cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
2yr ago
If you want to have a government, yeah taxation in some form is probably necessary.
And yeah the badness of taxation is on a gradient, and not all forms of taxation are evil. The problem is that the less offensive forms of taxation are often not as good at raising massive amounts of revenue.
I think certain use taxes are often ok-ish. Like docking taxes that pay for dredging of waterways. Other use taxes seem pretty messed up, especially when the government has an enforced monopoly on the service. The more necessary the service and the more those taxes are used to pay for random other things the more messed up it is.
Sin taxes are annoying and paternalistic, but I wouldn't call them evil.
Import tariffs that are applied universally on all goods (and not used for protectionist schemes) seem ok as well.
Head taxes feel a little less evil than income taxes, simply because they don't require a massive administrative state to look into everyone's incomes.
If poll taxes were the only tax I would consider them fully reasonable.
cjet79
2yr ago
There are also people who realize that what the government is doing through taxation is basically theft, and their response is something like "Ok yeah taxation is theft, but the theft is for a good cause. Plus its not like a lot of other theft, and the word theft has some negative baggage, so you are just using the association to say that taxation is bad". That is sort of Scott Alexander's response if I remember him correctly.
It can be both a massive theft and the correct thing to do. But if it is a massive theft and you are treating it as just a minor adjustment in policy then that might lead to you misunderstanding the anger coming your way.
If I was going to justify a land value tax I would start with requiring the income tax to be abolished. And that the land tax would explicitly exist as a way of funding defense of that territory. There is a massive amount of tyranny and injustice around the income tax, and the idea that the value of people's work is literally being stolen from them on a nation wide scale. Returning people's freedom over the money they earn through work seems like a worthwhile tradeoff for taking away the ability to meaningfully own land. But thats not how this discussion started out.
cjet79
2yr ago
Sounds like eminent domain.
But I'm not dead set on whether the government owns everything and rents to people, or the people own things and the government just constantly steals from them.
I am not more strongly against a land tax then I am against income tax. I consider them both a bit abhorrent in their implications.
cjet79
2yr ago
Anarcho-capitalist. Though I get along well with minarchists and try to avoid arguing with them.
I think even for people who are not minarchists/anarcho-capitalists that it is useful to recognize what government is doing. Governments collect money either by owning everything and charging rent, or they are stealing stuff from people. The government can own everything or steal things, because they have a monopoly on the use of force.
cjet79
2yr ago
I think there has been a philosophy in urban planning, and a desire by urban planners to control things that has led to zoning. Land owners might sometimes perpetuate it, but mostly bureaucrats control zoning in cities.
cjet79
2yr ago
And if you don't pay taxes in a Georgist system ... what happens?
In the current tax system they often take possession of the things they claim to be owed.
Taxation of a thing is ownership of that thing, including the right/ability to take possession of that thing if the taxed person doesn't pay up.
cjet79
2yr ago
Income tax is the state claiming ownership over work.
Think of it this way ... for any given tax, what would it take for a private non-government actor to implement that "tax". If I was a private actor and I wanted to charge someone rent for getting to use a parcel of land ... then I would need to own that land.
If I was a private actor and I wanted to take a cut out of all the money that someone gained, then I would have to own that person like a slave.
The power to regulate is also a form of ownership.
An alternative interpretation, is that the state doesn't own the things it taxes, it is instead just stealing. The libertarian refrain "taxation is theft" is along these lines. But that is what it boils down to, either the state has ownership, and thus the right to determine how the thing they own is used, or they don't have ownership and they are just constantly stealing.
cjet79
2yr ago
That being said I think if you take a look at the political will of the people in the U.S., with regards to land ownership, there is a growing clamor and need for housing reform. I don't know if Georgism will fix the problems we have, but it certainly seems useful enough to try. Landowners are a powerful political bloc though, so your point makes sense.
So much of that is a problem of zoning and environmental laws. Which don't seem directly related to a Land Value Tax.
cjet79
2yr ago
Putting it that way ... would you rather be a slave or a serf? I guess I'd choose serf. Though I'd prefer going back to an era when the government was small enough to be funded by alcohol taxes and tariffs. That way I'm just paying some protection money to the mafia.
cjet79
2yr ago
This was a needlessly antagonistic post, and added nothing of value to the discussion. User banned for 1 day.
cjet79
2yr ago
I don't know if the tech matters too much. There is only so much mind-reading that a computer can do. Any image generator has to be met halfway by someone that has played around with the generator enough to understand how to get useful images out of it.
The value-add of shutterstock is to be able to quickly search through a bunch of generic pictures. Even a curated list of AI generated images would work fine for this value-add.
The guy who currently does this at my company basically searches the tags of an article "inflation, money", and then gets a list of images that match those tags. He quickly visually scans a gallery of images, and then picks out the one he wants. While looking at the images he might spot one that has a building in it that looks like the federal reserve, and he thinks 'oh even better match' and he picks that one.
