fatpinocchio:
marcusseldon:
Okay, lately I’ve been becoming more and more suspicious about the techno-libertarianism/utopianism that seems to be increasingly popular in silicon valley and among the STEM culture more broadly, including the corners of the internet I frequent.
There seems to be a very anti-democratic strain to this sort of thinking. Like, the motivation seems to be to develop technology in such an unrestricted and unregulated way as to get around those annoying things like democracy, politics, and culture, in order to create broad based, systemic, and, in their eyes, positive changes to society.
Let our Virtuous Intelligent STEM Heroes break free of the shackles of democracy and government and politics and culture so they can go forth and lead us into a new and Better age with their genetic engineering, AI, big data (and cough constant surveillance cough), private foundations, and so on.
And this trend makes me nervous and suspicious. I don’t think STEM people are any more virtuous, wise, or knowledgeable about ethics as anybody else, but I feel like a lot of technolibertarians/utopians think they are, probably based on some very one-dimensional idea of what intelligence is whereby if you are smart enough to do math well you are obviously smarter at ethics and politics too. I worry that really it’s just one very-self-confident group that is already very powerful, in its technology and its wealth, advocating much more power for itself so that it can impose its (not obviously correct or better than all other) value system on the masses through the technology it creates without any oversight or checks.
It’s actually kinda authoritarian, albeit in a non-standard way, despite being couched in the language of libertarianism.
I agree the cluster you’re talking about isn’t perfect, but - have you talked to actual normal people? They already have too much power, and we’re lucky they don’t have more. Given their authoritarianism, puritanism, status quo bias, sacred values, pathological egalitarianism, etc, routing around these kinds of people is good.
To a first approximation, you’ll get closer to the truth in ethics by adopting a negative “skeptical” strategy towards other people’s moral claims than by making your own positive theories. And at least the technolibertarian cluster is decent at that.
As for it being authoritarian, that’s the same kind of conservative relativism that Eastern European national conservatives (e.g. Putinists) talk about when they complain about the West forcing homosexual equality down their throats. Rejecting other people’s (in this case, the masses’) imposition of power is libertarian and not at all authoritarian, and that’s what’s happening here.
I’m not exactly a central example but I felt like this post was talking about me, so it probably is.
Democracy has a very anti-me attitude so I don’t see why I should have anything but an anti-democratic attitude, when said anti-democraticness simply consists of “don’t impose your values on me no matter how much you think you know better than I do”. Because when people call for democracy on topics such as genetic engineering, I hear “let’s have the mob vote on promethea’s body”. I’m usually correct in hearing that.
But on the other hand these “technolibertarians” don’t actually seem to be that libertarian. In fact, I get very strong “these are the exact same people who built the nordic eugenics programs” vibes from them. The same naive “I can run people’s lives for them” progressivist elitist attitude, which in business simply either results in a product that solves someone’s problems, or bankrupty, but which in government has historically had the failure mode of forcibly sterilizing about 1% of the population. They don’t seem to reject the idea of running other people’s lives for them, but rather simply to think that they could do a better job at it.
Sure, they are better than the mob, but these technoprogressives seem to be other-optimizing way too hard and trying to replace democratic coercion with economic-cultural coercion which is not that much of an improvement.
The culture is good at solving white upper-middle-class men’s problems, and other people’s problems as far as they resemble white upper-middle-class men’s problems, but they are worse in solving even white upper-middle-class women’s problems, in a way that would have been perfectly predictable if they had had a healthy dose of austrian economics as a background assumption. The anti-democraticness of “I don’t consent to being paternalized by the mob” is not the anti-democraticness of “people should be paternalized by my culture and company, not the mob”.
2 months ago · tagged #heathy dose of austrian economics meaning #maybe people are non-trivially different #and thus more qualified to run their own lives #than we are to run their lives for them #not let's discard all empiricism #this is a social democracy hateblog #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 38 notes · source: marcusseldon · .permalink
Why Taxes Being Theft is Obviously Total Bullshit
jbeshir:
socialjusticemunchkin:
jbeshir:
socialjusticemunchkin:
jeysiec:
1. There are certain services and infrastructure required to have the sort of modern conditions that Westerners typically expect from their countries.
2. To not use those services/infrastructure you’d basically have to go live like the Amish, and that’s a best-case scenario.
3. If it wasn’t the government providing that services and infrastructure, it would just be private companies instead.
4. Those services and infrastructure cost labor and resources to perform/create/maintain.
5. Ergo any organization providing the services and infrastructure needs to be able to procure the necessary labor and resources.
6. If a private company provided those things instead of the government, it would almost certainly use money to procure the labor and resources and then demand payment for the resulting services and infrastructure, which would be identical to how the government procures using money and expects payment in the form of taxes.
6.5. In fact, it would probably cost you more money to get the services from the private company, since you’d be a captive audience, and a company would want to make a profit, and you would be less able to hold them accountable for bad service than you can government officials, since opting out would either be impossible or cause you great hardship. See for example: The US commercial internet providers and the outrageous prices and bad service they provide because they hold a monopoly over the proceedings, and how municipal internet is often better and cheaper.
7. If we instead provided the labor and resources via everyone making regular donations/volunteering in the required amounts, you’d essentially end up with a less-efficient tax system.
So when we consider all of the above, there is literally no way it makes logical and self-consistent sense to claim “taxes are theft” unless you think everyone both private worker or public worker is obligated to provide you with everything for free.
And then you run into logical problems anyway, because there’s no way in hell any organization can procure enough resources to provide you with free services without soliciting so many donations that you, like I said, effectively end up recreating the tax system less efficiently anyway.
(You’d also run into social problems, since there’s obviously no way in hell any business is going to accept the attitude that they’re obligated to give you free stuff.)
So the ancaps/libertarians/economic conservatives can stop projecting their own stupidity, insanity, and inability to understand basic economics onto everyone else, thanks.
If only the government stuck to providing those services, instead of shoving all kinds of “services” down my throat just because other people have decided I must have them.
Those vital services and infrastructure are a relatively small fraction of the total taxation. I wouldn’t object to them, what I object to is tax money being spent on kidnapping, ransom, and other kinds of banditry upon (mostly poor and black) people who are just trying to make ends meet in the totally legitimate businesses of sex work, drug dealing and braiding hair; tax money being used to “create jobs” for people in illegitimate businesses such as privatized prisons; tax money being spent on delivering barrels of pork to politically connected cronies; tax money being used to dictate my food in the form of agricultural subsidies; tax money being used to subsidize inefficient infrastructure in non-toll highways, fossil fuels and fucking alfalfa farming in fucking California; tax money being used to murder people whose only crime was being muslim in a region where some people are bad guys; tax money being used to prop up a bloated imperialist military that wastes ridiculous amounts of resources due to political gridlock; tax money being used to paternalize, degrade and humiliate poor people as a condition for being allowed to exist; tax money being used to prop up the privileges of the already privileged; tax money being used to keep brown people out and unable to make a honest living in a place where they want to make it, etc…
I would never pay a private company for about half of the things the government does, but thanks to the idea of democratic legitimacy combined with the inherent monopolies/oligopolies (at best) of states, I don’t have a choice.
I wouldn’t mind paying taxes to fund a sufficient basic income to somewhat consensualize the economy, provide basic (genuine) security for everyone, internalize externalities, handle natural monopolies, and do the important investments the private sector is bad at doing (basic science, basic healthcare research etc.) and [the things I’ve forgotten to mention but belong here]; especially if taxed from economically efficient sources like land, usage of natural resources (”privatize” the aquifers and the atmosphere, sell the water/pollution rights to the highest bidders and share the profits to everyone to solve so many problems simultaneously!) and the government’s services (there’s an argument to be made that since the police and military ultimately protect mostly property, the owners of said property should be the ones who pay for the system that protects them from people who would rather see the property in their own possession), etc.
Everything else is waste though, robbed at gunpoint (indirectly; I pay my taxes without guns being involved because I don’t want to get guns involved but the threat of violence is always upholding all state actions and that’s why we don’t do state actions except where it’s actually genuinely necessary and important) without consent. Those I am well within my moral rights to protest.
