domain:youtu.be
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5hr ago
people breaking into the country's main legislative building
I could point to the 1954 Capitol shooting, in which Puerto Rican separatists (Americans) fired 30 rounds in the House of Representatives chamber, hitting five representatives. Their sentences were commuted by Jimmy Carter in 1978 and 1979.
Or the 1983 bombing of the Senate, done by a self-described "Armed Resistance Unit" protesting US involvement in Lebanon and Grenada. Their sentences were commuted by Bill Clinton in 2001.
Or the 1971 bombing of the capitol done by Weather Underground, whose leadership largely escaped any criminal charges and went on to be professors in universities throughout the country.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
I'm open to hearing your case. Please tell me what is the argument for setting a police station on fire being less illegal than breaking into the building of the legislature.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
5hr ago
No, it's special pleading to pretend like breaking into Congress directly after a Presidential election is the exact same as rioting in a city. They are quite different things, even legally.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
5hr ago
I have to agree. While I'm broadly more aligned with the right, all of the equivocation of BLM riots with Jan 6th is annoying and mealy mouthed in my opinion. Breaking into Congressional buildings is an extremely different situation than protesting and even rioting.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
5hr ago
Ok yeah everyone is talking about China, that could be fair! But China was also industrializing as well right? In the last century they were half peasant farmers.
campfireSmoresEaten
5hr ago
Yeah. In addition to that, I regret using the word "gross" in an internet vernacular sense
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6hr ago
How is this not equally applicable to literally every other politician that has been term-limited out of office?
It is.
Singling out Trump for political cowardice on the matter amounts to special pleading...
I'm not doing that. Trump was under discussion, not anybody else. Nor did I call him a coward.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
Nah, collect the taxes in countries where the assets are. If people want to invest in China or India or Somalia instead, let these countries decide if they want to tax them and how much.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
So what happens once nobody that owns anything of substance is a US Person?
My proposal did not hinge on the nationality of the owner, or them being a natural person or identifiable. As long as the asset is physically within the US, the US can tax it just fine.
I also think it fairer to tax investors in the country of their assets than in their country of residence, which is the opposite of what the US is doing. If a US citizen builds a thriving business in Somalia, I simply do not see how this is Uncle Sam's business (apart from the wealth transferred in or out of the US, perhaps). She is certainly not depending on the US to secure her property rights or provide legal security. By contrast, if a rich Swiss person is buying a mall in the US, he is asking the US for a lot more: that the US shall uphold the doctrine that individuals can own unlimited amounts of land, that the police please prevent robbers and looters from ruining his investment, that the court system be fair and not rule against him just because his name sounds too French. Let him simply pay the same capital gains tax a US citizen who owned the same property would pay, and if he does not like it, he can always invest in China or India instead.
This would have an additional practical advantage. For the billionaire class, becoming a citizen of a tax haven is not a big problem, while investing their wealth in a tax haven will likely be difficult. Sure, your social media company will not pay taxes, just restrict profiles to residents of the Cayman Islands. You want to pay taxes in Ireland? No problemo, just design, produce and sell your smartphones there.
Are you going to start seizing American companies from their shareholders or something?
In so far as taxation is theft, yes.
More importantly, does anybody even read Hayek anymore?
I just looked up the guy on WP and did a ctrl+F tax:
Hayek was against high taxes on inheritance, believing that it is natural function of the family to transmit standards, traditions and material goods. Without transmission of property, parents might try to secure the future of their children by placing them in prestigious and high-paying positions, as was customary in socialist countries, which creates even worse injustices. He was also strongly against progressive taxation, noting that in most countries additional taxes paid by the rich amount to insignificantly small amount of total tax revenue and that the only major result of the policy is "gratification of the envy of the less-well-off". He also claimed that it is contrary to the idea of equality under the law and against democratic principle that the majority should not impose discriminatory rules against the minority.
Hm, it seems some vandal replaced his ideas with neoliberal strawmen.
I disagree with him about inheritance tax. Say we have a progressive inheritance tax which caps the amount parents can pass to their children at 10M$. A billionaire with a single child might spend 990M$ to on "placing them in prestigious and high-paying positions", instead of only the customary few millions for Harvard, private tutors and so on. But he will find that spending money on education and prestige has diminishing returns. The last million he spends on his kid will not be increase their lifetime earning potential by 1M$. Turning your child into a movie or sport star, or sponsoring them to run for public office is all nice and well, but even if it works, most stars are not billionaires and most public officials do not manage to grift billions either.
