I think that sounds a bit exaggerated. Yes, taxes do seem excessive but the state provides services in return. Without those services you would have to pay private companies to police your neighborhood, to collect refuse, to repair roads, etc., and I'm not sure that would come out much cheaper.

I did not request those services. So why should I have to pay for them?

Like you, Fitzhugh lamented wage labor, capitalist exploitation, and was fervently illiberal. It’s neat how the tandem desire for control can make slave masters and socialists comfy bedfellows. So I think you are more inclined to fit in well with him than me.

It’s true; I am operating on the assumption that a slave is chattel, is forced to work at the discretion of his master, is not allowed to leave, is involuntary, and so on. Maybe you don’t define “slave” in such a way, but I do, and given that these conditions are absent in wage labor, the conditions of slavery are not the same as the conditions of wage labor. This admittedly common sense view of slavery, not as penetrating as your own no doubt, suffices for me to distinguish slavery from wage labor, and why I refuse to consider wage labor as wage slavery. As far as pejoratives go, it’s a weak and boring one.

I don’t think it can be argued that slavery was voluntary or consensual, or that slaves should be blamed for their conditions, so we’ll just leave that one aside.

It’s true that leaving a job can lead to financial hardship, but then again it can prove beneficial. It would be interesting to see some statistics on it, but from personal experience, I know of no one who has quit a job and faced homelessness or stigma or humiliation. Certainly some do, but I’ve quit plenty of jobs and am the better for it. Have you ever quit a job before? Have you ever had a job before?

As for the theory of exploitation, for me the criticism of the theory remains the same as when Böhm-Bawerk made them over a century ago: surplus value is not equal to profits and wages are often paid in advance of revenue. That and the collapse of the labor theory of value renders the theory pretty useless.

But I don’t think you really care much about the exploitation of labor, anyways, especially when it comes to the government taking it. Your so-called “say in what the state does with taxes” is false. I wager you have not followed a single dollar of your taxes to any final destination. If you cannot know where it goes, you cannot have a say in where it goes. All you’ve done is hinged your servile hopes on the promises of politicians and bureaucrats, pretending that selecting from a rogues gallery of state careerists amounts to having a say in government.

I’m well aware of the concept of wage slavery. I just don’t believe it is accurate at all, especially when used to describe employment in general. Voluntarily working for a wage does not rise to the level of slavery, chattel or otherwise. What’s more, I have never subscribed to the theory of exploitation or the labor theory of value, so I am unable to agree with your description of employment in that respect. There is no valid reason beyond pure greed that an employee should own the company he works for by virtue of him working there alone.

The state, on the other hand, subsists entirely on exploitation in a way that is morally equivalent to forced labor: through taxation. I have to pay homage to the state with each purchase in the form of sales tax. If I don’t pay it I don’t eat. By taxing my income, my property, they confiscate the fruits of my labor. As far as exploitive practices and greed is concerned, the robber baron pales in comparison to the state.

Okay good, you agree that such demarcations allow or facilitate abuse rather than cause it. If you’re actually interested in solving a problem it’s usually best to deal with the cause of it.

Do you apply these pseudoscientific taxonomies to human beings?

I believe that “race” is a pseudoscientific taxonomy, and that whole swaths of people should not be demarcated within those abstract boundaries. I believe that such a fake demarcation has allowed racists to run roughshod on entire groups of people, and I simply refuse to adopt it in my thinking.

All I fail to apprehend is the classification of human beings into pseudoscientific taxonomies, which are as ridiculous as the day they were born. One needn’t use these taxonomies to recognize that people apply entire stereotypes to them, draw false conclusions from them, and abuse others because of them.

Ignoring an advantage ≠ ignoring racism.

My own conclusion remains the same. The criticism of color-blindness remains unproven and unprovoked. The idea that one will ignore racism by refusing to include racial taxonomies into his thinking is false on its face, because racializing people, viewing them as a member of this or that racial group and deriving assumptions thereby, is the problem to begin with. In short, one cannot banish racism by evoking it.

I’m just a layman and am relaying my own, admittedly limited knowledge, as conferred to me by everyone from public health officials, journalists and politicians. From here forward I’ll be sure to include pharmaceutical companies.

I only said that they never mentioned how quickly the virus can circulate among the vaccinated, specifically as it pertains to vaccine certificates, which are rolling out across the globe. In fact, such a scenario was only recently modelled and released just yesterday.

