promethea.incorporated

Anonymous asked: I mean neoreaction is just an evolution of anarcho-capitalist ideas. Look at Peter Thiel: utterly typical alt-right person and also utterly typical libertarian person, and it's the same qualities and opinions that make him utterly typical of each. It just stands to reason that the alt-right and libertarians are of a kind. I think the alt-right are on an upswing and a lot of libertarians are going to join their ranks over the next decade.

Anarchocapitalism motivated by a desire to live in a specific way (get the government out of my patriarchy) instead of universal freedom is pretty easy to see as naturally evolving into NRx (get my patriarchy into the government).

For example Hoppe being like:

wirehead-wannabe:

Maybe my confusion is a consequence of not having read any Thiel, but I have no idea how you could go from ancapism to NRX. “Everyone should be able to make deals on their own without government influence.” Versus “we should bring back the monarchy and patriarchy.”

In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order

And such an attitude lends itself really well for reactionary bullshit. Especially if the balance of the proposal “okay everyone goes their own way and that’s fucking it” is broken and they start believing the authoritarian theory of government (that anything worth doing must be done with violence) if they aren’t allowed to do their kinks in peace with other consenting adults. If you remove a conservative ancap’s belief in the possibility of freedom the natural outcome is NRx who wants to impose their desired lifestyle upon everyone else instead of having everyone else’s desired lifestyle imposed upon them.

And I could rant massively about how this isn’t exactly surprising; regardless of whether it’s actually true or not, the horrendously code-bloated modern socdem state allows a lot of people to sincerely perceive themselves as the innocent victims of evily moochers and if the only alternative they see is a different oppression, not freedom, then that’s what they’ll support.

1 week ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #nrx cw · 44 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink

unknought asked: I suspect that your anon is taking Promethea's views (which they've described as trying to bridge the gap between ancoms and ancaps, among other things) as more representative of rationalism as a whole than they actually are. Anon, I think most of us are boring liberal statists, when it comes down to it.

sigmaleph:

What she said, anon.

actually, you probably shouldn’t assume any object-level belief strongly advocated by a rationalist is representative of the community without asking around.

Oh no you made me geek out on the history of libertarianism

Because anon was actually more correct than the explanation that it would be just about me

“Libertarian” in the 19th century meant just as laissez-faire as it means now, but the political alliances were reversed; they used to call us “voluntary socialists” because we considered ourselves allies of the labor movement and free enterprise against the state-supported capitalists and thought that a free society would be less inequal and oppressive.

(And that’s totally 100% true; without the Inclosure Acts and other such shit the dark satanic mills couldn’t have happened and the 18-19th century industrial capitalists were amazingly honest about how the entire point was to use the state to create a proletariat stripped of property so they could be forced into the mines and factories for a miserable living enriching others. (Every sin begins from treating people as product and so on…) Sometimes child labor was effectively legally mandated as parents weren’t allowed to work in the neighboring parish (or whatever they were called) so they had to send children instead even though there were unemployed adults who would’ve been willing to accept the jobs. And even during the Napoleonic wars the British army had more men keeping order in the industrial communities than fighting the French (anyone who’s played Civilization knows that thing where you put soldiers in a city so it stops rioting and that’s exactly what Britain did).)

Then Lenin happened, and everyone who was not a statist soon concluded that it was a terrible thing and the libertarian movement kind of split into two.

One part allied with right-wing statist capitalism against statist communism and the New Deal as it saw it as the lesser of two evils and over time mostly forgot that it was evil at all. That’s where the “points out every single law that favors the poor, and ignores every single law that props up the rich” type of “libertarian” comes from, or the type that triumphantly touts the $50B workers steal from bosses and disregards the $50B bosses steal from workers. Laissez-faire is not “pro-business”, laissez-faire is not “anti-business”, laissez-faire is “none of our business”.

