NationStates Jolt Archive

So.. how much do you think the state should have to say about your income ?

Some extra comments on some options:

Maximum wage laws (for all or some occupations)
Examples of occupation restricted wages: chairmen of charities should not be allowed to earn over 500k a year from their charity work. Or no civil servant should earn more than the head of state.

Laws determining if you can have a child based on income
Can't support a child financially ? Pity, cannot have one.
You want more than one child ? Then you will need to pay for that (compare with China's system).
Or: having a child at all requires you to pay 1 million dollars.

A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income
Such systems actually exist in many countries. Banks could for instance be forbidden to grant mortgages greater than 5 or 7 times a families annual income, or give over 50% in loans/credit. This helps countries survive a mortgage/loan crisis. Of course, one has to register all loans somewhere for this.

Government determining where you can live based on income
Seen in some poorer neighbourhoods: the local government will demand that you earn at least X before you are allowed to move in there; even though you could easily afford the rent with a lower income.
The reverse could also happen: the government forbids someone earning 100k a year to live in a small low-rent apartment downtown to not take away housing opportunities for the lower incomes.

A general note
All these things are real - as in they are actually implemented in certain countries (though not all in the same). Ponder that ;)

The government should keep their damned hands off my money! I earned it, I need it, it's mine. When they get it, they spend it on things for which I have no use or respect.

If the government were spending money only on those things which we were unable to do for ourselves, I could tolerate taxes - barely. But they persist in ignoring those things and keep spending it on things that we can do for ourselves as if we didn't have the sense to know what to do and how to do it.

When I was growing up my parents didn't have health insurance and they didn't make much relative to most people (my father was a contractor - which meant self-employed), yet we owned our home and two cars and could pay doctor and hospital bills, put food on the table, furnish the house, buy clothes, take vacations and pay for college for me (without taking out massive loans). We have more government intervention now than we did then, yet how many people do you know now who can do what my parents, without government input and massive amounts of debt, could do then?

I support

Minimum wage laws (though to a point)

Maximum wage laws: Go and get fucked

Variable tax rates based on income (instead of a flat tax): Umm yes but I don't mind a flat tax either, but the variable tax rate would have to be as you earn more you pay a higher percentage not the other way around

Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy: I believe I already pay for this through taxes (at least in Australia) to pay extra no bugger off.

Laws determining if you can have a child based on income: No, and the last line in the OP yeah right only if the state is going to pay for everything.

A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income: I didn't click this one but I do see the potential and the fact that this regulation was lowered is the part of the reason for the sub prime mortgage crisis.

Government determining where you can live based on income: How about the government worry about more important issues.

Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration): I would like more detail than this but at this stage no.

Obligatory health insurance/pensionfunds: Health insurance I ticked yes but now I mean NO, but I do think that we should be a small proportion (say .5%) of our income to the health safety net, where you pay a lower % if you have private health insurance.

Some of this is a bit brusque and not very detailed but I am not happy at the moment so I will place more detail in when people disagree with me.

Minimum wage laws. The value of minimum wage, unfortunately, has declined over the years. If it had kept up with inflation, it'd be much higher.

Maximum wage laws for some things. I've often thought about maybe allowing CEO's and corporate leaders should not be allowed to make 400 times what the average employees in their companies make, perhaps forcing them to settle for 20 times the average wage in the company, thus forcing them to raise everyone's wages if they wanted to get more themselves. Probably has a lot of problems, but the income gap really disturbs me.

Flat tax is a terrible idea. I support variable income tax.

Some tax should be used to help those who have nothing or cannot pay for everything. No one should have to choose between shelter, food and health care.

At the same time, I think it's the height of irresponsibility and recklessness to have a child with no means to support one.

The limit on loan size might be a good idea. People seem to be too stupid to realize it themselves, so maybe the government does need to say "No. You can't take out this loan because there's no way you could possibly hope to pay it back in the foreseeable future short of winning the lottery."

I support universal health care. One of my friends is slowly dying, at the ripe old age of 19, because she can't afford the treatment for her condition.

I don't vote for any of your poll options, because all of them are bad.

Minimum wage laws - unnecessary and unjustified.

Maximum wage laws - even more unnecessary and unjustified. Seriously, what good could come from this for anyone at all?

Variable tax rates based on income - nope. At best taxes should be paid based on the actual value of the government services one uses, but that would be defeating the purpose of compulsory taxation. So a flat tax, with the option to buy into other programs is the only system I consider okay.

Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy - forced charity is no charity at all.

Laws determining if you can have a child based on income - I don't support government control over people's wombs.

A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income. - unnecessary. This is one of those things that free exchange tends to handle quite well.

Government determining where you can live based on income - the market does that.

Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration) - discriminatory.

Obligatory health insurance/pensionfunds - the only ones where I even thought about it for a second. I can see the practical side of it, and in the current political situation it may be a least bad option, but that doesn't make me a supporter in general.

Government determining where you can live based on income - the market does that.

Not the way I explained in the OP ;) Market forces create ghettos.

Not the way I explained in the OP ;) Market forces create ghettos.
Market forces distribute housing of various quality to people who are willing and able to pay for it. The types of state involvement you're talking about fiddles around in there and distributes housing to either those who can't pay for it, or who don't want to pay for it.

Either way you create dead-weight losses for no particular reason.

The ghettos, by the way, are created by the people who live there. It's nobody else's fault many poor neighbourhoods are also very bad neighbourhoods.

"Minimum wage" is so primitive. Collective bargaining of minimal standards with little to no government intrusion in the negotiations is where it's at.

"Maximum wage" is loony.

"Variable tax rates based on income" is commonsensical.

"Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy" is sort of what the tax system is largely for...

"Laws determining if you can have a child based on income" is heinously fascist.

"A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income" - not directly, but through consumer protection standards aimed at punishing the loan-givers should they deliberately offer loans to people who clearly cannot support them.

"Government determining where you can live based on income" - ridiculous.

"Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration)" - oh, a privilege system for the wealthy? How feudal and, I mean, the French Revolution was such a pleasant shindig, who wouldn't want one again?

"Obligatory health insurance/pensionfunds" - again, what the tax system is there for...

It's nobody else's fault many poor neighbourhoods are also very bad neighbourhoods.

Because poverty exists in a vacuum... :rolleyes:

Because poverty exists in a vacuum... :rolleyes:
I don't believe I claimed that it did. But poverty doesn't imply crime or just generally not caring about one's neighbourhood. Back before emancipation in the south, black neighbourhoods in the US were even poorer than today, but people cared quite a lot. They knew each other, forces like local churches, regular community events and so on kept people together and though tough, at least life there wasn't physically dangerous.

none of the above!

