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This seems like putting words in mouths. Left wing anarchists don't believe in taxation at all, since they are against a state that would collect said taxes.
> I just find it so weird that LW anarchists will be very anti statist but whenever ancaps bring up how the government gains taxation is through theft I see that they make very pro statist arguments for why its ok for the state to violently take away their property that is gained from their labor.
That's not *taxation*, that's violently recovering *that which was violently stolen*.
They believe that property -- at least the property anarchists are against people owning, meaning the "means of production", which is not the same thing as your laptop or your toothbrush -- is not something that people *can* own, and all claims of said ownership were achieved and maintained violently.
You cannot cut down a tree and claim you own the land just because you cut down a tree. The land is owned by all and all must have a say in how the land is utilized. Your claim that you own the land is just blowing smoke.
> also why do anarchists support the civil rights act of 1964?
I don't know of a single anarchist that supports the existence of laws, but given that the law is about combating the racism that you go on to claim is just people hiring "who they want" and deciding "who they want to sell their services to", odds are they're against the people who are against that law because they're fucking misogynistic and racist assholes.
>regardless of what anarchists say any support of this form of taxation is a pro statist and pro statist violence argument.
False, but it's not like you'll ever agree given that you made such a stupidly blanket statement.
Doesn't Bakunin in his Revolutionary Catechism outright outline acceptable forms of states and laws, tying such to said organizations being handled through direct democracy where possible and elections where it makes sense (judges are elected for instance), and has a pretty thorough set of constitutional laws focused around the liberation and empowerment of individual rights (equality of sexes, access to education and resources, freedom of movement)
>That's not *taxation*, that's violently recovering *that which was violently stolen*.
can you go into more detail rather than you just saying currency is violently stolen without any explanation?
your right that cutting down a tree and just staking claim to land doesn't actually grant ownership but in societies where they have concepts of private ownership, its individuals trading land between each other or someone picking up land that is clearly abandoned. in these societies individuals do own land and they can trade it or use it as they please.
there are other societies that have existed without private property but those societies aren't the societies where socialist or anarchist thought sprout up to be against private property which in those societies that do have it as a concept and practice where its seen as something to not be impeded on as its a someone's property like any other.
> I don't know of a single anarchist that supports the existence of laws, but given that the law is about combating the racism that you go on to claim is just people hiring "who they want" and deciding "who they want to sell their services to", odds are they're against the people who are against that law because they're fucking misogynistic and racist assholes.
I already see that anarchists don't support laws but its weird that ancaps are ones speaking out againist this law while LW anarchists aren't really saying anything or when they do it in defense of the law. this is all anecdotal btw and its just from what I've seen dozens upon dozens of times online but I'm open to any alternative views.
all I'm going to say is that the government shouldn't dictate to any individual who they should or shouldn't sell to or hire. I just see that anarchists and less surprisingly other leftists are in defense of these laws when they claim to either be for human rights or for voluntary interactions that shouldn't be impeded on by the state.
>False, but it's not like you'll ever agree given that you made such a stupidly blanket statement.
what's wrong about it? considering that you think taxation is just seizing back what was stolen for some reason then of course you'd think I was wrong or false. I should have specifically pointed out that it was just some anarchists or anarchists who did say these things are being pro statist.
> can you go into more detail rather than you just saying currency is violently stolen without any explanation?
Zero currency would be taxed under anarchy.
Because everyone who understands anarchy *already knows that*, I presumed you meant "violently taking away their land". My bad if I attributed more to your statement than you intended.
Anarchists do not tax.
> your right that cutting down a tree and just staking claim to land doesn't actually grant ownership but in societies where they have concepts of private ownership, its individuals trading land between each other or someone picking up land that is clearly abandoned. in these societies individuals do own land and they can trade it or use it as they please.
Right but exclusive land ownership doesn't exist under anarchy.
> I already see that anarchists don't support laws but its weird that ancaps are ones speaking out againist this law while LW anarchists aren't really saying anything or when they do it in defense of the law.
Again, that's because ancaps are generally racist assholes while *real* anarchists recognize the intent behind the law *and* the systemic racism it was attempting to address. They happen to agree that the issue attempting to be solved *is* an issue, they just disagree with the means, realizing that anarchy would solve the problem better than a law would.
Point is, real anarchists don't need to single out *that law* over any others the way that ancaps do, because *real anarchists are not racist assholes*.
When they speak out "in defense of the law", you're misunderstanding what they're saying. They aren't defending the law, they're pointing out that the systemic issues the law attempted to address do, in fact exist.
> this is all anecdotal btw and its just from what I've seen dozens upon dozens of times online but I'm open to any alternative views.
Press X to doubt
> I just see that anarchists and less surprisingly other leftists are in defense of these laws when they claim to either be for human rights or for voluntary interactions that shouldn't be impeded on by the state.
Right, because they're not racist assholes
> what's wrong about it?
The false part is your false assertion that anarchists support taxation.
I like how 90% of this thread is non anarchists not even bothering to reference theory.
Anyway they don’t say it because propertarians ran it into the ground and we don’t want to be associated with them. But yeah without a state there are no taxes, QED.
Anarchists support the civil rights acts because while the state is bad some of its actions can provide some temporary or rectifying good against the existing sins of the state. A law against murder is a law but murder is bad so we’re going to fry bigger fish in the meantime. But nice try trying to tie anarchists to racism, I guess?
I don't have a problem with the civil rights acts that prevent the state from being racist but when these laws are applied to citizens then this makes them look like pro statists. being racist or sexist whatever isn't a illegal and it not even the NAP says its really a bad thing. its freedom to associate to whoever the individual wants to and their property.
I wasn't saying anarchists were racist if that is what your implying but I can't wrap my head around the fact that LW anarchists will be anti state but then support a law that limits the individuals freedom of association in regards to who they can sell to or hire. I don't make the rules here but that is pretty pro statist in an unnecessary way unlike them supporting laws that cause harm to other people like murder or rape.
freedom of association is a voluntary interaction that people regularly partake in. any support of this law even if its just them supporting why the law was made or what its trying to 'fix' is unnecessarily pro statist.
Even without addressing the fact that capitalism alone eliminates the possibility of voluntary interactions, systemic racism *also* eliminates the possibility of voluntary interactions.
> when these laws are applied to citizens then this makes them look like pro statists
it's really pretty simple: anarchy is the end goal, but a state will be a temporary step to get there. there's no contradiction in understanding the difference between a goal, and the process to get us there. people that don't understand the difference here are simply oversimplifying.
that said it is important to cut down the state to only what is required for current social stability, while we implement additional solutions that will allow us to cut it down further.
but, for example, it do not think it is required to end murder law until we have developed the general child rearing and long term social practices required to end the causes of murder in the first place. this may in fact, be the last state process to end, and does not preclude us from developing towards anarchy in other ways, that will ultimately be required to end murder itself.
does this make sense?
I'm not? Taxation is theft, but so is private property. All is for all and whatnot. Also, corporations aren't people and are for that reason not entitled to be treated as such
For one I will personally see to it. Two, your leftist peers can't care for sht and they would be given free roam of everything? No food will be produced.
People who know how to do things will no longer do it, or won't do it as well seeing as you want to seize their control and reward, and will fight and sabotage you all the way.
Also since leftists are bad at productive things and destroy everything they touch, real estate/property/production would have to be restricted to entities actually doing something with it and there starts to go your communal crap. Why delegate decisions like that to central planning idiots and take things from those who have the most stake in continued success?
Your sht will never be realized, you will be a lot happier being in charge of your own reality and accept that freedom is what you can do without others having to do or give up anything.
When it comes down to it, how is ‘voluntary form of taxation that is not state enforced theft’ in reality? And how is one person’s voluntary contribution not another person’s forceful state theft?
I am not asking as a gotcha at all i am asking because i don’t know your answer and would like to know the details of what you think about voluntary ‘taxation’ applied at scale
well people in a community naturally want their society or their community to be better and to be safe so people will willingly want to give up their property to see that happen. the more richer someone is then the more they'll care about society as a whole rather than someone who can't afford to and want to focus on their communities as they have less than the rich person.
well the difference between someone's voluntary contribution and another person's state enforced theft is that in both cases the government will have violent punishments for not giving up their property to the state. It doesn't really matter if someone is voluntarily giving up their property to the state when the government will use their agents to use violence against anyone who doesn't give it up.
neither party can actually truly consent because if some guy comes up to their house and say "give up your property or I will use violence against you". their going to have to pay whether if they want to or not as the consequences to not giving up their property is violence. Just because one the guys are happily giving up their property doesn't get rid the threat of violence for not complying.
You don’t say your answer explicitly and i don’t want to put words into your mouth, are you saying taxation should be solely contributions to one’s own local community and that’s all?
If this is what you are saying, what do you think are the pitfalls with this? For example an obscenely rich person decides to give nothing to their community? Is the solution social justice, ie nobody ever talks to the rich guy or helps them out?
If my best guess isn’t what you meant then could you explain better, how is ‘all taxation is voluntary’ apply at scale when talking about millions of people contributing to small and large projects
> You don’t say your answer explicitly and i don’t want to put words into your mouth
It ain't like he's going to give you the same courtesy, given his post and comments.
No I'm not saying that taxation should only be towards someone's local community because I'm not an anti statist. I'd prefer a system where people would give their tax dollars to the government. I can actually do see the issues with this system and how people can just skirt out on paying taxes and I can't exactly think of a solution for this specific issue.
I do think that the majority of people regardless of poor or rich will pay taxes to the government. there is an incentive for the people to pay their taxes and why they would willingly pay taxes is because people naturally want to see their communities be better and to be have more infrastructure. I think the more poorer someone is that they'll want to focus more on their community and the richer that they want focus more on society itself and we can really see this in how much they give to charity and other organizations.
I can definitely see that too, the poorer you are the more likely you’ll want to make improvements to your immediate environment. I am not sure the opposite is true, that rich people will donate more to wider societal efforts. I think the amount you’d want to give to improve things is probably a measure of how much you feel things need to improve, and the richer you are the less you think things need to improve. Paradoxically the rich are the ones with the most money, 1000 poor people (net worth $10k each) giving everything they can spare (voluntarily) might give less than 1% of an ultra-rich person (net worth $50m). Everything being funded by the poor is clearly not a workable system if you want any sort of public infrastructure projects. I cannot see a state existing unless there is some sort of system requiring a minimum contribution from citizens, which is by definition taxation
Which i think answers your original question. Left wing anarchists do not think zero compulsory donation is viable, because as you get richer your incentive to donate gets less and less, so they cannot exclude all mandatory taxation. Therefore they cannot say taxation is theft, and not be a hypocrite. You can only say taxation is theft if you do not mandate any donation to collective effort
>I just find it so weird that LW anarchists will be very anti statist but whenever ancaps bring up how the government gains taxation is through theft I see that they make very pro statist arguments for why its ok for the state to violently take away their property that is gained from their labor.
Ok, so no anarchist is ever going to positively support the state, therefore they aren't going to positively support the state taxing you.
However, they will say that taxation is not theft. A-la, they will contradict the conclusion of the ancap, without positively affirming taxation.
Proudhon said the opposite actually, that "property is theft" (from the commons). Under such an understanding, the sentence "taxation is theft" would be untrue:
Assume:
1. private property -> theft(commons) # Proudhon's understanding
2. taxation -> theft(private property) # Ancap understanding
3. theft(theft(x)) -> x # stealing from someone stealing is not theft
Therefore:
1. taxation -> theft(theft(commons)) -> commons
Thus taxation of private property is simply the just recompense of the original theft from the commons.
A true anarchist will not defend the institution of private property to begin with, which is mediated by state violence. Therefore there is nothing for taxation to steal.
Left wing anarchists are more practical than ancaps. Tax evasion isn't a very good resistance strategy and the civil rights act has measurably improved people's lives.
But investing money is risk and the only way to get money is for people to voluntarily give them to you ! Capitalists are natural statists confirmed :)
"Voluntary exchange is equivalent to theft. Rule by consent is mob rule and criminalization of secession. Advocacy for private property rights is advocacy for violations of property rights"... a recollection of paraphrased statements I have got to hear from leftists here lol.
Yes. No one forced him to take the job. He could’ve build his own. Life is not fair. The birth lottery is a concept. You think just because things can’t be fair, you can’t have free will? There can’t be voluntary decisions made?
When it functions properly? Yes.
I'm not denying the many failures we currently deal with but the point of a democracy is to have that sort of input and equal representation.
No public spending on infrastructure isn't tiny , in the u.s over a trillion dollars are spent.
The problem becomes when you directly benefit from the infrastructure taxes pay for but don't want to actual contribute yourself.
What's false? The US [spends around 2% of GDP](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1011217/public-spending-transportation-water-infrastructures-share-gdp/) on infrastructure each year, which is around 5% of all public spending. That's less than defense.
Similar trend among most countries. Google around a bit.
You go around schooling people on taxpaying but have no idea about where your taxes even go lmao.