(And real freedom in employment contracts inevitably implies at least a bare minimum of pro-union stance, and the absence of state intrusion in bargaining the details would make labor struggles meaningful as employers would need to give workers a deal worth taking but it would also simultaneously prevent redwashed rentiers from looting others. All in all I’d expect a freer market with fewer distortions to deliver everyone a money which is closer to the value they create than currently, and if workers are getting less than their true worth then they obviously would get more. Even if capital isn’t redistributed, one would expect its accumulation to lower its value over time as labor would become more of the limiting factor (there are some issues around automation and the control of human-displacing capital but “everyone who is not a robot loses their job and gets fired (upon)” is a very massive market failure). This line of thinking seems to be utterly alien to many non-libertarians, although I must say that those right-libertarians who are very R first with a really small l aren’t helping at all.)

Another part decided to go against both of them and usually got stomped every time (Ukraine, Kronstadt, Catalonia, etc.) and also lost its free-market laissez-faire ideals because those were now right-wing in the Big Ideology Fuckup of the 20th Century.

There were a few attempts at reconciliation eg. in the 60s when Vietnam made right-libertarians notice that the capitalist state was an oppressive piece of shit as well (eg. Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter Karl Hess switched sides to Emma Goldman because her writings were like Ayn Rand’s but with the boring parts stripped out; something that might appear completely incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t understand libertarianism), but Murray Rothbard decided that he wanted to appeal to “tight-assed conformists, who want to stamp out drugs in their vicinity, kick out people with strange dress habits, etc.” instead of the weirdos and founded “paleolibertarianism”. (As a weirdo, I decided that Rothbard was a total asshole.) And during the previous half-century the left got way too enarmored with social democracy and statism and when dissolving that system in the late 70s began opposing anything smelling of laissez-faire turned into a tribal symbol and an Important Hill To Die On. (You wouldn’t believe how frustrating it is to be surrounded by 5 million socdems who make Bernie Sanders look like Ron Paul in comparison. (By that I mean that he isn’t that socially liberal but he does propose low taxes. Yes, that’s Finland for you; where Bernie would be the low-tax candidate.))

And speaking of tribal symbols, the question of private property had alwas been divisive but I see that as kind of a ??? thing because there’s no way to enforce private property on a voluntary collectivist community without violence, nor is there a way to non-violently expropriate a community which maintains consensual private property, and neither side could destroy the other so making some kind of peace in the form of “agree to disagree, each side goes its own way and doesn’t fuck with the other’s stuff” is the only stable outcome anyway unless the entire world was instantaneously brainwashed into one or the other.

(And the division of that stuff would end up being such that ancoms would actually have some to begin with. For pragmatic reasons. By pragmatic reasons I mean that letting ancoms expropriate enough to have their ancommunities be actually economically viable is more economically efficient than dealing with a lot of disgruntled ancoms. Disgruntled ancoms with guns and a special interest in expropriating things, specifically. Even Murray Rothbard thought that capital owned by the state or businesses that receive enough tax money is a legitimate target for homesteading and thus there is a clear win-win solution in expropriating the state and its monopolist cronies for the ancommunities so ancoms can get a real job building their vision of a good society without bothering others or being bothered, while ancaps can run their own society instead of whining on reddit. And mutalists and other inbetweeners can inbetween freely.)

Ancaps usually recognize that there is nothing stopping ancoms from having ancommunities in ancapistan while ancoms tend to be vaguely uncomfortable around the opposite equivalent, usually evading the question with something like “but nobody would want it”; my opinion is that if a bunch of people want to live on a ship among themselves, bothering nobody, stopping them with violence makes one the bad guy. At that point I don’t care about lofty proclamations about how “that ship is made from materials that belong to everyone” or the other usual justifications some (but fortunately not all) ancoms give for why they would do violence to stop those people and take their ship; I’d be there, protecting their right to do whatever the fuck they want amongst themselves without bothering anyone else, with whatever amount of violence I need, and I’d probably go on the ship with them because if land is filled with people who won’t let people do some consensual thing among themselves because it would be immoral, I don’t want to live there. (this is totally going to end up misquoted in a call-out post some day as “promethea is an ancap” but do I look like I give a shit)

More abstractly, I can sidestep the issue of the morality of private property by looking at it with cynical pragmatism: in most of the possible outcomes, ancaps won’t, or more importantly can’t, prevent ancommunities; and ancoms can’t prevent ancapistan existing somewhere, so both could and should be happy with the deal of “let’s build a new society where we both can do our thing without bothering the other side”. What I think about the morality of property doesn’t matter for my anarchism because I wouldn’t impose my views on non-consenting people anyway, and I’m willing to ally with anyone who agrees with that.

