The hypocritical cliff

[RuralEngineer]

Socially sanctioned theft?

I'd much rather be a wealthy business owner in 2013 than a slave or soldier forced into servitude pre-1971.

I don't things are nearly as scary as you make them sound.  In fact, in some ways, as individuals, we've never had it better. In a world where you could have been drafted or enslaved, today's is pretty damn free.

Good for you and your false choice.  "It could be worse" is never justification for poor behavior.  The mugger could have shot you rather than just taken your wallet.  I'll be thankful for my life, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try and prevent the mugging in the first place.

I'd prefer to be a free man in 2013 able to enjoy the fruits of my own labor except that which is necessary to maintain the upkeep of the resources I utilize and provide myself with freedom.

Theft:

1
a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it

I say socially sanctioned since our government has taken the "felonious" part out of the redistribution of wealth from those who earned it to those who haven't.  At the end of the day, it's still men with guns coming to remove your property by force, over your objection.

[moda0306]

"It could be better" is never a justification for pretending the world is becoming less and less fair every day we remove ourselves from 1776.

[RuralEngineer]

"It could be better" is never a justification for pretending the world is becoming less and less fair every day we remove ourselves from 1776.

Really?  We have the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the Civil rights act, and we're LESS free than we were in 1776?  What the hell planet are you living on?  I'm sure the Native Americans share your fond look back in time to the "good ole days" of fairness (not that they've seen the gains other groups have, but at least they aren't being exterminated anymore).

There wasn't even a mechanism for wealth redistribution back then.  I'm not sure you'd be any happier back then.  Then again, the majority of Americans were, by today's standards, incredibly poor.  Absolutely poverty stricken.  But as long as we're all poor and poverty stricken together, I guess that's "fair."

[moda0306]

RE,

Re-read what I posted. I was stating that we ARE far more free than in 1776.  Pretending otherwise is a bit foolish.

Benko mentioned that we seem to have an increased desire for socially sanctioned theft.  That's excessive in my opinion, because the very progress you mentioned.

If slavery and the draft aren't "socially sanctioned theft" and "redistribution mechanisms" I don't know what are.  They're the worst kind, because you don't really have a choice and it's very well theft of your very humanity. Everyone earning a high income has a right to stop working so hard if they feel like it's not worth it and still live a very meaninful, secure lifestyle.

I don't want to constantly carry the "it could be worse" torch, but when the dialogue starts looking back on "the good ol' days" (as it almost always does in discussions about the role of gov't) I can't help but call people out on how bs that is. If you want to compare the US to a freer potential model, one might want to look at a better model than our past.

[Benko]

RE,

Benko mentioned that we seem to have an increased desire for socially sanctioned theft.  That's excessive in my opinion, because the very progress you mentioned.

What does one have to do with the other?  There is a great quote by Thomas Sowell:

"What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice."

Socially sanctioned theft  or social justice to use Sowell's words have everything to do with growth of gov't and desire for it has grown over the last 4 years since the topic has constantly been harped upon.  What does equality for women, gays or blacks have anything to do with the desire of people for this to happen?

[MachineGhost]

Ok, here's the U.S. relative to other OECD nations by effective average corporate tax rate.  Still above average by a considerable margin.

Looks like its been going down as they've gotten better at tax avoidance.  Savvy corporations like Murdoch's News Corp only pays an effective rate of around 2%.

Corporations in the U.S. paid only an average of 12.1 percent in taxes on the profits they earned inside the U.S in fiscal 2011, according to statistics from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The Wall Street Journal reports that it's the lowest percentage corporations have paid on those profits since at least 1972, and it's less than half of the 25.6 percent they paid on average between 1987 and 2008.

[moda0306]

RE,

Benko mentioned that we seem to have an increased desire for socially sanctioned theft.  That's excessive in my opinion, because the very progress you mentioned.

What does one have to do with the other?  There is a great quote by Thomas Sowell:

"What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice."

Socially sanctioned theft  or social justice to use Sowell's words have everything to do with growth of gov't and desire for it has grown over the last 4 years since the topic has constantly been harped upon.  What does equality for women, gays or blacks have anything to do with the desire of people for this to happen?

The theft of somebody's life in the form of being forced at gunpoint to go kill foreigners, or their entire free will through slavery, were either directly or indirectly government sanctioned, and seem far worse to me than a government that tells you to pay more than what you feel your fair share of taxes are.

