Death Tax Logic

Libertythoughts · 3 days

Well the keys here are to have a government which does not show any favoritism.

That's pretty hard to accomplish. Just to begin to pull that off, you'd need to:

Get rid of all income, property and sales taxes. These favor the poor over the rich by design. Government revenue would have to derived entirely from fines for criminal convictions. By necessity, this would result in a drastically smaller government.
Get rid of all welfare for the poor. This favors the poor over the rich. Welfare for the disabled can remain, but that's all that can be allowed to remain.
Get rid of all subsidies. These favor the rich over the poor.
Get rid of all court fees so the rich and poor can litigate equally. In addition, disallow the use of personal funds to hire lawyers, investigators and expert witnesses. Instead, the state would need to give a defense budget to everyone who goes to court so that they could hire a defense team. Adding personal money to that budget would have to be illegal, to ensure that poor people and rich people are equally equipped to defend themselves in court.
Ban lobbying. It favors people who can afford to live near Washington D.C., and people who can afford to hire lobbyists or fly to Washington D.C. Writing letters to congressmen would have to be made free, to ensure no bias between the rich and the poor.
Give everyone a budget for campaign donations and require them to spend exactly that amount of money on such donations and not a cent more or less. This way, candidates who appeal to the rich would not be favored over candidates who appeal to the poor.
Select all congressional and presidential candidates by lottery, then sort out the candidates through elections. This way, rich and famous people would not have an advantage over ordinary people in getting elected. Alternatively, don't even bother with elections and just select members of the government by lottery alone, like ancient Athens (which didn't want elections precisely because rich and famous people would have an advantage).
Revoke limited liability. The limited liability provided by government-endorsed corporate charters allows the rich to do business in a way where bankruptcy will only cost them their investment. When the poor do business without such limited liability, bankruptcy costs them everything they own. Instead, the rich and poor must be legally equal when it comes to failed businesses.
Ban all no-bid contracts issued by the government. All government agencies seeking to make purchases would be legally required to design a fair bidding process first, rather than simply designating a company of their choice to receive the contract. All bidding processes would have to be submitted to civilian oversight committees composed of randomly-selected people. This would help prevent the government from favoring some companies over others.

And that's just a start...

okpok · 5 days

They'd have to shoot you in the back, repeatedly, and then leave you to bleed to death instead of calling an ambulance. Your family would probably find your death extremely suspicious after seeing your body, and they'd probably try to get any video or audio evidence available. If the evidence was all 'lost', you're 100% SOL. If they actually find something which proves it was murder, there's a small chance that the officer will be fired from that particular police department. Thus, the officer has a tiny incentive to not shoot you in the back after saying you can leave.

BlitzkriegDD · 6 days

He said +20dB.

ThisisaThrowAway88 · 8 days

Well, a good way might have been to handle it like an ordinary person. If someone is clearly doing something wrong, you stop them. If it's just questionable, ask questions, have a discussion if necessary. If it's acceptable behavior, leave it alone. Try to leave a situation better than you found it.

In this story, there was a domestic dispute over child custody between Dozier's brother and another woman who had a child with him. Someone called the police, probably hoping they could talk some sense into her brother. Officer Wheeler and Dozier's brother got into an argument, at which point Wheeler decided to taser him to 'calm him down'. That's stepping well outside of ordinary person territory. If an ordinary person used a taser on someone else for arguing with them, it would be called aggravated assault.

Next, Dozier says (and the officer agrees) that she got upset because he was tasering her brother. She got close to the two of them and was crying and demanding to know why the officer was doing that. The officer gave her three verbal commands to get back, then claims that she 'moved at him aggressively'.

Did that really happen? The officer says yes, she says no. However, the officer's own story doesn't hold up very well. The officer says he told her to get back, so she had to have been pretty close to begin with. She obviously couldn't have started running towards him. Furthermore, if he was in a position where he was able to 'push' her belly with his leg, she couldn't have been extremely close either. For the officer's story to hold up, she must have been close enough for him to say "Get back", but still far enough away that she could move at him aggressively and still leave him enough room and time to use his leg to push her away. It seems either that either his "Get back" range is pretty far, or he's lying. Since he never specified exactly what kind of aggressive movement she made, it seems very likely that he made this up. Did she run at him? Try to grab his gun? Try to punch him? If so, he would say that, wouldn't he? This is a cop who shot a chained-up dog when he went to the wrong house. His credibility is questionable.