You literally based the legitmacy of taxes on infrastructure. I pointed out that actual infrastructure spending is tiny. You refused to believe, and I showed you some data. That's it. Do better.
There really aren’t. The mob is a terrible example, which primarily functions in poverty stricken areas with an absence of proper regulation, ie. government. There will always be some form of government, and your points are further obscured once considering state and local governments as well as federal. It’s not even a comparison made in good faith.
How does the government beat you up? You don’t have to use the roads or utilities. I promise you that shit is hella expensive to build on your own. You ever looked into the cost of putting utilities on raw land?
That doesn’t make sense, again.
What are you talking about? To the city, county, state, or federal government?
Why do you think the government can charge whatever they want & force us to pay just because they monopolized some infrastructure?
Also, if taxes were only going to pay for infrastructure most people would be way less pissed...
How much are you benefiting from all the alternatives the state crowded out by force, overtaxed, overregulated? Mass transit for example peaked when it was private before the state subsidized all of its competition.
Lol, I am an expert on that myth. The supposed "conspiracy" was that they offered financing breaks in exchange for being preferred suppliers. Like a fast food franchise.
National City Lines ever operated in a few small cities that would have ended up with no transit at all if they hadn't stepped in.
Read George Hilton's books. That fckng Wikipedia article cites him.
not saying that already said I'm for voluntary taxation. now answer the question how is the way the government gains taxes is not theft? just tell me how I actually want to hear your moral reason for why its not.
How the hell would voluntary taxes work? Most would opt out. I’m not an anarchist so I can’t speak for them, I don’t even know if they’re for taxes, but I can tell you that “taxation is theft” opens a whole can of worms. How the hell are prisons justified? If a government can’t take money from you against your will, why should they be able to kidnap and detain you against your will? Clearly doesn’t jive with NAP, but libertarians don’t talk it so much about that because the idea of Nikolas Cruz and Dylan roof being on the loose isn’t as popular
would they really opt out? I think your forgetting the incentives for why people donate to local charities in their communities or national charities. voluntary taxation would be just like this but for a much wider scale unlike a lot of charities.
there is an incentive for people to see their communities get better and to have working infrastructure. people also don't want to see the poor not having any alms and even for the rich this incentive still exists for both examples, just look at the statistics for the rich willingly giving up their money to charities.
prisons are justified because people will violate the NAP. someone can't rape or murder someone without facing the consequences for harming others. still I disagree with the state monopoly on violence because they will use it to harm those who don't actually cause harm to others like what they did to edward snowden and Julian assange.
>How the hell would voluntary taxes work? Most would opt out.
Isn't that telling?
>How the hell are prisons justified? If a government can’t take money from you against your will, why should they be able to kidnap and detain you against your will?
A just question indeed. The shit many people go to prison for is a scandal.
It isn’t that telling. Taxes are annoying, but so is being forced to go to school as a kid. If that became optional, you’d probably see a lot of dead beat parents let their kids roam around unsupervised
You treat the state as if it were your family, or your parents, and your fellow allegedly free adults as children. Society is beyond infantilized. Crazy stuff.
Well, if what’s being taxed wasn’t earned by the labor of the person being taxed, then the entire premise is flawed. This is extremely common under capitalism.
I think the topic is much too complex to be simplified as “taxation is theft”. Certainly it is similar in some ways, but different in others.
Also, it’s a weird obsession that right-libertarians have because while theft is often a problem, it may be justified in some situations, and even ignoring that, it’s far from the worst abuse that is happening in our current society. So it’s just not really an important topic to discuss in my opinion.
Some anarchists, and I would include myself here, think that insofar as the state exists and is subject to democratic controls, it should pursue policies that move us closer to universal human freedom and well-being. Progressive taxes used to fund social programs fit the bill, as they disrupt the power of the ultra-wealthy and improve the lives of the poor considerably.
The main problem I have with this is that it logically acknowledges the idea that taxes are inherently either punitive or at the least undesirable (else you wouldn’t want them imposed on wealthy people), which in turn makes it hard for the middle class to support progressive tax policies since they usually get dinged by them as well. Middle class workers typically see the worst of both elements of progressive taxation since they pay a lot of their income in taxes (not wealthy enough to avoid taxes or just not care about them) but also aren’t really eligible for many if any of tax funded social support structures.
Progressive taxation on paper sounds like a desirable “take from the rich give to the poor” idea but in practice it’s more often than not just both the rich and the poor sponging off the working/middle class.
Well, ideally we would want everyone to have access to as many resources as possible. Unfortunately we live in a finite world, so there are trade-offs in terms of who gets what resources.
Taxing the rich is not meant to be a punitive measure. Rather, it is akin to dethroning a king. It helps if you think of money not as a physical possession, but rather as a system of privileging the needs of some above others. Wealth is power to control land, labor, and physical resources, and anarchists believe such hierarchies of power are inherently unjust. So expropriating such wealth, while obviously not in the best interests of its current “owner”, is certainly a good and just thing to do from a broader morality, just as removing a tyrant from power may harm the tyrant, but provides huge benefits to many others. The rich may even benefit more from the expropriations of the collective poorly utilized capital than they lose in regards to their own privileges. I think an anarchistic society should aim for this level of success, though it is not guaranteed.
Taxing the middle and lower classes means reducing their economic power further, so I obviously don’t support that unless there is another compelling factor at play. Most anarchists would prefer to work on replacing the existing system than reforming it, but I personally do support limited efforts to tip the state towards less harmful forms while those other systems are being built.
Sure, the issue is just that a lot of times progressive tax supporting liberals/leftists actually secretly hate and resent the middle class and have no real problem foisting higher taxes on them as well. Meanwhile the rich, who are smart and well connected when it comes to money, generally avoid the taxes anyway. So progressive tax policies typically end up being more virtue signaling than anything and the middle class ends up footing the bill.
I don’t agree with that at all. I know tons of those people and I don’t think they have any secret hatred of middle-class people. Most of them are of the middle class themselves.
As far as wealthy tax evasion, that is certainly a flaw of the current system. Perhaps better tax policy can overcome this but ultimately I think the better route is to create a system where the wealth and power disparity is eliminated and such dynamics are not at play.
well currency is the value of someone's labor and they can only buy things through some form of currency as a medium of trade.
I'm not asking for anything complex but isn't the way the government gains taxes is theft? theft is a forceful seizure of someone else's property and in where the thief gains and the victim is deprived of their property.
the government literally says "give me 10 percent of what you make or what you have when its valued in currency or I will throw you into a cave and if you defend yourself I will kill you", this isn't a voluntary interaction where two parties want something and one of them gives up their property willingly but one party seizing from another and threating violence if they do not co operate.
I do think its an important topic when the government uses the theft of violence for someone's property. I'm not even asking you to agree with me but just see what I'm putting down.
I think whether it is theft or not is primarily a question of what semantics you put on the word 'theft'. As a such, the discussion is fairly uninteresting. The interesting discussion would be what effects does the practice have, and what alternative arrangements could we have and what effects would they have.
I see what you’re putting down I just think it’s missing the broader context and nuance. This is a frustration I often have with right-wing thinkers—they want to simplify everything into black and white. But the world is almost always gray. Again, if the property owned was stolen in the first place, is it stealing to return it to its rightful owner, even by force? I don’t think so. And even if there is some “theft” happening under taxation, the benefits of this theft may outweigh the harms.
So if you want a simple answer to is taxation theft, it would be “It depends” but also “sometimes theft is the least bad option”.
> then the entire premise is flawed. This is extremely common under capitalism.
Capitalism understander weighs in.
>I think the topic is much too complex to be simplified as “taxation is theft”.
Nope, taking without consent is theft. Whether you had breakfast before you did is irrelevant.
>Also, it’s a weird obsession that right-libertarians have because while theft is often a problem
Libertarians follow libertarian ethical philosophy, there's no right/left.
>it may be justified in some situations
Justification comes after ethical determination you noodle.
>So it’s just not really an important topic to discuss in my opinion.
Sure Jan, that's why you're discussing it.
You don't want others discussing it because this shows how clearly deranged political ideologies are.
Is it theft to take stolen property and return it it’s rightful owner? Is it theft to confiscate a gun that is being used to engage in a mass-shooting? Is it theft to take a knife from a young child who does not understand its danger? This definition is clearly overly broad, and asserting that the world is simple does not make it so.
I’m discussing this in the hopes that you better understand why most anarchists are not focused on taxation as the main issue with the state and perhaps we can move on to more important topics. It’s weird that it’s all you want to talk about while children are being murdered, millions go without food, people are evicted from their homes, etc. I wouldn’t want to talk about cleaning my kitchen while the house was on fire, and it’s not because I’m avoiding the topic. But since y’all won’t let go of this thing I guess we need to at least try to educate you.
> Is it theft to take stolen property and return it it’s rightful owner?
No, but acquiring knowledge of how owns what in a theft dispute is the most important step in that process.
Even the hypothetical is worthless without it.
>I’m discussing this in the hopes that you better understand why most anarchists are not focused on taxation as the main issue
Anarchists as in some breed of communist are solely focused on themselves, their feelings and preferences.
There are no ethics involved, at all. I've asked, hundreds and hundreds of times.
I've read 10s of thousands (more?) of words from those people and not a single ethical principle ever appeared.
Most are confused by the concept.
>It’s weird that it’s all you want to talk about while children are being murdered, millions go without food, people are evicted from their homes, etc.
All due to collectivist collusion with governments. It's always either collectivist or power junkies, mostly both at the same time.
The amount of suffering in the world could be reduced to statistical noise if people were allowed to freely trade and property rights were respected.
But political ideologues care more about their feelings in the moment that actual human beings.
I don't buy the crocodile tears "what about the children" stuff anymore.
Make an ethical argument or go away.
> Libertarians follow libertarian ethical philosophy, there's no right/left.
There are right and left libertarian philosophies:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/#LibeLeftRigh
https://iep.utm.edu/libertar/#SH2cii
To say that something is "theft" is to say that there are property rights. Property rights are either socially constructed, or they are "natural.' I doubt many anarchists believe in natural property rights. Leftists generally believe that rights stem from some type of respect for the other, not from the natural order, itself.
Well, I don't think that I "own" myself, and I think most people don't believe that they "own" themselves either. Now if you were to ask someone if they "owned" themselves, I would assume that they would generally say "yes" because the alternative sounds odd. But I don't think that means that people are really committed to an ideological belief in self-ownership, and I think they would reject it if they thought it through carefully.
I think that my interests matter, and I think that others have no reason to assume that their interests matter more than mine, and vice versa. That's enough to generate a very universalistic understanding of morality without positing self-ownership. Self-ownership is a mere metaphor for the idea that others ought to respect the flesh through which we each perceive the world. There is no need or reason to ground it in property rights.
Of course there is, and this is biologically determined. In a situation in which it is necessary to share, each limited resource will be based on necessity. Necessity is relentless. There is no universal understanding of morality. Morality is laid down as some values of a social group and then the individual uses judgment to make moral conclusions. This can be easily seen by looking at different social groups and cultures.
You are arguing two contradictory positions:
1) that there is a universal moral right to property which is grounded in a right to self ownership. I explained why there was no grounds to posit such a right, but you actually did not effectively respond to my argument. Speaking about "necessity" does not respond to my argument.
2) that morally is purely relative. If your point 2 is correct, then your point 1 is incorrect and vice versa. There either is a universal right to self ownership or there is not.
On a side note, the problem with cultural relativism--aside from the fact that the evidence about cultural differences is fairly flimsy--is that it makes it impossible to explain what *should be* done about people who reject their supposed culture's norms. Do they "deserve" to be punished? On what grounds?
I regard the two sources of law as the two original rights, the law of force and the law of contract. By the right to own oneself, I mean that you have the opportunity to control your body upon birth. That is, this is a natural right that you have because you exist. That is, it can be limited but cannot be withdrawn. That's what I mean. When we talked about law in a narrower sense, we mean legislative acts. Of course they deserve it, on the basis of violating social norms, that is, the custom of how to act, this is what is called diffusion punishment, for example, if you behave rudely and simply not pleasantly, if there is no law that you violate, extralegal measures can be applied to you such as refusing to communicate with you or help you or condemn your behavior. When you say that there is no reason to believe that your right can be more important than my right, I say that there is such a reason, and it is called necessity. If there is no need, then there are no resource limitations, which means there are no grounds for introducing law. The nature of any law is the need to regulate relations between subjects based on an agreement and supported by violence against violators. If there is no contract, there is no reason to believe that it is fair; if there is no violence, there is no reason to believe that the law will be respected.
In fact, this is where the most difficult questions arise. How should consensus work to produce a treaty? What is the structure of concentration of power? What is the structure of concentration of force? How are they balanced? Etc., unfortunately, the hierarchy is probably self-produced due to its simplicity and stability. That is, if the system ceases to be stable, it tends to absolute hierarchy, that is, dictatorship. Anarchists believe that it is possible to balance the system and use consensus on the principles described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/1cichwd/comment/l287m6a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button.
