At no point did I say that unfettered capitalism was the best of all possible worlds
Maybe not but you suggested that capitalism was in some way non-ideological when it's certainly not.
merely that people, left to their own devices, tend to place value on goods and services and develop a market under their own steam, rather than someone sitting down in a cave somewhere and saying "hey let's build a stock exchange because we deeply believe in the fundamental principle of private property".
Yes and, as was my point, people when left to their own device also tend to do whatever they can to exploit and live off the work of others up to and including enslaving them and credibly threatening them with death to enforce that enslavement. The slave-driven economies of the ancient world, the capitalist economies of the modern world, and the feudal economies that bridged the gap between them, were none more or less "natural" than the others. They were and are just what people tended to do in their respective times when nobody stopped them from doing it. In other times people did stop them from doing some of those things, and then people tended to do other things instead; if we allowed feudalism or slavery today, people would tend to do those sometimes too. Would that make a nonchalant stance toward slavery somehow non-ideological? Would "people hold slaves, and I don't object to that" be ideologically neutral just because if nobody objects to it people will tend to hold slaves?
And bonus negative points for backhandedly equating the ownership of private property and the exchange of said goods and services to people who "steal from and enslave and murder each other".
There was no equation, there was illustration by analogy.
You claim that people tend to do a certain thing if nobody stops them and then claim that supporting or allowing that thing is ideologically neutral because of it.
I point out that there are other things that people tend to do if nobody stops them, things that we do not generally consider non-chalant attitudes toward to be ideologically neutral.
Thus illustrating a counterexample to the principle you seem to be employing, to make the point that accepting or protesting the practices of capitalism is no less ideologically neutral than accepting or protesting the practice of slavery, etc. Not because the two are the same thing, but because in either case it doesn't matter whether people will tend to do it if not stopped or not, you're still taking an ideological position if you say either that you're ok with it or that you're not.
If you're asked "Should this happen?", any answer you give will be a moral opinion. If you respond "that does happen", you've just avoided the question and given an answer to a completely different one.
Analytic philosophy's adherence to mathematical rigor is what saved it from falling down the post-modern hole that swallowed up all the "other humanities".
(I'm not fond of that category "humanities" and how philosophy doesn't fit well into it. Paintings and literature are just arts. History is a thing of its own that transcends all the fields, arts and sciences alike, and so is philosophy. Lumping half the arts in with two big overarching fields in their own right doesn't sit well with me. Math also shouldn't be lumped in as a science, that's a thing of its own too on part with art, and we're completely lacking the normative analogues of science, engineering, and technology, although some things like sociology and anthropology are approximating a normative analogue of science, and bus-econ courses are in the right general area for a normative analogue of engineering and technology, but that whole area is woefully underdeveloped).
(I drew a diagram of something like this once, though I wasn't sure how exactly to incorporate history into it).
Capitalism is what people do when you leave them alone. You may as well say physics is a religion.
People also steal from and enslave and murder each other when you "leave them alone", in the sense of total unregulated anomie.
To say that people should be "left alone" in that sense is still to take an ethical, moral, or as you've been calling it, ideological stance. To say that nobody should do anything about it; that it is ok, acceptable behavior. Moral nihilism is still a moral position: the position that everything and its negation is OK, that nothing is either forbidden or obligatory.
Now on the other hand, what I think you probably more likely meant to say, is that free markets (which are not identical to capitalism) are what happen when people leave each other alone, in the sense of not stealing from and enslaving and murdering and otherwise violating and exploiting each other. But because people will violate and exploit each other if "left alone" in the earlier sense, i.e. if nobody stops them, then in order to achieve a state where we all leaving each other alone in the later sense, we cannot "leave alone" those who would violate and exploit others.
Freedom requires either everybody to be perfectly well behaved of their own accord (good luck with that), or for there to be enough people actively counteracting the misbehavior of others (but going no further in their actions against those others than to counteract their actions). As Adam Smith put it, a free market is a well-regulated market.
And whether the practices that underlie capitalism (which, again, does not simply mean a free market) count as misbehavior or not, and are in need of counteraction or not, is an ideological position. Should we let people exclude others from the means of production by force, and even help them do so? (i.e. should it be privately owned?). Should we let people demand repayment on borrowed money or goods beyond the return of the money or goods, on threat of force, and even help them do so? (i.e. should contracts of rent and interest be enforceable?) Capitalism answers "yes" to both of those questions; a "no" answer to either would not be capitalism, but could still be a free market.
