241–250 of 325 posts
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"financial intervention" I would laugh if the ridiculous lengths you're going to in order to euphemize violence and imprisonment wasn't so fucking terrifying.
Logic and coherence appear to be playing an ever decreasing role in your comments.
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Communism is evil on a nightmarish scale because it advocates for violating an entire population's right to 1. their property, and to 2. engage in economic activity with other consenting adults.
No, to the extent that Communism can be considered evil, it is because it leads to terrible outcomes. You can argue that the outcomes are a consequence of not enforcing a property system, but it's still the outcomes themselves which are bad.
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What you say would be true if property would be an issue with two people when they meet one-to-one. There are different kinds of property on a sliding scale. 1) Your personal belongings, tools of trad and other things needed for living are considered yours by everyone in practically all cultures. That's property protected by ethics and morality. 2) Anything past that is service that society/government provides for pe…
>2) Anything past that is service That is just an arbitrary distinction to justify your greed for the property of others. We either have a moral right to make exclusive use of natural resources or we do not. Whatever argument you make for the right to appropriate natural resources as 'personal' property can be applied to the right to appropriate natural resources as 'non-personal' property. These debates get very phi…
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Excuse my ignorance, but how can one then have a concept of property without implying the use of force?
Force in defense of property is self-defense. Force in pursuit of other people's property is aggression. Aggression is the problem, not force in general.
I think "hurting or threatening to hurt people" is a perfectly sufficient definition of aggression, and trying to stretch it to include property rights is a rhetorical trick to try and make a complicated political opinion seem obviously correct.
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How about you act like a decent human being instead of making ridiculous strawman arguments against me? Regarding welfare, I was being vague, so let me clarify: social welfare spending has increased substantially over the last 40 years in the US: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-... In Western countries in general, social welfare spending is substantially higher now, as a percentage of GDP,…
I would LOVE to know what the negative consequences are of compulsory income redistribution and for whom. In fact, I wonder if there are any positives. Social democracy is OF COURSE a recent phenomenon -- I mean, what era are you comparing it to? Furthermore, and not saying that I disagree about your comment on the New Left, but "free association" is a non-sequitur even in the society you wish to exist (which doesn't…
These programs are also clumsy cookie cutter solutions, which with a stroke a pen, impose the same formula to tens/hundreds of millions of people, without any consideration for the unique circumstances of this vast multitude of people. On one end, the people lose out, and on the other, they win out in the short term. The only determinant of which side a person is on is the amount of currency that they report to the government that they received for that year.
This becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now).
To boil it down to its essence: there is no way compulsory income redistribution will be as effective (in the context of increasing economic output) as the market at distributing capital, and it is increasing economic output that is responsible for almost all gains in qualify of life and poverty reduction.
Free association is a straightforward concept and entirely feasible to protect through laws.
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Force in defense of property is self-defense. Force in pursuit of other people's property is aggression. Aggression is the problem, not force in general.
Sure, you can define it like that, but in doing so you've just rolled an extremely complicated economic system (property) into the otherwise very simple concept of non-aggression. I think "hurting or threatening to hurt people" is a perfectly sufficient definition of aggression, and trying to stretch it to include property rights is a rhetorical trick to try and make a complicated political opinion seem obviously cor…
Property is not extremely complicated. If I take your laptop without your consent, that's a violation of your rights. If you have 20 laptops, that doesn't change that fact. If I have 99 other people that agree that I should be able to take your laptop, that still doesn't change that fact.
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> How about you act like a decent human being instead of making ridiculous strawman arguments against me? Love the calls for civility from the person proposing that anti-discrimination laws were bad. Also "the free baby market" isn't really a leap from any of these hardcore libertarian views. > In Western countries in general, social welfare spending is substantially higher now, as a percentage of GDP, than it was be…
>Love the calls for civility from the person proposing that anti-discrimination laws were bad. You say that as if saying anti-discrimination laws are wrong is uncivil. That is just whole different level of close-mindedness and intolerance to ideological unorthodoxy. I'm half-expecting you to call me a heretic. You're completely missing the fact that I consider forcing (through threats of imprisonment) people to surre…
It's not "moving the goalposts", your claim was that welfare programs were "growing". The definition of beneficiaries and benefits hasn't grown probably since LBJ was in the white house, only the pool of retirees and disabled persons has grown. In other words, government hasn't changed anything to make the program grow.
> Should we throw people in prison for not living up to your moral standards and giving to the poor?
How many people are in jail because of tax fraud versus in jail for some form of theft of property? That's a good primo facie test to verify that this ideology even passes a simple smell test. Even if that did demonstrate a problem, this idea that there's anything nonviolent about your ideology is fucking bonkers. The non-agression principle is anything but: http://www.demos.org/blog/1/29/14/what-world-following-non-a...
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>Love the calls for civility from the person proposing that anti-discrimination laws were bad. You say that as if saying anti-discrimination laws are wrong is uncivil. That is just whole different level of close-mindedness and intolerance to ideological unorthodoxy. I'm half-expecting you to call me a heretic. You're completely missing the fact that I consider forcing (through threats of imprisonment) people to surre…
> Now that I've substantiated my claim that welfare AND social welfare spending have grown tremendously, you're trying to move the goalposts. You ridiculed me with your snarky put-down when I made the claim, and it turned out to be absolutely correct. It's not "moving the goalposts", your claim was that welfare programs were "growing". The definition of beneficiaries and benefits hasn't grown probably since LBJ was i…
And I showed that they are.
>The pool of beneficiaries and benefits hasn't grown probably since LBJ was in the white house,
I have no idea if your claim is correct (probably isn't, given the massive increase in people of working age receiving disability benefits), but this is in fact "moving the goalposts".
When I said welfare programs were growing, I clearly was referring to how much was being spent on them. Your pedantic nonsense notwithstanding, my claim was absolutely correct.
>How many people are in jail because of tax fraud versus in jail for some form of theft of property?
The carrying out of the threat may be rare, but the use of the threat to deprive someone of their rights is not. It is endemic. A person has a right to their property and their privacy and income tax laws violate both.
>The non-agression principle is anything but:
Can you distill your anti-libertarian article down to its essence and post it here?
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>2) Anything past that is service That is just an arbitrary distinction to justify your greed for the property of others. We either have a moral right to make exclusive use of natural resources or we do not. Whatever argument you make for the right to appropriate natural resources as 'personal' property can be applied to the right to appropriate natural resources as 'non-personal' property. These debates get very phi…
There is a silverlining to loss of financial privacy due to taxes. It enables insurance. It reduces principal agent problem when you have many layers of employees. It enables safer voluntary transfer of wealth. It gives you some leverage against government by shopping tax jurisdictions for your business.
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Sure, you can define it like that, but in doing so you've just rolled an extremely complicated economic system (property) into the otherwise very simple concept of non-aggression. I think "hurting or threatening to hurt people" is a perfectly sufficient definition of aggression, and trying to stretch it to include property rights is a rhetorical trick to try and make a complicated political opinion seem obviously cor…
Laws against stealing are one of the basic laws of society. Property is not extremely complicated. If I take your laptop without your consent, that's a violation of your rights. If you have 20 laptops, that doesn't change that fact. If I have 99 other people that agree that I should be able to take your laptop, that still doesn't change that fact.
Yes it is.
How do you determine it's my laptop? How do you determine I didn't give consent? What about if I wrote a contract to lend you my laptop and we didn't specify a certain edge case? What about if you're using a hose in your garden and you accidentally damage my laptop next door? What about if I sell you the laptop and it breaks a few days later?
There are answers to all these questions, but we need a complicated system of laws to determine them.