PS. Can we agree on a compromise that taxation is theft the same way property is?
(Also seriously, the war on drugs is basically such a perfect example of how utterly fucked-up the state is. It robs taxpayers so it can give money to people whose job it is to basically kidnap black men who do something some other people don’t like even if they hurt nobody in doing it, and deliver them to other people who are paid to hold black men in captivity, because the ~democracy~ has decided that such things are right and just and proper. Then when marijuana is legalized the state regulates it so that poor black people can’t make a legal and legitimate living off it because barriers to entry shut them outside the business.)
The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.
And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.
And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.
This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process.
Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.
Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.
And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.
If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).
But in practice left-libertarianism seems to be basically an economic equivalent of the people grousing about the evils of foreigners who admit when asked that they think anyone who wants to work in the country should be allowed to; people whose action’s consequences are wildly different to what they claim to want, but who don’t think about that or act differently because they don’t have to live with those consequences. And I think it maintains the presence of a lot of harm in much the same way.
(I’m only talking about my own libertarianism, not claiming that others’ views would be the same)
The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.
And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.
I think a big part of this is the way the right has a stranglehold on downsizing the state. Deregulatory capture happens because left-statists are too much in love with the state so the only ones willing to make it smaller are disproportionately on the right, and thus deregulation is done on the right’s terms.
There’s also this idea that there are two kinds of services: the bad ones, and the popular ones. A lot of what the electorate wants is terrible, and pork delivers votes reliably. One could take this fatalistic approach all the way, and conclude that what happens will happen anyway (in which case there would be no need to do left-statist advocacy for not downsizing), or try to find ways around it.
And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.
This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process.
Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.
#notmylibertarianism
Narrowing services may make the state superficially smaller when measured in money, but it also makes it a lot more intrusive. A decently-sized basic income with a flat 40% marginal tax rate (or even better, no income tax at all, but simply taxing land, resources, consumption and pollution etc.) is superficially more expensive than a horrible bloated bureaucracy delivering a million different programs to people who pass the checks, but in reality it “governs” and distorts the economy far less (which is the *real* problem with taxes; if we could have a 90% tax rate which delivered exactly the things that “should” be delivered it would not be a problem at all, but because the state can’t allocate most things as well as the market, it’s better to just give people money/not take away too much of their money).
Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.
As an ex-recipient of european welfare, I can say that your view of this continent’s ability to be horrible and degrading to poor people is an underestimate. Left-libertarianism is basically unheard-of here, yet the system still sucks for poor people.
And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.
That’s not libertarianism. That’s banditry. Cops should not be authorized to rob and kidnap citizens. This is non-negotiable. Incentive systems that enable robbing and kidnapping citizens violate people’s autonomy and basic rights and this is economic conservatism combined with unchallenged state authority.
If I were running the prisons, I’d do it the nordic way because it’s so much better in every way. Short sentences, minimize the harm to everyone instead of looting the coffers of the public to lock other parts of the public to satisfy the rest of the public. The american “justice” system is exactly the kind of a travesty that unrestrained democracy produces; two wolves and a sheep (guess the color) voting on what to have for dinner.
Compare that with the cost-effective, freedom-preserving nordic system which gives no fucks about what the public thinks because screw democracy, we’re doing what works, and we don’t let the mob vote on judges and prosecutors and what the fuck, but simply install them based on competence and tell them to try to keep the prisons empty. One of these systems respects people’s freedom, another sacrifices their liberty to the whims of the vox populi; the fact that the superior system is also cheaper to the taxpayer is a nice bonus. There are other kinds of freedom than just economic freedom.
(And if I were to privatize prisons altogether, I think it’s rather obvious that it’s the prisoners who are the customers and who get to choose which prison they want to spend time in, if they need to be imprisoned at all. Assuming such thorough abolition of the state (which I don’t necessarily support) the natural system would be that people sign to a security provider, which then negotiates with others’ security providers and delivers justice to its own members. The Black Panthers would probably do a much better job protecting black people than the cops of Ferguson; and if I were a shopkeeper dealing with a cigarette theft I’d be a lot more comfortable handing the teenage miscreant to them, instead of bandits whose loyalties lie with white savages with no concern for the actual welfare of the people their actions affect. Fucking yay democracy!)
If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).
I don’t want to dismantle welfare, I want to radically simplify it so that instead of the unholy bloated festering mess we have now, we’d simply give money to people who don’t have enough money, defined with the amazingly simple method of giving everyone money and taking back some of their income and letting the market, aka. poor people themselves, decide what the poor really need.
And instead of establishing an unholy bloated festering mess of subsidies, ill-considered efficiency standards, terrible regulations, and cap-and-trade aka. delivering windfall profits to cronies, I want to prevent global warming with the amazingly simple method of putting a price on greenhouse emissions and letting the market, aka. people who actually know whether implementation X is a good idea or not, decide how to cut emissions.
And instead of regulating the number of taxis and pharmacies (yes, the number of pharmacies is centrally planned in Finland), or mandating that housing must screw over the poor to subsidize car-owning families with parking requirements and mean apartment size regulations (yes, in Finland there are rules that condominiums must build more parking spots and big apartments that the market would deliver on its own, effectively redistributing upwards by making rich people’s housing artificially cheaper at the expense of poor people’s smaller apartments and non-car-owningness; and then builders evade the regulations by building one huge useless apartment so the rest can be smaller and that’s why the top floor of every other building in Finland has a square footage georg that should not be counted), etc. I want the state to simply fucking not do such things, with the amazingly simple method of just fucking not doing it.
And instead of having the state regulate my gender, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of regulating relationships and voting on whether or not gay and poly marriage is okay, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of deciding what substances people are allowed to put into their bodies and in which situations and kidnapping those who don’t obey, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of having the state decide what terms I may sell my labor with, or to be more specific it’s not even the state but the employers’ union (yes, we do have an employers’ union) negotiating with the labor unions but this is corporatism and they are an accessory of the state, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of trying to “create jobs” and looting Peter to pay Paul to push paper instead of creating value, it could just fucking not do it.
Over half of what the state currently does can be solved with two amazingly simple heuristics:
1. Just fucking don’t do it
2. Give cash to everyone instead so they can buy it if they really want it
and the corollary
3. Always prefer the simpler and more general option with less loopholes and less risk of terrible side-effects to poor people: give money instead of services unless you’re really exceptionally certain that this one service is worth it; regulate instead of banning, or just don’t; tax instead of regulating, or just don’t; tax generarly and broadly and avoid specificity because people are smart and will find ridiculous ways around your bullshit; let the market sort itself out; just fucking trust the market don’t fuck with it; if you think the market is screwing over the poor don’t fuck with the market just give the poor more money so they can afford to vote with their feet/wallets; and never ever let anyone do anything that would make someone say “vote for X because they care about the interests of group Y”
I’d agree with (or like to see tried, anyway) the goals here, I think, and in particular your third heuristic, which seems to contain a more nuanced version of the other two if I understand correctly. I might disagree on whether particular services qualify as ‘worth it’ or not (although I understand this is more about whether there is some particular reason the market can’t do them than about how important they are to life), but that doesn’t need resolving.
But I think the method employed, basically delegitimising the state until politicians fix everything, is a bad one. I don’t think narrow, invasive systems come from anyone *wanting* them, I think they fall out of the incentives that a sizeable mass of people who view the state as illegitimate create.
Specifically, I think they come from the natural political midpoint between “people who view state involvement in anything as morally heinous” and “people who don’t want poor people to starve on the street” that garners the most votes being to pander to the first group by cutting all services which normalize state involvement in/redistribution to normal people’s lives, and to pander to the second group by promising to save the people who *really* need it through these narrow targeted things that people in the former group can’t get strong feelings about.
And I think the louder the first group gets the more you see that happen. The more illegitimate the government taxing and spending money to help people is in the eyes of the electorate, the more people regard taxation as theft, the more it’s going to be narrowly targeted at the cases where it’s harder and harder to disagree with, meaning more and more complicated and expensive and invasive and impossible to navigate eligibility testing and holes that people fall through and lack of proper support and similar.