To lose a free market, you'd have to answer "yes" to "Should we let people demand goods and services from others on threat of force?" It could be argued that allowing that on threats other than force would also lose the freedom of the market. Should we let people demand goods and services from others on threat of the release of private information (e.g. blackmail, I'll tell about your affair unless you pay me off). Should we let people demand goods and services from others on threat of letting them starve or freeze to death because they have no food or shelter? Now it's getting into controversial territory. But no matter what your answer to that question is, you're taking an ideological stance.
Somehow I don't think the government licking my balls really conveys the right idea of the bad things they're doing. That's generally the kind of thing you'd tell someone you don't like to do because it demeans them and pleasures you, not the kind of thing someone oppressing you does to you of their own choice.
Well, maybe it's different for men and women, their stereotypical experiences and perceptions at least. A bunch of pervs wanting to lick a woman's genitals against her will gets more into the territory they're probably trying to convey here.
I wouldn't know how to make sense of "2.3 times smaller" in any context. Except maybe... you have things A, B, and C, and B is smaller than A, as is C, and the A-C = 2.3 * A-B. But I wouldn't know what to make of it if you just said "C is 2.3 times smaller than B!" without the comparison to A. And I don't know how you would phrase that comparison... "C is 2.3 times smaller than A than B?" That's just confusing.
You're both right. Bad social skills result in rejection and loneliness which results in resentment which results in a lack of empathy which results in misogyny. The resentment is the missing piece there.
That's not a justification of anything, just an explanation.
Merits of mandatory insurance aside, your analogy is broken.
Nobody is being forced to take birth control; some people are being forced to pay to provider others with the option of birth control, if those others choose to use it.
The gun analogue would not be that people are forced to have smart gun technology on their guns, but that some people would be forced to pay to provide others with the option of smart gun technology on their guns, if those others choose to use it.
You have a standard set of rights and responsibilities. They can be conditional (e.g. if X then you must Y, unless X you may not Y, etc).
Nobody can change anybody else's rights or responsibilities, in any way, including by mutual agreement. You cannot sign away your rights or responsibilities. You can only change which conditions in fact obtain, and consequently which conditional rights and responsibilities may or may not apply to you.
The reason locals don't take the jobs is *because* they don't need it. They are in high enough demand that they can get better-paying jobs elsewhere. The businesses don't like the employees having the leverage like that for once, so they want to bring in more cheap labor to fix that problem and bring down the overall cost of labor, so that the locals *can't* pass up the low-paying jobs because then they'd be passing up all jobs since there's always more low-paid immigrants to do it at that price if the locals won't.
Consider whatever you do for a living. You can command a certain wage for that job, that is to say you can expect to get paid a certain amount, and that amount is set by how low you could possibly afford to go (your costs of your labor), how much employers could possibly afford to pay you (the value of your labor), how many jobs of that kind are open (how in demand your kind of labor is), and how many other people could do that job (how much supply for that kind of labor there is). Consider a scenario where the number of jobs and the number of qualified workers are well-matched: there aren't unfilled jobs, any employer can always find a worker if they're willing to pay them well. But the employers of course want to pay less for the same value of labor if they can. So if they could suddenly bring in a bunch of new workers who for whatever reason can or will accept a much lower pay than you and others in your field (lowering costs and increasing supply), then they will hire all of those people instead of the locals like you, unless locals like you are willing to accept those lower prices too (because if you don't, you'll be passed up for someone who will). They didn't have a shortage of workers, they had a shortage of workers-willing-to-accept-lower-prices. Bringing in more workers willing to accept lower prices forces all of the workers to accept those lower prices by creating an excess of workers and forcing workers to choose between lower pay or unemployment.
Just because a business can't fill a job for a specific price doesn't mean it can't fill it for any price. Maybe they think that price is not worth the value of the work, but if those people are passing up those jobs for higher-paying ones elsewhere, then clearly someone thinks it is worth it, and the other businesses are either just cheapskates who don't want to pay more, or are doing something wrong that they can't get the full value out of their employees' labor, in which case they deserve to fail to those other (higher-paying) businesses that can.
