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Maradon! painfully thought these words up:
This is very, very, very, very obviously satire.

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lol at your sig

off by about 4 years tho

img-tinfoilhat

Kegwen fucked around with this message on 11-06-2008 at 01:06 AM.

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Peanut butter ass Shaq Kegwen booooze lime pole over bench lick:
Maradon firmly believes that everyone that disagrees with him on anything fully intends to destroy everything he holds dear...

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Not everybody, just collectivists.

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...and that, given time, everyone else will come to agree with him

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Not everyone, just the people who discover the objective truth, as I have.

It's really got nothing to do with anarchism at all. Law that doesn't propagate liberty isn't good, but some law does, and it's not hard to tell the difference.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 11-06-2008 at 10:52 PM.

"It's called consolidation." - Leo Gold

I'm sure what you're saying is there ought to be regulation to prevent all of this, because that's the reasonable outlook. Without some form of collectivism, there's no reason for anyone not to cheat. It's when societies work as a large game over the long run that people realize that it's in everyone's best interest to cooperate, even if there is incentive in the short run to cheat (i.e. be able to horde money). Rousseau's idea of a social contract is an example of this, which as you know forms the basis of a legitimate (classically republican) government. It's because of the social contract that people form their own bubbles of political influence. Does this sound familiar? It's libertarianism. Therefore, with regards to collectivism, it's like this:

- Collectivism is the philosophical outlook that humans are interdependent and benefits are to be had from cooperation
- The social contract is a collectivist idea that separates people into spheres of influence by their general will (a classic republic)
- In the long run, there are benefits to be had from trade as long as inherent advantages exist.
- This trade can only exist through human cooperation.
- Therefore, not only is a republican collectivist, but anyone who endorses liberal (not in the American sense, in the actual sense) economic policies of free and fair trade is actually supporting interperson cooperation, and therefore collectivism.

This is just semantics bullshit though as you are no doubt thinking, ha ha, and what you actually mean is that it's stupid to provide a disincentive to economic growth by limiting it with extra tax, which is pretty much true, except that this situation exists only in a very tiny amount of the population and the massive amount of revenue it will rake in will be able to pay off debt and possibly even advance the living standards in southern states past that of a third world country.

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x--Steven SteveO-('-'Q) :
I know it has nothing to do with anarchism, because in a free market the people with economic means are in charge, haha. See industrial revolution, global capitalism in the development of Latin America and any other colonial region, etc. It's great for conditioning plebs and putting money in the pockets of fat cats.

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Nothing could be farther from the truth. In a free market, the people who choose to accumulate wealth by means of production - in other words, the only people to reliably accumulate it - are virtually slaves to their consumers. Selling must be a win-win situation in order for it to happen, and the consumer is at an enormous advantage. They only need one producer to buy from, the producer needs as many consumers as they can get. In a free market, the consumer holds all the power.

"The customer is always right." -Harry Gordon Selfridge

This only changes in cases where a producer places the attainment of power ahead of money. During industrial revolution era America, producers used difficult and expensive travel conditions and crippling poverty to abuse workers and consumers by robbing them of any other choice. In latin america drug cartels manipulate governments and use third world conditions to do the same thing. In other words, things only go wrong when corporations begin to behave like collectivist government.

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I'm sure what you're saying is there ought to be regulation to prevent all of this, because that's the reasonable outlook. Without some form of collectivism, there's no reason for anyone not to cheat. It's when societies work as a large game over the long run that people realize that it's in everyone's best interest to cooperate, even if there is incentive in the short run to cheat (i.e. be able to horde money).

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Your definition of collectivism is academic, but impractical. The idea that people are interdependent and should cooperate is a truism. If that's collectivism, then I'm a collectivist. Milton Friedman is a collectivist. Ayn Rand is a collectivist.

That's not the collectivism I'm talking about and that's not the collectivism that Barack Obama believes in. Political collectivism is the belief that government should be used as a tool to subjugate, by violence, the will of the individual to the collective good.

Your collectivism is donating to a charity. My collectivism is paying taxes to fund a welfare check or going to jail.

Individual liberty cannot exist in this system, because if people have the freedom to choose between self interest and some ephemeral collective good, they will always choose self interest because human beings are singular entities and define themselves by their own achievements.

The consumer is robbed of choice. They can pay their taxes or they can go to jail. They could move to another country, but even if they can find an agreeable one, travel and starting over is still very expensive and difficult. Does this sound familiar?

Collective good cannot exist without individual good, collective sovereignty cannot exist without individual sovereignty. This is because the only person qualified to judge what is good for any given individual is that individual. Governments, no matter how benevolent, are necessarily incapable of providing good, individually or collectively.

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Rousseau's idea of a social contract is an example of this, which as you know forms the basis of a legitimate (classically republican) government. It's because of the social contract that people form their own bubbles of political influence.

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Rousseau's social contract is a description of social organization and has nothing to do with collectivism. Again you seem to be confusing social organization in general with the ideology that the individual is subjugate to the collective.