The images aren't supposed to be special. They exist mostly just to break up what would otherwise be an ugly wall of text. We might all be fine reading sites like reddit, but apparently a bunch of people like more variety in their visual space.
cjet79
2yr ago
I have removed some posts that were clearly AI generated. All the cases I saw were rdrama users trying to troll.
Long posts written by bots are often easy to identify. They feel like someone typed up the words of a drunkard, and added in a bunch of proper punctuation. They tend to have a disconnect between the quality of ideas presented (crappy) and the quality of the presentation (near perfect).
Shorter posts might be a way for bots to hide. Because they tend to pattern match low effort posters. But that is just a problem with low effort posters disguised as a bot problem. Low effort crappy posts are bad coming from humans or bots. Alternative high quality posts seem fine to me, even if an AI wrote it.
cjet79
2yr ago
Its possible that even smooth transition graphs are actually just a bunch of micro tipping points lumped together. Maybe that is a more accurate way of modeling the climate?
There can also be tipping points for costs to fight climate change. Once you burden the economy enough that it is no longer growing then you could actually run into some pretty serious political upheaval.
cjet79
2yr ago
I work for an organization that uses shutterstock. That is absolutely a tradeoff worth taking. We use a dozen or so images a day, so spending 1 minute on an image instead of 10 minutes changes it from a part time job, to just a small additional task. The person's salary that gathers these images is in a mediumish salary range. But it would still be worth it to us if we were paying this person minimum wage.
Shutterstock only needs to save an hour of time of a minimum wage employee once a month to be worth it. It saves us thousands of dollars, its easily worth it. Until someone creates a giant library of free AI art with clear image rights then shutterstock will continue to be worth it.
cjet79
2yr ago
My immediate thought on reading this was:
Kansas - Carry on My Wayward Son
But while looking at the video I noticed the #rock tag.
https://youtube.com/hashtag/rock
AC/DC is maybe the most listened to rock song with "Thunderstruck"
and when I think of rock music I really think more of AC/DC then I do of Bruce Springsteen. I might be a younger generation than you, but Rosalita really sounds more like jazz to me than rock and roll. And it just has all the wrong feelings. When I think of a rock song that has all the right "feelings" I got to the song that is a partial parody of rock, but also nails the feelings. The writers of the song have won Emmys, Grammys, and Annies. The ultimate: Trey Parker and Matt Stone - America Fuck Yeah
cjet79
2yr ago
It was three days before christ was resurrected. It was 27 years before Mandela was released. It was 12 hours before you were unbanned. My turn-around time is better than god.
cjet79
2yr ago
Ya this is how I misread it, decision reversed. Thanks for pointing out the mistake.
User has received 7 day temp ban for this post. Personal attacks aren't acceptable.
Edit: My bad, I misread this post. User has been unbanned.
cjet79
2yr ago
So, since I keep seeing it get treated as novel, here I am, posting this.
Is this your first week reading the culture war thread? Its not a novel argument around here. In fact, it might be the whole reason this culture war roundup exists, and thus the oldest argument on this particular forum.
The argument you are gesturing at is sometimes call Human Biodiversity (and sometimes called "scientific racism" by its detractors) or HBD for short.
Some history:
There was a blog called SlateStarCodex (the blog still exists, but is now continued under a different name: astralcodexten. That is a whole story in itself). A guy named Scott Alexander wrote interesting articles on there. People liked his writing. They made a subreddit to follow the blog, the subreddit took the same name as the blog. Scott Alexander occasionally wrote about culture war issues (it was mostly supposed to by a psychiatry blog). These articles would attract a lot of attention. Scott often did not like all this attention.
Scott had weekly open threads where people could talk about anything. He found that people kept wanting to talk about the culture war and it drowned out all other conversation. So he said 'no more talking about the culture war'. The subreddit stepped in, and created a weekly thread where all the discussion of the culture war would be contained, so that it wouldn't spread and infect all other discussions.
This went on for a while. Eventually some people felt that the culture war thread was being taken over by HBD arguments. Some of those people were moderators of the SlateStarCodex subreddit. They decided to ban discussion of HBD in the subreddit. I was a moderator of the subreddit at the time. I did not like how often HBD discussions happened. I was weakly against banning the discussion altogether. Unlike most readers of a subreddit, when you are a moderator you can't just ignore a discussion because you don't like it. You have to read through all the comments to suss out what is going on. I wished there was less HBD discussion, but I didn't think banning it would mean less work for me as a moderator (and my main complaint at the time was how much work it created for moderators).
Eventually the HBD discussion ban expired or was overturned, I can't remember which one. It left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths. Some people were upset about the HBD discussion, others were upset it had expired. I'd guess that most people that are still around in this community today were more upset by the discussion ban.