Eh, all of those things are unnecessary.

Minimum wage laws, fine, and taxes based on income, fine, but things like telling people where they can live based on their income are unnecessary, seeing as congregations of rich/MC/poor people will tailor house prices in the area to suit anyway, and your bank ought to lend you what it thinks will be a good investment, so there we go.

No one should be able to make over $75,000US. The rest will be collected and distributed to everyone that made less then $60,000US. Then we will all be equal.

I don't believe I claimed that it did. But poverty doesn't imply crime or just generally not caring about one's neighbourhood. Back before emancipation in the south, black neighbourhoods in the US were even poorer than today, but people cared quite a lot. They knew each other, forces like local churches, regular community events and so on kept people together and though tough, at least life there wasn't physically dangerous.

Local churches, regular community events, and so on are less prevalent in the US than they used to be (almost?) everywhere. Poverty and the lack of certain institutional supports does imply not caring about one's neighborhood.

So.. how much do you think the state should have to say about your income ?

Minimum wage
Yes, because otherwise it'll be a race to the bottom. The state should have every right to enforce rules concerning how private interests can treat it's citizens, since this has a direct affect on social structures, and ergo has security and social policy implications.

Maximum wage laws (for all or some occupations)
No salaried individual should earn more than the head of state. If we think a CEO is more important than our head of state, our culture is seriously f*cked up.

Laws determining if you can have a child based on income
Beyond two children, I think the parents should pay for the medical costs during pregnancy, child birth and medical care for the first year of the child's life. having more children to cope with the baby boom is just creating another baby boom. A controlled population decline though "velvet glove" coercion is more sensible on an archipelago of small, crowded islands.

A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income
As lngas banks are responsible no further intervention is necessary. Should the credit issuing be getting out of control (as it was before the most recent crisis) then the state should act as necessary to restore balance.

Government determining where you can live based on income
Not where you live, though access to low cost housing should be restricted to those on low incomes. As to it's physical location, I don't see why this would ne needed.

As for National Insurance, I'd like to see it integrated into the income taxation system. As it stands, it's a very regressive tax and hits people on incomes under £20k particularly. If a combined income/NI tax were set up, this would also simplify collection and we could discard the "year accumulated" system which is mostly meaningless, since those not working still have NI paid via the benefits system. All it does is penalise those who study to Phd level and so have shorter (but more valuable) working lives.

This is details, however, the principle of a mandatory NI/SocSec system is entirely sensible in any case. However since we are part of the "Global Economy" BS where this is little to non existent job security then it's particularly important to giving security and welfare to the lower class, which is beneficial on many levels.


The government should keep their damned hands off my money! I earned it, I need it, it's mine. When they get it, they spend it on things for which I have no use or respect.

You earned with the permission to do so on land and space which ultimately belong to the rulers of your country. You also earned it with their assistance. Without their protection, provision of infrastructure and creating an atmosphere where you were able to accumulate your money, you would have nothing. I'm assuming, of course, that by your writing on an electronic forum you aren't living in Antarctica or on a remote coral outcrop, having surrendered your citizenship, in which case the above doesn't apply, and whichever government is taking taxes shouldn't be doing so.

If the government were spending money only on those things which we were unable to do for ourselves, I could tolerate taxes - barely. But they persist in ignoring those things and keep spending it on things that we can do for ourselves as if we didn't have the sense to know what to do and how to do it.

Well... tough. Once tax is paid it isn't your money. It belongs to the treasury, and is spent as the people in charge decide is best. If you live in a democratic society there is nothing stopping you running for government if you feel you could use those resources more effectively. If you don't live in a democratic society, well, that's life. Deal with it. The only certainties, are, after all, death and taxes.

I don't vote for any of your poll options, because all of them are bad.

Minimum wage laws - unnecessary and unjustified.

How are they unjustifiable? Countries without minimum wage laws have greater problems associated with poverty. Ergo, they seem necessary as a social mechanism in ensuring the lowest strata in society has enough to survive.

Maximum wage laws - even more unnecessary and unjustified. Seriously, what good could come from this for anyone at all?

See my point in replying to OP.

Variable tax rates based on income - nope. At best taxes should be paid based on the actual value of the government services one uses, but that would be defeating the purpose of compulsory taxation. So a flat tax, with the option to buy into other programs is the only system I consider okay.

Which other programmes? Paying tax based on value of services used is going to give grief later on. Retired people who need medical assistance? The mentally ill? Veterans?

Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy - forced charity is no charity at all.

Social security isn't about charity. It's about security.

A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income. - unnecessary. This is one of those things that free exchange tends to handle quite well.

Sometimes it does, but not always, as we are seeing right now.

Government determining where you can live based on income - the market does that.

Sometimes. Doesn't apply to low cost housing though, especially in places like Singapore and Hong Kong, and, to a lesser degree, London, Moscow and Tokyo.

Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration) - discriminatory.

Agree for the most part. However to regulate demand, means testing for access to some services is important. For example, a lot of stress on the NSH could be reduced if people over a certain income had to pay the prevailing private market rates at NHS facilities, thus encouraging them to go private.

Maximum wage laws (for all or some occupations)
No salaried individual should earn more than the head of state. If we think a CEO is more important than our head of state, our culture is seriously f*cked up.


I don't think you should judge head of state by the same terms as CEO... For one thing, I wouldn't want people to do the job because of the money, so a head of state should not be paid vast sums (or even sums such as a CEO). Also CEOs are employed to make more money, and are a quantifiable 'investment' in a sense that I don't think is applicable to a head of state.

Plus, in the current global capitalist paradigm, everyone would have to agree to a maximum wage, or there would just be a giant talent drain to the country that doesn't have a limit (as there already is from poorer to richer countries because of earning opportunity). And how the hell would you equalise the world economy for a set ceiling to make sense?!

Minimum wage laws (for all or some occupations): I reluctantly support this.
Maximum wage laws (for all or some occupations): :upyours:
Variable tax rates based on income (instead of a flat tax) Tax people more for making more money? Where's the incentive to make more money if it's taken away by the state?
Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy: No.
Laws determining if you can have a child based on income: No.
A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income.: NO!
Government determining where you can live based on income: No!
Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration): Are you crazy?
Obligatory health insurance/pensionfunds: No, why do you think we have private companies?
All should be equal ! The state should provide all and I am happy to live in service of the state! All hail big brother!:hail:

"Minimum wage" is so primitive. Collective bargaining of minimal standards with little to no government intrusion in the negotiations is where it's at.