Let's go back to the ordinary person solution. He should have gone to the house and had an argument. He should not have pulled out any weapons unless he needed them to protect himself or someone else. He should not have used his taser as a tool to achieve compliance. If argument could not resolve the dispute and there was no crime, he should have left. If there was a crime, he should have simply made an arrest and left. How's that?

isigneduptosaythis · 8 days

How to spot a concealed handgun.

TheUKLibertarian · 9 days

I think you're talking about something completely different at this point.

I repeat, it is not the corporation which imposes private losses upon the people, it is the government.

It's both. As I've said, corporations are allowed (by the government) to limit their liability. People have limited liability too; you can give up all of your assets and declare bankruptcy. The difference is that you can take some money, start a corporation, cause enormous damage for enormous profit, then declare the corporation bankrupt and keep the profit. That's not something a person could do under normal circumstances.

And I see no reason to oppose limited liability companies.

Based on your wording here, it seems you don't really understand what you're talking about. All corporations have limited liability, not only LLCs.

Also, you really need to explain this statement. Take the Montana gold mining businesses for example. You're saying there's nothing wrong with the owners of the companies being able to declare their businesses bankrupt and to keep the profits?

Governments would be just as amenable to 'partnership' money as to corporate money, and the electorate would be just as fat dumb and happy in either situation.

It sounds like you're talking about campaign donations here. I'm not sure where this came from.

Only difference really is that if your dad's business goes broke, the sherriffs come around and evict you and take your toys.

It would depend on how broke your dad's business goes, but, yes, if it lost enough money or got sued enough, this would be a possibility. Anyone who accrues so much debt that they can never pay it back tends to have to file for bankruptcy, and that's as it should be.

We already have laws on the books about corporate responsibility, they are as enforced as any future laws about 'partnership' responsibility would be.

I'm not suggesting any new laws regarding partnership responsibility. The laws are already there. If a corporations or a person or partnership damages you or your property, you have the right to sue them for reparations, and they'll go bankrupt if they did enough damage. The difference is that if someone owns a corporation and does it through their corporation, they can declare it bankrupt and avoid going into personal bankruptcy. If the corporation has few assets at the time of going bankrupt (e.g. gold mines) then the maximum loss is quite small, even if you gained enormous profit and did enormous damage.

You can't fix stupid with more legislation, especially when the current laws aren't enforced.

I'm not suggesting any new legislation. I'm suggesting getting rid of the legislation which allows corporations to be established such that the owners have limited liability.

TheUKLibertarian · 9 days

To deny corporations would be to deny partnerships and free association. How is imposing an artificial limit upon how people can do business supposed to make things better?

You're misunderstanding. Abolishing corporations does not mean abolishing businesses.

Businesses in general are not necessarily corporations. It's entirely possible to have non-corporate businesses already, and they already exist - many family businesses are not incorporated. The owners of non-corporate businesses are fully liable for any debts their businesses may accrue.

Corporations, as I've said already, are a legal instrument to limit the liability of the owners of a business to the amount of money they invested.

I'm not suggesting any artificial limit on how people do business. I'm suggesting getting rid of artificial protections which shift the burden of failed businesses onto society, the people who will never be compensated properly for the damage that was done to them. It's simple: if you own a business, and your business destroys other businesses or property, or injures people, you shouldn't be able to declare your business bankrupt and just walk away with millions of dollars in profit, leaving the victims without compensation. If you make the mess, you clean it up, the end.

TheUKLibertarian · 10 days

Why do corporations require a nanny state? Don't they pre-date the nanny state?

They go hand in hand with it. Corporations are a legal instrument to limit the liability of the owners to the amount of money they invested. It's a form of nanny state welfare for the rich.

Take the gold mining businesses for example. In Montana, gold mining companies would use cyanide heap leaching to extract gold from gold ore. Of course, this cyanide would leak into the groundwater, flow downstream into irrigation canals, and run across the surface over crops. Crops were destroyed, fisheries were wiped out, and the cost of the damage far exceeded the gains made by extracting the gold. They were sued. However, the gold mining companies had only a very tiny investment: the mine, and the mining equipment. So they took their profits, declared bankruptcy, and let their victims lay claim to an emptied out goldmine and a handful of mining equipment. It was an extremely profitable businesses, for the gold miners at least.

