For about ten seconds I read this as a totally sincere motivational sign and was briefly motivated.
…I am just not the intended audience for this rhetoric.
WORK HARD!
Children, the elderly, and the chronically ill cannot fend for themselves!
oh noes, taxation is theft
As someone who is not exactly a friend of taxation, I’d be very glad if my tax money went to millions of poor people instead of millions of rentseekers, wealthy moochers, crony capitalists, special interests (of the statist, not the autistic kind), and various forms of shooting and kidnapping innocent black and brown people both at home and abroad. Providing an adequate basic income to everyone is one of the most legitimate uses of taxation IMO, and I do find this sign personally motivating.
I would have liked to see some exploration of more possibilities, including a NIT, but overall the first section of the linked article is good. The rest of it is mostly appeals to liberty based on moral intuitions that I don’t share, so I can’t comment on how convincing others will find it.
In general though, yes, we need more people playing around with the numbers and trying to figure out exactly how expensive all of this would be.
IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE EFFECTIVE MARGINAL TAX RATES OF PEOPLE CURRENTLY RECEIVING ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS
If we replace all income taxes and anti-poverty programs (and also all the bullshit benefits like the mortgage deduction) with a flat income tax equivalent to the current highest marginal tax bracket and a basic income equivalent to what we can afford then, we’ve certainly superficially increased taxation substantially, but the massively increased simplicity in the economy must be accounted for in any analysis that wishes to be actually sufficient.
Having an anti-poverty program with a cutoff income is equivalent to effectively having a really bullshit form of taxation with marginal tax rates all over the fucking place which distorts the economy far more than a nominally higher but stable and predictable flat marginal tax rate (because we aren’t hiding any bullshit anywhere). Anti-poverty programs with bullshit cutoffs also introduce deadweight loss (or else I’ve seriously misunderstood what deadweight loss means) and if deadweight loss is equivalent to the square of the effective tax rate, a universal flat tax rate minimizes it.
(And for the progressives who are worried about progressive taxation: the beauty of a basic income is that it turns anything that is not a head tax because fuck head taxes, even a consumption tax even though people usually think those are regressive, into an effectively progressive tax; no need to fuck up the system otherwise because social justice is built-in to it anyway!)
This is also why NIT and UBI are effectively the same fucking thing and why we can’t just look at how much we are “taxing”; their difference is merely an accounting trick because the effective marginal tax rate is always the same in both (assuming both are implemented with the same base parameters).
You motherfuckers don’t just increase all taxes by a flat 50% because what the fuck, you abolish the FICA because it’s a bullshit tax, and tax everyone’s income at the highest marginal tax rate of approximately 40% (or more if you want to replace some of the lost taxation from abolishing the FICA, but seriously just implement a basic income and otherwise privatize pensions there’s no need to make it complicated).
The Philosophical Economist is a lazy motherfucker who should not be commenting on economics. Address basic income properly or go home. If steelmanned basic income, in its best and strongest and most justifiable form, is found wanting; then I will try to find something else. Until then, I only see people whacking at strawmen and weakmen.
I am with Milton Friedman. The true effective tax rate is basically the same as the percent of GDP taken up by the government. So the effective tax rate in the USA is quite high. There is plenty of money for GBI.
Of course “the government” covers quite alot of programs. you only get back approx 40-50%+ of GDP (depending on country) if you cut everything the government does. Roughly speaking local/state spending are both somewhat less than 50% of federal spending in the USA. Very few people want to cut the whole government in any nation (certainly I don’t want to). But redistribution does actually take up a large share of the federal budget. And much of the government really could be cut.
I want to do the numbers properly sometime, but at a glance pretty much every government’s budget feels like an innocent-hurting version of the silly budgeting meme and there would be plenty of things to cut and reallocate way more optimally if only voters would stop acting like voters and states would stop acting like states.
The government:
Crucial governance stuff: $50 Badly implemented but theoretically laudable redistribution: $1500 Buying votes from assholes: $3600 I dunno, cops or something: $200
Help me budget this, my poor people are dying
Me: spend less money on buying votes from assholes. also UBI.
If someone was running a private security company in Ancapistan I wonder if they would be tempted to offer a deluxe package which costs ten times as much and offers immunity to minor crimes, or a platinum package which costs even more and shields you from murder investigations.
Would you want to buy security from a company that would let some members of Argumate’s Hypothetical Security Firm not be prosecuted for murdering you?
Probably not, in which case you would have to buy from me! :)
It’s kind of surreal to watch libertarians argue, and forget that some people don’t have money. Or do you just think that victims of crime don’t matter unless they are rich?
Presumably, people with fewer possessions are less likely to have lots of thieves target them, so they should be able to get lower rates. In terms of “random assaults”, normal police already don’t constantly go around breaking those up?
IDK. I mean, it’s not clear that current police serve poor communities particularly well.