(Intellectual property is an exception; when it comes to things like copyright and patents I’m 100% pirate and in favor of expropriating everything; people could obviously keep trade secrets and use DRM and make license contracts and that’s fair game, but breaking DRM and using cracked licensed software is totally fair game too.)

And about the word “libertarian”? I’ll let Murray Rothbard explain: “One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy… 'Libertarians’… had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over…”

And my response is that Rothbard is once again being a massive dickbag of an asshole and I’m not letting assholes monopolize that word.

But yeah, even right-libertarianism actually has its roots in the same soil as communism and the history is fascinating and people should learn it. (And Lenin and Stalin are assholes.)

1 week ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #this is a social democracy hateblog #this is an emma goldman fanblog #still bitter for '36 #i _may_ have a special interest in this topic #at least based on the word count #bitching about the country of birth #laissez-faire used to mean _stop trying to help us_ · 14 notes · source: sigmaleph · .permalink

sinesalvatorem:

Me: This is one of the things I’m most concerned about for having kids. If the price of college keeps ballooning stupidly, what will happen to my kids financially?

@endecision: They will be really smart and get scholarships?

Me: (I guess they’ll have to have “non-traditional” resumes, like mine :p)

@endecision: or go to App Academy

@endecision: or found a start-up or something

Me: Hopefully programming will still be a wide open free for all then, like it is now.

Me: But I expect the government to start regulating and licensing it, like it does with every other good profession, because regulatory capture is pure fucking evil.

Me: The people who won’t let you braid hair or unclog a toilet unless you bend over for the gatekeepers won’t keep letting people get rich without ruining themselves for very long.

@endecision: Yeah

Me: “You wouldn’t want a HACKER working for your bank, would you? Look at this poor grandma who had all her pension money stolen by an ebul hacker! If you want to keep hackers out of programming jobs, vote for prop 69 to tell all the self-taught programmers to go fuck themselves. They’re entitled Silicon Valley twats, anyway.”

stop you’re giving me nightmares

although at that point I guess we might as well just whip out the drone armies and take out the normies’ governments for good

if any normies are listening (I don’t think so but just in case) please do not force self-taught programmers to start a civil war

you would lose it and people would suffer and that would be sad

1 week ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 35 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink

ilzolende:

shieldfoss:

nentuaby:

sinesalvatorem:

shieldfoss:

Principled stances on taxation:

• “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
  
• “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
  

Unprincipled stances on taxation:

• “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
  

Tag yrself I’m a principled consequentialist.

This is… So silly. If the consequentialist position sounds wildly different from the “unprincipled capitalist” position then you really need to choose a completely different word than “theft” in all of the above, because you’re COMPLETELY failing to express what you’re trying to say by it.

There are important differences in the behavior of politicians who believe the one compared to politicians who believe the other.

One approach realizes that when you tax people, you hurt people. When you have the power to impose VAT on food items while children go hungry to bed, you have the power to hurt people. That is a grave responsibility, and should only be exercised when your taxation scheme helps people more than it hurts starving children.

The other approach, which I see too often, goes

Lol I want to signal that I am cultured, let’s fund the Royal Theatre by taxing important goods! Wait, there are starving kids in our country now how did that happen? Let’s tax luxury goods to help the kids. Poor alcoholics can no longer afford homes? Let’s tax cars exorbitantly. People die because they don’t replace old cars that don’t have the newest safety features? Let’s make those mandatory! Poor people can no longer afford to drive at all now? Well sucks to be poor I guess but cars aren’t a necessity.

What, you feel taxes are unjust? They’re the price you pay to live in civilization! Without them we wouldn’t have great things like the Royal Theatre but only the art that people like enough to pay money for without being forced to and that would be terrible.

