The morality of taxation

Let’s say we increase taxes on business owners so that the best they can hope for from their investment in a business is to break even. In that case, they won’t invest, because they would take on risk with no expected return. So they won’t open a business, hire workers, and organize activity to produce useful things. The employees are all left as unemployed as they would be if the business had tried and failed. That’s bad for workers. If we want workers to have work, we should want investors to have incentives to invest.

The share of workers earning minimum wage or less is like 1% of all workers, and less than 3% of hourly workers. So clearly a lot of people willingly pay their workers more.

It’s not that they aren’t performing services, and in some cases government labor can provide more value than the private sector labor it displaces (e.g. maintenance of the commons). But it always shifts the demand curve. The public sector jobs compete against the private sector jobs, and the same pool of labor is spread across more productive outlets. Again, this is not always negative-sum.

I like this way of framing the question, and I agree that the risk profile differs for public vs private, and that there are cases where public sector profile is better. But as you might have guessed, I think the private sector usually does a better job of getting the right answer. Again, I agree there are exceptions, there are cases where incentivizing risk is a bad thing and where we’d prefer the incentive profile of public funding. But the private sector tends to do better, including by answering questions like “what is the optimal risk?” That question is about values, and by letting people choose for themselves what their risk is worth, we end up with the market settling around an optimal risk.

I took the following to be a causal implication:

If you flip the sentence, it makes the implied causal relationship stand out:
“The better for everyone, the more the private sector is kept in check…”

As I read the flipped sentence, it’s saying that prosperity will tend to keep the private sector in check, which tells me that the original sentence implied that keeping the private sector in check benefits everyone.

It’s semantic, though, and I accept that it wasn’t your intention. But it’s important to point out, because I see the point presented as an argument for a larger welfare state. Yes, we have larger stabler governments who exert more control over the market wherever we see wealthier societies, but we also see more efficient markets and freer trade. Look at the Nordic countries, thought of as a socialist utopias, but with significant levels of privatization and market freedom.

If you’ll permit me a personal anecdote: I worked for a little while at the FCC with the team rewriting the satellite industry regulations. My impression of it was that it wasn’t adversarial at all, neither between the FCC and the businesses that would be covered by the regulations, nor between the businesses themselves. What the companies wanted, and what the FCC provided, was a set of common standards that kept people from running into each other or drowning out each others signals. Compare it to the drive-on-the-right rule in the US: every driver is made better off by the government enforcing that standard, because otherwise there is a coordination problem and driving becomes more dangerous and less efficient. A lot of law functions this way, and wealthy countries with large functional governments are able to establish these conventional rules more broadly, to make private players more efficient. But the bottleneck for these things isn’t how much we’re taxing, it’s having stable and trusted institutions with the resources to put the conventions into place. We can’t generate beneficial social institutions through higher taxes, even though as those institutions grow it will benefit society to increases taxes to support them.

Taxation spawns from militarization and protection costs.

Everybody pays for protection. If your tribe or country has no army, then another will invade, rape, kill, steal from you. Thus taxation is always a vital requirement throughout humanity. Taxation is the cost of security, first and foremost. Thus the “morality” of taxation is also the morality of protection, security, and defense. Can you defend yourself? Hypothetically, if an individual or society could defend itself (militarily) then it would NOT “need” taxation, as the cost of defense would be incurred upon the body itself. However most people cannot do this, cannot defend themselves, women and children for example.

In order to justify “no taxes whatsoever” you must also immediately justify no Defense. And that is anti-natural, unnatural. Anybody who leaves themselves completely defenseless, will soon have all their assets stripped away from them. Because humanity is predatory on the base level. Order is imposed through (the threat of) violence.

That’s an inaccurate assessment for failing to take into account that state minimum wages are often higher than federal, so it’s not so clear that “a lot of people willingly pay their workers more.” According to this, 42.4% of workers make less than $15/hr. Pew estimated in 2014 that approximately 30% of hourly workers make less than $10. I’m confident it was an honest mistake since you typically exhibit such equitability in deliberation which is, btw, admirable.

I feel zero-sum is correct that employers will not be philanthropic in their wage offerings (hence min wage laws in the first place) and with automation stealing jobs and the pervasion of college educations, supply of competent workers far-exceeds demand allowing employers further leverage. I suspect this development is heavily contributing to the opioid epidemic by engendering a sense of hopelessness in the lower tiers of the population.

