> Except the uber wealthy who can afford to lose money to pay taxes for the infrastructure that has enabled their explosive asset growth.
Federal income tax almost never gets used for infrastructure. Infrastructure is mostly built by state and local governments, which receive most of their income from sales tax and property tax, and other taxes, which are already almost entirely paid by businesses. So, they are already paying for the infrastructure that enabled their growth.
A great many state projects are 50-90% funded by federal grants. Interstate highway projects and airport projects in particular are often 90% federal (and are self-evidently infrastructure).
Various levels of local governments provide many services and benefits for my physical property located in their jurisdictions, so I do not oppose a reasonable property tax. But the federal government provides no services or benefits to the securities in my vault, so a general federal wealth tax on them is altogether different, and I oppose it.
The government very clearly provides for support for the equities in many ways (which I’m sure you’re aware of) How do the following not count as benefits to the equities in your vault?:
1. Maintaining a navy that reduces piracy enough to have global JIT delivery networks that reduce costs for corps
2. Protects corp interests abroad allowing a larger market and higher profits
3. Enforces regulations that attract a larger than otherwise likely share of people to put their money in the stock market, increasing the value of your equities.
The federal government has spent several trillion dollars fighting several disastrously stupid wars over the last several decades. Please don't try to pretend all that death and destruction wasn't good for the securities in your vault.
Or if that’s too abstract for you, think about how the securities in your vault would fair in the absence of government maintaining basic law and order; honouring and enforcing otherwise fictional property such as copyright, trademarks and patents; some degree of redress in a court system; and some degree of stability of regulation of markets.
So much of the wealth on this planet relies on Governments for it to exist and to persist.
I disagree that you can compartmentalise Government in that way. To the extent that there's aspects of Government which don't directly prop up the value of assets, many of them still play an important role in maintaining the social license required for Government to govern—and thus provide whatever it is you imagine is in your "1%" bucket.
The fact that a lot of unrelated money transits through Government to pay for social services is completely irrelevant to the point.
Military spending is 54% of the federal discretionary budget, though (the discretionary budget is about 1/3rd of the total budget). That all contributes to its security, if not all directly.
According to the 2020 figures, national defense was 11% of federal spending. Discretionary vs. mandatory seems irrelevant here. We might as well say military spending is 100% of military spending. It's just dividing it by something to make it sound higher, usually for propaganda purposes.
Nevertheless I totally agree some part of that 11% will benefit business and commerce. But it is still a terrible deal. In any other context no one would ever buy something with a 90% "commission".
I overlooked that I was looking at the chart from 2015 sorry about that. I was reporting the number on the chart I was seeing, which is why I specified discretionary and also said that discretionary was about a third of total spending, so it was clear. I just didn't have the exact number.
So I did look up actual numbers and the numbers I saw were different to yours. In 2020 the percentage was 15% (721.5 billion for military of 4.79 trillion budget).
But the exact percentage isn't that important. I still don't get the 'not a great deal' part. It's not some good you could either buy from retailer X or brand Y. If no money is spent on military than the country is ripe for invasion, so it's either secure or it isn't. And it's not like we want the percent to be higher. Like we don't want to spend MORE than the Department of Defense thinks we need to secure the country. That's an even worse deal.
Even if you choose to move your assets/business to a country that spends a lot less on military, you're likely benefitting indirectly from how much the US spends on military (assuming it's an ally and the world is stable, that might not stay true in the next couple of decades).
Unless you're arguing to pay for a private security firm to secure your assets, then maybe you can pray we get to a Mad Max style future where it makes sense to do that.
Or you're suggesting it can be bypassed by buying cryptocurrency, which is secured by other means than government might. If that's the case then I'm on board with that thinking.
If your main argument is 'I want all of the money I spend in taxes to solely be spent on securing my assets, so reduce my taxes!' then that's ignoring the other government services those taxes provide.
As a counterpoint, $900 million to get rural America actual broadband, where cable companies used similiar handouts to line their own pockets and do nothing...
