BenjiW

Don't be stupid. People need money to survive. There is asymmetry of power in a work contract - driven by relative levels of capital held - and you know it. Wake up. People fought for employment rights for fucking centuries. The idea that big capital had these fabulous intentions for people is so intellectually dishonest there's no point talking to you.

If you don't give people days off, employment benefits, or a good work life balance, they'll go and work for someone who does. Because employers have a huge incentive to keep good employees. You don't know anything about anything. You just assume people will work for no pay instead of going somewhere else. But I don't blame you. You think people work like that because that's how socialism is. No matter how much your socialist job sucks, there's nowhere else to go, because there's no such thing as competition under socialism.

Every ‘equal society’ in history ended the same way: with force. You cannot redistribute productivity without coercion. That’s the part radical socialism never admits. The more 'equality' you want, the more authoritarian it must become to enforce it.

Does the robber provide you with healthcare, education, roads, buildings, social care, energy infrastructure, care for the disabled, military defence, foreign policy, a state pension, police, sewage management, legal courts and foreign policy? It's not theft. It's an investment into us all. It's an investment into the social contract.

@BWAProject @RealTexasRick @KonstantinKisin If I walk down the road and a man with a gun tells me to give him money, it is called a robbery: theft through coercion. If the government tells me I need to give them money else they will send a man with a gun to lock me in a cage, is that not also robbery?

You owe tax for services provided like education, roads, non-expoitative healthcare, military defence, social care, and generally towards social contract and civility. Do you want to provide for the disabled and injured veterans, or for those who can't feed their kids, or do you want to be a child and claim this is "tyranny" or "authoritarianism" as KK is claiming? Money is created by government and invested into us all. If there's too much in circulation i.e. in excess of resource, labour and productive capacity, it has to come back out again via tax.

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin Tax is entirely tyrannical. It is an absolute violation of the individual and fundamentally against the foundation of all rights: the right to one's own life. No part of anyone or their life is owed to anyone else. That said, you are correct about the creation of money.

Yes, because capitalism on its own would run us all into the fucking ground wouldn't it. Its goal is to maxmimse return for the capital owners, not give you days off work, employment benefits, or any resemblance of work life balance. It needs regulating. Capital begets capital, and that needs re-engineered. You're living in a fantasy.

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin Socialism requires a massive establishment to micromanage the redistribution. Every single time. Stop being a cuck for the establishment. Stop misunderstanding big capital, monetary policy, and human nature. Choose capitalism, the only anti-establishment economic system.

@RjectModernity @KonstantinKisin a) They aren't b) It's a very small number of people Go get mad at the £60bn tax gap driven mainly by tax evasion, or better yet, at coporations exploiting profit shifting mechanisms, or better yet, the HNWIs expoiting complex offshore trusts to hide their income.

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin A welfare recipient should NEVER be paid more than low wage workers. It's a completely fucked up and unfair system. The low wage worker also has to spend time & money on transportation that the welfare recipient doesnt.

Oh I 100% agree with you re the £100k barrier and the resulting taper of PA, child benefit etc. That seems like it could be better designed to be less punitive and promote productivity. Equally, at that level of salary, youre 3x the national average and fully capable of living without tax perks/child benefit. Assume most folks at that level also have investments and various tax advantages on the capital gains side to butress. And re your first question - what kind of society do you want to live in? Personally, I dont mind paying more st those levels because that's the price of us all living civily, with support for those who have had less favourable circumstances in their lives, to promote decent living conditions for all and to engineer relative economic stability/employment.

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin Is your argument that I should be grateful to the State for allowing me to *still* retain more of my wages than what they take away from me at source? Someone works 4 days and makes £90,000 instead of £112,500 as the reward for working one extra day isn't worth the effort.

Full job seekers/UC endowment for someone with kids and rental help (in London) is £25,300 pa, but the reality is most are on significantly less than that. Minimum wage on full time hours gets you to £26,400. And remember, this is a statistical minority of people. Circa 1.5m people who are able to work who take jobseekers allowance, or 5% of the labouring populace, at a cost of circa £12bn pa (0.1% of tax receipts).

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin Not not only that. There are people working pretty low wage jobs in many western nations who are forced to pay taxes to people on welfare who ends up with more money than those who work.