The term "big government" can be measured either on a percentage of GDP, or a realistic view as to whether government is enacting horrible invasions of our individual sovereignty. 

All government is coercion.  The government's recognition of slaves as private property probably didn't cost too much in terms of state GDP, but I wonder if some people being forced into life long servitude at that time didn't think they were being stolen from and that there wasn't a "big government" facilitating the process.

To me, all government is coercion, and "big government" is a bullshit term.  Government can facilitate the creation of wealth and all sorts of other things we do with our potential.  It can also be a horrible force of organized evil.  Size is irrelevant until we discuss function, because if government is facilitating private sector operations, the economy of the private sector might be extremely dependent on big government, representing a symbiotic relationship.  Think manhattan... Big government.  Huge private sector.

[moda0306]

bringing in the history of slavery and the draft seem to me to be missing the point of the argument being made, the anti big government case isn't that things are worse now than before, it is that government always (ALWAYS!) grows, it is fundamental to its nature and the human nature of the people who work for it, think of it as a rube Goldberg device with two steps, where somebody will always point out that there is a chance for those two steps to fail so they (government ) add another step, and another, and another, each step throwing off unintended problems requiring more steps to fix..

we seem to all be in agreement that taxation and redistribution is theft and that it accompanys adding steps to the machine,
the disagreement is that the social justice side think that the theft is OK and that it is ok to keep adding steps indefinitely regardless of the outcome or the unintended consequences (and need for more steps) it generates..

Everything government does is theft and coercion. What matters is to what ends do they coerce us, and what options do we have to avoid.  Some peopl like military, private property in the form of natural resources (and sometimes people), and freeways.  Others prefer social safety nets get worked into what government does.  The size of government, to me, is much less important than that size is being used for reasonably productive and equitable means.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that to complain about the size of government is useless until you compare it to the size of our freedoms and private sector.  For instance. The fact that our government has drones flying over head does seem a bit disturbing at times, but our private sector gives us eerie glimpses into people's homes and yards via google.

As our private sector becomes more complex, it's only natural that the government does as well.

the problem with size is its correlation with complexity, incompetence and unintended consequences, the larger the leviathan gets the more you get of each, and when the "go to" solution to the problems those cause is "more government" the complaint about size should be almost self explanatory..


limited government doesn't mean no government, or that we cant debate about what government should or shouldn't do, or that we can't compromise in some areas of what government should do,
what it can't compromise on is its fight against the problem laid out above, "in all areas of government" even ones we want and need and think are constitutionally mandated..

[moda0306]

Intellectual property is probably the purest form of private property, but hands down the most difficult to record and regulate.

However, it's easy to draw a line around a plot of land and give it to someone for them to be productive on.  Problem is, it was never really their land to begin with.

[systemskeptic]

At the end of the day, it's still men with guns coming to remove your property by force, over your objection.

This is why I am a libertarian from the market up, and a socialist from the market down. Libertarians forget how society [property rights] were born in the first place.  Capitalism / libertarianism is a great way [the best way?]  to organize a society once the earth's shared resources have already been assigned to property owners -- but how do you assign that property in the first place?  Men with guns coming to assign property rights by force...

Imagine this scenario 3000 years ago:  there is a quiet village with 100 residents on a lake in the mountains.  Each resident has a house by the lake and lives an easy life taking a few fish a day to live on.  There is no "owner" of this resource as it is shared by all and everyone has free access.  One day 10 of the villagers form a group and decides to builds a fence around the lake and claim this resource as theirs. 

They position guards at the gate to enforce this claim and proclaim that anyone may take up to 5 fish at a time as long as they pay a fee of 1 seashell per visit (the currency at the time).  This is going so well that they later build nets which allows them to automate the process of fishing, and instead start selling fish for 1 seashell each.  The 10 of them are raking in over 500 seashells a day and are wildly rich.  The rest of the village is suddenly poor because where they once had access to free fish, now they have to spend 8 hours a day harvesting enough seashells just to feed their families.

Fast forward 3000 years and J.G. Fish is the owner of a tuna factory which today sells 1,000 lbs of tuna on that same lake. 

So, how does a Libertarian address the fact that the current property delineations are largely a result of ancient wars, slavery, and violence where the politically, socially, and financially dominate figures amassed large fortunes by exploiting the lack of human rights [liberty] at the time?

