Why are antiracists so... racist?

[Berzerker]

The federal government's spending is self-financing - it doesn't require tax revenue to spend.

great, ban taxes!

 

[inthesomeday]

I wonder if these right-wingers would oppose wage slavery if we started referring to profit as taxes

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If you more than you need of something that somebody else has none of, you have stolen it from them.

I'm not interested in playing pretend with words that have established meaning in the English language. I actively disrespect the above statement, which co-opts a term used for crime and lacks even the decency to separate "something needed to survive" from other possessions.

People in pain dont want to be murdered, they want to end the pain. If the latter aint happening some choose death. Has anyone in such a situation told their kin or doc to 'murder' them? Of course not, they know it aint murder - its suicide (assisted). The fact some people do commit murder doesn't mean they want to be murdered, it means they're hypocrites. And some guy who wants to die in his fantasy aint being murdered, he chose that for himself. If you're murdered you dont get to make the rules, the murderer makes the rules.

If you make up definitions as you go and skip using them in coherent fashion, you can make anything fit or not fit the definition by whim. That's not a resounding case for absolute morality, it's a demonstration of lacking any case whatsoever.

When I said nobody wants to be murdered, I wasn't suggesting you cant invent circumstances under which someone wants to be murdered, you just haven't done it yet if thats your goal. But arguing over universal and nearly universal seems rather pointless, it dont really matter to me if you can find some crazy guy who wants to be murdered. You say there's no evidence, ask everyone if they want to be murdered without inflicting pain or mental illness on them first and you'll see a universal response.

You ignored the second part of my post, where I pointed out that killing people against their will is also frequently not considered murder depending on context.

What better basis (objectively) for morality than the universality of opinion?

A self-consistent one would be a start. General opinion of the society is a pretty good starting point, but you're still in the realm of subjective morality if that's all you've got.

Government doesn't spend any more or less efficiently, on the whole, than private enterprise.

Hahahaha!

The mouthfuls of straw after quoting me aren't worth anybody's time so I won't address them.

Taxes are by definition lawful; ergo they can't be theft. SMH.

Mostly true, but it is possible in principle to create/enforce taxes that the government's constitution defines as illegal. I guess you could explain that away as not technically being taxes any longer though.

All taxation, regardless of structure, redistributes wealth.

All TRANSACTIONS, of which taxes are a subset, redistribute wealth. What matters is the reason you're doing it.

"He has more than me" is garbage. Paying people who keep other countries from coming and bashing your head in, to enforce law/property rights, and to build/maintain infrastructure like roads also unquestionably "redistribute wealth", but they have a different basis than simply claiming that someone else has more of something as if that's a legitimate justification for action.

unless you specifically disapprove of a certain group getting assets for a certain reason.

I clarified the basis/reasoning to which I was opposed in the post you quoted . I'm not buying a "perceived moral wrong" without direct causal evidence though. I'm a descendant of slaves too, if you go a few hundred years further back. Most would agree that there's no observable causal relation between that fact and my present lifestyle. If we're going to redress > 100 year old (or any arbitrary amount of time) history, there needs to be coherent rationale based on the evidence available.

The reality seems to be that the problem lies somewhere else, and this "redress" crap is a distraction from it.

Maybe right now, but technology advances (regardless of economic organization). I think that the vast social problems caused by capitalism are not worth the vague work-or-die incentive that "motivates" laborers to do specific tasks that could theoretically be mechanized.

There's nothing in capitalism that precludes the design and usage of mechanization though. No competent approach would do that. Post-scarcity would be a good thing under any sane model I can conceive...maybe I'm missing something?

The argument that this mechanization somehow causes people to starve is not supported by evidence. We're better off now than in 1870, despite huge amounts of mechanization. That's true even at the lowest levels of income. You'll notice people work fewer total hours and have more to eat with better tech (on average), capitalism or not. What makes you think post-scarcity levels of tech would change that?

And how did you determine this?

You can measure it if you look at the impact of adding/removing them. With enough sampling you can even limit the amount that noise skews the conclusion. Say you hire/fire 10000 people of x position and y position. If you're getting markedly different outcome measures when doing that to one group vs the other consistently, that's decent evidence that there is disparate value.

