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Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

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Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#451

Post by kuschku »

mopenstein wrote: post #442
kuschku wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are truly just the fruits of your labor, and the society contributed nothing, you are free to move to a zero-tax third world country and live there. And if society did contribute more to your work than these taxes cost — which it likely did, considering you didn't move to a third world country yet — then society is free to take its fair share in return.

Why is coercion the chosen course and not voluntarism? I actually like your reply the most. You almost proudly admit to being in favor of violence against your fellow man but didn't quite get there. I'll help finish your thought: > then society is free to take its fair share in return. And if you don't give up what society thinks is fair, then society will imprison you and if you resist their agents, society will aut…

You are again free to leave. It's a relatively simple social contract. If you take something from society, you'll have to pay for it.

If I go into a walmart and take products off the shelf, Walmart also expects that I'll pay, and will enforce that under threat of violence.

I'd gladly switch to a voluntarism based society, but it turns out the vast majority that claims to support voluntarism just wants to take advantage of society without paying for it.

Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#452

Post by fragmede »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #107
vivekd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think life in the 1920s, while having downsides, was a lot better than many people imagine.

I imagine many women would disagree. Or the people who just got back from WW1, and are about to send their kids to WW2.

African Americans might also have something to say about how they were treatment during that time period. Still, you can't say that something hasn't been lost when previously, one person, working 9-5 M-F, including lunch, at a job that's not particularly spectacular, can provide a house, food, transportation, for two adults and multiple children, and if we look forwards a few decades, a college education for said children without lifelong crippling debt, and careers of their own.

Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#453

Post by t0bia_s »

em-bee wrote: post #396
t0bia_s wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why "not pay taxes" means "away from others"?

because living in a community requires financing of community facilities, which depends on contributions from every member of the community, aka taxes.

Why do you think its a condition for living in community?

Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#454

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

[...] thinking back to the early-American homesteading days when a man could venture into uncharted territory and make a simple life for himself [...] Edit: Several users have pointed out that homesteading was incredibly difficult, and we’d all likely die trying to live so simply. Let’s assume the person is relatively capable of sustaining life using whichever resources might be provided by the particular environment — forest, desert, famous Bay Area city[...]

Someone did the reasonable thing and pointed out the 'romantic fallacy' on part of the OP. With what little gardening I have done in my life I can say with confidence that I will fail by a large margin to harvest more than a tiny fraction of what I need to survive even if I were given a plot of land and all the gardening and farming tools you'd need. Even then it would be potatoes day in day out and not much of anything else. I was even able to harvest 2800 grams of potatoes from my balcony this year and could multiply that number if I wanted, but that is still a tiny fraction of only the potatoes I eat in a year's time, not to speak of what I consume apart from potatoes.

Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#455

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mikhailfranco wrote: post #418
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we do have division of labor and pay each other for the work, we've reinvented capitalism Nope. Capitalism, at least 21st century western capitalism, consists of 3 things: 1. relatively free markets, in the sense that what can be bought/sold and for how much is only loosely regulated 2. an entrepeneurial culture that supports the idea of "starting a business" 3. the idea that the rewards of any given human ventu…

Your (3) contradicts (1). Rewards do not necessarily go to capital. (1) says rewards are assigned based on supply and demand. If labor is scarce and investment is plentiful, rewards will go to labor. If investment is scarce, and labor is plentiful, rewards will go to capital (with the obvious caveat that there are many other factors that affect returns, and their distribution within the pools of labor and capital). U…

I don't agree. If the rewards of a human venture (involving some amount of capital, labor and IP, but almost certainly all 3) do not go to capitalism, then it's not a capitalist venture.

There are certainly other ways of distributing the rewards, no question about that.

So the question arises: why do the rewards go preferentially to capital in so many of the ventures that exist in our system? Your argument claims that it reflects the (relatively) low supply of capital (compared to the (relatively) plentiful supply of labor; we'll ignore IP for now).

By contrast, I claim that it doesn't reflect that primarily, but is instead deliberate economic/political/legal choice made under significant influence by capital, and that's why we call it "capitalism".

If we lived in a world, for whatever reason, the rewards of a human venture went primarily to labor, we can still recognize that there's a "system" distributing the rewards, but we would not call that "capitalism".