We're in a "Give a man a fish/teach a man to fish" type hypothetical now.
Hungry starving sick people make the least effective revolutionaries.
They’re also not very good at spending money on consumer goods when they don’t have any, which Amazon absolutely needs. (Tesla needs a lot of people above average income, given their cheapest offering).
And these two giants aren’t the only places people can work. (Not enough by itself, but still a massive improvement compared to the situation leading to the French Revolution).
Super-rich as a class exists because we let them exist, but there is a reason we let them exist… and a reason we have things like the SEC and FTC to stomp on them if/when they get out of line.
Hungry starving sick people make the least effective revolutionaries.
Surely not. Starving people are desperate people, and desperate people are always dangerous.
Fed People with most of their basic needs met and a few luxuries make the least effective revolutionaries since they have little to gain and are terrified of losing the little they have.
If that was true, nobody would’ve revolted in Europe since the potato famine (the former Stasi HQ is a short trip from me), and the potato famine would’ve triggered an immediate war for independence in Ireland rather than set one off a generation later.
Edit: before anyone suggests food shortages in DDR, based on what I saw in the DDR museum the shortages were of fancy food like coffee rather than staples like bread and potatoes.
> Hungry starving sick people make the least effective revolutionaries.
This is true, but their visible presence and the risk of joining them often motivates the people in slightly better circumstances to become the most effective ones; the starving masses usually aren't the effective revolutionaries, but their presence often accompanies revolution for that reason.
> Hungry starving sick people make the least effective revolutionaries.
This is clearly historically incorrect.
> Super-rich as a class exists because we let them exist, but there is a reason we let them exist…
What reason is that? They exist because they are powerful, thus hard to topple. That the SEC and FTC are so ineffective (and ridiculously small pieces of the puzzle) is evidence of that.
If you actually study history (not YouTube, history books) you’ll find starving people and human rights violations to be a common cause for revolution.
“Pop trash” sounds like you’re dismissing it out of hand because you don’t like the conclusion.
I mean, it might be, but as I’m not even claiming to be a domain expert I have to (argument from authority fallacy notwithstanding) rely on the author biographies as a proxy for how much they know.
Now, would you like to give me a brief summary of how, biologically speaking, you recon being malnourished fails to put a bunch of revolutionaries at a relative disadvantage to a non-malnourished bunch of revolutionaries?
I’m saying you need to read actual history as you seem to think that starving a population won’t lead to a revolution.
> Now, would you like to give me a brief summary of how, biologically speaking, you recon being malnourished fails to put a bunch of revolutionaries at a relative disadvantage to a non-malnourished bunch of revolutionaries?
People revolt because they have nothing left to lose, not because it’s strategically a good idea. “Biologically” speaking when you outnumber your foe 100 to 1, you have at least an advantage in numbers, but again that’s not why people revolt.
Sick, miserable people make terrible revolutionaries. Desperate and hungry people have nothing to lose. Poor people in the US are miserable, but not miserable enough to be desperate.
Based on my visits to the USA, I think that’s mainly because Taco Bell and McD are cheaper than anything even vaguely healthy from any American supermarket.
(Regions visited: Central and North California, I-80 highway between SF and Salt Lake City, New York-Newark conurbation, Boston-Providence area)
It ain't that ridiculous. Poor people can't afford high quality raw ingredients and so more rely on highly processed, high-calorie foods (especially HFCS) that leave them obese.
Food stamp payments might be more than you think. For example, for a household of two people in California, the minimum payment is $430/month [0]. That's not going to be putting fancy food on the table, but its more than beans and rice (or soda and chips).
Cicero was a conservative in some ways. But I don't think he was particularly prejudiced or classist, for the time. Remember that he was technically a plebeian himself, although obviously a privileged and successful one.
Cicero's father was of the equestrian order, not patrician but definitely not plebeian. Think upper middle class from the midwest who goes to the right schools and ends up in DC.
