Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Grizzly on February 22, 2014, 11:31:02 am
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https://www.upworthy.com/if-you-think-only-poor-people-need-welfare-wait-till-you-see-what-really-rich-folks-do-with-it?c=ag
Most of you probably already know quite a bit of this stuff, but it's good to fill in the details.
(Also, I want to gauge everyone's opinion on this a bit).
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vivisect the rich!
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No offense to those that are in need and are getting help but....
I kinda took exception with some of her comments. For example when she said that people that take a deduction for mortgage insurance are getting assistance from the government. Geez no wonder this country is so screwed up when the educated liberals can't understand the difference between some one getting to keep some of the money they EARNED by working (because they paid a bank for a loan) and those that get money from the government that they did not work for (welfare, food stamps ect). It also irritates me when people receiving assistance think of it as a pay check or owed to them. It is the generosity of the working people in this country that make it possible.
Where does everyone think this money comes from? The government has no real money. Only the money they tax from working people or borrow that will some day need to be paid back with interest. I dare say there are many middle class people that do not receive any 'assistance' from the state or federal government. They are the ones paying the bill for the entitlement generation. This idea that the poor can some how demand that they have a standard of living owed to them is just crazy.
Remember this. Socialism works as long as you don't run out of the other guys money.
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Receiving tax breaks and such is exactly the same as receiving money from the state directly.
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Indeed. When you get a job, you know how much money you're going to be taking home. In many ways it's foolish to consider the tax as ever having been your money.
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Indeed. When you get a job, you know how much money you're going to be taking home. In many ways it's foolish to consider the tax as ever having been your money.
Well, there's that, but there's no avoiding that when you calculate all the taxes, pension fund things and social security costs and realize that you are actually netting less than half, you might start to wonder whether the state is indeed greedy.
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I dunno, asking "why am I paying all this money for pensions, health insurance and social security" is a very shortsighted thing to do.
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<sarcastic aside>Perhaps where you come from. Over here I think not asking "Why am I paying all this money for... health insurance" is a very shortsighted thing to do.</sarcastic aside>
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Well, let's see how it's going then:
Public education system: Dysfunctional due to teachers not having sufficient control over the classes. I don't know how Finland manages to get within top 5 in PISA tests, because that sure as hell does not correspond any way to normal life. The best thing here is probably practically free University and High School, but what good does that do to you if there aren't jobs to University level engineers, when too many of them are taken in to begin?
Health care: Currently a bad joke compared to 90s. 9 month waiting times are not uncommon for NMR in the public side (recently tried this myself). I don't know whether it has been intentionally dismantled, but currently we actually don't get what we pay for. The only thing that does work is intensive care. To be able to see a doctor in weekends, you usually have to travel to a city, often requiring trips exceeding 100 km, one-way.
Pension: Actually, most of the people under 35 believe we will never see a trace of the money we put into the system. It was rigged before us by the baby boomer generation, who never collected enough taxes to fund their pensions. We pay their pensions now. And the debt they accumulated over the years. And the regulation they put up back then, making our housing something like three times more expensive than theirs was.
With this sort of background, you really start to think about where the hell is the money I'm paying as taxes going to. Because I seriously cannot see it there where it should be.
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In many ways it's foolish to consider the tax as ever having been your money.
:wtf:
Taxation is theft. It's legalized theft, and it has a long historical precedent, but it's still theft. It is the deprivation of personal property under threat of force.
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Taxation is theft. It's legalized theft, and it has a long historical precedent, but it's still theft. It is the deprivation of personal property under threat of force.
So what would you make of the laws against public nudity then? Surely they are also a form of oppression?
Taxes are part of the social contract. There's not much you can do about them in any modern society. The standard of living you would have if you tried to provide yourself with those services would undoubtedly by higher (with the possible exception of the super-rich - Not the 1% but the 0.00001%) and more importantly would lack any kind of legal justification to it. Forget education, health, and pensions, without taxes how the hell could you possibly deal with crime without devolving to a set of independent kangaroo courts?
While I have no problem with people arguing about how the money should be used, I still feel it's rather foolish to pretend the money was yours in the first place. If instead you always assume your salary is what you have after taxes, and treat any rebate as free money, you'd probably be much happier.
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All right, lets make one thing clear. Taxation is theft. The state takes your money under the threat of force. And it absolutely is your money the state is taking, without taxes or with lower taxes you would have more money for your personal use. And if you want to argue that it is not your money but your employers money, then it changes nothing on it being theft, only the victim changes.
Social contract is not a contract at all, I didnt sign nothing. It is a figure of speech.
Now dont get me wrong, taxation has some differences from most forms of theft, namely it is distributed roughly equally and not arbitrary in order to not piss of anyone too much, and most importantly, it is considered JUSTIFIABLE theft (really similar to a starving person stealing a bread or something like that, a lesser of two evils), thats the crucial difference. So I am certainly not some anarchist trying to get rid of all taxes, however I also dont lie to myself about forcibly taking someones money magically not being theft.
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Taxation is theft, much like my use of this sidewalk is trespassing, my access to town water is piracy, and my morning subway commute is grand theft auto. You can voluntarily forgo taxation any time you please! Just forgo your membership in a state with public goods of any type. Go live in the wilderness. At last you will be free from the tyranny of the state.
Taxation is a solution to the free rider problem, and a really good one. The tragedy of the commons makes taxation a game theoretic necessity, and information problems compromise 'voluntary tax' setups like the Lindahl model since agents cannot accurately assess the marginal benefit of public goods.
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Taxation is theft, much like my use of this sidewalk is trespassing, my access to town water is piracy, and my morning subway commute is grand theft auto. You can voluntarily forgo taxation any time you please! Just forgo your membership in a state with public goods of any type. Go live in the wilderness. At last you will be free from the tyranny of the state.
You're not trespassing on the sidewalk because trespassing is infringement on private property, and the sidewalk is public. You're not pirating the water because you pay a utility fee for that, on top of any taxes. And riding the subway is not grand theft auto because a) you're not driving the subway, b) you're not preventing other people from riding the subway, and c) a subway is not an automobile.
Also, you are laying the groundwork for a bait and switch here. This thread is about welfare, corporate indulgences, and other redistributative schemes -- not public utilities. Just about everyone who categorizes taxes as a necessary evil accepts them for the purposes of roads, utilities, and transportation. There is a huge difference -- a huge difference -- between that and taking someone's property and giving it to another arbitrarily. That's wrong whether the recipient is a poor person or a well-connected financier.
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Personally I also agree that in any society we need taxes to pay for public services such as police, fire, ect
However entitlements such as food stamps and welfare do not fall into public services. People making the money are paying for people not working and getting money. Having your money taken and spent on roads means you are getting something out of it and as someone said it is actually cheaper for all of us because you are putting your money with everyone else to afford the infrastructure of society. How can anyone say that the people paying is the same as the people getting a handout? Yes all working people pay taxes but these tax dollars should be spent wisely. About a third of the federal revenue is spent on entitlements.
Quoting a Senator... there is too many people IN the wagon and not enough people pulling it. When you get assistance you put a burden on the people paying the bill. What ever happened to self reliance and pride? My father's generation would have starved to death before taking welfare. How far we have come when people now expect society to hand them a living.
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If you're worried about not getting something out of your tax money, maybe it would help if you thought about it like this: you pay for food stamps so that you don't get mugged on your way back from the grocery store by a starving person. Cops are expensive and they aren't going to stop a person who has nothing to lose from committing a crime. Food is cheap. Like, it grows on trees.
Entitlement programs aren't theft, they're kickass preemptive strikes against theft! :yes:
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However entitlements such as food stamps and welfare do not fall into public services. People making the money are paying for people not working and getting money. Having your money taken and spent on roads means you are getting something out of it and as someone said it is actually cheaper for all of us because you are putting your money with everyone else to afford the infrastructure of society. How can anyone say that the people paying is the same as the people getting a handout? Yes all working people pay taxes but these tax dollars should be spent wisely. About a third of the federal revenue is spent on entitlements.
This sentiment is at the heart of the matter. It's the fundamental question "What should society do to help people".
