Marx is a retard jew nigger who never held a real job. Taxes are socialist, its the government taking ownership of what you earned for the benefit of the community. They're often not paid freely, make them optional and see how many people pay it.
Framing taxes as socialist just makes people like taxes more, so, I'm not sure what you're going for here. That's why libertarians are seen as retarded and ineffective. You fundamentally don't understand humans are social creatures that rely on their community to survive. It's also bit ironic to say this, on KF of all places, when it's filled with people dependent on their family for financial support. Taxes is the only reason why you're shitposting like a retard on KF.
Trump's tariffs are essentially a tax to pay for his tax cuts, and not even trump thinks "taxation is theft." He is not an lolbertarian, thankfully.
Anyone who likes anything because its called socialist is a fucking retard.
Right because capitalism means no one can socialize or have a community anymore, even though that's what socialism has destroyed in the UK. Depending on your community and depending on government are two very different things.
Socialism is expensive.
Indeed, also its a barrier to offshoring production for cheaper. And again yes, a libertarian would warn then shoot the invaders, rather than wasting tax payers money shipping them back.
You are essentially trying to associate socialism with stuff people find popular like social welfare spending, and it has the opposite effect. This isn't a productive way to approach politics. Openly calling for Bellum omnium contra omnes is not a feasible political tactic; especially in a society where majoritarian rule makes a lot of the decisions.
Taxes are what society uses to make our communities possible in the first. You could not administrate standing armies, police, prisons, administrate airlines, or even make sure food is safe without paying for it in some capacity. Bureaucracy, which is required for any society to function, doesn't work for free. Modern capitalism does require taxation to even pay courts to enforce property and contract laws. Not even Adam Smith had your view of capitalism. You can't admonish taxes, love your community, and then say you support doing away with the mechanism that allows it to persist in the first place. It's a bit of a motte and bailey. A better argument would be to optimize taxation to make it more efficient and effective at what it provides.libRT dijo:
Implementing socialistic ideas can be expensive, yeah. There isn't a dispute here; every economic policy has trade offs you should weigh and consider on a level of feasibility. Many countries do this, while also providing a minimum set of benefits and safety for their people. The Britain example you used is a bit strange considering the French government just collapsed over pension reform. Britain's problems stem its regulatory environment (The Online Safety Act being a perfect example) and lax immigration policies. But this also makes the assumption that all forms of socialism must be at the expense of the public. Producer and consumer cooperatives would not exist. Nor would credit unions or community food banks if socialism required state management and allocation. Opposition to policy has to be grounded political realities, not ideological dogma, if you want to accomplish anything worth while.
It is socialism, I don't really care for public opinion, but people are realising that inflation is getting serious (can't speak for other countries), and its now getting to the point where its becoming a struggle to even exist. People need to understand that the services provided are not free and due to the different incentives, is often shit. For example, government services that are effective often get their budgets cut, whilst ineffective government services often get an increased budget. It's also why you get the march spending madness as if said services do not spend all their budgets they risk it being cut. I will concede that there are some things that are better served by government, but its not a band-aid for everything.
Communities existed before governments, For the majority of history, taxes weren't really used to build community. Whilst anarchy would be the best system objectively as its zero cost, I don't think its the ideal system in the current world, and probably not for a long time due to human nature. I would prefer to reduce and decentralise government as much as possible but I realise there is a limit to that given the world we live in. I would argue we need more boundary control, not just on immigration, but penalising outsourcing/offshoring, which is against free market principles, but I think it may be worth it to prevent multinationals abusing the system and effectively freeloading. I'd remove the tax breaks on investing, and introduce a tax on investments greater than X million over a yearly period (first million invested is tax free, after that its taxed).
We're going to get into a chicken and egg argument here. New public service strains the market, working class gets pushed down a bit more (when you tax a company, one of the easiest ways to cut costs is labour, since its usually one of the biggest expenses), the working class who were already at the breadline now are fucked and require more welfare, New public service strains the market... etc etc. Safety nets are great but it always ends up with people taking the piss, and the government is very willing to give them that because its easy votes.
If its voluntary its not socialism because there's no government involvement. If those receive tax payer funding then it is socialism and does come at a cost to the public. I'm using the political definition of socialism, not ideological.
That's not healthy, and you're not doing yourself any favors by taking such anti social position. You can talk about politics all day, but without understanding the dynamics of it - everything you say is meaningless. There's no possibility for societal change, and it makes your political beliefs odd since it can't be anything other than pure idealism. There's no point for you to even participate, or complain, about the current state of affairs because you have no realistic plan for action to change this current state of affairs. Politics, for it to be something other than a hobby, has to be actionable, and that, as history shows, requires collective action.