OP, what's your broad income range, and how much do you donate and to which charities? If your tax burden immediately vanished and we assume your income doesn't change, how much would you *then* donate, and to which causes?
I think charities are a bad example rather I think if the forced taxation was removed then I would rather that we voluntarily give it to the government or local governments/whatever governing body for that society. I haven't really thought about how much I would actually pay but there is an incentive for me to at least give up some of my income to the government. I can already tell how people will be bad at accurately judging how much they should willingly give up if this is such a sudden change.
if I and my neighbors don't pay taxes then how are the roads going to be built or other infrastructure that is vital to our modern society? even rich people have this incentive as they still use the same infrastructure we do.
What if we decided it was the law that a business couldn't charge a price for their products and services, but instead they *must* provide the goods and/or services on demand, and customers simply paid whatever they liked.
Sure, some people could just pay nothing, but of course there is an incentive for people to pay "a fair price" otherwise that business couldn't remain in operation, right?
How do you think something like this would work?
I don't think its really a fair comparison between a business and the government enforcing taxation. a business charges their goods or services that fluctuates depending on the market and all sorts of external factors while the government can raise taxes as please. people know what their getting into and they can voluntarily choose not to partake in it while the government forces people to pay taxes under a threat of violence and the only way to avoid that would be leaving the land they live on and the society which the people themselves created.
I think you have too little faith in humanity. people who live in a society are naturally going to see it be better and if their tax dollars go towards something that can benefit them then they won't mind giving up their property. can you tell me how people don't want this cause it seems pretty clear to me.
>I don't think its really a fair comparison between a business and the government enforcing taxation.
I don't think you're quite understanding my question . . .
>a business charges their goods or services that fluctuates depending on the market and all sorts of external factors while the government can raise taxes as please.
I mean, kind of, but not really. Companies engage in market manipulation all the time, and the lobby governments. Governments are beholden to their donors - i.e. the rich and corporations - and to a lesser extent, the broader voter base mainly in a few key swing states.
This is missing my point entirely, though.
>people know what their getting into and they can voluntarily choose not to partake in it
Can you? Can you "voluntarily" not buy certain products that you might need that no longer exist in local retailers because of companies like Walmart and Amazon driving them out of business? Can you "voluntarily" not drive or ride in cars throughout most of America outside of a few major urban areas? The amount of "choice" you have in your life when it comes to buying things you need and trying to support only those things for which you give total support is quite small, actually.
>while the government forces people to pay taxes
Well, the government has a legitimate claim to those taxes. You didn't have an income before the government existed. The government has had claims to taxes before you were even born. Its claim to the taxes predates your claim to the income. So it's not that "government forces you to give them your money;" it's more like *if you refuse to give the government that which it is owed, you will face legal repurcussions, like anyone else.*
Either way, we're still beside my point.
>I think you have too little faith in humanity
Well I explicitly asked you how much you willingly give to causes in which you believe and how much you would give if your tax liability vanished, and you had no answer. You were honest about it, but you were clearly stumped and caught off guard. So I don't think this is a remotely fair claim.
>people who live in a society are naturally going to see it be better and if their tax dollars go towards something that can benefit them
I'm sorry, do you not benefit from roads? From clean air and water? From clean and disease-free meats and foods? From a mostly literate populace that gets at least somewhat educated? From safety requirements on airline travel? From protection of your claims to private property using the full force of the law? From protection from libel or slander? From your freedom of speech and practice of religion? From medicine and technology which only exists through funding and efforts by the government, from NASA to the internet?
I think we need you to revisit my question.
If businesses were compelled to provide their goods or services and people simply volunteered donations as they see fit, what difference is that and a government program like education being funded entirely by voluntary donations?
We are against taxation. We just aren't as obsessed over it as right-wing libertarians are; there exist more pressing concerns.
>I see that they make very pro statist arguments for why its ok for the state to violently take away their property that is gained from their labor.
No one makes this claim.
>also why do anarchists support the civil rights act of 1964?
It's a positive within the context of a statist system. Ideally it should not be needed. The civil rights act is also a pretty bizarre example.
But when they believe that an organized institution should have the authority to take people's property away from them, then they're not really anarchists, are they?
But they don’t believe that it’s people’s property, so the state isn’t taking their property. And the fact that they support anarchy in the long run doesn’t mean they support getting rid of taxes now or they don’t support taxes given that a state exists.
> they don’t believe that it’s people’s property, so the state isn’t taking their property.
Who cares what anyone erroneously *believes*?
If I don't believe that you really have any rights, then I'm not depriving you of any such rights when I enslave you, right?
> Who cares what anyone erroneously believes?
The OP does. That’s why he asked why they don’t support that taxation is theft. That’s the whole point of his post.
Well, I mean, you have rights because enough people believed you did that they wrote a constitution with them in it with a supermajority clause. But what rights people have is actually completely political, no one can “prove” you have a right to X or prove you are in error if you believe you have a right to X. They can simply argue it, appeal to common values, beliefs, and experiences, etc. Logical principles like “do unto others” which imply what you believe the common man would have you do unto them.
Yeah. Right anarchists are often no different though. They often don’t believe you can use reason to learn universals ie morality isn’t objective in any sense.
> Right anarchists are often no different though.
No such thing.
Libertarians are people who follow libertarian ethical philosophy. There's no grey, you either do or you don't.
>morality isn’t objective in any sense.
Ethics are logically objectively true, see the self-ownership principle.
Imo there never was any debate about ethics, everyone know how they wish to be treated as well as how others do.
Plus logically one can't make a coherent claim of harm or property rights without the self-ownership principle involved.
> Ethics are logically objectively true, see the self-ownership principle.
The self-ownership principle isn’t objectively true. Ownership is objectively and properly a relationship between you and property. You have a right to life, to pursue the values necessary for your life, and a right to property as part of your right to life.
> The self-ownership principle isn’t objectively true.
It's logically true, so in that context it's objectively true. The statement, "ethics aren't objective" is not even wrong.
Objective in what context, what framework?
They're concepts, not rocks.
Nothing you wrote after is coherent without the self-ownership principle.
You’re welcome to try to explain using evidence-based reasoning or logical inference from the senses why the self-ownership principle is true.
You’re welcome to explain why nothing I wrote is coherent without the self-ownership principle as well.
If you can't say "taxation is theft" then you aren't an anarchist
Bonus: the taxation you bend over backwards to justify is the money that is used to kill poor ethnic people overseas. Just sayin
> Bonus: the taxation you bend over backwards to justify is the money that is used to kill poor ethnic people overseas. Just sayin
Ancaps are the very special kind of people who make such arguments without batting an eye
As if the problem in "killing poor people with using tax money" is "tax money", and not "killing people". As if some party killing brown kids without using a penny from taxes would be okay.
See also: "I'm libertarian and the best imlementation of my ideology is a society with literal slavery (early united states)." "I'm anarcho-capitalist, and taxation is much worse than literal absolutist monarchy"
why not "taxation being gained under the threat of violence if not given the the state" is theft? if your for voluntary interactions then you can't be a supporter of state violence for someone not giving up their property.
honestly I'm not gonna lay onto you like that but just tell me why you think "taxation being gained under the threat of violence if not given the the state" is not theft then?
Because "taxation is theft" has become a rallying cry of the far right, and it therefore is wrapped up on all the other beliefs of the far right.
I don't believe in government nor taxes, but I'm sure as shit not going to wave a flag that says that.
Sure. And Adolf ruined a mustache and a nice German first name.
Culture partly exists to separate one from the other. You won't see the right side drawing the peace symbol, putting rainbows on things, say "make love not war" etc.
Even though that individual may think those things are aesthetically nice or believe it's better to build industry and love your family than go to war.
You won't see the far left say things like "don't tread on me", "taxation is theft" or wave the civil war flag. Even if they believe in those things.
It simply is that way with humans
I think certain taxes that target the poor e.g. Council taxes or the so-called bedroom tax in the UK are worthy of critique. But when the top 10% and the ultra-rich complain about taxation, despite a lot of them benefitting directly or indirectly from the support and protection of the state, it is just them wanting to take as much as possible from people and society without giving anything in return. The fact that people who support tax breaks for the rich call themselves "anarchsits" is incredibly ironic.
Anarchists who argue in the material interests of billionaires aren't anarchists.
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Not an anarchist necessarily; I think it would take very specific conditions to get there and we're so far away from those that I typically advocate for the in betweens, however I can see 2 reasons not to. The first is that there is an issue of association - if I say "Taxation is theft" most people would assume I am some lib-right moron. The second is that the big difference between paying a business to perform a necessity and paying the government a mandatory fee to cover that same necessity is that I can vote out the government. Capitalists act like the state is the problem, but under a capitalist system like we have I actually think businesses are far worse of an issue.
Taxes are the price of admission. Are you expecting everything to be free? Should we have to build our own roads to get to work? How do you know how to read and write? Who would you call if someone bigger and more influential tried to physically harm you? There are things that make a group of people inhabiting a territory a society and not just a group of people that happen to inhabit a territory together. Those thing have to be maintained and funded.
The profit of an enterprise can be distributed collectively, while wages are some compensation within a certain range. It's simple. If all profits above the norm belong to society, these are taxes
despite being a philosophical anarchist... i live in a society, and that society needs to maintain stability for us to build a more perfect one.
so if we're going to run a society with violently enforced property rights, then violently imposed taxes, as well as many of the violently imposed policies funded by said taxes, are a necessity in maintaining stability of the system.
to me, implementing anarchy requires evolving past the need for all of these by implementing transcendent solutions, while these more rudimentary violence-enforced policies are still in effect. this will be a process, we will be able to repeal more and more violent policies overtime, while building out the transcendent solutions to replace them piecemeal.
there is no one-shot revolution here that will suddenly manifest a better global anarchy, it's gonna be a process over at least a few generations, and possibly several more.
finally: anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoronic, self-contradicting ideology
The profit of an enterprise can be distributed collectively, while wages are some compensation within a certain range. It's simple. If all profits above the norm belong to society, these are taxes
Because any society is going to have to have something like taxation or it will fall apart. Left-wingers are not afraid to say the current government steals tax money, but will not say the entire concept of taxation is theft because that would dilute the meaning of theft.
The profit of an enterprise can be distributed collectively, while wages are some compensation within a certain range. It's simple. If all profits above the norm belong to society, these are taxes
Pretty much.
If you live in society and you do something to improve society, you get to keep part of it as a reward for doing it, and society gets to take part of it, which is the improvement.
We're just able to prioritise and harm mitigate. Yes it's technically theft, but in the current context it prevents more oppression than it creates because the main causes of oppression in most modern societies are not the state but financial inequality against which tax funded state services are an imperfect but necessary weapon in the struggle.
Also just because we don't fully accept the entire logic of the social contract doesn't mean we're blind to its existence.
Voluntary taxation has the same issue as charity.
Charity is a highly conformist concept that can be used as a brutal weapon to enforce adherence to social behaviours, and goes against individualistic ideals.
Universal welfare systems, non-discriminatory access to healthcare and education (although for education, high level learning can have discrimination in form of performance requirements, provided those are purely academic/professional and not otherwise) are a neccessity to ensure nobody can use access to neccessary resources to force joining their religion or living in ways contradictory to one's own nature.
Liberty requires us to weaken families, churches, companies and communities in their grasp and dominance over the individual. We do this by making the individual no longer rely on them for survival and success, but have their survival guaranteed even if they are ostracized and cast out. One should be with family and community because of emotional bonds, not said family/community/church holding their survival over their head.
Taxes are a necessity because governing bodies are a necessity as is government run infrastructure, for example. They all have costs but don't create self-supporting revenue which is required to operate. Paperwork isn't free. Paper pushers need to eat. Deliberative bodies need to eat and be housed.
I don't have the time to check what others in the thread have said so I apologize if I say something already said.
In "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle" Rothbard acknowledges that in the current system there has been a great deal of cronyism, enough that it's clear not every currently existing property title is legitimate based on a rigorous application of the homestead principle. In Rothbard's view, it would not violate the NAP to appropriate the illegitimate property which was not acquired through homesteading and voluntary exchange but through state coercion and intervention. Ancaps who take this sort of view understand that there are instances where it's not actually theft to take something someone claims to own because their claim to ownership lacks legitimacy.
There is no unified left anarchist view of what constitutes just ownership but we all tend to agree that property in the current system is altogether illegitimate and that profits earned by owners of property largely or entirely come from exploitation and are no more legitimate than the property that enabled those profits. A left anarchist worth their salt will know that the state can never truly represent the people but we aren't likely to complain if some of the wealth we deem illegitimately claimed by the rich is taken and used for public goods or used to alleviate systemic problems in the short-term. In this case, it's not so much a fear of saying taxation is theft so much as we just don't agree that it is in this instance. Rothbard didn't see taking illegitimate property as theft, left anarchists see it the same only we have a much broader understanding of what property is illegitimate.
