I'm reminded of the book 'Wasted Lives' by Zygmunt Baumann. In it he describes how the ever changing nature of capitalism constantly creates a population that is surplus to requirements. Think of what happens to dockside communities when the harbours are automated and the dock work dries up. Or coal mining towns when the mines are closed. This pattern is repeated all over the world throughout history as capitalism renews itself through creative destruction or flees to low wage countries in response to labour militancy.
Unnecessariat
141–150 of 256 posts
Re: Unnecessariat
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Little by little the argument that "taxation is theft" will come to sound like: "But it's not fair to demand that the hard working robot owners pay more in taxes to help the people too lazy to own their own robots."
"Taxation is theft" is true regardless of whether robots are employed or not. The fundamental issue is, simply, that it involves the use of force (or threat of use of force). As long as men with guns will come and arrest you if you don't "pay your taxes" then it is theft. No rhetorical flourishes or byzantine logic can alter that.
If your definition of "theft" is "taking something by (threat of) force", then (1) private property at least of land clearly is theft, (2) one could even go further and argue that some forms of taxation aren't theft, and (3) police are regularly involved in theft even while doing the right thing.
The key is in "taking something": there is a baseline state of the world against we're comparing the current status quo.
For point (1), there is clearly a historical baseline in which no land was owned by anybody, and all land was equally accessible to all. Then people started to make claims that some part of land was theirs, and that they had the right to exclude others from it - if necessary by force. They took something from others by (threat of) force - hence committing theft according to your definition, and this theft is enshrined by modern property law.
For point (2), consider the way income taxes work in many (most?) countries. Instead of money being paid by / taken from the employee, the money is instead withheld. The money that is "paid as income tax" is in reality never the employee's to begin with, so it is not taken away from the employee - hence no force is involved.
You might argue that the money is taken from the employer, but nobody forced the employer to employ someone.
For point (3), consider what happens when person A owns some widget, but person B enters their house at night and takes it from them - without force, because person A was asleep. Note first that, that is not theft according to your definition! Later on, person B is tracked down by police, who arrest him or her by force to return the widget to person A. The police have just engaged in theft - which is totally absurd use of language, but a necessary consequence of how you want to define theft.
Points (2) and (3) highlight something important: what belongs to whom is always a social construction. Social convention (encoded into law) says that land ownership is possible, and therefore land ownership is not actually theft. Social convention says that police are allowed to take stolen goods back to their original owner, and therefore those actions aren't theft. And whether you like it or not, social convention also includes taxes, and that is why taxes aren't theft. Because at the end of the day, the useful definition of theft has nothing to do with force - the useful definition of theft is "taking something against the established rules of society".
Re: Unnecessariat
#143We do have theories. But all of them include some form of heavily progressive taxes (even on property) and redistribution.
But anyway - here is my theory (without touching taxes) - every year kill the 10 richest people in the country. It will create very good incentive to give away parts of your fortune.
Re: Unnecessariat
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course there's no followup discussion. The fact that software engineering is "destroying jobs" is the wrong problem to focus on, but any discussion that approaches the right problem -- capitalism -- is practically taboo in United States.
But what's the alternative? Removing the incentive gradient of capitalism doesn't create paradise, it just creates a new incentive gradient that can be even more perverse and horrifying than the last. http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/85 http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/
But don't forget about http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/. Capitalism, while great initially, is getting very problematic now - its incentive gradients pull us more and more in directions we don't want to go. We need to alter those gradients, it's not a question anymore.
I don't think there's a coherent "ideology" that would be better (nor do I generally think accepting ideologies wholesale is a good idea), but UBI feels like a part of the right solution.
Re: Unnecessariat
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
So just like the US, but the elites are less elitist, and the people are less broke?
Well in the US it doesn't matter where you came from or what you believe, the uniting factor is our work. This makes us believe that if you want a higher standard of living, you have to work for it, and if you are destitute, you deserve it. It has inspired many rags-to-riches lives and the caused hardship and suffering for many more.
"believe" is the operative word here. It seems to me that a lot of exploitation of the low and middle class in the US comes from maintaining the belief in the "American Dream". "The poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires", and all that.
Re: Unnecessariat
#146Automation can automate manual labor jobs the easiest. Maintaining cities, crafting medicine, colonizing space -- these are important jobs that humanity has. I think the bigger issue is that most people don't have resources to pursue training to tackle this kind of work. There are so many problems left to solve in the world it's a joke to say "there isn't work to be done"
> There are so many problems left to solve in the world it's a joke to say "there isn't work to be done"
There is a lot of work to be done, and there will be in the conceivable future - but it doesn't mean there's profitable work to be done by humans. a) machines keep replacing us doing more work and doing it better than us, and b) capitalism doesn't optimize for useful work, it optimizes for profitable work - so even if there's a lot of world problems to solve that could be tackled by the poor and uneducated, they're still screwed if they can't feed themselves from that work.
Re: Unnecessariat
#147We do have theories. But all of them include some form of heavily progressive taxes (even on property) and redistribution. But anyway - here is my theory (without touching taxes) - every year kill the 10 richest people in the country. It will create very good incentive to give away parts of your fortune.
That sounds cruel, assuming you're talking about natural persons. They should at least get to live until the first gray hair shows up on their head.
Re: Unnecessariat
#148We do have theories. But all of them include some form of heavily progressive taxes (even on property) and redistribution. But anyway - here is my theory (without touching taxes) - every year kill the 10 richest people in the country. It will create very good incentive to give away parts of your fortune.
That sounds cruel, assuming you're talking about natural persons. They should at least get to live until the first gray hair shows up on their head.
Think of it as reverse stack ranking.
Re: Unnecessariat
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Little by little the argument that "taxation is theft" will come to sound like: "But it's not fair to demand that the hard working robot owners pay more in taxes to help the people too lazy to own their own robots."
"Taxation is theft" is true regardless of whether robots are employed or not. The fundamental issue is, simply, that it involves the use of force (or threat of use of force). As long as men with guns will come and arrest you if you don't "pay your taxes" then it is theft. No rhetorical flourishes or byzantine logic can alter that.
Theft is when I take property which I have no right to take possession of. It doesn't matter if guns or force are involved, or fraud, or sneakiness, etc. If taxation is theft, then it is theft even if it's unenforced and involves no threats of force.
Why is taxation theft?
Re: Unnecessariat
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Little by little the argument that "taxation is theft" will come to sound like: "But it's not fair to demand that the hard working robot owners pay more in taxes to help the people too lazy to own their own robots."
"Taxation is theft" is true regardless of whether robots are employed or not. The fundamental issue is, simply, that it involves the use of force (or threat of use of force). As long as men with guns will come and arrest you if you don't "pay your taxes" then it is theft. No rhetorical flourishes or byzantine logic can alter that.
Matt Bruenig (yes, the guy who was recently hounded out of his job for calling a powerful Hillary supporter a scumbag) had an interesting description of this argument, or rather this series of arguments. First, he says, libertarians defend inequality through desert:
* People should keep their money, they worked hard for it!
Then Bruenig points out that there is capital income, which does not come from work. Capital will keep "working" for you even if you stole it or inherited. It's extra obvious in the case of owning fully autonomous robots that could do anything a human could, but it's true for much simpler forms of capital, too.
Then they retreat to voluntarism:
* OK, so capital owners didn't work to get that money, but it was all voluntary. I'm just against force and for voluntarism.
Then he points out that property rights are enforced through violence too - the only reason you will make those "voluntary" trades for food and shelter, is that men with guns will come and arrest you if you just take it.
Then libertarians retreat to common-goodism:
* OK, we could imagine a society where people could just take as they please, so property rights are in a sense man-made. And they do require violence to enforce. But not having them would lead to the tragedy of the commons. Without property rights, we would all be miserably poor!
And this is certainly true, but if the common good is what we target, why not have a proper welfare state, a solid UBI funded by high taxes etc.?
Usually at that point they go back to the first step.