After this, Montana decided to ban cyanide heap leaching. This is unreasonable because you're not allowed to do it even if you do it responsibly. The reasonable thing to do would be to simply get rid of corporations as a legal instrument. If you own a business and your business causes enormous damage, you ought to be personally liable for that damage in proportion to your ownership, even beyond the money you invested.

A lot of people will claim that this would stifle investment. If you hold investors personally responsible for damage done by the companies they invest in, they might not be willing to invest so easily. Ironically, this is exactly how it should be. Society should not be required to subsidize the risks of investment - all of the risk must rest on the shoulders of the people who choose to engage in that business.

Just imagine what would have happened during the financial crisis if the shareholders of the banks had been held personally responsible for the bank's losses. No bailouts, just personal responsibility. Just imagine how that would have changed the banking industry's bullshit.

Corporations need to be abolished.

morellox · 11 days

Just look at how helpless the police is in the face of these thugs.

They didn't seem very helpless. They arrested the neonazi who got aggressive and appeared to let the others go back inside. That's pretty much what I'd expect from a decent police force.

What did you want them to do?

zaoldyeck · 15 days

Part of the problem though would be creating an intuitive user experience, since it's fairly difficult to have actual different running timelines in a game where the player him/herself is only experiencing a single sense of time.

This is something I've wondered about in a lot of game ideas. Consider a medieval warfare game (I'll come back to a generally-applicable solution at the end). Somehow, the player knows everything about what's happening in his/her kingdom at all times, regardless of distance or the fact that they had no radios or telephones. A realistic medieval warfare game would have severe delays in communication.

At best, troops on the front lines could use homing pigeons to send back news from the front lines rapidly, but homing pigeons only go home, they wouldn't be able to return to the troops. Your news would arrive at about 80 km/h, or much longer if the distance is too great for a single pigeon to fly reliably (about 800 km).

You could receive news of attacks almost immediately if you set up fire signals (like China had along the great wall), but you'd never know where the attack came from exactly. Your soldiers would just have to follow the wall to find the area where the signal was started, and then possibly follow tracks to figure out where the enemy army went.

You would be effectively unable to send any kind of rapid orders. You face several problems. Firstly, your fastest (and most reliable) mode of communication would be to send out your messages along with supplies and reinforcements. If the reinforcements travel by wagon, your messages would move at a speed of 16 km/h. Since your army would be constantly on the move, they might have trouble finding your troops or catching up with them.

I think the best way to handle all of this is to actually just make things even more realistic. Instead of letting the player see the whole world, like in a normal strategy game, turn it into a first-person strategy game. You're a king. You've got a castle. You have a war room. Your war room has a map. Your map has pieces you can move around to represent your infantry units, archery units, cavalry units and ships.

You have advisers who collect information about the status of your kingdom and can give you updates and refresh your memory. You have spy masters who can tell you about the enemy plans. You have generals who can help you construct standing orders, plan attacks, counterattacks and devise emergency plans. You have couriers to send orders to your field officers. If you prefer, you can have all of this loaded onto wagons and you can manage important battles in person.

The same idea should applicable to your game. You have some technological aids, some 'people' to help you, and you just handle the strategy of the game in a first-person manner, like an actual person who has been thrust into that situation.

chitwin · 19 days

1) Does your own body count as a natural resource which you have unfair access to?

No. People aren't resources.

2) You need to be able to have exclusive rights over your supper or the ground you stand on.

No left libertarian would disagree.

3) Sharing land, resources, means of production etc is completely compatible with the right-libertarian view.

No, it isn't. The left libertarian view follows with John Locke. By claiming a part of nature for yourself, you are taking away from everyone else, yet most people give back to society more than they take away, which legitimizes the taking of land and other resources. However, people who don't give back to society have no right to take away from society.

In practical terms, this means that we see it as completely legitimate if a jobless person decides to just walk into an abandoned office or workshop and start using it productively. We see it as completely legitimate if a homeless person decides to just walk into an abandoned home and start fixing it up and using it as their own. We acknowledge the right of usufruct.