 

[Dachs]

All TRANSACTIONS, of which taxes are a subset, redistribute wealth. What matters is the reason you're doing it.

"He has more than me" is garbage. Paying people who keep other countries from coming and bashing your head in, to enforce law/property rights, and to build/maintain infrastructure like roads also unquestionably "redistribute wealth", but they have a different basis than simply claiming that someone else has more of something as if that's a legitimate justification for action.



I clarified the basis/reasoning to which I was opposed in the post you quoted . I'm not buying a "perceived moral wrong" without direct causal evidence though. I'm a descendant of slaves too, if you go a few hundred years further back. Most would agree that there's no observable causal relation between that fact and my present lifestyle. If we're going to redress > 100 year old (or any arbitrary amount of time) history, there needs to be coherent rationale based on the evidence available.

The reality seems to be that the problem lies somewhere else, and this "redress" crap is a distraction from it.

You seem to have misread what I said. You claimed to be opposed to forced redistribution of wealth. Taxation is forced redistribution of wealth, which is why I brought it up. Talking about "all transactions" is unnecessary (because they aren't all forced); it's like you want to read each individual sentence while ignoring the entire post, or why the post was written.

The reason I brought that up is because I felt, apparently quite rightly, that you were talking about "redistribution of wealth" as a way to distract from the actual reasons for your position. People aren't usually opposed to redistribution of wealth in practice (because, y'know, they are accommodated to taxation, or to economic activity in general); they just like to use that as a scare phrase to make people think of Bolsheviks or Khmer Rouge instead of a normal, everyday economic activity. So I pointed that out.

I did this chiefly to try to poke you into treating the discussion with the sort of seriousness it deserves. But you characterize a legal system that makes it unbelievably easy for wealthy people to get wealthier as "enforc[ing] law/property rights" as though the law just sprang up out of the ground, sui generis; you reduce the difficulties faced by black Americans to having had a slave ancestor centuries ago; and you ask for "direct causal evidence" when it is widely available, in both narrative and statistical form, in a way that is in its most essential form agreed almost unanimously by the American historical academy. (And it's easy to see why those who disagree, disagree.) I don't think "treating the discussion with the seriousness it deserves" is gonna happen. So: have fun.

 

[Lexicus]

You can measure it if you look at the impact of adding/removing them.

I submit that even such measurement is ultimately meaningless. Let's take a simple example, digging ditches, what does it mean to "look at the impact of adding/removing" a worker? You have 1 worker per shovel, so taking away a worker means a shovel just there idly. That's a simple example, mind...more complicated and you start getting into interpersonal qualitative dynamics that render comparison even between two identical positions impossible, plus the fact that the productivity of workers depends on the productivity of other workers, not to mention the vagaries of the market (if you're measuring productivity using any kind of monetary value then the "productivity" of workers can be decimated by a collapsing bubble).

It is simply not possible to objectively evaluate a person's contribution to a productive process, but we have fooled ourselves into thinking we can. And that's the source of much injustice in the world today. It's why reproductive labor goes largely uncompensated while sociopaths are paid millions to loot the economy. It's why women get paid less than men, and why black people get paid less than white people. Etc, etc.

 

[Berzerker]

If you make up definitions as you go and skip using them in coherent fashion, you can make anything fit or not fit the definition by whim. That's not a resounding case for absolute morality, it's a demonstration of lacking any case whatsoever.

What definition did I make up and proceed to skip? You just made that up. Where did I define assisted suicide as murder? Yeah, the word murder has a meaning that distinguishes it from other forms of killing. You guys are citing the other forms as if they're murder and sticking me with that straw.

You ignored the second part of my post, where I pointed out that killing people against their will is also frequently not considered murder depending on context.

I agreed with the point - not all killings are murder.

A self-consistent one would be a start. General opinion of the society is a pretty good starting point, but you're still in the realm of subjective morality if that's all you've got.

How is it not consistent? Because some crazy guy wanted to be eaten (did he think murder was moral?)? General opinion has supported all sorts of evil, universal opinion doesn't. If you think what people generally believe is a good starting point, why wouldn't what everyone believes be a better one?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

ou seem to have misread what I said. You claimed to be opposed to forced redistribution of wealth. Taxation is forced redistribution of wealth, which is why I brought it up.