And what were those pre-civilization communities like? They were quite poor, nomadic, and victims to the wimps of natural disasters. Glorying primitive forms of human organization is not the best argument for your case. There are stateless communities of people who exist today, like the Kurds, and they are just victims of what ever state that is stronger than them. Decentralization as a principle, makes sense, if we're talking an efficient allocation for resources for particular commodities, but it doesn't scale up well for national defense (ironically the Russian Revolution is a great example of this considering how disorganized the white movement was), or even furthering human progress. We weren't inventing space ships, phones and transmission lines when humanity was decentralized. We were farmers praying for the clouds to rain, dying of scurvy and hoping bandits didn't rape us at night. It's not a surprise why humans evolved to accepting higher hierarchical forms of management when the technological and social benefits of it are clear.LibRt dijo:
Welfare is necessary once people get old, we all do, since we don't have the capacity to take care of ourselves to be productive members to society once we reach a certain age. There's also the fact there are many people who simply can't provide for themselves, because of some deliberating physical or mental illness, and there needs to be a solution for that. Societies, especially modern ones, see it as beneficial to provide welfare to solve that problem. There are also circumstances that humans can't account for, such as natural disasters, that make it necessary too. It exists to solve problems societies must face to survive. Markets are made of people, and people need to be taken care of if you want them to participate within it.LibRT dijo:
This is not by any means correct because socialism is not predicated on government involvement. Socialism, and has, existed without state involvement. Common property can, and has, been done a scale without government involvement. It was popular with some of the predecessors to Marx, like Robert Owen, who were entrepreneurs who used their own funds to start up co-operatives. This claim is arbitrary and capacious, and not historically accurate. Even Rothbard, and many Libertarians, disagreed with you on this, so, I'm surprised you would say this. I mean, you may not realize this, but many Libertarian minded people like him (Hoppe, Sowell, and even Friedman) don't even agree with you here at all. Are you just not aware of this? For example, Sowell was a communist when he was younger and studied Marx extensively. And so was Hayek. They were aware of the co-operatives being experimentations in socialism and saw it as such. This isn't a very defensible claim.
I would say it's worse. It's people who have been fed a line by the media as to what the past was like and don't have any authentic memories of the past that aren't filled in with media narratives. It's like rose coloured glasses or beer goggles for a time that never existed.
Money used to go further. Inflation has really gone instance since the 1980 and and ward. So it's not that buying things is wrong, smart people spend more on their kids and if they have less money kids become too expensive sadly. A lot of political and social changes have occurred that have made dating, marriage, and family very difficult and impracticable. It's not only consumerism. The fact that people buy things and are not just given a ticket to take to the store because they are the right type of brown or the right type of white wouldn't change whether people are having families. Government social programs over the past century have all be directed at destroying families and making kids drug addicts and those have been driven by the very capital holders who are supposed to allegedly be interested in making money. But they don't care about money, they already have all of it, they want to restructure society so there is no competition and they own everything just like in Feudal Europe. Consumerism does not describe that processes or intent.
That's a pro revolutionary traditional socialist communist interpretation. How is that not trapped in the same nostalgia for romanticised revolutions that never went as later described? The value of money is the real problem. Re-framing it as using money period is the problem is just a cliche. Immigration is not about voting. Immigration changes countries because demographics are destiny. Once a new culture brought by immigrants takes hold, then the country changes because the people have charged. Once cirtical mass is achived the native population takes on the new culture brought by the colonising immigrants. Case and Point:
Gay nigger sheep is what got us into this mess.
You can't really compare pre-civilisation communities to now since technology has advanced so much since then and thats the biggest factor in production capacity/standard of living. Yeah wouldn't have spaceships, but was it worth the hundreds of billions? Anything useful like phones and internet would have been invented without government anyway, Xerox did a lot of stuff for computing. Governments kill millions pretty much every few years, but I said decentralise as much as possible, I don't think it would be wise to get rid of standing armies when everyone else has them, would be nice to not need them sometime in the future.
How far does this go? Effectively what you are saying here, is you have the right to steal from others to sustain yourself. Taken to the extreme, is it fair to make someone who doesn't need care homeless, in order to provide that care for someone in need?
Labour costs are driven primarily by supply and demand, innovation just changes the demand in some markets and often can create entirely new markets (IT hasn't even been around for a century), though some innovations do cause temporary shock.
I guess I didn't make myself clear, I do not care for voluntary socialism (though that just sounds like capitalism and everyone is given equal shares), do whatever you want in that regard, more power to you. I'm just arguing against 'authoritarian socialism', the kind that involves the government.
There's substantial inherent group differences especially between groups (especially ones that are genetically distant from each other) due to evolutionary mechanics.
There's substantial group differences between white working class and white upper class. White upper class has a higher average raw intelligence. Whites from a professional background family (especially multiple generations) probably has a different genotype than white working class. Those whites are legit evolution, and our societies were eugenic when they had higher fertility rates than working class.
A lot of the stuff we use came from government, corporate collaboration. Modern computers were developed by the U.S. military to improve radar and weapons systems. Modern electronics came to fruition because research institutions cooperated with government. MIT and Bell Labs are the most famous examples. The Italian Renaissance, and really any famous cultural renaissance in history, was only possible because states funded the arts. Phones require satellites, and much of the innovation for those came from NASA, the U.S. military, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. States provide significant capital investment, in the form of grants and loans, that you otherwise could not get if you had to rely purely on voluntary donations.