Concerning the morality of taxation, the main purpose, if not the sole purpose of taxation is the redistribution of wealth for the engineering of society.

Here is G. Edward Griffin, the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, saying what I just said: youtu.be/dsqGR31zoVA?t=17m59s

Without that redistributive mechanism, we’d devolve back to the bi-class society absent the of middle classes that existed at the dawn of the industrial revolution for the simple reason that money always flows uphill and without either a constant creation of money being funneled to the bottom or a redistribution from the top, the bottom would run dry. Wages alone are not enough to balance the tiers because employers hire employees for the purpose of making a profit. Employees, by definition, are compensated less than the productivity they contribute and therefore it’s only a matter of time before all the money ascends to the top. In order to have a functioning society at all, taxation is absolutely necessary. And what is necessary to prevent suffering en masse is obviously moral.

As an example, I used to employ workers who I compensated $10/hr in exchange for their making $50/hr in revenue for me. So I net-benefited $40/hr from them and that doesn’t count the $50/hr I made for myself as well. That’s how money flows uphill and it’s always the case because no employer would hire anyone unless they could generate a profit. So, therefore, the very act of employment necessitates redistributive taxation or money creation in order to fill the void generated by the profiteering of labor which is conveniently veiled by the guise of “providing a service to the community”. :laughing:

Hello, I see you’re hungry and I’m willing to leverage your desperation to eat by offering you these peanuts in exchange for your mining some gold nuggets for me. Deal? We’ll call it “providing a service to the community”. Of course, you’ll also have to pay your share of taxes as it wouldn’t be “fair” if I carried the full burden. :evilfun:

Look up Tax/GDP ratios.

Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden are the top 2-5 - basically THE Nordic countries almost exclusively populate the very top of the scale. Timor-Leste is top, and for reference, the USA is about 1/3 of the way down. Whilst Norway only claims just over 1/2 of its GDP in tax, I don’t think you can honestly make an argument that its “significant levels of privatisation and market freedom” aren’t smaller relative to most other countries of the world. They literally are a model of Social Democratic (not Socialist) success. Anyone trying to put their success down to the “significant levels of privatisation and market freedom” would be somewhat ridiculous considering that even the most successful countries with lower degrees of Social Democracy output less value per person. If anything, we ought to be questioning just how much more successful could Nordic countries be if their economic model of Social Democracy was enhanced even further! I think if you believe these people who are trying to give you the impression that Nordic countries are successful because of “significant levels of privatisation and market freedom”, you are being deceived.

Whether or not the correlation is in fact causation, you have to remark at just how much the data appears to support the hypothesis that it is in fact a causal relationship - at first glance at least. It at least bears looking into! But are we? It seems like the Capitalist powers that be are trying very hard to stop this. It might very well be the case that there are other factors at work, or that any causation goes in a different direction. I am in favour of finding out and absolutely against those who are trying to stop us from finding out.

This doesn’t look far enough. If taxes on business owners are increased, that just pushes out the non-optimal competition - and each time this happens, all their business goes to the better performing businesses or to other areas of the market. Revenues go elsewhere, and whether the taxation goes into paying people to produce goods and services or straight back to businesses, the taxed money re-enters the private sector in proportion to how much the output of the private sector is still valued. Tax and tax some more, the revenues are still made, they just don’t go so much to private businesses anymore - and when they do, only to the best who are able to stay in the game - they go more to public businesses instead. The incentives are still there for the private sector, or at least existing private businesses - newer ones and less successful ones don’t have as much incentive to try and eat into the profits of already established and successful businesses because there aren’t as much profits there to do so - just the same as if a market was already saturated with competition.

And if the private sector can’t afford more workers, this is exactly because the public sector now can. The workers just work for the public sector instead of the private sector… there’s no negative impact to job availability. The public sector gets the incentive to invest instead - and they’re the same people who equally want to advance in the world, they just don’t have the autonomy and the high risk high reward of doing it privately.

Only partly true. This assumes competence, and moreover - foresight. No matter how competent a risk taker is, they cannot see the future and their failure affects more and more people the more money that is risked. There is no such thing as both autonomy in risk, and consequences independent of others. All financial decisions affect others. Individuals (in)famously do not have as good an idea of how things are and how they will go as they often think - restricting risks in line with alternative opinions, especially the highest risks, is statistically optimal. The only thing that complete autonomy has in its favour is that even the wisdom of the crowd is flawed, and happy accidents happen. New frontiers can be broken much better with more autonomy, but at what cost? If you’re speaking of “optimal risk”, this involves restricting people.