I would point out to you, however, that the people who are just slacking off on welfare are certainly in the minority. Most of those receiving assistance from the government are people who, despite being able and willing to work, just aren't capable of making ends meet. If someone has to work two or three jobs and still has to decide whether food or living space is what's going to be paid for this month, if someone has to decide whether or not to get treatment for something because doing so might bankrupt him, that's when you know your system isn't working right.
You are calling social security help "entitlements". Let me ask you, do you have any personal experience with the circumstances that would lead someone to apply for social security help? Have you ever had to do the math on what you're earning, and find out that no, this month you won't be able to get good food every day?
Quoting a Senator... there is too many people IN the wagon and not enough people pulling it. When you get assistance you put a burden on the people paying the bill. What ever happened to self reliance and pride? My father's generation would have starved to death before taking welfare. How far we have come when people now expect society to hand them a living.
You wanna know what happened to self-reliance and pride? The 70s. There is a sharp divide between the generation of my grandparents (Who were reasonably secure that a job they would take would last them a lifetime), to the generation of my parents (Who were raised to expect that they too could find a job they would be able to do their whole life, but who found out that those were no longer offered), to my generation (Who kind of accepted that changing jobs every couple of years is just the way things work now). The basic security your grandparents had and your parents expected, that of having a job that would take care of you for 3 or 4 decades, just does not exist anymore. As a result, the state has to step in to provide relief to those caught in the gears of this brave new world.
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If you're worried about not getting something out of your tax money, maybe it would help if you thought about it like this: you pay for food stamps so that you don't get mugged on your way back from the grocery store by a starving person. Cops are expensive and they aren't going to stop a person who has nothing to lose from committing a crime. Food is cheap. Like, it grows on trees.
Entitlement programs aren't theft, they're kickass preemptive strikes against theft! :yes:
Ditto. Keeping poor people alive by providing basic necessities keeps the whole community safer. Pretty much every revolution in history got started because poor people were starving.
Taxation is necessary, and I'm okay with it. However, I'd prefer if all the tax money was spent efficiently, since it can be tossed around ineffectively for political show or sometimes corrupted away. I guess, for those reasons, it makes sense to argue that governments should collect less taxes: keep the necessities running, but don't give enough so that there's lots at stake when mismanagement happens.
Oh well, I'm from Canada. We're super "socialist" and we're proud of it :P
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Let me ask you, do you have any personal experience with the circumstances that would lead someone to apply for social security help? Have you ever had to do the math on what you're earning, and find out that no, this month you won't be able to get good food every day?
This question doesn't even need an answer.
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Taxation is theft. It's legalized theft, and it has a long historical precedent, but it's still theft. It is the deprivation of personal property under threat of force.
All right, lets make one thing clear. Taxation is theft. The state takes your money under the threat of force. And it absolutely is your money the state is taking, without taxes or with lower taxes you would have more money for your personal use. And if you want to argue that it is not your money but your employers money, then it changes nothing on it being theft, only the victim changes.
Social contract is not a contract at all, I didnt sign nothing. It is a figure of speech.
Now dont get me wrong, taxation has some differences from most forms of theft, namely it is distributed roughly equally and not arbitrary in order to not piss of anyone too much, and most importantly, it is considered JUSTIFIABLE theft (really similar to a starving person stealing a bread or something like that, a lesser of two evils), thats the crucial difference. So I am certainly not some anarchist trying to get rid of all taxes, however I also dont lie to myself about forcibly taking someones money magically not being theft.
Okay, I had to look up the definition of theft to see what would make you think taxation is theft.
theft: the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. The word is also used as an informal shorthand term for some crimes against property, such as burglary, embezzlement, larceny, looting, robbery, shoplifting, library theft and fraud.
Merriam-Webster's definition of theft includes that it must be against the law; Wikipedia's definition is a bit broader but it does include the term rightful owner, which, again, is defined by law.
What I find interesting is your opinion that taxation is theft despite it being legal. You are not the rightful owner of the taxes you pay. It's that simple.
If you consider taxation to be theft despite it being sanctioned by the legislation...
...then logically you should consider killing people in war to be murder, regardless of the fact that it is sanctioned by the government waging the war, and in many cases sanctioned by the international legislation as well.
If you don't, there seems to be a clear double standard here somewhere. And before you say that these are completely different matters - how? If theft is taking a person's property, murder is taking a person's life. If lawfully justified "theft" is still theft, then lawful killing must also be murder.
On the other hand, if you do consider killing in war to be murder, it begs the question why so many people are so annoyed by "their money" being "stolen" and used for social security, but feel perfectly comfortable about the stolen money being used to facilitate murder and support professional murderers.
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So I am certainly not some anarchist trying to get rid of all taxes, however I also dont lie to myself about forcibly taking someones money magically not being theft.
Actual anarchists don't want to get rid of taxes, they want to get rid of property. Anarcho-capitalists are a bizarre attempt at appropriating the label by people who are naive enough to conflate unregulated capitalism with 'freedom'.
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"When the poor rob the rich, it is called Robbery. When the rich rob the poor, it is called Business."
Come to think of it, in the US and many others, don't you find it odd that megacorps can get loan from the reserve banks at almost negligible interest rate, while graduates are forced to pay their college fees with higher interests?
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Taxation is theft, much like my use of this sidewalk is trespassing, my access to town water is piracy, and my morning subway commute is grand theft auto. You can voluntarily forgo taxation any time you please! Just forgo your membership in a state with public goods of any type. Go live in the wilderness. At last you will be free from the tyranny of the state.
You're not trespassing on the sidewalk because trespassing is infringement on private property, and the sidewalk is public. You're not pirating the water because you pay a utility fee for that, on top of any taxes. And riding the subway is not grand theft auto because a) you're not driving the subway, b) you're not preventing other people from riding the subway, and c) a subway is not an automobile.
Rather the point exactly, isn't it?
Also, you are laying the groundwork for a bait and switch here. This thread is about welfare, corporate indulgences, and other redistributative schemes -- not public utilities. Just about everyone who categorizes taxes as a necessary evil accepts them for the purposes of roads, utilities, and transportation. There is a huge difference -- a huge difference -- between that and taking someone's property and giving it to another arbitrarily. That's wrong whether the recipient is a poor person or a well-connected financier.
Replying directly to the topic of discussion is never a bait and switch. Welfare is a social utility. It's an economic sidewalk, a civil water system. Taxing people and redistributing the money is far from a huge difference - a HUGE difference - it's functionally and morally very nearly identical. The state collects the tax and uses it to maintain public goods that are collectively necessary but not supported by individual incentive.
e: Fractional reserve banking is by any definition much closer to theft than taxation; most people who go to a bank don't willingly consent to it or even know it's happening. Yet it's a vital engine of economic growth that on net benefits everyone. Reductive attempts to treat taxation or lending or even debt as simple household matters obfuscate what these systems really achieve.
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Taxation is theft, much like my use of this sidewalk is trespassing, my access to town water is piracy, and my morning subway commute is grand theft auto. You can voluntarily forgo taxation any time you please! Just forgo your membership in a state with public goods of any type. Go live in the wilderness. At last you will be free from the tyranny of the state.
Many public services that are paid for voluntary and you can opt out of them if you want, such as public water, public mass transportation or lets say, highway stamps. These are of course not theft and I dont think they are considered taxation at all. So thats a different matter altogether. Taxation cannot be opted out and that is equivalent to theft, altough arguably justified one.
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Taxation is used to pay for public services. You cannot say that public services are not theft but taxation is. You can try to advocate Lindahl taxation but the tragedy of the commons and preference revelation make it completely impractical.
Of course you can opt out of taxation! I just told you how. Simply reject the social contract and leave the state, including all its infrastructure and public goods. Move to a cave and make no use of any system which relies on public goods. You are free of the state and all it has built; you will not have to pay taxes.
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You miss understood me if you think I do not want to help those in real need. For the able bodied I would think something along the lines of work-fare would be better than just a handout (my dad joined the CCC's that planted many of the trees we see today in that area of the country). I am sure we could come up with something for these people to do that would be better than sitting at home seeing we are already spending the money and foster some pride in their lives. As for the sick or anyone else that is not able bodied then we have an obligation to help them.
