211–220 of 254 posts
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It is your responsibility, which is part of the reason why you pay taxes in the first place. The fact that so much of your money is misappropriated is another story though.
I pay taxes because a regime with guns says I have to or they will take me away and put me behind bars. This is a crime against me
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Just IMO, many Americans probably don't think homeless people deserve free housing, because they have (the taxpayers) have to pay for their own housing and also contribute to homeless housing via taxes. "Fuck you got mine" is real here. Just see the nauseating argument against discharging student loans.
Student loans argument is not 1:1 at all. Every student loan forgiveness proposal I see suggests that taxpayers foot the bill and the counterargument is why should those who did not attend and/or those who paid off have to foot the bill. I agree with that counterargument and will never vote for forgiveness. However, send put a proposal in front of me that seizes assets from the universities selling these degrees that…
A lot of this would solve itself if people in student loan debt could discharge it through bankruptcy. Colleges that can't produce degrees where students can pay their loans off would close and many people wouldn't be able to get student loans, and I argue that would be a good thing.
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Yes, we pay to defend Europe from Russia, and we do it for free. We should stop doing that, and invest more in domestic needs.
> Yes, we pay to defend Europe from Russia, and we do it for free. If 'we' is the USA, then I'd suggest the USA pays to maintain a very lucrative industry, and as far as anyone can tell, they pay way over the going rate, and have very poor book-keeping. The idea that some older equipment, rather than being retired or disposed of, is being sent to Ukraine, as somehow being exclusively a defence of a distant place, and…
Providing decades of national defense as a service is quite a different thing. Especially when the beneficiaries are some of the richest nations in the world.
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Yes, we pay to defend Europe from Russia, and we do it for free. We should stop doing that, and invest more in domestic needs.
No, you pay to continue having hegemony over multiple continents. Don't call American military spending in any sense some kind of altruism, it's done to keep the USA power and money floating around.
Sure, it's that too. It's both.
Regardless, it should stop.
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I’m not supporting the idea of USA exceptionalism, but scale /absolutely/ does matter. I’ve lived on most continents, and currently in the EU, I can see when even small increases in load on services leads to total breakdown. There’s a reason they are unable to sustain amidst immigration.
Of course it matters, that's why I brought up the point that each state in the USA is supposedly small enough to have local governance, that they have enough state-level freedoms to solve localised problems and exactly why I compare the scale of Texas to all of the Nordics as they are very similar in GDP and population.
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> They miss many things including Scale. Yes, it's very easy to completely miss scale, as well as missing sensible priorities, etc, and embrace a mantra of exceptionalism as a convenience. Apropos ranking, the United States spends more on military / defense than the next 10 countries combined.
Yes, we pay to defend Europe from Russia, and we do it for free. We should stop doing that, and invest more in domestic needs.
Are the homeless in Finland hooked on fentanyl and various other hard drugs? Is half of their homeless population suffering from mental illness (stemming from and made worse by the psychosis from the hard drug use)? Do they have an illegal immigration problem? Is there a perverse incentive for politicians and their families to profit off suffering? The situation in the US imo is not at all equatable to most of the wo…
The point of the Finnish experience, and plenty of evidence from elsewhere, is that you're far more likely to address drug abuse (yes, the Nordic countries also have drug problems) and other problems once people are housed. The US exceptionalism is almost always a cop-out. For a country that is supposedly so advanced, a shockingly high proportion of Americans seem convinced you can't possibly solve anything.
I’m a naturalized citizen and US is my one and only home. It’s sad that half the people I meet seem to hate living here and even hate their own country.
When I was in Japan there was a massive rainfall and Kyoto station was flooding. I saw a bunch of old people appear out of nowhere wearing bright vests and helping to remove the mud and water. I found out they were elderly volunteers and that it’s just something Japanese people do there.
In the US I feel like it’s so rare to see that kind of unity unless it’s a situation already dialed to 11.
The investor class in the US treats people here like cattle. And the cattle all know they’re fucked unless they can elevate into the investor class.
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Not at all the same in Germany, but even as a property owner, I see some justification for effectively legalizing squatting in unused buildings. It would create some incentive for property owners to invest and rent out buildings, or otherwise sell them cheaply. Ideally this would be formalized and matched with a proper framework, i.e. municipalities can easily buy unused properties at a nominal cost, property owners…
> It would create some incentive for property owners to invest and rent out buildings, or otherwise sell them cheaply. Property is property, you should be free to do what you want with them. Otherwise it's not property. It's like saying "you have a car, you need to use it everyday, otherwise we can justify people borrowing your car when they need one". Also, rent controls, aren't they a thing in some parts of Germany…
Most countries have long lists of exceptions, ranging from limiting your ability to be a nuisance, to limiting your ability to deny others access to various resources, and up to and including guaranteeing public access to some types of property in some countries (e.g. in Norway you have a legal right to cross, forage in and camp on most undeveloped rural land, irrespective of the wishes of the landowner) because it is seen to increase liberty. In Norway, this freedom to roam was seen as so obvious that it was one of the last parts of Norwegian law to be codified, because courts just took it into account despite Norwegian law generally not having any common-law component or system of precedent binding courts.
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> It would create some incentive for property owners to invest and rent out buildings, or otherwise sell them cheaply. Property is property, you should be free to do what you want with them. Otherwise it's not property. It's like saying "you have a car, you need to use it everyday, otherwise we can justify people borrowing your car when they need one". Also, rent controls, aren't they a thing in some parts of Germany…
to my sibling comment, so what you're saying is, mob rule? this is probably defacto how it is, but it does not make it right. Nobody else has any rights to what I own, and I dont have rights to them. this kind of thinking that the "society" can just set rules that violates other people is a sick and disgusting development, this form of communist cancer has to be destroyed.
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Look, there are two possible definitions of "ownership" and "property". One is, you own whatever you can physically keep. If you have a pretty stone, and I come to you, and bash your head in, and take your stone, guess what, it's mine now. If I scoop your brains out of your half-broken skull, I'll have a new ashtray too, so I profit off this exchange! The second definition is, whatever set of rules the society enforc…
your right ends where it takes away others. Forcing taxes on people is not that. I cannot violate others, and anyone who would give themselves the rights to do so, are bandits, oftentimes having formed a gang
This is exactly Proudhon's argument for his infamous "property is theft" - property rights limits the freedom of others by restricting them from e.g. making use of the land you arbitrarily fence off - and why Dejacque, the father of libertarianism [1], and a firm anarcho-communist, agreed with him.
The right-libertarian property fetishism is founded on ignoring the restrictions property rights places on the rights of others; something every legal system on the planet recognises to various degrees. As such, while none go as far as Proudhon and Dejacque wanted in stripping away property rights, the default of human society is to see property rights as inherently and necessarily limited for the protection of the rights of others.
(I'd be all for giving you the opportunity of opting out of taxes, as long as society gains the freedom to refuse to deal with you if you opt out, up to and including freedom to deny you the use of everything funded by said society; freedom is a two-way street)
[1] On the Human Being, Male and Female, Joseph Déjacque, is the first use of "libertarianism" as a political ideology. Dejacque accuses Proudhon of being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian". Dejacque went on to publish "Le Libertaire" (The Libertarian), the first libertarian periodical.
On the Human Being, Male and Female, can be found here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t...