Why are antiracists so... racist?

[inthesomeday]

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.

I recognize the fact that there have been meaningful reforms achieved by moderate progressives, but I would argue that many of these forms would (a) be achieved much faster if said moderates were more open to or even less condemning of radical actions and (b) be significantly wider and, as you said, resilient, if they were to be structural as opposed to superficial.

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.

I don't think even a 90% tax would overpower the profits to be gained from exploitation. Bill Gates made more than 10 billion dollars in 2016, for example. With a 90% tax on that one single annual gain of his, he would have made 1 billion dollars, more than the average worker sees in a lifetime. If the rich turned their nose up at this massive profit out of petty rage for having been taxed, which I agree they probably would, then you see my contention with this being called a problem of disincentivizing profit, and my preference to call it what it really is, which is whining.

Again, though, I think profit as an incentive is a little bit evil.

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.

What gives the right to ownership, then?

 

[Lexicus]

Again, though, I think profit as an incentive is a little bit evil.

It would make some sense, if that were actually how the system works. But under Actually-Existing Capitalism (AEC), as opposed to the theoretical version of capitalism that most of the status quo's proponents seem to think they're defending, the big money is in rent-seeking and fraud. Productive activity is often actively dis-incentivized.

 

[Berzerker]

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

like what purpose?

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.

In reality, opinions aren't fixed.

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.

So which is it, I'm making up the definition or I'm refusing to define it? When did you ask me to define it anyway? The same post you're accusing me of refusing to define it? And then I get a lecture about debate ethics? I thought the definition was obvious, the unjustified and premeditated killing of another person. Didn't you already make the distinction between murder and justified killing?

I'm pretty sure you just quoted my post but didn't actually respond to anything I said.

I responded to your cannibal case, the link said he wanted to be killed, not murdered.

This is you playing around with words. Yes, if a person wants to be murdered, then they don't actually want to be murdered, they just want to be killed, because if they want to be killed, then it's not "murder" in the strictest definition. This is not a moral argument, this is a word game.

If I want to die and someone helps me, that aint murder. Might be illegal, but we're talking morality - justification.

Imagine however a person in severe pain, they really want it to end and have already decided that death is the only way out of it, but have not yet found the "strength" to commit suicide, and assisted suicide is not available for them. Then a random mass murderer comes around and stabs them two-hundred-eighty-nine times in the chest. The stabbing was done for the expressed purpose of murdering a person, yet the last thought of the victim may be: "It's finally over."

Your gut reaction now is probably: "But they were in pain and suicidal!" ... yes, they were. So? If a "universal response" is not actually the response people give under certain circumstances, then it's not a "universal response", is it? "Mental illness!" is not an excuse either, because it's just how we've defined behavior that is not fit for society. How a person "should" work, or "should" think, and whether they "should" want to fit into society is inherently subjective in itself.

And I'm the one playing word games? Do you really think they wanted to be stabbed 289 times? What do you mean by strength to commit suicide? Desire or ability? Yeah, who wants to be stabbed 289 times? Good question... Anyway, your example is murder. The person wanted to die but the mass murderer didn't have to stab them 289 times. Now, had the mass murderer taken pity on the person and slit their wrist and let them bleed out, I wouldn't call that murder.

The case of the cannibal I linked clearly wanted to be murdered, and not because his life was suffering, no, because the idea to die and be eaten stimulated him. He actively moved to a person for the expressed purpose to be killed and eaten, and five other people had replied to that invitation, and had met with the cannibal.

So your argument is again basically: "It's a universal response, except when in rare cases it's not." ...well again, then it's not a universal response. It's clear that these cases are very, very rare and exceptional, but a single case proves that there is nothing universal to it - it's subjective, but most of us agree about subjectively better state of being.

You're assuming the man in your link wanted to be murdered. He may not have seen it that way - he was dying the way he wanted. Did he say he wanted to be murdered or did you say that? Linking to someone who wants to die is not a rebuttal to "nobody wants to be murdered".

 

[Kyriakos]

What gives the right to ownership, then?

Property is theft.