I don’t think this contradicts my assertion: it can simultaneously be true that employers voluntarily pay their employees more than the minimum they are allowed to pay them by law, and also that they pay them less than some larger amount. Though, perhaps there is some ambiguity in Zero’s qualifier that no one pays more “in any great number”. I took that to be about how frequently people are paid more than the legal minimum (i.e., great number of people), rather than how much more than the minimum they are paid (i.e., a great number of dollars-per-hour), but the latter interpretation is also possible, in which case your point is well taken.

Please note that I don’t think this is evidence that employers are being philanthropic; it is pure rational self-interest. Employers pay higher than the minimum wages because it makes business sense to do so. More money can attract more and better applicants to a position, and can incentivize workers to stay. Though I must concede that the minimum wage probably has an anchoring effect, so that employers are offering “more money” than the minimum, because the minimum is the alternative against which they’re competing to recruit and retain workers.

I agree with this and with your comments on the necessity of redistributive taxation. I favor a basic income in large part for the reason you identify here: if you have to work to eat, it doesn’t matter what the minimum wage is, you will always be extorted by the threat of starvation.

I did some quick comparisons between Wikipedia’s list of countries by per capita GDP, and its list of countries by tax as a percent of GDP, and there isn’t much correlation. The top twenty countries are:
Qatar
Macau
Luxembourg
Singapore
Brunei*
Ireland
Norway
Kuwait
United Arab Emirates
Switzerland
Hong Kong
San Marino*
United States
Saudi Arabia
Netherlands
Iceland
Bahrain
Sweden
Germany
There was no tax info for Brunei and San Marino, but setting those aside, there isn’t a clear trend in this group for social democracy. Indeed, the correlation coefficient between per capita GDP and tax as a percent of GDP is actually negative (-.268). On the other hand, over all the countries that appear in the GDP list, the correlation is positive (.273). Not having much background in stats (I’m just using the Excel CORREL() function), I wasn’t sure what to make of that. So I also looked at the Wikipedia list of countries by economic freedom, and found that it too had a negative (though less negative) correlation in the top 20 (-.037), and a similar (but slightly larger) correlation across the whole set (.278).

As I say, I claim no statistical expertize, so I can’t say how statistically significant this is. I’m sure there are problems with the data set (and the economic freedom rankings are much less complete than either the tax rankings or the GDP rankings). Still, I’d say it’s enough to reject the claim that there is a particularly clear correlation between wealth and taxation such that we should suspect the link is causal.

To start, I agree with some of your points here, and of course you are correct that some level of business taxation is socially optimal, if only because we have a system that allows people to create legal fictions that insulate them from the full consequences of their actions (which is also so socially optimal, but a tax recoups the risk that society bears as a result). And competition from the public sector can also be good, and you are right that it can actually improve the competitiveness of private businesses up to a point.

But shifting from private to public labor is not a free lunch. Some public industries operate well, others don’t, and I don’t think it’s the case in any industry that displacing all labor from private to public is a good thing. The incentive to optimize that the private sector has is valuable, and can’t really be simulated in the public sector. There are public choice problems in public sector employment that can get out of hand without the discipline provided by a competitive market. While there may be no negative impact to job availability (I’m not sure that that’s the case, given that the tax collecting and spending bureaucracy is effectively a middle man), there is likely to be a negative impact on productivity because public employers don’t have the same incentive to maximize output.

I may have been implicitly assuming those, but they aren’t necessary for a functioning market. The market is an evolutionary process. As long as businesses vary in their approach, the market will select for the approaches that work. Incompetent managers and those lacking foresight will lose their shirts, and ones that are competent, or that just luck into the right answer, will get more investors to fund their future attempts.

I agree that some restriction is optimal (and here to it will vary by industry), but it’s easy to underestimate the value of happy accidents. Like in all investing, the upside is worth more than the downside, because the downside is capped and the upside can be reinvested. If one unhappy accident loses everything and another happy accident doubles the investment, society is better off.

Well in your first link (GDP/person) we can clearly see Norway coming in at 6th, Sweden in 16th, Denmark 20th and Finland 25th.

These are the top 2-5 in the tax/GDP stats in your second link - all rating in the top 25/187 in terms of GDP/person.

So whilst you might not be able to conclude that GDP/person relies on high taxation, you should be able to see that high taxation seems to coincide with significantly high GDP/person.