I realize this isn’t primarily about mandatory art, but nonetheless mandatory art is the worst.

ugh that thing

that exact thing

one politician around here (from the Party Formerly Known as the Communist Party) has written an excellent piece on how “criminal law isn’t a list of facebook likes” and I just want to live somewhere where the government budget isn’t treated as a list of facebook likes either

(via ilzolende)

2 weeks ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink

The most infuriatingly misleading rhetoric from politicians

sdhs-rationalist:

sinesalvatorem:

marcusseldon:

“It’s time to put the politics aside/stop shouting/grow up and get to the hard work of Solving Problems TM.”

Yeah, except the reason you can’t get to “solving” “problems” is that people can’t even agree on what values should underlie those solutions, what the problems even are, what means are acceptable as solutions, and so on. It’s like they pretend their solutions are obvious and their opponents agree but are being petty for no reason.

YES. This. It is so hard to have a conversation with someone about solving a problem when no one notices that they have drastically different ideas about how the world works.

*cough* minimum wage *cough cough*

#endorsed

this is why I always always try to get people to define their terms when it comes to values and consequences

which helps, but only partially

@ambivalencerelations/@insideitsdifferent, whichever you go by these days

2 weeks ago · tagged #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor #this is a social democracy hateblog #nothing to add but tags · 38 notes · source: marcusseldon · .permalink

shieldfoss:

argumate:

shieldfoss:

argumate:

leviathan-supersystem:

i do actually think a communist revolution in Japan or Australia would increase life expectancy- primarily because of free housing and the consequent end of homelessness. Plus the proposed platform of the Japanese Communist Party seems to me to be preferable to the policy of the current Japanese government.

Momentum is building for ending homelessness by giving people homes, there has already been a trial program in Melbourne with promising results.

It’s based on cost reduction instead of ideology, but what can you do.

Are there empty homes in Australia/Japan that could be given to the homeless? “Free housing” kind of requires there to be housing to give away freely and if the housing market is a free market,* then the price of housing already accurately reflects how much is available.

If they’re not giving homes away for almost free, then: There are fewer homes than are demanded or there is a market intervention that makes it bad business to earn a dollar by selling a $4 home for $5.

(My guess is: “Both.”)

My actual guess is: There are probably empty homes available for very cheap, but they’re far away from urban centers where the homeless want to be. All the homes near urban centers are either already lived in or very temporarily empty and giving the temporarily empty to the homeless just means the people who would have bought them e.g. when moving to the city to pursue their career now cannot buy that home.

This is definitely a problem locally - we have (rounded numbers) 2.5 million homes for 5 million people, that is, 1 home for every two people. The average family is 4 people. That is: We have more than enough homes, I could buy a house for less than a single years wage. A shitty house far from everywhere I want to be, but I can. Instituting communism would not solve our homelessness problem because our homelessness problem is caused by the fact that our homeless would rather be homeless than live in their assigned homes, far from their community of fellow homeless. Where they want to be is in the city centers, and no amount of communism will make land value in the city center go down, it will, at most, make it illegal to make housing decisions based on land value (Hint: this is a terrible idea.)

*hahaha i slay :(

Technically there are plenty of empty homes in the city centre, although these tend to be expensive apartments being held by investors.

Homelessness is typically an intersection of various mental health conditions that make it difficult to hold a job or even access welfare payments, thus making it impossible to rent accommodation. It turns out that insisting people solve this before giving them access to housing doesn’t work well, and that putting people in secure homes makes it a lot easier to manage whatever it was that was messing them up in the first place, creating a self-sustaining system.

Apparently this has been tried in Utah to good effect, although I don’t know much about that.

I mean yes there can be various instances of market failure in allocating new housing, but that is not the major issue when homelessness is considered.

Technically there are plenty of empty homes in the city centre, although these tend to be expensive apartments being held by investors.

That would be:

or there is a market intervention that makes it bad business to earn a dollar by selling a $4 home for $5.