Depends on the government and why. Certain governments, like ones that historically pursued communism sure. Irredentist governments like Russia yeah. Even the US has had military blunders that led to unnecessary deaths. But that doesn't mean the things they do for us that are not useful and keep us alive. You don't have to support everything governments do to realize they are necessary to make life bearable. I think Finnish people are the most happiest people in the world primarily because hey had a government to protect them when a certain government of people passed their borders once.
Well, supply and demand are a sum of human relations. Innovations in agriculture, like the Green Revolution, and government improvements to public health played a crucial role in keeping enough humans alive to engage in markets in the first place. If babies are dying before they're born because their mothers are malnourished and suffering from cholera, I don't think supply and demand will matter much. You have to create a stable material basis first before you can even think of allocating resources to people. Ernst Engel's law is probably more important here, to be honest, since an agricultural surplus is necessary for any civilization to flourish. Again, this is something states historically have done too to protect waterways so people could grow their crops.
As I explained earlier, Marx conceived socialism as an emergent process from capitalism. A socialist society, to Marx at least, is a product of the current cultural and economic development of any society. To him, a socialist society would truly end what he considered the social ills of capitalism (ecological destruction, recessions, and structural unemployment) because it would do away with the unorganized, mercantile nature of the economy in favor of economic planning and scientific management. This, of course, was his view, and it's important to realize there is a diversity of socialist thought that doesn't hinge on those conclusions and aspirations. Some people just aren't that revolutionary and are a bit more pragmatic about it.
Most of which would have eventually been invented/created unless you believe companies hate profit. For every 'government success' theres at least 10 costly failures. Look at what IP law is doing for innovation nowadays.
The west in the middle east for the past 20 years. The japanese over WW2, just a couple of examples off the top of my head. Then you got the experimentation on people too, tuskagee experiments, porton down.
Didn't need it, that certain government avoided countries that had a high gun ownership at the time, simply because occupying them is far too costly.
Not sure what you are trying to say here, clearly the mother wasn't in very high demand if she was malnourished and the market always corrects. Yes, production capacity defines population capacity.
Okay, thats probably why socialist co-operatives are all the rage without government intervention. Economic planning from a third party who has no real skin in the game rarely works out.
It's related to genes too. The republican era romans were smarter than the imperior era romans, and it all went downhill when they imported germanics/celtics and levantines who both had an average intelligence much lower than theirs. We can compare modern italian polygenic score for intelligence to the romans. GWAS studies have shown they were pretty similar, so around an IQ of 96. Germanics, Celtics and levantines average IQ was in the low 90s. Late antiquity and middle ages were eugenic as the shitty conditions allowed the wealthy and professional classes to have a higher fertility rate than the peasants. So they've had an outsized contribution to the gene pool over the centuries (looks like eugenics was not pseudoscientific...)
Depends how the decline happens. If it's dysgenic, then the power peaked once their upper classes, gifted and somewhat gifted had less kids than before. As those people's creative accomplishments hard carries the nation (See the entire world). If it's from foriegn migration, then society will tragically decline as its characteristics change for the worse (see Western europe, and anglo settlers nations).
Bro, I don't know how you can look at the retarded nepobabies that make up a large chunk of our 'upper class' and conclude that they are genetic ubermensch. Please sterilize yourself in accordance with your own ideals.
The problem with this claim it's not true if we actually study history. As you should know, economics is a science that must have case studies or testable claims. What the historical record does show, however, is that most innovation in human history has happened in the last 200 years because of government. "What ifs" are totally irrelevant here. Humans were without governments, or states, for most of their history. Humanity had all the time in the world to prove it. The laws of probability don't favor this argument.
I've already addressed the fact governments have done bad things, but that doesn't mean they haven't done great things. African Americans are not repatriating to Africa because of what happened to the Tuskagee airmen. Because they realize life is much better where they're at because they have a government advanced enough to protect them from Wagner mercenaries, African warlords and ISIS. Even the Middle East benefits heavily from government bodies, like the U.N., to provide economic and food aid for societal development.
History shows people typically need states to defend themselves. Groups without states, such as kurds, jews, druze and the yazidi just get genocided without a state because they are too disorganized to defend themselves. Not even Finns agree with you here, which is why they have mandatory conscription and look up highly to their state idols like Mannerheim.
Shouldn't it be a bit obvious?
You treat markets as an abstraction when they are mediations between people. You are putting the cart before the horse here. You can't have an economy without agriculture, and states primarily exist to ensure people have access to a stable food supply. This is a pretty basic tenant of developmental economics which is why anti-poverty programs primarily focus on providing nations food. Saying markets let mothers die is fundamentally not understanding how societies develop or where markets come from. Trade, which facilitates markets in the first place, isn't possible without an economic base that makes it possible in the first place. People are not going to participate in markets if they can not move past subsistence.Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts dijo:
