@JoePostingg I don’t know if you’re right, but I like the novel thinking
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theboldmoose
122 posts
@The_Sublimatory But they wouldn’t categorize it as theft, that’s a jump only NAP libertarians for the most part are willing to take.
They can be for taxation and against expropriation, for example, which they couldn’t be if both were just different kinds of stealing.
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Most deontologists recognize that taxes are good, because this is an obvious truth.
My point is that the way they justify it within their moral framework is convoluted and unconvincing.
“It’s wrong to steal except under the following conditions:
- .”
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The world is a confusing place for deontologists.
“If theft is wrong and taxes are theft then it’s bad to have a safety net that prevents millions of elderly people from starving.”
Taxes can *only* be justified on utilitarian grounds. But since they’re obviously good, deontologists have to wrap themselves into knots trying to explain why it’s actually ok in certain circumstances.
wanye@xwanyex
There’s a kind of person who is really taken in by the idea that they can prove morally that the property tax is the correct one. This is, by the way, why I think it’s OK to care about the motives of these people. They very clearly start from the position of being skeptical about property ownership and then set themselves to work trying to develop a moral framework that justifies their intuition. Like most cases in which the logic comes after the emotion, libertarians and LVT enthusiasts have not done a very good job of this. Their arguments are universally unconvincing, facile, or logically fallacious. If all they ever claimed is that property taxes were the most efficient, then there’d be nothing to argue about.
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@The_Sublimatory It seems like you’re conflating deontology writ-large with the right-libertarian NAP. Deontologists aren’t just automatically against taxation, nor should they be. They may even go as far to view paying their taxes as a duty.
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Deontologists have to explain why taxation is not theft, which is hard to do since it involves taking someone’s money against their will by threatening violence.
These attempts always look to me like they are starting from the understanding that taxes are good, then working backwards to get at a way to consider them categorically different from theft.
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@The_Sublimatory 2) The structure utilitarianism would provide is also more demanding than what we would recognize as normal taxation.
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@The_Sublimatory 1) First off, believing in rights does not make you a deontologist. Second, deontologists don’t have a problem justifying taxation, unless they happen to be ancaps or something who think all taxation is theft
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@ErrorTheorist The author has no idea where computers came from apparently
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Here’s a paper arguing that there is no progress in philosophy. The author claims that if Aristotle visited a modern university, he would be amazed by modern physics but feel at home in the philosophy classes, since the debates haven’t fundamentally changed. What do you think?
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@jimthegiant @ani_aval US labor and welfare reforms were brought about mostly by the trade unionists and progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, not socialists. To quote our most important reformer, Samuel Gompers:
“I have no use for the Socialists. They have never done anything for labor except talk.”
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I mean brother, yes, when you look at history you have to understand context of the era
before Ford’s decision you have Pullman Strike,
Homestead Strike, Lawrence Textile Strike
Ford was seeing the pressure from rising unions, strikes, and socialist movements who were forcing concessions across industry
Do you think he was just felt nice one day?
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No… capitalism didn’t slash poverty to 10%
Socialist movements within capitalism achieved:
Minimum wage
The National Health Service
Unemployment benefits
Worker safety laws
The weekend
Pensions
Free education
Paid holidays
Sick pay
Maternity leave
Trade union rights
Child labour laws
Public housing
All of which reduced poverty that socialists had to fight tooth and nail for against the capitalist classes to achieve
𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐠@CasuallyGreg
Demanding capitalism deliver a 0% poverty rate is peak stupidity. Before markets, extreme poverty was ~90% in 1820. Capitalism slashed it to under 10% today, lifting billions. No system has done better. Zero poverty is a utopian fantasy ignoring human nature & incentives.
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@mehdirhasan Just like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton did, right?
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A reminder that this is how politics - and shame - is supposed to work. A politician is accused of major scandals, crimes!, and their party disowns them and they are forced out not just from a race from but from public life.
You’re not supposed to re-elect them to the presidency.
bryan metzger@metzgov
Over the course of just 72 hours, Swalwell went from being the frontrunner to be governor of the nation's largest state to announcing his resignation to head off a potential expulsion vote.
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@mtracey Except the consenting part, you almost got it Michael!
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Even if you despise Eric Swalwell, this warp-speed defenestration is an insane precedent. Campaign implodes, mass disavowal, criminal probe, has to resign under threat of *expulsion* -- all for what seemingly boils down to some hookups/flings/flirtations with consenting adults!
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@segyges definitely a case of right-wingers not loving the econ 101 result, lol
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It's fascinating to see someone argue against land value taxes libertarian-ly. It is essentially the most libertarian tax that is still a tax at all.
When I see people crying about anti-rentseeking measures I assume they're rent-seekers.
wanye@xwanyex
People sort of act like they live in a fairytale in which there’s a group of privileged land owners and then on the other hand the peasants who have been locked out. But in our country what happens is we buy land with money. You aren’t granted the privilege to use it. You buy it with money, like everything else. And the title transfers. You can save up some money and go buy some land yourself. High housing prices, notwithstanding, very large shares of the country are still homeowners. It’s not like this is an extreme minority group.
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@MattBruenig @Sheesh_barak @TheStalwart @xwanyex A right is an entitlement, and entitlements have to be secured somehow. The state uses force at the end of the chain, but that doesn’t mean the thing itself is just “a violence voucher.” You’re collapsing the entitlement into the enforcement.
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@Sheesh_barak @TheStalwart @xwanyex Correct. One way of putting it is that you don't actually buy land. You buy a voucher that you can redeem with the state at any time to have it violently exclude others from it. This "violence voucher" is what is valuable. The land, absent a violent voucher, would trade for ~$0.
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People sort of act like they live in a fairytale in which there’s a group of privileged land owners and then on the other hand the peasants who have been locked out.
But in our country what happens is we buy land with money. You aren’t granted the privilege to use it. You buy it with money, like everything else. And the title transfers. You can save up some money and go buy some land yourself.
High housing prices, notwithstanding, very large shares of the country are still homeowners. It’s not like this is an extreme minority group.
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@phl43 @severino205 Yeah he’s a dumb ML. That’s about the extent of it
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@severino205 "His opinions are regular leftist opinions that are bad in the way that leftist opinions are bad and he delivers them with some attitude, but nothing outside the pale."
That was more or less what I was assuming.
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I have never listened to Hasan Piker speak on his podcast or read anything he's written. I'm not even sure he actually writes anything. I'm just assuming both that he isn't very interesting and that the pro-Israel brigade makes him sound crazier than he really is. I may or may not be right about that, but in any case, I'm pretty sure I'm right that it's not worth spending time to try to figure it out.
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Was Jeane Kirkpatrick's hypothesis correct? That propping up capitalist autocracies against communist autocracies was a good way to spread democracy long-term?
Looking specifically at East Asia, yeah that seems to have probably been more correct than not.
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@CharlesHenryLe3 @worst_account You didn’t make yourself, should you own your body?
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@worst_account I think it makes a lot of sense. The only primary factors of production are land and labor. They are saying you should be able to keep 100% of the value add from labor but 0% of the value of land itself. It is a conceptually clear distinction.
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"No one creates land" is the worst Georgist argument by far. It is *goofy.*
No one creates *anything* in the sense land isn't created. Your car isn't made ex nihilo, the materials are transformed. Just like cultivated land.
Other (especially economic) arguments are much better.
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@JohnTeufelNYC @jasonbowden1000 …then you shift the party right on certain issues to renormalize and strip away voters. This is how our two-party system has worked forever.
Remember, the Democratic Party literally used to be the party of Jim Crow. Massive change can happen quickly.
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@jasonbowden1000 What do you think of population shifts giving Republicans a possibly insurmountable EV advantage by the 2032 election? Sure it's *possible* for Democrats to win, but the deck is stacked.
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I'm going to hijack this millionth Hasan tweet to raise a larger, more important point: it is fairly clear that the US version of liberal democracy is not working. The Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, the 2-party system, all broke. So what do we do with that?
Jeremiah Johnson 🌐@JeremiahDJohns
There's something missing from the Hasan Piker discourse. Hasan's fans and critics often overlook the most troubling fact about him. The core problem with Hasan Piker is that, on a fundamental level, he doesn't believe in liberal democracy. x.com/CNLiberalism/s…
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My view on "illiberal democracy" is that, in contemporary societies, justice, the media and cultural institutions are biased in favor of liberals for various structural reasons, so when conservative governments want to change that, they have to actively intervene and this requires violating norms that are supposed to protect those institutions from political interference, whereas a liberal government can respect them and still enjoy an institutional environment biased in their favor.
The result when the norms against political interference in the governance of those institutions are violated however is not just a right-wing version of the kind of biased institutional environment you'd see otherwise, because the kind of heavy-handed intervention that is required to counter the natural bias of those institutions produces a closer political alignment with the government and a much more visible sort of collusion with it than what would happen with a liberal government if you let that natural bias play out.
Ross Douthat@DouthatNYT
The results in Hungary tend to confirm one of my strongly-held views, which is that terms like "illiberal democracy" can be usefully descriptive but the phrase "competitive authoritarianism" is just a contradiction in terms. x.com/zackbeauchamp/…
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@HedgeDirty “Having a job” and “buying and selling stuff” aren’t rights wtf.
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No. Land ownership is indeed a right, not a privilege.
But being right not a privilege does not imply exemption from taxation.
Having a job is a right, but we tax income. Buying & selling stuff is a right, but we tax sales
bob's burgers urbanist 🐿️@yhdistyminen
voice of the narrator: "Land ownership is, in fact, a privilege."
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@Kama_Kamilia "Madon" is Sicilian slang meaning "My God".
James Gandolfini never got that pronunciation quite right🤣
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