I am getting a similar correlation figure of about 0.3, not sure why yours is closer to 0.27 (maybe it’s because I corrected a couple differently spelled country names between the two lists to get the extra information), which doesn’t look like a significant correlation, I agree, though a positive correlation nonetheless.

However, if you remove just a few outliers, even including the Nordic Countries, this increases.

I removed just the top and bottom 5 countries in GDP/person, and the top and bottom 5 countries in Tax/GDP and got a correlation of over 0.5, which is starting to get pretty significant. I believe this is the case because the competition with the Nordic Countries’ in terms of GDP/person is due to countries either sitting on natural resources or being micro states with particular attractions to foreign investment. Norway and Denmark even fall into this category to an extent, though certainly the Middle East + the smaller countries do. This is why I removed them just to see what this did to the correlation, and even though there still remain some oddities in the data, the increased correlation is showing an even clearer link between taxation and output per person.

I don’t have time to look into whether higher taxation is better for more developed countries, and the Marxist theory is that the move towards Socialism naturally occurs after Capitalism, which I agree works well within less developed countries, so it would be interesting to see if this is the case - excluding outliers/exceptional cases that throw off the overall trend.

I have a friend who said “We perpetually have 30 positions open that pay almost twice the minimum wage that we cannot fill.” The implication being that people are so “lazy” and “entitled” that they turn their noses up at approx $12/hr. I said simply, “If you can’t find workers, raise the pay until you find workers.” That’s capitalism, right?

Nope. Apparently people should be coaxed into accepting pay below their willingness or be accused of having crappy work ethic and desiring handouts… essentially shamed into slavery.

Of course, some folks are overpaid as well. My local walmart store manager is compensated $250k for his ingenious expertise at hiding the horseradish with the sourcream. I dispatched an email stating the next time I go in and have to check myself out for lack of a cashier, I’m leaving a whole buggy of icecream in the pantyhose aisle then walking out. He can either pay for the ruined icecream, pay for someone to put it back, or pay for a cashier to check me out. That’s bullshit that he’s too cheap to pay even one cashier while making that much himself and pawning the extra work off onto me. I’m sure there are people here who’d be willing to do his job for half his pay… and probably do it better (definitely couldn’t be worse).

And then we have these ceos who make 400x their average employee’s pay as if they could possibly do anything 400x better than anyone else. There is no human on this planet who can do anything 400x better than another human, unless we’re counting being a 400x bigger asshole who can steal 400x more money from 400x more grandmas (Enron, Wells Fargo, et al)

Yup! Not only basic income, but the upper tier should bear all the taxation leaving the middle free from taxation. If the rich pay 80% of taxes, then they won’t notice the extra 20%, but the middle will. The velocity of money would go to the moon with that strategy fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V

It isn’t about what’s good for society, but it’s about wealth differential because what fun is it being rich if there is no one to be richer than? Keeping others down is therefore more important than lifting the self up. If a rising tide lifts all boats, then we must sink the other boats.

Check this out: (FWD to 10:20)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRvVFW85IcU[/youtube]

It’s not that the older kids suddenly developed philanthropy, but they’ve learned a more clever and subtle way to get one-up by realizing the tokens are worthless and the real prize are acts altruism in front of cameras. Seriously, could you pick the selfish option while not feeling like a goober in front of the test administrator? The truth about humanity is revealed by the younger kids who haven’t yet realized what feeling like a goober is.

So, people are willing to take less societal benefits for themselves so long as it means you get nothing.

Taxation falls easily within the definition of theft.

Someone is forcing you to give them some of your money, and if you refuse, they will use force against you to get it. You have something, someone else wants it, they threaten you with force if you do not give it to them, so you give it to them. It does not matter if you want to give it to them or not, that does not even appear as a question. Some people claim to actually want to give their tax moneys to the government, but I bet if the government stopped forcing them to give it and they were free to write a check to the government for whatever amount they wanted, they would either write an amount far less than their current tax bill, or no amount at all.

None of that has to do with the question of whether or not taxation is actually good or not, of course. In some cases, perhaps, theft can be a “good” thing. It would depend on how we define theft, I suppose. And also looking more deeply into the means and ends.

Taxation is basically theft normalized. So is theft good if it becomes normalized and if it achieves ostensibly good ends? But of course the theft of taxation also achieves quite a large number and significant degree of bad ends, too.