"Maximum wage" is loony.

"Variable tax rates based on income" is commonsensical.

"Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy" is sort of what the tax system is largely for...

"Laws determining if you can have a child based on income" is heinously fascist.

"A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income" - not directly, but through consumer protection standards aimed at punishing the loan-givers should they deliberately offer loans to people who clearly cannot support them.

"Government determining where you can live based on income" - ridiculous.

"Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration)" - oh, a privilege system for the wealthy? How feudal and, I mean, the French Revolution was such a pleasant shindig, who wouldn't want one again?

"Obligatory health insurance/pensionfunds" - again, what the tax system is there for...
I'm going to have to agree with Fass here, including with some of his biting sarcasm towards the idea of laws granting rights based on income.

Although I CAN, however, see the logic in limiting of children based on income, I wouldn't ever agree to actually implement something like that unless it was truly necessary, either because of massive overpopulation--unlikely in a fully industrialized country--or some other factor I can't think of at the moment.

All should be equal ! The state should provide all and I am happy to live in service of the state! All hail big brother!:hail:

Oh yes, I forgot about that one... Bad idea, I agree. Lowest common (literally) denominator, here we come... :rolleyes:

I don't think you should judge head of state by the same terms as CEO... For one thing, I wouldn't want people to do the job because of the money, so a head of state should not be paid vast sums (or even sums such as a CEO). Also CEOs are employed to make more money, and are a quantifiable 'investment' in a sense that I don't think is applicable to a head of state.

True and valid points. However, for better or worse, our society uses what we pay people as our way of saying how important we think they are, and how much we value them (literally). So if we pay our CEOs more than our Head of State, it sends the aforementioned seriously f*cked up message.

Plus, in the current global capitalist paradigm, everyone would have to agree to a maximum wage, or there would just be a giant talent drain to the country that doesn't have a limit (as there already is from poorer to richer countries because of earning opportunity). And how the hell would you equalise the world economy for a set ceiling to make sense?!

We wouldn't need to. Money isn't the only factor, at least it isn't in a healthy culture. Saudi Arabia pays more than anyone, but people just tend to go there for a while and then return home again because most foreigners find it's culture hard to hack on a permanent basis. There's other ways of rewarding people, and there is no reason they still can't be paid well. But I wouldn't encourage a view that in a culture that defines money as worth, paying a CEO (or indeed, anyone) more than the ruler of the nation is particularly healthy.

Plus, I hesitate to describe being a CEO as having "talent". A good artist, writer, engineers, designers, even military men and accountants all have specific talents. A CEOs job, by contrast, is basically a retirement scheme for politicians with abnormally high levels of amorality.

Local churches, regular community events, and so on are less prevalent in the US than they used to be (almost?) everywhere. Poverty and the lack of certain institutional supports does imply not caring about one's neighborhood.
That may or may not be true - afterall, these institutions only exist because people care about them and use them to stay in touch with others.

But that's not really the crux of the issue: living in a bad neighbourhood can make it much more difficult to escape poverty, but that doesn't imply that poverty causes neighbourhoods to become bad.

How are they unjustifiable? Countries without minimum wage laws have greater problems associated with poverty.
Like Germany? Minimum wages written into law require employers to pay an amount for something they don't see as being worth it, or at least as more as they would in a world without violence.

That's the bad side of them, and the good side doesn't actually require them.

http://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/04/14/countries-without-minimum-wage-law/

See my point in replying to OP.
So you say that a head of state does work that is more important than a CEOs. That may be true - but that doesn't affect what a CEO should get paid. Salaries aren't random numbers picked out of thin air, they're reflections of the value the employers place on the work that is being done. CEOs get paid a lot because (in the ideal scenario) the owners of the company consider that fair pay in order to secure the experience, knowledge and skill of this particular person in running the firm.

If you think the government's CEO/Head of State doesn't earn enough, you should make this known in the next shareholder's conference/election and put it to a vote.

Which other programmes? Paying tax based on value of services used is going to give grief later on. Retired people who need medical assistance? The mentally ill? Veterans?
Whatever they want. Things like welfare, socialised medicine schemes, state pensions and so on could certainly be handled like an insurance scheme, in which people sign up on their tax return, pay the fee (and because it's done by percentages rather than absolute amounts the poor should also be able to get on board, at the expense of those "rich" members who make the choice voluntarily) and then be eligible for the benefits, should it become necessary.

Basically an opt-out approach to the welfare state.

Social security isn't about charity. It's about security.
That's one way of looking at it. Of course, security borne from the barrel of a gun really isn't any security either.

Sometimes it does, but not always, as we are seeing right now.
The market is working reasonably well on the lending-out-to-people end. It's what people did with the mortgages afterwards that's turned out to be idiocy, but that doesn't really affect my point.

Sometimes. Doesn't apply to low cost housing though, especially in places like Singapore and Hong Kong, and, to a lesser degree, London, Moscow and Tokyo.
To ask a question: why do people with no marketable skills need to live in inner London or Hong Kong? If they produce value to the people around them, they'll be rewarded accordingly and they'll be able to find a place to live. But there is no obligation for financial centres to be cheap enough to house people who couldn't add to the financial industry, to use an example.

Agree for the most part. However to regulate demand, means testing for access to some services is important. For example, a lot of stress on the NSH could be reduced if people over a certain income had to pay the prevailing private market rates at NHS facilities, thus encouraging them to go private.
Could be fixed in no time with my opt-out approach. The problem is that the NHS is such a huge distortion that there really isn't much of a private market outside it - really divide it from the industry and the market, simply as one particularly cheap form of health insurance (or particularly expensive, given that it'd work as percentage of income) and I think you'd fix most things about it.

Where's none of the above?

Minimum wage laws (for all or some occupations) -- Let the free market decide. Minimum wage laws are counter productive IMO.
Maximum wage laws (for all or some occupations) -- Maximum wage? Sorry, if we're talking USA hell NO. This is a free nation not Socialist.
Variable tax rates based on income (instead of a flat tax) -- Give me a consumption tax and kill income tax. You should never punish people for making money.
Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy -- Tax breaks for contributions to private charities, the Govt is too inefficient to trust with SS.
Laws determining if you can have a child based on income -- What the hell are you smoking? Not to mention the fact, how do you enforce this, fines? Mandatory abortions? LOL
A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income. -- None of Govt's business. If you're stupid enough to buy a home you can't afford, you're dumb enough to get the boot when you can't afford it.
Government determining where you can live based on income -- LMAO, the free market figures this one out just fine, though unintentional.
Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration) -- Nope.
Obligatory health insurance/pensionfunds -- Health insurance isn't a need, it's a want. Retirement also is a want. You have the right to make your own choices and FAIL if you make the wrong ones. This cradle to grave crap flies in the face of freedom.
All should be equal ! The state should provide all and I am happy to live in service of the state! -- Screw equal, I want freedom. That means you're free to fail too.

"Minimum wage" is so primitive. Collective bargaining of minimal standards with little to no government intrusion in the negotiations is where it's at.

"Maximum wage" is loony.

"Variable tax rates based on income" is commonsensical.

"Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy" is sort of what the tax system is largely for...

"Laws determining if you can have a child based on income" is heinously fascist.

"A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income" - not directly, but through consumer protection standards aimed at punishing the loan-givers should they deliberately offer loans to people who clearly cannot support them.

"Government determining where you can live based on income" - ridiculous.

"Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration)" - oh, a privilege system for the wealthy? How feudal and, I mean, the French Revolution was such a pleasant shindig, who wouldn't want one again?

"Obligatory health insurance/pensionfunds" - again, what the tax system is there for...

^pretty much.

However, I'm kinda anti-government health insurance except for people who are indigent or otherwise need coverage and can't get it (like the uninsurable) and also, the tax/income level thing I would like to add in that deductions and credits are win, flat tax is fail unless it's not progressive.

Variable tax rates based on income (instead of a flat tax) Tax people more for making more money? Where's the incentive to make more money if it's taken away by the state?

Good point I have seen people decide to produce less because doing so would place them in a higher tax bracket.

I would like to know why people are opposed to a flat tax? One argument is that it favours the wealthy but I don't see how, the only reason I see why people oppose it is down to the old class warfare ideals that people (and the media) still have.

Good point I have seen people decide to produce less because doing so would place them in a higher tax bracket.

I would like to know why people are opposed to a flat tax? One argument is that it favours the wealthy but I don't see how, the only reason I see why people oppose it is down to the old class warfare ideals that people (and the media) still have.

I'm opposed to a flat tax rate because I consider it toi be unworkable in most developed countries. I expect that if the tax burden were spread evenly across all earners then it would drive a large number of people into poverty.

Progressive taxation isn't a disincentive to earn more because your wages don't decrease as you earn more (unless you go from earning just below to just over a tax bracket). The earner still gets more money, but the government gets more as well.

Minimum wage laws (for all or some occupations):
This is beyond obvious. Without minimum wage laws, you can get companies paying pittence for hard labour. Sure, the people can just quit, but in a time when unemployment is at a high, that is very difficult. So it's either work for pennies, or have nothing at all, which is wrong. Minimum wage ensures that everyone earns a decent amount.

Maximum wage laws (for all or some occupations):
This is an interesting one. I'd say it should be rounded in with the next option, of variable tax rates, so that the more you earn, the more you are taxed. It would have to be a somewhat logarithmic relationship, so that you still earn more than the previous bracket, and it wouldn't converge to some limit, but it would have to level off. Do you really think someone earning $10 000 000 per year is working 100x harder/longer, or has ever worked longer/harder than someone earning $100 000 per year?

Variable tax rates based on income (instead of a flat tax)
No doubt. No one really needs more than, say, $100 000 per year. Everything beyond that is pure indulgent luxury. Naturally, people earning more should be taxed more, since the system which has allowed them to earn money has done so well for them, it is only fair that they give more back. Moreover, the incentive to earn more is so that you earn more. You're not going to be taxed so much that you're earning less than someone in a lower bracket than you. To even suggest such a thing is retarded. You will still earn more, it just won't be as much more. But it's not like you have to work much harder for it anyway.

But I am going to stress again that people who are earning more SHOULD pay more in taxes, since the very system those taxes support has worked so well for them, that they OWE it to the system to give more back to it.

Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy:
If you're earning over a certain amount, then yes. Jesus himself preached helping those in need. So I deem that any Christian against this is a hypocrite and should be shot dead. But those non-Christians should still contribute. I would.

Laws determining if you can have a child based on income:
It's a good idea, but it isn't entirely fair. People have been having kids for millenia, and just because we now have a capitalist economic social system, doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to. I personally think there should be laws stating that stupid people can't have kids, thus strengthening the gene pool and ultimately making the human race stronger. But that's another debate for another thread.

A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income.:
Isn't that up to the banks to decide? Besises, if you go bankrupt, all your debts are cleared anyway.

Government determining where you can live based on income:
Nah. That's just stupid.

Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration):
I say yes, but in the opposite direction. Poor people get more consideration for immigration and stuff over rich people. You should not be able to 'buy' your way into a country.

Obligatory health insurance/pensionfunds:
Obligatory health insurance I'm all for. I'm not sure about pension funds. But health insurance should be available for everyone, not just those who can afford it. However, I hold education in higher regard than health. If education suffers for health, then you're just curing a bunch of sick stupid people. But ultimately, everything boils down to education. Countries with better public education are always better off than countries with poor public education.

All should be equal! The state should provide all and I am happy to live in service of the state!
I'm all for abolishing private education. Everyone should have the right to be educated to the best of their potential no matter what their income. The same goes for medical insurance. Everyone should have the same right to health-affecting surgery, regardless of cost or the ability to afford it. No one should suffer il-health because they can't afford it.

Remember, you live in a society. If everyone else falls, you fall. If everyone else is lifted up, so are you. This even applies to the rich. If people aren't paid enough, they don't buy as much, and so stores don't earn as much, which ultimately hurts the economy, which hurts everyone.

I'm opposed to a flat tax rate because I consider it toi be unworkable in most developed countries. I expect that if the tax burden were spread evenly across all earners then it would drive a large number of people into poverty.

Progressive taxation isn't a disincentive to earn more because your wages don't decrease as you earn more (unless you go from earning just below to just over a tax bracket). The earner still gets more money, but the government gets more as well.

Which is the type of increase in wages I was talking about, where I have seen people produce less so they don't have to pay more, this effects the economy as a whole.

