People take into account moral considerations, so your market claim is nonsense, worth ignoring.

You’re using money issued and backed by the government and the government enforces the terms of the contract.

And? They are not a party to the contract.

I cannot nor can anyone else because the state has acquired all power to make decisions in those ventures, even if in most of those cases the contract work out to private people.

No it isn’t.

Your mistake is that you believe only the state can lay asphalt and build bridges and protect our dealings.

Who gets to decide the worth of their labour?

Consenting parties in the transaction.

You repeating it doesn’t make it untrue, either.

Do you really think it is just to take the fruits of someone else’s labor without their consent?

Ah, wisdom dawns!

You only own property if we say you do.

From there, the whole edifice of individual sovereignty collapses.

The rest of my quote magically disappears.

You're missing a premise from which you can then derive the conclusion that you therefore have the legal and/or moral right to that pre-tax income.

It is unjust to take the fruits of someone else’s work and effort for your own benefit. I have the right to my income simply because it was given to me. I acquired through a just transaction.

But it was offered to me and given to me for the services my employer and I both agreed upon.

It was their property. One edict was even called “Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property”. Of course, the Nazis would lay claim to it should they need it for the sake of the German economy.

My argument is that it is immoral to take from others, not what they ought to possess. That my money was given to me for services rendered is enough to know that it is mine.

So the capital levy on Jewish wealth imposed in 1938 proves that it wasn’t their property after all?

I haven’t quite worked out a theory of property, but I suppose it would be on the Lockean side. Is your theory of property one of government dictate?

Right, the government declares it can legally take my money, and it is theirs, therefor they are not taking my money. You probably work for the government, don’t you?

You could be right. Communal living wouldn’t allow the sort of power imbalance and organized exploitation present in modern states.

I didn’t think I’d have to explain why theft was wrong. I’ll pass, either way.

Necessary or not it has it. I cannot defend my property or take it back by force. At any rate, I’d prefer it wouldn’t take my wealth in any fashion.

For a moment there I thought you were above the most basic of strawmen.

Tax laws…We know what that means in practice: use the monopoly on violence to exploit the labor of others so you can spend their dollars on your investments, whether it’s war, infrastructure, or other ineffectual pork. You steal my income, steal it again when I buy something, steal it more when I make some gains. No private man has done that to me or anyone else but a rank thief.

I’m not sure why someone would defend Stalin. It’s difficult to find a favorable quote about collectivism, I’m afraid.

I'm Australian and value our 'compulsory voting'. To me it's not a tyranny - it's just a reminder that we have responsibilities as well as freedoms. But no one actually has to vote. We show up for 10-15 minutes and have our name ticked off. Then you are perfectly able to write, "Go fuck yourself!' or some anarchist missive on the ballot paper if you wish to demonstrate how much you hate the system.

A protest vote is still a vote. You have to go to a poll and cast a ballot.

It isn’t clear that voting is the “civic responsibility” we are often told it is, though. And if one believes that no man is good enough to be another’s master, voting might come off as objectionable.

The conceit is in the idea that so long as you can form a ruling class of your proles all will be right and well. Of course, this idea has ruined every society it has touched. So much for thriving together.

The idea of class war need not demonize the rich but only describe a tendency of the rich to maintain their luxuries and privileges at the expense of outsiders. Indeed, the poor are often encouraged to emulate the class consciousness of the rich. One way to clean my own room as a shrewd prole is to form free associations with other such proles and do what the rich do, team up explicitly in order to better squeeze politicians for tax money, protections, and privileges.

Collectivism in a nutshell. Make hasty generalizations and form a politics around it.

On “direct” vs “indirect” perception, JL Austin makes some great points regarding the language of the debate in his manuscripts Sense and Sensibilia. The use of these terms in my own and in other’s arguments admittedly sent us off in wild directions. I’m going to quote them here.