As for what is considered basic standard of living that seems to be blurred these days. Is alcohol, cigarettes, cable TV or cellphones basic?
My whole point is that this help is just that.... HELP. It should never be just expected like it is owed to them. It is the generosity of their fellow men (even if it comes through taxation). This world has become cold on all levels. There is a lack of compassion as much as there is a lack of gratitude. It is a serious problem when people start looking at the government as their caretaker. The powers at the top can use this to leverage their votes and slowly erode their sovereignty.
Unfortunate human nature being as it is will sometimes become lazy when they know they can get a basic level of living by not working.
We don't need better social entitlement programs we need more jobs. This is what people should be shouting for. As for my father's generation and not wanting handouts. It was way before the 70's and spanned across the great depression. They still did not look for handouts. People look back and think it was always easy to get a job. That was a very short couple decades. Let us not forget the oil embargo and food shortages of the 70's. The deep recession of the Carter years in the 80's. The blood bath in the streets in the 40's for worker rights. For the most part it has always been a struggle.
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Taxation is used to pay for public services. You cannot say that public services are not theft but taxation is. You can try to advocate Lindahl taxation but the tragedy of the commons and preference revelation make it completely impractical.
Of course you can opt out of taxation! I just told you how. Simply reject the social contract and leave the state, including all its infrastructure and public goods. Move to a cave and make no use of any system which relies on public goods. You are free of the state and all it has built; you will not have to pay taxes.
Public services are not always payed by taxation, often they are paid for by ordinary payment that can be opted out of, then it is not a tax. I dont pay taxes to have public water or electricity. I pay bills, and that is very different.
If I move to a cave then I wont be paying for these public services, but I still will be paying some taxes. For example, no matter when I move or whatever I do, I will most likely be forced to pay income tax or maybe some land taxes and who knows what else. That is no different that theft, except that it maybe can be justified as a lesser of two evils (i.e. stealing a bread to feed a starving person). You cannot reject the social contract because it is no contract.
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The problem of having welfare being given as "help" instead of regarding it as a social "safety net" that everyone is entitled to if we get unlucky at some point of our lives, is that exactly contrary to what you say, it is degrading to one's "ego", or pride. Most people who are unemployed are just not to be blamed for the state of the economy, they are the unlucky ones who got the bad side of the wheels of this nonlinear strange economies we have. If these people have to endure not only their dire situation, also have to beg and say "Thank you" every time they get a food stamp... do you really think this would be a better society? I loathe all the Rand Pauls and so on who actually believe in this ****ty nonsense.
I actually think a society where people who are unfortunate enough to be unemployed feel they deserve these "handouts" as you call them is a better society than what it substituted, with ego-smashed beggars all around. And no, I am sorry, I don't think other people get to say that these people should stop smoking or watching tv.
There's also this naive stupid idea (I'm not saying you have this idea, but there's lots of it going around) that states that if only unemployed would be with a better "morals" and "character", that the problem is one of personality, if only they were these self-made-wo/men that battled for a better life and perhaps start with scraps but fight hard and hard and eventually they will get jobs and so on and then the economy would be without unemployment. This is outright ridiculous. Yes, in individual terms it is true that if you try harder than anyone in your situation, you'll be personally probably better than your "competition", but this is a zero-sum-game. For all the "self-made-men" that get out of unemployment, there's another one who didn't get the job (because it was given to the former one), and unemployment figures will be left exactly in the same spot.
With a difference of course. Now these "self-made-wo/men" will be like rats willing to do anything their bosses tell them to and in any conditions they find themselves in. Isn't it a great thing that this amazing new morality of "job creation" gives rise to an incredible force for slaverization of workers who are just too happy to be exploited for any scrap of bread they are given?
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Many public services that are paid for voluntary and you can opt out of them if you want, such as public water, public mass transportation or lets say, highway stamps.
Good luck opting out of the justice system. :p
I notice that everyone claiming taxation is theft decided to ignore that one. You all benefit from having it but yet you don't want to pay for it. Who really is the thief?
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You can reject the social contract - you simply need to give up all the benefits it provides you. Believe me, if you're living in a cave in the deep wilderness nobody's going to be tracking you down for income tax evasion. You just have to accept that you're also giving up access to EVERY form of public good your taxes pay for - and yes, of course that includes utilities like public transit and water! In the US, the electrical grid is maintained horizontally by private corporations financed by private investors - but these organizations operate in an environment rendered permissive by the government. They use public infrastructure, arbitrate disputes under government law, receive finance from a stable and insured banking system, and obtain labor from a work pool kept healthy and educated by government action. Criminals who attempt to exploit these systems (e: Kara pointed this out well) are deal with coercively by the state monopoly on force. Your taxes pay for this.
Without the state, public goods vanish. Without public goods, private actors become ineffective. This is why game theory demands a state: the only way to align individual incentives with global needs is via an arbitrator.
You accept the social contract when you make use of public goods, because those public goods would not exist without state action. And those goods underpin pretty much every system you rely on.
The really interesting question, to my mind, is how to determine which uses of taxes are effective. Taxation is inevitable and necessary. Figuring out where taxes should be spent, and to what effect, is an open and useful question to explore.
e: and Luis is correct, having a social safety net is a public good. Imagine it as a friction shield that prevents the economy from losing valuable labor to the constant attrition of misfortune and happenstance. Most Americans on needy-family welfare stay on it less than two years before either dropping out or moving back into the workforce.
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I would point out to you, however, that the people who are just slacking off on welfare are certainly in the minority. Most of those receiving assistance from the government are people who, despite being able and willing to work, just aren't capable of making ends meet. If someone has to work two or three jobs and still has to decide whether food or living space is what's going to be paid for this month, if someone has to decide whether or not to get treatment for something because doing so might bankrupt him, that's when you know your system isn't working right.
That's the common story, but it isn't true. Yes, there are people who are simply unable to make ends meet, but they are vastly outnumbered by the people exploiting the system. They purchase iPhones and expensive TVs and then the complain that they don't have enough money left over for food and utilities. Other people discover that they can make more money churning out babies and getting welfare checks than working at a job, so they choose the rational economic action and stop working.
If you subsidize laziness, you get more of it.
You are calling social security help "entitlements". Let me ask you, do you have any personal experience with the circumstances that would lead someone to apply for social security help? Have you ever had to do the math on what you're earning, and find out that no, this month you won't be able to get good food every day?
My parents ran a sole proprietorship business for years, and they have plenty of experience seeing what the welfare system produced. As an example, the US has a requirement that people receiving unemployment benefits must demonstrate that they are actively searching for a job to continue receiving them. So that led to people coming into the office and asking if there were any job openings. If there were, they would simply leave. If there were not, the people would ask our office to sign a form stating that the person applied for a job but there was no job available.
As another example, there were three separate instances of female employees applying for a job, getting it, going out on maternity leave eight months after getting the job, and then quitting once maternity leave was exhausted. And this was in an office with a staff of only five people, so one person on leave was a significant burden.
Merriam-Webster's definition of theft includes that it must be against the law; Wikipedia's definition is a bit broader but it does include the term rightful owner, which, again, is defined by law.
Legality != morality. The legal system is not the objective arbiter of what is and isn't moral. As I said, theft is "depriving the rightful owner of personal property", which fits your definition. Taxation simply happens to be a legal form of it.
What I find interesting is your opinion that taxation is theft despite it being legal. You are not the rightful owner of the taxes you pay. It's that simple.
This is a very dangerous position to hold. Who, then, is the rightful owner of that portion of your money? The state? If you take that to its logical conclusion, then is a person only entitled to as much property as the state deems, in its sole discretion, to be appropriate?
If you consider taxation to be theft despite it being sanctioned by the legislation...
...then logically you should consider killing people in war to be murder, regardless of the fact that it is sanctioned by the government waging the war, and in many cases sanctioned by the international legislation as well.
War is a special case because soldiers essentially put their life up as collateral when they fight. Killing civilians in war could be described as murder.
A more appropriate extrapolation is abortion. Abortion is morally equivalent to murder, as it is the taking of an innocent life without justification. The fact that it happens to be legal doesn't change this.