 

[Ryika]

And I'm the one playing word games? Do you really think they wanted to be stabbed 289 times? What do you mean by strength to commit suicide? Desire or ability? Yeah, who wants to be stabbed 289 times? Good question... Anyway, your example is murder. The person wanted to die but the mass murderer didn't have to stab them 289 times. Now, had the mass murderer taken pity on the person and slit their wrist and let them bleed out, I wouldn't call that murder.

Murder is not defined by whether the person wants to be killed, it's defined by the intent of the person doing the killing. I chose the example for comedic intent, but there's actually a point in it, too, namely that yes, you can set a threshold where nobody will agree that it's a good way of being murdered, but that's not an "objective" moral standard, it's just a value that is above everybody's subjective threshold.

It's like size. Is a person who is 1.85m big? "Small" people will tend to say yes, while "Tall" people will tend to say no. So what is big is subjective. However, when you then ask everybody whether a person who is 3m is big, then everybody will say that person is "big". Not because they're "objectively big", but because everybody who lives agrees that the person is "big". If humans grew to be 4m average at some point, a person who is 3m would no longer be considered "big".

So it is obvious that even in a subjective system, there will be things that everybody agrees upon, that's still subjective, because that could theoretically change in the future, if it were objective, it could not.

To get back to the murderer, getting the over-the-top example out of the context... a person may very well wish to be shot in the head because it would be an easy way out of a miserable life. If then a mass murderer with a sniper rifle comes around and shoots them in the head, with the intend of killing random strangers, then that's still murder, and the person being murdered might very well be okay with it. So again, you're just wrong about the fact that nobody wants to be murdered.

 

[sophie]

like what purpose?

1) Grants the currency a degree of intrinsic value. i.e. You have to pay your taxes in dollars, so you expect to be paid wages in dollars, so everybody demands that dollars be the medium of exchange for literally all transactions

2) Grants the central bank a very secure and reliable means of controlling the money supply

3) Allows the government to incentivize things the government wants citizens to do (get married, have children, get a mortgage, donate to charity), and disincentivize things the government doesn't want citizens to do .

 

[TheMeInTeam]

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

Ignoring points and stating something already proven false is intellectually rude. What's the point of not discussing in a discussion?

Again, though, I think profit as an incentive is a little bit evil.

Based on a morality that can't possibly exist (non-relative), it is easy to define anything inconvenient to your position as evil. What you're not doing is establishing why it is bad based on criteria that people are actually using when formulating societies.

What gives the right to ownership, then?

Government law. It's what keeps people from shooting each other and taking stuff without consequence. Someone else got more stuff? Too bad. It's ironic to call other people out for "whining" in such a context.

So which is it, I'm making up the definition or I'm refusing to define it?

Both. First, you claimed nobody wants to be murdered, which implies other people might define murder differently than you. Rejecting some interpretations of murder *does* imply that you have a definition of murder, which you're not establishing (doing so would destroy your universality of opinion position). Your application of the term between posts does not appear consistent, however.

I thought the definition was obvious, the unjustified and premeditated killing of another person. Didn't you already make the distinction between murder and justified killing?

The "justification" piece of your definition is an important detail. When one person's murder is not another's, you have no universality of opinion. Unless you're willing to actually establish this justification is universal? I think you'll fail if you attempt that but I can easily be proven wrong if you can do it.

If I want to die and someone helps me, that aint murder. Might be illegal, but we're talking morality - justification.

There exists hard evidence that people have claimed that the person's "helping someone die" because they want to do so is not a justification for killing them. Given that simple difference of opinion, the act does in fact meet your own stated standard for murder.

Property is theft.

And so is taking it . Even if you're joking, words need meaning that differentiates actions. Those who are actually making such a case are functionally claiming everything is theft by their own logic. It's not a functional position.

3) Allows the government to incentivize things the government wants citizens to do (get married, have children, get a mortgage, donate to charity), and disincentivize things the government doesn't want citizens to do .

Including using it to incentivize votes by promising them to a majority of people, regardless of what you actually do later.