The question is whether those qualified citizens are willing to accept wages as low as the companies want to offer.
Ad the answer is no, so the companies would much rather bring in immigrants over whom they have far more leverage and who will accept lower wages... consequently lowering the average wage for those positions that local citizens are applying for.
The companies offer positions requiring high qualifications and low pay; those who are qualified won't accept the pay, so they cry there's "no qualified applicants" and demand more visas to bring in immigrants willing to accept a lower price.
The members of congress are also partial to the current electoral method, seeing as they're usually members of the major parties too. I wasn't only talking about presidential elections but congressional ones as well. Nobody currently in congress would support election reform as it would undermine their own political careers; we'd still need to first somehow get enough people into congress who would support it. Though I agree, the first step to that is getting the people to want it.
Agreed but the only people who might ever do that would be 3rd party politicians trying to secure more opportunities for them to get elected in the future. So to secure a world where 3rd parties are viable options, we first need to get enough 3rd parties to win that they can institute electoral reform.
I'm glad to hear someone else pointing this out too.:-)
A secondary benefit to this strategy is that if enough people follow it, if everyone in swing states started voting their true choices instead of buying into the two-party horse-race, because their votes didn't matter anyway, then their votes would start to matter. E.g. if we assume there's a lot of Californians who prefer Democrats over Republicans but would really prefer Greens, and they all start voting that way because their votes don't make a difference since the Democrat is a shoe-in anyway, then the Democrats would be weakened and the Greens would become a viable party and now suddenly it really matters who you vote for. You might (as a left-leaning voter) say that would actually be a bad outcome because then the Republicans might win California, but if the right side of the spectrum was doing the same thing meanwhile (e.g. if a lot of Californians who prefer Republicans over Democrats would really prefer Libertarians over either, and started voting Libertarian cause it's not like the Republican was going to win anyway), you could get an actual contested election with multiple viable options and a third party could possibly win the state.
I really wish the various third parties would get together and run a series of ad campaigns in election season targeting would-be third-party voters in swings states telling them "[Liberals/conservatives] of [state], [shoe-in candidate] is in all probably going to win [state] no matter who you vote for. So why waste your vote on [them/their major-party opponent] if that's not who you'd really prefer? Why not vote for [short list of prominent third-party candidates aligned with target audience] instead? They're even more [liberal/conservative] than [shoe-in candidate / their major-party opponent], and a vote for them will bring attention to the issues you really care about like [issues the major parties are neglecting]. Vote third party this election and make your vote count!"
It's also a big thing in Santa Barbara, CA, which has streets full of "homeless" teens from wealthy families who voluntarily move out to the street to escape their "dictator" parents, and which is also apparently some kind of "homeless mecca" to which homeless people from other cities want to migrate because of great weather and sympathetic liberal-minded college kids stocked up on their rich parents' money.
Oh and on top of all of that: if you somehow make absolutely nothing whatsoever, you automatically get about $20 a day to work with, which should at least keep you from either starving or being homeless (pick one, cause it won't cover both).
Oh and for a concrete example, here is that form, the simplified version with the last two lines combined, using the following values for X, Y, and Z:
X = 2, so we're exactly halfway between a flat tax and total communism. Y = $25,000, which is a mean income of around $50,000 divided by X = 2 above. Z = $17,500, which is a mean income of around $50,000 times a 35% tax rate.
That mean income and tax rate chosen because they're nice round numbers close to the current actual figures.
So, that said:
Line 1: Enter your gross income. Line 2: Divide the amount on Line 1 by 2. Line 3: Subtract $7500 from the amount on Line 2.
If you made $15,000/yr, which is about full time minimum wage ($7.25/hr * 40hr/wk * 52wk/yr = $15,080/yr), you would pay no taxes.
If you made minimum wage working half time (20hr/wk, 52wk/yr) for a total of $7540/yr, you would get a tax credit of $3730, which would mean a whopping $8 or so extra spending money a day. Don't spend it all on one meal.
If you made twice minimum wage full time for about $30,000/yr, you would owe $7500, which would be about $288 or 15% withheld from each biweekly paycheck.
If you made the mean income of $50,000/yr, you would owe $17500, which would be about $673 or 35% withheld from each biweekly paycheck.
If you made twice the mean income, or $100,000/yr, you would owe $42,500, which would be about $1635 or 42.5% withheld from each biweekly paycheck.