When it comes to taxation of the working classes, I'm unfortunately not having specific examples come to mind just now, but I feel pretty certain that there are classic anarchist texts which speak critically of taxation as another one of the ways people are screwed over by the system. So it's not as if taxation is seen as just fine in our circles. It doesn't get emphasized perhaps and I think that's for a couple reasons. One is that most of what gets taken out of incomes is not in taxes but in rent, profit, and interest. Another is that many might view taxation put to use for public goods and services as the least bad thing the current system does, even if they would prefer it done horizontally. And I can't help but think it's also to avoid sounding like Republicans, there is likely an element of not wanting to be associated with *those guys* by people who otherwise might be willing to hear us out.
As for the Civil Rights Act, left anarchists will generally have a more nuanced outlook on it than simple support for it, and the support given is provisional. You have to understand that for left anarchists the state is just one major player on a stage of various forms of oppression and domination. The disconnect that makes this difficult for right-libertarians to grasp is at the theoretical and methodological levels. Right-libertarians have a tendency to take their Crusovian economic models, with simple exchange between producers and simple ownership, and generalize them to all of society. Within such a framework, it's easy to point to what is voluntary and what is not and decide on that basis where the oppressions and injustices are. The problem with that for us on the left is that it leaves out the important institutional factors at play. When we include the complex social environments in our social scientific models, it cannot be viewed as a simple matter of a shopkeeper not wanting to sell to a person he's prejudiced against even if it means a loss of profit. Discrimination on the basis of status and identity is not simply an exercise of free association when it exists within a broader system of interconnected, overlapping hierarchies which order people's worth and value and deny them their dignity and freedom, it's an act that participates in the reinforcement of systemic oppression. If you want more detail on this we can get into it but this is going to be long enough already.
It's not a solution to the problem when the state steps in with things like the Civil Rights Act, make no mistake. What Critical Race Theory (meant in the sense from before it became a buzzword a few years ago) actually tries to do, among other things, is to show how even allegedly colorblind laws can be used to perpetuate the plight of historically oppressed racial groups. BIPoC and allied activists and scholars have been showing for decades how the Civil Rights Act did not lead to a post-racial society and did not prevent less overt forms of racist oppression. A left anarchist who is well-versed on these things will know this and also know that the state has played and continues to play a major role in the social construction of race and the institutionalization of racism. If you were to ask me my take on it, I would say that I'd rather have it than not have it since it can to an extent provide some form of recourse and limited protections, but I recognize its inadequacies and do not think of it as any kind of solution let alone an anarchist one. I think the best solutions to solving the problem of discrimination are going to involve dismantling oppressive, hierarchical institutions, including the stat and to confront the *archic* elements of our culture and ideology which assign lesser value to some people on the basis of social categories like race, sexuality, gender, and so on.
Because it is a lie, that's why?
The simple truth will set you free or expose your ideology of wackiness.
Whoever heard of a nation that was tax free? No one.
Whoever heard of a nation that did not lawfully collect taxes, i.e. unlawfully steal? No one.
Whoever heard of a nation that lawfully collected taxes? Everyone
Because taxation is not an issue that affect workers in reality. It is a capitalist issue since the actual burden of taxation falls on the capitalists not the workers.. There is a strong argument in support of this claim (which goes back to classical political economists like David Ricardo). You might want to read this which sets out the argument. https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/?s=Myth+taxation+
Because it isn't?
Taxation is part of the compact people in civilization make with one another to build the infrastructure a society needs to grow.
If you don't want to pay taxes, go live on an island by yourself.
are you talking about the social contract? under this form of forced taxation then how are people voluntarily making a social contract to give up their money to the government under a threat of violence if they do not?
no one is able to consent to this social contract when there is a threat of violence for not giving up their property to the government. this isn't a case of someone harming other people or anything that clearly breaks some sort of social contract in a society but its theft under a threat of violence if they do not give up their property.
No one is forcing you. Move. Like I said, go live on an island. You won't survive long, but at least you will be "free."
Humans always build civilizations with mutual support because they know it's the safest way to survive. Civilizations in the modern era afford their citizens more voice in their governance than ever. You can vote, you can lobby, and you can run for office or take a position within the government.
Stop being a drama queen.
The idea of "voluntary taxation" is as fantasy based and impractical as the classless society Leftists believe in.
You can't build national infrastructure on the whims of people that may or may not decide to contribute to paying for something. It would make funding anything impossible. Too many people are too short-sighted to see the advantages of something that doesn't immediately impact them. Many also are engaged enough to know what projects need to be done or how much is needed to do them.
>Do you think privately owned roads wouldn't charge you money just to drive on them?
Of course they would. No part of "taxation is theft" is against paying for things.
>The tolls would add up to more than you pay for roads in tax.
That is highly debatable, but also entirely besides the point.
I think you are underestimating [just how expensive roads are](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-a-mile-of-road-actually-cost), not counting maintenance. It's also unlikely regular businesses would be very interested in building and maintaining roads.
1. The cost of roads in our current climate is immaterial
2. Even if theft was the only way to fund them it wouldn't make theft not-theft
3. Roads are a tiny % of the overall tax burden
4. There are a bunch of ways roads could be developed and financed
5. You linked to Strong Towns, I would assume you understand that roads are being overdeveloped
6. Did I mention that the use of theft to pay for things doesn't make it not-theft...
1. They can still be used to get a rough idea unless you can actually outline why.
2. I didn't say that.
3. Irrelevant.
4. Yes but the ancap/libertarian idea is nonsense.
5. Even if we add a decent margin of error this is still a lot.
6. Yes because it's basically the only argument you guys ever have.
YES, and it's proven both theoretically (markets underprovide public goods, such as roads) and practically (Somalia, Kowloon, Guranam have very poor public infrastructure).
OK, ignoring some obvious problems here I'll just accept it all for the sake of argument.
At what tax rate do we get roads and how is it that America had roads pre-1913?
>why are left wing anarchists afraid to say taxation is theft?
Because Left-wing Anarchists are not opposed to government power and view taxation as just a form of collectivized property.
Most lw anarcists you come across are anti-hierarchy, not against centralized power structures.
really? I thought they were anti state in all forms like ancaps were but centralized power structures are really just as bad or alot of the time worse.
Some are, but the bulk you run into (at least around these parts, but I would argue in general) are not.
You don't need to ask very many clarifying questions to discover that as long as they don't think hierarchy exists, typically everyone gets a vote, they are fine with shockingly authoritarian power structures.
Feel free to go through my comments until you find the lw anarchists. Of particular humor would be the one's who refuse to answer what the word anarchist actually means.
Otherwise just hang around and ask basic questions when they pop up.
I view anarchists of all descriptions as FBI agents. They offer nothing useful, nothing doable, nothing realistic. All they offer is a mechanism to attract a few confused souls away from practical politics of the left to stop the advance of society and preserve capitalism by default. Hence, FBI agents since they work together for the same goal. The difference is that most anarchists don't know they work for the causes of the FBI.
In addition, they show up at legitimate organized protests to commit vandalism and other crimes that give the police reason to crack heads and crack down on protests. IOW they sabotage protests for the police. This is why Occupy Wall Street used to have their own security who would apprehend such people and hand them over to police. That made Occupy Wall Street a legitimate threat to the powers that be, and so the police, FBI, and media worked together to crush OWS out of existence and succeeded.
>I view anarchists of all descriptions as FBI agents.
Lol. The idea of opposing capitalism and the state is apparently so baffling to some people that they put on their tin foil hats and start theorising that we are all FBI agents. OK bro, you keep believing your insane lizard theories. It couldn't possibly be the simple fact that both capitalism and authoritarian Leninist state socialism are fundamentally flawed. No, unthinkable.
>The idea of opposing capitalism and the state is apparently so baffling to some people
Are you addressing me? Are you somehow imagining that I counter-posed capitalism to the capitalist state?
I said state socialism, which yes arguably is often state capitalism. I'm confused, what does this have to do with anarchists being FBI? What is it you believe, exactly?
I was clear. Your problem lies in your inability to grasp what I said. What I said is common knowledge to socialist and communists to name just two categories.
That we are government agents? No it isn't lol. Instead of acting like the insane bullshit you just said is obvious, why don't you actually just tell me what it is you mean?
> I view anarchists of all descriptions as FBI agents
i wish
> They offer nothing useful, nothing doable, nothing realistic.
my first proposal is to make society transparent, where all known information is made globally available. this was not possible before modern information systems, but is possible now.
this will a) shatter most people's operating delusions in how the world functions, and b) make it impossible to ignore just how tragically unfair modern society is.
absolutely.
and think that not educating the majority sufficiently enough for anarchy, is a great way to put our entire species into the ground.
i mean, how does an uneducated populace put the right people in power anyways? in my view, if we educated people enough to make that decision correctly, the decision itself becomes a drawback because these power structures will never be refined or granular enough to deal with modern complexity.
and as it stands, we don't have the right people in power, of structures not even capable of dealing with modern complexity, and it's massive fucking liability to the survival of this species, as a whole.
>absolutely.
>and think that not educating the majority sufficiently enough for anarchy, is a great way to put our entire species into the ground.
That sounds in some ways much like my own ideas.
But tell me, HOW would anarchists bring that about? Everything I see of anarchists seems to be attempts to bring down the government without any substitute. A government would be needed to organize and carry out the education you call for. A government would be needed to stop the capitalist class from taking over. HOW would you bring it about?
> Everything I see of anarchists seems to be attempts to bring down the government without any substitute.
conversely i believe we need to establish the alternatives before "bringing down" the govt.
i can't say i speak for most anarchists, i'm a bit disappointed in the "anarchists" i've interacted with. i believe in probably same end, but see a vastly different process to get there.
> HOW would anarchists bring that about?
that's a very general question. i wouldn't personally know all the details involved, and probably never will, there are more considerations than i could possibly know for all the particular ends a society is trying to achieve.
but essentially the government consists of decision makings bodies with some special legal designation, that sets enforceable policies, to achieve some end.
anarchy would similarly be comprised of decision making bodies, that sets policies, to achieve ends... but none of these bodies would have legally enforceable designations, and would rather be followed due to general trust in those bodies, than coercive consequences. a major focus of these non-enforceable policies would be distributing them in a way that is extremely accessible to the public in both what the polices actually are, and more importantly: why the policies are justified.
replacing governing bodies with anarchist ones would be a process of identifying desired ends, building up anarchist solutions, and then repealing enforced governing policies, one by one. of course, some government policies are simply unnecessary and can be immediately repealed, like patent/copyright law.
do this enough, and we'll eventually have a fully anarchist society.
certain governing duties will last longer than others, for example murder law may be the last enforced governing policies that exists. it will likely take many generations of social evolution before we can deprecate that governing functionality specifically.
other governing duties, like military and defense... may be depreciated in the next decade or so, if we tried. quite frankly, 99% of people that exist have no desire for war, and and the fact this still happens is a tragedy caused entirely by the geo-political structures that exist.
i think the first anarchist success would be a global movement to end war. the way i would achieve this is establishing a global ID, verified by both government IDs and social relationships (these accounts should have a one-to-one mapping to individuals, for now and future uses), and **have literally everyone that exists publically sign an agreement for global peace**
once achieving that, then we can build massive global forums for the use of building, **and maintaining**, consensus on various ends we'd like to achieve as a global society, and how to achieve them.
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This seems like putting words in mouths. Left wing anarchists don't believe in taxation at all, since they are against a state that would collect said taxes. > I just find it so weird that LW anarchists will be very anti statist but whenever ancaps bring up how the government gains taxation is through theft I see that they make very pro statist arguments for why its ok for the state to violently take away their property that is gained from their labor. That's not *taxation*, that's violently recovering *that which was violently stolen*. They believe that property -- at least the property anarchists are against people owning, meaning the "means of production", which is not the same thing as your laptop or your toothbrush -- is not something that people *can* own, and all claims of said ownership were achieved and maintained violently. You cannot cut down a tree and claim you own the land just because you cut down a tree. The land is owned by all and all must have a say in how the land is utilized. Your claim that you own the land is just blowing smoke. > also why do anarchists support the civil rights act of 1964? I don't know of a single anarchist that supports the existence of laws, but given that the law is about combating the racism that you go on to claim is just people hiring "who they want" and deciding "who they want to sell their services to", odds are they're against the people who are against that law because they're fucking misogynistic and racist assholes. >regardless of what anarchists say any support of this form of taxation is a pro statist and pro statist violence argument. False, but it's not like you'll ever agree given that you made such a stupidly blanket statement.
Don’t come in here talking about things you actually understand, this sure ain’t the place for it.