Similar for civil forfeiture and prison phone systems; I don’t think anyone’s ideology demanded those. I think they just fell out of being able to say you were cutting taxes playing to the popular attitude that taxation was theft (plus the all-holy “localism” which is the cause of so much NIMBYism, incompetence, and efforts by local governments to shove their problems onto each other, including when those “problems” are people).
More generally, I think there is a failure mode in lots of political ideologies working towards goals which boil down to “build new system for supporting people, destroy old inferior one” where because building is hard and has no coalition and destroying is easy and there’s all kinds of people to join up with, they run an effective campaign for crippling the existing system while making zero progress on the replacement. And no one notices or cares, because there’s no direct incentive on them to.
And I think the only solution here is to be very strict on the replacement being built first or enacted at the same time or with transitionary arrangements, and making it a part of proper incrementalism that nothing should be supported that hurts people now on the basis that it’ll be part of a complete improved system as soon as everyone else comes around on the rest of the plan.
Edit: Also I more specifically agree with the Nordic prisons bit, I think most everywhere else has an abominable prison system that I hope future generations regard as monstrous, and don’t have any objection to the prisoner being allowed to choose their prison in principle; we might find that the market goes too far towards comfort, especially for those with friends with money on the outside, but we can risk that and adjust when we see signs if we need to.
What I’d like to see politically done is delegitimizing state intrusiveness (no spying, no police oppression, no means-testing benefits (okay that’s a bit utopian), not banning things etc.) while minimizing the harms, because I don’t really trust in solving this with parliamentary politics.
I don’t think statist democracy would ever deliver freedom, and current welfare states seem unsustainable in the long term and unfixable because of voters, and thus I see eschewing the state and constructing alternatives outside it as the only properly viable solution (even if one has to go to the bottom of the sea to do it), or at the very least an extremely important backup plan.
The “don’t break it until you’ve fixed it” attitude is precisely why I’m so big about UBI because it’s really important to do it asap, and implementing it properly would allow a lot of freedom elsewhere (goodbye means-testing, most labor regulations, incentive traps, many value-destroying jobs for bureaucrats etc.).
Also, it’s really entertaining that I’m exactly 100% in both of those groups, and supporting the exact opposite of the policies the groups separately have resulted in. And I don’t think there’s (usually) a big ideological conspiracy turning things into shit, it’s just democracy without proper restraints, with people believing anything is okay if the mob says so. That’s the thing I want to delegitimize, along with it being okay that poor people die on the streets. Everyone should have their basic material needs met unconditionally, the democratic mob can go fuck itself because it doesn’t have the right to impose its will on non-consenting people, and apart from the things that are necessary to implement these two conditions as much as reasonably feasible, everything else should be up to the voluntary and consensual interactions of people, with an extra dose of “fuck you” to democratic statism just out of spite because holy shit demstatists are terrifying.
(via jbeshir)
2 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 29 notes · source: jeysiec · .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
thetransintransgenic:
themindislimitless:
clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:
pterocopter:
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.
Ok wait a second wait a second. I’m seeing Uber hate on my dash.
First of all, the cab industry (at least in my city) is corrupt as hell. There are a limited number of cab “permits”, and they are all owned by super rich people who then rent them out to cabbies for outrageous fees.
Cab drivers don’t always take the most direct route, milking you for more money, because they do not make very much money. The REASON cabs are more expensive is the cab company is taking most of that money and putting it in the pocket of the super rich person, not in the pocket of the driver!
Uber, on the other hand, pays each driver significantly more, so even though you are paying less your uber driver is actually making more. Uber displays your route right on your phone so you can follow along – and you are agreeing to a certain fee to get to a certain location.
You can report your Uber driver easily, and Uber will take action. Also, riders are asked to rate their driver at the end of the trip.
You receive an email receipt at the end of your Uber ride.
You don’t need to carry cash with Uber, you pay through the app.
Oh, and with Uber Taxi, cab drivers can join Uber and make more money doing it!
The cab industry as it is needs to change. Uber has created an elegant 21st century solution. I honestly feel 100% safer riding in an Uber.
I do not speak for the other services - I’ve never used Lyft and only just heard about this service for women. But Uber is the bomb.
I feel like people keep reading this as a defense of cab companies when all it is is an indictment of uber.
Listen, I get that you like Uber.
But I PROMISE YOU:
Your drivers aren’t making enough to live. They aren’t. And they will continue not making enough to live because the people who are brave enough to sue for employee protections get bought off with settlements that don’t help the rest of the drivers.
So let’s put it this way:
None of your drivers, if you are outside Portland Oregon, are making enough to live, no matter what the service you use, unless it’s a surge night and you’re charged $300 and even THEN, the majority of that money is going to the man who developed the ap.
Stop defending it. It works really well for you, that’s great.
It is not working for the drivers. Trust me. I heard from them constantly. They are BEGGARED, and strategies like the introductions of thousands more into cities that are already flooded only cement the proof that the company doesn’t care about the drivers, it cares about profit.
So if it works for you that’s really great, but stop ignoring the fact that the workers across the board are getting screwed for your cheap ride.
Other points, as someone who doesn’t care much for cab companies but will defend cab workers being able to, well, survive:
- Cab drivers generally don’t own their cabs, but rent them (thus leading, in part, to the massive fees they need to pay). Uber/Lyft don’t provide cars, and the ones they do rent– well, what’s the difference between renting from them versus the cabbie companies?
- Cab drivers are largely immigrant and/or working class folk that work as cab drivers full-time and rely on the income. Uber/Lyft drivers don’t work on it full time: they generally have other jobs and are looking to make extra $$$, and in a large city, most of the folk who have cars also have $$$ (hint hint, gentrification).
- Uber drivers practice “client poaching” (driving up to someone and going “Uber?” and said person possibly getting into the car before they realize this is not their ride. Not only shitty, but also extremely dangerous esp for women).
- Not sure if they’ve changed it but up until Jan at least, Uber didn’t have a customer service number, and people accidentally calling (and suing) a design company regarding shitty drivers or poachers or whatever it may be and getting nowhere. So no, “Uber will take action” is false, bye.
- Unless the state/city requires it, Uber (idk abt Lyft) cars are not required to undergo safety inspections, and even when required, it is a frighteningly basic “inspection” that consists of another Uber driver coming out to “inspect” the make/model/take pictures of the car and the licence plate, and getting paid $20 for it, a process that takes 30 minutes. (Hullinger). As opposed to cab drivers that, as stated, have to undergo: car/safety inspections, driving screenings, and their cabs abide by ADA regulations.
- Please trust me when I tell you that you want to make sure your driver can drive well, because taxi driving is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US (and more so than for cops, but that’s a different convo)
- Uber does not regulate their drivers as much as police them– you know, considering they’re trackable, even when not at work, and generate massive data for the company that folks aren’t compensated for? And no, Uber does not pay drivers “significantly more” and there’s a lot of info about Uber drivers not even making minimum wage. Also they dropped their rates even more recently. (Cassano)
- Not sure why people favour Uber/Lyft over cabbies as ~well their money goes to rich people too~. Yeah. But only cab drivers and cab companies are regulated and have fees applied that Uber/Lyft drivers don’t have to abide by. Tax evasions aren’t very progressive tbqh.
-
No really, Uber/Lyft is directly aiding gentrification and it’s hurting people. Here’s an account by a cab driver why you should reconsider ride-share apps and how they aid gentrification.
- Ultimately when it comes down to it, Uber= gentrification and it’s one thing to have to deal with shitty government policies regarding working as a cabbie (which they do, whoa, guess what! many of them are in unions and/or community organizers), but add gentrification, the loss of income, and additional racism and this becomes much worse.
@socialjusticemunchkin this responds to many of your points and a bunch of other ones and also does yes have some philosophical differences.
I … I think for the most part you were agreeing with at least 70% of the above?
Like I think the main jut of the above comments was specifically against the “sharing economy” which denies that the workers it actively controls are. workers. that they exert control (and thus ought to have responsibilities toward) over. Which I think was the main point of your final paragraph?
