Yeah, all we have to do is massively relocate about 20% of the population of the United States, that'll solve it! It's only a little shy of 60 million people, we can do it! I guess one out of every five people in this country just chose to be born in the wrong place. Fuck you.
This becomes most clear when we try to discuss anarchism. Not to argue for or against it, but just to talk about what it is and how it relates to other ideas.
Most anarchists would say that anarchism is inherently socialist, and that capitalism is wholly incompatible with anarchism. What they mean by that is that in an anarchic society, ownership would necessarily be widespread, because if it was concentrated in just a few hands then those few owners would effectively rule everyone else so it couldn't be anarchy.
Anarcho-capitalists on the other hand would say that anarcho-socialism is a contradiction in terms because by "socialism" they mean "command economy" which you can't have without a state obviously. Instead they would insist that anarchy must inherently be "capitalist", by which they means "free market", because with no state there's obviously nobody to control the market.
Thing is, the anarcho-socialists were there first. (Before the anarcho-capitalists, and before Marxist style socialists too). And in their use of the words, they can and do say that market capitalism is possible, state socialism is possible, and state capitalism is possible, and they are against all of them, especially the last one. Anarcho-capitalists on the other hand, like the state socialists they oppose and everyone on the line in between them, cannot even comprehend what "anarcho-socialism" or "state capitalism" would mean, because their use of language has become so degraded that they don't even have adequate words for ideas.
It's the same reason that the modern "right" think fascism is "left". Fascism is state capitalism, but they think statism = socialism and so cannot even see that they are as close to fascism as the state socialists they oppose, and the true opposite of it is anarcho-socialism, libertarian socialism, market socialism, which is an idea they're not even capable of thinking thanks to this Orwellian newspeak that can't distinguish between things anymore.
Adam Smith wrote about free markets, not about capitalism. The term capitalism as originally coined did not refer to the same thing as a free market. It is a redefinition of terms to equate the two.
Market socialism predates Shaw. It predates even Marx. Marx is the one who first claimed that free markets entail capitalism and that socialism therefore required a command economy, but many of his socialist contemporaries disagreed with him, only to be largely forgotten by history now. So clearly "market socialism" is not a contradiction in terms in their original sense, and "socialism" therefore cannot simply mean the opposite of "free market".
"It doesn't matter what words you use" as in I'm not trying to defend the purity of language for its own sake here, but to be able to distinguish between concepts, however you want to label them. If by "capitalism" you mean only the opposite of a command economy, a free market, then you now have no word to describe the opposite of widely distributed ownership, unless you'd like to coin one, but then nobody's going to understand what you mean until you explain you new word.
Likewise if by "socialism" you mean only the opposite of a free market, a command economy, then you now have no word to describe widely distributed ownership. You're using the word "distributivism" here, but that means specfically a market-based kind of distributed ownership, and not just the concept of distributed ownership agnostic to the market or command nature of the economy. So, again, do you want to have to coin a new word?
The earliest free market thinkers like Adam Smith did not favor concentrations of wealth and did not call themselves capitalists. The earliest socialists did not favor command economies, but they opposed concentrated ownership of capital and systems that favored it, which they called "capitalism". Back then we had these four clear terms -- free market, command economy, capitalism, socialism -- and could discuss things coherently.
Then Marx and his followers and their opponents over the past century or so heavily conflated free markets with capitalism and socialism with command economies to the point that now people cannot even think about the two different issues at play there. I am simply informing people of the older, undistorted meanings of the words, and opening up the possibility of discussing things more clearly with them.
You are talking out your ass. Most of us cannot afford to start buying anything at any size, and for those of us who could, the interest alone on the cheapest available purchase would exceed the cheapest available rent, so we'd be even more fucking paying money-rent (interest) to the bank then we are paying land-rent to our landlords now. We desperately want to own, and have been trying desperately to get on that ladder our entire lives, but it keeps getting pulled even further up out of reach.
Adam Smith wrote nothing about capitalism he wrote about free markets. Try actually reading him.
The term “capitalism” was coined by a socialist. Its conflation with “free market” (and “socialism”’s conflation with “command economy”) is the propagandist redefinition.