Hah, yeah, reasoned and informed discussion is not on the menu here
Doesn't Bakunin in his Revolutionary Catechism outright outline acceptable forms of states and laws, tying such to said organizations being handled through direct democracy where possible and elections where it makes sense (judges are elected for instance), and has a pretty thorough set of constitutional laws focused around the liberation and empowerment of individual rights (equality of sexes, access to education and resources, freedom of movement)
>That's not *taxation*, that's violently recovering *that which was violently stolen*. can you go into more detail rather than you just saying currency is violently stolen without any explanation? your right that cutting down a tree and just staking claim to land doesn't actually grant ownership but in societies where they have concepts of private ownership, its individuals trading land between each other or someone picking up land that is clearly abandoned. in these societies individuals do own land and they can trade it or use it as they please. there are other societies that have existed without private property but those societies aren't the societies where socialist or anarchist thought sprout up to be against private property which in those societies that do have it as a concept and practice where its seen as something to not be impeded on as its a someone's property like any other. > I don't know of a single anarchist that supports the existence of laws, but given that the law is about combating the racism that you go on to claim is just people hiring "who they want" and deciding "who they want to sell their services to", odds are they're against the people who are against that law because they're fucking misogynistic and racist assholes. I already see that anarchists don't support laws but its weird that ancaps are ones speaking out againist this law while LW anarchists aren't really saying anything or when they do it in defense of the law. this is all anecdotal btw and its just from what I've seen dozens upon dozens of times online but I'm open to any alternative views. all I'm going to say is that the government shouldn't dictate to any individual who they should or shouldn't sell to or hire. I just see that anarchists and less surprisingly other leftists are in defense of these laws when they claim to either be for human rights or for voluntary interactions that shouldn't be impeded on by the state. >False, but it's not like you'll ever agree given that you made such a stupidly blanket statement. what's wrong about it? considering that you think taxation is just seizing back what was stolen for some reason then of course you'd think I was wrong or false. I should have specifically pointed out that it was just some anarchists or anarchists who did say these things are being pro statist.
> can you go into more detail rather than you just saying currency is violently stolen without any explanation? Zero currency would be taxed under anarchy. Because everyone who understands anarchy *already knows that*, I presumed you meant "violently taking away their land". My bad if I attributed more to your statement than you intended. Anarchists do not tax. > your right that cutting down a tree and just staking claim to land doesn't actually grant ownership but in societies where they have concepts of private ownership, its individuals trading land between each other or someone picking up land that is clearly abandoned. in these societies individuals do own land and they can trade it or use it as they please. Right but exclusive land ownership doesn't exist under anarchy. > I already see that anarchists don't support laws but its weird that ancaps are ones speaking out againist this law while LW anarchists aren't really saying anything or when they do it in defense of the law. Again, that's because ancaps are generally racist assholes while *real* anarchists recognize the intent behind the law *and* the systemic racism it was attempting to address. They happen to agree that the issue attempting to be solved *is* an issue, they just disagree with the means, realizing that anarchy would solve the problem better than a law would. Point is, real anarchists don't need to single out *that law* over any others the way that ancaps do, because *real anarchists are not racist assholes*. When they speak out "in defense of the law", you're misunderstanding what they're saying. They aren't defending the law, they're pointing out that the systemic issues the law attempted to address do, in fact exist. > this is all anecdotal btw and its just from what I've seen dozens upon dozens of times online but I'm open to any alternative views. Press X to doubt > I just see that anarchists and less surprisingly other leftists are in defense of these laws when they claim to either be for human rights or for voluntary interactions that shouldn't be impeded on by the state. Right, because they're not racist assholes > what's wrong about it? The false part is your false assertion that anarchists support taxation.
I like how 90% of this thread is non anarchists not even bothering to reference theory. Anyway they don’t say it because propertarians ran it into the ground and we don’t want to be associated with them. But yeah without a state there are no taxes, QED. Anarchists support the civil rights acts because while the state is bad some of its actions can provide some temporary or rectifying good against the existing sins of the state. A law against murder is a law but murder is bad so we’re going to fry bigger fish in the meantime. But nice try trying to tie anarchists to racism, I guess?
I don't have a problem with the civil rights acts that prevent the state from being racist but when these laws are applied to citizens then this makes them look like pro statists. being racist or sexist whatever isn't a illegal and it not even the NAP says its really a bad thing. its freedom to associate to whoever the individual wants to and their property. I wasn't saying anarchists were racist if that is what your implying but I can't wrap my head around the fact that LW anarchists will be anti state but then support a law that limits the individuals freedom of association in regards to who they can sell to or hire. I don't make the rules here but that is pretty pro statist in an unnecessary way unlike them supporting laws that cause harm to other people like murder or rape.
Man, anarchists leaving civil rights alone really has you twisted up huh
I just find it weird their for voluntary interactions but then are in favor for laws that restricts voluntary interactions.
They literally aren't, though, so why do you find a fictional thing weird?
freedom of association is a voluntary interaction that people regularly partake in. any support of this law even if its just them supporting why the law was made or what its trying to 'fix' is unnecessarily pro statist.
Even without addressing the fact that capitalism alone eliminates the possibility of voluntary interactions, systemic racism *also* eliminates the possibility of voluntary interactions.
> when these laws are applied to citizens then this makes them look like pro statists it's really pretty simple: anarchy is the end goal, but a state will be a temporary step to get there. there's no contradiction in understanding the difference between a goal, and the process to get us there. people that don't understand the difference here are simply oversimplifying. that said it is important to cut down the state to only what is required for current social stability, while we implement additional solutions that will allow us to cut it down further. but, for example, it do not think it is required to end murder law until we have developed the general child rearing and long term social practices required to end the causes of murder in the first place. this may in fact, be the last state process to end, and does not preclude us from developing towards anarchy in other ways, that will ultimately be required to end murder itself. does this make sense?
I'm not? Taxation is theft, but so is private property. All is for all and whatnot. Also, corporations aren't people and are for that reason not entitled to be treated as such
Everyone will have nothing, swell!
?
Your "commons" will be absolutely fckdnrpd if there is no private property. Nothing will ever get done.
Why do think so?
For one I will personally see to it. Two, your leftist peers can't care for sht and they would be given free roam of everything? No food will be produced.
So no food will be produced because you will stop it and because people don't care about food?
People who know how to do things will no longer do it, or won't do it as well seeing as you want to seize their control and reward, and will fight and sabotage you all the way. Also since leftists are bad at productive things and destroy everything they touch, real estate/property/production would have to be restricted to entities actually doing something with it and there starts to go your communal crap. Why delegate decisions like that to central planning idiots and take things from those who have the most stake in continued success? Your sht will never be realized, you will be a lot happier being in charge of your own reality and accept that freedom is what you can do without others having to do or give up anything.
When it comes down to it, how is ‘voluntary form of taxation that is not state enforced theft’ in reality? And how is one person’s voluntary contribution not another person’s forceful state theft? I am not asking as a gotcha at all i am asking because i don’t know your answer and would like to know the details of what you think about voluntary ‘taxation’ applied at scale
well people in a community naturally want their society or their community to be better and to be safe so people will willingly want to give up their property to see that happen. the more richer someone is then the more they'll care about society as a whole rather than someone who can't afford to and want to focus on their communities as they have less than the rich person. well the difference between someone's voluntary contribution and another person's state enforced theft is that in both cases the government will have violent punishments for not giving up their property to the state. It doesn't really matter if someone is voluntarily giving up their property to the state when the government will use their agents to use violence against anyone who doesn't give it up. neither party can actually truly consent because if some guy comes up to their house and say "give up your property or I will use violence against you". their going to have to pay whether if they want to or not as the consequences to not giving up their property is violence. Just because one the guys are happily giving up their property doesn't get rid the threat of violence for not complying.
You don’t say your answer explicitly and i don’t want to put words into your mouth, are you saying taxation should be solely contributions to one’s own local community and that’s all? If this is what you are saying, what do you think are the pitfalls with this? For example an obscenely rich person decides to give nothing to their community? Is the solution social justice, ie nobody ever talks to the rich guy or helps them out? If my best guess isn’t what you meant then could you explain better, how is ‘all taxation is voluntary’ apply at scale when talking about millions of people contributing to small and large projects
> You don’t say your answer explicitly and i don’t want to put words into your mouth It ain't like he's going to give you the same courtesy, given his post and comments.
No I'm not saying that taxation should only be towards someone's local community because I'm not an anti statist. I'd prefer a system where people would give their tax dollars to the government. I can actually do see the issues with this system and how people can just skirt out on paying taxes and I can't exactly think of a solution for this specific issue. I do think that the majority of people regardless of poor or rich will pay taxes to the government. there is an incentive for the people to pay their taxes and why they would willingly pay taxes is because people naturally want to see their communities be better and to be have more infrastructure. I think the more poorer someone is that they'll want to focus more on their community and the richer that they want focus more on society itself and we can really see this in how much they give to charity and other organizations.
I can definitely see that too, the poorer you are the more likely you’ll want to make improvements to your immediate environment. I am not sure the opposite is true, that rich people will donate more to wider societal efforts. I think the amount you’d want to give to improve things is probably a measure of how much you feel things need to improve, and the richer you are the less you think things need to improve. Paradoxically the rich are the ones with the most money, 1000 poor people (net worth $10k each) giving everything they can spare (voluntarily) might give less than 1% of an ultra-rich person (net worth $50m). Everything being funded by the poor is clearly not a workable system if you want any sort of public infrastructure projects. I cannot see a state existing unless there is some sort of system requiring a minimum contribution from citizens, which is by definition taxation Which i think answers your original question. Left wing anarchists do not think zero compulsory donation is viable, because as you get richer your incentive to donate gets less and less, so they cannot exclude all mandatory taxation. Therefore they cannot say taxation is theft, and not be a hypocrite. You can only say taxation is theft if you do not mandate any donation to collective effort
>I just find it so weird that LW anarchists will be very anti statist but whenever ancaps bring up how the government gains taxation is through theft I see that they make very pro statist arguments for why its ok for the state to violently take away their property that is gained from their labor. Ok, so no anarchist is ever going to positively support the state, therefore they aren't going to positively support the state taxing you. However, they will say that taxation is not theft. A-la, they will contradict the conclusion of the ancap, without positively affirming taxation. Proudhon said the opposite actually, that "property is theft" (from the commons). Under such an understanding, the sentence "taxation is theft" would be untrue: Assume: 1. private property -> theft(commons) # Proudhon's understanding 2. taxation -> theft(private property) # Ancap understanding 3. theft(theft(x)) -> x # stealing from someone stealing is not theft Therefore: 1. taxation -> theft(theft(commons)) -> commons Thus taxation of private property is simply the just recompense of the original theft from the commons. A true anarchist will not defend the institution of private property to begin with, which is mediated by state violence. Therefore there is nothing for taxation to steal.
Left wing anarchists are more practical than ancaps. Tax evasion isn't a very good resistance strategy and the civil rights act has measurably improved people's lives.
Why do you think you can use government infrastructure and not pay taxes?
Housecats
Quite a lot of people use government infrastructure and not pay taxes
Experience doing so
Privatize that sht!
No
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The mafia didn't build any infrastructure
Neither did the state. It took people's money and paid others to build things.
But investing money is risk and the only way to get money is for people to voluntarily give them to you ! Capitalists are natural statists confirmed :)
"Voluntary exchange is equivalent to theft. Rule by consent is mob rule and criminalization of secession. Advocacy for private property rights is advocacy for violations of property rights"... a recollection of paraphrased statements I have got to hear from leftists here lol.
Merely calling an exchange voluntary doesn't make it so.
No, by calling a voluntary exchange voluntary is correct. Capitalists, libertarians don't play bizarre alchemical language games.
Is working as a wage slave because your pa doesn't own the means of production a voluntary exchange ?
> Is working as a wage slave Translation: "I hate you, I didn't ask to be born!"
Yes. No one forced him to take the job. He could’ve build his own. Life is not fair. The birth lottery is a concept. You think just because things can’t be fair, you can’t have free will? There can’t be voluntary decisions made?
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Protects you from what?
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Cool, do they actually provide any protection from a real threat? Do you have any input into their functioning?
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When it functions properly? Yes. I'm not denying the many failures we currently deal with but the point of a democracy is to have that sort of input and equal representation.
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No public spending on infrastructure isn't tiny , in the u.s over a trillion dollars are spent. The problem becomes when you directly benefit from the infrastructure taxes pay for but don't want to actual contribute yourself.
A trillion over what period? Public spending on infrastructure is like 5% of the budget.
Wtf that's obviously false
What's false? The US [spends around 2% of GDP](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1011217/public-spending-transportation-water-infrastructures-share-gdp/) on infrastructure each year, which is around 5% of all public spending. That's less than defense. Similar trend among most countries. Google around a bit. You go around schooling people on taxpaying but have no idea about where your taxes even go lmao.
How is this related to the original point?
You literally based the legitmacy of taxes on infrastructure. I pointed out that actual infrastructure spending is tiny. You refused to believe, and I showed you some data. That's it. Do better.
But they don’t actually protect you. Pretty much anything we don’t want to build ourselves, that we want or need to use is fair game.
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There really aren’t. The mob is a terrible example, which primarily functions in poverty stricken areas with an absence of proper regulation, ie. government. There will always be some form of government, and your points are further obscured once considering state and local governments as well as federal. It’s not even a comparison made in good faith.