The police don’t exactly help poor people a lot in the status quo… like, Friedman addresses this argument in Machinery of Freedom, and he’s like “in a statist society, poor people pay taxes to get victimized by police, and in an ancap society poor people will pay fees to get protection that actually has an incentive to, you know, protect them.”
Yeah. Black Panthers are what I’d expect marginalized people to have if the state wasn’t intent on smashing every such attempt (guess what the fuck happened to the Black Panthers in reality). If the poor have their own protection agency that negotiates with the protection agency of the rich, even from a drastically lopsided negotiating situation, it’s still strictly better than the status quo where the protection agency of the rich is allowed to kidnap anyone who tries to organize the poor people’s protection agency.
“So many cases had been overturned where young men had been sitting in
jail for years and years before someone got around to vetting the
prosecution,” he recalls. “It occurred to me - why are we doing that at
the end? Why don’t we have a procedure in place on the front end to vet
prosecutions before they can become a conviction?”
Yes, why not try not imprisoning people who are “actually innocent”, what an absolutely novel concept.
Jesus
Things like this are why privatizing the courts is starting to sound like a far better idea than one would naively expect. I don’t think the Black Panthers could do much worse than the existing system.
So I know, like, “abolish the U.S. government” isn’t actually a practical step forward but gosh if I had a button that could do it -
the government set up a fake university, persuaded international students it was a real university, got thousands to enroll, and then revealed it was a sting and they’ll all be deported with an immigration violation on their visas for enrolling in a university that they should have known was fake. Despite the fact that, in order to make the sting more successful, they got the fake university accredited, so if students did check it would all seem legitimate!
they did this with our tax money!
Holy what the fuck
This is how most federal law enforcement works. They don’t investigate anything, because that’s hard. They set up elaborate sting operations and then entrap people. Numerous “domestic terrorists” they’ve caught were people that undercover agents had to cajole, convince, and persuade to participate in a plot that the agents themselves cooked up, and the agents themselves supplied all the money and materials for. The DEA will also do this for low-level drug dealers. If you’re caught with drugs, they’ll offer you a reduced sentence if you offer to sell drugs to someone else and get them caught too.
They create crime where there was none and then “solve” it.
I read a few articles about this about a month ago and these comments don’t tell the actual story of how things went down and it had nothing to do with tricking the actual students.
But ok
This is tumblr though. Where the meanie government is out to make crime because capitalism.
Tumblr: Where the facts are made up and the source doesn’t matter.
So it’s true that the goal of the sting operation wasn’t to trick the students; the goal was to catch brokers. That doesn’t change that 1,000 students, many of whom thought what they were doing was legal because the school was listed on official government websites as approved and school officials promised them it was legitimate, are getting deported.
“it had nothing to do with tricking the actual students” is a pretty lame defense. Sure, a thousand people who now can’t pursue careers or lives in this country weren’t the point, they’re just acceptable collateral damage. But you don’t get to quite literally ruin peoples’ lives and then say ‘it had nothing to do with you’.
Those students were wronged. Catching 20 ‘brokers’ does not justify what was done here.
…or they could just open the borders and abolish immigration restrictions and let the people in regardless of their enrollment in whatever university, fake or not.
Also sgibbz, get your facts straight, the meanie government is out to make crime because statism
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 everyoneboth 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”
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.
drug interaction checkers should include drug drugs (harm reduction!!!) and why and how they interact and stuff about chemistry
and drug interactions listed on pill bottles and stuff don’t even say severity
“don’t mix with grapefruit juice” will i have a headache or will i die this is an important distinction
As someone who went off a medication almost 2 weeks ago that is rumored to stay in my system for up to a month: I would love to know when I can eat a grapefruit and be a normal person entitled to do normal things again.
The peasants are too stupid and ignorant to understand. It’s for your own good. Trust in the experts. The experts know better than you. This information is above your clearance level, infrared. Informed consent is a myth. The System is your friend. Freedom is slavery.
Continuation to Those Two Tribes; the stuff I’m talking about will make a lot more sense if you read that one first.
The Pew Political Typology study of 2014 is pretty interesting when compared to the U/R model. There’s the expected left/right distinction but also a strong second axis which seems to correspond beautifully to U/R-ness.
On a lot of questions it’s easy to observe a comb-shaped pattern where ‘solid liberals’, ‘next generation left’ and ‘young outsiders’ fall on one side and ‘steadfast conservatives’, ‘hard-pressed skeptics’ and ‘faith and family left’ are on the other. Solid liberals and steadfast conservatives are the obvious central cases of tribes U and R respectively, and the “values coalitions” map without too much shoehorning into:
U left: solid liberals (SL) U centre: next generation left (NG) U right: young outsiders (YO)
R right: steadfast conservatives (SC) R centre: hard-pressed skeptics (HS) R left: faith and family left (FF)
Business conservatives (BC) don’t match as easily to this simplified model, as they seem to opportunistically straddle the line between R and U. FF is very far from the R archetype in my original post and doesn’t really belong in tribe R (even the membership of HS is somewhat doubtful) but they are on the same side of the general R-ness factor so it should be noted that R means “R and R-adjacent and R-resembling” for the rest of this post. On many questions SC and BC form a Core of Evil which ruins everything; on these HS and FF disagree so it’s not so much an U vs. R thing as it is a “thoroughly evil” vs. “not irredeemably evil” thing.