Why do you consider it to be unworkable? Why do you think more people will be brought into poverty?

the only obligation, 'should' be on the part of government, any and all governments, to justify their existence by providing the means to prevent anyone from starving, freezing, or beating each other over the head, and/or, useful tangable infrastructure, and seeing to that infrastructure being provided in the most environmentally harmonious and sustainable ways.

as for money, it creates so many illusions and deceptions, we might very well be better off to just stop printing it entirely.

i think the only real challange to that, is enabling everyone to be able to get their hands on tecnologies that facilitate the gratification of creativity.

and i whole heartedly belive this is very much possible, and in ways not in anyway dependent upon causing suffering, for anyone, anywhere, ever.

No one should be able to make over $75,000US. The rest will be collected and distributed to everyone that made less then $60,000US. Then we will all be equal.

Hey! Let's make it $7,500, and redistribute to everyone under $6,000! Or heck, $75 for $60. [/sarcasm]

Numbers make no difference: all your idea does is impoverish EVERYONE, which of course leads to widespread famine and a total lack of progress.

And, BTW: Why on Earth is economic equality even desirable? Do you REALLY want to go and become a doctor when you get paid the same as a hotel desk clerk? What you make =/= how good/important a person you are! :)

i have no brothers, great or small, and no income.

only idiots with guns who support centralized heirarchies to which they are indentured, and continue to indenture themselves by using credit and making babies.

i have two hands and a great deal of imagination and prefer using both to very much in the way of human company at all

Without minimum wage laws, you can get companies paying pittence for hard labour. Sure, the people can just quit, but in a time when unemployment is at a high, that is very difficult. So it's either work for pennies, or have nothing at all, which is wrong.

...

Do you really think someone earning $10 000 000 per year is working 100x harder/longer, or has ever worked longer/harder than someone earning $100 000 per year?
What comes out of this to me seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding for why people get paid what they get paid.

There is no objective measurement for work. Nobody but you yourself knows how hard you worked, and how much of your reserves you used in the process. That's not what people care about when they decide how much they want to pay you, just like you don't buy things from a store based on how long people worked on it or how hard they worked. You buy stuff, and your employers pay you money, based on the value provided to you or them respectively.

If I pay someone a pittance, it's because their work isn't worth more than that to me, given the alternatives available to me. And if I pay someone millions, I do it because that's what their work is worth to me. If there was only one garbageman on the planet, and I paid him millions to take away my trash, it's not because a garbageman trains so hard to get his job or works so incredibly hard - it's because my demand matches the supply at that price. The only judges of the worth of labour are the person doing it, and the person exchanging things for it.

Naturally, people earning more should be taxed more, since the system which has allowed them to earn money has done so well for them, it is only fair that they give more back.
And they naturally would, given that they'd be paying a percentage of a higher income. The question is why they should also be paying a higher percentage.

But it's not like you have to work much harder for it anyway.
Again, it's not about working hard, it's about working smart. That being said, you'll find that the usual high-paid villains work hours and under stressful conditions that would call most people onto the streets for a good old union protest.

Jesus himself preached helping those in need. So I deem that any Christian against this is a hypocrite and should be shot dead. But those non-Christians should still contribute. I would.
That's not an argument. The most central question that all supporters of socialism or welfare programs have to answer is: why should I give money to people I wouldn't want them to have, for if I did I wouldn't need any system outside private charity.

Isn't that up to the banks to decide? Besises, if you go bankrupt, all your debts are cleared anyway.
Bankruptcy laws are government interferences (reasonable ones, as it were) into the lending market. Back before then, the options were suicide (if you had family honour or something to protect) or the debtor's prison.

I'm all for abolishing private education. Everyone should have the right to be educated to the best of their potential no matter what their income.
What does one have to do with the other? Public education doesn't get any better because private education is abolished.

The same goes for medical insurance. Everyone should have the same right to health-affecting surgery, regardless of cost or the ability to afford it. No one should suffer il-health because they can't afford it.
That's a lot of "shoulds". I'd be more impressed if you added some "becauses".

Good point I have seen people decide to produce less because doing so would place them in a higher tax bracket.

Are you sure those people weren't just misinformed? What kind of country is so badly run that moving into a higher tax bracket leaves you with less rather than more? Higher tax rates apply only to income above a certain amount.

I would like to know why people are opposed to a flat tax? One argument is that it favours the wealthy but I don't see how, the only reason I see why people oppose it is down to the old class warfare ideals that people (and the media) still have.

The media have class warfare ideals? I don't know how many working class activists own news channels where you are, but it's got to be a lot more than around here. Higher tax rates make sense because as you earn more, the percentage you spend on basics lowers.

What does one have to do with the other? Public education doesn't get any better because private education is abolished.

There are obviously huge problems with abolishing private education but public education does get better in relative terms if private education is abolished. Which in turn makes society more meritocratic.

Are you sure those people weren't just misinformed? What kind of country is so badly run that moving into a higher tax bracket leaves you with less rather than more? Higher tax rates apply only to income above a certain amount.

It doesn't matter if they were misinformed or not (they didn't have the understanding btw) because the point of all this is perception, with a flat tax rate they would be more than willing to work longer contributing more to the economy as they wouldn't have to pay a higher percentage on tax. But regardless as those sentences are very weak, can someone tell me why a flat tax rate is so bad

The media have class warfare ideals? I don't know how many working class activists own news channels where you are, but it's got to be a lot more than around here. Higher tax rates make sense because as you earn more, the percentage you spend on basics lowers.

Yes it must be a lot more as the editors and journalists do have class warfare ideas, they mainly (all tabloid papers and news services and a few other outlets) cater to the common man and like to have a little bash on richer (read earning higher than the average wage) people. The ironic thing is that people who are quite 'rich' (though I use the term loosely as you can hardly call someone on $90,000 rich) still have a class warfare mentality, especially the older people.

Shouldn't that mean you should pay less if you are using less government funded services?

There are obviously huge problems with abolishing private education but public education does get better in relative terms if private education is abolished. Which in turn makes society more meritocratic.

Well I didn't write this even though it is attributed to me, can people please when quoting other people ensure they have the name in the quote.

There are obviously huge problems with abolishing private education but public education does get better in relative terms if private education is abolished. Which in turn makes society more meritocratic.
And if I break Usain Bolt's legs, I also become a better runner in relative terms. But that's not what we're aiming for here.

Education, as I keep saying, is a funny thing. It's not really a service, where you go to a good provider and come out with a good result. You can get a fancy piece of paper, but the different values people put on these don't go away if you abolish private schools. I went to a public school which is very well respected, while there are others that people would hesitate to put in their CVs. More importantly, the actual result of an education is the result of both parties cooperating effectively. One can go to a great school and come out an idiot, or to a very bad school and come out well-educated. Of course it makes some difference, but a far greater impact comes from the student him/herself.

