Ethics in taxation

*taxes AREN'T being taken from you

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This.

Taxation is unironically theft by the state and under socialism there would be no taxation.

Because finite public goods/resources require we all pay.

Progressive tax rates are good because those who earn the most generally have taken the most advantage of public resources (e.g., infrastructure) to earn their wealth.

Taxes are theft though, but so is property and rent.

Taxes buy you civilization. Don't like the deal? Go to Somalia or some other hellhole and enjoy your freedom.

If you work for a failing company, you make less for your boss than you are paid. You steal the rest. That's exploitation.

And end to progressive taxation is the start of an uprising, DO IT.
youtube.com/watch?v=DnEe4oaSC88
youtube.com/watch?v=junBJZRDFzk

Not a voluntary act.

I'd be fine if that was the case, but wherever I go it's a state claiming I should be paying a yearly tax for my own land. BTFO.

Then why are you a leftist :^)

Oh, so that's why >40% of the budget of the USA and the country I live in, as well as most european countries is welfare. Capitalism, right. BTFO.

What if it is not my intent to use the state's product? If pave your alley do I have the moral right to ask you for money, despite the fact that you did not ask for me to pave your alley?

The boss also invested his own money into the business, buying tools and, for smaller companies, particularly ones started on debt, possibly risking his livelihood in the process. He is taking a risk that you don't have to risk - the product may not sell well, but you still get your salary until the factory closes even if the factory lost money the whole time.

Again, I never asked for their service of building a road. Perhaps I'd be perfectly fine with investing and hiring a company to build a road for me.

You know, this whole "Total value you produce" thing really makes me think - what about the investment value? Why do you all ignore the fact that the "boss" also invested?

But I could make the reverse argument - the poor are those who earn the most off the progress of the high earners who invent and invest.

I actually consider Somalia a viable alternative to socialist Europe, if you have enough capital to start up a new home there and enough people to colonize, the natives don't seem exactly trustworthy.

Taxation is theft, as is surplus labor and rent. Being against one and not the other just shows how inconsistent you are. The state doesn't have the right to steal by labor and give me a shitty service in return just like the capitalist doesn't have the right to steal my labor and give me a shitty wage in return.

Literally what? The failure of Reaganomics completely BTFO this whole idea of rich people investing in a way that trickles down wealth if taxes are cut.

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If you don't want the services of society go live a hunter gatherer lifestyle in the woods.

There are a couple of arguments. Pick your poison:

1.
Money can be used to earn more money, and hence wealth grows exponentially. Someone earning $10,000 per day isn't working 1000 times harder than someone earning $10 per day - in fact they're likely working much less hard. The difference is that the person earning $10,000 per day is taking advantage of the work of others (employees, tenants, etc.) to profit from their capital. Meanwhile the person earning $10 per day isn't going to have any capital because they have to spend their entire income on basic necessities. Without some form of wealth redistribution the gap between rich and poor would spiral out of control, not because the rich contribute more to society, but because of a runaway feedback loop inherent to capitalist economics.

2.
Let's say we accept your free market ideals. The government are effectively a publicly owned corporation who own all the land. You can either pay them rent or fuck off. You can get out of paying tax by building your own libertarian paradise in international waters. I'll be waiting.

I do at least agree that the tax system is far from optimal though. VAT mainly hurts the poor and contributes to the poverty trap, and there are a lot of ways for the capitalist (ie. property owning) class to avoid paying taxes which aren't available to workers. The average worker can end up paying more tax than the largest multinational corporations. Also far too much tax money is spent on stupid shit like wars.

But this simply isn't true. The inventer/investor class retain the most profits.

You agreed to it by living in the city.
Go somewhere where there is no state.. I don't know… Somalia? Siberia? Somewhere by yourself. What do you mean you don't want to be by yourself? It's the only way not to have a state.

Why, I agree!
Cut all welfare and let's see how well the people that don't have enough to survive take it! Hmm.. Let's ask Tzar Nikolas II…

Don't use it.

You don't own that land. You paid for a permanent license to use a thin slice of it from a few feet underground to a few feet above ground. You even have to apply for planning permission to build on it. It was all in the terms and conditions (the law) which you should have read before paying for that limited license.