Progressive taxation can very easily be justified through utilitarianism. There are diminishing returns to wealth and income. The difference between driving a 500$ car and driving a 10.5k$ car is a lot bigger than the difference between driving a 100k$ car and driving a 110k$ car.
I think it is generally more enlightening to look at wealth inequality than income inequality, because what counts as income will be subject to zillions of complex regulations of tax law, while wealth is much more easy to quantify. Just assume that everyone gets born in some natural state without a penny to their name, and if they end up being a billionaire, they must at some point have increased their net worth in a way which would in principle be taxable (unless the gains were made in Somalia).
The wealth Gini for the US is 0.85. Students of mathematics will notice that this is a lot closer to one (one person owns everything) than zero (everyone has equal wealth). If we use wealth as a proxy for "taxation potential", we can see that Hayek when he asserts that raising the taxes on the 0.1% would amount to insignificantly small amount of total tax revenue.
In the US, the marginal federal income tax goes from 10% (for the first 11k$/year) to 37% (for dollars made above 578k$). Looking at WP, it looks like the highest income quintile pays more than twice as much taxes as all the other quintiles combined. This means that if you do not want to change the budget, a flat tax rate would have to be roughly the same as the 24% effective tax rate charged to the fifth quintile, say 22%. (In reality, it would likely be a bit closer to the 29% the top 1% are paying.)
If you tax the poor quintile (currently taxed at 1.5%) that amount, the effect will be that they will unable to make ends meet, so one way (social security) or another (prisons), the state will have to pay for their cost of living.
When he whines about the rich people being suppressed by the poor minority, my response is that there is no human right to unlimited wealth. Capitalism is neither just nor god-given, but it is a system which works much better than all the other systems which have been tried, so societies are willing to accept high income inequalities to reap its benefits. The present deal seems very favorable to the 1%, and asking them to pay a lot to keep the status quo does not seem inherently unfair.
Assuming that the WP excerpt was a fair summary of Hayek's ideas about taxes, I can understand why he is not widely read today.
anon_
6hr ago
But this isn't a conspiracy! It's a legitimate attempt to use a model to design a regulatory-compliant system.
GBRK
6hr ago
Deficits aren't free money. You either pay for government spending via mostly property or income taxes now, or via an effective wealth tax-- inflation-- later.
If neiither the republicans nor democrats raise taxes, then the federal reserve will raise them on their behalf. There's no way out of paying the piper.
anon_
6hr ago
Discerning the true beneficial owners through multiple layers of indirection is highly non-trivial. Threatening sanctions over it isn't addressing the core issue: the majority of countries (mostly) readily turn over specific details pursuant to a particular investigation.
Already most places in the world don't let US citizens open bank accounts easily because of all the extra regulatory burden the US currently imposes on third countries for US persons, there's no reason they can't extend that to trusts and foundations.
They can extend to US trusts and foundation, but when a Qatari firm shows up, that's not gonna apply.
[ It's also quite clear that the wholesale financial surveillance required here would make the debanking phenomenon seem quaint by comparison. A superweapon kind of thing.
LateMechanic
6hr ago
Im asking for some kind of real economic cost; "Its annoying when the prices are different than I remember" doesnt count, no.
You could look it up, it's not my argument. It's good enough for me that most people hate it, so let's avoid it. It's fun when nickels are worth picking up off the ground and can get you a coke.
If you dont pay enough interest, people will stop lending you money.
When you have your own currency and central bank, people don't 'lend' you your own money at all. You can print up IOUs and tell people they pay 0% or 150%, up to you if you want to subsidize savings.
Well, you said that the difference between me and the state is that the state can tax. If it doesnt actually need to do that, then whats the difference?
I said the government levies 'some' taxes every year, reoccurring indefinitely, broadly on everyone. That provides a perpetual anchor value for the government's debt, understood universally, even though the amount outstanding can continue to rise (if people want to keep accumulating it for the future, for a rainy day, to pass down to their kids, whatever).
That doesn't imply anything about somehow taxing it all back and paying it all off or whatever, at some unspecified jubilee judgement day where we have to unwind everything.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
Didn't Obama have some very distant claim to descent from ADOS through his white mother? His father was African-(not-American).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
Whether or not those conservatives should be required to pay taxes towards your seen-as-elective medical treatments is probably also a sticking point. That one comes up with abortion too, and has with birth control in the past --- I'm not sure if anyone beyond Hobby Lobby really cares quite as strongly there these days.
Bartender_Venator
6hr ago
If I recall correctly, Mearsheimer's realist thesis is that Israel's influence over the US is long-term bad for Israel because it makes them structurally dependent and less rational as a state - relying on US support rather than doing whatever realist stuff they need to survive on their own. But Mearsheimer's an interesting writer, in that he will overstate his theses if he thinks that's a direction that policy discourse should be dragged in (in order to counterbalance the weight of "mainstream" discourse).
TIRM
6hr ago
interfering in states where they aren't wanted
Federal law enforcement does not need local permission to enforce federal laws.
Tractatus
6hr ago
How is this not equally applicable to literally every other politician that has been term-limited out of office? Of all the Presidents to serve two full terms - and thus, their "careers in politics were over either way" - while Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid existed, which of them fell on their sword and cut those programs in their 2nd term? The answer is none, not Reagan, not GWB, not Obama. Singling out Trump for political cowardice on the matter amounts to special pleading; no politician intends to retire with the mantle of "single person who was responsible for their political party's complete collapse."
Bartender_Venator
6hr ago
I think it's fair to say that any movement will have people who sincerely believe in the motte and do not believe in the bailey.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
If it's so non-special, why do protesters not storm it more often?
For the same reason people don't burn down that specific police precinct in Minneapolis more often.
Manifestly, doing so would shut down a central government function that pisses a lot of people off
The protest in question did not result in the shutdown of the central government.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
6hr ago
Well, I think that pretending that the seat of one of the branches of government is nothing special just so you can equivocate is special pleading. If it's so non-special, why do protesters not storm it more often? Manifestly, doing so would shut down a central government function that pisses a lot of people off, and guarantee eyeballs in a way that torching some random police station in bumfuck nowhere won't.
Other countries also hold that legislatures are special: in Germany, for example, where there is otherwise a fairly strong right to public protest, there is a special cutout prohibiting assemblies in a certain radius around federal and state legislatures and the constitutional court. This has been in place since 1920.
remzem
6hr ago
Charging everyone present because their protesting made it inconvenient to undertake a planned future action is already stretching the law beyond anything it's been used for in the past
Jan 6th?
LateMechanic
7hr ago
Now at 3.5% they're acting like it's crisis mode on the other side (too far above 2%), so they're probably shying away from argentina style for now.
But yeah with Japan's public debt size, they were definitely confusing the brake pedal for the gas pedal in the 2000s, and should have checked out what a 2% rate hike would have done as stimulus. (or just cut taxes)
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
7hr ago
There isn't a consensus sorting of everyone into male and female either
I agree thats the status quo; but success for the trans movement would be creating one. Thats what I said.
they call a definitional core of "unambiguous women", but this would look like "phenotypical women not asserting they are not + progressives in good standing asserting to be women".
I think this goes back to whether the definition by self-identification is circular or not. I think we all, including OP, know that progressives can answer "a woman is whoever says theyre a woman" in response to the question. He must not consider that a real answer.
neither side is okay with transracialism (central-example whites asserting that they are central-example blacks).
Actually, I dont think theyre necessarily fine with non-central people asserting to be either, either.
where both agree on central examples, the boundaries are fuzzy so few would be comfortable defining an exhaustive predicate and committing to it
The difference is that with gender, progressives are accused, IMO accurately, of their criteria ultimately depending on sex stereotypes, and they deny it. The right on race, once its out that they care about it at all, doesnt really mind their categorisation judgements being understood. I dont think progressives even have a theory there, true or not, that they would want to deny.
That's all right, I'm not a progressive.
The other difference between this and defining "woman" is that people who disguise themselves as other races are not really an issue, and the equivalent for women is. If a lot of white people claimed to be black and tried to look black, the definition would no longer work.
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