Taxation is theft, much like my use of this sidewalk is trespassing, my access to town water is piracy, and my morning subway commute is grand theft auto. You can voluntarily forgo taxation any time you please! Just forgo your membership in a state with public goods of any type. Go live in the wilderness. At last you will be free from the tyranny of the state.
You're not trespassing on the sidewalk because trespassing is infringement on private property, and the sidewalk is public. You're not pirating the water because you pay a utility fee for that, on top of any taxes. And riding the subway is not grand theft auto because a) you're not driving the subway, b) you're not preventing other people from riding the subway, and c) a subway is not an automobile.
Rather the point exactly, isn't it?
Of course not. Taxation fits the definition of theft that I provided. The three examples you provided do not fit the definition of the crimes you describe. Your argument is not coherent.
Also, you are laying the groundwork for a bait and switch here. This thread is about welfare, corporate indulgences, and other redistributative schemes -- not public utilities. Just about everyone who categorizes taxes as a necessary evil accepts them for the purposes of roads, utilities, and transportation. There is a huge difference -- a huge difference -- between that and taking someone's property and giving it to another arbitrarily. That's wrong whether the recipient is a poor person or a well-connected financier.
Replying directly to the topic of discussion is never a bait and switch. Welfare is a social utility. It's an economic sidewalk, a civil water system. Taxing people and redistributing the money is far from a huge difference - a HUGE difference - it's functionally and morally very nearly identical. The state collects the tax and uses it to maintain public goods that are collectively necessary but not supported by individual incentive.
Now that I've pinned you down, you're trying to escape by confusing the issue. What you are doing is a bait and switch, because you responded to an argument about the negative effects of welfare with a statement about the positive effects of public utilities. You are trying to make them equivalent when they are not.
Welfare is not a social utility. It is not the provision of public services for money, it is the deprivation of resources and property from an unfavored political class, and the granting of the same to a favored political class. It is unjust deprivation of one party and unjust enrichment of another party.
e: Fractional reserve banking is by any definition much closer to theft than taxation; most people who go to a bank don't willingly consent to it or even know it's happening. Yet it's a vital engine of economic growth that on net benefits everyone. Reductive attempts to treat taxation or lending or even debt as simple household matters obfuscate what these systems really achieve.
A discussion on fractional reserve banking would warrant a separate thread.
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Already replied to, see above. Remember, I'm discussing taxation as a whole.
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I notice that everyone claiming taxation is theft decided to ignore that one. You all benefit from having it but yet you don't want to pay for it. Who really is the thief?
I stated that taxes are a necessary evil. I would consider roads, utilities, infrastructure, and the justice system to fall under that necessity. But the fact that it is a necessary evil doesn't change the fact that it is an evil, and therefore it should be minimized as much as possible. It is not minimized if it includes things like redistributative schemes.
This is similar to what George Washington said about government:
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
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Taxes are not inherently deontologically evil. They should be used to exactly the extent that they're effective at achieving aims. If a 100% tax rate got the job done better than a 10%, and if 'got the job done' could be cleanly and consensually defined, there'd be no reason not to go for it. These conditions are just generally impractical.
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Welfare is an incendiary topic and I don't have a rigorous grasp of the statistics in play, but it's also worth noting that the myth of welfare exploitation is AFAIK largely not supported by empirical evidence. Families on social support spend less, particularly on entertainment and luxuries, and average time on welfare stats just don't suggest a pervasive lifestyle of gaming the system.
There have been several waves of welfare reform over the past decades, with interesting effects on the population taking welfare and the poverty rate. I'm hesitant to make a lay analysis without really getting into the science.
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That's the common story, but it isn't true. Yes, there are people who are simply unable to make ends meet, but they are vastly outnumbered by the people exploiting the system. They purchase iPhones and expensive TVs and then the complain that they don't have enough money left over for food and utilities. Other people discover that they can make more money churning out babies and getting welfare checks than working at a job, so they choose the rational economic action and stop working.
If you subsidize laziness, you get more of it.
Pure unadulterated bull****. "Citation needed" doesn't even make it justice. FUD type kind of excuse to keep blaming the welfare "takers" for the state of the economy and pretend this ideology isn't farcically cruel. These ideas are not only ignorant, they are outright harmful. It's as if people actually believe there are no such things as "poor people", they are just a cover for actual "lazy people with iphones".
Again, I had predicted this comment. I said above that the conservative mindset about the unemployed who are receiving welfare benefits are "lazy", or having other character flaws. "If only they were better organized, if only they were more disciplined, this culture is to blame, all these lazy takers".
Until conservatives stop spewing this bull**** we will get nowhere.
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You can reject the social contract - you simply need to give up all the benefits it provides you. Believe me, if you're living in a cave in the deep wilderness nobody's going to be tracking you down for income tax evasion.
Whats this thing with a cave in wilderness. You dont need to live in wilderness to not use any or very little government services. You certainly dont need to stop interacting with other people! My point is that if the system was set up on "you pay for what you use" basis, it wouldnt be theft. But it is absolutely not and so it is clearly theft.
And by the way, tax evasion would still be illegal if you live in wilderness and I really dont think anyone could live there for long and remain unnoticed. So you have yet to show how the fantasy about a social " contract" is anything other than a figure of speech.
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You can reject the social contract - you simply need to give up all the benefits it provides you. Believe me, if you're living in a cave in the deep wilderness nobody's going to be tracking you down for income tax evasion.
Whats this thing with a cave in wilderness. You dont need to live in wilderness to not use any or very little government services. You certainly dont need to stop interacting with other people! My point is that if the system was set up on "you pay for what you use" basis, it wouldnt be theft. But it is absolutely not and so it is clearly theft.
And by the way, tax evasion would still be illegal if you live in wilderness and I really dont think anyone could live there for long and remain unnoticed. So you have yet to show how the fantasy about a social " contract" is anything other than a figure of speech.
Yes, you do! You must stop extracting benefit from all public goods, and the only way to do this is to get out of ALL systems that benefit from the state, including, yes, interactions with other people, which are governed by state law!
I've pointed out multiple times why 'pay for what you use' is completely impractical. Preference revelation sinks it totally. Lindahl taxation does not function with real actors and information - people cannot accurately assess the utility they extract from public goods and the tragedy of the commons burns everything.
Of course you can live in the woods and remain unnoticed. Bear researchers do it! It's just going to be extraordinarily difficult and unpleasant, and you'll die young. This is the price of rejecting all systems built on public goods.
e: You should be pushing tax choice, not Lindahl taxation.
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how can you "pay" for military protection for instance. or environmental protection? or justice? or police? or firefighting?
All these services cannot function properly if they have to worry about who their "clients" really are. Are we letting this house burn but not its neighbor? Are we going to let that person die from an attack because he wrote a post saying he "wanted out of the system"?
You are just not thinking this thing up. The only way you can stop benefitting for these services is actually to live in the wilderness. Go watch how Somalia is doing without a government. I heard it's the perfect libertarian paradise!
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Yes, you do! You must stop extracting benefit from all public goods, and the only way to do this is to get out of ALL systems that benefit from the state, including, yes, interactions with other people, which are governed by state law!
I've pointed out multiple times why 'pay for what you use' is completely impractical. Preference revelation sinks it totally. Lindahl taxation does not function with real actors and information - people cannot accurately assess the utility they extract from public goods and the tragedy of the commons burns everything.
Of course you can live in the woods and remain unnoticed. Bear researchers do it! It's just going to be extraordinarily difficult and unpleasant, and you'll die young. This is the price of rejecting all systems built on public goods.
e: You should be pushing tax choice, not Lindahl taxation.
Ahh, now I see why you are confused.
Using public services just like any other service including private ones only counts if it is done willingly and directly.
example number 1: someone gives me a gift which I benefit from in some way. Then he decides to steal my money for what the gift was worth. This is theft, too.
example number 2: in my block of flats we have individual heat meters on every flat. For a big part of winter I dont need to use any heat because I can manage with heat radiating from my neighbours. Should they have a right to take my money for this heat? No, and it would be theft to do so.