It all comes down to income and wages, taxation isn’t the same when a millionaire or billionaire gets taxed 15% per year compared to when somebody makes $20,000.00 a year getting taxed the same amount. It’s not even close concerning financial risks or debt. Don’t tell me that their risks outweigh more than workers as that is simply bullshit.

Wages and income in the United States have not been equalizing whatsoever where instead for workers they’ve been dropping or stagnating the last forty five years, get real!

The divide between rich and poor within the United States has been increasing the last seventeen years.

If you want to participate in our economy in order to generate profits far exceeding that of average folks by taking advantage of the fact that we have a LOT of average folks, then you have to pay your dues which guarantee we will always have a LOT of average folks (middle class) and failure to pay is theft. You’re stealing from the ecosystem and not giving back like a farmer sucking resources from the land and not refertilizing… and it would end the same way.

You do realize that taxation is regressive, right? And that it isn’t necessary that I be taxed in order for me to work freely and produce profits for myself and my employer. No one needs to be taxed, except that we need to find a way to fund social systems and governments and the theft of taxation is basically the only way anyone has discovered how to do that.

Do you drive on a public highway?

I’m against income taxes myself however there is nothing wrong with all other forms of taxes.

Stop being an ignorant anarchist that wants to enjoy the benefits of society living in it without contributing anything. You can’t have both.

I already noted that taxation is the only way we have found so far to fund social services and government.

Apparently you don’t know how to read.

I’m not sure… what do you mean by regressive?

If everyone worked for themselves, such as fur-trappers, metal smiths, farmers, coopers, etc, then there would be no need for taxation except maybe to fund a police force or some social function. The problem arises when people work FOR someone else.

To see how that is true, you first have to imagine an economy on a gold standard where the amount of money is fixed because gold is too limited. Now, when one more person is born, where does the gold come from for that new person to have in the economy? If the population expands, the money supply has to keep up or there is not enough money to go around. That is especially true if people are expected to get richer over time, as with investments and savings accounts. So we have new people being born and the older ones getting richer with time and that demands new money.

The next problem is employment because no employer would hire anyone unless that person can make money for him. So by definition of employment, money transfers uphill, which means the money would run out on the bottom unless the supply were being expanded.

Lets make a math problem from it. Let’s say there is an self-contained island with 10,000 coins on it. If there is a man who employs a worker to help make widgets that he sells for 10 coins/day and he pays the employee 3 coins/day and spends 3 coins/day on supplies, then he makes 4 coins/day profit. Of that 4, he spends 2 coins back into the economy on entertainment and food or whatever. He saves the remaining 2 coins/day in a pile. How many days until he has all the coins on the island? (or all of them to the point that no one can afford to pay 10 coins for his widget)

Solving the problem isn’t important, but the point is that he will have most-all the coins eventually and that is because of employment.

To see how that is true, let’s outlaw employment so the men split up and make their own widgets for their own money. In that case, each man will be in competition with the other and each will see less demand, so they make less profit and no one man is able to monopolize the money supply. Only through employment can one monopolize the supply of money. This is what nobody seems to realize. You could never acquire all the money by being a black smith or cooper or farmer or anything that you can do as a trade because you are only one person; only through employing others can it be done and that can only be explained by an inherent theft of productivity that has occurred.

In reality, we can’t expect each person to trap furs and mine gold considering how many people exist on the planet. Employment is a necessity of life; that is, working to make someone else rich is necessary for your own existence. But, we’ve just demonstrated that the money will run out if something is not done to remedy the problem.

So our choices are: Print more money or redistribute through taxation.

So far, the printing of money has only benefited the rich which undermines its own purpose. Since the poor do not own stocks and bonds, the only means to give them money is to hand it to them, which is too unpalatable for society. Giving it to Goldman Sachs is preferable for some reason.

That leaves taxation as the only means of replenishing the supply of money on the lower tiers, but that is also unpalatable on the basis of “fairness”… and that it’s “theft”… stealing from the productive to give to the unproductive. Yeah, but, if you don’t, then how will people have money to buy your products? Where will the money come from? Not wages because for every dollar earned by an employee, the employer gets a cut and the math problem shows us that money runs out under that scheme.

Without taxation, the middle class would go extinct. It would be a 2-class system of extremely rich and everyone else would be dirt poor. Like what existed before FDR.

So taxation couldn’t possibly be immoral, since it benefits society. If anything is immoral, it’s employment and the theft of taxation rights the wrong which is the theft of the earnings of the people who did the work in the first place and caused the class distortions. But without that theft of earnings, there wold be no incentive to employ. If you can’t make me money, why hire you? In order words, if I can’t steal some of your money, then why hire you?

