Topic: Defend Taxation - page 3. (Read 6132 times)

That's kinda why I stuck with tomatoes, since we're focused on taxes here, not animal rights. For the sake of argument I'm assuming not all whales are people.

The sum to be paid would not be infinite - it would just be expensive enough to maintain equilibrium. (Not to put words in FirstAscent's mouth) IMHO cap & trade is the most efficient existing way to distribute natural resources like whales, so we would auction off whaling permits. It does however introduce the weakness of "who maintains the cap?" so there I'll admit my argument is weak compared to potential market-based alternatives.

Part of the reason I like this forum is because I do think we can eventually do better, and solve these problems without a state. But until then I'm very hesitant take an existential risk.

It's unethical to eat anything (be alive), then.

So basically, it's unethical for me to kill any animal without giving everyone in the world an infinite sum of  money and paying damages to the animal's family. I guess I'll just go on being unethical, then.

Did you ask the whale?

http://www.google.com/#q=whale+personhood&oq=whale+personhood

Simple, we all live in a social group called a community.  In that community there are services that the general public uses and needs to be maintained.   The system we use to collectively pay for these services are called "taxes or taxation".   To be specific here are some of the services that fall into this category:  National defense, prison, major roads, Public Utilities, Fire & Police.   

You may feel compelled to challenge these but each one fits a very important public good.   I do believe people can operate outside of a social group but those are rare and we are social beings at the core of our nature. 

Being that you call people who would give reasoning to taxes, a statist, lends me to believe you challenge the legitimacy of a state.  Is this true?

Dalkore

What if I levitate the whales to my moon-habitat, then levitate their offspring back?

To be comprehensive, we also need compensation for:

- The ecosystem services the plot supplied prior to being repurposed for growing tomatoes.
- The deleterious effects to the ecosystem viability of neighboring plots, due to edge effects.

I will concede that the plot, as a tomato crop still provides some ecosystem services, but it has generally been shown that conversion to agricultural use (especially specialized single crop use) results in a severely depleted set of ecosystem services provided.

Again, it all boils down to the importance of fully understanding the mechanisms of the environment, and the importance of ecological studies.

Also, the deleterious effects on the climate, assuming you read the article fully. Which in turn affects the value of real estate, species extinction rates on land due to their inability to relocate their habitats due to barriers, which in turn affects the health of ecosystems due to how species co-evolved to live together...

So, when you kill a whale, do you have to reimburse everyone for:
1. The whale they can no longer kill
2. All the life it will no longer stimulate
3. Its infinite theoretical offspring

And you get to keep the blubber?

Here's an excellent example of natural capital at work. Please read the article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/blue-whale-poop/

1. Then let's stop wasting time. I'm proposing we vote on people with guns to go door to door demanding payment for land use, and distribute that between residents of the jursidiction. Either call that a tax and dispute it, or call it restitution and don't. Every other libertarian I've ever talked to calls this a tax. Your call.

2. The deer and tomato are natural capital.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_capital
If you're collecting tomatoes in a public place, you should reimburse everyone else whose tomatoes you're taking. If you've paid land taxes to farm them in private, we're already getting reimbursed for the factor of production so any surplus tomatoes you can grow belong to you.

Example:
Plot of land will naturally yield 10 tomatoes.
We allow you to privatize it.
Under your wise supervision, the plot yields 100 tomatoes.
We still deserve reimbursement for the 10 tomatoes we can no longer pick, but not the 90 that are a result of your labor - those are yours.

1. Except that nothing that you've called a tax has actually been a tax, and the justification for taxation that your stated (or at least linked to) philosophy supports (and which might actually have a chance of standing up under fire), you haven't used.

2. You "homestead" the deer when you hunt it, the tomato when you harvest it, how is that any different than homesteading the land, when you till it?

1. Well gosh, VOTING?!?! If you're so surprised I think we should VOTE on the things I outright called a tax from the start, then maybe you shouldn't try to play semantics and act like you have no idea how taxes and governments work. I don't even know how you think there COULD be taxes without government, which in a modern context assumes voting.

2. Brilliant, if I was arguing against work, which I'm not. I'm arguing against giving away land for free to whoever gets there first and "homesteads" it.

1. Wait, now you're including voting into things? That's a whole other kettle of violent fish. Let's not go there - unless you want to, but do it in another thread, this one's about taxation. You can have men with guns who demand restitution under AnCap, as well, that's called a defense agency.

2. Hunting and/or farming is work, as well. I didn't specify work for someone. I didn't even specify buy. You need to output labor in order to appropriate resources, whether those resources are land, food, or material goods. That labor may be in raw form (farming, hunting, etc), or it may be in condensed liquid form (currency).