So I'd partially agree with your argument but then invert it: an important reason why the rewards go to capital - i.e. we live in a capitalist society - is that there's sufficiently little countervailing pressure on this arrangement. How much this comes from population numbers, lack of political will, schemeing by the rich etc. is always going to be hard to say. However, a system that didn't work the way ours does would not be capitalism.

Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#456

Post by nradov »

monadINtop wrote: post #388
nradov wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is the alternative which has ever been proven to work at scale? As long as we have private property which people are allowed to buy and sell then capitalism is the only possible result. The fact that some primitive tribes managed to eke out a basic existence for a while with a gift economy or whatever isn't a valid counterargument.

What are you talking about? Private property refers to the ownership of the organs of economic production - factories, steal mills, whatever - by private institutions (e.g shareholder-managed organisations). If your referring to markets in general, they have existed since the dawn of urban human civilisation, thousands of years before capitalism. Markets can even exist in the most despotic communist dictatorship, or…

And all of that basically failed or at least never expanded. It is not a scalable economic model that can work in large societies.

Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#457

Post by AureliusMA »

grecy wrote: post #401
pnut wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people who have documented the actual cost of doing this over decades, to the penny. A couple catching their food, doing their own boat maintenance. $300k over ten years is the line below which you are arguably living homeless like transient vanlife, but on water - that is, living on the margins of society, on borrowed time. So buying a boat ($$), getting it fitted initially ($$), after that, mayb…

I've driven from Alaska to Argentina, right around the coastline of Africa and right around Australia. On the Pan-American Highway for two years I spent an average of $1,200 per month, for all expenses including SCUBA diving, shipping the Jeep (and flying myself) around the Darien Gap and everything else. That was 40,000 miles In Africa I spent an average of $1,650 for all expenses including all National parks, visas…

A boat that doesn’t work sinks and kills you. A car that doesn’t work stays put. It’s a whole different world. I would not trade my van for a boat if I was looking for a cheap life.

Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#458

Post by em-bee »

t0bia_s wrote: post #453
em-bee wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because living in a community requires financing of community facilities, which depends on contributions from every member of the community, aka taxes.

Why do you think its a condition for living in community?

how can you have a functioning community where noone contributes anything?

sure, many services can be provided by for-profit businesses for a fee, but who helps to put out fires for example? who pays for equipment used by firefighters?

i see no way to make firefighting work unless everyone contributes.

unless you rely on generosity of some, but that would not be fair, nor is it sustainable.

how do you build streets? a public park? do you want to charge for their use?

how do you pay for cleaning streets? street lights? traffic lights? street signs? police? judges? jails?

there are many other examples that work better if the whole community collaborates to achieve them. taxes need not be only money but could be some other form of contribution.

Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#459

Post by t0bia_s »

em-bee wrote: post #458
t0bia_s wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think its a condition for living in community?

how can you have a functioning community where noone contributes anything? sure, many services can be provided by for-profit businesses for a fee, but who helps to put out fires for example? who pays for equipment used by firefighters? i see no way to make firefighting work unless everyone contributes. unless you rely on generosity of some, but that would not be fair, nor is it sustainable. how do you build streets?…

- How can you have a functioning community where noone contributes anything?

How would that people make money?

Re: Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?

#460

Post by eesmith »

poppafuze wrote: post #372

Svalbard, Marie Byrd Land, Gornja Siga, Lagoan Isles, Bir Tawil.

Svalbard requires you have a job or can show you can support yourself. There is almost no available housing in the archipelago so 100sq m costs about $500,000 _ https://www.finn.no/realestate/homes/search.html?location=0.... .

Food is expensive and you will not be able to live off the land.

Here is someone who was forced to leave the island because he could not demonstrate he could support himself, and was in poor health: https://icepeople.net/2021/07/24/our-editor-get-expelled-her...

How does one get enough food and heat to survive while living on Marie Byrd Land?

Croatia controls Gornja Siga.

Lagoan Isles is a pretend place definitely under English control.

Bir Tawil is a tough place to live, like Marie Byrd Land but easier to survive. Good luck finding water.

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