The best solution is to let the employer steal money from the employee and then steal it back through taxation. It keeps the carrot in front of the horse.

Anything can be used as currency, I wasn’t talking about fiat currency, I was talking about taxation. I don’t want to go back to gold coins or barter days, that would be idiotic.

Taxation had nothing to do with whatever currency system you have. Currency is just a medium of exchange of value, a common denominator that allows direct trade of values made. Again, taxation has nothing to do with any of that. You can have a currency exchange system like that where someone else comes in between you and the other party with whom you’re trading, and take a cut of the currency that is exchanged between you, or that cannot happen. If I buy something from a dude in his garage sale and give him cash, no one is coming in between that transaction to tax it. There is literally no reason why all transactions could not be like that, except that we need a way to generate funds for social services and government functions. I’m open to ideas other than taxation, because as I already said, when someone else comes in between me and the other person with whom I’m freely transacting, pulls out a gun and demands I give them a percentage of the transaction, that is theft. And that is exactly what taxation is. The gun might be deferred, but if you don’t pay taxes you either literally cannot buy/sell in the market or down the road you will get arrested for tax evasion.

Taxation is regressive, this means that taxes negatively impact poorer people more than richer people. Take a 10% tax rate on someone making $20k a year versus someone making $200k a year; the $2000 you take from the poorer person has a lot more immediate, important and desperate value to him than does the $20,000 you take from the richer person, because at the end of the day the poorer person has $18,000 and the richer person has $180,000. Same tax rate. I’m sure that rich guy could have found great use for that extra $20,000, but the poor guy really needed it because on $18,000 you can barely survive.

This is why we have progressive tax rates. But even these are still regressive, and to the point the progressive tax rates become steep enough to arguably stop being regressive they also approach the point of absurdity; for example, poor guy from above gets a 5% tax rate while the rich guy gets 50% tax rate, so the poor guy has to pay $1000 out of his income and ends up with $19,000, rich guy has to pay $100,000 and ends up with $100,000. You can see how this is still regressive in nature, the poor guy could do a lot with an extra grand in his pocket, out of sheer immediate need, while the rich guy obviously would want that extra $100k but after paying his taxes he still had $100k left over.

Increase even further: poor guy pays no tax, rich guy pays 75% like under some kind of Bernie Sanders plan. Now poor guy is happier getting all his money he really does need, while rich guy has to pay $150k in taxes and has $50k left over. Maybe this seems more balanced to some people, but it’s absurd, because you have a guy creating value in the economy on par with a $200k salary who only actually makes 1/4 of that, and he is totally funding someone else to pay no taxes at all. It becomes irrational at the point you have a small number of people at the top basically funding the entire government.

Also it’s basically irrational to have different tax rates for different people. If you earn more salary that means you’re freely being paid by an employer or customers commensurate with the overall value you are creating in the economy. So it’s already “balanced out”: poor guy creates net value in the economy commensurate with a $20k salary, rich guy creates net value in the economy commensurate with a $200k salary. Once you divide out their salaries by the net value they are generating for the economy as a whole, it cancels out. So the idea of progressive tax rates is irrational at face value, because you’re actually taking more real value out of the upper tiers of the economy where more net value is being generated into and as the economy as a whole. There is no reason why someone making $200k “needs to pay more” as a percentage of income to taxes than someone making $20k, because both of those people are working to create value in the economy at exactly commensurate ratios, assuming a broadly free market system where employment and economic transactions are freely engaged in or not.

On the issue you raise of money supply, the money supply does naturally expand over time, even if you have gold coins. People find more gold, and exchange gold with other countries and economies. The total supply of gold is always going to be larger than the value-producing nexuses centered within economic spheres, so there is a flow of gold to these nexuses and which naturally distributes around each nexus in rings emanating from the center. That’s just how it works. But the question is moot anyway since we don’t use gold coins, we can just print more money as needed to reflect the increase of value which the economy is producing; this is about increase of value, not physical money supply. If you didn’t print more money, or if you only printed more money on par with however much money was destroyed or lost ever year, so that the money supply remains the same from year to year, there would still be growth in the economy because there is growth in value created, and the result would be that the relative value of each unit of money would go up. To try and keep the value of each unit more or less the same over time you have to slowly inflate the money supply over time, to keep pace with all of the new value being created. Obviously our politicians are printing way more money than needed to achieve this balance, because the relative value of each unit of money is going down over time.