Rousseau wasn't thinking in terms of the individual when he came up with the idea, and so it doesn't even address that aspect of society, which is why years later Pierre-Joseph Proudhon came up with the individualist social contract to compliment it.

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Does this sound familiar? It's libertarianism. Therefore, with regards to collectivism, it's like this:

- Collectivism is the philosophical outlook that humans are interdependent and benefits are to be had from cooperation
- The social contract is a collectivist idea that separates people into spheres of influence by their general will (a classic republic)
- In the long run, there are benefits to be had from trade as long as inherent advantages exist.
- This trade can only exist through human cooperation.
- Therefore, not only is a republican collectivist, but anyone who endorses liberal (not in the American sense, in the actual sense) economic policies of free and fair trade is actually supporting interperson cooperation, and therefore collectivism.

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Again, the definition of collectivism under which you are operating is a truism and practically meaningless. That sort of collectivism is the natural product of free market capitalism. People not only cooperate for mutual benefit all on their own without any prompting from a despot, but the more despots fool with it the less it works.

In light of that, everything else that you've said here is basically correct.

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and what you actually mean is that it's stupid to provide a disincentive to economic growth by limiting it with extra tax, which is pretty much true, except that this situation exists only in a very tiny amount of the population and the massive amount of revenue it will rake in will be able to pay off debt and possibly even advance the living standards in southern states past that of a third world country.

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Well, for one, tax rate increases do not increase revenue, they decrease it considerably.

The "very tiny" amount of the population affected by tax disincentive isn't meant to stay tiny, but does under a graduated income tax, and the steeper, the tinier. The rich pay a greater share of the tax burden when their tax rates are lower - see the facts about the Reagan administration that Zair posted.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 11-07-2008 at 07:22 PM.

Even a solipsist can observe that there exist testable laws which govern the universe and are the same for every observer or, in the case of the solipsist, the observer and his imaginary friends. To try and claim otherwise is mystical mumbo jumbo of the most base and absurd variety.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 11-07-2008 at 09:39 PM.

Mandatory taxation via either consumption or income is an absolute requirement once population and dispersion reach a certain point within any society.

Contribution to infrastructure, public health, and future development is price one must pay in order to live within a civilized society.

You can be a drama queen and call it placing a gun to the head of the populace. You are smart enough to see what it really is, even if the thought is distasteful.

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Tyewa Dawnsistering:
I like roads, therefore I am a collectivist.

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Hardly.

Our system of roads can scarcely be called a triumph of collectivism. For one, many of them pay for themselves via tolls, making them just the same as any other business.

Secondly, even though our roads were built at the point of a gun doesn't mean they had to be. Obviously because of land limitations, completely unrestrained competitive road building probably would have ruined resources and limited the choice of consumers and automobile makers, but that's a failing of humans, not of any system. Don't forget, law is good if it propagates liberty. I can easily envision a scenario in which government administered ground rules for private industry to cooperate on a road system and then just put a reasonable toll on everything, maybe wrapped into the price of a car. The details aren't important, the point is that collectivism wasn't necessary and was almost certainly detrimental.

On that note, are our roads really that great? As a pittsburgh native this is a topic near and dear to my heart. There is more wanton corruption in our DOT than a chicago community organization. Winters get better and they get worse and yet somehow PennDOT's budget just has to keep getting bigger at a rate that puts inflation to shame, and in exchange we get roads closed for a pothole during rush hour while workers smoke and drink coffee for two hours in full view of traffic.

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Mandatory taxation via either consumption or income is an absolute requirement once population and dispersion reach a certain point within any society.

Contribution to infrastructure, public health, and future development is price one must pay in order to live within a civilized society.

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This is probably true, but an income tax certainly isn't necessary, much less a graduated one. We got by for 137 years without income taxes and for twenty more without much of them, and the needs of society as they pertain to government have not changed much.

If you completely abolished the income tax today, federal receipts would be the same as they were in 1998 with the income tax at the time. That's not even taking any growth resulting from abolishing the income tax into consideration, and there would be explosive growth.

There are better, pro-growth ways to collect taxes.

The vast majority of our present federal budget allocations are completely unnecessary as well, but I'll save that one for another day.

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You can be a drama queen and call it placing a gun to the head of the populace. You are smart enough to see what it really is, even if the thought is distasteful.

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When discussing government, it is of paramount importance to remember this one fact: The only thing that separates government from the Elks Club is the socially sanctioned employment of violence.

Any time you ask government to do something, you are asking someone to use violence on your behalf. The only reason anybody listens to the government is because of the threat of violence.

When I talk about the government as the point of a gun, I am not engaging in hyperbole, it is literal truth and it should be at the heart of every belief that you have about the role of government.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 11-08-2008 at 02:28 PM.

I prefer the idea of a flat tax around 15% and no corporate tax at all. It works really well in Russia and even better in Georgia.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 11-08-2008 at 02:42 PM.