Like, in order of what you said emphatically, then going back through the above posts for the points that you mentioned off-hand:
Accountability: This is a fundamental difference you have, whether being held legally accountable is more or less powerful than being held market-based accountable. (Given that, what is your opinion on the ADA and stuff? ‘Cause that seemed to work pretty well, no?…) (I also don’t quite understand why you think that because cabs are held legally accountable they won’t be held accountable by the market, too…)
Surge Pricing: I’ve seen arguments for and against it – I’m not convinced either way, and I also don’t think either of the above people are, on a moral level – but for the purpose of this context, that was only mentioned once in the above two posts, in a single fragment of a sentence, as a PS at the end. It was explicitly not a fundamental part of their argument. (Possibly a good way to handle it is with multiple companies, at least one of which has surge pricing, at least one of which doesn’t, all trying to win brand loyalty? Which… seems much more possible and fair with the multi-taxi-company apps like Way2Ride and Arro, than single-app-per-company stuff like Uber, Lyft, and Chariot.)
Employee vs. no: Uber actually specifically has a system (which they brag about) to create drivers without control over their means of production:
- Rode with a Lyft driver who also drives for Uber. His car is lease-to-own, paid via Uber. If he doesn’t make $350/week, his car won’t start. – sha
@shashashasha 6:47 AM - 17 Jan 2016
- http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/04/24/one-uber-drivers-story-how-he-was-trapped-by-auto-loan-program
I don’t know about Lyft, or the new one, but especially for something advertising itself as “Uber but ~Feminist~ in this one specific way”, I seriously don’t have much hope.
I’m pretty sure they would agree with you after only a small discussion about the medallions.
(Frankly, I think I’m a bit frustrated at Uber about this, because wow, you looked at this bleeped-up system and found out how to make a copy of it – without medallions propping it up – so much worse.)
Also, here’s an entire article about how no, Uber drivers are in very few ways their own independent contractors. Comes with a published academic paper and 9 months of collected data. Samples: “Uber’s system enforces blind acceptance of passengers, as drivers are not shown the passenger’s destination or how much they could earn on the fare.” “In order to remain active on the system, drivers must meet an average rating target that hovers around 4.6 out of 5 stars.”
So I think they would agree that there are advantages to not being an “employee” – just that the’re pretty sure Uber deliberately removes most of them.
Unions: Uber, at least, is VERY anti-union. I dunno about Lyft?
Um… okay this post got unfocused and I think I claimed I would keep a consistent argument throughout but I’m not sure I did. I’m ending this now.
Tagged: Uber is EVIL, (And I’m glad we all agree on that fact. And the disagreement is more ‘is their more than a single thing they might have done okay-ly’.).
(Joining the two threads for trackkeepability)
So first of all, Uber is evils georg and I don’t know how bad the situation is with the competitors, other than “less bad” but that’s once again best described as “burying the bar”. I’ve even heard that Uber has an easy time attracting talent because conservative douchebros find the rest of Silicon Valley a bunch of neotenic degenerates who aren’t douchebro-y enough while Uber has a sufficiently respectable and elitist “screw the poor” attitude for them. “Ridesharing” as an idea is excellent and if Uber etc. bust the cartels and then get replaced by better and less abusive alternatives it would probably be the ideal outcome. I don’t oppose fairly maligning things that need to be maligned as long as it’s not used to defend other things that need to be maligned just as well.
And speaking of maligning, that cab driver’s account in huffpost was…pretty much what one’d expect from a working-class cartelmember. Sympathetic, but terrible.
For cabbies to earn a decent living there has to be proper regulation of the industry. Too few cabs and the public isn’t served and too many and drivers can’t make decent money.
If there are “too many” cabs and drivers don’t make decent money, where do the drivers come from? Where do they go if they can’t be cab drivers? Whatever it is, it’s likely to be even worse than being a cab driver who can’t make decent money. (Unless there’s fraud or coercion, which Uber’s financing schemes seem to, unsurprisingly, be very good at. In fact, the financing is exactly as predatory as the medallion cabs’ in Toronto. That thing needs to be stopped with overwhelming force if necessary.)
The article basically says, “we’re poor, and should be allowed to have [disguised welfare]” and I don’t like [disguised welfare]. This would be solved by UBI (I’m starting to keep track of how many times I repeat my standard talking points of “UBI” and “liberalized zoning and better urban planning” (abbr. LZ) because I suspect they are going to come up a lot) so that everyone would make ends meet anyway.
Good jobs are scarce in this city for the working-class and driving a cab is one of those good jobs.
Good jobs are scarce, let’s maintain that scarcity, never mind those who can’t become cab drivers because they can’t get the medallions. Most of the customers are poor so they are effectively subsidized by the few who aren’t. UBI + LZ would help with the one-two of better income and lower housing costs. And unlike a cartel, it would also help those who aren’t cab drivers.
Then we get a broadside of binary politics and applause lights about how there are pros and cons and cons are bad and pros are good and pros must support regulation. As a lel I feel erased and marginalized and oppressed by this discourse, and this pro really needs to check his binary-political privilege. My eyes glazed over because there was no substance.
And then exciting words like gentrification! If 10 000 hipsters really want to move in to where 10 000 poor people live, they really can’t be stopped in any reasonable way. Hipsters are effectively a force of nature, an inevitable calamity, so it’s better that the neighborhood is rebuilt to accommodate 20 000 people so the original residents don’t need to move away just because hipsters move in. LZ, turn rent control into bostadsrett, etc. instead, and try to achieve a mix of classes and races which is the Objectively Correct Way to do cities because it leads to higher social mobility, better services for the poor and black people because they live where the rich and white people live and thus get rich white people services, and because the rich white people have more money they inject it into the local economy (the complaints about staffing bars with non-locals only are perfectly valid though, and I support voluntary initiatives to increase the diversity of workers in hipster bars and would participate if I ran a hipster bar and would pressure bars to participate if such a thing existed and I was a patron of an eligible hipster bar) which is better than poor black people being segregated in separate areas and economies with poor black people only. (If any city suffering from such issues wants to hire me as urban planning czar to experiment with cracking the question of how to replace regular gentrification with this kind of “hybrid gentrification” which could benefit the poor as well, I’m available.)
And then something about unions, and asfdgasfgd the current system is so broken. Right-to-work is bullshit, state-enforced collective bargaining is bullshit, everything in the current labor laws of apparently everywhere is bullshit. Let’s just introduce the UBI and erase most of the labor laws, let workers unionize and negotiate freely, let employers not employ if they disagree, and let someone else outcompete the troglodytes by offering something of actual value to then-inherently-consensual labor because people can just tell the employers to do something anatomically impossible if they don’t make a fair offer. And then something about local politics and “hail regulatory capture!” (total: 3 UBI and 2 LZ)
Okay, back to the rest of it. So Uber is terrible, treats workers like shit, news at eleven. So does the government. Everyone treats poor people like shit, except sometimes other poor people who know what they are dealing with, and I wouldn’t trust regulations a priori as not effectively treating poor people like shit exactly the same. The questions about safety etc. are not exactly lgbtq rights where the state just follows popular opinion and probably is a net negative, and I’m a fan of some things like ADA (or at least parts of it, not familiar with everything) because accessibility is awesome and at least California seemed to have made substantially more progress on that front than Finland, but those things can also be overdone. I don’t know the specifics of ADA requirements so I deliberately avoided commenting on that part.
Sexual assault is where the government obviously should be protecting people, but has proven to be relatively reluctant in practice, which is kind of what I’m referring to with the claim that the markets (broadly interpreted) are what actually deliver the outcomes. Unlike curb cuts and wheelchair ramps, sexual assault is one of those things that are disgustingly open to interpretation, so just banning it doesn’t help much if the actual de facto will to enforce it isn’t there. Cops are often not very cooperative, etc. so the standard tendency is to just sweep stuff under the rug everywhere. If there are actual credible methods for dealing with abuses, and not just a nominal complaint system, then great. But Uber still has the advantage of being inherently more capable of addressing them (because it tracks more data, while hailing a cab from the street is a hail mary in comparison); the same deal with driver safety, as they don’t carry money and riders are less anonymous.