[systemskeptic]

Logically, I'm not sure it's even possible to put forth a rational argument supporting the ownership of natural resources.  This is a huge intellectual problem with Libertarianism.  Possibly the only way to address it would be to forbid ownership of land and instead have some sort of system where rent is paid to society...it is very complicated but the point is you can't just blindly accept the notion that the "rich are rich because they are smart and deserve it" and "the poor just need to work harder" because the world and the philosophy of society are much more complicated than that.

There has to be a process where those who have become wealthy from the worlds resources support the society they live in. 
As an example, Warren Buffet is probably the perfect illustration of how capitalism succeeds admirably, and fails miserably at the same time.

[RuralEngineer]

Moda,

You might want to calibrate your moral compass. You acknowledge wealth redistribution is theft, and even compare it to slavery or conscription and yet you think this is not only acceptable, but should be encouraged. Usually the social justice folks try to argue that it isn't theft. You might give their delusional denial of reality a try, see how that feels.

Systemskeptic,

Do you have a time machine to lend? Because otherwise we have to live in the world we have. Even as we try to change it we can only move forward. Even your rise colored glasses don't reflect the historical reality. Humans have always defended their territory against the "other". The only way to make your ideal a reality is with a minute human population, zero growth, and no migration at all.

[moda0306]

RE,

You are totally twisting my words. I said any and all government is coercion of some sort, including the draft and taxation and slavery in some ways too.  My choices, then, are to either decide whether full-blown anarchy is a better option than a system of coercion that's organized and fair enough where we are better able to leverage the vast freedoms we still have to become much happier (most of us, anyway) than we'd otherwise be. Also, if we are going to do that partially by assigning private property rights to some of wealth that isn't inherantly private, then we can just maybe also have a social safety net to help those who have had zero wealth simply handed to them in the form of a deed. 

I just ask that others quit fooling themselves that a government that goes to war and assigns private property isn't coercive, but social safety nets are.  These people may be just as if not more delusional as those who see everyone as having some right to a social safety net.

More importantly, maybe we shouldn't lament about how America is losing its core principal of not wanting to steal from thy neighbor.  Sorry, but this country was founded, as many have been, on people taking shit that's not theirs and killing to defend it. Yes, there were a lot of wonderful people and ideas mixed in there... I'm not trying to undermine people who were victims of their times.

[RuralEngineer]

Moda,

What government assignment of property are you referring to?  To my knowledge, the last big land rush was in the 1890's.  Every assignment of property since then has been a private transaction, except for a few unusual cases, like eminent domain land seizures. 

The land has been assigned for over a hundred years.  You can't turn back time and change it.  Accept it and stop living in the past.  We need to live in the world we have, and in that world property has been allocated already.  So, this is no longer coercive, regardless of how it happened centuries ago.

Your second argument is also firmly set in the past.  We no longer have a draft, all military service is voluntary.  This is not coercive.  The payment of taxes to fund it is obviously, and I agree that we should be trying to put a stop to all these pointless foreign wars.

You seem dead set on justifying coercive behavior because coercive behavior exists.  This is extremely poor reasoning.  We should be striving to minimize government coercion, not expand it.  You're fighting for the wrong team.

[MachineGhost]

[Storm]

The graphs make it look scary, but the reality is that we knew this all along.  If we let the Bush tax cuts expire and let the sequester take place, deficits would be cut.  But, not letting them expire and not cutting spending is only going to let the deficit continue to grow.

[Storm]

Hilarious infographic at WSJ showing their editorial bias.  Apparently they don't believe anyone makes less than $100K:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... nteractive

[MachineGhost]

Agape.

[craigr]

Hilarious infographic at WSJ showing their editorial bias.  Apparently they don't believe anyone makes less than $100K:

Maybe it's in Argentinian Pesos?

[notsheigetz]

Hilarious infographic at WSJ showing their editorial bias.  Apparently they don't believe anyone makes less than $100K:

I suspect not many WSJ readers actually do make less that $100k.

I did notice the black couple making $180k in retirement turned out okay. I sure hope my white ass does as well in the near future.

[gizmo_rat]

Thanks Storm, the more I look the more I laugh.
They look so down trodden, so miserable, my favorite is Bob Cratchit there on the bottom right with Tiny Tim on his back. No turkey this year thanks to tax increases. FFS.