Money is just a symbolic representation of realvalue created. That’s all it is. Money is not value, it is a symbol of value and a common means of transacting and trading values.

And you are fundamentally mistaken about the nature of work. The employer does not “steal” money or profit from the worker, rather the worker rents the employer’s capital and means of production in order to be able to work to produce more net value than the worker could do on his own, and the employer pays the worker a salary for that. The salary has to be agreed upon by both parties, in a free (non-communist, non-socialist, non-authoritarian) economy. In a free economy the worker is free to leave employment if he doesn’t think his salary is good enough. In reality, Marx is deeply wrong about the nature of work as surplus-value: Marx said that the employer steals surplus-value from the worker and this is the source of profit, when in fact people want to give their surplus-value to a meaningful enterprise and the source of profit is three-fold: 1) free giving of surplus-value by human beings either in work or in their daily lives, 2) refinement of existing processes of production (increase in technology, etc), or 3) discovery of more resources able to be fed as inputs into existing processes of production thus creating more products, more values.

People want to give their energy and surplus-value. That is how we are. We freely give our surplus-value and work-effort, our “poeisis” as Parodites said, in many different ways. People want to work, they want to generate value in the world and they want to get paid for doing that because “getting paid” is symbolic of that value of made. If you want to get paid more money then you need to start making more value in the world.

Leftists talk about how happy they are to pay more taxes, well you don’t need a tax law and system of tax collection to pay more in taxes, just mail a check to the IRS. They will happily cash it. Of course none of these leftists does that, because they’re all talk. It’s just psychological games for them.

No rich leftist who pretends to be so happy to pay more in taxes because the tax rates went up, is going to keep voluntarily giving that extra money to the government if the tax rate were to go down. It’s bullshit and lies, it’s fucking politics, people. Open your fucking eyes.

Oh I know, I was just illustrating why a money supply needs to grow and be redistributed. In order to show that, I had to use a fixed money supply as example.

Right, I agree with that because the prime purpose of taxation is redistribution and therefore a tax on the poor doesn’t make any sense. Therefore all flat-taxes (ie sales tax, gas tax, etc) are without purpose. Trump wanting to hike the gas tax is a tax on the poor as much as anyone.

Yeah I see what you mean. Sales tax is a shake-down by the state. I mean, there probably are redistributive values in it since the rich probably do buy more, but redistribution is better-handled by the income tax because sales tax cannot take income into account and is therefore a tax also on the poor. There is no way to not tax the poor by using a sales tax.

It appears you’re right, except the income tax which rights the wrong of the theft of income through employment. All other taxes are therefore theft without justification. Maybe a minor property tax is ok to pay for roads and schools since the more property one owns, the richer they probably are while the poor probably rent.

That’s a good observation and I’m totally down with that.

Seems right.

I see what you’re saying, but we have ceos making 400x what their own average employee makes. They could pay 90% and still live like kings.

What is it they say??? 90% of the taxes are paid by 20% of the people? By your own fairness reasoning, why not make them pay the other 10% of the taxes because they wouldn’t notice while the bottom 80% of people would certainly notice if they paid no taxes.

Check out the table of historical tax rates en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_ta … in_history

For 50 years the top rate was 70-90% and those are the years that Trump says he wants to get back to, as in MAGA. Back when a man could support a wife and 2.5 kids without her having to work also… and the dr came to your house for $20 and the guy at the station pumped your gas. That was the fat middle class FDR created by redistributing the money through taxes. Now we bag our own groceries and we’d be lucky to see a cashier again and soon we may have to slaughter our own animals in order to save costs so the consumer can afford to keep buying and running up debt to supplement income.

You’re getting paid what you’re willing to accept, not the value you contribute or there would be no incentive to hire you. How could you be paid what you’re worth to the economy?

I was an employer. I got $30 per unit and hired a guy who could do one unit per hour. I paid him $10 and made $20 per hour off him. $10 was the going rate back then and was $5 above minimum, so I wasn’t underpaying. But if I gave him what he is worth, then I’d have to give him the whole $30 that is my revenue. If I did that, they why bother employing him in the first place? So it’s almost by definition that employment is a tax on the worker. I have to have my cut of his value, which is theft and is taking advantage of a situation that no one else will give him $10/hr and I’d be leveraging his hunger for profit. I justified it by claiming that he could always open a business and do it too, but if everyone were an employer, who’d be the employee? In order to have the rich, we must have the poor.