Specifically, it is the market intervention that you’re not allowed to kick people out with a days notice. Those investment companies would love to rent those apartments out for any dollar amount higher than the maintenance cost of renting them out, but that makes them harder to sell because they cannot kick out the renters if the new owner doesn’t want them.

But yes absolutely, there are more, other issues than “homes in city centers are expensive for a reason.” That’s just the first, most obvious issue.

Humorous anecdote time:

I remember a day ~10 years ago when I was still a student. I lived in 36 square meters for approximately USD 600.

I received an offer from an alcoholic I met at the train station - he’d rent out his ~80 m2 apartment to me for $300, because it was an apartment assigned to him by the state - that is, for free - in a city he didn’t want to live in. He’d rather go be homeless in the capital with an income of my $300 than stay in this city where he didn’t know anybody and had nothing to do but drink alone and chat with strangers on the train station. Solving his problem wouldn’t take free housing - he had that - it would take “free housing in the location where he wanted,” which, pro-tip, is also where everybody else wants to live so good luck with that.

I didn’t take his offer, but say that I did. I guess the market value of his apartment rent was probably around $800 or so, we’ll go with 800 for easy math. That means that the state pays $800 to him. He then gives $800 worth of housing to me, in return for $300 from me.

In an attempt to solve the homelessness problem, the state has spent $800 to give me, the son of wealthy parents, $500 worth of housing subsidies and him, the alcoholic, $300 drinking money to spend while homeless. A++ governance, vote Communist for more economic efficiencya solution to the housing crisis.

I swear, my anarchist sentiments are not from fuck-you-got-mine, they’re from the fact that the state actively ruins value. Close all services and subsidies, Universal Basic Income starts today.

I swear, my anarchist sentiments are not from fuck-you-got-mine, they’re from the fact that the state actively ruins value. Close all services and subsidies, Universal Basic Income starts today.

Nordic anarcho-welfarists roll call, #2 reporting in!

Also, is there a name for the phenomenon where governmnent attempts to address individual discrimination (such as the landlord kicking out perfectly nice tenants because they don’t like their face) end up creating systematic discrimination instead (such as landlords refusing to take tenants from certain marginalized groups because they don’t want to bear the risk of getting a shitty tenant they can’t kick out)?

(via shieldfoss)

1 month ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor · 82 notes · source: leviathan-supersystem · .permalink

multiheaded1793:

thirqual:

neoliberalism-nightly:

thirqual:

multiheaded1793:

“It’s not only undesirable but *literally impossible* to afford basic social infrastructure or redistribute basically anything, so suck it up” is perhaps the most amazing article of faith I’ve seen among US-style libertarians.

Yup, it’s like Western Europe does not exist.

What if EU implodes and Western EU except Germany just go into full crisis?

You have to admit that the fiscal situation in most of Western Europe is not pretty and Brexit, Greece and peripherals really could be ticking time bombs. You can say money are just numbers on paper, but they really do reflect something fundamental even if non-obvious and distorted.

Like I don’t think I need to say that it’s entirely plausible that by making today nice it could make the future a lot worse, since that’s what more or less Greece did. In this case whoever they imported stuff that they can’t make easily stopped giving them imports because they can’t come up with those numbers in their bank account.

It’s easy to say pretty words, and I’m sure rich people as a whole are incredibly good at that. But if they are really less charitable than the average person, from that article I saw floating around, then probably you (idk what’s your objective, but just a reasonable guess xD) need to be careful there. Since we also can agree they are probably very good at dodging bills too. And just let you know I want those skills too for obvious reasons because I believe with good faith and careful consideration that it’s in my best interest to do so.

“We” might not be able to resist completely, but we are really good at it!!! And our resistance makes us less productive and also incidentally salt the earth for the rest of you as well. And who knows, I feel maybe, just maybe you people here actually will be pursuing your objective better if you kept us around and just tried to focus on structuring things better than to trying to take more and more blindly without focusing on the logistics. But then again this is like the whole strategy from a subgroup of us who’s politically connected. Because I’m pretty sure bureaucratic power must stroke someone’s fetish out there as well.