None of which would explain why we should aim to destroy private schools, if there seems to be a market for them. I fully support measures to end any public funding for them (in Australia at the moment some of them receive massive sums), and I'd support measures to give them more influence about what and how they teach so that students and parents can choose from a greater variety of options (for example schools that are already tailored towards particular career options). But those are measures to improve their ability to play the role they're there for, which is to provide an alternative.

Which is the type of increase in wages I was talking about, where I have seen people produce less so they don't have to pay more, this effects the economy as a whole.

Why do you consider it to be unworkable? Why do you think more people will be brought into poverty?

The data from the Tax Foundation (http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/250.html) (an organisation with 5 excellent principles for tax reform, read about them here (http://www.taxfoundation.org/about/)) shows that a flat tax in the US would at present be about 12.6% - note that this figure is not directly comparable with the current tax bands. This would represent on average a fourfold increase in taxation for the porrest 50% of the population given that they currently pay 3%.

minimum wage not really a fan of this but i can tolerate it.


maximum wage yeah lets just remove all incentive to succeed.

tax. progressive taxes are dumb. hey you make more you have to give the government an arm and a leg and not just your arm. Flat tax is better and is more equal. Though I am not a fan of income tax to begin with A sales tax would be much better. the more you spend the more you pay. encourages saving and investing rather then spend like mad under the current system.

obligatory donation to social security. TO be honest this is a scam. it would be far better for the government to just tax and spend the funds as normal. The social security fund gets raided when the government wants money but wants to hide tax increases and the poor sick and old get screwed.

right to have children based on income. I would like this maybe even factor in a test to determine intelligence as well. but it is largely unenforceable. the stupid poor will still have tons of sex with out birth control and have lots of kids they cant afford.


government saying where i can live based on income ??? that sounds like some home owner association scam. thats all I need is the government acting like the HOA.

Immigration based on income is a good idea. allows those in who will benefit our economy.

mandatory health care/retirement. Blagh. I wont go for it at all.

Good point I have seen people decide to produce less because doing so would place them in a higher tax bracket.
Aye, it is, in part, an anti-inflationary measure. Something people would realise rather quickly if they had a think about things.
I would like to know why people are opposed to a flat tax? One argument is that it favours the wealthy but I don't see how
Because in most first-world countries, a flat tax at a 'moderate' level would reduce taxes on the rich and put them on the poor instead.
the only reason I see why people oppose it is down to the old class warfare ideals that people (and the media) still have.
Class warfare, aka Keeping Up With The Joneses keeps the economy moving.

Because in most first-world countries, a flat tax at a 'moderate' level would reduce taxes on the rich and put them on the poor instead.

That only works if going from the assupmtion that we have a different tax rate t begin with, I know we do but if we were looking to implement an income tax rate why not.

Class warfare, aka Keeping Up With The Joneses keeps the economy moving.

Aye, a funny man we 'ave 'ere but no it isn't

None of which would explain why we should aim to destroy private schools, if there seems to be a market for them. I fully support measures to end any public funding for them (in Australia at the moment some of them receive massive sums), and I'd support measures to give them more influence about what and how they teach so that students and parents can choose from a greater variety of options (for example schools that are already tailored towards particular career options). But those are measures to improve their ability to play the role they're there for, which is to provide an alternative.

Why? While some schools do have a lot of money behind them despite the government funding many do not have the same amount of funds to easily access.

The data from the Tax Foundation (http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/250.html) (an organisation with 5 excellent principles for tax reform, read about them here (http://www.taxfoundation.org/about/)) shows that a flat tax in the US would at present be about 12.6% - note that this figure is not directly comparable with the current tax bands. This would represent on average a fourfold increase in taxation for the porrest 50% of the population given that they currently pay 3%.

Interesting, interesting.

That only works if going from the assupmtion that we have a different tax rate t begin with, I know we do but if we were looking to implement an income tax rate why not.
Because if you take more money away from lots of people in an economy, you are going to have problems of sustainability in darker economic times.

A very rich person still only really needs a couple of TVs, some furniture and all of the rest per house, and can afford these very easily. Reducing poor peoples' capability to waste their money on overpriced appliances will lead to either less stuff being bought, or even more dodgy credit, something we could do without.
Aye, a funny man with 'ave 'ere but no it isn't
How is The Buying Of Pointless Shite To Prove How Your Genes Are Superior To Those Around You not the reason for why economies keep moving?

Because if you take more money away from lots of people in an economy, you are going to have problems of sustainability in darker economic times.

A very rich person still only really needs a couple of TVs, some furniture and all of the rest per house, and can afford these very easily. Reducing poor peoples' capability to waste their money on overpriced appliances will lead to either less stuff being bought, or even more dodgy credit, something we could do without.

Maybe its because I have been up for 16 hours and I am a bit tired but what? Though are you trying to tell me that a progressive tax system helps the economy?

How is The Buying Of Pointless Shite To Prove How Your Genes Are Superior To Those Around You not the reason for why economies keep moving?

Hang on now you have lost me, what has that got to do with keeping up with Mr & Mrs Jones? Or class warfare for that matter?

Because if you take more money away from lots of people in an economy, you are going to have problems of sustainability in darker economic times.

A very rich person still only really needs a couple of TVs, some furniture and all of the rest per house, and can afford these very easily. Reducing poor peoples' capability to waste their money on overpriced appliances will lead to either less stuff being bought, or even more dodgy credit, something we could do without.



I don't know I think id kill for the economic growth of Ireland right now(they use flat tax). flat tax Seems to work for the most successful western European economy. Besides what ever happened to equality some how the rich are less equal and need to be taxed at a higher rate then everyone else?

then again a sales tax would be where its at.

I don't know I think id kill for the economic growth of Ireland right now(they use flat tax). flat tax Seems to work for the most successful western European economy. Besides what ever happened to equality some how the rich are less equal and need to be taxed at a higher rate then everyone else?

then again a sales tax would be where its at.

The Irish tax rate is not flat and its economy at present is suffering.

Maybe its because I have been up for 16 hours and I am a bit tired but what?
OK.

Rich person has less money - a bit sad, but can still afford to buy stuff without too much hassle, thus contributing a bit to the economy. OTOH there are not actually that many of these.