In reality you aren't free to work on your own at any time. Most businesses fail, but to even start one in the first place you either need years of saved capital, which would necessitate living a life where you can effectively save capital, or getting a loan from a bank, effectively making you a worker for the bank. The system has been intentionally designed for you to not have freedom to work for yourself, one aspect being English Enclosures, and other similar systems throughout the work of forcing peasants into proletariat.

Don't shitpost.

Don't use retarded ancap arguments.

I can live wherever I fucking like and I shouldn't have to be extorted by warlords demanding my labor.
Don't use retarded liberal arguments.

Not an option if a person wants to live a modern, regular life. Not like using it or not using it has any factor on whether you're stolen from.

Which means living a life where you can effectively save capital*

I never asked for my landlord to provide me with doors in my house. Perhaps I'd be perfectly fine with buying my own doors. Therefore I should be able to live in the house without paying rent.

Exactly. Fuck the landlord. Squatters are people too!

I don't even agree with almost anything governments do, but you are still making retarded arguments.

So you admit that you desire for something the existence of which requires the labor of others, but you think paying for that labor is theft because there's no contract somewhere that says that you agreed have that labor done?

But that picture is retarded.
Are you retarded, user?

Whoops, meant to spoiler but i saged.

I've always heard this, but this seems to contradict you en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics#Analysis . I honestly don't know much about the situation, so I'd appreciate your perspective.

If you don't appreciate me building you an alleyway which I am now forcing you to pay for at gunpoint then go live a hunter gatherer lifestyle in the woods.

1. The way I view is that "working hard" means nothing - I can work hard sorting rocks in a large pile from smallest to largest all day, but that has no actual value.

I often see the basic necessities idea, but I rather see it as a non-issue in countries like mine - rather, lower taxes would be better since only after taxes are earnings for the poorest only big enough to pay for necessities.

2. The government inherently doesn't own all the land, or that would conflict with me owning my land. It's either or. I didn't even buy my land from them, I most likely bought it from someone else who owned it. Ignoring the years the dreaded communism was actually applied in this country, ownership likely goes back to before my country even formed, in certain cases before a unified state even coalesced.

Well I don't use it and I'm still forced to pay. What now?

In modern western countries, at current wages, that wouldn't be an issue but everyone wants to live like a king all the time for some reason and then complain when careful spenders come on top. At least, that's my view..

The house in of itself is a product. If I owned the house and someone barged in and installed doors when I didn't want them, I wouldn't feel obligated to pay them.

Even Stirner dissagrees.
Can you protect your property? It's yours.
Can you enter a house and live there, without anyone kicking you out or calling the police? It's yours.

Well, if you don't like society, go live without society.
And yes, society means state, even if you call it "commune" or "corporatation".

Just tear down the fence fam

you need to remove the fence OP

You dont use roads, sidewalks, the police?

Yes, exactly! But anyway, governments aren't landlords, they're an occupy force that adds no value to anything.

If the road workers wants to be compensated for their labor, that's fine. It's not fine when some third-party demands labor for me and then says they're doing me a favor because they used a miniscule part of that labor to fund the shitty maintenance and construction of services I might not even want or use.

Not everyone is middle-class consumerists. An extremely large amount of people in America live below the poverty line. Even people who can effectively save capital usually save it at the expense of giving up many aspects of modern life, including a family. Here's a nice quote from Marx about it.
That reason is Capitalist propaganda (i.e. advertising) to be consumerists, not to mention the "my life is shit so I'm going to deal with it by buying luxury items that I think will make me happy or drugs that will sedate me"
They don't come on top; the majority of small businesses fail.

Stirner didn't advocate for might makes right. Besides, my point is I don't have any moral obligation to let bandits and warlords steal from me, even if they say they'll use some of my money to fund a service I might or might not need.

Nice.

That's a bad example and you know it. You don't employ people to pointlessly sort rocks. You employ people to do things which enrich you, and then allow them to keep a small fraction of the wealth which they created through their labor. You are contributing much less to the species because while the workers are working to create wealth, you are simply sitting back and collecting the proceeds.