And honestly my charitable mood from my childhood over the years gradually turned sour from seeing how entitled people can be, so who knows. I don’t think I’m the only one here who might put up extra effort into resisting just because ~feelings~ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Greece? You want to invoke Greece in the last 6 years to caution against the successes of Western Europe since 1950 (arguably, since Bismark in the German Empire) ?

A crisis which was in part due to corruption, widespread tax evasion and financial advisors from Goldman Sachs advising the Greek government to misreport their level of debt ?

Where did the economic crisis began by the way¹ ? Oh yeah, a boom-and-bust cycle in the USA.

And then you want to argue why it is desirable for you to acquire those ‘skills’ ?

“Take more and more blindly” does not represent the reality. Increasing volumes of tax evasion, weaker enforcement of tax laws, greater sophistication of tax avoidance, on the other hand…

Nice veiled threats too and spite against the “entitled”. Thanks for reminding me why I am for very large punitive damages for tax evasion.

(note: even the IMF says that only in extreme cases redistribution lead to bad growth outcomes)

¹not that the Greek situation was stable, mind you.

Yep, the veiled threats and the laughable… petulant tone really got me as well. Also, nice passive-aggressive essay in the tags there…. Pretty words this ain’t.

Tagged with: politicsreference for discussioni honestly think with existing revenue you people already can do a lotyou also can reform god dam corporate tax and stuffand that will raise revenue and growthand you can reform welfareand bite the fking bullet and end protectionismmaybe if you people even did a bit rather than exacerbating it more I wouldn’t have gone to the other campbut I’m deep in there now and you won’t ever get me back except make me disinterested in topics like thiswhich is what I’m trying to do because I want $$$$$$$$$$

Okay seriously, I do agree with NN on a lot of this. The socialdemocracies of Western Europe are not in trouble because of the inaffordability of redistribution, they are in trouble because of the inaffordability of all the bullshit they’ve tacked onto the redistribution.

Finland could pay every single person a basic income of 15 000€ a year without increasing taxes a single cent. That’s almost double the minimum pension, nearly three times the spending money people on welfare get (along with rent, and significantly more than the highest amount welfare pays out even with rent included), and more than what tens of thousands of working poor earn. And as a result poor people’s effective marginal tax rate would go way down from the 50-100% it’s now.

And this includes children. Right now the state pays, at most, 4000€ per child; free education, healthcare and childcare would end but the extra 11 000€ a year would go a long way in letting poor families access the services they need. Or if we want to account for the fact that not all families would know to purchase the right insurance etc. and spend 5000€ per child per year in providing vital services to them we would “only” up the money children directly get to 10 000€ a year.

And obviously this massive basic income would render pretty much any tax scheme progressive, so we could drastically simplify the tax code. I don’t even know what the true transparent flat tax level would be because the system is so complicated with all kinds of hidden fees and multi-level taxes, but it would make things simpler. If one assumes that, after privatizing all other forms of social security (15k€ is already more than a lot of people make even from the income-dependent benefits) the income tax level would end up a transparent 40%, someone earning another nominal 15k€ on top of the basic income would get to keep 24k€ to themselves. Easy, simple, not hard to calculate. (And if it sounds ridiculously high, one should note that currently around 25% of people’s wages goes straight to pensions but it’s hidden so they only see 7% as “”“the employer pays”“” the rest (they buy it because most people cannot into math))

But the tax system itself could use some (and by “some” I mean “an awful lot of”) change; property taxes should be replaced with land value taxes, income taxes could be shifted onto consumption, a revenue-neutral carbon tax should be instituted, corporate taxes taken only from dividends to owners, etc.

And we could end so many laws. Who needs regulations on working hours, minimum wages and benefits when one has the 15k€ option to simply tell the boss to screw themselves if a job offer is unacceptable? (only statists) Ending corporatism and freeing both employers and unions to negotiate without external coercive intervention would make the economy a lot more responsive to changes, and everyone has that 15k a year to fall back on even if they end up without work (and a lot of bureaucrats rightfully would), along with any savings they have. That’s a lot more than what most working-class people currently would get from unemployment insurance.