 

[Kyriakos]

And so is taking it . Even if you're joking, words need meaning that differentiates actions. Those who are actually making such a case are functionally claiming everything is theft by their own logic. It's not a functional position.

'Property is theft' (or something very close to that) is a quote by some french anarchist

 

[inthesomeday]

In the same response to me, you:

-Criticized my usage of subjective morality (obviously "evil" has no real place in a political discussion, but I'll say that profit incentive encourages practices that are harmful to the earth, to the laborers, and to the consumers, by removing the element of societal good that products should be made to benefit and replacing it with personal gain)
-Cite government law as the basis for property rights

So which is it? Are we playing in the realm of subjective morality or are we gonna try and universalize something as trivial as government law, rules that come from arbitrary human-made profit machines?

I accepted that you seem to value completely different things to me, and that disarms any moral or ethical argument either of us could make against one another. However, to claim that property rights come from the government is contradictory to this, and is indeed very silly because it relies on the obsolete and backwards idea that rights come from governments, which would definitively make them no longer rights.

 

[luiz]

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

Bizarrely (for MMTers, that's is), the people actually running all governments in the world and setting tax policy actually belive that taxes serve to finance the government, like all sane people.

 

[Lexicus]

Ignoring points and stating something already proven false is intellectually rude. What's the point of not discussing in a discussion?

I mean, I feel the same way about the nonsense you're peddling. Generations of economists have failed to prove the proposition you claim has "already" been proven, and your attempts to argue for that proposition in this thread have been laughable. Your most recent attempt, as I explained, failed to separate the productivity of workers from the productivity of their equipment and so was a total failure. I didn't "ignore" your point, your point was just wrong.

Bizarrely (for MMTers, that's is), the people actually running all governments in the world and setting tax policy actually belive that taxes serve to finance the government, like all sane people.

This is of course, completely false. The people working at the US Treasury, for example, certainly do not believe that because they can observe for themselves how the federal government's spending does not require any revenue. Indeed, you simply -not to put too fine a point on it- do not know what you're talking about. I will quote Warren Mosler, who assuredly does know what he's talking about:

In fact, the people at the U.S. Treasury who actually spend the money (by changing numbers on bank accounts up) don’t even have the telephone numbers of - nor are they in contact with - the people at the IRS who collect taxes (they change the numbers on bank accounts down), or the other people at the U.S. Treasury who do the “borrowing” (issue the Treasury securities). If it mattered at all how much was taxed or borrowed to be able to spend, you’d think they at least would know each other’s phone numbers! Clearly, it doesn’t matter for their purposes.

It's all right for you not to have done any exhaustive analysis of the operational realities of financial systems but for you to imply that the people who have done such analysis are "insane" doesn't speak well of you at all. Now, it is certainly true that the US Congress believes that taxes fund the government and has no idea how the monetary system works, much like yourself, but this is actually the source of many of our (USA's) economic problems. I would say that the more Congresscritters believe something the less likely it is to be true, but of course that's a general heuristic and not to be relied on in any given case.

 

[luiz]

This is of course, completely false. The people working at the US Treasury, for example, certainly do not believe that because they can observe for themselves how the federal government's spending does not require any revenue. Indeed, you simply -not to put too fine a point on it- do not know what you're talking about. I will quote Warren Mosler, who assuredly does know what he's talking about:

It's all right for you not to have done any exhaustive analysis of the operational realities of financial systems but for you to imply that the people who have done such analysis are "insane" doesn't speak well of you at all. Now, it is certainly true that the US Congress believes that taxes fund the government and has no idea how the monetary system works, much like yourself, but this is actually the source of many of our (USA's) economic problems. I would say that the more Congresscritters believe something the less likely it is to be true, but of course that's a general heuristic and not to be relied on in any given case.

The problem with MMT and its proponents, in the simplest terms, is that they're stupid.

Forget for a second about "operational realities", forget about accounting, leave the bean counting aside.