Now, you must understand, I don't hate you for being a parasite. It is a systematic problem and you can't really be blamed for making rational choices. You can be blamed for not recognizing the nature of the problem though.

It's really ironic that an ardent capitalist doesn't understand how ownership works under the current capitalist system.

You don't own your land in the libertarian sense of ownership. In fact you don't own anything in the strictly libertarian sense. There are a complex set of laws which fundamentally form a contract between the current "owner" of the land and the state. If you break your end of the contract, there are penalties set out in the law. You were aware of this when you bought the land, so following libertarian logic it's your own fault.

You do know socialism isn't about taxation right? But okay I'll bite, it's more ethical to take something from someone who has far more than everyone else than to let everyone not be taxed and allow child starvation etc to exist.

That's right, yes. Which is yet another reason there will be no taxes under communism.

No. You have a legal obligation, cause by living within a society you accept it's laws.
If you don't accept the laws, don't live in that society.

what the fuck kind of argument is this? You can decide not to be a tenant of a landlord but you can't decide for the government not to build roads.

Nice spooks. Not to mention you're thinking laws are actually created by society and not forced onto society by the ruling class.

That sounds a lot like the definition of a landlord to me. Someone who owns land and demands payments from anyone who wishes to use the land, but doesn't any value to the land themselves.

Thos analyses of reaganomics is done by shills and disciples of shills.
An increase in wealth when it's just from asset inflation or rent extraction is meaningless, I literally don't care if my house's value doubles or haves, and if a toll is setup on the bottom of my street to extract money from me that is good for the GDP balance sheet but it does absolutely nothing of value except stop me from saving (which is not a bad thing) or spending it somewhere else.
Good economic policy should produce good outcomes, and Reaganomics didn't unless you were already rich and played the speculation game - i.e a parasite.

You can decide not to be a tenant of the government too.
Buy a boat, sail 200 miles off the shore, and you will never have to pay another cent in taxes again. It's not the government's problem that buying your own country is expensive. Homeless people don't get to take your property for free just because they're too poor to afford it.

Not my comrade

Personally I believe all private property is theft, but I'm not going to pass up the opportunity to use ancap logic against ancaps.

I could do without them if they weren't in the way.

They're incompetent anyways, so nope

I am sure there is some utility that someone can find out of it, if small. The example stands.

I find that funny coming from socialists, considering that, the way I see it, the whole shtick is being a parasite while complaining about exploitation.

And, without me and my investment that whole company would not exist and there wouldn't be any proceeds to speak of.

Using tools I bought using wealth *I* created through *my* labour at some point. At what point does proper investment of my earnings become too evil and exploitative?

Well, if society doesn't agree with the laws, it can force them to be changed!

In fact.. I thought that was what we were doing…

Now, are social constructs real? No. Do they have power? Only as much as society gives them. It's like warhammer Chaos.

I find this concept of "the state owns everything" extremely irritating, since the state only came to "own everything" in the first place through violence and not through voluntary acts.

You'd still have to pay taxes to buy the boat, the fuel for the boat, etc.

I'm not an ancap btw

No you couldn't. You use plenty of services that require the existence of sidewalks, roads and the police.

Yes if we're talking about natural property, and not houses or apartments. Landlords are supposed to maintain that type of property, so they are adding value of some kind.

If only society was class conscious and not bootlickers thinking they have some moral obligation to obey the government.

Their choice, the people paying for those services should increase the price to cover the expenses, just like with any other service that is required.

The state doesn't own everything: The people own everything and empower the state to regulate usage.

The post I replied to implies that, as well as other posts in this thread.

As is your choice to not use their services, but

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No, your "investment" is just numbers on a computer screen. Workers built the factory. Workers built the machines in the factory. Workers mined the raw materials. Workers operate the machines to turn those raw materials into useful products.

I understand where you're coming from here, but ultimately you're saying that the fact that someone has used a small initial sum of money more wisely gives them the right to reap eternal and theoretically unbounded profits from the labor of people who have used their money less wisely. That doesn't sound like a particularly fair system, although that might just be because I don't believe in dog-eat-dog social Darwinism. Nobody is born with innate knowledge of how to invest money, so even that knowledge must have been gifted to you by someone. There isn't a single person in the world who can accurately be described as a self-made man.