Poor person has less money - either they'll buy less stuff, or they'll take credit to buy the same amount as before. We're seeing the impact of dodgy credit at the moment with a worldwide banking crisis of sorts (although HSBC still made £5 billion profit in the first half of the year, so I fear the whole thing might be being played up a bit tbqh).
Though are you trying to tell me that a progressive tax system helps the economy?
Yep.
Hang on now you have lost me, what has that got to do with keeping up with Mr & Mrs Jones? Or class warfare for that matter?
Keeping up with the Jones/class warfare = All ways of people trying to dominate one another by owning more pish, right?

Seeing as the earning of money to buy shit is mainly about proving you're better than people and have a superior quality of life, this is why the economy works.

its economy at present is suffering.

Although mainly due to things outside of their control.

Although mainly due to things outside of their control.

Yeah, I'm just pointing out that 'the economic growth of Ireland right now' is not something to kill for.

I don't know I think id kill for the economic growth of Ireland right now
Uhu... their economy is rising so quickly because it used to be so poor. It'll plateau soon enough.
(they use flat tax)
No, they don't.

People earning between 0 and 34,000 Euros p.a. pay a 20% tax rate, and if you earn more than that, you pay 20% on the first 34,000 and then 41% on anything after that.
flat tax Seems to work for the most successful western European economy.
The Germans do not have flat tax.
Besides what ever happened to equality some how the rich are less equal and need to be taxed at a higher rate then everyone else?
It's not about them being less equal, it's about their money being less necessary past a certain threshold. Once you have a house fully stocked with everything you need, that's sorta the end of that game. Aye, you can get another house, and fill that with pish also, but even the richest own ten houses tops.

Taking more tax from people who are poor and are going to be continually trying to upgrade their quality of life will simply lead to them spending less, or taking credit. Neither of those are very good.
then again a sales tax would be where its at.
Don't really see why tbqh.

none of the above!

Agreed!!!

There should be a "none of the above" to chose.

That may or may not be true - afterall, these institutions only exist because people care about them and use them to stay in touch with others.

True to some extent. Its just much easier to maintain strong churches and strong communities when those who choose not to go to church or atten community events suffer from loss of social status. Its also harder to maintain the above when churches have become less relevant to most people and when

But that's not really the crux of the issue: living in a bad neighbourhood can make it much more difficult to escape poverty, but that doesn't imply that poverty causes neighbourhoods to become bad.

There's, however, a correlation between poor neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. Its probably self reinforcing. Bad neighborhoods become poor neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods have people with little to lose from committing crimes.

Whatever they want. Things like welfare, socialised medicine schemes, state pensions and so on could certainly be handled like an insurance scheme, in which people sign up on their tax return, pay the fee (and because it's done by percentages rather than absolute amounts the poor should also be able to get on board, at the expense of those "rich" members who make the choice voluntarily) and then be eligible for the benefits, should it become necessary.

Basically an opt-out approach to the welfare state.

So basically a situation that suffers from adverse selection just like private insurance. Those with little need opt out and those with great need opt in raising the price, ie the tax percentage, and/or lowering the the benefits offered by the scheme chasing away more and more of those in the middle.

That's one way of looking at it. Of course, security borne from the barrel of a gun really isn't any security either.

That's what the burglar told me when while I made sure he stayed in place until the cops came.

Could be fixed in no time with my opt-out approach. The problem is that the NHS is such a huge distortion that there really isn't much of a private market outside it - really divide it from the industry and the market, simply as one particularly cheap form of health insurance (or particularly expensive, given that it'd work as percentage of income) and I think you'd fix most things about it.

Unless its subsidized from general tax revenues I don't see how it would remain cheap for those who choose to opt in.

However, I'm kinda anti-government health insurance except for people who are indigent or otherwise need coverage and can't get it (like the uninsurable) and also, the tax/income level thing I would like to add in that deductions and credits are win, flat tax is fail unless it's not progressive.

I rather like Switzerland's healthcare system. It mandatory to get some basic insurance, community rated by age, with subsidies for the poor.

I don't know I think id kill for the economic growth of Ireland right now(they use flat tax). flat tax Seems to work for the most successful western European economy. Besides what ever happened to equality some how the rich are less equal and need to be taxed at a higher rate then everyone else?

From a certain point of view they are, it's a flat tax on luxury income rather than gross income.

Why? While some schools do have a lot of money behind them despite the government funding many do not have the same amount of funds to easily access.
Because either a school is private, or it isn't. I'm not a supporter of government charity to for-profit organisations.

So basically a situation that suffers from adverse selection just like private insurance. Those with little need opt out and those with great need opt in raising the price, ie the tax percentage, and/or lowering the the benefits offered by the scheme chasing away more and more of those in the middle.
Yep, and that's the nature of insurances. The solution is not to threaten people with violence in order to make sure prices don't reflect economic realities though.

The government has no innate responsibility to make sure anyone has healthcare. If people think it should do so, I'm all in favour of them trying to set up a scheme that will do it, and try and fix any errors within this. What they can't do is then force everyone else to participate or otherwise use the powers of government that exist to protect people from violence inflicted by others for different purposes.

That's what the burglar told me when while I made sure he stayed in place until the cops came.
The question is: whose security? The security of you, if your burglar gets free money rather than having to steal yours? In that case, yeah, welfare payments might provide security. Of course, it's blackmail basically, and the fact that stealing, although wrong, is rewarded rather than punished.

But security for those who actually receive it? Certainly not - receiving welfare destroys lives just as much as not receiving it does. The latter makes life harder physically, the former destroys any sense of purpose and self-worth one might once have had.

Minimum wages written into law require employers to pay an amount for something they don't see as being worth it, or at least as more as they would in a world without violence.

Where does violence come into it? I'm all for encouraging the best out of your workers, but beating them up is a tad, inhumane? An employer will never see any reason to pay anything more than the minimum they can get away with at any given moment. In a time of high employment this is fine. In times of unemployment, however, it gets very bad very quickly, as the depression in the US showed.

That's the bad side of them, and the good side doesn't actually require them.

http://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/04/14/countries-without-minimum-wage-law/

However virtually all the countries listed have collective agreements which we assume are legally binding. The only difference in effect is that the wage varies by industry (which some minimum age laws do anyway) and that it's reached by a process of negotiation rather than decree. In which case it comes down to how much you feel a corporate opinion is a valid contribution to national policy.

So you say that a head of state does work that is more important than a CEOs. That may be true - but that doesn't affect what a CEO should get paid. Salaries aren't random numbers picked out of thin air, they're reflections of the value the employers place on the work that is being done. CEOs get paid a lot because (in the ideal scenario) the owners of the company consider that fair pay in order to secure the experience, knowledge and skill of this particular person in running the firm.