I said that, then when it was pointed out that my stated logic was flawed I qualified my statement with my actual objection for clarity's sake. However, what you quoted above included that qualification - IE the rationale for forced redistribution with which I disagree. It hasn't been unclear for a while now :/.

it's like you want to read each individual sentence while ignoring the entire post, or why the post was written.

At this point that's my line .

I did this chiefly to try to poke you into treating the discussion with the sort of seriousness it deserves. But you characterize a legal system that makes it unbelievably easy for wealthy people to get wealthier as "enforc[ing] law/property rights"

No. If you don't have property rights, it really is pure law of the jungle, use physical force to take what you want and if you can't protect what you want by yourself or with those willing to pool resources, you're screwed. That's something necessarily in the realm of government regardless of its specifics. Why does it immediately go back to "but the wealthy get more money"? Does this actually matter to you more than someone being able to come clean out your house with you having no recourse?

sui generis; you reduce the difficulties faced by black Americans to having had a slave ancestor centuries ago; and you ask for "direct causal evidence" when it is widely available

Quoted isn't coherent. Either the slavery was different, several extra lifespans w/o change somehow creates a wildly different situation, or you're stuck with a more plausible conclusion that something is systemically wrong up to and including *right now* and the redress narrative is likely garbage.

I didn't say anything about black Americans, but now you have. What logic dictates that black Americans who immigrated here in the past century should pay reparations to great-great grandchildren of black slaves in the US? You're asking me to take that seriously (it is a necessary implication of any self-consistent slavery redress), but you're not giving me a very good reason why that is.

Who is paying, who is getting the redress? What's the actual criteria?

Widely available "direct causal evidence" is a joke. Event sequences > 100 years don't work like that...it's like claiming WW2 was the obvious conclusion of post-Napoleonic France.

submit that even such measurement is ultimately meaningless. Let's take a simple example, digging ditches, what does it mean to "look at the impact of adding/removing" a worker? You have 1 worker per shovel, so taking away a worker means a shovel just there idly.

You take away 50 workers with shovels or you take away 25 workers with backhoes. Which of these two options moves more (now less) dirt? There is an answer, it's not "they're the same", and that fact isn't "meaningless" to reality.

And yes, you do get that level of productivity variance between some positions and especially when comparing involved technology...something directly related to the post-scarcity consideration.

It is simply not possible to objectively evaluate a person's contribution to a productive process, but we have fooled ourselves into thinking we can.

Work can be measured, and firms that do it competently and act on that knowledge will outperform those that don't. Moving dirt is a simple example, but it's not like similar is impossible in other vocations.

What definition did I make up and proceed to skip? You just made that up. Where did I define assisted suicide as murder? Yeah, the word murder has a meaning that distinguishes it from other forms of killing. You guys are citing the other forms as if they're murder and sticking me with that straw.

You refuse to pin down murder while claiming it's universal opinion that it's wrong. That only functions when people have different definitions of murder.

Even ignoring that, only people seem to care about murdering people for the most part (advanced intelligence animals might dislike a particular person dying, depending, but we don't have any evidence that non-humans avoid murder on the whole). Rocks definitely don't care, nor do air particles or sponges.

Whenever humans want to allow killing people against their will, they change their definition of murder to avoid including that method of killing or to allow taking some lives. War is a good example, but not the only example. We have no evidence that support "universality of opinion" and a ton of counter-evidence for that...

Define murder, and it will be trivial to find other people or societies that have a different interpretation of what constitutes murder vs justified killing. At that point your universality position doesn't hold unless the definitions is allowed to be made up as you go. Pick one.

General opinion has supported all sorts of evil, universal opinion doesn't.

This isn't fantasy land. There is no "universal opinion". Even if we could somehow manage it, you'd STILL not have "absolute morality", because universal opinion is still in the context of human preferences, not some outside unchangeable source.

 

[Lexicus]

Work can be measured

No, it cannot.

You take away 50 workers with shovels or you take away 25 workers with backhoes. [...] There is an answer, it's not "they're the same", and that fact isn't "meaningless" to reality.

You're not comparing people, you're comparing shovels and backhoes. Really, this is quite sloppy.

 

[civver_764]

No, it cannot.