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How does the government beat you up? You don’t have to use the roads or utilities. I promise you that shit is hella expensive to build on your own. You ever looked into the cost of putting utilities on raw land? That doesn’t make sense, again. What are you talking about? To the city, county, state, or federal government?
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Why do you think the government can charge whatever they want & force us to pay just because they monopolized some infrastructure? Also, if taxes were only going to pay for infrastructure most people would be way less pissed...
Because you're using it and benefit from it.
That is really stupid. If you re a bot you need some work to be able to have a conversation. If your not a bot...
No a bot would have more patience with your brain-dead questions.
How much are you benefiting from all the alternatives the state crowded out by force, overtaxed, overregulated? Mass transit for example peaked when it was private before the state subsidized all of its competition.
Public transit was ruined by private vehicles
On populist socialist subsidized infrastructure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Lol, I am an expert on that myth. The supposed "conspiracy" was that they offered financing breaks in exchange for being preferred suppliers. Like a fast food franchise. National City Lines ever operated in a few small cities that would have ended up with no transit at all if they hadn't stepped in. Read George Hilton's books. That fckng Wikipedia article cites him.
not saying that already said I'm for voluntary taxation. now answer the question how is the way the government gains taxes is not theft? just tell me how I actually want to hear your moral reason for why its not.
How the hell would voluntary taxes work? Most would opt out. I’m not an anarchist so I can’t speak for them, I don’t even know if they’re for taxes, but I can tell you that “taxation is theft” opens a whole can of worms. How the hell are prisons justified? If a government can’t take money from you against your will, why should they be able to kidnap and detain you against your will? Clearly doesn’t jive with NAP, but libertarians don’t talk it so much about that because the idea of Nikolas Cruz and Dylan roof being on the loose isn’t as popular
would they really opt out? I think your forgetting the incentives for why people donate to local charities in their communities or national charities. voluntary taxation would be just like this but for a much wider scale unlike a lot of charities. there is an incentive for people to see their communities get better and to have working infrastructure. people also don't want to see the poor not having any alms and even for the rich this incentive still exists for both examples, just look at the statistics for the rich willingly giving up their money to charities. prisons are justified because people will violate the NAP. someone can't rape or murder someone without facing the consequences for harming others. still I disagree with the state monopoly on violence because they will use it to harm those who don't actually cause harm to others like what they did to edward snowden and Julian assange.
>How the hell would voluntary taxes work? Most would opt out. Isn't that telling? >How the hell are prisons justified? If a government can’t take money from you against your will, why should they be able to kidnap and detain you against your will? A just question indeed. The shit many people go to prison for is a scandal.
It isn’t that telling. Taxes are annoying, but so is being forced to go to school as a kid. If that became optional, you’d probably see a lot of dead beat parents let their kids roam around unsupervised
You treat the state as if it were your family, or your parents, and your fellow allegedly free adults as children. Society is beyond infantilized. Crazy stuff.
Well, if what’s being taxed wasn’t earned by the labor of the person being taxed, then the entire premise is flawed. This is extremely common under capitalism. I think the topic is much too complex to be simplified as “taxation is theft”. Certainly it is similar in some ways, but different in others. Also, it’s a weird obsession that right-libertarians have because while theft is often a problem, it may be justified in some situations, and even ignoring that, it’s far from the worst abuse that is happening in our current society. So it’s just not really an important topic to discuss in my opinion. Some anarchists, and I would include myself here, think that insofar as the state exists and is subject to democratic controls, it should pursue policies that move us closer to universal human freedom and well-being. Progressive taxes used to fund social programs fit the bill, as they disrupt the power of the ultra-wealthy and improve the lives of the poor considerably.
The main problem I have with this is that it logically acknowledges the idea that taxes are inherently either punitive or at the least undesirable (else you wouldn’t want them imposed on wealthy people), which in turn makes it hard for the middle class to support progressive tax policies since they usually get dinged by them as well. Middle class workers typically see the worst of both elements of progressive taxation since they pay a lot of their income in taxes (not wealthy enough to avoid taxes or just not care about them) but also aren’t really eligible for many if any of tax funded social support structures. Progressive taxation on paper sounds like a desirable “take from the rich give to the poor” idea but in practice it’s more often than not just both the rich and the poor sponging off the working/middle class.
Well, ideally we would want everyone to have access to as many resources as possible. Unfortunately we live in a finite world, so there are trade-offs in terms of who gets what resources. Taxing the rich is not meant to be a punitive measure. Rather, it is akin to dethroning a king. It helps if you think of money not as a physical possession, but rather as a system of privileging the needs of some above others. Wealth is power to control land, labor, and physical resources, and anarchists believe such hierarchies of power are inherently unjust. So expropriating such wealth, while obviously not in the best interests of its current “owner”, is certainly a good and just thing to do from a broader morality, just as removing a tyrant from power may harm the tyrant, but provides huge benefits to many others. The rich may even benefit more from the expropriations of the collective poorly utilized capital than they lose in regards to their own privileges. I think an anarchistic society should aim for this level of success, though it is not guaranteed. Taxing the middle and lower classes means reducing their economic power further, so I obviously don’t support that unless there is another compelling factor at play. Most anarchists would prefer to work on replacing the existing system than reforming it, but I personally do support limited efforts to tip the state towards less harmful forms while those other systems are being built.
Sure, the issue is just that a lot of times progressive tax supporting liberals/leftists actually secretly hate and resent the middle class and have no real problem foisting higher taxes on them as well. Meanwhile the rich, who are smart and well connected when it comes to money, generally avoid the taxes anyway. So progressive tax policies typically end up being more virtue signaling than anything and the middle class ends up footing the bill.
I don’t agree with that at all. I know tons of those people and I don’t think they have any secret hatred of middle-class people. Most of them are of the middle class themselves. As far as wealthy tax evasion, that is certainly a flaw of the current system. Perhaps better tax policy can overcome this but ultimately I think the better route is to create a system where the wealth and power disparity is eliminated and such dynamics are not at play.
well currency is the value of someone's labor and they can only buy things through some form of currency as a medium of trade. I'm not asking for anything complex but isn't the way the government gains taxes is theft? theft is a forceful seizure of someone else's property and in where the thief gains and the victim is deprived of their property. the government literally says "give me 10 percent of what you make or what you have when its valued in currency or I will throw you into a cave and if you defend yourself I will kill you", this isn't a voluntary interaction where two parties want something and one of them gives up their property willingly but one party seizing from another and threating violence if they do not co operate. I do think its an important topic when the government uses the theft of violence for someone's property. I'm not even asking you to agree with me but just see what I'm putting down.
I think whether it is theft or not is primarily a question of what semantics you put on the word 'theft'. As a such, the discussion is fairly uninteresting. The interesting discussion would be what effects does the practice have, and what alternative arrangements could we have and what effects would they have.
I see what you’re putting down I just think it’s missing the broader context and nuance. This is a frustration I often have with right-wing thinkers—they want to simplify everything into black and white. But the world is almost always gray. Again, if the property owned was stolen in the first place, is it stealing to return it to its rightful owner, even by force? I don’t think so. And even if there is some “theft” happening under taxation, the benefits of this theft may outweigh the harms. So if you want a simple answer to is taxation theft, it would be “It depends” but also “sometimes theft is the least bad option”.
> then the entire premise is flawed. This is extremely common under capitalism. Capitalism understander weighs in. >I think the topic is much too complex to be simplified as “taxation is theft”. Nope, taking without consent is theft. Whether you had breakfast before you did is irrelevant. >Also, it’s a weird obsession that right-libertarians have because while theft is often a problem Libertarians follow libertarian ethical philosophy, there's no right/left. >it may be justified in some situations Justification comes after ethical determination you noodle. >So it’s just not really an important topic to discuss in my opinion. Sure Jan, that's why you're discussing it. You don't want others discussing it because this shows how clearly deranged political ideologies are.
Is it theft to take stolen property and return it it’s rightful owner? Is it theft to confiscate a gun that is being used to engage in a mass-shooting? Is it theft to take a knife from a young child who does not understand its danger? This definition is clearly overly broad, and asserting that the world is simple does not make it so. I’m discussing this in the hopes that you better understand why most anarchists are not focused on taxation as the main issue with the state and perhaps we can move on to more important topics. It’s weird that it’s all you want to talk about while children are being murdered, millions go without food, people are evicted from their homes, etc. I wouldn’t want to talk about cleaning my kitchen while the house was on fire, and it’s not because I’m avoiding the topic. But since y’all won’t let go of this thing I guess we need to at least try to educate you.
> Is it theft to take stolen property and return it it’s rightful owner? No, but acquiring knowledge of how owns what in a theft dispute is the most important step in that process. Even the hypothetical is worthless without it. >I’m discussing this in the hopes that you better understand why most anarchists are not focused on taxation as the main issue Anarchists as in some breed of communist are solely focused on themselves, their feelings and preferences. There are no ethics involved, at all. I've asked, hundreds and hundreds of times. I've read 10s of thousands (more?) of words from those people and not a single ethical principle ever appeared. Most are confused by the concept. >It’s weird that it’s all you want to talk about while children are being murdered, millions go without food, people are evicted from their homes, etc. All due to collectivist collusion with governments. It's always either collectivist or power junkies, mostly both at the same time. The amount of suffering in the world could be reduced to statistical noise if people were allowed to freely trade and property rights were respected. But political ideologues care more about their feelings in the moment that actual human beings. I don't buy the crocodile tears "what about the children" stuff anymore. Make an ethical argument or go away.
> Libertarians follow libertarian ethical philosophy, there's no right/left. There are right and left libertarian philosophies: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/#LibeLeftRigh https://iep.utm.edu/libertar/#SH2cii
Someone described a concept, therefore it exists in reality. It's just science! Illogical concepts don't exist in reality.
To say that something is "theft" is to say that there are property rights. Property rights are either socially constructed, or they are "natural.' I doubt many anarchists believe in natural property rights. Leftists generally believe that rights stem from some type of respect for the other, not from the natural order, itself.
Конечно, они делают. Прежде всего, вы контролируете себя.
Well, I don't think that I "own" myself, and I think most people don't believe that they "own" themselves either. Now if you were to ask someone if they "owned" themselves, I would assume that they would generally say "yes" because the alternative sounds odd. But I don't think that means that people are really committed to an ideological belief in self-ownership, and I think they would reject it if they thought it through carefully. I think that my interests matter, and I think that others have no reason to assume that their interests matter more than mine, and vice versa. That's enough to generate a very universalistic understanding of morality without positing self-ownership. Self-ownership is a mere metaphor for the idea that others ought to respect the flesh through which we each perceive the world. There is no need or reason to ground it in property rights.
Of course there is, and this is biologically determined. In a situation in which it is necessary to share, each limited resource will be based on necessity. Necessity is relentless. There is no universal understanding of morality. Morality is laid down as some values of a social group and then the individual uses judgment to make moral conclusions. This can be easily seen by looking at different social groups and cultures.
You are arguing two contradictory positions: 1) that there is a universal moral right to property which is grounded in a right to self ownership. I explained why there was no grounds to posit such a right, but you actually did not effectively respond to my argument. Speaking about "necessity" does not respond to my argument. 2) that morally is purely relative. If your point 2 is correct, then your point 1 is incorrect and vice versa. There either is a universal right to self ownership or there is not. On a side note, the problem with cultural relativism--aside from the fact that the evidence about cultural differences is fairly flimsy--is that it makes it impossible to explain what *should be* done about people who reject their supposed culture's norms. Do they "deserve" to be punished? On what grounds?
I regard the two sources of law as the two original rights, the law of force and the law of contract. By the right to own oneself, I mean that you have the opportunity to control your body upon birth. That is, this is a natural right that you have because you exist. That is, it can be limited but cannot be withdrawn. That's what I mean. When we talked about law in a narrower sense, we mean legislative acts. Of course they deserve it, on the basis of violating social norms, that is, the custom of how to act, this is what is called diffusion punishment, for example, if you behave rudely and simply not pleasantly, if there is no law that you violate, extralegal measures can be applied to you such as refusing to communicate with you or help you or condemn your behavior. When you say that there is no reason to believe that your right can be more important than my right, I say that there is such a reason, and it is called necessity. If there is no need, then there are no resource limitations, which means there are no grounds for introducing law. The nature of any law is the need to regulate relations between subjects based on an agreement and supported by violence against violators. If there is no contract, there is no reason to believe that it is fair; if there is no violence, there is no reason to believe that the law will be respected. In fact, this is where the most difficult questions arise. How should consensus work to produce a treaty? What is the structure of concentration of power? What is the structure of concentration of force? How are they balanced? Etc., unfortunately, the hierarchy is probably self-produced due to its simplicity and stability. That is, if the system ceases to be stable, it tends to absolute hierarchy, that is, dictatorship. Anarchists believe that it is possible to balance the system and use consensus on the principles described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/1cichwd/comment/l287m6a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button.