Back to basics. To build a road (or a pyramid), the government needs real resources. The government cannot, out of thin air, create real resources. Money has no intrinsic value, it's just a representation of real resources. So to build something, the government needs to appropriate part of the real resources that belong to its subjects. They can take a part of their harvest, or of their cattle, or hours of their labor, or a representation of that in the form of money. That doesn't change the basic nature of taxation : a transfer of real resources from the people to the government. Without this transfer, the government cannot do anything.

That's the basics. Now the self-evident truism that Mosler is talking about, and that he certainly believes is some grand discovery, is that a financial system allows for the temporal dislocation between revenues and expenses. But that doesn't change the basics in any way.

 

[Lexicus]

Forget for a second about "operational realities", forget about accounting, leave the bean counting aside.

Back to basics.

You just told us to forget the basics. Don't worry, I'm only savoring the delicious irony for a moment.

To build a road (or a pyramid), the government needs real resources. The government cannot, out of thin air, create real resources. Money has no intrinsic value, it's just a representation of real resources. So to build something, the government needs to appropriate part of the real resources that belong to its subjects. They can take a part of their harvest, or of their cattle, or hours of their labor, or a representation of that in the form of money. That doesn't change the basic nature of taxation : a transfer of real resources from the people to the government. Without this transfer, the government cannot do anything.

Yes! Precisely all true! And the fact that you think MMT'ers don't understand this is just...obviously you have never read even one word written by an MMT'er, ever (we've been over this before)! But it's these transfers of real resources, not taxes, that sustain the government (not "finance" it).
Here is Mosler on this point:

The reason I look at it this way is because the “right amount of government spending” is an economic and political decision that, properly understood, has nothing to do with government finances. The real “costs” of running the government are the real goods and services it consumes - all the labor hours, fuel, electricity, steel, carbon fiber, hard drives, etc. that would otherwise be available for the private sector. So when the government takes those real resources for its own purposes, there are that many fewer real resources left for private-sector activity. For example, the real cost of the “right-size” army with enough soldiers for defense is that there are fewer workers left in the private sector to grow the food, build the cars, do the doctoring and nursing and administrative tasks, sell us stocks and real estate, paint our houses, mow our lawns, etc. etc. etc.

That's the basics. Now the self-evident truism that Mosler is talking about, and that he certainly believes is some grand discovery, is that a financial system allows for the temporal dislocation between revenues and expenses. But that doesn't change the basics in any way.

The point that Mosler is making is that Treasury outlays are totally unaffected by, independent of, the amount of tax revenue brought in. Treasury spending happens because Congress passed a law that said it should happen. That's all there is to it. It isn't about temporal dislocation of revenues and expenses. It's that there's no necessary relationship between revenues and expenses for the federal government over any period of time (except, of course, for self-imposed or 'political' constraints that Congress has created because it, like you, does not understand how the monetary system works, though to be fair a some of the rules made more sense in the 18th century).

The entire point being made by MMT folks is that financial resources need to be distinguished from real resources, and that when we do this properly we will come to understand that the real resources certainly exist to do things like provide healthcare, a job, and a home to every American. Your argument is preposterous (among other reasons) because the objections to government spending on these things are essentially never framed in terms of real resources, but always in terms of "how will you pay for it? where will the money come from?" I mean, for Christ's sake, Hillary Clinton wrote in her latest book about exploring the idea of adapting Alaska's oil dividend policy to the rest of the United States ("Alaska for America - bad name for it in my opinion), and she and her policy team didn't reject the plan because they thought it would put too much strain on the real economy leading to inflation, they rejected the plan because they "couldn't make the numbers work," and couldn't find a way to "pay for" the plan in financial terms!

This is why it's so bizarre for you to try to pass it off as though it's the MMT'ers who don't understand the difference between real and financial resources, when it's clearly the mainstream that does not understand this.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Your most recent attempt, as I explained, failed to separate the productivity of workers from the productivity of their equipment and so was a total failure.

Different people can use different equipment. Even in this oversimplified example, a person who's never touched a backhoe is not going to use it effectively compared to someone with training. Capability variance can get much larger than that.

The failure in interacting with this example was not mine.