Abstract
Vaccines are thought to be the best available solution for controlling the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. However, the emergence of vaccine-resistant strains may come too rapidly for current vaccine developments to alleviate the health, economic and social consequences of the pandemic. To quantify and characterize the risk of such a scenario, we created a SIR-derived model with initial stochastic dynamics of the vaccine-resistant strain to study the probability of its emergence and establishment. Using parameters realistically resembling SARS-CoV-2 transmission, we model a wave-like pattern of the pandemic and consider the impact of the rate of vaccination and the strength of non-pharmaceutical intervention measures on the probability of emergence of a resistant strain. As expected, we found that a fast rate of vaccination decreases the probability of emergence of a resistant strain. Counterintuitively, when a relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions happened at a time when most individuals of the population have already been vaccinated the probability of emergence of a resistant strain was greatly increased. Consequently, we show that a period of transmission reduction close to the end of the vaccination campaign can substantially reduce the probability of resistant strain establishment. Our results suggest that policymakers and individuals should consider maintaining non-pharmaceutical interventions and transmission-reducing behaviours throughout the entire vaccination period.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95025-3

So much for vaccine certificates.

Isn't that why we have governments in the first place? Containing us?

The belief that we could control a virus by controlling human beings is only the most recent mistake of man’s hubris.

Why do I always read your words with a snivelling, high-pitched tone?

I haven’t heard anywhere that the virus can spread easily among the vaccinated, and your nasally diatribe failed to inform me of the contrary. One quote of some expert will suffice.

Oh dear, the business owner cracking the whip on the backs of their voluntary slaves. Such entitled nonsense. There is much to be said about employment, but I’ve had too many jobs to believe in a concept like wage slavery, and I would never expect ownership of a company I did not create. That’s just me.

The cost of registering an LLC or corporation was about $100 in the state I’m from, the last time I checked. So it’s a lie to imply only the rich can start a company and incorporate. Starting a business takes plenty of time and dedication, lots of risk, maybe some borrowing, sure, but one needn’t be a trust-fund baby to do so.

Never mind that governments, too, employ vast amounts of people. There are millions of American slaves grinding for wages in your precious state machinery right now, all so people like you can beg them to pick up the slack wherever you refuse to. Where’s the foam at your mouth now?

I’m sure vaccination helps. From what the news tells me, those who are hospitalized with the disease are largely unvaccinated. What they never mentioned was how quickly the virus can circulate among the vaccinated. In any case I much rather assume the risk of living than let governments, all of which failed to contain the virus, continue to contain human beings.

No slavery I know has at-will employment, where both employee and employer can terminate the relationship whenever they choose and for whatever reason. No slavery I know allows bargaining between both parties. No slavery I know permits a slave to be an employer himself. In slavery one is forbidden to leave, has no say in the relationship, and is subject to the arbitrary whims of their master.

It’s weird to me to expect democracy from a corporation, with votes and such. Democracy is a form of government, not a business model. More than that, running a company is also work, and owners are workers. They accept more risk, acquire the means of production, the property, pay the overhead, build the clientele, and employ human beings. He runs it because it’s his project, his property, the fruits of his own labor. Without him there is no opportunity to participate in it.

Nonetheless, there is “workplace democracy” out there. Any worker can become an owner. Anyone can start a company and run it as he chooses, even to the point of letting his employees oversee everything from wages to vacation pay. The question is, to those who lament the corporation and business men, why won’t you do that? fundamentally changing the system?

We know why. Confiscating the means of production is the path of least resistance, and a coup d’état is easier than a proper revolution.

CDC study shows three-fourths of people infected in Massachusetts covid-19 outbreak were vaccinated

If the virus can spread easily among the vaccinated, the vaccine passports are redundant, as was the moralizing and finger-wagging surrounding the idea. What we know, though, is that governments are willing to treat others as second-class citizens out of fear.

I can appreciate your faith in mankind. Insofar as the state represents the conversion of social power into state power, though, I see the state as a fundamentally anti-social institution. Even if all political careerists vying for positions of state power had the right principles, the motives of the state, it’s machinery, and its functions remain: the exploitation of the people, the confiscation of their wealth and power, and the regulation of their activity. To its core, the state is little more than a grand scheme of forced labor.

The state has the ultimate choice in controlling anything. They can choose to be guided by the corporations, but they can also choose to tax the corporations to help the poor and vulnerable in society, as Jeremy Corbyn believes in, and presumably Bernie Sanders on the other side of the pond.

The state can get away with evils you or I or a corporation or a church cannot. They can plunder your wealth, skim off every purchase, break into your home, steal your property, and imprison you. The lesser evils, the everyday slights, denials, red tapes, wage garnishing, ticket-giving, are just facts of life now. Even if Jesus Christ took power, none of those evils would dissipate.

Corporations are largely private enterprises. You or I could start one and direct it to do good, but no statist seems interested in even trying. Much better to aggrandize the state while shrinking our own power.

Never figured you for a communist. Good to see you’ve had a change in heart.

I’ve only ever seen communists coerce, imprison, and kill members of their community. I wager you’d turn me into the stasi as soon as you could.

We don’t need the rich when good, compassionate people such as yourself are around. Or do we? At any rate, delegating such a responsibility to a faceless institution full of power-seeking careerists is to refuse to help others.