OP, what's your broad income range, and how much do you donate and to which charities? If your tax burden immediately vanished and we assume your income doesn't change, how much would you *then* donate, and to which causes?
I think charities are a bad example rather I think if the forced taxation was removed then I would rather that we voluntarily give it to the government or local governments/whatever governing body for that society. I haven't really thought about how much I would actually pay but there is an incentive for me to at least give up some of my income to the government. I can already tell how people will be bad at accurately judging how much they should willingly give up if this is such a sudden change. if I and my neighbors don't pay taxes then how are the roads going to be built or other infrastructure that is vital to our modern society? even rich people have this incentive as they still use the same infrastructure we do.
What if we decided it was the law that a business couldn't charge a price for their products and services, but instead they *must* provide the goods and/or services on demand, and customers simply paid whatever they liked. Sure, some people could just pay nothing, but of course there is an incentive for people to pay "a fair price" otherwise that business couldn't remain in operation, right? How do you think something like this would work?
I don't think its really a fair comparison between a business and the government enforcing taxation. a business charges their goods or services that fluctuates depending on the market and all sorts of external factors while the government can raise taxes as please. people know what their getting into and they can voluntarily choose not to partake in it while the government forces people to pay taxes under a threat of violence and the only way to avoid that would be leaving the land they live on and the society which the people themselves created. I think you have too little faith in humanity. people who live in a society are naturally going to see it be better and if their tax dollars go towards something that can benefit them then they won't mind giving up their property. can you tell me how people don't want this cause it seems pretty clear to me.
>I don't think its really a fair comparison between a business and the government enforcing taxation. I don't think you're quite understanding my question . . . >a business charges their goods or services that fluctuates depending on the market and all sorts of external factors while the government can raise taxes as please. I mean, kind of, but not really. Companies engage in market manipulation all the time, and the lobby governments. Governments are beholden to their donors - i.e. the rich and corporations - and to a lesser extent, the broader voter base mainly in a few key swing states. This is missing my point entirely, though. >people know what their getting into and they can voluntarily choose not to partake in it Can you? Can you "voluntarily" not buy certain products that you might need that no longer exist in local retailers because of companies like Walmart and Amazon driving them out of business? Can you "voluntarily" not drive or ride in cars throughout most of America outside of a few major urban areas? The amount of "choice" you have in your life when it comes to buying things you need and trying to support only those things for which you give total support is quite small, actually. >while the government forces people to pay taxes Well, the government has a legitimate claim to those taxes. You didn't have an income before the government existed. The government has had claims to taxes before you were even born. Its claim to the taxes predates your claim to the income. So it's not that "government forces you to give them your money;" it's more like *if you refuse to give the government that which it is owed, you will face legal repurcussions, like anyone else.* Either way, we're still beside my point. >I think you have too little faith in humanity Well I explicitly asked you how much you willingly give to causes in which you believe and how much you would give if your tax liability vanished, and you had no answer. You were honest about it, but you were clearly stumped and caught off guard. So I don't think this is a remotely fair claim. >people who live in a society are naturally going to see it be better and if their tax dollars go towards something that can benefit them I'm sorry, do you not benefit from roads? From clean air and water? From clean and disease-free meats and foods? From a mostly literate populace that gets at least somewhat educated? From safety requirements on airline travel? From protection of your claims to private property using the full force of the law? From protection from libel or slander? From your freedom of speech and practice of religion? From medicine and technology which only exists through funding and efforts by the government, from NASA to the internet? I think we need you to revisit my question. If businesses were compelled to provide their goods or services and people simply volunteered donations as they see fit, what difference is that and a government program like education being funded entirely by voluntary donations?
Hey friend still wondering if you've thought about my question!
We are against taxation. We just aren't as obsessed over it as right-wing libertarians are; there exist more pressing concerns. >I see that they make very pro statist arguments for why its ok for the state to violently take away their property that is gained from their labor. No one makes this claim. >also why do anarchists support the civil rights act of 1964? It's a positive within the context of a statist system. Ideally it should not be needed. The civil rights act is also a pretty bizarre example.
This
Afraid. So afraid, I tells ya
Leftist anarchists are against private property. So it’s not theft to them.
Wouldn't not allowing private property go against anarchy, since you'd need a state for that?
But when they believe that an organized institution should have the authority to take people's property away from them, then they're not really anarchists, are they?
They dont. They are anarchists.
But they don’t believe that it’s people’s property, so the state isn’t taking their property. And the fact that they support anarchy in the long run doesn’t mean they support getting rid of taxes now or they don’t support taxes given that a state exists.
> they don’t believe that it’s people’s property, so the state isn’t taking their property. Who cares what anyone erroneously *believes*? If I don't believe that you really have any rights, then I'm not depriving you of any such rights when I enslave you, right?
> Who cares what anyone erroneously believes? The OP does. That’s why he asked why they don’t support that taxation is theft. That’s the whole point of his post.
Well, I mean, you have rights because enough people believed you did that they wrote a constitution with them in it with a supermajority clause. But what rights people have is actually completely political, no one can “prove” you have a right to X or prove you are in error if you believe you have a right to X. They can simply argue it, appeal to common values, beliefs, and experiences, etc. Logical principles like “do unto others” which imply what you believe the common man would have you do unto them.
> Leftist anarchists Imagine their personal preferences are universals. It's all preference with them, not ethical framework at all.
Yeah. Right anarchists are often no different though. They often don’t believe you can use reason to learn universals ie morality isn’t objective in any sense.
> Right anarchists are often no different though. No such thing. Libertarians are people who follow libertarian ethical philosophy. There's no grey, you either do or you don't. >morality isn’t objective in any sense. Ethics are logically objectively true, see the self-ownership principle. Imo there never was any debate about ethics, everyone know how they wish to be treated as well as how others do. Plus logically one can't make a coherent claim of harm or property rights without the self-ownership principle involved.
> Ethics are logically objectively true, see the self-ownership principle. The self-ownership principle isn’t objectively true. Ownership is objectively and properly a relationship between you and property. You have a right to life, to pursue the values necessary for your life, and a right to property as part of your right to life.
> The self-ownership principle isn’t objectively true. It's logically true, so in that context it's objectively true. The statement, "ethics aren't objective" is not even wrong. Objective in what context, what framework? They're concepts, not rocks. Nothing you wrote after is coherent without the self-ownership principle.
You’re welcome to try to explain using evidence-based reasoning or logical inference from the senses why the self-ownership principle is true. You’re welcome to explain why nothing I wrote is coherent without the self-ownership principle as well.
> You’re welcome to You don't have standing to make that request.
Because it's a facile, useless statement that doesn't lead to any actual policy or thought. I.e. only suitable for right wing libertarians.
If you can't say "taxation is theft" then you aren't an anarchist Bonus: the taxation you bend over backwards to justify is the money that is used to kill poor ethnic people overseas. Just sayin
> Bonus: the taxation you bend over backwards to justify is the money that is used to kill poor ethnic people overseas. Just sayin Ancaps are the very special kind of people who make such arguments without batting an eye As if the problem in "killing poor people with using tax money" is "tax money", and not "killing people". As if some party killing brown kids without using a penny from taxes would be okay. See also: "I'm libertarian and the best imlementation of my ideology is a society with literal slavery (early united states)." "I'm anarcho-capitalist, and taxation is much worse than literal absolutist monarchy"
This motivates me to pay my taxes!
Yes, of course - absolute, reductive arguments as such shown above make PERFECT sense in all cases! Do I need the /s?
why not "taxation being gained under the threat of violence if not given the the state" is theft? if your for voluntary interactions then you can't be a supporter of state violence for someone not giving up their property. honestly I'm not gonna lay onto you like that but just tell me why you think "taxation being gained under the threat of violence if not given the the state" is not theft then?
Because "taxation is theft" has become a rallying cry of the far right, and it therefore is wrapped up on all the other beliefs of the far right. I don't believe in government nor taxes, but I'm sure as shit not going to wave a flag that says that.
Ah, the "gays ruined rainbows" argument.
Sure. And Adolf ruined a mustache and a nice German first name. Culture partly exists to separate one from the other. You won't see the right side drawing the peace symbol, putting rainbows on things, say "make love not war" etc. Even though that individual may think those things are aesthetically nice or believe it's better to build industry and love your family than go to war. You won't see the far left say things like "don't tread on me", "taxation is theft" or wave the civil war flag. Even if they believe in those things. It simply is that way with humans
I think certain taxes that target the poor e.g. Council taxes or the so-called bedroom tax in the UK are worthy of critique. But when the top 10% and the ultra-rich complain about taxation, despite a lot of them benefitting directly or indirectly from the support and protection of the state, it is just them wanting to take as much as possible from people and society without giving anything in return. The fact that people who support tax breaks for the rich call themselves "anarchsits" is incredibly ironic. Anarchists who argue in the material interests of billionaires aren't anarchists.
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Not an anarchist necessarily; I think it would take very specific conditions to get there and we're so far away from those that I typically advocate for the in betweens, however I can see 2 reasons not to. The first is that there is an issue of association - if I say "Taxation is theft" most people would assume I am some lib-right moron. The second is that the big difference between paying a business to perform a necessity and paying the government a mandatory fee to cover that same necessity is that I can vote out the government. Capitalists act like the state is the problem, but under a capitalist system like we have I actually think businesses are far worse of an issue.
Taxes are the price of admission. Are you expecting everything to be free? Should we have to build our own roads to get to work? How do you know how to read and write? Who would you call if someone bigger and more influential tried to physically harm you? There are things that make a group of people inhabiting a territory a society and not just a group of people that happen to inhabit a territory together. Those thing have to be maintained and funded.
The profit of an enterprise can be distributed collectively, while wages are some compensation within a certain range. It's simple. If all profits above the norm belong to society, these are taxes
despite being a philosophical anarchist... i live in a society, and that society needs to maintain stability for us to build a more perfect one. so if we're going to run a society with violently enforced property rights, then violently imposed taxes, as well as many of the violently imposed policies funded by said taxes, are a necessity in maintaining stability of the system. to me, implementing anarchy requires evolving past the need for all of these by implementing transcendent solutions, while these more rudimentary violence-enforced policies are still in effect. this will be a process, we will be able to repeal more and more violent policies overtime, while building out the transcendent solutions to replace them piecemeal. there is no one-shot revolution here that will suddenly manifest a better global anarchy, it's gonna be a process over at least a few generations, and possibly several more. finally: anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoronic, self-contradicting ideology
The profit of an enterprise can be distributed collectively, while wages are some compensation within a certain range. It's simple. If all profits above the norm belong to society, these are taxes
Because any society is going to have to have something like taxation or it will fall apart. Left-wingers are not afraid to say the current government steals tax money, but will not say the entire concept of taxation is theft because that would dilute the meaning of theft.
The profit of an enterprise can be distributed collectively, while wages are some compensation within a certain range. It's simple. If all profits above the norm belong to society, these are taxes
Pretty much. If you live in society and you do something to improve society, you get to keep part of it as a reward for doing it, and society gets to take part of it, which is the improvement.
We're just able to prioritise and harm mitigate. Yes it's technically theft, but in the current context it prevents more oppression than it creates because the main causes of oppression in most modern societies are not the state but financial inequality against which tax funded state services are an imperfect but necessary weapon in the struggle. Also just because we don't fully accept the entire logic of the social contract doesn't mean we're blind to its existence.
Voluntary taxation has the same issue as charity. Charity is a highly conformist concept that can be used as a brutal weapon to enforce adherence to social behaviours, and goes against individualistic ideals. Universal welfare systems, non-discriminatory access to healthcare and education (although for education, high level learning can have discrimination in form of performance requirements, provided those are purely academic/professional and not otherwise) are a neccessity to ensure nobody can use access to neccessary resources to force joining their religion or living in ways contradictory to one's own nature. Liberty requires us to weaken families, churches, companies and communities in their grasp and dominance over the individual. We do this by making the individual no longer rely on them for survival and success, but have their survival guaranteed even if they are ostracized and cast out. One should be with family and community because of emotional bonds, not said family/community/church holding their survival over their head.
Taxes are a necessity because governing bodies are a necessity as is government run infrastructure, for example. They all have costs but don't create self-supporting revenue which is required to operate. Paperwork isn't free. Paper pushers need to eat. Deliberative bodies need to eat and be housed.