As I say though, it's the system that's the problem. I'm investing my own money and hence exploiting the labor of others, so I'd be a hypocrite if I judged you for it. I just wish you'd understand that the entire system is fundamentally unethical and needs changing from the ground up.

Pic related is retarded, the left image is just idealist meritocracy/feudalism, the pick on the right is what a feudalist or idealist meritocrat thinks that Socialism is like. When its really everyone except for the elites of that society being reduced to poverty, but sustainable poverty. the reason those Soviet bloc nations were so long lived is because they weren't fucking decadent. I hate to be cliched but the West is fucking grotesque and decadent, Communist nations or Socialist nations tend to be much more rustic and modest. Which goes a long way towards durability and being able weather the "business cycle". So I agree that it involves some people being economically mutilated or dispossessed its also more about raising up those who are already powerful: the intellectuals, cultural and social elite and then those who want to seize power (sociopaths and ambitious parasites). So, this idea that its literally a conspiracy of the weak as in the lowest members of society to dispossess the middle and top members is really absurd. I know its a meme but this is why communication through signs and not memes is so important and why I think memes are a disgusting defilement of human discourse. There weren't just one or two things wrong with that image there's like 100 and some of them are really serious philosophical errors.

no, and I'll tell you why. Because ultimately a society which is concerned with anything beyond small communities is one which is going to naturally trend towards hierarchy and technological expansion, which will cause massive conflict. So in a small community, where people are already concerned with each other. There is literally no need to force people to pool resources. they will naturally do it to barter and get what they want, not in the sense of profiting, but just getting basic necessities. I do this all the time with friends, making sacrifices to get things I need (not want) from them. This is how almost all small communities i've interacted with IRL function. Almost everyone is eating, almost everyone has access to opportunities to reproduce, almost everyone has access to medicine and work and a roof over their heads. Its not something that we need to be instructed to do, our genetic code contains our entire race's memory we won't forget how to build or share.
this is what I also think stems from the philosophical errors in this picture. Its not as if the goal is to force the capable people to literally give up their essence to the worst and lowest people. Its just that people should know that leveraging their greatness over others to bilk resources out of the community and their social network is psychopathic and anti-social and the basis for elites, monarchs, aristocracies, priestarchy, master-slave dynamics. People should know not to do this, that doesn't mean their skills need to be redistributed to everyone. If you domesticate a cat and it spends most of its time with you and some of the time with the rest of the community, for all intents and purposes its "your" cat, as in its your relationship. There's no reason to force you to pass it around the community, just like you don't need to pass around you wife or your clothes. You have a continuous and obvious relationship with those things that the others don't, therefore there is no reason to redistribute that. This idea that the individual is obligated to prop up everyone else is absurd, you should share and be generally willing to help out, but you aren't their foundation and you aren't there to save them from themselves. Stupid people should be allowed to fail, if you want to pick up the pieces after the fact that's on you it should allowed and not discouraged but also not rewarded and encouraged. I hate how people become obsessed with charity and volunteering, its always motivated by some personality deficiency or guilt on the giving side. If someone falls and you want to catch them, fantastic, good for you that you are an agent and making unbound decisions. I don't fucking care and it shouldn't be a virtue or mandate or doctrine or law of the community. This is really all there is to it: you chose to share, no one has to share, if you don't share, sometimes, some bad things might happen, but more often than not you'll probably be ok if you are self-sufficient already. No one should shame those who share and no one should chastize those don't want to. The issue is always with people who monopolize whole means of acquiring resources, skill sets and major natural resources. That's where violence, justified violence starts becoming the perogative of the community. If you are some big bad Chad faggot who is trying to dominate the food supplies with your friends, somebody should come along and take your head off.

Odds are you are not part of Bourgeoisie. I literally do not care what the top 1% feel. They are not their capital, to assume they are really worth that much is akin to recognizing a monarch's "divine right to rule" instead of God, the divine force is capital or "the free market".

It seems unamerican to me. :^)

getting cucked is 100% american though