Privatizing public services and state-owned corporations would be most naturally done by handing ownership to their users and workers; so schools would be owned by parents and teachers, universities by students and professors, buses by drivers, etc.; this would prevent a massive transfer of wealth and capital from the state to cronyist oligarchs while allowing all service providers to participate equally on the markets. Finland is one of the per capita richest countries in the world because of its absolutely bloated pension funds (in fact, to such an extent that the national debt is effectively -80% of its nominal value) and this money could be either used as the basis of a post-labor universal capital fund, or immediately redistributed to everyone as an investment account of 15 000€ while keeping enough in reserve to cover the national debt (of course, paying out the debt would be folly when the interest rates are around zero but the return on investments is several percent; any sane corporation would borrow and invest on such terms).

Furthermore, this would completely decimate the non-productive parts of the economy, freeing both labor (which is not desperate and exploitable because remember that 15k€ a year?) and money to productive things (of course, ex-bureaucrats would be so pissed at having to learn how to do good things to people, but you know what scorn dem).

The private sector would be almost as dramatically rearranged as the previously public sector, as artificial industries such as agriculture (where something like 50% [fucken sic] of revenue comes from subsidies instead of selling things people want to buy) and exploitation of forced labor (the current welfare system is inhumane and there are basically sweatshops where disabled people work for 1,5€/h [fucken sic] making scarves rich ~designer~ assholes sell for 300€ a piece, pocketing the difference) would be flattened into the economic equivalent of a glowing glass parking lot. The ensuing stimulus of domestic demand and the abolition of many cumbersome regulations would open up massive opportunity for people to make a value-creating living while reducing the economy’s dependence on big businesses. The abolition of regional subsidies and artificial limits on the housing supply of Helsinki would trigger a significant movement into the big cities where jobs are available, workers productive, and services cost-efficient.

And if one wants to get really hardcore, abolishing patents and copyrights would be a pretty huge move. Suddenly obscene barriers on innovation would be wiped away and people wouldn’t need to waste time figuring out whether they need to push lots of paper just because someone else “owns” a number, and drugs and many other things would get dramatically cheaper.

And they should totally build the hyperloop between Turku and Stockholm.

Without an increase of a single cent in taxes.

Yeah, it would be quite a drastic shock doctrine. A glorious, magnificent shock doctrine leaving behind only the ashes of the old system. Ashes which the seeds of freedom and poor people finally not being treated shittily could blossom from. A beautiful, terrifying cataclysm of creative destruction. The value-destroyers and parasites would feel the pain of righteous vengeance, a pain which would be far less than what they had previously imposed on others because 15k€ a year.

But instead, we have some “”“engineer”“” who got lucky and became a millionaire prime minister despite having no economic or political savvy whatsoever, and whose dream seems to be to become the Thatcher of Finland; a dream he pursues mainly by trying to become as widely hated as Thatcher was/is, and assuming the rest follows on its own.

1 month ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #i am worst capitalist #win-win is my superpower #this is a social democracy hateblog · 37 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ozymandias271:

maxiesatanofficial:

maxiesatanofficial:

Wait a goddamn second political alignment charts are literally the same exact thing as D&D alignment grids. What the shit

• Lawful Good: True State Socialism
  
• Lawful Neutral: Left-leaning liberals
  
• Lawful Evil: “moderate” liberals, neocons
  
• Neutral Good: [Impossible due to the nature of politics?]
  
• True Neutral: South Park libertarians, Legal Weed Capitalists
  
• Neutral Evil: people obsessed with “states’ rights”
  
• Chaotic Good: Anarcho-communists, the Yippies
  
• Chaotic Neutral: Vermin Supreme
  
• Chaotic Evil: militia groups and anarcho-capitalists
  

tag yourself I’m true neutral

I’m seeing that Neutral Good is unoccupied territory and seizing it to be the refuge of all “I don’t really know the specifics but we should have post-scarcity and freedom and niceness and 3d-printers for all and nobody voting on anyone’s body” people

I thought given it’s between between state socialism and Anarcho-communists, “Social Democracy“ was the obvious idea to slot there.