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And yet, in your second example, your neighbours would be justified in calling you an entitled heat moocher, living off of their hard-earned money.
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Yep. By not heating your own room you are making more heat leak through from theirs to yours, and thereby increasing their heating bills.
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****ing taker.
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Ahh, now I see why you are confused.
Using public services just like any other service including private ones only counts if it is done willingly and directly.
Sure, I guess, which completely proves my point. When you consume a public good you either pay for it somehow or you're a free rider. Free riders are the collective death of organized social systems. You must accept responsibility when you choose to take society's resources and convert them into individual utility.
So you are willingly and directly using public goods, and taxes are your recognition of this.
The solution to your problem isn't to pay no taxes, it's to realize that you're willingly and directly tapping public goods, constantly, all the time. Your whole life and everything you have is predicated on it. If you realize that you are unwillingly and indirectly using public services, well, you're unwilling! Stop! Move to a bear cave!
(lol i sound like an elder)
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All right, maybe that was a bad example, I was thinking of something that gives me indirect benefit without incurring additional costs on the payer. Thermodynamics dont work out that way in my example, lol.
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But there are no such things, on the scale of an entire society! No man is an island, entire in itself -- you can't just trivialise the complexities of infrastructure and management of a vast and complex system by reductively grinding it down to interactions between individuals.
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Sure, I guess, which completely proves my point. When you consume a public good you either pay for it somehow or you're a free rider. Free riders are the collective death of organized social systems. You must accept responsibility when you choose to take society's resources and convert them into individual utility.
So you are willingly and directly using public goods, and taxes are your recognition of this.
The solution to your problem isn't to pay no taxes, it's to realize that you're willingly and directly tapping public goods, constantly, all the time. Your whole life and everything you have is predicated on it. If you realize that you are unwillingly and indirectly using public services, well, you're unwilling! Stop! Move to a bear cave!
(lol i sound like an elder)
All right, I dont think you know what "willingly" means here. It means that I want to do it, not that I can or cannot opt out. I have another example:
People in a block of flats decide to contribute towards a pool to insulate the building. All agree with the plan except one who is satisfied with what he pays for heating (he uses little heat) and doesnt want to put a hefty sum to the pool. The building must be insulated whole, they cannot keep one part uninsulated, so they pay for the whole building, including the wall of that guy. Is it theft to take his money then? Absolutely.
I repeat, just because you benefit doesnt make it any less of a theft. Not if it is indirect or unwilling benefit (more like a gift?).
EDIT: If I steal $500 from someone and then I offer them $500 worth of my services for free it is still robbery.
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Yeah, could you stop making up bull**** examples?
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The main thing you're demonstrating here is that analogies involving a handful of people are not a very good lens through which to view the government of tens of millions.
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I think that situation is a really good example of your specific point, and an even better example of what you're not understanding about taxation, and why your whole point is fundamentally untenable.
When taxes are used effectively, taxation isn't 'we need to insulate the building'. Taxation is 'there is a bug problem' or 'the heating has broken' or 'we would like to turn our open refugee camp into an apartment building'. Everyone agrees that something must be done. YOU agree that something must be done - because otherwise you'd be just as happy in a bear cave.
But each individual agent now steps into a collective action problem. If they defect, they can get away with paying nothing and still obtain the benefit. But if everyone defects, the benefit will never occur, and everybody suffers.
The only solution is to align individual incentives with the global, either by punishing those who do not cooperate or by making cooperation mandatory. This is taxation. Your notional apartment building gets together and says 'We are at an unacceptable risk of fire. We must install fire safety.' You say 'I do not think the risk of fire is high enough to justify this expense'. (Like all actors you have an individually very myopic view of the situation.) But the building has voted, and now it will either allow you to free ride or coerce you into paying as well. Free riders destroy systems in the long run: this is a game theoretic inevitability. For the building to survive in the long run, it must coerce you. And you extract enormous benefit from the building's survival, even if you don't think it's at risk of fire.
Once you understand this, you can stop advocating for Lindahl taxation and start advocating for tax choice. In this model, taxes as a whole are mandatory, but you can hypothecate your individual contribution towards specific efforts. I don't know if this is actually a better system, but it's much closer to what you want to argue for in the real world.
Let's circle this back around to one last repudiation of your metaphor:
Your notional apartment dweller lives in an apartment building. He must pay the rent. The rent is not theft. But if he is born in the apartment, raised within it, and comes to take the apartment's existence - as well as the police who guard it, the firemen who protect it, the laws and landlords that arbitrate its disputes - for granted, he comes to believe that he himself does not need these services. 'My rent is theft', he says. 'Reduce my rent. Some of it is going towards services I don't benefit from. This is theft.'
But he does benefit from this service - his preference revelation is myopic. He is playing a game with enforced rules and he benefits from those rules. What he is really saying is: 'Let me be a defector. I will allow the cooperators to continue to cooperate; I do not need to.' But he does not understand that if everyone defects, using the same logic he does, he will suffer enormously.
Taxation is a rule used to solve collective action problems.
EDIT: If I steal $500 from someone and then I offer them $500 worth of my services for free it is still robbery.
If every day year I pay $10 to prevent a disaster that would cost me $10,000, this is not theft. It is insurance.
If I am born with $10,000 dollars and every year I repay $10 to the foundation that gifted it to me, this is not theft.
You should be focusing on the issue of tax choice and on how to determine where taxes can most effectively be spent. Taxation is not theft. But taxes can be grossly misused, and you have every right to attack that problem.
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It's funny how the social contract thing works both ways. See, you can also make the argument that if society demands its individuals to play by its rules with threat of force if necessary (because living in a cave isn't much of an option really), then the least it should do in return is to provide for them.
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Condo Civilization
(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wGd2NtdnflY/UQ5C3j9bXOI/AAAAAAAAI9U/ErAkjFd5KBY/s1600/citizen-kane-clapping.jpg)
I was going to use Public Education as an example but bravo.
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Education is a great example of a public good. It benefits everyone hugely - basically a unilateral good, I'd be tempted to say - and it enables a lot of productivity. So the payoff for being educated and having educated labor is enormous. But the payoff for conducting education is very low for the educator, who extracts little material benefit. Left to individual choice, people will defect and the educational system will collapse, with enormous consequences for society as a whole.
So there has to be some kind of top-down incentive or tax to allow education to continue. Mere individual choice cannot find this global optimum. It takes a global search function.
A tax to pay for education is a great example of a tax people might protest (I don't care about underprivileged kids in Detroit! I want to fund local education) which actually globally benefits them by enforcing the rules and social infrastructure of society. They just have trouble detecting the causal pathway by which the benefit reaches them (say, ideally, crime falls in Detroit and more jobs spring up, freeing up resources and generating wealth, helping the national economy).
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I was gonna say that this thinking process is akin to those who think nowadays that "vaccines are just bad **** that shouldn't be enforced". We are so used to being without the diseases that the vaccines eradicated that we live now in a situation where idiots like this actually think they are being reasonable when they say we shouldn't get vaccinated, etc. Of course, all the "defector" problems that General Battuta delineates start to happen and now we get children having diseases that we thought as being eradicated.
It's the thinking process of a spoiled entitled pseudo-libertarian brat.
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Legality != morality. The legal system is not the objective arbiter of what is and isn't moral. As I said, theft is "depriving the rightful owner of personal property", which fits your definition. Taxation simply happens to be a legal form of it.
That's not exactly right. Legislation is (and must be) based on the morals of the society (although there are examples of famously ineffective laws which went against social morality, which resulted in them having very little legitimacy).
I am, of course, talking about democratic systems of governance where people actually have a say in the content of legislation, rather than dictatorships (either theocratic or secular) where laws are imposed on people as the Great Leaders see fit.
If a law is immoral (ie. opposing to the moral code of the general public), I would actually argue that in a properly functioning democratic system it will end up being contested and changed.
If that doesn't happen, I see it as an indication that the democratic system is not functioning properly...
What I find interesting is your opinion that taxation is theft despite it being legal. You are not the rightful owner of the taxes you pay. It's that simple.
This is a very dangerous position to hold. Who, then, is the rightful owner of that portion of your money? The state? If you take that to its logical conclusion, then is a person only entitled to as much property as the state deems, in its sole discretion, to be appropriate?