-Cite government law as the basis for property rights

However, to claim that property rights come from the government is contradictory to this

You asked who gave property rights, not the basis for property rights. Those are two different questions. That governments create and enforce property rights is uncontroversial; it's a position that is trivial to verify with evidence.

In contrast, the *basis* for property rights...IE "why SHOULD the government do this" is not as trivial. That's not what you asked earlier, but basis comes from societal preferences obviously (notably still subjective morality). On the whole, incentives work better when people have some right to their own resources. Otherwise, you've no incentive to attain beyond what you need to survive/can physically protect.

I don't want to live in a society where people can take stuff from each other on a whim (by force or otherwise) with no consequences beyond the retaliation of the party losing it. It seems most societies of people feel similarly, and so create/enforce property rights. This is done more frequently than many other laws, but doesn't have to be in principle.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Hobbes is great on this last point: why humans form societies that protect property rights.

 

[Lexicus]

Different people can use different equipment. Even in this oversimplified example, a person who's never touched a backhoe is not going to use it effectively compared to someone with training. Capability variance can get much larger than that.

The failure in interacting with this example was not mine.

Let's go back to the example.

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.

We were discussing how it's possible to measure individual productivity. Your example doesn't compare the productivity of two different workers, it compares the productivity of workers along with the technology they're using. Unless you can figure out a way to actually separate the contribution of a worker from the contribution of the tools that worker uses, then that comparison is meaningless if your goal is to isolate the individual contributions of people. Of course, since such a separation is an impossible task, it quickly becomes apparent that the theory itself, and the whole idea that individual productivity can be objectively assessed, is meaningless. It's a circular reasoning, ultimately invoking the thing it's supposedly explaining as its own explanation.

Why are people paid what they're paid?

Because that's what they contribute to the economy.

How do we know how much people contribute to the economy?

Easy, we just look at how much they get paid...oh wait...

Even reckoning without the fatal problems with the theory that I have already explained, the theory only holds as long as the standard bourgeois economics assumptions of perfect competition, perfect information, and so on hold. Which they don't, ever.

I don't want to live in a society where people can take stuff from each other on a whim (by force or otherwise) with no consequences beyond the retaliation of the party losing it. It seems most societies of people feel similarly, and so create/enforce property rights.

On one level this is a wholly unobjectionable explanation of why property rights exist. On another, though, this framing of property rights hides some very important questions and issues. First of all of course there is not one system of property rights. The clearest example I can think of for this concept is that the US had a very different property system prior to the abolition of slavery, than it had after the abolition of slavery. Of course, the property system as whole is constituted by a vast, unimaginably complex system of rules, including civil law, case law, the common practices of property owners, and so on. So every little change to any law or rule relating to property ownership represents a "different" property system in this sense. But it seems rather absurd to characterize a property system that includes a property right to slaves in the way you've done, doesn't it? Slavery seems to be the exact definition of "a society where people can take stuff from each other on a whim (by force or otherwise) with no consequences beyond the retaliation of the party losing it."
Of course, this is obviously not some sort of mere footnote as historically slavery has been hugely important in many property systems. In the antebellum US slaves were by far the most valuable capital asset; Roman property law also dealt heavily with slavery as is evident from surviving records of court cases and legal rulings.

What I'm getting at here is that while you have explained the widely-agreed purpose of property systems pretty well, you have elided the issue that there are property systems that are better and worse at realizing those ideals. And while the property system we have now is pretty good, certainly better than most that have existed in history, it is not really fulfilling its purpose. It isn't guaranteeing fairness, and we currently live in a society where "people an take stuff from each other on a whim with no consequences beyond the retaliation of the party using it."

So for example, we have drastically different standards for the sorts of things that people can claim a property right over. The TPP had provisions that allowed corporations to claim a property right to future profits, and to sue national governments for passing laws that interfered with these future profits. But if a worker tried to sue a corporation for cutting pay, claiming a property right to their future wages, the case would almost certainly be laughed out of court. One of the most egregious examples is our system's total failure to deal with the challenges posed by global warming. As the developed world burns through the world's carbon buffer, we are destroying the property of people mostly in the global south who live near the ocean. Entire island nations, with all their property that cannot be moved, are going to be swallowed up! What institutions or fora exist for these people to make their property claims against the carbon-burners? Another example; the Brazillian government has granted property rights to vast tracts of forest to (often foreign) extraction (mining, logging, oil drilling, etc) corporations; the property rights of the indigenous tribes who have been living in these forests for millennia go ignored.

