Well, I guess it is fair for someone that manages those resources full time to get their payment for their management labour from those pool of resources no? The implementation is what must be very strictly looked out for and be as transparent as possible. It is why we have created a country along with its governmental system. Now, whether ANY currently implemented system is perfect or not is another debate.
Well it’s not everyone, both those things effect people differently. Even if I live in a country with decaying infrastructure- if I barely go outside it doesn’t effect me that much. Or, I may value infrastructure or the climate differently than you.
it does. if you barely get out of the house you still need that infrastructure to get food, energy and sewer service delivered to you, regardless of how important you judge it to be. society is a big web of interconnected people and services.
There are plenty of people who homestead. Are they at least out of the we? And I never disagreed that most people rely on each other. Instead I disagree that that mutual reliance makes a collective of people with the same desires, interests, and goals.
im not really saying they have all common interests, but that they overlap.
someone who is completely off the grid will also get affected by the rest of the world’s industrial and energy policy due to climate change and polution too.
no one person is single handedly making decisions for everyone else on a given subject.
No, as I said, the best you can get when you have a unrestricted democratic government is the majority making decisions for the minority. That’s still not good.
Every new business model now is just insinuating themselves into an existing structure so they can grift/leech money out for themselves. They call it “innovation “.
Yea but gofundme doesn’t rely on neighborliness as a function of their business. Why not just use gofundme instead of this. Next Door is full of weirdos and relies on the same right?
Your example was on Google Chrome, and your example said you had tabs opened with searches, so I assumed you were using chrome. I guess bad assumption though…
Can you name a functional civilization without oppressing some minority populations? Does that mean oppressing minority populations is good or necessary?
After they enriched themselves by pillaging the work of others. Also let’s not forget the widespread (almost 100%) abortion of those diagnosed with down syndrome pre-birth. So when you prevent the disadvantaged from even being born its pretty easy to not oppress them. Furthermore, Iceland like the rest of Europe, does have a bit of bullying of Polish(and other) migrants- but I have no clue how wide spread it is.
Can you name a functional civilization without oppressing some minority populations?
If you meant, “can you name a functional civilization without their ancestors oppressing some minority populations at some unspoken point in the past?” Then no, no I can’t. And it’s a stupid question.
I wrote the initial goalpost, you interpreted differently than I intended. Okay, so then acknowledge the two other things I pointed out that are addressing how you interpreted what I wrote.
Are you fucking shitting me? You’ve had post after post to make the claim that I misinterpreted you and you’re suddenly only doing it now? Sorry, I don’t buy that for a second.
Why? Because you’re trying to weasel out of the fact that you asked a very straightforward question and I gave you a very straightforward answer, which you still refuse to accept.
Saying “no your insult of me is wrong” is totally useless. But apparently if I don’t explicitly say it you will then use that to attack me. So no, your insult of me is wrong. I was referring to civilizations that were built without oppression. I gave 1 example of oppression that led to the building of Iceland, and 2 examples of ongoing oppression. You decided to latch onto one because you interpreted it as me saying continuous oppression. I called out you not addressing the rest and you ignored it. So yeah no, I don’t really have an interest in talking to someone who seeks to maliciously interpret people.
FOSS has no taxes, people support the projects they like on their own volition, this ensures that the money goes to where it’s supposed to instead of bombing foreign countries or oppressing local communities. I see no reason why this system couldn’t scale.
I never said that there should be no taxes, but I’m also not going to pretend that there isn’t a degree of duress, coercion, extortion, non-consent which I consider fundamentally evil, perhaps a necessary one but evil nonetheless and I think it should be minimised.
I thought that was a rhetorical question so I answered to what I thought was the spirit of it: An example of a functional system voluntarily supported by the community.
To answare your unrhetorical question: No. I can’t think of a tax free civilization, but if I asked you 150 years ago to give me an example of a functional civilization where men and women had equal rights and people weren’t discriminated against based on their race or sexual orientation or of functional space faring civilization you probably couldn’t give me an example either. Just because something hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it can’t or that we shouldn’t try to make it.