@OzReviewer @KonstantinKisin I'm 60-40. It's hard to argue against the clear emancipation from poverty this system has produced, but it is now rapidly concentrating wealth and power in a fairly backward fuedal manner, eroding democracy, exploiting third world countries etc. We have to address these things?

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin So you are happy with capitalism with social net to support those that need a hand up. I am too. That’s not communism tho.

@iLeftyFemBot @KonstantinKisin Help me understand then!

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin You dont seem to understand ANY of it...

But that's not how the tax system is structured. It's still a net benefit to your bottom line at the additional rate of taxation i.e your retain more than you pay to hmrc. If people are choosing to not work those hours it's probably more ideological e.g. more time with family, vs the fiscal impact?

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin When you have professionals who decide to work 4 days a week in order not to get overtaxed yes, it also becomes a productivity issue. You are fiscally punishing people for trying to be more productive.

@PeterFreem1972 @KonstantinKisin Tax is not tyrannical though is it. If governments created money in the first place, tax is just there to control the resulting inflation.

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin Tax is the use of force. Please be honest

I appreciate there is value add and technological deflation/cost savings, but wealth is just a reflection of access to resources, which are finite on a finite planet, so mostly disagree with your first point. Really it's more about who has amassed the capital to lay claim to those resources isn't it? And re your second point; it does exist. It's called tax?

Socialists' ideas have two implied assumptions that rarely get challenged. First, they view wealth as static. It is a pie that gets sliced up in some manner. They have no idea how the wealth got there. As Thomas Sowell remarked, they are keenly interested in how wealth might be distributed, but have no interest in learning how wealth gets created. Second, by talking about "redistributing wealth", they assume that there already exists some sort of wealth distribution system that functions for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, and all they need to do to create "social justice" is to get their hands on the levers and buttons that control that system. But no such system exists.

Bar children, the disabled, those who are unwell, the retired, and those who are working but still require in work benefit, who are these unproductive people? The cost of people who are authentically out of work (but are seeking it to qualify for UC) is tiny. This isn't enough to move the needle in the way KK is discussing.

@BWAProject @KonstantinKisin Nor is it solely productively rich v productively on the bread line…there is unproductive, which to use your terminology could be further split into unproductively rich v unproductively on the bread line!

I've been on 70% of the major marches through London since the conflict began. They have all been peaceful, broadly attended by all faiths, and obviously vocipherously against the Israeli government. The common interest is humanity, love, peace and support, and that is practiced by the majority of activists. You'll always get some bad apples, no matter the context and demographic, and I know it's highly tempting to draw broader conclusions from them. But the reality is not as you've shared. Come join a march and you'll see how wonderful and supportive these things are ❤️

@HespeChris34466 @MichaelRosenYes @AWumman @DPJHodges I can see you are going to keep denying reality so frankly, you can go to hell. I could post some of the antisemitism I see on this site everyday, but you’d probably make excuses for that too. Also, I don’t want to upset more people. Muted.

One thing on the pro-Palestine marches. If you accept they directly intimidate the Jewish community (which they do) then you must also acknowledge the Unite the Kingdom rallies have precisely the same effect on Muslim and other minority communities. We ban both, or neither.

@ZiaYusufUK You guys are sick cunts. Go fuck yourself, and your facistic supporters.

Today we announce a new policy: In order to deport all illegal migrants in Britain, Reform will need to detain tens of thousands at a time. Migrants will not be able to leave these detention centres, and each will be held there a couple of weeks before being deported. So here’s our promise: A Reform government will not put any migrant detention facilities in any constituency with a Reform MP. Nor will we put them where Reform controls the council. And of the remaining areas, we will prioritise Green controlled parliamentary constituencies and Green controlled councils to locate the detention centres. Put simply, if you vote in a Reform council or Reform MP, we guarantee you won’t have a detention centre near you. If you vote Green, there’s a good chance you will. This is an important exercise in democratic consent, not just for our mass deportation policy, but for where the detention centres are placed. Given @ZackPolanski openly advocates for open borders, I look forward to their warm embrace of this policy. votegreengetillegals.com

@awake_canadian @PeterMcCormack If that's the case then no collateral use case either. If an asset has value and you can take a loan out against it (which predictably, is also tax free) then you can pay an amount of tax on it.

