metagorgon)
2 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #vulgar libertarianism · 168 notes · source: fierceawakening · .permalink