This is pretty much exactly what I’m talking about. An obvious comb-like pattern in the responses on numerous questions that do match very well to the U and R characteristics. I didn’t realize I should’ve made actual testable predictions before I was on page 9 so I’ll instead just compare the answers to my original post, noting the accuracies and inaccuracies as much as applicable. The data will be just eyeballed; I’ll be reporting deviations from the general left-right trend, so YO might be less in favor of idea X than FF, but if they are above the overall line it’ll be taken as evidence that the U/R factor contributes to opinion X.
Section 1: U is more likely to favor compromise.
Section 2: U is more critical about the US and less exceptionalistic, it considers ability to change more important and wants to interpret the constitution in a modern context. It’s slightly more in favor of regulating business, and very marginally less in favor of protecting people from themselves.
Section 4: U is more positive towards immigration, although FF has a better attitude than YO.
Section 5: Basically everything. U is less islamophobic.
Section 6: U prefers diplomacy and restraint over military force, but only the core of evil is really evil. FF should not be listened to on terrorism.
Section 7: U is slightly more in favor of protecting the environment; the core of evil once again proves its name.
Section 8: U wants to legalize weed, nobody is surprised. U is also slightly in favor of gambling.
Section 9: U is less religious and spiritual, more upbeat and optimistic. And they recycle.
I’m not really seeing much deviation from the original descriptions on the issues so I’ll say the U/R factor is [confirmed] at least as solidly as anything coming from Mythbusters.
The demographics are where stuff gets interesting, though, and predictions would fly out of the window had I not added the disclaimer that only SC is properly R; with the disclaimer I’m able to save a bit of face.
U is boring. Its demographics are basically the same from left to right, and no significant trends can be observed apart from education making U-tribers lean left. It’s somewhat more white and well-off than the general population, that’s it. Even the drastic difference in economic views between SL and YO isn’t enough to establish dividing lines; if anything they are holding views very slightly “against” their own interests.
R is all over the place. In the core of evil black people are basically a rounding error, while women, PoC, and poor people are very strongly sorted into FF and HS. Income, race and education predict R views in exactly the ways one would assume. One might almost say that U evaluates politics more impartially, while R votes according to its class interests. This I honestly did not expect, and am quite astonished by.
Other, somewhat unrelated observations:
I had thought that the ~neoliberal~ was just a european mythical straw bogeyman created by the outgroup homogeneity bias making people think that there is one coherent set of people responsible for everything evil, instead of the realistic mess of politicking and different groups building mutually unsatisfying compromises. Then I saw BC and was like what the fuck 10% of americans are *actually* comic book villains
A lot of these typologies translate really well internationally. In Finland NG is obviously the green party; FF is christian theocrats; SL is the party formerly known as the communist party; the fascist party got to power by pandering to HS but in government turned out to do 100% evil core politics regardless; BC is the crony capitalist party; the redneck party is SC with a side order of FF and HS; and the social bureaucrats are whatever, a bit of SL, NG, FF mostly. YO are left all alone and homeless, mostly stuck in the youth wing of the crony capitalist party and constantly founding new ones in an attempt to become relevant.
YO is my problematic fave. I don’t understand why, because they are Wrong On Many Important Questions, but I get this weird sense of protectiveness about them all the same (maybe I want to rescue them away from the right which is dominated by the evil core, into the neotenic degeneracy of a left-libertarianism which can address their economic concerns without screwing over the poor). HS is another; I really sympathize with them while being simultaneously utterly disgusted by them, in the way only a U-triber can. All in all, the R typologies elicit an outgroupy reaction of revulsion, while the U groups are more like “let’s have a friendly discussion on why your policies are Objectively Terrible”, because they do have many Objectively Terrible policies.
NG is especially terrible, what the fuck happened to make leftists pro-oppression? Oh, right. Obama.
The questionnaire for sorting oneself is also terrible. Half of the questions feel like “have you stopped beating your wife yet”; both answers seem to imply approval of a different $BADTHING, and I’m feeling coerced to choose between Stalin and Hitler.
I’m viscerally terrified by the fact that 50% of the american public is evil, and 22% is EVIL. Those numbers go up to 56% and 36% for the “very engaged” category, and this is why the government shouldn’t have so much power aieeee *runs and hides*.
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 everyoneboth 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.)