Pompey, Crassus, Cicero, Gaius Marius, Mark Anthony even Octavian (before being adopted by Ceasar) were technically all Plebeian. By mid/late Republic the Plebeian/Patrician distinction had lost almost all meaning, as most Patrician families had died out or were surpassed in wealth and political influence by more successful Plebeian families.
The Equites were purely a social/wealth based class, any Roman citizen could become one if he we satisfied the wealth requirements.
Calling equestrians the upper middle class is not accurate. They were firmly upper class, just the lower portion of the upper class. If the senatorial class was roughly the billionaires, then the equites were the ten and hundred millionaires. Perhaps not as rich as the very top of the upper class, but still a league above the upper middle class.
Yes, calling Equestrians the upper middle class is not accurate. Our classes don't accurately map on to Roman classes; it was just a flip remark. Nouveau riche doesn't work either.
However, the Senatorial class was not an economic distinction either but rather an aristocracy. Even in the Late Republic these were old families who had had Senators and Consuls in their heredity. There were fewer of these clans, 14 at the time of Caesar (of the Julii clan). Cicero by comparison was of Equestrian rank and a New Man, novus homo, in the Roman political world.
Equestrians weren't knights anymore, expected to field a horse, .... The Roman legions had been professionalized by then. There were property and suitability requirements enforced by the Censors.
Technically it was illegal for senators to engage in any commercial activity besides agriculture so they still had to really on the equites who directly exploited the natives in the provinces to give them their cut (tax collection was privatised in the republican period). So it's not unlikely that there were individual equites who were more wealthy than many Senators.
That's fair, since senatores was a political class, not an economic class, and equites was technically the top economic class. I tried to simplify things to make the analogy possible, and I think the spirit of it is instructive even if the details could be more complicated.
The important point is that no one should mistake the equestrians for anything close to even the top end of the middle class.
Why are governments allowed to collude like this? Isn't this the same idea as price fixing? Exploiting their monopoly (governments' monopoly on the right to do commerce) to unfairly raise prices (taxes)?
The world needs at least somewhere where you can opt-out from Western neoliberalism and socialism.
You are right, of course. But Rousseau made it quite clear that the sovereignty of a government is discretionary. This sort of thinking isn't convincing on an ideological or theoretical level to anyone but a medieval peasant, and it only increases my indignation.
Then be indignant I guess? Countries pressuring each other to do things dates back as far as the existence of countries. And it isn't like this is a broadly unpopular idea either. Most people do actually believe that multinational corporation should pay their fair share of taxes.
It's interesting that you're being downvoted but you make a solid point. People in government are no different than those not in government, we're the same human beings. To suggest that they should be able to do anything they want seems pretty backwards and quite contrary to the enlightenment ideas.
It's a philosophical point disconnected from reality. In most countries we've got some system of elected government with various branches who get more power and influence than other people. Having a solid philosophical point against it doesn't change the world.
"Why is the government allowed to put me in prison for not paying my taxes, but when I kidnap someone and lock them up in my basement, I'm somehow the bad guy?!"
How so? do remember that they can only do things supported by the general climate of opinion so them being in government isn't the point of contention here. It's what we as people tolerate (passively or actively) that matters. Besides, this greatly undermines the justification for anti-trust laws as they're clearly communicating to everyone that "it's OK to collude"
Collusion between governments isn't illegal, and there is no governing body that would prevent this. At best there are economic treaties between countries.
This applies only to "global companies with at least a 10% profit margin". By definition, you're already playing ball with all of these actors if you're a global company.
> Compared to those that were less free, countries with higher economic freedom ratings during 1980–2005 had lower rates of both extreme and moderate poverty in 2005. More importantly, countries with higher levels of economic freedom in 1980 and larger increases in economic freedom during the 1980s and 1990s achieved larger poverty rate reductions than economies that were less free. These relationships were true even after adjustment for geographic and locational factors and foreign assistance as a share of income. The positive relations between the level and change in economic freedom and reductions in poverty were both statistically significant and robust across alternative specifications.