The particular words you use don’t matter so long as you use enough of them to distinguish four different things:
-a market where ownership is widely distributed among many people
-the opposite of that, a market where it is concentrated in a few hands who can use that to exploit others
- the orthogonal matter of a market where trades are dictated by a central authority
- and the opposite of that, a market where trades are made freely between equals
If you only use one word (“socialism”) for 1 and 3, and another word (“capitalism”) for 2 and 4, or worse still only talk about 3 and 4 using those words while others are talking about 1 and 2 using the same words, then it’s impossible to even have a meaningful discussion about any of this.
"Crony capitalism" is a misnomer. Nobody has to give favorable treatment to their cronies for property-owners to exploit non-property-owners. That's just capitalism. That's what capitalism is: a market distorted in favor of those who own capital.
What you call "crony capitalism" is just capitalism. What you call "capitalism" is just a free market. A free market where capital is widely distributed in a decentralized way, not held by one class of people to the exploitation of another, is market socialism. "Socialism" doesn't mean everything is controlled by the state, it means capital is owned by the people. Widespread individual ownership by many people still counts; it doesn't have to (and shouldn't) be collective ownership through the state.
... and that is capitalism’s fault, not an attack on capitalism. Capitalism wants most people owning nothing and being beholden to the property-owning elites.
I think the reference to domestic violence was supposed to be a token of sympathy to the "imaginary foes", not a slight against abuse victims. Saying that those foes are, in fact, being abused (by capitalism), and yet sadly are still defending it, implicitly for psychological reasons similar to those behind people who stand by their domestic abusers.
Also, you know domestic abuse is not just man-against-woman, right? Women abuse men too; and also, gay and lesbian couples exist, and can be just as abusive as straight couples.
It's both, actually. Market price is a product of both demand (how much people value something) and supply (inverse of how hard it is to get). A job being hard to do means it's harder to get people to do it, which will raise its price. Not above the maximum that people would pay for it, of course, but it's still a factor. Just like if, say, lumber became harder to get, but demand for lumber went unchanged. The price of lumber would go up.
I've been thinking lately that there is an epistemic analogue of the problem with anarchy involved here. In simple words: freedom is unstable and likes to quickly collapse into non-freedom, unless there's something standing in the way of that, which is then itself a kind of non-freedom.
In the political sphere, in the absence of good governance whoever has the most power quickly establishes themselves as a state and then imposes their own, usually terrible, form of governance upon everyone else. It's possible for such states to gradually learn to govern better and become less state-like, but if they were to just give it up entirely and allow everyone unchecked freedom, the first asshole to abuse it would become the new state and restart the whole cycle. It's conceivable to have some form of stateless governance to stop that from happening, but figuring out how exactly that would work is a notoriously difficult problem.
In the academic sphere (for lack of a better word -- matters to do with education, learning, disseminating information, which news is a part of), the analogue of a state is something like a religion. Not necessarily the thing you probably think of when you hear the word "religion", not necessarily anything to do with any god or gods, but something with a dogmatic approach to making everyone believe the same thing. Social conformity to the shared assumptions you describe fits the bill. In the absence of good education, the analogue of governance here, all manner of little "cults" with their own dogmas spring up -- every manner of kook and crank and quack you can think of, each with their own little One True Worldview that everyone else is just too stupid to wise up to.
Left unchecked, they could easily become actual full-blown religions, their quirky little forms of madness becoming widespread, socially-acceptable madness. But how do we check them? With better education of course, but that amounts to having a more widespread and convincing message to all such people that they are wrong and should believe such-and-such else instead... and now we're veering awfully close to proposing effectively our own "religion" to counter theirs. Which unsurprisingly is a claim such kooks love to make, that mainstream academia push their consensus views with a religious dogmatism, oppressing all the freethinkers who dare to disagree.
I think the kooks are wrong, at the moment, but there's is a small point to be made about the danger of that. The kind of widespread and highly influential education that could keep such crazy conspiracy theories properly marginalized easily threatens to become the dogma it would seek to prevent, just like the kind of widespread and highly influential governance that could keep violent would-be warlords properly marginalized easily threatens to become the tyranny it would seek to prevent.
Maybe a solution to one problem could also be adapted into a solution to the other.
Hopefully they learn to take cigarettes from the people actively smoking them, and then go offsite to get more, and teach others crows this behavior, and finally the ash-hole problem will be solved.