1. First of all, it is essential to realize that here the notion of perceiving indirectly wears the trousers—'directly' takes whatever sense it has from the contrast with its opposite while 'indirectly' itself(a) has a use only in special cases, and also (b) has different uses in different cases—though that doesn't mean, of course, that there is not a good reason why we should use the same word. We might, for example, contrast the man who saw the procession directly with the man who saw it through a periscope; or we might contrast the place from which you can watch the door directly with the place from which you can see it only in the mirror. Perhaps we might contrast seeing you directly with seeing, say, your shadow on the blind; and perhaps we might contrast hearing the music directly with hearing it relayed outside the concert hall. However, these last two cases suggest two further points.

2. The 'first of these points is that the notion of not perceiving 'directly' seems most at home where, as with the periscope and the mirror, it retains its link with the notion of kink in direction. It seems that we must not be looking straight at the object in question. For this reason seeing your shadow on the blind is a doubtful case; and seeing you, for instance, through binoculars or spectacles is certainly not a case of seeing you indirectly at all. For such cases as these last we have quite distinct contrasts and different expressions-'with the naked eye' as opposed to 'with a telescope', 'with unaided vision' as opposed to 'with glasses on'. (These expressions, in fact, are much more firmly established in ordinary use than 'directly' is.)

3. And the other point is that, partly no doubt for the above reason, the notion of indirect perception is not naturally at home with senses other than sight. With the other senses there is nothing quite analogous with the 'line of vision'. The most natural sense of 'hearing indirectly', of course, is that of being told something by an intermediary—a quite different matter. But do I hear a shout indirectly, when I hear the echo? If I touch you with a barge-pole, do I touch you indirectly? Or if you offer me a pig in a poke, might I feel the pig indirectly—through the poke? And what smelling indirectly might be I have simply no idea. For this reason alone there seems to be something badly wrong with the question, 'Do we perceive things directly or not?', where perceiving is evidently intended to cover the employment of any of the senses.

4. But it is, of course, for other reasons too extremely doubtful how far the notion of perceiving indirectly could or should be extended. Does it, or should it, cover the telephone, for instance? Or television? Or radar? Have we moved too far in these cases from the original metaphor They at any rate satisfy what seems to be a necessary condition—namely, concurrent existence and concomitant variation as between what is perceived in the straightforward way (the sounds in the receiver, the picture and the blips on the screen) and the candidate for what we might be prepared to describe as being perceived indirectly. And this condition fairly clearly rules out as cases of indirect perception seeing photographs (which statically record scenes from the past) and seeing films (which, though not static, are not seen contemporaneously with the events thus recorded). Certainly, there is a line to be drawn somewhere. It is certain, for instance, that we should not be prepared to speak of indirect perception in every case in which we see something from which the existence (or occurrence) of something else can be inferred; we should not say we see the guns indirectly, if we see in the distance only the flashes of guns.

5· Rather differently, if we are to be seriously inclined to speak of something as being perceived indirectly, it seems that it has to be the kind of thing which we (sometimes at least) just perceive, or could perceive, or which—like the backs of our own heads—others could perceive. For otherwise we don't want to say that we perceive the thing at all, even indirectly. No doubt there are complications here (raised, perhaps, by the electron microscope, for example, about which I know little or nothing). But it seems clear that, in general, we should want to distinguish between seeing indirectly, e.g. in a mirror, what we might have just seen, and seeing signs (or effects), e.g. in a Wilson cloud-chamber, of something not itself perceptible at all. It would at least not come naturally to speak of the latter as a case of perceiving something indirectly.

6. And one final point. For reasons not very obscure, we always prefer in practice what might be called the cash-value expression to the 'indirect' metaphor. If I were to report that I see enemy ships indirectly, I should merely provoke the question what exactly I mean.'I mean that I can see these blips on the radar screen'-'Well, why didn't you say so then?' (Compare 'I can see an unreal duck.'-'What on earth do you mean?' 'It's a decoy duck'-'Ah, I see. Why didn't you say so at once?') That is, there is seldom if ever any particular point in actually saying 'indirectly' (or 'unreal'); the expression can cover too many rather different cases to be just what is wanted in any particular case.