Why, if the bridge will be beneficial to the community why wouldn’t it set up a donation goal to build it? If enough people want it i.e. the percived value of it is greater than the percived value of money they’re donating it will succeed, if not, it will fail because the community voted with their wallets that it wasn’t worth it and they would rather put their money somewhere else.
Exactly this, even in Foss we see a similar issue wherein large corporations can use the programs but provide no return value to the project itself.
Taxes are supposed to be a way to get rich people and corporations to pay their fair share, unfortunately in the US at least, regulatory capture, lobbying and propaganda has made it so that the scales are so extremely tipped in the rich and Corp favor that it’s in no way a fair system at present.
I agree. A lack of fair taxation does not mean that the concept of taxation is bad. It means it’s improperly (or properly, depending on who you are I guess) implemented.
Then they would have to count on external investment or aid or collect money over a longer period. That is no different than the current system, richer countries, states, neighborhoods have better infrastructure. The difference is that the collected money stays in the community and goes towards what the community wants and needs instead of what the politicians think it needs and filling their pockets in the process.
What if the political class is corrupt and uses the tax money and their possition of power to fill up their own pockets, bailout banks and corporations owned by their billionaire friends and family members making them invulnerable to competition ensuring they’ll control the market, oppress the population to the point that it has no capacity to resist and even if it did it wouldn’t have the time nor strength to do so after working all day just to stay alive? What if the corporations collude with the politicians to introduce loop holes into tax law so that they don’t have to pay them and if they can’t do that they’ll just trickle-down the cost onto the workers and consumers by increasing prices or lowering wages?
You can’t dismiss a system based on theoretical “what if” edge cases, especially in the face of common everyday reality that we’re all living.
The world isn’t perfect and we can’t afford to act like it is. What we can do is try things out, see what the result is and act accordingly. If you tried to bring down a tree by punching it and it broke your hand you wouldn’t just punch it harder next time, you’d try something else. The same goes for the tax system, no matter how much money we’ll shovel into it, it won’t fix the underlying issue. It doesn’t have to be perfect, nothing is, and dismissing anything short of it won’t get us anywhere.
Because you can always make up a theoretical “what if” edge case and the counter argument to it is a real world “this is happening right now” endemic.
I’d also appreciate if you’d post an answare to my entire argument instead of picking a single point and answering it with a question, otherwise this discussion won’t be very productive.
What if the political class is corrupt and uses the tax money and their possition of power to fill up their own pockets, bailout banks and corporations owned by their billionaire friends and family members making them invulnerable to competition ensuring they’ll control the market, oppress the population to the point that it has no capacity to resist and even if it did it wouldn’t have the time nor strength to do so after working all day just to stay alive? What if the corporations collude with the politicians to introduce loop holes into tax law so that they don’t have to pay them and if they can’t do that they’ll just trickle-down the cost onto the workers and consumers by increasing prices or lowering wages?
This is happening right now, to everyone, saying that something bad might theoretically happen to a small amount of people if the system changes does not justify sticking to a broken, fundamentally evil, anti-human, extorcionistic system of finantial rape.
Im arguing that it’s counterproductive to try to extract good out of something fundamentally evil and prone to abuse no matter how good your intentions are and that it’s a good idea to replace it with something fundamentally good even if it’s not perfect.
We can argue whether taxation is a necessary evil or not but if you can’t see evil in forcefully taking away any sovereignty from an individual, financial sovereignty included I think further discussion is futile and the best we can do is agree to disagree.
As for the poll you linked, or any other poll that doesn’t ask something along the lines of “do you think we should change our public funding scheme to (description)” is not a valid measure of support in this case (the way the question is phrased I might even say yes to it) and certainly not a valid measure of what’s good or evil. Not too long ago majority of people thought it’s ok to enslave other people because they looked different or castrate them because they loved different or lock them up for having a certain plant, the list goes on…
It’s not rape, he only put in <50% of the shaft. You’re not paralyzed, you still have full control over your left arm and leg. You’re not a slave, you can do what you want after you are done working the fields. It’s not theft they only took half your money.