Other regulations obviously sound superficially appealing to many, but my prior is to be skeptical, because often such things seem to devolve into mere barriers to entry with little actual content. At least around here a lot of certifications are basically paying some crony’s company to deliver a specified amount of lessons (which far exceeds the time an effective course would need, and still doesn’t really teach the material half as well) because it managed to lobby such a criterion. And then there’s the fact that there’s no way to avoid all tragedies; I do know that my utopia would have a steady stream of unfortunate fates because the harm from stopping people from having them is too great, and that’s terrible but I don’t pretend I can fix everything YGM. It’s easy to sweep the unfortunate fates under the rug with regulation, and thus we get things like the FDA which prevent spectacular bad things from happening, at the cost of creating far more bad things in a less spectacular form (I wouldn’t necessarily abolish it completely but I’d tone down the strictness a lot and accept that every now and then we’ll get a thalidomide or vioxx as the price of getting important things to the market faster; of course that’s probably impossible in a democracy because the voters would just vote back the regulations as big unspectacular tragedies are more politically viable than smaller spectacular ones, just ask anyone who’s gotten sick from the coal we burn to avoid scary ~nukular powaa~).
And I don’t consider taxpaying necessarily virtuous either; anyone who’s done the GWWC pledge has IMO a carte blanche ethically to do all the tax evasion they want because EA is so much better than the state. Bednets don’t shoot black people. There seems to be a “standard progressive fallacy” that if the tax is nominally paid by the employer it reduces the employer’s profit instead of the workers’ wages, which just isn’t expected in an elastic market; if you slap a tax of $20 on a thing costing $100 which initially is divided 50/50 with the worker and employer, I’d guess the prior for the actual outcome would be more like 40/40 once the market has adjusted, regardless of where it’s hidden. And once again there’s this “a real progressive is a socdem” thing which is really turning me off from progressivism even if I probably agree with many of the values regarding whether poor people should stay poor or not.
The situation with employee vs. contractor vs. fake contractor I agree with, and would definitely prefer to see an actual market instead of this bullshit, but I really think that there should be a better distinction; Uber isn’t evil because it has contractors instead of employees, it’s evil because it lies and calls its employees “contractors”, and this should be addressed properly so that a honest platform for independent workers wouldn’t be saddled with the fallout of re-designating Uber as an employer, because I’m kind of afraid that something along those lines might be a risk.
And surge pricing is very important, and it was called “fucking surge pricing”, so I kind of assumed that the writer of that part disagrees with me. I like flexible prices, I even buy my electricity by the hour (because I can’t buy it by the minute YGM) from Nord Pool Spot. Of course, the actual impact of optimizing my electricity consumption this way isn’t technically “worth it” but my kink is the great chain instead of the party whip (sorry, I simply had to say it) so it’s kind of a hobby and a cheap signaling effort to shift my consumption around the prices because I’m contributing! to! the! market!
Whether Uber is actually worse or just slightly less terrible than traditional cabs when accounting for the totality, not just the drivers (because being in a cartel can definitely be comparatively nice and distorts the data if the people who can’t get a job because of it aren’t accounted for) is not a question I can answer here right now because it would require scrutinizing a lot of data I don’t have. What I can say is that I could totally do better.
To the question in the tags: I do think Uber is doing relatively well (for a certain value of “well”) in many things; the things they claim to be doing sound good on paper and I think the actual problem is the inherent exploitability of a desperate workforce on a shitty market. As long as it exists unscrupulous companies will keep trying to find loopholes for exploiting, and patching the loopholes without addressing the core issues just creates a regulatory hell that leaks constantly and makes legislators and unions play a silly whack-a-mole that ends up whacking a lot of innocent people too. And this is what’s letting Uber get away with being evilness georg and not delivering what it promises, not the lack of enough regulations everywhere.
(via thetransintransgenic)
2 months ago · tagged #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor #this is a social democracy hateblog #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 1,618 notes · source: clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead · .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
theunitofcaring:
leftclausewitz:
Another element I’m liking in Nihilist Communism is the statement that being working class is not an identity, it’s not a cultural thing, and that there isn’t anything necessarily virtuous in being working class.
That’s something that has marked a lot of leftist and social justice analysis, something I’ve brought up before but the association of ‘oppression’ as a concept with ‘virtuousness’ as a concept both obfuscates a lot of aspects of oppression (for instance in creating the moral desire to be oppressed, hence people either donning working class clothes or trying to analytically ‘edge into’ oppressed spaces by arguing that they, themselves, are oppressed), or by engaging in guilt rhetoric or by finding some contrarian point (by casting the oppressed as, themselves, being inherently oppressive; leaving the ‘normal’ ‘middle class’ analyst as the most clearly Good person, see the way northern liberals talk about the Southern working class, or the way white liberals construct PoC as inherently homophobic).
Certainly there’s a colonizers mentality that comes with occupying an oppressive position, but we shouldn’t get into abolishing oppression because the oppressed are better / more deserving people, we should be trying to abolish oppression because it destroys people’s lives, whether those people are virtuous or saintly. The association of Oppressed / Revolutionary (that is, being of the revolutionary class) with ‘goodness’ helps no one.
Does a communism that is less “the working people are virtuous” also end up leaning less on “work is good and economic systems ought to be about empowering workers to work”? One of the things that I find most offputting in a lot of leftist economic proposals is the assumption that the role of an economic system ought to be creating work (and distributing the fruits of that work) rather than eliminating work or finding ways to get more goods from less work. What I want is an economy that produces enough for everyone with as little work as possible. Is there anyone doing leftist economic analysis that assumes the necessity of work is a problem we haven’t solved yet, not a virtue and not a goal (and not an identifier of the people qualified to wield coercive power?)
C4SS: eg. “Jobs” as a Red Herring: The Dangers of Make-Work Bias and Nothing to Fear from New Technologies if the Market is Free
“You can either compete with technology for a job, or use it to help you make a living outside of a job. Your choice.”
Murray Bookchin: Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Eclipse Phase is relevant, as always, with its substantial and inspirational variety of approaches towards low-scarcity economies
Jacobin: Four Futures
For as Marx puts it, “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” Whatever activities and projects we undertook, we would participate in them because we found them inherently fulfilling, not because we needed a wage or owed our monthly hours to the cooperative.
r/Post-Scarcity
etc.
(Don’t know how much these qualify as “analysis” as opposed to “agitation” but the ideas certainly are out there, it’s just that the mainstream democratic left is stuck in 20th century ideas because its voters are stuck in the 20th century and democracy is beholden to the biases of the electorate.)
3 months ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #this is a social democracy hateblog · 1,045 notes · source: leftclausewitz · .permalink
matty-boops:
this is the best single panel comic
who did it
Reminds me of this.
Also:
Instead of forming a pro-growth coalition with business and labor, most of the San Francisco Left made an enduring alliance with home-owning NIMBYs. It became one of the peculiar features of San Francisco that exclusionary housing politics got labeled “progressive.” Over the years, these anti-development sentiments were translated into restrictive zoning, the most cumbersome planning and building approval process in the country, and all kinds of laws and rules that make it uniquely difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to add housing in San Francisco.
times_\”progressives\”_have_thrown_poor_people_under_the_bus += 1
(these guys are the primary reason @sinesalvatorem didn’t see other black people in SF; scorn dem)
(via ilzolende)
3 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #okay those aren't _literal_ socdems #but the same basic archetype #of precariat-bussing leftists #(or more like leftists compared to europe but still) · 21,166 notes · source: matty-boops · .permalink
Shadow Over Finnsmouth
I didn’t quite understand it before I visited SF but in Finland there’s this strange atmosphere of clean oppressiveness and control, and upon my return it hit like a barrel of intangible psychological bricks.