> Some fear that growth propelled by economic freedom will leave the poor behind. This was not the case during 1980–2005. During this quarter of a century, the developing countries that moved the most toward economic freedom achieved both strong economic growth and substantial reductions in poverty. This indicates that an institutional and policy environment consistent with economic freedom is an important ingredient for progress against poverty.
> We study the relationship between economic freedom and poverty rates in 151 countries over a twenty-year period. Using the World Bank's poverty headcounts of those living on less than $1.90 per day, $3.20 per day, and $5.50 per day, we find evidence that economic freedom, measured by the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, is associated with lower poverty rates. We also test the effect of various components of the Index of Economic Freedom. We find that a government's integrity and a country's trade freedom are associated with lower poverty rates. We check the robustness of our results using alternative freedom indices.
Anyway we aren't really talking about removing peoples economic freedoms, you can have a strong economy whilst retaining workers rights, social support and environmental controls. It's the poorest parts of the world that don't have a handle on this stuff.
Corporations profit the most from infrastructure, education and other collective achievements of a society, so it makes sense that they also funnel resources into that system.
The charitable interpretation of this agreement is that this is to be achieved by coordinating taxes of multinational corporations.
It seems reasonable to me, strategically speaking. I have political reservations (to say the least) towards high concentration of power though, since we’re talking large corporations, G7 and so on.
People do move there. Singapore picks up a ton of US expats, as did Hong Kong before it got swallowed by China. Bermuda and the Caymans have tons of companies and restrict immigration so tightly that they are less attractive.
Singapore has Common Law inherited from the British. Hong Kong also used to have British-style laws, until, as you said, it was "swallowed by China" (and even then, it's fairly Western on paper).
Are you trying to claim any G7 country is socialist, while suggesting an administrative division of the one-party socialist People’s Republic of China is a good alternative?
Its similarly difficult to find examples of competent propaganda ; because anything easily labeled propaganda is not competent.
Scientific and logical principles of "evidence" to not apply to human political systems, b/c the method of inquiry are too compromised by the power the system wields over them. Even information about Afghanistan comes through via the government. But today? There is us nothing modern the government wants you to know about.
On the contrary, those countries are extremely popular places to base your business activities or start a company or manage your finances from. Ever been to Bermuda? Or the Virgin Islands? You can't move for wealthy industrious Western expats and their business ventures. And also to a lesser extent Ireland, the Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland, etc. These are all some of the most popular countries to move to in the world.
But now the United States and Canada and whoever else is the G7 are trying to shut them down and force everyone to follow their hellish tax laws.
Are you implying Ireland, Luxembourg, Bermuda (part of the UK), the Virgin Islands (part of the US and UK), Singapore, and Switzerland aren't western countries part of or at very least allied with and influenced by other western "neoliberal" countries/G7?
Because that's a very, uh, unique idea. Also weird to jump from implying escape from western influence doesn't exist to listing western countries as a way to escape from the west.
The website looks really beautiful on my screen. Probably a question of screen resolution? It is true that many serif typefaces degrade quickly on lower resolution displays.
Looking at it on a 27" 5K screen — not a matter of screen resolution. The font size is definitely too small for comfortable reading, and once zoomed to a reasonable font size, the column width is too large.
According to Google Scholar, he has dozens of papers, 10000 citations, and an h-index of 37. What do you have?
And if you follow through, at least a couple of the four retractions mentioned on Wikipedia appear to be nothing but some acknowledgment/funding related trivia.
No, it’s not. In a discussion about the credibility of an academic researcher, their track record is entirely relevant. The same isn’t true of an HN comment.
"Valid ad hominem arguments occur in informal logic, where the person making the argument relies on arguments from authority such as testimony, expertise..."
Any ad hominem cannot inform you about the quality of an argument. It _can_ inform you that you should look at an argument critically but, even in the "valid" form, it doesn't address the argument.