...who is mentioned in the article, and where can I subscribe to his newsletter?
Also, can we implement his suggestion nationwide, or at least buy pretrained crows to guard our own localities / follow us around and clear the area of those filthy ash-holes?
Classically, the "liberal arts" were seven specific fields of study, five of which were forms of math: the "trivum" of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, plus the "quadrivium" arithmetic, geometry, "music" (meaning harmonics, i.e. cyclical functions, like trigonometric ones) and "astronomy" (meaning dynamics, i.e. mostly calculus).
Today they seem to be treated as a synonym to the "humanities", and I'm at a loss as to what exactly those are supposed to be other than "not a (physical) science, technology, engineering, or mathematics field".
Psychology seems to be counted sometimes, but that's a physical science, a level of abstraction up from biology. Sociology, which seems to always be counted as such, is likewise a level of abstraction up from ecology (societies are basically human ecosystems), which in turn is definitely also a physical science on par with biology even though I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "STEM" blowhards here wanted to count it as some "soft, leftist" field because of its environmentalist connotations.
Mathematics also isn't a physical science, or even an application thereof as engineering and technology are. But I guess math gets lumped in with them because the physical sciences use lots of math?
So how about fields like political science and economics, which use extensive math in things like control theory, voting theory, game theory, decision theory, and so on? Those aren't physical sciences, not even to the extent that sociology is, because they're talking about prescriptive rather than descriptive topics: what kind of actions it would be rational to take, not just what kind of action people do in fact take. You might call them "ethical sciences" (at least I would like to). But they're definitely not physical sciences, which seems to exclude them from STEM even though they rely just as much on math?
What about linguistics, which is not just anthropology of language but an abstract field with close connections to mathematics at times? Linguistics and mathematics seem to have about equal claim to the field of logic.
And what about philosophy, which like mathematics and linguistics is a highly abstract field, and like mathematics is extremely rigorous in its logic (sharing at least as equal a claim to that field as math or language do), yet largely unconcerned with the empirical observations of the physical sciences, and lays the groundwork of the "ethical sciences" as much as it does the physical ones?
The arts are definitely not physical sciences, or any kind of science at all. So are those "the humanities"? Do you just mean "the arts" when you say "the humanities"? If so, then don't go lumping linguistics, philosophy, the "ethical sciences" like economics and political science, and some actual empirical physical sciences like psychology and sociology in with it. Those are all their own separate things, and really don't belong in one category with each other (any more than mathematics belongs in the same category as the physical sciences and applications thereof in engineering and technology).
This line of argument seems to presume that more equal income distribution, whatever the cause, causes price inflation, which is bad for everyone. That consequently implies that greater income inequality leads to price deflation that somehow benefits everyone. The logical conclusion of this line of argument would be that one person having all the income and everyone else having none would reduce the price of everything to near zero -- which, yeah, it largely would, because nobody would be able to buy anything for more than that -- and that that would somehow be to everyone's benefit, despite that nobody would have the money with which to buy the cheap shit, except the one person who has all the income.
We're not talking about adding more money to the economy. Nobody is printing $58k/person in new bills. Money headed for the top is being redirected to the bottom instead. People around the middle are unaffected. Prices will likely go up, sure, but for everyone below the mean -- which is a supermajority of people, because of income distribution right-skew -- their income increases faster than the prices, resulting in greater net buying power. People above the mean will see their costs go up some, sure. Just like the one guy with all the money in the extreme scenario above would pay more if other people had money and prices went up because of that. But the whole point of this is to help the poor at the expense of the rich, so what did you expect?
Under my proposal that can never happen, because the closer the top gets to the middle, the less the effect it has on those on the top. It basically puts a center-ward pressure on all incomes, in proportion to their distance from the income. As incomes get more disproportionately distributed, it automatically pushes harder; as they get more evenly distributed, it automatically pushes less. If incomes were naturally distributed fairly evenly, my proposal would have very little effect on anyone at all.
Your point is true, but beside my point. I meant only to speak of income and what I said is true of income: “wealth “ waa just misspeaking. Nothing I suggested would takke land from farmers or anything like that.
A flat tax plus a UBI creates an automatic progressive tax curve, so you wouldn't be raising the tax to fund the UBI on the normal tax curve.