No counter-argument. No refutation. No additional explanation. Just a flat statement of your own opinion. What's the point of even posting this? You haven't advanced the discussion one bit.

 

[Perfection]

Whose pocket do these programs come out of? In the context of modern capitalism, any of these programs would cost money, and money is generated for government use by taxes. If taxes are levied against the poorest population in the country, then they are essentially making net zero gain for the most part, and the poor folks with jobs will have to denote a chunk of their already measly pay towards the poor folks without jobs. Ultimately, poor folks shouldn't be paying any taxes at all when there are rich folks with vast and unnecessary stockpiles of wealth, which is serving essentially no purpose other than to establish them as an extortionist class capable of controlling the flow of goods. Do you see the dilemma with government social programs? The closest thing to a middle ground here would be to tax only the rich, and to a huge degree, so as to give the government enough capital to realistically provide the population with a social safety net. Then the question arises, if you're willing to forcefully redistribute wealth for the basic social needs, why not also for the luxury goods that are afforded in surplus to the rich anyway? IE, if the rich are wasting capital by hoarding it, what's the crime in instead repurposing that capital to bring the entire population the luxury goods that could be available to them but are not for sheer failure of organization?

I think we can provide a social safety net with good ol' standard progressive taxation - we do not need to overthrow rich to do so. I support certain tax increases on the richest but nothing that would destabilize the system of incentives that make capitalism work. I should also point out that most of the wealth of the wealthiest people is in the form of owning companies and companies provide the public with numerous goods and services. The wealth isn't just sitting there rotting but is an extremely important part of how our society functions.

I think that most service jobs could most certainly be automated, with a pretty simple computer interface, as the role of the retail service provider has been reduced essentially to a limited transaction interface. Then there are the slightly more involved positions, like maintenance or some more skilled, often technology-based retail, and to this I'll argue that, while the jobs themselves are admittedly difficult to mechanize, the training involved in many of them could probably itself be mechanized. For example, if somebody needs to fix a leaky pipe in their house, chances are that they would be able to use online resources to develop at least a very basic involved skill set. Now I'm not saying that these positions are quite as obsolete as simple low skill manufacturing or agriculture jobs, but it definitely seems that they could be in the near future, given many of our technological advances of the digital age.

It's a mixed bag. I myself hate self-checkout though I'll gladly shop online for many items.

You're forgetting:

3. People who hoard enormous amounts of capital and therefore withhold it from use from the rest of the population.

Capital is a fiction when people have a lot of it, they really don't prevent others from having it. We don't need the rich to get poorer for the poor to get richer.

Alternatively:
1. (I agree, roughly)
2. Completely restructure the way capital allocation works so that these low-skill jobs (that can't be easily mechanized) provide stable and luxurious lifestyles in and of themselves.
3. Invest in the mechanization of these low-skill jobs, and the technology that can mechanize those which yet escape this.

The whole burn the system to the ground and start over seems like a bad plan. We have a functional economy, do not think that's something we can synthesize out of thin air. Economic chaos will prevent people from getting the vital services they need.

I think with relatively minor alterations to the current US system we can both boost productivity and provide comfortable lives for everyone. I propose we try that before going off the deep end.

 

[Berzerker]

You refuse to pin down murder while claiming it's universal opinion that it's wrong. That only functions when people have different definitions of murder.

Define murder, and it will be trivial to find other people or societies that have a different interpretation of what constitutes murder vs justified killing.

At that point your universality position doesn't hold unless the definitions is allowed to be made up as you go. Pick one.

I didn't refuse, I said nobody wants to be murdered and you disagreed because of assisted suicide and war. How do those show people want to be murdered? Find the society that makes no distinction between murder vs justified killing and you might have an argument.

This isn't fantasy land. There is no "universal opinion". Even if we could somehow manage it, you'd STILL not have "absolute morality", because universal opinion is still in the context of human preferences, not some outside unchangeable source.

All morality is within the context of human preferences, it becomes 'objective' when its universal because it no longer relies on the differing subjective opinions of individuals.

 

[Perfection]

And how did you determine this?

Let me be clear. I do not think all low-pay low-skill positions are unimportant or don't add a lot of value. Some positions could be eliminated and the results would be catastrophic (no more cleaning crews and things would get ugly very fast) and some (say cold call telemarketers) would be hardly missed. I do believe each camp has a substantial fraction of low-pay low-skill jobs.

 

[Lexicus]

Capital is a fiction when people have a lot of it, they really don't prevent others from having it. We don't need the rich to get poorer for the poor to get richer.

Sure, in the long run...but in the long run we're all dead. We need to redistribute wealth in a big way now. We need to cut the super-rich down to size ASAP if we want anything resembling democracy to survive.

We have a functional economy,

I don't know that I would call the current US economy functional. How many people need to be poisoned by their own tap water for you to decide the economy is no longer functional?

Let me be clear. I do not think all low-pay low-skill positions are unimportant or don't add a lot of value.

But do you still think they should be low-pay jobs because they're low-skill? If you think they should be low-paid then why bother with lip service about "I don't think they're unimportant"?

 

[inthesomeday]

I think we can provide a social safety net with good ol' standard progressive taxation - we do not need to overthrow rich to do so. I support certain tax increases on the richest but nothing that would destabilize the system of incentives that make capitalism work.

How would increasing taxes on the rich and eliminating them for the poor affect the profit motive? As it stands, the richest people fleece ENORMOUS profits out of the surplus value produced by low-skill laborers, much much more than is taxed from them. Even by vastly increasing taxes on the property owners, the whole point and structure of capitalism would elevate them significantly above the laborers. Obviously this is still unacceptable to me, as I don't find property ownership to contribute much to society, but it's a bit ridiculous to imply that nearly any degree of taxation against the rich could ever make them poor.

I should also point out that most of the wealth of the wealthiest people is in the form of owning companies and companies provide the public with numerous goods and services. The wealth isn't just sitting there rotting but is an extremely important part of how our society functions.

Just by owning something you don't automatically have any claim to the merits of its utility. Companies can easily operate without somebody to skim off the top. They are rarely managed by their owners, and their owners rarely handle anything but the arbitrary movement of capital which is abstracted from the actual purpose the company serves, and yet the owners receive most of the profits generated by the company. Ownership of property is equal to wealth rotting, to me, because it is essentially pointless and even harmful to the operation of that property.

It's a mixed bag. I myself hate self-checkout though I'll gladly shop online for many items.

Maybe, but I bet you could probably handle it if you wanted to. If you say that losing the option of human interface in your checkout experience is an unacceptable loss, then you're forgetting the fact that the interaction is probably basically involuntary for the worker (I.E., they would not be there if not for the threat of starvation). This point may seem a little bit extreme for this example but it expands to the larger discussion in a meaningful way. If your own personal experience as a consumer is hurt, try to consider the experience of the worker; I'm certain that the net unpleasantness of the system is higher when the worker is forced to engage in some kind of work for hours on end than when the select consumer has slightly less choice of how to shop for a few minutes.

Capital is a fiction when people have a lot of it, they really don't prevent others from having it. We don't need the rich to get poorer for the poor to get richer.

The first sentence is false. If a limited amount of capital exists in the world, then some people having more than their equal share is literally only possible if others have less than their equal share. If an unlimited amount of capital exists in the world, then everyone should have access to it, and there is no reason as to why some should not.

The second sentence is only partially true. While the amount of capital generated in a society can experience a net increase despite wealth inequality, there's a pretty solid historical precedent that says that the increase in societal wealth will heavily benefit the lifestyle of the rich, while the poor experience only marginal differences and sometimes even a detriment to their lifestyle. For example, with the natural increase of wealth in the United States in the last ~40 years, the wealth gap has increased along with it, to the point that the rich have gotten wildly richer, while the actual material conditions of the poor have crawled along to, in some cases, a slightly better situation, and indeed in others a slightly worse situation. Now it's true that the poor have maybe felt some results of the more basic technological advances in the last 40 years, but I really don't think these can be attributed in their entirety to capitalism. The profit motive is limiting, and researchers and scientists who work in the civilian tech field might indeed work faster if they were freed from budget constraints and corporate politics. An example is the new capitalist holy grail, the smart phone. How much advance in smart phone technology has been snuffed in favor of the profits to be gained from releasing only a slight improvement on the previous model? Alternatively, how many smart phones are produced very cheaply and then sold at such high prices that their actual producers are unable to use them?

The whole burn the system to the ground and start over seems like a bad plan. We have a functional economy, do not think that's something we can synthesize out of thin air. Economic chaos will prevent people from getting the vital services they need.

Our economy is functional in that it produces great profit for the richest people. Meanwhile it is dysfunctional in that there are millions of deaths from starvation while the world produces a surplus of food; in that there are droughts despite our having technology that is able to purify water easily; in that there is vast climate damage by fossil fuels and animal agriculture despite our having pioneered simple, much cleaner alternatives to both.

I think with relatively minor alterations to the current US system we can both boost productivity and provide comfortable lives for everyone. I propose we try that before going off the deep end.

The moderate progressive has been trying that since the invention of capitalism. The whole point is that this works way too slowly to be acceptable, especially considering the rapid deterioration of our planet's livability.

 

[Lexicus]

An example is the new capitalist holy grail, the smart phone. How much advance in smart phone technology has been snuffed in favor of the profits to be gained from releasing only a slight improvement on the previous model? Alternatively, how many smart phones are produced very cheaply and then sold at such high prices that their actual producers are unable to use them?

Two points to add to this: one is that if phones built to break in a couple of years max are the best we can do we are probably going to end up extinct in a few centuries; the other is that phones could be so much more useful if they were liberated from capitalist nonsense.

The moderate progressive has been trying that since the invention of capitalism. The whole point is that this works way too slowly to be acceptable,

Not quite accurate. We've gotten many worthwhile reforms over the historical lifespan of capitalism. The problem is that those reforms, once passed, are vulnerable to the concentrated power of big business as long as that power is left intact.

especially considering the rapid deterioration of our planet's livability.

This is the elephant in the room today, of course, and it may be the case that capitalism ultimately destroys itself in this way. The capitalists have so thoroughly captured the political systems in the advanced countries that timely action on climate change may prove impossible.

Just by owning something you don't automatically have any claim to the merits of its utility.

Owning stuff is not a productive activity. Nor have I ever seen any good moral argument for why the owner of something should realize most or all of the benefits. In my view the people who actually work with and use capital should control the revenue generated thereby, not the people who own the capital.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I didn't refuse, I said nobody wants to be murdered and you disagreed because of assisted suicide and war. How do those show people want to be murdered? Find the society that makes no distinction between murder vs justified killing and you might have an argument.

Still not defining murder, still disingenuously ducking the reality of no universal opinion. You claim you don't refuse...yet you continue to avoid doing it. That is refusing to do it. That's your prerogative, but you don't get to simultaneously claim you're doing something you're not.

All morality is within the context of human preferences, it becomes 'objective' when its universal because it no longer relies on the differing subjective opinions of individuals.

In reality, opinions aren't fixed.

You're not comparing people, you're comparing shovels and backhoes. Really, this is quite sloppy.

People who can use shovels > people who can use backhoes. True for other tech too. You're also dodging the reality of productivity variance between these workers.

it's a bit ridiculous to imply that nearly any degree of taxation against the rich could ever make them poor.

It's not ridiculous at all. Set taxes to 100% and watch what happens. Knowing that, there is obviously some point where disincentive overpowers incentive. How close we are to that point is debatable of course.

Ownership of property is equal to wealth rotting

Companies are created on said owners' incentive to create them. Ownership of property is a crucial detail to avoid having people take your stuff because they want it and you have no more right to it than they do.

 

[Ryika]

Owning stuff is not a productive activity. Nor have I ever seen any good moral argument for why the owner of something should realize most or all of the benefits. In my view the people who actually worth with and use capital should control the revenue generated thereby, not the people who own the capital.

Then how do you get the people who own the capital to allow other people to use it?

 

[Lexicus]

People who can use shovels > people who can use backhoes. True for other tech too. You're also dodging the reality of productivity variance between these workers.

Again, you are not comparing the productivity of people unless you can separate out their contributions from the those of capital they use.

 

[sophie]

great, ban taxes!

Just because taxes don't serve the purpose commonly ascribed to them, doesn't mean they serve no purpose at all.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Just because taxes don't serve the purpose commonly ascribed to them, doesn't mean they serve no purpose at all.

...............................................Ban them anyway!