I'm so tempted to quote the bible on this occasion that it isn't even funny. You know, the part where they discuss whose face is stamped on coins and who they belong to.
But that would be no argument for or against anything, just a literary anecdote.
Instead I'll point out that you're trying to construct a straw man here. Taxes don't limit overall ownership, and no one can (legitimately) say how much value a person can own. Nor do they attempt to do such a thing (excluding attempts of implementing communist societies with no personal property, and they've all pretty much failed).
No, taxes are actually more of a transaction fee.
An employer pays you salary and part of it is taxed; in most sensible setups the taxed part never arrives on your bank account but rather the employer pays that part directly to state's accounts. So if you never were in ownership of that representation of value, who did it belong to, to begin with?
In a way, money does belong to the state that authorizes it as a legitimate tool of exchanging value. They provide the security that any currency needs - the knowledge that this abstract representation of value actually can be exchanged for physical goods and services, and to measure the value of all other items.
So when people exchange money, the state demands a transaction fee. Whether it's you paying the VAT for products, or the employer paying the income tax of your salary, it is the same thing in both cases.
Of course, this model is simplified and you could rightfully say it doesn't apply to doing business in unsanctioned currencies like cryptocurrencies or foreign currencies, but I believe there are pretty strict definitions for tax evasion and money laundering that deal with those issues.
On the baseline, Battuta's argument is right. Taxes are a common payment for all the use of public goods everyone in the society uses. Providing a stable currency is just a small part of those services.
If you consider taxation to be theft despite it being sanctioned by the legislation...
...then logically you should consider killing people in war to be murder, regardless of the fact that it is sanctioned by the government waging the war, and in many cases sanctioned by the international legislation as well.
War is a special case because soldiers essentially put their life up as collateral when they fight. Killing civilians in war could be described as murder.
Taxes are a special case because taxpayers get much of the value of their taxes back in public goods. You don't get anything back from theft.
See, if you can add stipulations to things, I can do that as well.
But if we keep things simple and define theft as taking another human's property without consent (as you seem to do in the case of taxes), and murder as taking another human's life without consent (which is an analogous definition)...
...then if taxes are theft, killing in war is also murder.
All I'm saying is, if you want to think in black and white terms, go ahead, but at least be consistent about it - if you apply one type of logic on how you define taxes to be theft, you can't really opt out of that same logic on other topics.
And, again, if my money were taken from me - with or without my consent! - and then used for a. helping people and b. murdering people, I would be far more upset about the part where people die than the part where my money was used to pay for someone's education or surgery costs.
Or, like Battuta says, determining where my tax money goes is more important than how much I have to pay. I have a privilege to live in a country that doesn't spend billions of eurobux on killing people on distant lands, so that's something I don't really need to trouble myself with. Instead I'm more interested in how well the money is used - repairing roads, maintaining the good education system, public health care, etc. etc.
Of course, war has been described as exactly that - a calculated, condoned slaughter of human beings, to quote a veteran of First World War. I don't personally believe soldiers who kill in battle to be murderers - but neither do I think taxes are theft.
A more appropriate extrapolation is abortion. Abortion is morally equivalent to murder, as it is the taking of an innocent life without justification. The fact that it happens to be legal doesn't change this.
There are more than enough justifications for abortion in most cases, and even if you disagree on that the analogy doesn't really compare because there is no commonly agreed upon definition on when human life begins, so it's entirely subjective whether abortion even qualifies as murder - if there's no human life taken, it can't be murder. But this is not the place for that particular discussion (which we've had several times with very little effect on anyone's views on the matter).
EDIT: Adding this relevant piece of art to remind us of the problems related to redistribution of wealth
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I think that situation is a really good example of your specific point, and an even better example of what you're not understanding about taxation, and why your whole point is fundamentally untenable.
When taxes are used effectively, taxation isn't 'we need to insulate the building'. Taxation is 'there is a bug problem' or 'the heating has broken' or 'we would like to turn our open refugee camp into an apartment building'. Everyone agrees that something must be done. YOU agree that something must be done - because otherwise you'd be just as happy in a bear cave.
But each individual agent now steps into a collective action problem. If they defect, they can get away with paying nothing and still obtain the benefit. But if everyone defects, the benefit will never occur, and everybody suffers.
I agree mostly with everything in this post, except the conclusion that taxation is not theft. It shows well why taxation can be neccessary, why this kind of theft can be justified as a lesser of two evils, but thats all.
Regarding the benefits, I dont think the benefits recieved from the government and taxes payed are very related, there is at least no system in place to make it so, and even opposite relationship may be true. So while this whole "freeloader" thing could be used to justify some part of taxation, most of tax burden exists because of different reasons. Namely humanitarian ones (cant let people be without basic needs, which includes justice and healthcare IMHO), the simple fact that nobody has come up with a better practical system that would be more just, utilitarian ones (the needs of the many outweights the needs of the few) etc. And these reasons are compatible with the view that taxation is (justifiable) theft.
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Last time I checked the government printed the money, the properties you own are yours because of the laws and protections government provides. Otherwise you would be subsistence farming and anything you owned was your's so long as you could fend off those who would otherwise take it from you. So since you are using the government's money and laws in order to exist I'm not sure how paying the upkeep costs to use those services is theft? If you've decided to live in society, part of the deal is paying to maintain it, otherwise by all means you can live in the bear cave or move to Mogadishu.
Out of curiosity what do you think would exist without taxes, other than 1990s Somalia?
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That's the common story, but it isn't true. Yes, there are people who are simply unable to make ends meet, but they are vastly outnumbered by the people exploiting the system. They purchase iPhones and expensive TVs and then the complain that they don't have enough money left over for food and utilities. Other people discover that they can make more money churning out babies and getting welfare checks than working at a job, so they choose the rational economic action and stop working.
If you subsidize laziness, you get more of it.
Please provide statistics for this. Seriously.
My parents ran a sole proprietorship business for years, and they have plenty of experience seeing what the welfare system produced. As an example, the US has a requirement that people receiving unemployment benefits must demonstrate that they are actively searching for a job to continue receiving them. So that led to people coming into the office and asking if there were any job openings. If there were, they would simply leave. If there were not, the people would ask our office to sign a form stating that the person applied for a job but there was no job available.
You do know the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", right?
As another example, there were three separate instances of female employees applying for a job, getting it, going out on maternity leave eight months after getting the job, and then quitting once maternity leave was exhausted. And this was in an office with a staff of only five people, so one person on leave was a significant burden.
See above.
Look, I do not doubt that there are people who exploit the system. But, as following the relevant discussions in my own country showed me, hell, what being dependant on state subsidies for most of my adult life showed me, is that a) living off of welfare is no ****ing picnic, b) getting out of it is very very hard (and not helped by the fact that, if you're like me and have to take an apprenticeship position somewhere, losing those subsidies will result in you haveing a LOT less money available despite working 40 hours per week), c) the claims of widespread social assistance abuse come mostly from the various tabloids out to troll for profit.
Just for reference, a single person living in Germany off of welfare qualifies for a grand total of 350€ of assistance (with rent covered separately), an amount that is barely enough to actually live with. With rent included, the maximum amount payable is around 700€. If you're working, or in a rehab program (like I was), I qualified for an extra 150€ on top of that, an amount that barely covered the added expenses for food and travel that said program incurred.
Given all of that, living off of social security may be possible, but it sure as hell isn't fun (and being at the mercy of people who can cut your funding instantly if they believe you did something wrong doesn't help either).
There's another part of your argument here that I want to come back to, so let me requote:
They purchase iPhones and expensive TVs and then the complain that they don't have enough money left over for food and utilities.
Yeah, that's really bad. How dare these people want a slice of the luxury pop culture throws at them as objects of desire and emulation! How dare they purchase entertainment from the money we gave them! Can't they have the decency to behave like proper poor people!
As you may have guessed, I find this statement to be absolutely disgusting. You are effectively saying "they're living off of MY money, so I should have a say in what they should and should not buy with it", which in my considered opinion is wrong. They're not using YOUR money. They're using the state's, given to them with the express permission to use it freely. That sentiment of yours? It's degrading to poor people. You are pretty much telling them that they aren't capable of making competent decisions with regards to money.