Things went on for a while, but Scott was recieving increasing pressure from people and threats of doxxing because he was associated with a subreddit that allowed discussion of HBD and other ugly culture war things. Scott asked for the subreddit to end culture war threads.
The mods agreed, but also decided to create a splinter subreddit that would not be directly associated with Scott, but would also allow the culture war discussion to continue. This splinter subreddit came to be called "TheMotte", a reference to motte and bailey arguments. There was uncerntainty about whether this move would succeed. I can say I was publicly confident enough that I took a bet on it and won the bet. I wish I had also taken a public bet for the move from reddit to off reddit to succeed too. I felt it was more than likely to succeed, but less likely than the subreddit switch.
The move off reddit happened because reddit admins were increasingly removing random comments, and going after subreddits that we had previously thought of as 'canarys in the coal mine'.
cjet79
2yr ago
No, haven't noticed. I tend to listen to comedy podcasts, and many of them seem to have trouble keeping big name advertisers.
cjet79
2yr ago
It ended up not mattering. The censorship isn't really happening at the ISP level. Its happening at the level of social networks, and search engines. None of the net neutrality stuff was ever intended to prevent it (because why would big tech want to hamstring themselves? They were the biggest advocates of net "neutrality"). The issue has been quietly abandoned since the level of insincerity to call for a "neutral" internet would be pretty obvious.
cjet79
2yr ago
I feel like this is just rephrasing what I said, and that none of it changes my original objection.
Governing other people is harder than governing yourself. So to say that a person is incapable of governing themself but capable of governing others is a bit insane. Which is exactly the conceit of a nanny state in a democracy.
I think what has actually happened is that some people have recognized that some other people are sometimes incapable of governing themselves. They have stripped the incapable of the responsibility to governing themselves, but left them with the responsibility to govern others. We are left with children and the criminally insane to rule over us.
cjet79
2yr ago
"the people" aren't an entity you can actually consult. The practical implementation of democracy still requires you to go around and ask all of the individuals that compose "the people" what they want. Any government that claims to represent "the people" without actually consulting them might as well be ruling by divine right for the religion of democracy.
cjet79
2yr ago
I'm libertarian and generally think most things should not be subject to democratic control.
I think there is a philosophical and somewhat legitimate case to be made that common goods, and public goods should be subject to democratic control. I think in practice this still kind of fails, but its at least gestures at a philosophically sound argument.
I have objections to democratic control, but they fall into philosophical categories more than policy categories.
Objection #1: Individual Sovereignty
The idea that there should be democratic control over individual decisions seems self-contradictory to me. A democracy is supposed to invest political power in the individual. To then turn that power towards restricting the individual seems odd to me. As if a monarchy spent all its time just writing laws about what the monarch is allowed to do ... laws that could easily be overridden by their predecessor. It seems to undermine the whole thesis of democracy. If an individual is smart enough and sovereign enough to make decisions about their government, why would they also not be smart enough to make decisions about their personal consumption and interactions? I feel like anyone subject to nanny-state like protections should also be stripped of their voting power in a democracy.
Objection #2: Defining the Polity
There is an issue with how government is run that different functions of government make sense to be run at different levels. A national defense strategy makes sense to run at a national level. A fire department makes sense to run at a local level. Who gets to vote on these things? A national level of democratic control over a national defense makes sense, but national level of control over all locally run fire departments? Its not as clear to me that this makes sense.
But even supposedly straightforward votes like national defense can become confusing. Someone in Nebraska might not care at all about how well the coast of Hawaii is defended. Someone in Hawaii might reasonably ask "why does some yokel in Nebraska get to determine how much money we spend on our coastal defense?"
There aren't logical or philosophically correct ways to determine who gets to vote on what. Its all a matter of practical and political maneuvering. And just because a system manages to screw over everyone equally doesn't mean it has made the correct allocation of governing power.
Objection #3: Voting sucks
Until we all get hooked up into a giant AI that determine what everyone wants and how to get it ... we will never get democratic control. Instead we just get voting. Which is a rough and terrible approximation of democratic control. There is an old saying: "democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for dinner". The majority of voters joining together to screw over a minority of voters is a winning strategy. When these minorities try and pool their resources together to fend off the predations of the majority we have a dirty word for it: lobbying.
Much of the western world seems to be under some strange impression that the solution to the problem of voting is to add more voting. Vote for representatives who then vote for things. It changes little, especially when you make those representatives barred from accepting bribes from minority groups.
The "one person one vote" rule squashes all strengths of preference into a single level of difference, so many supposed "subversions" of democracy are really just attempts to correct this fundamental problem of voting.
Whats the alternative and better way to get democratic control? I don't know, and it probably doesn't exist.
Based on the implementation of previous tax schemes it would be highly unlikely for the income tax to be ever fully phased out. Its not like the US really got rid of any other taxes once it had income taxes. For a while they got rid of alcohol taxes by banning all alcohol, but thats about it.
Having income taxes and LVTs seems terrible.
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