If you made a seven-figure income of $1,000,000/yr, you would owe $492,500, for a tax rate of 49.25%.
If you made an eight-figure income of $10,000,000/yr, you would owe $4,992,500, for a tax rate of 49.925%.
If you made a nine-figure income of $100,000,000/yr, you would owe $49,992,500, for a tax rate of 49.9925%.
But nobody would ever pay higher than a 50% tax rate, because we set our X = 2 which means the maximum possible tax rate is 1/2 = 0.5 = 50%.
Every government needs to influence behavior of it's citizens
Citation needed, unless by "influence behavior" you only mean things like stopping people from aggressing upon each other. (For which taxes are a horrible method; would you punish violent criminals just by raising their taxes?)
Why does any government need to influence its people's behavior beyond keeping people from using force to "influence" each other's behavior?
I think a big point of his tax form is that all of that complication is problematic. Any kind of income should count the same and be taxed the same, with no loopholes. If we're going to allow deductions for expenses, any kind of expense should be taxed the same. But what defines an expense, you might ask? I would answer: any trade where you lose capital, like paying for services, but not paying for goods. Likewise, I would define income as any trade where you gain capital, like selling services, but not selling goods.
This would have positive motivational effects as well, as it would encourage the rich to make money by selling off their capital and to spend money by buying labor, thus spurring business ("creating jobs") for the poor who have nothing but their labor services to sell, in turn enabling those poor to buy the capital goods that the rich are selling off, creating a natural, voluntary redistribution of capital from the rich to the poor. It would also allow the poor to deduct their expenses for "services" like rent paid to the rich, for which the poor gain no capital and thus no wealth.
Only very slightly more complex form to allow for progressive taxation:
Line 1: Enter your gross income. Line 2: Divide the amount on Line 1 by X[1]. Line 3: Subtract Y[2] from the amount on Line 2. Line 4: Add Z[3] to the amount on Line 3.
If the amount on Line 4 is greater than zero, this is the amount that you owe. If the amount on Line 4 is less than zero, this is the tax credit you will receive.
[1] This figure controls how progressive the tax is; a smaller X will make it more progressive, a larger X will make it less. [2] This figure is last year's mean personal income divided by X. Assuming the mean hasn't changed drastically since the previous year, someone making about the mean income this year should thus get about zero on Line 3, while people making above the mean should have positive numbers on Line 3, and people making below the mean should have negative numbers on Line 3. [3] This is the amount we actually want to tax each person on average; to convert to this from a percentage tax rate, just multiply the mean income by that percentage. People making less than mean will pay less than Z due to their negative Line 3, but people making more than the mean will make up for it due to their positive Line 3, meaning Z is still the average tax per capita. It's possible that people making far less than the mean could get actual positive tax credits in the end, a negative tax, depending on how progressively we crank the value of X, and how high the per capita tax Z is set.
Of course this should actually be simplified a step further by pre-calculating what Z minus Y is, call it W, and making Line 3 "Add W to the amount on Line 2" and you're done. But I spelled it out here for clarity.
Yes, the little people are idiots for not spending the money they'd otherwise waste on things like food and rent on buying themselves privileged treatment. Because that's totally a choice they are stupidly making and not an economic necessity.
If you find your condition limiting then I agree it's fine to call it a handicap or a disability or an illness or what have you. I'm just supportive of people who might have similar conditions and like being that way and not want to be any different -- people who'd find that becoming 'normal' would be tradeoff that's not worth it. (And contrasting that with something like blindness or deafness, where it's not like you get Daredevil-like powers by being blind, or X-ray vision from being deaf... there's nothing you would lose from gaining an ability others have and you lack. It's not a different emphasis or optimization of different traits like many mental conditions can be, it's just a deficit in one).
Yes but he was not any specific Asian ethnicity (on purpose), and as some people find offense in lumping all Asians together I felt it necessary to note that I wasn't just unsure of what Asian ethnicity Sulu was, he specifically didn't have a definite one.
I wonder if the people who take offense at references to nonspecific "Asians" take offense at Sulu being one, rather than say, Japanese or Korean or something.
