[RD] Taxes are actually not theft

[civver_764]

The majority of your income is a function of the society you live in. Unless you think that an American janitor has a vastly superior ethic to an Bangledeshi one, or that a Norwegian bus-driver is a scale-order better at driving than a Chilean one, I think it's easy to make this point.

It's a function of the economy. How much can we credit that to the government? That's a good question that I don't know nearly enough to answer.

By analogy, I will use a mutual fund. They actively invest the money, and charged a (say) 1% service fee. I both get profits and constantly pay a fee for it. Likewise, you're using your country's infrastructure to get a vastly higher income than you could without using it. And then you're charged a fee for that access. Importantly, you're charged this fee after you make use of the services.

I would be charged whether or not I made use of the services, and it wouldn't be proportionate to the amount of services that I used. So your analogy isn't really that great.

Finally, a lot of the things you get for free, you don't actually have to pay for. Access to sidewalks (that you didn't pay for) is free, and that's just one . You don't need to pay an income tax in order to access them. Like, at all.

Well there's not a lot of sidewalks in jail as far as I know...

Should a shareholder get that company's services for free? Or is it okay that the services they consume from a company is proportionate to their use of that company's services?

I think you mistaking 'shareholder' for 'customer' here?

Now, functionally my dividends can cover my expense if the company is rich enough. A Walton can essentially shop at Walmart without actually performing any useful work, entirely due to their inheritance. But they can only get their Walmart products 'for free' up to the point where they've spent the entirety of their dividends.

Uhm, you lost me here.

 

[El_Machinae]

It's not a function of the government. It's a function of the society. The government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the society.

I'm not mistaking customer with shareholder. If you use the benefits of the society to generate wealth, you're a customer of that society. The voters are the shareholders. The citizens are, more accurately.

Yes, your use of the services are not perfectly proportionate to the amount you use. I'll grant you that. When I rent a security box, I pay the same whether I stuff it completely full or just keep a few items in it. When I visit my bank to discuss my mortgage, I pay the same whether or not I used the bathroom and accepted the free coffee there. That's a decision made by the owners of the company.

But make no mistake, your use of the services is very nearly proportional to the amount of money you make, especially when you scale up.

I'll go back to the diesel example. If you bought a tank of diesel and got burned by the seller, you have a series of options. If you bought a tanker-truck's worth of diesel, you have a series of options. With the tanker truck, those options are literally worth more. As well, if you bought a bunch of tanks of diesel from a variety of people, you have a greater number of options - at the very least, you have the same options as the one, but multiplied many times over.

As for the last bit, my point is that the shareholders own the profits and assets. Sometimes people think that shareholders should get discounts. But it doesn't really need to work that way. I might have spun off into my analogy a bit too hard. I'm still trying to distinguish between who's the customer and who's the owner.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'm still trying to distinguish between who's the customer and who's the owner.

Good luck with that, since there is no distinction.

There's also no need for one. As I said, compliance is voluntary. If you want to:

Not be employed by any company that is in compliance with the tax code.
Not do business in any way other than spot cash transactions with any company that is in compliance with the tax code.
Not own any sort of property that is regulated by the Federal Government, including real estate, securities investments, bank accounts, etc.
Not enter into any legally binding contract.
and
Not apply for any sort of benefit from the Federal Government.

You are welcome to not participate.

 

[El_Machinae]

There absolutely is a distinction, insofar as there's an owner of the resulting fees.

Nokia shareholders use my country in order to make money for themselves. Some of those shareholders are Canadian, many are not. We then charge a service fee for the infrastructure and services we provide.

That service fee is then owned by the voters. And this is true whether or not that voter is an owner of Nokia shares.

One can concomitantly be a customer and an employee. One can be a shareholder and a customer. One can be an employee and a shareholder. And in all those cases, the ownership of the profits is rather clear!

But you've summarized it very nicely. You're allowed to enter into legally binding contracts. That's an enormous benefit. One that vastly benefits high earners compared to low earners. And there are a lot of taxes that merely are the equivalent of charging a fee for that service.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Well, yes, there is a distinction between customers and shareholders in the case of Nokia. But when you transition your example from Nokia to Canada the distinction disappears...unless we posit that every Nokia shareholder is a Nokia phone user, and vice versa. In Canada every citizen is both a "shareholder" and a "customer" at the same time, so no distinction is available. Unless they follow the course I laid out, in which case they become neither...and whether they really even can be rightly called a "citizen" becomes a question.

 

[El_Machinae]

Yes, every Canadian citizen is concomitantly a shareholder and a (potential) customer in my model. But the amount you pay is not proportionate to you shareholder status, it's proportionate to how much of a customer you are.

Not all the customers are shareholders, though. Nokia is not a Canadian citizen.

The dividends that you receive are merely the profit distributed. When you walk a sidewalk, you get to do so for free merely because you're a shareholder. The dividend isn't expressed as a cash, but as a variety of services and good that a shareholder can access. If we wanted to just cut every citizen a cheque instead, that would be just fine. In fact, we could just cut a cheque. The service fees are our money.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Yes, every Canadian citizen is concomitantly a shareholder and a (potential) customer in my model. But the amount you pay is not proportionate to you shareholder status, it's proportionate to how much of a customer you are.

Not all the customers are shareholders, though. Nokia is not a Canadian citizen.

The dividends that you receive are merely the profit distributed. When you walk a sidewalk, you get to do so for free merely because you're a shareholder. The dividend isn't expressed as a cash, but as a variety of services and good that a shareholder can access. If we wanted to just cut every citizen a cheque instead, that would be just fine. In fact, we could just cut a cheque. The service fees are our money.

Your sidewalk example has a minor flaw, in that "use of the sidewalk" is not limited to "customers" or "shareholders." It is effectively a free commodity that as long as it is not used beyond its capacity requires no system of distribution. Just like there is currently no "economics of air," the sidewalk is no longer a part of the system once it is built. Sidewalk maintenance is a distributed good governed by the rules of the system. Someone who has opted out in the way I described may walk on the sidewalk, but if they try to call for maintenance services on a particular stretch of sidewalk that is of importance to them without some sort of status they won't get it. Sidewalk construction is similar in that no one is asking the opinion of the non participant where the sidewalk should be built.

And Nokia, while neither a citizen nor even a human (which is, or at least should be a prerequisite), is in fact both 'customer' and 'shareholder' and thus also lacks any distinction between those two states. They "give and take" in the same basic ways as a citizen even though they are not one, as long as they choose to participate in Canada.

Now, when you circle back to the question of how that 'give' is proportioned relative to how the 'take' is proportioned you meet economics head on. Every participant (being both shareholder and customer simultaneously) perceives a balance between their giving and taking that is acceptable enough to have them continue participating. Looking at my list of requirements to stop participating it is obvious that this "acceptable enough" does not really set a very high bar. One has to be really seriously dissatisfied to take the required action to stop participating. Nokia isn't abandoning the Canadian market. Canadians are neither emigrating in droves nor are huge numbers of them making the effort to become an in place nonparticipant.

Which is important because near as I can make out no one is perceiving a balance that is very far above the minimum acceptable. The poor ***** like mad about their balance of give and take, but so do the rich, and everyone in between. Everyone believes that their own complaints are valid, while the other complaining people just can't see how good they have it...they blame a problem in the other's perception of the balance as related to them rather than the balance itself. And they apply all this to their own balance and continue to find it adequate, though barely.

 

[El_Machinae]

Hmmmn, to call Nokia a 'shareholder' means that you and I are misunderstanding each other's metaphors. Nokia has no voting rights. Nokia owners don't, either.

But I agree, each citizen certainly balances the value they're getting as a customer and as a shareholder. I am not disputing that. My thread "taxes are not theft" is basically about the ownership of those taxes, due to how the customer and shareholder hats work. I appreciate that you're trying to add nuance to the discussion, but as far as I can tell, you're just using a different set of heuristics in order to arrive at a similar conclusion.

At that point, we're just having a memetic face-off. Who can change more minds away from the position 'taxes are theft'?

 

[Camikaze]

I haven't followed the shareholder analogy from the beginning, but I think it's necessary to appreciate that a company's shareholders don't own the company's assets. The company owns the company's assets. The word 'share' is probably misleading in this regard. A 'share' isn't beneficial ownership of a portion of a company's assets (in contrast to, say, a partnership, where the partners actually do directly own the partnership's assets, as a partnership is not a separate legal entity). A 'share' is instead a chose in action; a right held against the company, equivalent to a portion of that company's assets. The value of a share is that it grants certain rights that may be enforced against the company, in accordance with the company's constitution and various rules of law (such as the right to vote for directors, or the right to receive an equal dividend, although usually not a right for a dividend to be declared). That's much more similar to a citizen's rights against a government than would be the case if a 'share' were direct ownership of a portion of a company; governments being separate legal entities in relation to which citizens have certain rights. I suppose if the 'shareholder' equivalent in government is considered to be those who have some form of participatory right against the government (rather than say a right against the government arising out of a transaction), then those who qualify as shareholders might be quite broad, extending beyond citizens in some cases. Remember there can be more than one class of shareholding.

 

[El_Machinae]

Thanks! My language might be sloppy. I'm gunning for colloquial. My only tidbit to re-emphasize is that the 'shareholder' is over 'country', not the 'government'. The government is merely a portion of what's owned. I think of them as employees.

A Walton gets no individual say over a cashier or a stockboy

 

[Timsup2nothin]

At that point, we're just having a memetic face-off. Who can change more minds away from the position 'taxes are theft'?

Well, yeah. I actually sort of stayed away from this thread because I think that we have very few people daft enough to be on the "taxes are theft" side around here. I just sort of checked in to see how things are going and how it went on this long. Did you actually have to slap some daffies?

 

[El_Machinae]

There's no slapping available. It's a heuristic. This means that it requires time to be integrated and overcome dissonance. You can almost never do that in realtime.