Comment on Taxes are cool
CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Funny, but taxes ARE cool. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to do the research by living in any number of failed states.
Don’t be that guy that goes to dinner with a large group of friends then skips out on the bill.
I’d rather live in a world without government or currency. Taxes suck, but only insofar as it legitimizes and enables the monopoly of violence
Have fun in Mad Max might makes right land.
Mad Max land is what we have where people in the third world are impoverished so we can benefit off their hard work.
Capitalism cannot survive without exploitation at the bottom level.
Sure, but taxation and governments do not equal capitalism.
To your point, perhaps more than hou said, capitalism is exploitation all the way down, not just at the bottom.
Idk I’m pretty mighty
Anyone who disagrees is welcome to do the research by living in any number of failed states.
Currency is a tool of authoritarian governments to extract labor via the threat of poverty and state sanctioned violence.
Taxes are a means of legitimizing that violence by recharacterizing an extortionary rent as interpersonal debts, and the violence of collections as just compensation
Taxes are not theft. They are contributing to the group that shares resources like water and services like roads. These are not naturally forming, they are planned and maintained by people doing a job who need to be compensated.
The problem with taxes is who is taxed. If only a few hundred families control a majority of the wealth, why are you paying taxes? They need to be taxed back down to the quality of life that we live.
Taxes are not theft. They are contributing to the group that shares resources like water and services like roads.
They are not contributing to anything. Taxation is fully decoupled from public spending, which is why the US can issue $1.8T in new Treasury bonds in a year to no noticeable effect.
Public utilities (such that exist - most of them have been privatized in everything but name) operate on the expectation that the staff providing engineering expertise and materials can enjoy a reasonably comfortable quality of life. Setting aside that most utilities bill separately from state and local taxation (I pay a monthly water bill and a gas tax per gallon to fund these amenities), they are provided at an extraordinary mark-up that the actual staff don’t get to enjoy. As a case in point, Houston waste removal services have been chipped away at since COVID, with staff working longer hours for lower pay using outdated equipment. The mayor has outsourced more and more of the work to a private contractor owned by one of his mega-donor friends. What money is collected via property taxes goes first into the profits of the private contracting agencies, then to their administrators, and only at last to trickle down on the actual laborers collecting the trash.
Meanwhile, the housing and personal transport and groceries and other lifestyle amenities required by the waste management workers is… once again outsourced to the private sector, where owners take their cut first and labor gets the dredges. The end result is a working class mired deeper and deeper into debt, while the landed class grows fatter and richer.
This isn’t taxation paying for labor or materials. This is taxation paid out as a rent to landlords and cronies.
The problem with taxes is who is taxed.
That’s a system functioning as intended. Taxation is rent-seeking at the governmental scale. You don’t tax your aristocrats, because they’re supposed to be the recipients of the labor surplus. You tax the laborers, because you need a legalized mechanism for extracting any surplus remaining with them, in order to redistribute it to your aristocratic peers.
I’m pleased that you can conceptually see this “possibility”, for lack of a better word. It speaks of creativity and imagination.
That your conclusion seems locked-in on this possibility as the only solution, is needlessly below your abilities and shows mental rigidity or tunnel vision.
Currency and Taxation CAN and HAVE been weaponized as you described, but so has a carrot. Just because a carrot CAN be used to stab through someone’s eye and pierce their brain, killing them, doesn’t mean that is what carrots are for, or how public policy should treat carrots.
That your conclusion seems locked-in on this possibility as the only solution
I’m mostly just being contrary.
Currency and Taxation CAN and HAVE been weaponized as you described, but so has a carrot.
You’re going to have to cite how carrots were weaponized by the state to legitimize violence.
You’re going to have to cite how carrots were weaponized by the state to legitimize violence.
I like it when daddy america dominates me by forcing me to pay taxes like the dirty little slut I am.
Capitalism is not cool, taxes are thus not cool.
Directly working to make your local community better is cool. Be the guy who comes over and helps you cook a meal with your other friends which you enjoy together.
Socialism is just the highest tier plan on Taxes+
Yeah, but can I be the guy who supplies industrial amounts of chlorine, alum, sodium hypochlorite, lime, ferric chloride, sodium hydroxide, activated carbon, polyphosphates, hydrogen peroxide, and ozone for disinfection for my local water treatment plant? Can you spare the steel and engineering brother? I’m so thirsty.
I also have to take a dump. Can I give it to you?
Your right, the only way people would want to do a job such as make life better for other people is through exploitation.
If we make them fear not having food or a home leading to death, we can force them to do the jobs you don’t want to do.
You’re such a good friend!
Feel free to play with your little strawmen, just don’t fall under the delusion that you are having a conversation with anyone but the ghosts in your head.
Shut up nerd
tmyakal@infosec.pub 14 hours ago
Nothing inherently wrong with taxation. The problems are how taxes are determined, how they’re collected, and how that money is distributed.
Banana@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Exactly. Conceptually, taxation isn’t left, but the way some government use those funds absolutely is theft.
Not to mention how angry people are about taxation, but are also completely unaware that conceptually, profit is actually left of your surplus value.
Steve@communick.news 13 hours ago
Modern governments with their own Fiat currencies don’t use taxes to pay for anything. Taxes money doesn’t get distributed, it gets destroyed to control inflation.
LwL@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Not how that works. Not how any of that works.
TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
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Steve@communick.news 12 hours ago
It really is how this works.
It’s just that nobody realised until the last couple decades. And now we have a century of inertia behind economic theories that says otherwise. A century of economic theory that’s been horrible at predicting the real economy.
But it’s not difficult to understand.
If a government can make money out of nothing to pay for anything it needs to (the definition of fiat currency), then it doesn’t need to collect taxes to pay for things. If it doesn’t need to taxes to pay for things, then what do taxes do? Taxes remove money from the economy, offsetting the money added by government spending from nothing. This is direct inflation control.