If you want to give everyone $1000/mo, calculate what is $1000/mo divided by the mean income. Fund that UBI by taxing everyone that resulting fraction of their income, flat, everyone pays the same percent. If you do that, people making the mean income pay nothing and get nothing in net; everyone below the mean income benefits some in net (the more the further below the mean their income); and everyone above the mean costs some (the more the further above the mean you are). In the US, around 75% of people make below the mean income, because of how incomes are right-skewed, and the bulk of the 25% above it don't make very much above it, so an UBI funded this way benefits more than a supermajority of people, and costs most of the remainder fairly little. Because the vast majority of wealth is held by a tiny tiny fraction of the populace, who are the ones who drag the mean so far above the median (creating that skew), and so are the ones most affected by it.
Or, you know, give everyone $1000/mo and tax the average (mean) person that much back, and everyone else proportional to their relationship to the mean. So poor people keep more than they pay and rich people vice versa.
I'm kind of baffled that you could think it could possibly not be, absent some reason to think that (like your misunderstanding of Goedel). The alternative to reality being describable by a formal language would be one of these two things:
1) Some phenomenon occurs, and we are somehow unable to even speak about it.
or
2) We can speak about it, but only in vague poetic language using words and grammar that are not well-defined.
I struggle to imagine any possible phenomenon that could cause either of those problems. In fact, it seems to me that such a phenomenon is, in principle, literally unimaginable: I cannot at the same time picture in my head some definite image of something happening, yet at the same time not be able to describe it, as rigorously as I should feel like, not even by inventing new terminology if I need to. At best, I can just kind of... not really definitely imagine anything in particular.
To be fair, some people (theological noncognitivists) hold that religious concepts are like this, but precisely because of that, I find I cannot pin down what exactly they're even really talking about. They seem to be saying something to the effect of that religious terms are like poetry, which seems to me to mean that the referents of those terms are... the warm fuzzy feelings that that 'poetry' gives you?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, all we have to do is massively relocate about 20% of the population of the United States, that'll solve it! It's only a little shy of 60 million people, we can do it! I guess one out of every five people in this country just chose to be born in the wrong place. Fuck you.
This becomes most clear when we try to discuss anarchism. Not to argue for or against it, but just to talk about what it is and how it relates to other ideas.
Most anarchists would say that anarchism is inherently socialist, and that capitalism is wholly incompatible with anarchism. What they mean by that is that in an anarchic society, ownership would necessarily be widespread, because if it was concentrated in just a few hands then those few owners would effectively rule everyone else so it couldn't be anarchy.
Anarcho-capitalists on the other hand would say that anarcho-socialism is a contradiction in terms because by "socialism" they mean "command economy" which you can't have without a state obviously. Instead they would insist that anarchy must inherently be "capitalist", by which they means "free market", because with no state there's obviously nobody to control the market.
Thing is, the anarcho-socialists were there first. (Before the anarcho-capitalists, and before Marxist style socialists too). And in their use of the words, they can and do say that market capitalism is possible, state socialism is possible, and state capitalism is possible, and they are against all of them, especially the last one. Anarcho-capitalists on the other hand, like the state socialists they oppose and everyone on the line in between them, cannot even comprehend what "anarcho-socialism" or "state capitalism" would mean, because their use of language has become so degraded that they don't even have adequate words for ideas.
It's the same reason that the modern "right" think fascism is "left". Fascism is state capitalism, but they think statism = socialism and so cannot even see that they are as close to fascism as the state socialists they oppose, and the true opposite of it is anarcho-socialism, libertarian socialism, market socialism, which is an idea they're not even capable of thinking thanks to this Orwellian newspeak that can't distinguish between things anymore.
Adam Smith wrote about free markets, not about capitalism. The term capitalism as originally coined did not refer to the same thing as a free market. It is a redefinition of terms to equate the two.
Market socialism predates Shaw. It predates even Marx. Marx is the one who first claimed that free markets entail capitalism and that socialism therefore required a command economy, but many of his socialist contemporaries disagreed with him, only to be largely forgotten by history now. So clearly "market socialism" is not a contradiction in terms in their original sense, and "socialism" therefore cannot simply mean the opposite of "free market".