Slashdot Mirror
At no point did I say that unfettered capitalism was the best of all possible worlds
Maybe not but you suggested that capitalism was in some way non-ideological when it's certainly not.
merely that people, left to their own devices, tend to place value on goods and services and develop a market under their own steam, rather than someone sitting down in a cave somewhere and saying "hey let's build a stock exchange because we deeply believe in the fundamental principle of private property".
Yes and, as was my point, people when left to their own device also tend to do whatever they can to exploit and live off the work of others up to and including enslaving them and credibly threatening them with death to enforce that enslavement. The slave-driven economies of the ancient world, the capitalist economies of the modern world, and the feudal economies that bridged the gap between them, were none more or less "natural" than the others. They were and are just what people tended to do in their respective times when nobody stopped them from doing it. In other times people did stop them from doing some of those things, and then people tended to do other things instead; if we allowed feudalism or slavery today, people would tend to do those sometimes too. Would that make a nonchalant stance toward slavery somehow non-ideological? Would "people hold slaves, and I don't object to that" be ideologically neutral just because if nobody objects to it people will tend to hold slaves?
And bonus negative points for backhandedly equating the ownership of private property and the exchange of said goods and services to people who "steal from and enslave and murder each other".
There was no equation, there was illustration by analogy.
You claim that people tend to do a certain thing if nobody stops them and then claim that supporting or allowing that thing is ideologically neutral because of it.
I point out that there are other things that people tend to do if nobody stops them, things that we do not generally consider non-chalant attitudes toward to be ideologically neutral.
Thus illustrating a counterexample to the principle you seem to be employing, to make the point that accepting or protesting the practices of capitalism is no less ideologically neutral than accepting or protesting the practice of slavery, etc. Not because the two are the same thing, but because in either case it doesn't matter whether people will tend to do it if not stopped or not, you're still taking an ideological position if you say either that you're ok with it or that you're not.
If you're asked "Should this happen?", any answer you give will be a moral opinion. If you respond "that does happen", you've just avoided the question and given an answer to a completely different one.
Analytic philosophy's adherence to mathematical rigor is what saved it from falling down the post-modern hole that swallowed up all the "other humanities".
(I'm not fond of that category "humanities" and how philosophy doesn't fit well into it. Paintings and literature are just arts. History is a thing of its own that transcends all the fields, arts and sciences alike, and so is philosophy. Lumping half the arts in with two big overarching fields in their own right doesn't sit well with me. Math also shouldn't be lumped in as a science, that's a thing of its own too on part with art, and we're completely lacking the normative analogues of science, engineering, and technology, although some things like sociology and anthropology are approximating a normative analogue of science, and bus-econ courses are in the right general area for a normative analogue of engineering and technology, but that whole area is woefully underdeveloped).
(I drew a diagram of something like this once, though I wasn't sure how exactly to incorporate history into it).
Capitalism is what people do when you leave them alone. You may as well say physics is a religion.
People also steal from and enslave and murder each other when you "leave them alone", in the sense of total unregulated anomie.
To say that people should be "left alone" in that sense is still to take an ethical, moral, or as you've been calling it, ideological stance. To say that nobody should do anything about it; that it is ok, acceptable behavior. Moral nihilism is still a moral position: the position that everything and its negation is OK, that nothing is either forbidden or obligatory.
Now on the other hand, what I think you probably more likely meant to say, is that free markets (which are not identical to capitalism) are what happen when people leave each other alone, in the sense of not stealing from and enslaving and murdering and otherwise violating and exploiting each other. But because people will violate and exploit each other if "left alone" in the earlier sense, i.e. if nobody stops them, then in order to achieve a state where we all leaving each other alone in the later sense, we cannot "leave alone" those who would violate and exploit others.
Freedom requires either everybody to be perfectly well behaved of their own accord (good luck with that), or for there to be enough people actively counteracting the misbehavior of others (but going no further in their actions against those others than to counteract their actions). As Adam Smith put it, a free market is a well-regulated market.
And whether the practices that underlie capitalism (which, again, does not simply mean a free market) count as misbehavior or not, and are in need of counteraction or not, is an ideological position. Should we let people exclude others from the means of production by force, and even help them do so? (i.e. should it be privately owned?). Should we let people demand repayment on borrowed money or goods beyond the return of the money or goods, on threat of force, and even help them do so? (i.e. should contracts of rent and interest be enforceable?) Capitalism answers "yes" to both of those questions; a "no" answer to either would not be capitalism, but could still be a free market.