Slight of hand. We were not discussing the credibility of an academic researcher, we were to discuss the contents and logical merit of their submission.
Both were ad-hominem. The first one also suffers from a pompous bias: What does it even matter if the submission is not peer-reviewed? It could have been posted on a blog! It is dropping little seeds of doubt, to weaken and attack something you don't want to attack directly:
"A warning to everyone that the linked website does not adhere to Wikipedia guidelines for being a credible source."
Expect better. If you demand peer-review, then review the contents as a peer! You have the opportunity to get what you want, instead of needlessly attacking a fellow scientist' credibility.
Surely a distinction can be made between attacking someone's character and attacking their claim to authority. Within every scientific paper there's an implicit claim to authority and here the track record has weight alongside whatever qualifications they may have.
No. I'm just not convinced at all by his comment about the author's publication history.
>This paper is not peer-reviewed. It should end there.
So you think scientists aren't allowed to communicate with one another and the public except through peer reviewed articles? 'Tis absurd. Anyway, peer review means very little nowadays. I publish 3-5 papers per year in top journals in my field, and many of the referee reports I see are hilariously insignificant, effortless, and/or just totally off the point.
> Advertising must be clear that the value of investments, unless guaranteed, could go down as well as up, ASA rules stipulate.
One thing you can guarantee is that the value of GBP could only go down with these fools in power. Maybe we should have some rules stipulating that must be clear during political campaigning.
Surely with the debt load the UK has right now, one can only hope the GBP depreciates at a slow but steady rate over the next few years?
Here in Canada it's considered a disaster if the dollar rises too much too quickly. We're an export-oriented economy and a rising dollar depresses the manufacturing and extraction industries every time it happens.
You say GBP going down like it's an inherently bad thing and I can't figure why. If either CAD or the GBP started consistently appreciating over time, both countries would be in quite a lot of trouble. In fact the monetary policy and debt issuance policies assume slight depreciation.
I understand the macroeconomic argument, but I still think that the fact that inflation will totally destroy an uninvested, normal middle-class-sized savings account in less than a generation is a huge obstacle for normal people building wealth. That is the inherently bad thing about it.
I primarily attribute the growing "wealth gap"---the growth in the net wealth owned by the top 0.1% of people, from a 5% share in 1970 to a 20% share in 2020---to the end of Bretton-Woods and the gold standard (1971).
The real spike proteins are insoluble and stick to certain membranes, like in your lungs. The mutant ones are shorter and more soluble, so they can more easily accumulate elsewhere, e.g. the blood vessels in your brain: hence the vaccine-induced brain blood clots.
It's not just mods, reddit itself is at fault. They banned my IP. Now, every time I create a new account, it gets suspended within 24 hours, with a PM from the admins saying "ban evasion". Even if the new account doesn't post anything. This has lasted for around six months, apparently it is permanent.
Obviously I can get around it with a VPN, but it seems most VPN IPs are shadowbanned by default, so you have to wait for every comment to be approved by mods.
The "crime" which earned this sanctioning? Spam, advertising, racism? Nope, I never posted anything like that. It was a sensible and very highly upvoted comment last year in support of the lab leak theory. The initial suspension PM from the admins openly linked to that comment as the reason for the ban.
Is your behaviour in this thread a coping mechanism intended to relieve your own anxieties and make you feel good about yourself? Or is it a genuine attempt to convince vaccine skeptics by shaming and scorning them with appeals to emotion and ad hominem attacks?
In any case, your arguments, if they can be called that, are very doubtful, in light of emerging evidence about the risks of the vaccine (see OP), and the diminishing infection rates in many countries.
> Except the uber wealthy who can afford to lose money to pay taxes for the infrastructure that has enabled their explosive asset growth.
Federal income tax almost never gets used for infrastructure. Infrastructure is mostly built by state and local governments, which receive most of their income from sales tax and property tax, and other taxes, which are already almost entirely paid by businesses. So, they are already paying for the infrastructure that enabled their growth.