The infamous coin toss

(1) Government ownership, (2) ownership by a single rich person, (3) ownership by a nonprofit, (4) ownership by the employees, (5) ownership by the readers…

However, suggesting just one additional options focuses excessive attention to that specific option. Mentioning how much Twitter has changed going from a public company to a private one owned by a single wealthy person is only barely related to the underlying argument here. Namely, that you need to consider many options and their individual tradeoffs not just 2 bad options.

Your question was:

>Who should own media? Private people, or the state?

The reason why no one ought to answer a question like that is because it is presented in a format identical to a “bad faith” question.

You may have meant it genuinely but it looks like the old “Have you stopped beating your wife?” lawyer trap.

I chose not to answer the question because it was recognisable as a “false dichotomy”. Then I explained my reasoning and so on.

I wasn’t “doing anything but answer”ing what you were ostensibly asking. Avoiding it was easy. Trying to inform you and anyone else reading of why such a question is never worth answering, is what took a lot of effort. That’s just par for the course if one chooses to respond to a question that has the format of a bad faith argument. I don’t mind.

So (to carry on your schtick) apparently you feel that if “the undeserving rich” are, as I suggested, in any way restricted from owning media, the only other bucket is state controlled media. Well I’m sorry you feel that way. Perhaps a democracy could have some laws or something, without turning into a fascist state. Seriously - the general category of “functional democracy” provides millions of shades “between” oligarchy and totalitarianism - but even saying “between” is giving too much credence to a bad faith preposition.

I’ll go through it for you again if you wish.

Over here at a specific extreme we have a totalitarian regime controlling all the media. Over here at a different extreme we have a small number of rich people owning everything including control of media.

Now we can construct a 1 dimensional line and say that these are two extremes on a single axis. And we can go even further and say, as you have, that all possibilities fall into these two buckets.

Consider though that this world we live in and the world of political possibilities is not a one dimensional world. Nor is it two dimensional or three dimensional. It is “n” dimensional for some inconceivably large “n”. There are many different ways that power can be distributed, channeled and many more ways in which benefits and taxation can be organised - and or other mechanisms and feedback systems other than these. A functional democracy can avoid being either of those two specific buckets. That one dimensional line and those two specific buckets are not in any way inevitable.

Ad hominem includes many types attacks on a person that aren’t about the person but how they presented the argument. Ie mocking how slow someone spoke, or in this case how many words they used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

To answer your point, the thing about prices and taxes is that the price will be basically whatever the market will pay. It is not determined by the cost of service except at the lower end. So a low VAT (compared to no VAT) will come mostly out of the profits and not so much from a price increase.

This is especially true when the current situation is in most places that there is a rather high VAT, so there the lower VAT will actually reduce prices a little bit, but again not by the whole difference because the price of necessities isn’t determined by the cost but by demand.

In any situation however I remain of the opinion that until we get a progressive wealth tax we’ll continue on the same path of increasing inequality that ultimately destroys democracy.

2.25 * 0.36 = 0.81 = 0.9 * 0.9.