@BWAProject @PeterMcCormack How do you pay taxes on unrealized gains? 99 percent of wealth is held in assets, most are digital. What is your plan? Make them forced sellers, what do you think this does to markets? Just makes everyone poorer.

We live in a permanent state of socialism - for the rich. Yes and this is the irony for socialists. Our financial system is a system which extracts upwards through inflation and purchasing power. As more money is created > money loses purchasing power > assets gain purchasing power > wage earners get poorer as wages don’t keep up > asset holders get wealthier as asset values increase too. Further, the rich have better access to buy more assets with the newly created money. How do I know this? I am an asset holder, I benefit, I’m telling you because I think it’s vile. No party has made any attempt to deal with this. Why? To deal with this means not deficit spending, which means balancing the books, which means being honest with the public, which means not making false promises to win votes. It is a machine of lying and corruption to win power. If you want a fairer society, inflation would be your number one enemy. Everything else is theatre - tax the rich is theatre, billionaire whinging is theatre. The government loves inflation as they are in so much debt it wipes it away for them. The rich love inflation as it makes the wealthier. Everyone else should treat it like the plague. Ending inflation is the best way to reduce the growing wealth divide. If we don’t, our society will continue to hollow out and your life will get harder. Stop voting for your own misery.

@BitcoinMicropig @PeterMcCormack @WFC_Will He is exceptional, I agree. But he has too much now.

@BWAProject @PeterMcCormack @WFC_Will Musk has been an incredible force for good.

After an afternoon of arguing with socialists, here it is... These people are impossibly and dangerously stupid. They are making up policies as they go which will cause nothing but economic destruction. It is evident when arguing with them they have little to no understanding of the reality of economics and their ideas come from envy. They are predators. But... this was caused by the state itself: 1. Allowing leftism to take over the institutions 2. Buidling an education system with baked in Marxism 3. Failing to control inflation We are in very dangerous times.

Taxing him *a little more*. He won't feel it, he won't miss it, and it won't disincentivise him. I agree he's a great asset for the world, but one man doesn't need hundreds of billions/trillions when child poverty in western nations is also rising. Musk is a great example to use though. In the most kleptocratic way possible, he used his procured platform and wealth to lobby and promote a government who is now invading, stealing, kidnapping and terrorising the entire planet. Is that a good thing? Is that good concetration of wealth and power? I'd also argue that it's this exact problem - concentration of wealth - that has created the monetary policy you despise. What better way to line your pockets than to lobby and create tax loopholes, forcing borrowing and forcing asset inflation. Governments are in the pockets of the capital owners around the world, and they've created the perfect system to swallow everything. I repeat again. The problem is concentration of wealth.

I don't see the problem with 48% of wealth being concentrated among 1000 people. The alternative is to force ie. Musk to dump TSLA stock and crash its price which would cost ordinary investors lots of money. He is proven to be a great capital allocator, what is the big problem with letting him allocate capital? Taxing him won't make poor people any better off in the long run. They will just spend the money, badly in many cases, and remain poor. At which point you would force Musk to dump even more stock and crash the price again, to divvy more money to the people who are still poor, and still make poor economic decisions.

But you and I both know we're not talking about normal income inequality here; we're talking about 48% of global wealth belonging to 1000 people. That will only get worse and will corrupt every well-intentioned system implemented going forward unless it is redistributed fiscally. And redistributing a portion won't affect the health of wealth generators who have more dormant capital sat on balance sheets than ever before. It would amplify discretionary spend though, and that's not only good for labourers and asset owners alike, but compounds tax take.

We can't alleviate poverty by printing more money. That just creates more poverty through inflation. The additional support comes from higher prices incentivising the market to provide solutions. Income inequality is not in itself a social wrong. It's just the corollary of freedom versus authoritarianism. The key is to maintain the health of the wealth generating economy, not to attempt vainly to redistribute wealth to everyone who has failed to offer value. Much harder to erode democratic structures using bitcoin than fiat. Ditto wars. Hard to do these things if you eventually run out of money which you can't print. In fact if the Geneva Convention made printing fiat currency a war crime punishable by death there would be far less war in general. Far shorter, more contained wars, quicker truces, more demilitarised zones, more serious peace talks. We don't need to solve human nature - capitalism already works very well with it. We just need hard money in combination with it. The less state involvement the better as proven again and again all over the world since the year dot.