And, again, opinion of the majority has no effect on morality of the action.
Everyone has their own sens of morality, the way that the majority feels about something has nothing to do with the way that the individual feels about it. Otherwise anyone who holds an unpopular opinion or even the act of holding one would automatically make one immoral, and inversely having the same opinion as the majority would make one moral even if they are a nazi in 1939 Germany.
Your point was that if majority says something is good it is good and if majority says something is bad it is bad, which is not the case. There are plenty of examples where majority said that something is good and it was bad (genocides, oppression of minorities etc.) and when majority said something was bad and it was not (“witches”, science etc.).
My point was that you can’t use “majority thinks so” as a definition of what’s moral and what’s not.
I think taxation is evil, you don’t, we can talk about it and try to come to an agreement or agree to disagree, but our feeling on the matter don’t change the the facts that taxes are taking away sovereignty from an individual, that they are abused by politicians for the benefit of their families and friends, that they give unfair advantage to large corporations and stifle competition, that at the end of the day taxes are payed by workers and consumers and their biggest beneficiaries are banks and corporations…
You are free to think that everything I listed is good, but i’d appreciate if you told me why you think so.
How do you define what moral separated from what societies agree upon? Again, does a god decide what is moral? Do you specifically decide what is moral? If you specifically are the arbiter, that again goes to my point that just because you think taxes are immoral, the fact that very few people agree with you mean you will never get your way.
I decide what is moral based on my moral compass. I think that taking any sovereignty from people is evil, sometimes necessary, but still evil. I told you why I think so, now you can tell me why you disagree.
I think the system is fundamentally evil becouse it is founded on something that I think is evil. This is my opinion. You can disagree with it, but tell me why.
I can’t find anything paradoxical in the statement “I think the system is evil at the most basic level”, but if you do, I’m sorry for misspeaking, I hope that after this clarification you can see what I was trying to convey.
Will you now respond to the substance of the argument or continue to avoid it by asking questions and arguing about semantics?
The substance of your argument is based on your subjective opinion. There’s nothing to answer. Taxation will continue to be a thing regardless of your subjective opinion.
The substance of the argument is why do you think taxation is better than the system I proposed. I told you why I think taxation is bad and I told you why I think my system would be better.
I explained why very clearly- when applied fairly, it distributes money to places where it is most needed, whether people want to pay for those places to improve or not.
Your system would result in things like the small, very poor black neighborhood in a Southern town never getting any improvements because the white people with money are a bunch of racists. With taxes, they don’t have a choice. Good.
This is the what if edge case we ware talking about before, it’s a worst case scenario based on the assumption that majority of people are racist and don’t want to help each other, and even though I don’t belive that is the case and my opinion is supported by the countless amount of charities and non profits, sure, potentially that is something that could happen. The reason why this is an acceptable risk is because the alternative is what we have today, corrupt, wasteful, broken system of extortion where poor stay poor and rich get richer and puting more money into it won’t fix it.
And the current tax funded system clearly doesn’t prevent that and putting more money into it seems to only make it worse. Maybe if the people in those neighborhoods could decide how they want to invest their money and the money given to them by charities and donations instead of being dependent on their racist mayor doing the right thing and investing in their community instead of taking the money for himself and his community that would change.
Yes, we have already established that the system as it is now is not fair.
Maybe if the people in those neighborhoods could decide how they want to invest their money and the money given to them by charities and donations instead of being dependent on their racist mayor doing the right thing and investing in their community instead of taking the money for himself and his community that would change.
They don’t have money to invest because they’re poor. You do understand what poverty is, yes?