"It doesn't matter what words you use" as in I'm not trying to defend the purity of language for its own sake here, but to be able to distinguish between concepts, however you want to label them. If by "capitalism" you mean only the opposite of a command economy, a free market, then you now have no word to describe the opposite of widely distributed ownership, unless you'd like to coin one, but then nobody's going to understand what you mean until you explain you new word.
Likewise if by "socialism" you mean only the opposite of a free market, a command economy, then you now have no word to describe widely distributed ownership. You're using the word "distributivism" here, but that means specfically a market-based kind of distributed ownership, and not just the concept of distributed ownership agnostic to the market or command nature of the economy. So, again, do you want to have to coin a new word?
The earliest free market thinkers like Adam Smith did not favor concentrations of wealth and did not call themselves capitalists. The earliest socialists did not favor command economies, but they opposed concentrated ownership of capital and systems that favored it, which they called "capitalism". Back then we had these four clear terms -- free market, command economy, capitalism, socialism -- and could discuss things coherently.
Then Marx and his followers and their opponents over the past century or so heavily conflated free markets with capitalism and socialism with command economies to the point that now people cannot even think about the two different issues at play there. I am simply informing people of the older, undistorted meanings of the words, and opening up the possibility of discussing things more clearly with them.
Contract rent is a type of economic rent.
You are talking out your ass. Most of us cannot afford to start buying anything at any size, and for those of us who could, the interest alone on the cheapest available purchase would exceed the cheapest available rent, so we'd be even more fucking paying money-rent (interest) to the bank then we are paying land-rent to our landlords now. We desperately want to own, and have been trying desperately to get on that ladder our entire lives, but it keeps getting pulled even further up out of reach.
“Capitalist” as in one who owns capital does. “Capitalism” as in a system favoring capitalists does not.
Adam Smith wrote nothing about capitalism he wrote about free markets. Try actually reading him.
The term “capitalism” was coined by a socialist. Its conflation with “free market” (and “socialism”’s conflation with “command economy”) is the propagandist redefinition.
The particular words you use don’t matter so long as you use enough of them to distinguish four different things:
-a market where ownership is widely distributed among many people
-the opposite of that, a market where it is concentrated in a few hands who can use that to exploit others
- the orthogonal matter of a market where trades are dictated by a central authority
- and the opposite of that, a market where trades are made freely between equals
If you only use one word (“socialism”) for 1 and 3, and another word (“capitalism”) for 2 and 4, or worse still only talk about 3 and 4 using those words while others are talking about 1 and 2 using the same words, then it’s impossible to even have a meaningful discussion about any of this.
"Crony capitalism" is a misnomer. Nobody has to give favorable treatment to their cronies for property-owners to exploit non-property-owners. That's just capitalism. That's what capitalism is: a market distorted in favor of those who own capital.
What you call "crony capitalism" is just capitalism. What you call "capitalism" is just a free market. A free market where capital is widely distributed in a decentralized way, not held by one class of people to the exploitation of another, is market socialism. "Socialism" doesn't mean everything is controlled by the state, it means capital is owned by the people. Widespread individual ownership by many people still counts; it doesn't have to (and shouldn't) be collective ownership through the state.
... and that is capitalism’s fault, not an attack on capitalism. Capitalism wants most people owning nothing and being beholden to the property-owning elites.
Nobody is abusing them.
I think the reference to domestic violence was supposed to be a token of sympathy to the "imaginary foes", not a slight against abuse victims. Saying that those foes are, in fact, being abused (by capitalism), and yet sadly are still defending it, implicitly for psychological reasons similar to those behind people who stand by their domestic abusers.
Also, you know domestic abuse is not just man-against-woman, right? Women abuse men too; and also, gay and lesbian couples exist, and can be just as abusive as straight couples.
"Cue", not "queue". Unless you mean the apologists are lining up for something?
It's both, actually. Market price is a product of both demand (how much people value something) and supply (inverse of how hard it is to get). A job being hard to do means it's harder to get people to do it, which will raise its price. Not above the maximum that people would pay for it, of course, but it's still a factor. Just like if, say, lumber became harder to get, but demand for lumber went unchanged. The price of lumber would go up.
I've been thinking lately that there is an epistemic analogue of the problem with anarchy involved here. In simple words: freedom is unstable and likes to quickly collapse into non-freedom, unless there's something standing in the way of that, which is then itself a kind of non-freedom.