To lose a free market, you'd have to answer "yes" to "Should we let people demand goods and services from others on threat of force?" It could be argued that allowing that on threats other than force would also lose the freedom of the market. Should we let people demand goods and services from others on threat of the release of private information (e.g. blackmail, I'll tell about your affair unless you pay me off). Should we let people demand goods and services from others on threat of letting them starve or freeze to death because they have no food or shelter? Now it's getting into controversial territory. But no matter what your answer to that question is, you're taking an ideological stance.
Somehow I don't think the government licking my balls really conveys the right idea of the bad things they're doing. That's generally the kind of thing you'd tell someone you don't like to do because it demeans them and pleasures you, not the kind of thing someone oppressing you does to you of their own choice.
Well, maybe it's different for men and women, their stereotypical experiences and perceptions at least. A bunch of pervs wanting to lick a woman's genitals against her will gets more into the territory they're probably trying to convey here.
I wouldn't know how to make sense of "2.3 times smaller" in any context. Except maybe... you have things A, B, and C, and B is smaller than A, as is C, and the A-C = 2.3 * A-B. But I wouldn't know what to make of it if you just said "C is 2.3 times smaller than B!" without the comparison to A. And I don't know how you would phrase that comparison... "C is 2.3 times smaller than A than B?" That's just confusing.
...if you own your own home, which the majority of Americans do not.
Rejection and loneliness results in the misogyny
no. bad social skills and a lack of empathy do.
You're both right. Bad social skills result in rejection and loneliness which results in resentment which results in a lack of empathy which results in misogyny. The resentment is the missing piece there.
That's not a justification of anything, just an explanation.
Merits of mandatory insurance aside, your analogy is broken.
Nobody is being forced to take birth control; some people are being forced to pay to provider others with the option of birth control, if those others choose to use it.
The gun analogue would not be that people are forced to have smart gun technology on their guns, but that some people would be forced to pay to provide others with the option of smart gun technology on their guns, if those others choose to use it.
Let's do one better than that:
You have a standard set of rights and responsibilities. They can be conditional (e.g. if X then you must Y, unless X you may not Y, etc).
Nobody can change anybody else's rights or responsibilities, in any way, including by mutual agreement. You cannot sign away your rights or responsibilities. You can only change which conditions in fact obtain, and consequently which conditional rights and responsibilities may or may not apply to you.
In other words, fuck contracts in general.
The reason locals don't take the jobs is *because* they don't need it. They are in high enough demand that they can get better-paying jobs elsewhere. The businesses don't like the employees having the leverage like that for once, so they want to bring in more cheap labor to fix that problem and bring down the overall cost of labor, so that the locals *can't* pass up the low-paying jobs because then they'd be passing up all jobs since there's always more low-paid immigrants to do it at that price if the locals won't.
Consider whatever you do for a living. You can command a certain wage for that job, that is to say you can expect to get paid a certain amount, and that amount is set by how low you could possibly afford to go (your costs of your labor), how much employers could possibly afford to pay you (the value of your labor), how many jobs of that kind are open (how in demand your kind of labor is), and how many other people could do that job (how much supply for that kind of labor there is). Consider a scenario where the number of jobs and the number of qualified workers are well-matched: there aren't unfilled jobs, any employer can always find a worker if they're willing to pay them well. But the employers of course want to pay less for the same value of labor if they can. So if they could suddenly bring in a bunch of new workers who for whatever reason can or will accept a much lower pay than you and others in your field (lowering costs and increasing supply), then they will hire all of those people instead of the locals like you, unless locals like you are willing to accept those lower prices too (because if you don't, you'll be passed up for someone who will). They didn't have a shortage of workers, they had a shortage of workers-willing-to-accept-lower-prices. Bringing in more workers willing to accept lower prices forces all of the workers to accept those lower prices by creating an excess of workers and forcing workers to choose between lower pay or unemployment.
Just because a business can't fill a job for a specific price doesn't mean it can't fill it for any price. Maybe they think that price is not worth the value of the work, but if those people are passing up those jobs for higher-paying ones elsewhere, then clearly someone thinks it is worth it, and the other businesses are either just cheapskates who don't want to pay more, or are doing something wrong that they can't get the full value out of their employees' labor, in which case they deserve to fail to those other (higher-paying) businesses that can.