1. Thank you! You just made all my future arguments with anarchists much easier. My support of men with guns demanding restitution for the people isn't a tax, it's a court judgement! I hereby request you report for arbitration on November 4th at a voting booth near your home.

2. If every natural source of food has been privatized, taking away my ability to hunt/farm without paying a capitalist, then yes that is an injustice. I do not agree to give you full ownership of something no person has created, and was a shared resource by default.

In case anyone is interested in what I'm actually saying and not Myrkul's impressive interpretation, a good summary is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

So.. I can only conclude that you think theft is OK as long as the stolen money is used in a way you like..?

Seriously? Isn't this obvious? Language, for a start, is a huge barrier. No wonder same-language immigration is more common.
And... don't you have friends, family? What about culture? Eventually properties you want to keep etc. There are so many barriers in long distance immigration, you must be too cynic to even ask such question.
Just compare the percentage of people who don't live in the same city/town they were born with the percentage of people who don't live in the same nation they were born.


I'm not assuming that wouldn't happen (although the actual reason would never be economies of scale, that might be an excuse perhaps). I'm just saying that if it happens, it will be a change from a better configuration to a worse one. A regression.


Not sure I understood your question. Free trade is always optimal.
If you are wondering if free-trade would really happen, then well, I say it would, because these city-states would not be able to afford creating large barriers to trade. And the more free-trade there is, there richer the city-state would be, attracting more immigrants as I explained before.
But, even if you believe free trade is bad and we should only trade locally (what's false, but let's take it for granted), then still you have to agree that the city-states who raise such barriers would be more prosperous, and others would copy.

The point with competition is that it creates incentives to improvements. We don't even need to agree on what "improvement" means to see it.


Again, I'm pretty sure the city-states who follow such path would prosper less, and thus competition would end up killing such bad policies. But the same thing I said above applies. If you believe free immigration is bad for the economy, it should be clear to you that the city-states which allow it would have economic issues, compared with those which don't allow it.


By the way, do you know of a single empiric counter-example to this theory?
Can you point a micro-state, encrusted in a larger state, which is not better off than the large state? All examples I know are better off (Monaco, Lichtenstein, Singapore etc). Even when we take very-autonomous-but-not-really-independent regions like Hong Kong, Macau or Gibraltar, the principle remains.
There might be a few exceptions as for every rule, but I don't know any. It's clear that, in general, micro-states are better off than their neighboring large states.

Well, since the Anti-trust thing is going to be the "hard" fight, let me knock down the two easy ones first, then come back to it. Since we're doing it that way, we'll just go ahead and work backwards.

First, the product analysis. That's actually not funded by taxes, but it is legislated, so I'll do it anyway. Would you eat packaged foods that didn't have that handy chart on them? I probably would, but it is useful, so I would likely prefer foods that had it over foods that did not. Given that, it's likely that manufacturers would continue the practice of putting analysis of their products on the packaging, even without legislation requiring it. Even if they don't, there is a market demand for that information, so it would be provided, perhaps by a non-profit organization. One example that could be implemented with today's technology is a smartphone app which looks up that information in a database when the product's UPC code is scanned.

Distributed education cost. There most definitely is a better way to do that than taxes. I guarantee there are other people with as much caring for the underprivileged kids' education as you out there, and enough, surely, that you can, combined, pay for all those kids' education. Charities are a great way to voluntarily fund social programs like that. Kickstarter is another. Without the tax burden, you could pick and choose which social programs you want to fund, rather than giving it all to the state, and watching them piss away the money you wanted to go to educating inner-city kids on killing other countries' inner-city kids.

OK, now the big boy. First, a fun fact. In 1865, when Rockefeller’s (Standard Oil) market share was still minuscule, a gallon of kerosene cost 58 cents. In 1870, Standard’s market share was 4%, and a gallon cost 26 cents. By 1880, when Standard’s market share had skyrocketed to 90%, a gallon cost only 9 cents — and a decade later, with Standard’s market share still at 90%, the price was 7 cents. (source)

Second, Anti-trust laws don't do what you think they do. I'm probably going to get blasted for linking to C4SS, but that's where you're going to find this kind of information. I challenge anyone who complains to refute the article on its merits, not on its origin. This article is about the FDA, specifically, but it talks about the subject of Trusts and Cartels, as that's basically what the FDA is all about: http://c4ss.org/content/11299

@OP, not @current discussion.

(I'm a U.S. resident)

I like anti-trust laws and their enforcement. (I'm pretty certain)

I like that the cost of educating all of our children is distributed. I want to pay for less privileged children to have a shot at a life. (Maybe there is a better way of doing this than with taxes...)

Today I was just thinking that I like that I can pick up any package of food or any beverage and get what feels like a pretty rigorous and trustworthy analysis of its contents. I often take this for granted, but it is something I use on a daily basis. It is invaluable to me.