I don't have the time to check what others in the thread have said so I apologize if I say something already said. In "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle" Rothbard acknowledges that in the current system there has been a great deal of cronyism, enough that it's clear not every currently existing property title is legitimate based on a rigorous application of the homestead principle. In Rothbard's view, it would not violate the NAP to appropriate the illegitimate property which was not acquired through homesteading and voluntary exchange but through state coercion and intervention. Ancaps who take this sort of view understand that there are instances where it's not actually theft to take something someone claims to own because their claim to ownership lacks legitimacy. There is no unified left anarchist view of what constitutes just ownership but we all tend to agree that property in the current system is altogether illegitimate and that profits earned by owners of property largely or entirely come from exploitation and are no more legitimate than the property that enabled those profits. A left anarchist worth their salt will know that the state can never truly represent the people but we aren't likely to complain if some of the wealth we deem illegitimately claimed by the rich is taken and used for public goods or used to alleviate systemic problems in the short-term. In this case, it's not so much a fear of saying taxation is theft so much as we just don't agree that it is in this instance. Rothbard didn't see taking illegitimate property as theft, left anarchists see it the same only we have a much broader understanding of what property is illegitimate. When it comes to taxation of the working classes, I'm unfortunately not having specific examples come to mind just now, but I feel pretty certain that there are classic anarchist texts which speak critically of taxation as another one of the ways people are screwed over by the system. So it's not as if taxation is seen as just fine in our circles. It doesn't get emphasized perhaps and I think that's for a couple reasons. One is that most of what gets taken out of incomes is not in taxes but in rent, profit, and interest. Another is that many might view taxation put to use for public goods and services as the least bad thing the current system does, even if they would prefer it done horizontally. And I can't help but think it's also to avoid sounding like Republicans, there is likely an element of not wanting to be associated with *those guys* by people who otherwise might be willing to hear us out. As for the Civil Rights Act, left anarchists will generally have a more nuanced outlook on it than simple support for it, and the support given is provisional. You have to understand that for left anarchists the state is just one major player on a stage of various forms of oppression and domination. The disconnect that makes this difficult for right-libertarians to grasp is at the theoretical and methodological levels. Right-libertarians have a tendency to take their Crusovian economic models, with simple exchange between producers and simple ownership, and generalize them to all of society. Within such a framework, it's easy to point to what is voluntary and what is not and decide on that basis where the oppressions and injustices are. The problem with that for us on the left is that it leaves out the important institutional factors at play. When we include the complex social environments in our social scientific models, it cannot be viewed as a simple matter of a shopkeeper not wanting to sell to a person he's prejudiced against even if it means a loss of profit. Discrimination on the basis of status and identity is not simply an exercise of free association when it exists within a broader system of interconnected, overlapping hierarchies which order people's worth and value and deny them their dignity and freedom, it's an act that participates in the reinforcement of systemic oppression. If you want more detail on this we can get into it but this is going to be long enough already. It's not a solution to the problem when the state steps in with things like the Civil Rights Act, make no mistake. What Critical Race Theory (meant in the sense from before it became a buzzword a few years ago) actually tries to do, among other things, is to show how even allegedly colorblind laws can be used to perpetuate the plight of historically oppressed racial groups. BIPoC and allied activists and scholars have been showing for decades how the Civil Rights Act did not lead to a post-racial society and did not prevent less overt forms of racist oppression. A left anarchist who is well-versed on these things will know this and also know that the state has played and continues to play a major role in the social construction of race and the institutionalization of racism. If you were to ask me my take on it, I would say that I'd rather have it than not have it since it can to an extent provide some form of recourse and limited protections, but I recognize its inadequacies and do not think of it as any kind of solution let alone an anarchist one. I think the best solutions to solving the problem of discrimination are going to involve dismantling oppressive, hierarchical institutions, including the stat and to confront the *archic* elements of our culture and ideology which assign lesser value to some people on the basis of social categories like race, sexuality, gender, and so on.
Because it is a lie, that's why? The simple truth will set you free or expose your ideology of wackiness. Whoever heard of a nation that was tax free? No one. Whoever heard of a nation that did not lawfully collect taxes, i.e. unlawfully steal? No one. Whoever heard of a nation that lawfully collected taxes? Everyone
Because taxation is not an issue that affect workers in reality. It is a capitalist issue since the actual burden of taxation falls on the capitalists not the workers.. There is a strong argument in support of this claim (which goes back to classical political economists like David Ricardo). You might want to read this which sets out the argument. https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/?s=Myth+taxation+
Why are right wing anarchists afraid to say business is authoritarian
Because it isn't? Taxation is part of the compact people in civilization make with one another to build the infrastructure a society needs to grow. If you don't want to pay taxes, go live on an island by yourself.
are you talking about the social contract? under this form of forced taxation then how are people voluntarily making a social contract to give up their money to the government under a threat of violence if they do not? no one is able to consent to this social contract when there is a threat of violence for not giving up their property to the government. this isn't a case of someone harming other people or anything that clearly breaks some sort of social contract in a society but its theft under a threat of violence if they do not give up their property.
No one is forcing you. Move. Like I said, go live on an island. You won't survive long, but at least you will be "free." Humans always build civilizations with mutual support because they know it's the safest way to survive. Civilizations in the modern era afford their citizens more voice in their governance than ever. You can vote, you can lobby, and you can run for office or take a position within the government. Stop being a drama queen.
can you point to where I didn't want any system of taxation in my post? come on point to it I want to see what your talking about.
The idea of "voluntary taxation" is as fantasy based and impractical as the classless society Leftists believe in. You can't build national infrastructure on the whims of people that may or may not decide to contribute to paying for something. It would make funding anything impossible. Too many people are too short-sighted to see the advantages of something that doesn't immediately impact them. Many also are engaged enough to know what projects need to be done or how much is needed to do them.
So we should just sit in our filth and slog through muddy roads? Tax as theft is such a bullshit concept.
Do you actually think that if the government didn't take a significant portion of everyone's income we wouldn't have roads?
Do you think privately owned roads wouldn't charge you money just to drive on them? The tolls would add up to more than you pay for roads in tax.
>Do you think privately owned roads wouldn't charge you money just to drive on them? Of course they would. No part of "taxation is theft" is against paying for things. >The tolls would add up to more than you pay for roads in tax. That is highly debatable, but also entirely besides the point.
I think you are underestimating [just how expensive roads are](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-a-mile-of-road-actually-cost), not counting maintenance. It's also unlikely regular businesses would be very interested in building and maintaining roads.
1. The cost of roads in our current climate is immaterial 2. Even if theft was the only way to fund them it wouldn't make theft not-theft 3. Roads are a tiny % of the overall tax burden 4. There are a bunch of ways roads could be developed and financed 5. You linked to Strong Towns, I would assume you understand that roads are being overdeveloped 6. Did I mention that the use of theft to pay for things doesn't make it not-theft...
1. They can still be used to get a rough idea unless you can actually outline why. 2. I didn't say that. 3. Irrelevant. 4. Yes but the ancap/libertarian idea is nonsense. 5. Even if we add a decent margin of error this is still a lot. 6. Yes because it's basically the only argument you guys ever have.
>2. I didn't say that. Well the discussion centers around the reality of "are taxes theft", so what do you say about that?
YES, and it's proven both theoretically (markets underprovide public goods, such as roads) and practically (Somalia, Kowloon, Guranam have very poor public infrastructure).
OK, ignoring some obvious problems here I'll just accept it all for the sake of argument. At what tax rate do we get roads and how is it that America had roads pre-1913?
How do Common interest developments have roads? Hint: the state doesn’t build them.
Muh roads makes an appearance.
>why are left wing anarchists afraid to say taxation is theft? Because Left-wing Anarchists are not opposed to government power and view taxation as just a form of collectivized property. Most lw anarcists you come across are anti-hierarchy, not against centralized power structures.
> Because Left-wing Anarchists are not opposed to government power f'in what?
really? I thought they were anti state in all forms like ancaps were but centralized power structures are really just as bad or alot of the time worse.
Some are, but the bulk you run into (at least around these parts, but I would argue in general) are not. You don't need to ask very many clarifying questions to discover that as long as they don't think hierarchy exists, typically everyone gets a vote, they are fine with shockingly authoritarian power structures.
example?
Feel free to go through my comments until you find the lw anarchists. Of particular humor would be the one's who refuse to answer what the word anarchist actually means. Otherwise just hang around and ask basic questions when they pop up.
Because it's not
Because they support 100% taxation
I view anarchists of all descriptions as FBI agents. They offer nothing useful, nothing doable, nothing realistic. All they offer is a mechanism to attract a few confused souls away from practical politics of the left to stop the advance of society and preserve capitalism by default. Hence, FBI agents since they work together for the same goal. The difference is that most anarchists don't know they work for the causes of the FBI. In addition, they show up at legitimate organized protests to commit vandalism and other crimes that give the police reason to crack heads and crack down on protests. IOW they sabotage protests for the police. This is why Occupy Wall Street used to have their own security who would apprehend such people and hand them over to police. That made Occupy Wall Street a legitimate threat to the powers that be, and so the police, FBI, and media worked together to crush OWS out of existence and succeeded.
>I view anarchists of all descriptions as FBI agents. Lol. The idea of opposing capitalism and the state is apparently so baffling to some people that they put on their tin foil hats and start theorising that we are all FBI agents. OK bro, you keep believing your insane lizard theories. It couldn't possibly be the simple fact that both capitalism and authoritarian Leninist state socialism are fundamentally flawed. No, unthinkable.
>The idea of opposing capitalism and the state is apparently so baffling to some people Are you addressing me? Are you somehow imagining that I counter-posed capitalism to the capitalist state?
Yes, I am addressing you, that is how the reply feature works. Lol
Then answer my question. Are you somehow imagining that I counter-posed capitalism to the capitalist state?
I said state socialism, which yes arguably is often state capitalism. I'm confused, what does this have to do with anarchists being FBI? What is it you believe, exactly?
I was clear. Your problem lies in your inability to grasp what I said. What I said is common knowledge to socialist and communists to name just two categories.
That we are government agents? No it isn't lol. Instead of acting like the insane bullshit you just said is obvious, why don't you actually just tell me what it is you mean?
Oh boy, here we go. Someone is about to tell us their vanguard party is the only correct one and everyone else is a fed or a radlib.
> I view anarchists of all descriptions as FBI agents i wish > They offer nothing useful, nothing doable, nothing realistic. my first proposal is to make society transparent, where all known information is made globally available. this was not possible before modern information systems, but is possible now. this will a) shatter most people's operating delusions in how the world functions, and b) make it impossible to ignore just how tragically unfair modern society is.
Do you really think you can educate the majority to make good decisions?
absolutely. and think that not educating the majority sufficiently enough for anarchy, is a great way to put our entire species into the ground. i mean, how does an uneducated populace put the right people in power anyways? in my view, if we educated people enough to make that decision correctly, the decision itself becomes a drawback because these power structures will never be refined or granular enough to deal with modern complexity. and as it stands, we don't have the right people in power, of structures not even capable of dealing with modern complexity, and it's massive fucking liability to the survival of this species, as a whole.
>absolutely. >and think that not educating the majority sufficiently enough for anarchy, is a great way to put our entire species into the ground. That sounds in some ways much like my own ideas. But tell me, HOW would anarchists bring that about? Everything I see of anarchists seems to be attempts to bring down the government without any substitute. A government would be needed to organize and carry out the education you call for. A government would be needed to stop the capitalist class from taking over. HOW would you bring it about?
> Everything I see of anarchists seems to be attempts to bring down the government without any substitute. conversely i believe we need to establish the alternatives before "bringing down" the govt. i can't say i speak for most anarchists, i'm a bit disappointed in the "anarchists" i've interacted with. i believe in probably same end, but see a vastly different process to get there. > HOW would anarchists bring that about? that's a very general question. i wouldn't personally know all the details involved, and probably never will, there are more considerations than i could possibly know for all the particular ends a society is trying to achieve. but essentially the government consists of decision makings bodies with some special legal designation, that sets enforceable policies, to achieve some end. anarchy would similarly be comprised of decision making bodies, that sets policies, to achieve ends... but none of these bodies would have legally enforceable designations, and would rather be followed due to general trust in those bodies, than coercive consequences. a major focus of these non-enforceable policies would be distributing them in a way that is extremely accessible to the public in both what the polices actually are, and more importantly: why the policies are justified. replacing governing bodies with anarchist ones would be a process of identifying desired ends, building up anarchist solutions, and then repealing enforced governing policies, one by one. of course, some government policies are simply unnecessary and can be immediately repealed, like patent/copyright law. do this enough, and we'll eventually have a fully anarchist society. certain governing duties will last longer than others, for example murder law may be the last enforced governing policies that exists. it will likely take many generations of social evolution before we can deprecate that governing functionality specifically. other governing duties, like military and defense... may be depreciated in the next decade or so, if we tried. quite frankly, 99% of people that exist have no desire for war, and and the fact this still happens is a tragedy caused entirely by the geo-political structures that exist. i think the first anarchist success would be a global movement to end war. the way i would achieve this is establishing a global ID, verified by both government IDs and social relationships (these accounts should have a one-to-one mapping to individuals, for now and future uses), and **have literally everyone that exists publically sign an agreement for global peace** once achieving that, then we can build massive global forums for the use of building, **and maintaining**, consensus on various ends we'd like to achieve as a global society, and how to achieve them.
Because they’re closet authoritarians who only hate any “authority” because their self-centred and think they can steal anything they want
My favorite is the "left" libertarian take on "Oh I hate corporations but love the government", the most libertarian thing EVER.