The question is whether those qualified citizens are willing to accept wages as low as the companies want to offer.
Ad the answer is no, so the companies would much rather bring in immigrants over whom they have far more leverage and who will accept lower wages... consequently lowering the average wage for those positions that local citizens are applying for.
The companies offer positions requiring high qualifications and low pay; those who are qualified won't accept the pay, so they cry there's "no qualified applicants" and demand more visas to bring in immigrants willing to accept a lower price.
The members of congress are also partial to the current electoral method, seeing as they're usually members of the major parties too. I wasn't only talking about presidential elections but congressional ones as well. Nobody currently in congress would support election reform as it would undermine their own political careers; we'd still need to first somehow get enough people into congress who would support it. Though I agree, the first step to that is getting the people to want it.
Agreed but the only people who might ever do that would be 3rd party politicians trying to secure more opportunities for them to get elected in the future. So to secure a world where 3rd parties are viable options, we first need to get enough 3rd parties to win that they can institute electoral reform.
I'm glad to hear someone else pointing this out too. :-)
A secondary benefit to this strategy is that if enough people follow it, if everyone in swing states started voting their true choices instead of buying into the two-party horse-race, because their votes didn't matter anyway, then their votes would start to matter. E.g. if we assume there's a lot of Californians who prefer Democrats over Republicans but would really prefer Greens, and they all start voting that way because their votes don't make a difference since the Democrat is a shoe-in anyway, then the Democrats would be weakened and the Greens would become a viable party and now suddenly it really matters who you vote for. You might (as a left-leaning voter) say that would actually be a bad outcome because then the Republicans might win California, but if the right side of the spectrum was doing the same thing meanwhile (e.g. if a lot of Californians who prefer Republicans over Democrats would really prefer Libertarians over either, and started voting Libertarian cause it's not like the Republican was going to win anyway), you could get an actual contested election with multiple viable options and a third party could possibly win the state.
I really wish the various third parties would get together and run a series of ad campaigns in election season targeting would-be third-party voters in swings states telling them "[Liberals/conservatives] of [state], [shoe-in candidate] is in all probably going to win [state] no matter who you vote for. So why waste your vote on [them/their major-party opponent] if that's not who you'd really prefer? Why not vote for [short list of prominent third-party candidates aligned with target audience] instead? They're even more [liberal/conservative] than [shoe-in candidate / their major-party opponent], and a vote for them will bring attention to the issues you really care about like [issues the major parties are neglecting]. Vote third party this election and make your vote count!"
Wish I had mod points.
It's also a big thing in Santa Barbara, CA, which has streets full of "homeless" teens from wealthy families who voluntarily move out to the street to escape their "dictator" parents, and which is also apparently some kind of "homeless mecca" to which homeless people from other cities want to migrate because of great weather and sympathetic liberal-minded college kids stocked up on their rich parents' money.
Oh and on top of all of that: if you somehow make absolutely nothing whatsoever, you automatically get about $20 a day to work with, which should at least keep you from either starving or being homeless (pick one, cause it won't cover both).
Oh and for a concrete example, here is that form, the simplified version with the last two lines combined, using the following values for X, Y, and Z:
X = 2, so we're exactly halfway between a flat tax and total communism.
Y = $25,000, which is a mean income of around $50,000 divided by X = 2 above.
Z = $17,500, which is a mean income of around $50,000 times a 35% tax rate.
That mean income and tax rate chosen because they're nice round numbers close to the current actual figures.
So, that said:
Line 1: Enter your gross income.
Line 2: Divide the amount on Line 1 by 2.
Line 3: Subtract $7500 from the amount on Line 2.
If you made $15,000/yr, which is about full time minimum wage ($7.25/hr * 40hr/wk * 52wk/yr = $15,080/yr), you would pay no taxes.
If you made minimum wage working half time (20hr/wk, 52wk/yr) for a total of $7540/yr, you would get a tax credit of $3730, which would mean a whopping $8 or so extra spending money a day. Don't spend it all on one meal.
If you made twice minimum wage full time for about $30,000/yr, you would owe $7500, which would be about $288 or 15% withheld from each biweekly paycheck.
If you made the mean income of $50,000/yr, you would owe $17500, which would be about $673 or 35% withheld from each biweekly paycheck.