The poor pay taxes too, in fact they pay the highest percentage of their income because they have to spend most of their income and can’t afford to invest or save. By removing the burden of taxes you give them additional funds that they could invest, save or spend on necessities and let charities, non profits, donations fund infrastructure. What’s more beneficial to a poor person, extra 2 meters of road in their neighborhood or doubling their paycheck?
Sales tax, gas tax, utilities tax, property tax directly or included in rent, excise, all of the taxes imposed on businesses and their owners trickle down to the consumers because they have to increase the price of their products and services to cover what they pay in taxes. Every single tax is always pushed onto the last link in the chain - the consumer, and the poor have to spend the biggest part of their paycheck on consumption.
But the idea of a tax system is flawed to the point that it’s impossible to apply it fairly because the consumer is always the one paying, no matter what you change you can’t get away from it.
Doesn’t matter if you’re Elon Musk or a regular guy you both eat the same amount, sure a regular guy will get a $5 hotdog every day and Elon will get $500 stake every day but that’s peanuts compared to what his companies are supposed to pay and in reality is covered by regular everyday consumers.
Let’s say you are a rich guy who works in a bread oven factory who makes $10000 a month, then a new tax gets introduced and now you are making $8000. You can accept it and take a hit to your standard of living or go to your boss and ask for a raise so you and your colleagues ask for a raise, your boss used to make $100000 a month now he makes $70000 because of the new tax and increased cost. He can accept it and take a hit to his standard of living or increase the prices, so he increases the prices. Now in some bakery one of the bread ovens breaks and needs to be replaced. Because the prices of bread ovens increased the bakery has to charge more for the bread that it’s making to cover the costs. Because the prices of bread increased every customer of the bakery goes to their boss and asks for a raise or increases the prices in their business and so on and so on…
That’s how the tax gets pushed onto the consumer with a side of inflation.
I’m not familiar with your example but how do you know it didn’t happen? Have you checked the prices of goods and services from the companies whose owners and employees were hit by it?
You gave me a supposed real world example where something didn’t happen. I asked how do you know it didn’t happen and you said you don’t know how and you don’t even know if it happened or not. It’s the proof for me being wrong that you decided to cite.
You can prove a negative, it’s difficult so I don’t know why you chose to try to do it but it’s possible. I can prove you weren’t in my house an hour ago by having a recording of my house being empty or a recording of you being somewhere else. In this case a good proof would have been the same price on a receipt for the same product from affected company from before the tax was introduced and now, if enough time has passed for it to take effect. I realize that it’s not reasonable to expect you to have a proof like that but if you can’t disprove my claim then don’t lie by citing “real world examples” and point out the flaw in my logic instead, unless there isn’t one. Otherwise it’s just wishful thinking on your part and basically saying “I think that you’re wrong despite not knowing why and having no reason to think so”.
If you want to tell me how it’s possible to prove something that absolutely no one has said happened didn’t happen beyond “absolutely no one has said it happened,” please tell me how.
People not saying that something happened or not noticing it doesn’t prove it’s not happening. It’s like saying that until the 16th century Earth wasn’t going around the Sun and the proof for it is that no one noticed it.
I already gave you an example how you could prove your claim is true, but if you can’t provide it, then don’t claim that something is true if you don’t really know if it is or not.
Yes, and if you can’t do it, don’t lie that you can.
I explained to you how markets work. You said that markets can’t work that way because the real word data shows otherwise. I asked you for the data. You said there is no data and that lack of data (proof) is proof in itself.
Your argument for me being wrong was that you can prove me wrong with a real world example, and you have no evidence to support the real world example that you provided.
XD. Sure, you never explicitly stated that you can prove me wrong, I just assumed, like any reasonable person would that a purpose of bringing up an argument in a debate is to prove ones point. You can go ahead and answer now.
Your argument for me being wrong was that you can prove me wrong with a real world example, and you have no evidence to support the real world example that you provided.
The part about you having no evidence is true, because you have no evidence.
The part about it being your argument for me being wrong is an assumption on my part and depends on why you brought up the “real world example”, so if your reason for bringing it up was anything else than to try to prove me wrong, you can clarify why you brought it up and then we will know if I lied or not.