Thus, it is quite plain that the philosophers' use of 'directly perceive', whatever it may be, is not the ordinary, or any familiar, use; for in that use it is not only false but simply absurd to say that such objects as pens or cigarettes are never perceived directly. But we are given no explanation or definition of this new use—on the contrary, it is glibly trotted out as if we were all quite familiar with it already. It is clear, too, that the philosophers' use, whatever it may be, offends against several of the canons just mentioned above-no restrictions whatever seem to be envisaged to any special circumstances or to any of the senses in particular, and moreover it seems that what we are to be said to perceive indirectly is never—is not the kind of thing which ever could be—perceived directly.

Yet such is democracy.

It seems that what you really want is that your political stance should prevail with ease.

When democracy is indistinguishable from tyranny we’ve lost the plot.

And whose problem and fault is that?


This whole topic is about people who don't understand their role, their rights and their responsibilities as citizens of democractic countries. They are citizens of democractic countries, but they have the mentality of people living in a monarchy (or a cynical dystopia).

The power imbalance in so-called democratic countries is obscene. We’ve seen it in full action during the most recent pandemic, where most of these states seized the economy, ruled by dictate, and froze our precious human rights at their whim and fancy. I have no responsibility to any official in any of these states. I conceded no power and blended no knee.

Another day a government failure, another call for the government to fix it. By now we’ve relinquished so much social power, and converted what little responsibilities we used to share with one another into state responsibilities, that I fear it’s too late to do anything about it. So far gone are we that we now pretend voting for this-or-that politician or this-or-that piece of legislation is tantamount helping The Poor, even though politics and charity are wildly divergent activities.

The problem with the class war idea is that it isn’t true, and worse, pegs as good or evil one who may be the opposite—it’s unjust. Better to approach the blame game on an individual basis, to witness if one helps the poor or not, rather than making such determinations from which tax bracket or party they occupy. I wager you’d be surprised.

Yep

Then in terms of wages, benefits, you’ve had what others thought you deserved. It’s like having two employers, except you pay dues to only one of them.

I made the point in the original post that “representative democracy” isn’t rule by the people.

Though it’s true that a right to vote should be universal, and lords and landowners ought not to be the only ones able to elect who has the power and who makes the rules, the representative system, the relationship between a representative and his constituents, differs only in degree to the lords and land owners representing the landless tenantry in the decision making processes. That we get to vote for who should rule us seems more a consolation prize than any tangible enfranchisement.

Anti-social individualist-minded people who constantly feel they're oppressed, and who were heavily brainwashed with Cold War era propaganda, will predictably feel this way -- about any institution, in fact. Not a surprise.

But your feelings and anecdotes don't really say much about the labor movement. I know plenty of people who had bad union experiences who are very much in favor of union efforts -- they see their importance and stick around to make them better. Disowning and fleeing is an option, of course. Comes down mostly to temperament. As I said, anti-social personalities aren't a good fit anyway.

Have you ever worked for a union?

Grasping for straws. It’s so stoic I love it.

No.

It’s still a vote. If a vote is a concession of power to the state, it makes little sense to concede power while at the same time wasting a vote.

I always hated working for a union. Union dues was another tax. Shitty workers never got fired or reprimanded so we all just stooped to their level. It was just another layer of control and bureaucracy. I’d much rather bargain on my own or find better employment.

In my view that the choices are lousy isn't a reason why not to vote.

It isn’t a reason to vote, either.

I think that is a clever point but I have to disagree.

Two politicians, Alice and Bob, are running for city mayor. I refuse to vote. Which one am I indirectly supporting, Alice or Bob?

We were talking about not voting and you said it was an irresponsible political position. Why?

But you won’t say why it is irresponsible. The only one doing the rubbing are your emotions.

Someone is sour and couldn’t come up with anything better to say. Very praxisian of you.

It’s an irresponsible political position, or in a word: libertarian.

I’ll accept that. Statist responsibilities are little different than the slave’s, in my opinion.

Not voting is quite the opposite. Zero support is given. Besides, the effect of not voting is nil, and one doesn’t violate his morality by refraining from participating.