No because employees always create more value than they’re compensated for or they wouldn’t be employed (except in some cases where folks are overpaid). The purpose of employing someone is to extract some value from him as profit.

If there is increased value, there has to be increased money to represent it. Or if you’re saying prices fall, well that’s a result of competition, since nobody in their right mind would lower prices if he had a monopoly. Competition is usually what drives prices down, not value given by employees. Or perhaps it’s a result of falling demand and prices fall to attract buyers, but if that’s the case, the economy is not growing and therefore not adding value. If demand is falling in general, then value is leaving since things are considered less valuable. Oversupply is not adding value either since the more of something there is, the less valuable it becomes. I can’t imagine how else prices could fall.

They’re issuing more money to feed the expanding wealth gap. Those guys are making tons of money and that money has to be issued to them. It has to come from somewhere.

Value is extracted from the employees and that’s why money reflects the value flowing uphill.

That can’t be true because the money somehow disappears from the workers, and is replaced by debt to supplement the lack of money.

Rents? You mean eternally rents the equipment? Reminds me of my uncle who rented a phone from the phone company for untold decades. He could have bought 50,000 phones with the money he paid in rent. For a worker to be properly compensated, he would have to be share owner in the company, sharing all profits and expenses, not paying rent forever. Richard Wolff has some ideas about that since he’s advocating for that system.

Yeah, that’s why I say employment is a necessary evil. Everyone can’t be a tradesman who works for himself. So allowing employers to profit from employees is the carrot in front of the horse that drives the economy, but the evil is righted through the income tax.

Only if you can find better pay, otherwise he is not free to do that.

I have no clue what marx said lol. My ideas are purely my own.

Makes sense to me.

  1. I’m not sure I see how employees are freely giving up value as in charity to their employers. 2) Automation is owned by the employer and puts the employee out of a job. 3) I’m not sure what you’re saying with that one.

I don’t know anyone who wants to work. Hell, my friends sit and drink beer while I work on THEIR stuff! Rarely does anyone volunteer to help me do anything, and I do fun stuff! :sunglasses:

What’s your theory to explain why Warren Buffett advocates for his taxes to be raised and your taxes to be lowered, but he also does not write a donation to the gov? What scheme is he up to?

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dePMo9MK30[/youtube]

He is part of the same neoliberal corporate globalist system, he has everything to gain from pushing that system even if it means his tax rate goes up a little bit. The last thing he wants to do is see this system implode.

It is sanctimonious lying. Anyone can send more money to the government, nothing is stopping you. But the philosophical argument against people like Buffet is that they represent a system that believes in unlimited and unchecked massive growth in big government, which is strangulating the economy by decimating the lower and middle classes, and infusing radical leftism everywhere into society and economics. I posted a short list in another thread here about institutions controlled mostly or entirely by leftism, perhaps you saw that. People like Buffet want to expand this sort of leftist tyranny over all aspects of life, so when they get up and defend bigger and bigger government you have to know what they really mean. High taxes are just a way for this system to perpetuate itself.

The American colonies rebelled against high taxation and tyranny. That is what America was and still is. We do not want to live as serfs on the plantations of the super-rich. Buffet is a super-rich who wants us to stay in serfdom, he does not want economic opportunity for the greatest number, he does not want a reduction in big big government that takes control over more and more of every aspect of ours lives. Most people do not want to live as slaves. Buffet does not have to live as a slave, because of his wealth and position he can let this neoliberal globalist corporatocratic system of nanny state big big government continue indefinitely and it will never adversely impact him.

These billionaires are able to hire the legal teams and make the right political influences to secure their position in perpetuity, while any middle class person or small business owner cannot do that. How many jobs have been outsources, factories closed, towns decimated, how many people cannot even afford their own lives because they work 25% or 35% of the entire year just to pay the government? That is not rational.

High taxes only sustain massive statism. Since I am opposed to massive statism I am also opposed to high taxes, as the American founders were as well. This was the entire purpose behind the American Revolution, to throw off the oppression of wealthy bureaucrats who take huge chunks of your money, deny you freedoms, and force you to fall in line with whatever they decide is “best” for you. Fuck that.

But yeah, plenty of stupid people will swallow the propaganda that people like Buffet push. It is called virtue signaling. It is the antithesis of reasoning.

Ok I will respond to your other points now.