I don’t think we should leave the mentally ill to fend for themselves. A vast campaign of deinstitutionalization has already helped free many of these individuals from state imprisonment, and it would be in our own best interest to help them.

The story is odd because in that moment the protagonist seems to ignore the present threats of the tiger and the fall in favor of eating a berry.

Tough shit. Then you have the freedom to starve to death. That’s NOS’s ideal world, anyway. Government is the problem, free markets are the solution. It’s done wonders the last 40 years— especially the Friedman Doctrine.

In my ideal world we’d help members of our community instead of delegating that responsibility to the state.

I do want Guantanamo closed down, the patriot act repealed, the CIA and FBI abolished, along with every other federal agency. What about you?

What if…?

By slavery I mean the thirteenth amendment of the constitution, which reserved slavery and involuntary servitude for prisoners.

I don’t have the habit of identifying myself with specious classifications, and like Orwell, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests”. That’s your bag, and the habit of racists throughout history.

What about censorship on social media? And aren't corporations responsible for the wages they pay their employees? Maybe that isn't "skimming wealth", but corporations can decide whether or not you live in poverty - and many hard workers do merely because of the bottom line.

But if you don’t like the parameters, you can refuse to accept the terms or move elsewhere. They cannot force you to stay and work, and you are the ultimate arbiter of your employment. The state, on the other hand, particularly the American state, can force you into slavery.

We have to look to who has the monopoly on violence and coercion. That would be the state in nearly every case. No corporation or church can skim from my wealth or throw me in prison or regulate my activity. It is because they have this power that church and business often seek its favor and influence.

Yeah, you just have a history of allying yourself with those who welcome racists with open arms. It makes it hard to take anything you say about race seriously. One suspects an ulterior motive, but one isn't interested enough to follow up on the suspicion.

If all you can do is concern yourself with your own suspicions, it says more about you than it does about me or my views.

Black men are telling you about their experiences on an almost daily basis. Describing the world as it is through the eyes of another as a result of listening is not reinforcing racism or prejudice at all, it's learning to understand what the world is like "as a black person" through empathy. If you don't understand what they're going through, you can't help them.

Your ignoring the reality of racism as it exists today does nothing to change it.

Some individuals are, sure, and others are not. The only way to get around the inductive fallacy inherent in your thinking is to make unwarranted, and, as I have argued, racist assumptions.

I haven’t ignored racism at all. What I ignore is the race-consciousness and it’s perversions.

For me it’s not about ignoring phenotypes—an impossibility unless one is blind—but about refusing to make assumptions from them. One cannot assume someone’s experience, character, beliefs, desires, etc. from the fact of these phenotypes. “This man has such-and-such phenotypes, therefor he has this-or-that experience, behavior, beliefs, and so on”, is the logic of racism and other forms of prejudice, and I see no reason to continue using it.

One must use other means of discovery in order to better apprehend the truth about an individual, anyways. The fact of a boy’s phenotype doesn’t permit some white man to “actively engage him”, nor does it give the white man the authority “to allow him to have a different view from what is”. Like experience, beliefs, character, one can only discover whether another needs or even wants a white man’s help and blessings through basic communication and observation, not through making assumptions on the basis of race, which are specious classifications in any case.

Well put, Franky.

Big moves from Western states. Governments like France, UK, Germany are starting to institute vaccine certificates, discriminating and privileging on the basis of biology and fitness instead of disease. People in France and UK are protesting this move to no avail. People in Australia are protesting the heavy-handed lockdowns, with many being jailed and fined for doing so. Shitholes, all of them. The descent into tyranny continues.

A big difference is that incest can span all sexual preferences while homosexuality cannot. This is because incest isn’t a mere proclivity. It operates at a different level, like bestiality or masochism, at best a kink, at worst an abomination or abuse.

If you make one you’ll find out.

Collectives cannot make goals. Each node within its boundaries has its own goal, and since each node is different, so is each goal.

Living almost always involves work (at least maintenance) and certainly suffering.

But it involves a great deal more. It seems to me the rest should be included among what it is you are preventing.

I am not sure what you are asking. You can prevent work and suffering by not procreating. Once born, it is an inevitable (what I call) evil or form of suffering. Certainly, an implication is you shouldn't assume for another that they should go through this and all is good because you don't mind it (at the time of the decision at least).

Again, when I look at what act or object or process it is you are preventing, I can only ever see that you’re preventing fertilization, and nothing besides. I have nothing beyond your word to turn to that shows me, yes, he really is preventing suffering.

It’s true, one shouldn’t assume for another that they should live, but ought the corollary hold, one shouldn’t assume the opposite? We cannot get consent from the unborn in any case, so the idea of consent seems ridiculous, but might you wonder if in fact your future lives would prefer to be born?