The State owns you. You don’t belong to yourself. You belong to everyone else. They decide. The state tracks you from cradle to grave. You’re a number. Your gender is hard-coded into the number. The State will hurt you. It only does it because it loves you. The State will take care of you. The State knows better than you do. Don’t try to fight it. The State reigns supreme. The State does whatever the fuck it wants and gets away with it. They will support it anyway. They understand that everyone belongs to everyone and that’s why you can’t decide anything for yourself. Vox populi, vox dei. You are not an adult. You can’t choose for yourself. Live a DIN-standardized life. The only other option is the squalor of 19th century industrial slums. Do you want the squalor of 19th century industrial slums? Then shut the fuck up and accept the oppression. There are no other choices. Any attempt to create other choices will be destroyed. Submit or be destroyed. Submit and be ground down anyway because you’re too young, too poor, too strange.
In SF things felt “out of control” in some really strange, subtle backgroundish way. The visa system emphasizes that people regularly overstay their visas and they only get in trouble for it if they’re caught. The rules for changing one’s name are “just use it” instead of several pages of strict regulations. Even the regulations, where they showed up, felt like attempts to impose some degree of control onto something that is inherently out of control, instead of the inherent structure of society outside which nothing is allowed to happen. In Finland I feel safe and controlled, afraid to be the nail that sticks out because the welfare statism has been so thoroughly internalized that I constantly feel like someone is watching even when nobody is. In SF I feel alive.
The US federal government feels like an empire that loots and oppresses people to enrichen its cronies and prop up its mechanisms of violence, but ultimately is something “over there”, while nordic welfare corporatism feels like an entire machine made of paper in which people are just tiny cogs running the faceless monstrosity in its uncaring emergent abominableness. The US government tries to control life. In Finland the corporatist system has succeeded in it. Or at least that’s what it feels like. In Finland I constantly have to fight some subconscious instinct not to deviate from the system’s scripts, not to rock the boat, not to try to crawl out of the bucket. Afraid of the mallet that isn’t really there. Well, not always because often it actually really is there, just quite a lot of the time.
That’s probably why I get along so well with both anarchists and libertarians despite them otherwise not getting along with each other at all. Among them I can feel like I’m sane, safe from the constant gaslighting about the way the welfare state only has the best interests of its citizens at heart and surely it can’t be that bad and the people who claim it is that bad are just lying and whining and probably trying to grab too much for themselves. Safe from the cultists chanting “de-mo-kra-si de-mo-kra-si” and insisting that I join them in their strange rituals of putting pieces of paper in boxes and pretending that it absolves the system and the people composing it of all their sins. Safe from the people who think that everything must be strictly controlled, regulated, regimented, and standardized just so that it is. Safe from the people who think that nobody must have any alternative, that even the idea of people living on an artificial island somewhere without bothering anyone else is such an aberration that it simply Must Not Be Allowed. Safe from the people on disguised welfare, who loathe those who lack that privilege and have instead fallen onto overt welfare. Safe from the people who consider society’s most important function to be the punishment of those who do “wrong” according to the will of the majority, without regard for the consequences.
That hobo in a Ron Paul t-shirt, raving about some imaginary rugged individualism only he can perceive, may be utterly disgusting and otherwise several times detached from reality, but he is also a person who knows what’s really lurking behind the smiles of the scary socialdemocrats of Finnsmouth. Such people are rare and valuable and I treasure almost every single one of them, no matter how frustrating and fractally wrong and obnoxious they otherwise are. Because they understand.
3 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #this is a social democracy hateblog #this goddamn continent · 28 notes · .permalink
just-shower-thoughts:
If you aren’t at least a little ashamed of your country’s history, you don’t know your country’s history.
@ozymandias271 had asked me about this:
I am SO CURIOUS what is shameful about Finland.
my understanding of Finland is that you guys fought the Nazis, which is cool
so if you wish please enlighten me and my American lack of understanding of other countries’ history :)
And everyone knows that I’m always up for shameful things about Finland, so here’s the dirt.
The earlier centuries are not that relevant as it’s mostly the shamefulness of Sweden’s history instead as not much interesting happened around here before Sweden and Novgorod ran out of the interesting and began fighting over the non-interesting. The Trojan War might be an exception. Yes, there is an actual theory that the Trojan War was actually fought in Finland, because a bunch of names match. Troy is like Toija (the J should be an Y but finnish insists on not making sense), Lesbos is like Espoo, Ascania is like Askainen etc. Yes, people are that desperate to find something interesting.
The actual shamefulness part begins when the Swedish crown began colonizing America. It was really popular at the time, even the tiny Duchy of Courland and Semigallia (or as it’s known today, “a small sliver of land in the western part of Latvia”) tried to colonize Tobago. Because the original residents had turned out not to be that resistant to things like hepatitis and musket balls, there was a lot of sparsely-populated forest to turn into not-so-sparsely-populated not-so-forest. Thus it was really convenient that the swedish had a ready supply of people who had already been very accustomed to being colonial subjects in sparsely-populated forests: the finns. A few important innovations are related to this, such as log cabins (finns built a lot of them and they worked well so a lot of people began to copy them) and Rambo (originally a certain swedish farmer’s surname). Thus, the next time a bunch of paranoid libertarian wannabe-action-heroes with way more armament than is reasonable for any single person to own occupy a federal building built in the traditional American frontier style, you know whom to blame. (The swedish. The swedish are to blame for that.)
Another incredibly important innovation was “we are not like the other white people”. It’s a big deal in Finland that finns were discriminated against in America in the 19th century for their propensity to get drunk, resulting in them starting fights and/or organizing labor, both of which were frowned upon by the locals, and thus signs like “no service for finns or indians” were common in some areas. I assume this is partially because all white people are really eager to get cookies for people vaguely genetically and culturally connected to them not being as bad for the native population as the rest of the illegal immigrants, and partially because finns in particular are really fucking embarrassing in their obsession over what other people think about them. (Nothing. The answer is nothing, most of the time. Sometimes it is “how on earth are they this overrepresented everywhere on the internet”, but that’s simply because nobody else speaks the language so they have to use english anyway, and they are depressive shut-ins who spend their days on their computers because meatspace humans are scary.)
But back to the Old Continent. In the 19th century the swedish-speaking elite of a small piece of land in western Russia (That small piece of land had changed ownership because there was this guy who wanted to rule all of Europe and the people in his country agreed with him and he made a deal with Russia about some borders and Russia invaded Finland and then the conqueror guy got frustrated with not being able to invade Britain because he could not get across some in/conveniently placed water (depending on who you ask) and invaded Russia instead because it always works amirite, and then the winners made agreements to not let such things happen again.) weren’t really feeling like being russian subjects so they instead decided to make up a nation. It was really popular at the time.
Now, all such nations are really artificial but the finnish nation is really, really transparently duct-taped together. The general area was inhabited by a bunch of tribes; the tawastians, the karelians, the savonians, etc.; and the ruling elite made a standard language out of the various different dialects with the result that most neurotypical people never speak it. Instead, they use informal language, which varies very strongly regionally with the result of being extremely inpenetrable. For example, these are all the same word:
metsän – mettän – metän – mehtän – mehän – mesän – messän
But these are very substantial differences in meaning:
pitsa – pita – piha – pisa – pissa – pitsi – pisti – pihti – pihi – piti
Good luck deciphering that. You’re going to need it.
They also needed a mythology because every nation needs to make up some cool shit in their history to be a proper nation. For that they went to Karelia (known for things like not being located in Finland, the people there having a different religion, speaking a different-although-mostly-mutually-intelligible language etc.) and took some stories from there and declared the karelian stories, from karelian people in Karelia, to be the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland and the finnish people. (Then the americans had to one-up it with the Song of Hiawatha which was basically Kalevala, trochaic tetrameter and all, transposed to America with a thin veneer of thoroughly mischaracterized Objiwe on top. Wikipedia says “Longfellow’s poem was taken as the first American epic to be composed of North American materials and free of European literary models. Earlier attempts to write a national epic (…) were considered derivative.” and I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. Nope, it’s a proud, recursive continuation of the tradition of taking other people’s shit and calling it one’s own and that’s as european as it gets.)