And the world is full of injustices like this, full of totally inconsistent applications of the principles supposedly underlying property rights. This is why Adam Smith observed all the way back in the 18th century that civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

You notice he made the same mistake, of sweeping all the variation between different property systems under the rug. It's perfectly possible to imagine property systems that would tilt the balance of power decisively against the rich. For example, if we recognized the property rights of workers to the products of their labor, rather than handing those rights over to the owners of capital. Or the property rights of Bangladeshi peasants in their land when those lands are made useless and submerged beneath the sea by the actions of people halfway across the world. Incidentally, this is a beef I have with Marxists who take for granted the bourgeois/ruling class assumptions about property that make existing property systems unjust, and rather than saying "let's change the way this works so that it works for all the people instead of just the rich" they take the (much less productive) path of saying "Let's get rid of this entirely!"

 

[tuckerkao]

great, ban taxes!

The debt ceiling will go even higher if the government has insufficient incomes.

 

[sophie]

The debt ceiling will go even higher if the government has insufficient incomes.

The debt ceiling is, quite literally, just a number.

 

[Berzerker]

Both. First, you claimed nobody wants to be murdered, which implies other people might define murder differently than you. Rejecting some interpretations of murder *does* imply that you have a definition of murder, which you're not establishing (doing so would destroy your universality of opinion position). Your application of the term between posts does not appear consistent, however.

Do these varying definitions of murder overlap at all? Do they have anything in common?

The "justification" piece of your definition is an important detail. When one person's murder is not another's, you have no universality of opinion. Unless you're willing to actually establish this justification is universal? I think you'll fail if you attempt that but I can easily be proven wrong if you can do it.

If I ran around killing people with an axe and one of my intended victims kills me in self defense, who is the murderer? Me... Who will argue otherwise? Not me, and I'm the murderer... Go ahead, prove me wrong.

There exists hard evidence that people have claimed that the person's "helping someone die" because they want to do so is not a justification for killing them. Given that simple difference of opinion, the act does in fact meet your own stated standard for murder.

What evidence?

Sorry, I forgot about this debate.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Do these varying definitions of murder overlap at all? Do they have anything in common?

It's up to you to establish your definitions and usage, not me. I can notice if they're inconsistent to each other, but I don't have a means to read your mind.

If I ran around killing people with an axe and one of my intended victims kills me in self defense, who is the murderer? Me... Who will argue otherwise? Not me, and I'm the murderer... Go ahead, prove me wrong.

You're still completely failing to demonstrate universality of opinion. Just as an easy example, a person witnessing your axe murdering spree pulls out an automatic rifle and shoots you in the back. You never even saw him. Is he a murderer now? What if you hadn't actually killed someone yet when that happened?

The burden of proof here is on you. The concept of "universality of opinion" in this kind of case is an extraordinary claim which lacks the extraordinary evidence to back it as even plausible.

You're going to need to show that 100% of people would answer the same way regardless of the context above, and you're not going to succeed if you try.

What evidence?

Read opinion pieces on the assisted suicide debate with Kavorkian's actions. You will find at least some person concluding this is either manslaughter or murder, instantly destroying a conclusion of "universal" opinion regardless of what the mainstream conclusion was.

It's a circular reasoning, ultimately invoking the thing it's supposedly explaining as its own explanation.

Not nearly as circular as defining something as meaningless without basis and then inferring that anything involved is also meaningless because you think it's meaningless.

In reality, some people have more or less skill using technology than others and their productivity is higher or lower as a result. Noise in a measure does not instantly imply it's meaningless. If you applied that logic consistently you'd struggle to make a case for anything at all since it would all be meaningless.