If you made twice the mean income, or $100,000/yr, you would owe $42,500, which would be about $1635 or 42.5% withheld from each biweekly paycheck.
If you made a seven-figure income of $1,000,000/yr, you would owe $492,500, for a tax rate of 49.25%.
If you made an eight-figure income of $10,000,000/yr, you would owe $4,992,500, for a tax rate of 49.925%.
If you made a nine-figure income of $100,000,000/yr, you would owe $49,992,500, for a tax rate of 49.9925%.
But nobody would ever pay higher than a 50% tax rate, because we set our X = 2 which means the maximum possible tax rate is 1/2 = 0.5 = 50%.
Every government needs to influence behavior of it's citizens
Citation needed, unless by "influence behavior" you only mean things like stopping people from aggressing upon each other. (For which taxes are a horrible method; would you punish violent criminals just by raising their taxes?)
Why does any government need to influence its people's behavior beyond keeping people from using force to "influence" each other's behavior?
I think a big point of his tax form is that all of that complication is problematic. Any kind of income should count the same and be taxed the same, with no loopholes. If we're going to allow deductions for expenses, any kind of expense should be taxed the same. But what defines an expense, you might ask? I would answer: any trade where you lose capital, like paying for services, but not paying for goods. Likewise, I would define income as any trade where you gain capital, like selling services, but not selling goods.
This would have positive motivational effects as well, as it would encourage the rich to make money by selling off their capital and to spend money by buying labor, thus spurring business ("creating jobs") for the poor who have nothing but their labor services to sell, in turn enabling those poor to buy the capital goods that the rich are selling off, creating a natural, voluntary redistribution of capital from the rich to the poor. It would also allow the poor to deduct their expenses for "services" like rent paid to the rich, for which the poor gain no capital and thus no wealth.
Only very slightly more complex form to allow for progressive taxation:
Line 1: Enter your gross income.
Line 2: Divide the amount on Line 1 by X[1].
Line 3: Subtract Y[2] from the amount on Line 2.
Line 4: Add Z[3] to the amount on Line 3.
If the amount on Line 4 is greater than zero, this is the amount that you owe.
If the amount on Line 4 is less than zero, this is the tax credit you will receive.
[1] This figure controls how progressive the tax is; a smaller X will make it more progressive, a larger X will make it less.
[2] This figure is last year's mean personal income divided by X. Assuming the mean hasn't changed drastically since the previous year, someone making about the mean income this year should thus get about zero on Line 3, while people making above the mean should have positive numbers on Line 3, and people making below the mean should have negative numbers on Line 3.
[3] This is the amount we actually want to tax each person on average; to convert to this from a percentage tax rate, just multiply the mean income by that percentage. People making less than mean will pay less than Z due to their negative Line 3, but people making more than the mean will make up for it due to their positive Line 3, meaning Z is still the average tax per capita. It's possible that people making far less than the mean could get actual positive tax credits in the end, a negative tax, depending on how progressively we crank the value of X, and how high the per capita tax Z is set.
Of course this should actually be simplified a step further by pre-calculating what Z minus Y is, call it W, and making Line 3 "Add W to the amount on Line 2" and you're done. But I spelled it out here for clarity.
I plead Poe's Law.
Yes, the little people are idiots for not spending the money they'd otherwise waste on things like food and rent on buying themselves privileged treatment. Because that's totally a choice they are stupidly making and not an economic necessity.
If you find your condition limiting then I agree it's fine to call it a handicap or a disability or an illness or what have you. I'm just supportive of people who might have similar conditions and like being that way and not want to be any different -- people who'd find that becoming 'normal' would be tradeoff that's not worth it. (And contrasting that with something like blindness or deafness, where it's not like you get Daredevil-like powers by being blind, or X-ray vision from being deaf... there's nothing you would lose from gaining an ability others have and you lack. It's not a different emphasis or optimization of different traits like many mental conditions can be, it's just a deficit in one).
Yes but he was not any specific Asian ethnicity (on purpose), and as some people find offense in lumping all Asians together I felt it necessary to note that I wasn't just unsure of what Asian ethnicity Sulu was, he specifically didn't have a definite one.
I wonder if the people who take offense at references to nonspecific "Asians" take offense at Sulu being one, rather than say, Japanese or Korean or something.