Then when Finland became independent in the First World War, people promptly settled their differences over which direction to take the young republic in the remarkably civilized fashion of shooting everyone who disagreed. The whites shot more people than the reds and imprisoned the rest so they died of hunger instead, which saved bullets, and thus they got to decide. They initially wanted to give the country a german king, but it was the year 1918 and such ideas soon turned out to be remarkably bad, so they instead decided to call the position “president” and threw in some elections as well. Then they discovered that shooting everyone who disagreed didn’t make the problem of landless and destitute tenant farmers disappear, and instituted a land reform just as the reds had demanded, and over time pretty much everything else as well. The whole embarrassing debacle could have been avoided if the conservatives and the liberals had just skipped straight to the “do most of what the socialists wanted to do” part without trying the “shoot and imprison the socialists” solution first.
And the first thing the country did was invading Russia. Because that always works. Russia had that “civil war” thing going on, and the white finns got involved because of lofty altruistic idealism about liberating their karelian brothers from the bolshevik menace… I’m kidding of course. In reality they saw that the karelians’ shit was up for grabs and they wanted to take it and call it their own. To defend it from people who wanted to take other people’s shit and call it their own. Because it’s different or something. Such integrity, so idealism.
There was a prohibition too, and it went exactly as well as prohibitions tend to go. To this day, finnish drinking habits are fucked up in the expected ways; an emphasis on secretly drinking lots of hard booze whenever it’s available, instead of enjoying alcohol in a civilized european manner. And to this day, they are afraid if they sell anything stronger than a weak beer in grocery stores everything will collapse into Mad Max, like in such post-apocalyptic wastelands as the Netherlands.
In the WW2, Finland did indeed fight the nazis, but that was after they had been spending the previous years being really close buddies with them. You see, there was this guy who wanted to rule all of Europe and the people in his country agreed with him and he made a deal with Russia about some borders and Russia invaded Finland but this time the matrix glitched and that thing about spearmen and tanks every Civilization player is familiar with happened and Finland only lost most of the Karelia on its side of the border.
Then the conqueror guy got frustrated with not being able to invade Britain because he could not get across some in/conveniently placed water (depending on who you ask) and invaded Russia instead because it always works amirite, and Finland was totally neutral and definitely hadn’t spent the temporary peace fuming with irredentism and dreaming of taking the karelians’ shit and calling it their own and making a Greater Finland extending all the way to the Ural mountains or anything like that, no sir.
For some completely innocent reason Finland responded to the unprovoked aggression of the USSR by invading deep into the parts of Karelia that had never been legally parts of Finland or Sweden, building concentration camps, and having the northern half of the front full of german nazis. They promptly discovered that the karelians actually had a very different culture, a different religion, a different language etc. but it didn’t prevent them from liberating their brothers from the bolshevik menace taking the karelians’ shit and calling it their own, and if necessary imprisoning the karelians who objected. They also got promoted into honorary aryans instead of the disgusting mongol untermenschen they had previously been and this staggering discovery of new racial 100% truthinesses just coincidentally happened the exact same time Finland turned into a valuable ally for Nazi Germany.
Then they found out that invading Russia remains the absolutely fucking brilliant idea it’s always been, and got pushed back, but they were such a gigantic pain in the ass that they only lost the territory they had conquered from the USSR in the early 20s and were told to take out the trash in Lapland, which they promptly did. So yes, Finland did fight the nazis because Finland fought every single side in the war they could reach because finnish politicians are fucking geniuses. I think I said something about the finnish propensity to get drunk, start fights and organize labor (in the early 20th century Finland had the greatest popular support for socialists any country has ever had without resorting to dirty tricks to eliminate the competition).
Also, among the mandatory WW2 shenanigans are the way molotov cocktails got their name from finnish snark about soviet propaganda presenting incendiary bombs as food aid (molotov bread baskets), or the incident with the vodka warehouse when the finns were fighting the germans in Lapland over who would be allowed to take the sami people’s shit and call it their own (we’ll get back to this later).
After the war the winners made agreements to not let such things happen again, and Finland was, like all the other axis allies, thorougly denazified the only country which still retains the same basic system of government which had allied with the nazis and fought alongside them and built concentration camps etc. and to this day The flag of the President of the Republic of Finland has a swastika in it. It may be hard to see but it’s impossible to unsee. And if that’s not obvious enough, there’s the flag of the Air Force Academy with one really blatant swastika (it’s not upright and goosestepping in the german style, but drunkenly slumped over on its ass in the traditional finnish style), one subtle swastika, and in its physical incarnation the flagpole also has a swastika in it to make it absolutely certain that everyone knows that Finland is Swastika Country.
Then President Kekkonen happened. Finland is basically a third world cargo cult eastern bloc knockoff of Sweden (not that Sweden is actually that much better; it once gave a popular children’s book author a 102% tax rate because she hadn’t thought to gather enough deductions and tax evasion schemes), and Kekkonen is a brilliant example of what “democracy” means over here. He ruled from 1956 to 1982, after which everyone agreed not to let such things happen again and made explicit rules that presidents aren’t allowed to stay in office longer than two six-year terms, and began swiftly eroding the powers of the president.
In 1968 he was the candidate of five different parties. Thus the people had the extremely genuine and substantial and democratic choice between Redneck Kekkonen, Social Democrat Kekkonen, Communist Kekkonen, Swedish Kekkonen etc.
In 1973 the government decided that they don’t feel like holding elections because Kekkonen was going to win them anyway so they changed the constitution to extend his term by four years just because.
In 1978 Kekkonen was the candidate of almost every party; now the people could freely elect Crony Capitalist Kekkonen or Liberal Kekkonen as well. Social Democratic Kekkonen won with 74 electors, Redneck Kekkonen finished second with 64 electors and Communist Kekkonen was a close third with 56. I’m not bullshitting you.
In the 1980s Finland was really keen to first-world-ize without actually having a clue about how first-world financial systems work and crashed straight into a Great Depression Redux: Electric Boogaloo in the early 1990s. The Communist Party lost all its money in real estate speculation because they had wanted to become Donald Trump (I don’t think that’s how one is supposed to be doing communism…) and that’s why there is The Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party. Earlier in the 80s the Liberal Party joined the Redneck Party because being opposed to free markets and gays is exactly what liberalism means or something don’t ask me I don’t have a clue about how this works finnish politics simply make no sense okay.
Also, in 1972 Finland criminalized cannabis with a coin toss. The outcome of this literally random decision has since then been heavily entrenched in popular attitudes, new versions of Kalevala were censored to replace references to hemp with flax, the previously thriving and widely accepted use of medical marijuana withered away, and nowadays cops regularly commit illegal searches to catch hippies just in case they might have some weed on them for which they could be punished and placed in the drug abuser registries so they would be unable to get a job because if anything helps with drug “problems”, it’s becoming terminally unemployable.
And there is no recourse for the victims of illegal searches because the cops do whatever they want. The bureaucracies do whatever they want. The state does whatever it wants. Being on the wrong side of a high-trust society is really fucking scary because everyone else trusts the state when it’s lying through its teeth that the cops aren’t using lethal weapons against unarmed and mostly non-violent protesters (the cops started it), then stripping away all kinds of legal rights in jail and punishing people for the crimes that either nobody or at the very least somebody else committed (I know this because I have connections to places where the antifa actually honestly announce who did what without sugarcoating it, and people are given advice like “regardless of whether you did it or not, say this and do that”, so when someone there says they’re innocent I know they actually are because admitting guilt is the cred-earning move). 2015/12/06 never forget. That night like half my friends were locked up for protesting against very literal fascists. Also, the cops even protected the fash from a priest who was simply standing next to their march with a placard, doing nothing else. Meanwhile the fash shoot rockets and throw rocks at refugees, nobody gives a shit. Rural areas are like 1920s America with muslims playing the part of african-americans, lynching attitudes are fanned with false rape accusations, etc. and nobody gives a shit.
There is no constitutional court, instead MPs have a constitutional comittee which decides whether or not the law they’re preparing is constitutional, and it runs entirely on a honor system, aka. nobody gives a shit. The communists actually had a plan to make a revolution by getting a majority in the parliament, passing whatever laws they wanted and using their majority in the constitutional committee to declare those laws perfectly constitutional. It would’ve totally worked.