Zard0z · 19 days

Well, the Netherlands is just as questionable as Norway. They saw the same pattern of increasing inequality from the mid-70s to the mid-90s, then a return towards equality until the mid-2000s (which never reached the mid-70s level of equality), and then turned around again and became less equal by the late 2000s.

Spain certainly fits the bill. They've had increasing equality from the mid-80s to the late 2000s. However, there's one problem: the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party was the ruling party in Spain from 1982 to 1996. Although they lost the federal elections in 1996, they retained substantial power in many parts of Spain. They regained national control in 2003, and only lost it once again in 2011. I don't think this supports your point very well.

Do you have any other candidates for capitalist countries which are becoming more and more equal?

Zard0z · 19 days

Based on what I'm seeing here, Norway was at its most equal in the mid-80s. It gradually became less equal over the next two decades, but then regained some equality in the late 2000s, although it never returned to the level of equality in the mid-80s. Were you thinking of some other measurement of inequality, or some other time period?

Zard0z · 20 days

A capitalist society can exist which has fair wealth equality. Don't you agree that that is possible?

No. Can you point to a single capitalist society which has gotten more and more equal over time?

Zard0z · 20 days

The fact that an-caps can be an -ism would tend to indicate that capitalism can be mutually exclusive with authoritarianism.

In some people's minds, yes. But, as the article stated, most anarchists do not agree.

So when I see "anarchists" spewing dogma that Capitalism and that if we get rid of that it's rainbows and gumdrops I wonder what they are smoking and if I can get in on that.

You appear to have missed a few words, but I think you're saying that you think capitalism is good, and/or that it's not possible to get rid of it? Assuming that I'm understanding you correctly, anarchists actually have gotten rid of capitalism and government several times. See the Spanish Revolution, the Free Territory, and the autonomous zones of the Zapatistas.

Zard0z · 20 days

From Wikipedia:

Most anarchists do not consider anarcho-capitalism as a legitimate form of anarchism due to the perceived authoritarian characteristics of capitalism. In particular, they argue that certain capitalist transactions are not voluntary, and that maintaining the class structure of a capitalist society requires coercion in violation of anarchist principles.

Zard0z · 20 days

You're getting massively downvoted, so, without taking sides, I'll try to explain what you said that probably pissed people off.

First, you completely ignored the point that was made in the link. You said "All people see is...", but the very point of the link was that they don't care what the majority of people see. They're not doing it to change minds, make friends, or gain popular support. They're doing it to show hopeless people that the state is not as all-powerful as it seems and to show businesses that they can't steal from the public or manipulate the government without retribution. You claimed that such protests don't have this effect, that they're just "temper tantrums" but you never actually explained why you think your point of view is correct.

Second, you've committed the fundamental attribution error. You've claimed that black blockers are childish, they're just having temper tantrums, and that they're just trying to find a justification for their violent and destructive behavior and ignored situational explanations. By doing this, you've not only insulted and alienated your target audience, but you've also failed to even understand them well enough to make a cogent argument against them. If you read the article you replied to, you'll notice that the author emphasizes at the end that it's not simply a poor personality that makes them smash windows, it's a different set of goals and different understanding of the situation. You can't argue against that just by calling people childish. You need to explain why their goals are not good, or why their understanding of the situation is not correct.

Lastly, you insisted on the effectiveness of peaceful protest and vaguely pointed at peaceful protests which were effective in the past. The problem, as adammquinn pointed out, is that those movements also had violent components. To argue that purely peaceful protest is effective, you'd need to provide at least one example of a a successful and purely peaceful movement. As far as I know, there is no such example, but hopefully you had at least one in mind.

If you can't think of an example, don't worry about it. The absence of an example of a successful and purely peaceful protest would not invalidate your point, but would does mean that you'd need to provide some other argument to explain why you think violent protest doesn't work. Basically, you'd have to show that peaceful protests like the civil rights movement and Indian independence movement were successful despite violence, and that they could have succeeded even better somehow if they had never had any violence or threat thereof.

