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- A government imposes taxation on the citizens to fund the services the citizens are required to use for daily life.
Libertarians: "GOD THIS IS AN UNJUST TYRANNY TO ME AND ONLY ME"
- A corporation imposes a new service fee and increases the subcription charges, to fund their wallets and act like its better than it was before.
Libertarians: "This is normal and just, everyone is stupid except for me, I read Ayn Rand."
I'm down to talk out what is a just tax, what is unfair, what the taxes should go to once collected, but I think Libertarians are too hooked on think tank propaganda to decide something for themselves.
It's even better: a lot of essential or close to it things are pretty much monopolies or cartels (for example, Internet access in most of the US) so people have no actual choice but to pay a specific entity whatever they chose to charge.
It's like tax but without the upside of taxes (which is that they're money that's supposed to entirely end up benefiting you, even if most of it indirectly) because when you buy a product or service from a monopoly or cartel only part of it goes to cover the cost of the actual product or service you're getting and a large fraction or even most of it goes to shareholder dividends, which has zero benefit for you.
I've taken to call these things Taxes Paid Directly To Private Companies.
Weird. How did those ISPs end up the only option?
Horizontal Territory Allocation is a common practice with Oligopolies with physical products (which the telephone wires and routing equipment they build to run the internet very much is).
Basically two or three massive companies simply don’t enter eachothers turf by unspoken agreement and they all get to benefit by not actually competing with eachother. They they can take turns raising prices in their own turf and know their customers have to physically move to get their “competitors” prices. As long as they never actually talk to eachother about doing it it is technically not illegal.
As for how they got the turf in the first place this mostly was small governments at the town and county level signing short term exclusivity agreements with a telco to run the initial infrastructure back in the 80s-90s when this was common. And many of these municipalities actively work against new telcos moving into the area long after those original agreements ended. You can always rile up some nimbys to bitch about construction noise at a small town hall and halt projects like this for decades. This is exactly how my hometown spent 8 years blocking fios in an area that only had dsl.
You tell a 40-50 something homeowner a three inch patch of their grass will be ripped up for just a week and they’ll drag their balls bare over fields of broken glass to show up to town hall week after week for 8 years to avoid it even if their isp quadruples prices in the same time frame.
The land the utilities were built on were through government seized easements generally. The monopoly wouldn't exist unless propped up by a state.
Sounds like we should have made ISPs government owned then!
That could be a better system than the current government enforced monopoly.
Government and corporate interests can't help but suck each other off. Petty tyrants are gonna tyrant.
Corporations are fucked up. They will never allow the state to be abolished because they need to collect taxes in order to bail themselves out of trouble and in order to fight wars for them at the taxpayer expense so they can reap the profits... a corporation will never go to war alone. War is fucking expensive and is rarely directly profitable. They want to socialize expenses and privatize gain, which is impossible to do without a government of some kind.
...so, what, we're supposed to build an entire society on people's inherent willingness to help each other and just trust that crime will stop happening?
Like mate, I hate to break it to you, but psychopaths exist. The entire problem with capitalism is that some people are never satisfied no matter how much they have and will do anything they possibly can to hoard anything that could give them an advantage at the expense of the group.
Its true, the things that stop crime can only ever be made by a state.
In fact, people never managed to stop or punish theft or a murder until we invesnted states.
Yup, before states, if someone came a murdered your friend you had to trust that what you just witnessed didn't happen because there was literally nothing you could do about it, as states hadn't been invented yet.
Its good thing were too smart to fall for that.....
...and your proposed alternative is...?
I really, really hope I don't have to explain why vigilante justice is a bad idea.
I heard him say he murdered his friend.
Pity there is no third party to investigate my claim. We'll just have to string him up ourselves.
I call dibs on his shoes.
Well, in a society without judges, as the article linked proposes, I'm having a hard time seeing it any other way.
Lol nice try but I don't have to provide you with an alternative for you to attack. You're wasting youre time there.
The point is, even all those hundreds of years ago, we had an alternative to just trusting that crime wouldn't exist, as you suggested was the only alternative.
Other than its state-ness exaplin the difference between state vigilante justice and the exact equivalent done by any other kind of group.
I really, really hope I don't have to explain why it being done by a state doesn't magically make it better, in of itself.
Lol nice try but I don’t have to provide you with an alternative for you to attack. You’re wasting youre time there.
"See, the thing is, I already know I'm right, so I'm not going to waste time by giving you arguments to find flaws in."
I really, really hope I don’t have to explain why it being done by a state doesn’t magically make it better, in of itself.
...you mean why a system of justice that is held liable to a court system is not superior to a system of justice where people can just go after whomever they want? yeah, you do have to explain that actually
See, the thing is, I already know I’m right, so I’m not going to waste time by giving you arguments to find flaws in.”
Again, nice try but I'm used to people as slippery as you. What you mean is "you're right, we don't just have to sit around and trust that crime doesn't exist. However, I'm the kind of person who really struggles to back down or walk back even the most wild and silly of things that I imply."
you mean why a system of justice that is held liable to a court system is not superior to a system of justice where people can just go after whomever they want? yeah, you do have to explain that actually
Why would I explain something completely different to what I said to you?
Okay, so if we're not just going to trust that crime isn't going to happen, how are we going to prevent it? I asked you that, straight up, and you said "I'm not going to give you something just for you to poke holes in it. I've dealt with your kind before."
Before states if someone murdered your friend it would either split the tribe and/or you’d go to war with the tribe that killed your friend. Is that really better?
Maybe so, maybe not so but, whatever it is, its a hell of lot more than just trusting that crime didn't exist, don't you think?
I’m not sure where anyone suggested that people had to trust that crime doesn’t exist.
Its one of the major themes of the thread you're replying to.
It's one of the major themes of the source that you linked.
The many stories, past and present, that demonstrate how anarchy works have been suppressed and distorted because of the revolutionary conclusions we might draw from them. We can live in a society with no bosses, masters, politicians, or bureaucrats; a society with no judges, no police, and no criminals, no rich or poor; a society free of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; a society in which the wounds from centuries of enslavement, colonialism, and genocide are finally allowed to heal. The only things stopping us are the prisons, programming, and paychecks of the powerful, as well as our own lack of faith in ourselves.
Every society is going to have some criminals. Lack of access to things people need to survive is a major reason for commission of crimes, but it is not the only reason. Plenty of people do illegal things just because they feel like it. Some people are pathological liars. If a society cannot deal with those, it will eventually fail. Obviously crime will go down by (throwing a number out) a factor of at least five once the magical socialist utopia is in place, but to argue that it will entirely disappear is hopelessly naive.
One is something you choose to pay, the other you get shot if you don't pay. There is a pretty big difference.
One is something you choose to pay, the other you get shot if you don't pay.
Contract claims and property claims are ultimately enforceable by government force, as well. A "no trespassing" or "no loitering" sign, or a "Copyrighted work, all rights reserved" notice is enforceable by men with guns, too.
If taxation is theft, the same reasoning would extend to property being theft, too.
Depends how the property was claimed. Most property in the US was illegitimately claimed.