All power is illegitimate until it can prove itself legitimate. When a father leads his child across a street his authority need not be questioned. The relationship, the motivations, the behavior—all of it can prove the father’s authority over his child to be legitimate. When this principle is applied to the state, however, one can hardly find any reason why such an institution should reign over any individual, let alone to dictate his life and activities.

From where, then, does the state gain its authority? Assuming that, like money, the state has no power of its own, it goes to follow that we in the West, with our nobles and parliaments and congresses, willingly and obsequiously furnish it power each time we head to the ballot-box to select which mammalian “representatives” should have the right to our thraldom. Where one may on some days think it absurd to choose others to run his life, come election time he falls in line seeking suffrage, only to receive a perversion of it. It is in this act, the vote, that we participate in the state’s aggrandizement, never our own. And no matter whether our guy or their guy sits upon the throne, the throne itself, perched parasitically upon the wealth, land and bodies of the people who live there, remains long after he has left it. This is because the transient power of our so-called representatives is always offset, if not negated, by the absolute power of the institution. Furthermore, if the body of legislations, prohibitions, and regulations increase far quicker than their repeal, as they always do, state power must grow in inverse proportion to our own. It’s statism all the way down.

If one cannot justify state authority, if he believes with William Morris that no man is good enough to be another’s master, perhaps refusing to participate in the state’s aggrandizement is a first step to conscientious objection. But unless everyone refuses to vote this is not enough. One must, in a sense, vote through means not available in marking a slip of paper: with his influence, his voice, and his activity.

In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Etienne de la Boétie provides the only means of escape from this relationship without descending into another kind of tyranny, which is to simply refuse to obey.

“Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark will increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn; yet without being quenched by water, but merely by finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.”

Remember Shelley: “Ye are many—they are few!"

Boétie’s sentiment precedes the civil disobedience of Thoreau and Satyagraha of Gandhi by centuries, but it is an idea seemingly unvanquished by state power and propaganda. At this point refusing to obey, and the many actions and reactions such a choice may entail, is all we have left.

I made this argument:

“In order to prevent work and suffering one must prevent someone else’s or his own work and suffering. [The anti-natalist] is preventing no one’s work and suffering.”

I don’t remember if I said “he isn’t harming anyone” years ago, but the argument above is not analogous to the ones you listed. Maybe we’re getting our discussion mixed up. Perhaps you can help and explain why the one above does not work.

I am well aware of the “having children is a bad thing” argument, but I am more interested in the OP’s argument that he can prevent work and suffering by doing something other than procreating.

I get it, but I keep stumbling. I cannot conceive of living as work and suffering, in any case, but in order to prevent work and suffering one must prevent someone else’s or his own work and suffering. You’re preventing no one’s work and suffering. I can’t get past that fact.

While it is immoral to throw someone from a cliff, it does not follow that other behaviors—twiddling the thumbs, walking, or just standing there—must be moral because they don’t involve throwing people from cliffs. Even if I did believe procreation was immoral, I cannot see how doing something else, whether using birth control or burping the worm, must therefor be moral.

Your integrity and devotion to your principles could be seen as moral, and I do see it that way, but that’s as far as I can extend it. It doesn’t involve any one else, let alone their suffering, and I am unable to pretend you are preventing anything beyond fertilization.

The suffering is 100.. By adding another person, it becomes 120 let's say.. You have prevented that 20 addition that would have been suffered by someone So you HAVE done something. To ignore this fact would be to ignore future conditionals.. Then I would think you were making a playground of how we think of "could statements" to suit your argument.

I’m not ignoring future conditionals. I’m well aware that the opposite of your state of affairs is also possible, and have previously stated that, just as you claim to prevent suffering, I could blame you for preventing joy, love, and forgiveness.

What I mean is, your behavior does not prevent or alleviate extant suffering. Therefor it does not prevent or alleviate suffering. If I stand on the street and refuse to punch 100 people, I cannot say my behavior was ethical because I prevented 100 bloody noses, when in fact I did nothing at all. Again, all you’ve prevented is yourself having a child.

For me it does not follow that refusing to have a child prevents work and suffering any more than refusing to buy a car prevents a flat tire and busted tail-light. It’s not so much a problem with the proposition, but with my own thinking: the consequences of your behavior and the beings they are applied to cannot be empirically observed and measured. The sum total of suffering in the world remains. You haven’t prevented, eased or done anything about it.

At best I can say you are preventing yourself from having children. That’s it; you have prevented nothing else. And given that this behavior is entirely self-involved, that’s as far I can stretch the ethics in your behavior, and even then it’s pretty threadbare. In other words, it isn’t ethical at all.

To expect adulation and praise for what isn’t ethical behavior, though, is unethical behavior. I suppose that’s the man reason for my pushback.

Sorry, he was arrested for skipping bail. He is now facing extradition in the same cell. Now that’s a corrupt maneuver.