Hell, there are people in my life who are asking me "Why do you pay money for PC games? Why do you visit the Cinema? You know you can't very well afford it, you know you should do the smart thing and save up!". And yeah, they're right. In a perfect world, where everything went right? I totally should do that. As it stands though, I'm pretty certain that neglecting those few luxuries I am able to buy would result in me crashing down into depression once more, because try as I might, I am not immune to the lure of materialism, the appeal of forgetting that you are poor, if only for a little while.
Neither are the people you are angry about.
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im convinced that our welfare systems spend more money on bureaucracy than on actually helping the poor. i kinda think the whole system needs to be dismantled and replaced with a negative income tax type system. tax pays back if you are below the poverty line. if you have no income, tax pays you (why its negative) an income equal to the poverty level. tax becomes positive at the minimum wage, which would be kept greater than the poverty level.
one problem with welfare programs is there is no cash incentives to do any actual work. any money you make (from a part time job, for example) just gets gets deducted from the entitlement, and you end up with the same amount of money whether you have a job or not. so the gap in income between the poverty level and the minimum wage must be kept large enough to provide incentive to work. the size of the gap determines how much you can earn before your earnings cut into your entitlement, anything you make over that amount without passing the minimum wage line is subtracted from the entitlement until the entitlement becomes zero (and at which point you are making minumum wage). this rewards working members of the negative tax bracket.
people in the positive tax bracket would pay a flat percentage of income tax. to be fair the negative portion of the tax bracket would have the same rate as the positive side. this system would greatly simplify the tax code. it also makes any entitlement fraud tax evasion, so you dont need a separate oversight department to keep people in line. this also makes things like social security and food stamps obsolete. you eliminate a lot of bureaucracy this way.
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I think that if you are working, be it a low wage, part time etc. they should only deduct a percentage of your wage over the welfare you get. such as 50p in every pound (or 50c in every dollar whatever). That means if you are working, you still get a benefit for working, does that make sense?
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@Nuke
Yes, I am in favor of some kind of similar reforms (although I think flat tax is just idiotic and wrong). I think that's one thing that both right wing and left wing economists actually agree with, just not politicians for obvious reasons.
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Somewhere Locke, Rousseau, et al. are rolling over in their graves from some of these dismissals of the social contract concept.
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Somewhere Locke, Rousseau, et al. are rolling over in their graves from some of these dismissals of the social contract concept.
Do a welfarrel roll
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I think that if you are working, be it a low wage, part time etc. they should only deduct a percentage of your wage over the welfare you get. such as 50p in every pound (or 50c in every dollar whatever). That means if you are working, you still get a benefit for working, does that make sense?
The problem is situations where working actually yields less (economic*) benefit than just living on social welfare, which of course is indication of a broken system and should not happen.
Probably the best way to address this, of course, is setting up some arbitrary standard of living that should be achievable on welfare only, and then making sure that minimum wage is higher than that, and at minimum wage level you don't get taxed at all.
I don't think a "negative tax rate" is the way to go. Even though it is an interesting concept, it would be difficult to monitor in practice and defining who lives "under poverty line" is a pretty difficult thing to do.
In actuality I believe the biggest problem with setting up a viable network of social security is that it may put stress on a country's economic system, and - borrowing the page from Battuta's book - other countries are fully capable of defecting if it benefits them.
China, for example, is a defector (along with several other East Asian countries). It is beneficial to their economy to keep their workers' rights and protections (a form of social security) at minimal level. There are either no minimum wage / maximum hours limitations, or enforcing them is very lax and breaking them has negligible consequences. This means the workforce is very cheap and it's an economically competitive place to produce stuff in. The companies that produce stuff there have a serious advantage over countries that produce stuff in more expensive countries (which enforce workers' rights and have a comparatively good social security). And, of course, these defector countries attract a lot of business which superficially benefits their economy.
People, however, suffer from this immensely, both in the defector countries and the more expensive countries, because now these defector countries pull a lot of works from the more expensive countries and cause unemployment there.
Personally, I believe there should be a globally defined minimum wage and maximum hours (along with other workers' rights) and defecting from these rules should result in severe trade sanctions, to discourage this kind of exploitation of the "free market economy". Either the WTO or UN should be the ones to enforce these rules, and make them more detailed and defined. It would cause the Chinese and Vietnamese and Thai and Bangkok and many other governments to cry tears of blood as their economy would apparently suffer. It might meet resistance from the companies currently producing ****loads of stuff dirt cheap in these countries.
It might make things more expensive to produce. But, to counterbalance that, there would be more employment more evenly spread across the globe - so there would be more people with the funds to buy things. Especially, if the South-East Asian people were actually paid proper wages, can you imagine the buying power of those 3 billion people? It's not like salaries paid to people just disappear into a bottomless well - the more money moves, the better economy tends to work.
And those currently engaged in de facto slave labour would not be working themselves to early death - either by chronic industrial chemical poisoning or suicide - in really **** conditions.
It might even have an effect on the population growth rate, since standard of living tends to have inverse correlation to birth rates while death rate remains at 100% (although with longer and more productive lives).
It could seem catastrophic in short term, but in the end, it would benefit every person in the world.
Except maybe those few that benefit most from the current situation by exploiting as many others as possible.
*Talking about the sheer amount of money here. Having a work, even if social security would yield numerically more money, usually has a lot of positive, stabilizing psychological and social effects on a person's life, and I think most unemployed people would take that over "mooching on the society" in a heartbeat - but if their status changes to "employed" and the net effect on their income is negative compared to social securities only, they may not even be able to do it. What would you do if you were unemployed but had a family to take care of, the social security barely keeps you fed and sheltered - then you're offered a job, but you do the math and find that accepting the job would make your family worse off in the whole?
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The problem with making standardized maximum hours/minimum wages is that the cost of living varies drastically across countries. Minimum wage here is something like 10 dollars an hour. That's like 70 RMB an hour, or a ridiculously large amount of money, given that a decent meal from a small restaurant can cost 20RMB. On the other hand, housing in big cities is hilariously expensive at tens of thousands of RMB per square meter, while parking spots are usually in the millions of RMB. (btw, apparently average family income per year is around 13k RMB) The point is, while we could standardize wages to the "burger dollar", or however much food costs, it doesn't take into account that other necessities can vary quite a bit in relative cost across different countries. I don't think it's common in North America for parking spots to cost more than luxury sports cars, but that's the norm in the big cities of China now.
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If you standardize the wages it won't take long before the standards of living will start to stabilize to the new level. Quality and price of housing should be included in that.
Besides, I'm just talking about a forced global minimum wages and maximum hours. No one would stop higher salaries, and I expect in most normal countries the general expense level would affect the hourly rates negotiated in collective bargaining agreements between the employer organizations and workers' unions.
This would mainly be a measure to prevent unfair, artificial boosting of a country's attractiveness in the workforce market (typically by nonexistent workers' rights and protections).
If you're enabling companies to "hire" people to work 100 hours a week at 50 cent/hour rate, of course it seems more attractive choice than only being allowed to work people 50 hours a week at 5 USD/hr*. But, the only ones to benefit from this are the companies that get cheap production workers, and even then I would argue the quality of work will surely be questionable.
One could make a case that the host countries benefit from this economically - but I think it actually hinders their development (in addition to being ethically very questionable) and is actually only beneficial in comparison to other countries at similar economical situation. So, in the Far East you have a situation where countries are basically competing with each other on which one can offer the cheapest workforce and thus attract most foreign businesses and foreign capital.
If the Western nations started to defect from workers' rights, we could also provide a lot more jobs because companies could produce stuff here just as cheaply (at least as far as workforce is concerned). But the human price of doing that would be unacceptable...
*I'm just pulling numbers from my arse here, I have no idea what a good global minimum wage would actually be. And the maximum hours I took from 10 hours * 5 days, which is probably very low on global scale...
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im convinced that our welfare systems spend more money on bureaucracy than on actually helping the poor. i kinda think the whole system needs to be dismantled and replaced with a negative income tax type system.