I am very much in favor of using violence to take resources from people that don’t give back to the community they rely on. It’s a good thing to take money from the rich and greedy using violence. There is no imaginable society where people should be permitted to not contribute when they are capable of contributing.
If people are permitted to not contribute excess power, it places more of the burden on everyone else to make up for it. On top of that, as the tax dodger accumulates too much control over resources(wealth), they can use those resources to hire people that then impose violence on the community when they try to take the resources back.
If anything, an anarchist society should be more vigilant of resource accumulation, forcing each other to contribute through violence and ensuring that large power imbalances don’t emerge. There would be no state to handle redistribution, so it’d be the responsibility of every individual to make sure everyone has enough. There’d be no justification for anyone to have too much exclusive control over important resources, nor would there be a justification to not give excess resources to ensure everyone has the essentials.
In a society that prohibits excessive wealth imbalance or centralization of control, there’d be power inequality, but there’d also be a well established ceiling and floor to the inequality. That will always require some form of progressive “taxation” or system of redistribution. There’d also need to be taxation on almost all worker productivity to help develop public goods that everyone will benefit from. Everyone would need to chip in what they can if they need a new communal well, or if they need to maintain the roads, or need to put someone’s home out if it caught fire. People would need to contribute even if they don’t benefit from the particular public service, as they might benefit from another one more than others.
A well functioning society must require people to contribute what they can to maintain & improve the community, must take from those that don’t contribute by force, must tax people even if they don’t consent. This isn’t optional for any system, state or no state. If it fails, exploitation, abuse, and suffering will destabilize the system until it falls apart from under its own weight. A society that taxes properly can minimize violence, maximize efficiency, and be far safer for everyone without exception. Even those on top are constantly in danger of being deposed by someone who wants their position, as well as the people they exploit.
Tldr: Yes, we must use violence to force contribution. Not doing so only causes more violence. Violence is unavoidable, and can only be minimized by ensuring no one gets too powerful to oppress.
Yeahhh I definitely disagree this is a fundamental truth. Not because you’re necessarily wrong from your perspective, but because we have fundamentally different values.
It doesn’t matter what you want the solution to be based on your values. If your solution jeopardizes your values more than the alternative solution would have, all you’ve done is make yourself feel better at the expense of others.
If you let people accumulate power unopposed, they will use less of it on improving the common good than if it was in the hands of more people. Poorer people give a greater proportion of their wealth to charity. A lower portion of the excess wealth controlled by billionaires goes to improving people’s lives than if that excess wealth went to those who had barely enough, or not enough. Wealth has diminishing returns on happiness. A million dollars to a billionaire won’t be noticed, while a million dollars to 99% of people would be life changing.
Taking from the wealthy and giving to everyone is tyranny of the majority on a tiny minority. The wealthy would still be on top and live comfortably, but they would now live in the same economic reality as everyone else. They could no longer burn money for fun while their fortune passively accumulates to see a net gain in wealth. Losing a million dollars would actually be felt, and they would need to adjust their lives in reaction to the loss.
On the other hand, if you rely on voluntary charity in the spirit of freedom, you see tyranny of a minority on the majority. They give far less of their money to the common good, instead spending more of their wealth on protecting their riches. This is what we see in reality. They lobby the government to serve their interests at the expense of the public, or in non capitalist systems, hire guards to protect their interests directly.
Feudal lords pay their workers wages that are lower than the value their work generates because they control the farmland. They control the farmland by protecting it with guards they pay, think knights and samurai. If the workers complain or try to sell food made on the land without giving the lords their cut, the guards suppress them using violence. The lord’s ownership of the land is only valid if they are protected, with violence, by their personal guards, payed for by the workers.
Does that sound like freedom? Do those workers sound free? By allowing people the freedom to gain power over a resource, the land and crops on that land, the workers have lost their freedom to see the fruits of their labor, sometimes literally. The fruits they pick are given to the lord, who trades the fruit for resources, but only give the workers enough resources to survive.