In the political sphere, in the absence of good governance whoever has the most power quickly establishes themselves as a state and then imposes their own, usually terrible, form of governance upon everyone else. It's possible for such states to gradually learn to govern better and become less state-like, but if they were to just give it up entirely and allow everyone unchecked freedom, the first asshole to abuse it would become the new state and restart the whole cycle. It's conceivable to have some form of stateless governance to stop that from happening, but figuring out how exactly that would work is a notoriously difficult problem.
In the academic sphere (for lack of a better word -- matters to do with education, learning, disseminating information, which news is a part of), the analogue of a state is something like a religion. Not necessarily the thing you probably think of when you hear the word "religion", not necessarily anything to do with any god or gods, but something with a dogmatic approach to making everyone believe the same thing. Social conformity to the shared assumptions you describe fits the bill. In the absence of good education, the analogue of governance here, all manner of little "cults" with their own dogmas spring up -- every manner of kook and crank and quack you can think of, each with their own little One True Worldview that everyone else is just too stupid to wise up to.
Left unchecked, they could easily become actual full-blown religions, their quirky little forms of madness becoming widespread, socially-acceptable madness. But how do we check them? With better education of course, but that amounts to having a more widespread and convincing message to all such people that they are wrong and should believe such-and-such else instead... and now we're veering awfully close to proposing effectively our own "religion" to counter theirs. Which unsurprisingly is a claim such kooks love to make, that mainstream academia push their consensus views with a religious dogmatism, oppressing all the freethinkers who dare to disagree.
I think the kooks are wrong, at the moment, but there's is a small point to be made about the danger of that. The kind of widespread and highly influential education that could keep such crazy conspiracy theories properly marginalized easily threatens to become the dogma it would seek to prevent, just like the kind of widespread and highly influential governance that could keep violent would-be warlords properly marginalized easily threatens to become the tyranny it would seek to prevent.
Maybe a solution to one problem could also be adapted into a solution to the other.
Hopefully they learn to take cigarettes from the people actively smoking them, and then go offsite to get more, and teach others crows this behavior, and finally the ash-hole problem will be solved.
Maybe not but they are all ash-holes.
...who is mentioned in the article, and where can I subscribe to his newsletter?
Also, can we implement his suggestion nationwide, or at least buy pretrained crows to guard our own localities / follow us around and clear the area of those filthy ash-holes?
Classically, the "liberal arts" were seven specific fields of study, five of which were forms of math: the "trivum" of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, plus the "quadrivium" arithmetic, geometry, "music" (meaning harmonics, i.e. cyclical functions, like trigonometric ones) and "astronomy" (meaning dynamics, i.e. mostly calculus).
Today they seem to be treated as a synonym to the "humanities", and I'm at a loss as to what exactly those are supposed to be other than "not a (physical) science, technology, engineering, or mathematics field".
Psychology seems to be counted sometimes, but that's a physical science, a level of abstraction up from biology. Sociology, which seems to always be counted as such, is likewise a level of abstraction up from ecology (societies are basically human ecosystems), which in turn is definitely also a physical science on par with biology even though I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "STEM" blowhards here wanted to count it as some "soft, leftist" field because of its environmentalist connotations.
Mathematics also isn't a physical science, or even an application thereof as engineering and technology are. But I guess math gets lumped in with them because the physical sciences use lots of math?
So how about fields like political science and economics, which use extensive math in things like control theory, voting theory, game theory, decision theory, and so on? Those aren't physical sciences, not even to the extent that sociology is, because they're talking about prescriptive rather than descriptive topics: what kind of actions it would be rational to take, not just what kind of action people do in fact take. You might call them "ethical sciences" (at least I would like to). But they're definitely not physical sciences, which seems to exclude them from STEM even though they rely just as much on math?
What about linguistics, which is not just anthropology of language but an abstract field with close connections to mathematics at times? Linguistics and mathematics seem to have about equal claim to the field of logic.
And what about philosophy, which like mathematics and linguistics is a highly abstract field, and like mathematics is extremely rigorous in its logic (sharing at least as equal a claim to that field as math or language do), yet largely unconcerned with the empirical observations of the physical sciences, and lays the groundwork of the "ethical sciences" as much as it does the physical ones?