No, socdems are LN in this one; NG is a continuation from “states’ rights” to “weed capitalists” to X so it’s some kind of egalitarian minarchism which is close enough for these purposes.

But that doesn’t include the idea that we are obligated to help each other, which joins state socialism and anarcho-communism.

Curses, maybe OP was right.

“We are obligated to help each other, so the state should get out of the way and stop hindering it by trying to micromanage human interaction, but it should ensure a sufficient basic income because that’s very important and can’t be left to chance”

The axes are perfectly coherent: Lawful = big government, Neutral = small government, Chaotic = no government; Good = equality, Neutral = (as Vermin Supreme puts it) “letting shit fall where it may”, Evil = hierarchy.

Thus the Neutral Evil/Neutral/Good becomes:

small government for purposes of hierarchy (“states’ rights” is often basically a very transparent euphemism for “the federal government shouldn’t be able to stop us from reinstating slavery”)

small government for purposes of letting shit fall where it may (soft libertarianism)

small government for purposes of equality (which some kind of welfare minarchism would be pretty much exactly; (arguably a post-scarcity society might be closer to “letting shit fall where it may” and I personally might be actually closer to Chaotic Neutral in this chart (except quite pragmatic about it and thus approaching True Neutral most of the time or something) but I wanted to impose my desire of not allowing impossibilities on this one and the politics of niceness and helping each other were a good fit with neutral good (as I said I don’t really know the specifics and we just should have a good society with no poverty or voting on people’s bodies and I’m not lawful enough to let the letter of the chart override the spirit of neutral good)))

In comparison: Lawfuls are:

big government for hierarchy (imperialism, authoritarianism)

big government for letting shit fall where it may (social democracy is not exactly known for its anti-statist ideals; the people making “governmentisgood.com” websites about how the mortgage deduction is supposedly not an indirect way of robbing the poor to subsidize the homeowning middle class which is more well-off to begin with than those who don’t own homes, but instead “a good thing your tax moneys pay for” (oh sure, it’s my tax moneys all right, paying for someone else’s McMansion because I’m the kind of a person who doesn’t want to get tied down to property and thus the state shall scorn me financially to punish my degenerate lifestyle (I’m not a fan of landlords but they do create some value by enabling me to not own my own housing so I can move somewhere else really easily in pursuit of opportunities and/or cute people)) and defending things like “the state should regulate the opening hours of grocery stores” and doing all the big government apologia tend to disproportionately be socdems who don’t see all the harms they are causing with reckless applications of the State and PoliceMob; and it notably rejects the more aggressive leveling of Actual Socialism in favor of simply regulating the excesses of statist crony capitalism (or less charitably, sweeping them under the rug by its tendency to be unwilling to address the root causes like dysfunctional markets which, combined with the absence of meaningful alternative ways of acquiring sustenance, together permit the existence of such abominations as “shitty jobs for poor people” in the first place) thus it belongs here; of course it could be that “social democracy” means different things in different places, but I definitely live in one, am desperately trying to get away from there, and can tell that around here “social democracy” means Jantelaw, mind-bogglingly unnecessary regulation (San Francisco is certainly trying though, but it’s a neophyte in comparison) voting on people’s bodies, and “omfg you (mostly) americans aren’t going to believe how much of the value we create is seized by the state” (in Finland 24% VAT on most things, up to ~35% progressive national income tax, ~16-23% municipal income tax depending on location (with a flat deduction for the first few thousand euros a year) ~25% payroll tax for pensions, 20% corporate tax, ~30% capital gains tax, and extra taxes on specific things; and Sweden once taxed a childrens’ book author 102%[sic])))

big government for equality (statist socialism)

And Chaotics:

no government for purposes of hierarchy (basically “we have guns, you don’t, so we tell you what to do; should’ve gotten guns of your own if you didn’t want this to happen”)

no government for purposes of letting shit fall where it may

no government for purposes of equality

1 month ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #this is a social democracy hateblog #psa: do not tumblrpost in lisp please #be smart don't be like promethea who tumblrposts in lisp · 144 notes · source: maxiesatanofficial · .permalink