This. NIT seems to make a lot of sense to me, it is a continuous system with no hard transitions and would make even minimum wage obsolete. A few years ago government in my country wanted to implement it in all its glory, but then the government fell for unrelated reasons and it didnt pan out. It would certainly be an interesting experiment, at least.
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Except it's totally false, the notion "welfare systems spend more money on bureaucracy than on actually helping the poor". This discussion has suffered enough for the constant invention of bull****. People make stuff up and then proudly proclaim "see, this is the real problem". As if we don't live in the internet age.
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I figure long term able bodied welfare recipients should either attend educational workshops or work in civil service work gangs. In addition the minimum wage needs to be raised to a point that folks are self sufficient or they can receive some type of subsidy to make it so. Employment should always be more economically productive the welfare, and the system should always be actively trying to place people back into the work force, or at the very least contributing back in some way.
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Employment should always be more economically productive the welfare, and the system should always be actively trying to place people back into the work force, or at the very least contributing back in some way.
The Dutch already do this. I am currently on welfare (and it sucks), it's 75% of the minimum loan, and there's a lot of methods available to get people working (even for a short while untill I get studying again, at which point I get an entirely different subsidy).
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Somewhere Locke, Rousseau, et al. are rolling over in their graves from some of these dismissals of the social contract concept.
Mongoose wins the thread. I love the quasi-libertarian arguments that all ignore the fathers/precurors of libertarianism.
Government and the revenues that pay for it - taxation - are an obligation of the social contract. It's a bill, not theft. You can choose not to pay the bill, but generally the only way to do that is to avoid receiving the service, or remove yourself from the reach of the collection's agency - on both counts, I hear Somalia is nice if you don't like pesky things like public services, rule of law, and taxes.
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Except it's totally false, the notion "welfare systems spend more money on bureaucracy than on actually helping the poor". This discussion has suffered enough for the constant invention of bull****. People make stuff up and then proudly proclaim "see, this is the real problem". As if we don't live in the internet age.
you obviously dont live in the usa. im sure other countries do with less.
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citation needed for your bs.
else whatever.
endif.
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http://feedingamerica.org/how-we-fight-hunger/programs-and-services/public-assistance-programs/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program/snap-myths-realities.aspx
SNAP error rates declined by 57% since FY2000, from 8.91% in FY2000 to a record low of 3.80% in FY2011. The accuracy rate of 96.2% (FY2011) is an all-time program high and is considerably higher than other major benefit programs, for example Medicare fee-for-service (91.5%) or Medicare Advantage Part C (88.6%).
Two-thirds of all SNAP payment errors are a result of caseworker error. Nearly one-fifth are underpayments, which occur when eligible participants receive less in benefits than they are eligible to receive.
The national rate of food stamp trafficking declined from about 3.8 cents per dollar of benefits redeemed in 1993 to about 1.3 cent per dollar during the years 2009 to 2011.[ix] As you may have read in local news, USDA is aggressively fighting trafficking, but while there are individual cases of program abuse, for every one instance of fraud, there are hundreds of stories of heartbreaking need.
SNAP benefits don’t last most participants the whole month. 90% of SNAP benefits are redeemed by the third week of the month, and 58% of food bank clients currently receiving SNAP benefits turn to food banks for assistance at least 6 months out of the year.
The average monthly SNAP benefit per person is $133.85, or less than $1.50 per person, per meal.
Only 57% of food insecure individuals are income-eligible for SNAP, and 26% are not income-eligible for any federal food assistance.
Given SNAP’s exceptional efficiency, it is simply not possible to achieve significant savings without directly impacting participants. About 95 percent of federal SNAP spending goes directly to benefits and the remaining spending covers important services like employment and training services that help participants move from welfare to work, nutrition education that empowers individuals to make healthy choices on a limited budget, and federal oversight and trafficking prevention for the roughly 200,000 retail stores that accept SNAP benefits.
Just some facts about the food stamps program in the US since there is a notable lack of citations.
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Oh snap!
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people who run out of food stamps just dont know how to ****ing cook.
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people who get raped just don't know how not to dress provocatively
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people who run out of food stamps just dont know how to ****ing cook.
Ironically, eating mcdonalds 24/7 is substantially cheaper than buying fresh groceries from the cheapest store and cooking from scratch (Superstore/No Frills tier). So... It's actually "cheaper" to never cook, ever. Especially if you consider costs you save in dishwater and electricity for stoves.
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Until you get diabetes.
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people who run out of food stamps just dont know how to ****ing cook.
Ironically, eating mcdonalds 24/7 is substantially cheaper than buying fresh groceries from the cheapest store and cooking from scratch (Superstore/No Frills tier). So... It's actually "cheaper" to never cook, ever. Especially if you consider costs you save in dishwater and electricity for stoves.
Mostly in 'murica tho.
for the same amount of money a big mac menu costs here (in croatia), roughly 6-7$, i can get 400gr of minced meat for roughly 3$, 5-8 hamburger buns for $2, 200gr of cheese for 2$, a whole lettuce for 1$, whatever other condiments for similar amount. my mrs and i usually make around 6 hamburgers for that amount of money. with everything other than meat left over.
also, thank the satan that the greens arent too horribly expensive here, so its cheaper to eat "green" :p
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Yeah. McDonald's is considered luxury food that is far beyond the budget of lower class people in China (Also, pizza hut is upper class fine dining, hilariously enough, at several hundred a pizza).
But we were talking about food stamps in America, so yeah, Mcdonalds being dirt cheap is still a legitimate point. You can't blame people for being unable to cook economically when that's not at all the limiting factor when food stamps run out early.
Also, blaming poor people for being poor is similar to blaming handicapped people for being handicapped. Oftentimes (but not always, Darwin Awards exist for a reason), they are victims of circumstance, and they're really not trying to keep their life ****ty. However, their life remains ****ty because lots of factors prevent them from making improvements to their way of living.
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Mostly in 'murica tho.
Just gonna point out that looking at food prices in "murica" is a pretty pointless thing to do. Cost of living varies wildly across states, in plenty of places McDonald's is an economic way to eat and plenty of places McDonalds is not an economic way to eat.
Plus if you're actually poor and you're eating at McDonald's you're probably going to be getting a few dollar burgers instead of the $6 big mac. You're spending half the price and getting a good deal more food. :p
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i can get 400gr of minced meat for roughly 3$, 5-8 hamburger buns for $2, 200gr of cheese for 2$
Why the **** does Croatia measure things in grains?
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I assume he means grams.
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Yeah. McDonald's is considered luxury food that is far beyond the budget of lower class people in China (Also, pizza hut is upper class fine dining, hilariously enough, at several hundred a pizza).
Off-topic I know, but I didn't know of any fellow HLPers in China, whereabouts are you? I'm in Lijang myself.
As for the Pizza Hut issue, I always make jokes that in China McDonald's is considered a reasonable place to take a girl on a fairly early date and that Pizza Hut would actually impress her rather than making her wonder if you were 15 and had to borrow money from your dad for the date. :p
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Here in Czechia McDonalds is quite pricey, too. I can get a complete dinner of quality cooked food in a restaurant for less than a price of their burger.
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Here in Czechia McDonalds is quite pricey, too. I can get a complete dinner of quality cooked food in a restaurant for less than a price of their burger.
This begs the question: How can Mcdonald's even exist in Czechia, as the alternatives are just better in every way?
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Here in Czechia McDonalds is quite pricey, too. I can get a complete dinner of quality cooked food in a restaurant for less than a price of their burger.
This begs the question: How can Mcdonald's even exist in Czechia, as the alternatives are just better in every way?
I guess thats because its fast food, the food is caloric so going by price per calorie it is probably competitive, and the products are tasty in their own way.
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This begs the question: How can Mcdonald's even exist in Czechia, as the alternatives are just better in every way?
I'm more amazed it survives in China. It costs around 30RMB for meal here. For 12-13 you can go to any Lanzhou noodles shop and eat a bowl of noodles better than anything you've ever eaten in the a western Chinese place. For just 7 or 8 you can get a really good bowl of daoshao mian (a cheap and hearty bowl of noodles in broth).