The arts are definitely not physical sciences, or any kind of science at all. So are those "the humanities"? Do you just mean "the arts" when you say "the humanities"? If so, then don't go lumping linguistics, philosophy, the "ethical sciences" like economics and political science, and some actual empirical physical sciences like psychology and sociology in with it. Those are all their own separate things, and really don't belong in one category with each other (any more than mathematics belongs in the same category as the physical sciences and applications thereof in engineering and technology).
"Republic" and "democracy" are orthogonal concepts and the US is both.
This line of argument seems to presume that more equal income distribution, whatever the cause, causes price inflation, which is bad for everyone. That consequently implies that greater income inequality leads to price deflation that somehow benefits everyone. The logical conclusion of this line of argument would be that one person having all the income and everyone else having none would reduce the price of everything to near zero -- which, yeah, it largely would, because nobody would be able to buy anything for more than that -- and that that would somehow be to everyone's benefit, despite that nobody would have the money with which to buy the cheap shit, except the one person who has all the income.
We're not talking about adding more money to the economy. Nobody is printing $58k/person in new bills. Money headed for the top is being redirected to the bottom instead. People around the middle are unaffected. Prices will likely go up, sure, but for everyone below the mean -- which is a supermajority of people, because of income distribution right-skew -- their income increases faster than the prices, resulting in greater net buying power. People above the mean will see their costs go up some, sure. Just like the one guy with all the money in the extreme scenario above would pay more if other people had money and prices went up because of that. But the whole point of this is to help the poor at the expense of the rich, so what did you expect?
Under my proposal that can never happen, because the closer the top gets to the middle, the less the effect it has on those on the top. It basically puts a center-ward pressure on all incomes, in proportion to their distance from the income. As incomes get more disproportionately distributed, it automatically pushes harder; as they get more evenly distributed, it automatically pushes less. If incomes were naturally distributed fairly evenly, my proposal would have very little effect on anyone at all.
Your point is true, but beside my point. I meant only to speak of income and what I said is true of income: “wealth “ waa just misspeaking. Nothing I suggested would takke land from farmers or anything like that.
A flat tax plus a UBI creates an automatic progressive tax curve, so you wouldn't be raising the tax to fund the UBI on the normal tax curve.
If you want to give everyone $1000/mo, calculate what is $1000/mo divided by the mean income. Fund that UBI by taxing everyone that resulting fraction of their income, flat, everyone pays the same percent. If you do that, people making the mean income pay nothing and get nothing in net; everyone below the mean income benefits some in net (the more the further below the mean their income); and everyone above the mean costs some (the more the further above the mean you are). In the US, around 75% of people make below the mean income, because of how incomes are right-skewed, and the bulk of the 25% above it don't make very much above it, so an UBI funded this way benefits more than a supermajority of people, and costs most of the remainder fairly little. Because the vast majority of wealth is held by a tiny tiny fraction of the populace, who are the ones who drag the mean so far above the median (creating that skew), and so are the ones most affected by it.
Or, you know, give everyone $1000/mo and tax the average (mean) person that much back, and everyone else proportional to their relationship to the mean. So poor people keep more than they pay and rich people vice versa.
I'm kind of baffled that you could think it could possibly not be, absent some reason to think that (like your misunderstanding of Goedel). The alternative to reality being describable by a formal language would be one of these two things:
1) Some phenomenon occurs, and we are somehow unable to even speak about it.
or
2) We can speak about it, but only in vague poetic language using words and grammar that are not well-defined.
I struggle to imagine any possible phenomenon that could cause either of those problems. In fact, it seems to me that such a phenomenon is, in principle, literally unimaginable: I cannot at the same time picture in my head some definite image of something happening, yet at the same time not be able to describe it, as rigorously as I should feel like, not even by inventing new terminology if I need to. At best, I can just kind of... not really definitely imagine anything in particular.
To be fair, some people (theological noncognitivists) hold that religious concepts are like this, but precisely because of that, I find I cannot pin down what exactly they're even really talking about. They seem to be saying something to the effect of that religious terms are like poetry, which seems to me to mean that the referents of those terms are... the warm fuzzy feelings that that 'poetry' gives you?