Finland has political prisoners, including one of my friends (however seh is in a form of house arrest which is available for some offenders whose sentences are short enough). There is actual conscription which means that anyone listed as “male” in the citizens’ ID registry must go into a shitty LARP in the woods to learn violence and obedience for 6-12 months, or alternatively face 12 months of forced labor or 6 months of prison. This is blatantly unconstitutional but nobody gives a shit. Jehovah’s Witnesses get an exemption, which is also blatantly unconstitutional but nobody gives a shit.
I myself got off the hook by claiming that the law decrees that “male citizens…” must do it, and I am not male, therefore I don’t need to do it. Trans people usually give their doctors’ papers and get a medical exemption, but I specifically refused to provide those because the doctors don’t determine whether I am male or not. I was ready and willing to take the question all the way to the highest human rights courts in Europe (which Finland usually promptly ignores and continues to do whatever violation of human rights it was doing), but the system noticed that I was actually liable to smash it and quickly wrote me a medical exemption (which is illegal because only the state-sanctioned monopoly clinics are allowed to give those diagnoses, but nobody gives a shit).
Finland is a colonialist oppressor country, which is quite a feat for a small european country which has never had any overseas colonies. What we do have is one of the last indigenous peoples in Europe, and especially one of the even laster indigenous peoples still relying significantly on their traditional livelihoods.
Taking the sami people’s shit is a centuries-old tradition and it works pretty much the same way taking native americans’ shit works across the pond. Cultural appropriation for halloween, international mining companies taking the land and giving people only polluted water in return. (In fact, in Finland it’s traditionally been so that anyone who finds minerals on someone’s land is allowed to take that land and keep the minerals to themselves. The mining companies don’t even need to clean up after themselves if their exploratory borings don’t indicate profitable ores because the state will tell the owner of the land to clean up the mess someone else made on their land without their permission, with their own money, or to face the consequences. Yes, this is a real thing which has actually happened.) The sami people faced attempts at eradication that can be rightfully considered cultural genocide.
Then when they started getting some compensatory rights, the Sami autonomous government’s (which doesn’t really have that much autonomy) ballot lists were stuffed with settlers on the basis that those finns’ ancestors had been listed as fishermen in some 19th century census. The Sami government protested, the exact same supreme court which had stuffed the ballot lists got the case and decided that it didn’t do anything wrong with its previous decision, and one actual sami politician quit in disgust. Even now ILO 169 isn’t ratified, constitutional language rights aren’t respected, the government doesn’t give back the land that was taken from the sami because because the previous governments didn’t give them receipts when taking their shit. Remember kids, when colonialists come to take your shit and call it their own, always ask for a receipt.
Then there’s the sterilizations of over 50 000 people (nowadays they’ve gone to the exact opposite extreme and it’s way too difficult to get voluntarily sterilized) which continued in Finland (and Sweden because yay nordic progressive humane social democracy!) way after eugenics went out of fashion elsewhere. Or the impressive number of 1700 lobotomies which per capita is really up there. Or the fact that trans people still technically have to be sterilized, although it’s a soft warm fuzzy hormonally-induced mostly-only-technical forced sterilization instead of the traditional “dragged screaming onto the operating table” forced sterilization.
ETA: then there’s also the Roma. Think “kind of like jews, but without the money and status” and you’ll know how they were treated. They arrived in Finland because Sweden wanted to get rid of them and unlike Australia, Finland was a place that was both already discovered and conveniently close by, so they were sent into the eastern colonies. In the 17th century it was legal to hang the men and exile the women and children for the heinous crime of existing while roma. In the 19th century the situation was better: the punishment for existing had been reduced to forced labor. The 20th century was a more civilized era, so instead of physical genocide, they decided to solve the question with cultural genocide because just letting different people exist side-by-side is not a very european thing to do. The official assimilation policy ended in the 70′s, being replaced by an informal assimilation policy of systematic discrimination. Even in 2016 there are lots of restaurants where roma aren’t welcome (although today the politically correct way to do it is tacit understanding instead of overt signs) and nobody gives a shit.
Relatively recently the cops beat a roma person for the traditional crime of being really suspicious without actually having committed anything illegal. There’s nothing really surprising about that, but the real kicker was that they were caught on tape. The evidence was supposed to be presented at the trial, but the USB stick broke. Because those things are just breaking apart everywhere all the time. And because nobody uses backups. And nobody ensures that the copies are secure before destroying the originals. Yeah. Sure. (Finnish cops are actually often too incompetent to operate anything, so I kind of see why they thought people would buy that explanation even though there’s a well-known tradition of cops and rent-a-cops turning the cameras away when they feel like someone deserves a beating and inconvenient things like the law are standing in the way of justice.)
(via socialjusticemunchkin)
3 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #this is a social democracy hateblog #this goddamn continent #finland is swastika country #death cw #alcohol cw · 76,997 notes · source: just-shower-thoughts · .permalink
multiheaded1793:
an-animal-imagined-by-poe:
Can anyone explain to me why all the candidates (on both sides) are so obsessed with preserving American manufacturing jobs? Even if that ship hadn’t sailed decades ago (there’s only so much one can do to reverse globalization and technological progress), factory work is dangerous and soul-crushing and has all kinds of environmental effects. I’m not saying I have a better solution here (except probably service sector growth is going to be key), but I can’t believe this is the thing we want to preserve.
Increased redistribution is obviously important. And that’s step one. But I don’t think it’s a complete solution - there’s always going to be a significant subset of the population who derive a lot of self-worth from supporting themselves and their families. But the fact that the economy is shifting drastically should be an opportunity to create ways to do that that don’t suck.
Workerist ideology is a thing. And it ain’t unfounded or completely deluded.
The thing is, manufacturing workers had, in the glory days of the labour movement, won certain (cultural, identity) etc things that most service industries’ workers had never conquered because of their relatively weaker bargaining positions and greater coordination difficulties.
People want dignity. People want pride. People want to feel like they have a position of power, that they are not easily crushed. The real solution would be for the service sector to advance, to become less associated with humiliation and disrespect, of course - but you really, really can’t blame people for the cultural nostalgia. Most everyone who’s been poor and humiliated can understand the allure.
Russia never had independent unions, but heavy manufacturing industry workers also had power, importance and the same kind of class pride here, a sense of social stability and respect that is the opposite of “class mobility” ideology. And it was a good deal for them. Something everyone ought to have.
The dignity of the working class is important. It makes for a stark difference in individual and community well-being. Most liberals and libertarians seemingly cannot understand this. Reactionary/nostalgic socialist idealization of the 20th century is not the answer, but it’s important to retake that ground - for everyone this time, not just the chosen (and white, male etc) labor aristocrat elite.
Right now, nobody really seems to alieve in the dignity of service work. That is a major fucking problem. It’s why Uber doesn’t even bother to inform customers that drivers are deactivated at 4,6. Service work is normalized as a position of utter powerlessness.
The service industry lacks dignity because people perceive their situations accurately. They’re pawns of a system they can’t win in, forced to alienate their labour in exchange for survival on others’ terms, their livelihoods subject to decisions far away by political powers and corporate towers. They have no alternative, no power to bargain with, and their chance to tell bad customers to fuck off is determined by the whims of their employers, many of whom are quite whimsical indeed.
Now if there only was something that could prove to these people, in pure material terms instead of political gestures we all know to be vacuous and filled with the same stuff as the silently despairing servicariat’s souls, that yes, you deserve to exist independent of the surplus value someone else can extract from you; that you are more than an inconveniently embodied and thus materially needy servitude to someone more lucky; that you may negotiate your own terms and genuinely reject work which you do not consent to; that it’s your inalienable birthright as a human being to be entitled to a livelihood.
In other news, what’s basically the finnish grey tribe caucus is publishing a draft proposal which basically summarizes as “We could totally afford to give people an unconditional $1000 a month, look upon our calculations ye mighty and despair!” while the Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party is pushing for something like $1200 (the details tend to be more vague but the spirit is the same).
3 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 55 notes · source: an-animal-imagined-by-poe · .permalink