Anyway, don't let the downvotes intimidate you from continuing your argument. Just keep in mind that you need to actually engage your readers by understanding their points of view and by politely demonstrating why they are incorrect.

phileconomicus · 28 days

It's not simple utilitarianism. Haiti has ten times our population density and nowhere near the kind of industrial, agricultural and medical infrastructure that we do.

We have an abundance of land which we can efficiently work with combine harvesters, irrigation systems, fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers and cropdusters, thereby allowing just 1% of the population to feed the country. Haiti has buckets, dirt, and a relatively tiny amount of land which must feed ten times as many mouths and which requires 28% of the population to work it.

We have refrigeration systems, preservatives, vacuum-sealed food products, and low-humidity grain silos which enable us to have food reserves that could last for up to five years during a crisis. We have a huge country, so droughts in one area can be easily resolved by trading with other areas, and our shared borders with Canada and Mexico allow easy international trade for food. Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic, another country which isn't that much better off.

Now, suppose we have all of that taken away. Suppose that some civil war causes us to become Balkanized and isolated. Our infrastructure is destroyed. Our irrigation systems are broken, our grain silos are burned, and our power plants are left in ruins. Suppose our population soars to over 3.1 billion people. We might very well have a crisis, and other countries might decide to send us food aid. Our population would continue to grow, and available land per person would continue to decline, even when we're already too crowded to survive comfortably. If that aid were to continue for decades, and if our population were to keep growing rapidly, we'd never recover. Would some people want the aid? Sure. But getting it would put local farmers out of business because they'd be unable to compete with free food. In any other situation, it would be called dumping. Many of the Balkanized states might very well decide to reject the aid just to avoid the ensuing economic problems that would be caused by it.

It's not a simple question of utilitarianism. You have moral considerations, for example, is it right to dump free products on a country and put local suppliers out of business? For another example, is it right to enable a country's population to grow if you are unwilling to support that growth indefinitely? Once you start down that path, you have to take responsibility for your actions. If you don't think ahead, you're going to cause a holocaust if the United States has a drought and can't keep up with the shipments of food. But the utilitarian point of view is a good measure too: what course of action would improve the largest number of people's lives by the greatest amount? Certainly, food dumping seems like an unlikely answer to that question.

JonNikopol · 1 month

Actually, this was on the front page of r/anarchism two days ago with 49 upvotes. Here's the comment thread.

petdance · 1 month

Ah, yes, my mistake. I thought I was in r/python after I saw your line of Python code.

petdance · 1 month

python already ships with builtins that use underscores, so that is a moot point filenames and the like could conform to the no-underscore policy

Are you suggesting that the Python library would still work if you ran this script to remove every underscore in it? A lot of the Python library contains functions which are pre-compiled C code. You'd have to run this script on the C source code, recompile it, then run the script on everything in the Python library, then rename all 3,604 files in the Python library which use underscores, then pray that everything either still works or fails quickly.

petdance · 1 month

This won't work with any python code that uses magic methods. It would also interfere with any use of underscores in strings. Here's an example of how that could really mess things up:

filename = "pizza_picture.jpg"
with open (filename, "r"):
    do_stuff()

protosz · 1 month

WF is doing this because it will maximize revenue, which is what every person that banks there ultimately wants them to do, because it will increase their interest rates.

No it won't. It will increase profit margins. Interest rates will stay the same.

jest09 · 1 month

FYI, that's not the kind of water torture which is now legal. The kind which is now legal is where they strap you to a table with your feet above your head. Then, they gag your mouth and pour water up your nose. You'll immediately panic and feel like you're drowning - and you are - because the water is getting into your upper respiratory system. You start gagging and chocking and struggling to get the water out, but you can't because they just keep pouring it on. After 20 to 40 seconds, you begin to asphyxiate. You are literally suffocating. They have doctors on hand to determine the point when they're going to start causing brain damage, so that they can stop it, perform CPR if necessary, and you give you a chance to take no more than four breaths. They repeat the process again and again, for up to twenty minutes at a time, if necessary. You can never be sure when or if they'll really start causing brain damage or actually kill you.

Many prisoners prefer to trick the interrogators into killing them in order to end their suffering.

This is now legal.

IndustrialEngineer · 1 month

In other news, Python is not ideal for combinatorial optimization algorithms. Easy to learn, not that fast at executing.

Run your code in PyPy. Your program will probably run about five times faster.

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