Freedom without limit destroys freedom for most people. Freedom must have a ceiling and a floor, or the freedom of others can be taken by that of another. I value everyone having freedom, which requires a cap on the freedom people can have. No one can be free to horde too much power.
Neighbors helping neighbors? A collective group pooling resources in order to get social benefits? Community organizations? This all smells like dirty communism.
First I thought this was dumb, but actually… It doesn’t seem like taxes really get distributed to everyone. I live in a poor neighborhood and our streets are all jacked up, but somehow the rich neighborhoods always have nice streets. Am I paying taxes so the rich people get nicer streets? How do I get the city to fix our roads too?
But I don’t think this startup would help. The poor neighborhoods would still have less to invest. Privatizing taxes would just make the poorer neighborhoods worse and the richer neighborhoods nicer.
It depends. Yes, poor neighborhoods pay less taxes, and rich pay more taxes. But the imbalance in expenses may be even bigger, because of the way priorities work.
It’s the same as minority representation in democracies (and the reason Soviet system, not the real one, but the theoretical one, is bad), when representatives are chosen by voting, the minority has fewer chances of being represented than if sortition (randomization) is used.
The problem is two fold. First, the poorer people pay less taxes, thus their streets have less money. Additionally, the richer folk tend to donate to funds to make additional improvement. The solution is simple - pay more money.
Yeah, but where do the rich people get more money from than the poor? And I don’t mean middle-class doctor/lawyer “rich”, I mean CEO-of-15-companies rich.
CEO is not that rich, only a few well known exceptions are. Real rich people don’t live in the cities, their families own huge swathes of land and they’re totally fine living in their mansions and castles far away from the cities.
More than half of households in the UK are net recipients, meaning that those who earn more, contribute more and those who earn less actually use more in social services than they contribute in taxes. Basically those who earn more pay for those who earn less. I don’t think there are many countries where this is not true.
Am I paying taxes so the rich people get nicer streets?
Yes, unironically.
How do I get the city to fix our roads too?
By being rich, or having rich friends, or managing to gather a lot of people (50+) at the front of your politicians’ offices (or their homes for extra effect) and make the demand
Not that it’ll really help your situation, but you should look into whether or not your state’s Department of Transportation (DOT) has some sort of reporting tool online.
Mine does, and I’ve used it to report several issues, including several potholes on my neighborhood road. The potholes were filled within a week after I reported it.
I don’t think anyone here does not understand the difference between compulsory taxes and this nonsense which won’t work specifically because you don’t have to put money into it. It’s a libertarian’s idea of taxation.
Why does a startup let people do this? Were people not able to do this before and now with a start up suddenly they can? How much does the start up get?
This is basically just as opaque as a charity or HOA, with different steps. Which is great unless your community is poor.
My contention with this concept is that with taxes, I can vote for people that manage both the money gathering rules and how it is spent. That and the money typically works in a much larger pool spread across a wide range of socioeconomic groups, which can vastly improve its reach and capability. On top of all that, it’s also transparent. My guess is this has no such features.
Right, that’s the whole point of HOAs. They do all the same shit local government does, but without needing to share with the poors. They should be illegal.
Where I love HOAs are mostly for sharing maintenance and insurance costs of the houses, they don’t take over any responsibilities from the local government.
Ah, we just have co-ops for that. Though sometimes they aren’t actually that great at getting good deals for smaller stuff. It would kind of suck to be required to use the co-op.
Cooperative Capital lets people pool small amounts of money, vote on how they want to invest it to improve their neighborhood–and then generates returns.
I’m not saying this is good or bad. But you wrote a lot a received great feedback from the community despite no one actually reading what it is, evidently.
I was watching a thing not too long ago where a dude was praising the “safety net” of home and health insurance and almost in the next breath complaining how socialized medicine was a scam and welfare
I was like “MF you JUST said you wanted a group safety net”
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