So they old friends doing each other a few backhanded favours? I o not honestly believe that CEOs and directors pay in general is in any way related to their performance, and much more to their "networking skills".

Basically an opt-out approach to the welfare state.

This still fails to take into account people who never pay tax, such as those born disabled, mentally ill etc. or who become so before taking up work. It would also tempt those on very low incomes to not take up adequate protection in order to have a more livable take home amount, as now happens with health coverage in the US, bringing us right back to the social stability and security headaches I mentioned previously.

That's one way of looking at it. Of course, security borne from the barrel of a gun really isn't any security either.

What's with the gun barrel? We're talking money, not drive-bys.

The market is working reasonably well on the lending-out-to-people end. It's what people did with the mortgages afterwards that's turned out to be idiocy, but that doesn't really affect my point.

Buy houses?

To ask a question: why do people with no marketable skills need to live in inner London or Hong Kong? If they produce value to the people around them, they'll be rewarded accordingly and they'll be able to find a place to live. But there is no obligation for financial centres to be cheap enough to house people who couldn't add to the financial industry, to use an example.

Not everyone who lives in a "financial centre" works in a bank. They require a how slew underpaid workers, from cleaning, catering, hospitality, maintenance, transit, etc. etc. etc. Also these cities happen to be people's homes. Their family were born there and they have a right to live there. Other people work there in professional but lowly paid roles due to the distorted relationship we have with money. London is also centre of the arts, but many artists are poorly paid. Cities and regions don't exist only for one industry, and that industry has no right to effectively hijack a city for it's own speculative joy ride.

HK and Singapore meanwhile are not cities, but also entire nations (or in HK's situation, a de facto nation) and so this argument is even less valid.


Could be fixed in no time with my opt-out approach. The problem is that the NHS is such a huge distortion that there really isn't much of a private market outside it

A private health care system exists in the UK, and in my (admittedly end user) experience seems to co-exist alongside the NHS relatively easily.

- really divide it from the industry and the market, simply as one particularly cheap form of health insurance (or particularly expensive, given that it'd work as percentage of income) and I think you'd fix most things about it.

The problem is that as an opt out you describe the fact that for some it'd be a high cost exercise means they are likely to withdraw from the system, further narrowing it's collection net and forcing rates higher still. As I said earlier, only a mandatory spread keeps the per capita costs affordable, and ensures people a the bottom won't opt out of having any kind of provision.

The government has NO right to interfere in my income whatsoever.

The government has NO right to interfere in my income whatsoever.

You disagree with tax altogether?

And if I break Usain Bolt's legs, I also become a better runner in relative terms. But that's not what we're aiming for here.

Education, as I keep saying, is a funny thing. It's not really a service, where you go to a good provider and come out with a good result. You can get a fancy piece of paper, but the different values people put on these don't go away if you abolish private schools. I went to a public school which is very well respected, while there are others that people would hesitate to put in their CVs. More importantly, the actual result of an education is the result of both parties cooperating effectively. One can go to a great school and come out an idiot, or to a very bad school and come out well-educated. Of course it makes some difference, but a far greater impact comes from the student him/herself.

None of which would explain why we should aim to destroy private schools, if there seems to be a market for them. I fully support measures to end any public funding for them (in Australia at the moment some of them receive massive sums), and I'd support measures to give them more influence about what and how they teach so that students and parents can choose from a greater variety of options (for example schools that are already tailored towards particular career options). But those are measures to improve their ability to play the role they're there for, which is to provide an alternative.

I knew you'd respond with something along the lines of the Usian Bolt comparison. But private education IS about getting a better education than the people in public schools and not about getting a better education in fixed terms. Public education is good enough to educate you properly, people send their children to private schools to beat the public school kids into universities and jobs. I know I'll be accused of thinking of the economy as a zero-sum game but it hasn't got room for an infinite number of skilled jobs. People who take history degrees aren't doing so to learn techniques for the job market - the real value in the degree is seperating them from others. Someone still has to take out the trash, and we all know what schools they are going to come from.

It doesn't matter if they were misinformed or not (they didn't have the understanding btw) because the point of all this is perception, with a flat tax rate they would be more than willing to work longer contributing more to the economy as they wouldn't have to pay a higher percentage on tax. But regardless as those sentences are very weak, can someone tell me why a flat tax rate is so bad

It seems strange that you seem to put emphasis on personal responsibility but want to change the entire tax system to cover up for their inability to understand a fairly simple concept.

Yes it must be a lot more as the editors and journalists do have class warfare ideas, they mainly (all tabloid papers and news services and a few other outlets) cater to the common man and like to have a little bash on richer (read earning higher than the average wage) people. The ironic thing is that people who are quite 'rich' (though I use the term loosely as you can hardly call someone on $90,000 rich) still have a class warfare mentality, especially the older people.

OWN the media. If this really was class warfare, why would the people who OWN the media allow them to get away with it? The truth is that Western democracies are brilliant places to be rich.

Shouldn't that mean you should pay less if you are using less government funded services?

This isn't a business transaction. You don't pay tax for a good deal.


Well I didn't write this even though it is attributed to me, can people please when quoting other people ensure they have the name in the quote.

Oh relax

You disagree with tax altogether?

Yes.

Look, how much land and other resources does the government own and do nothing with?
If a private company did that the shareholders would be out for blood. Let the government generate its own income, it has the resources and the opportunity to create the ideal environment for its enterprises to flourish. Why should it have to suck the wealth away from the common man?

Yes.

Look, how much land and other resources does the government own and do nothing with?
If a private company did that the shareholders would be out for blood. Let the government generate its own income, it has the resources and the opportunity to create the ideal environment for its enterprises to flourish. Why should it have to suck the wealth away from the common man?

If it's going to generate its own income just like a private company it's going to spend its own income just like a private company. Who will run the police?

Yes.

Look, how much land and other resources does the government own and do nothing with?
If a private company did that the shareholders would be out for blood. Let the government generate its own income, it has the resources and the opportunity to create the ideal environment for its enterprises to flourish. Why should it have to suck the wealth away from the common man?

That is insane. What's to stop the government nationalising every profitable business in order to generate income?

Yep, and that's the nature of insurances. The solution is not to threaten people with violence in order to make sure prices don't reflect economic realities though.

So you make a public insurance scheme that faces the same problems as

The government has no innate responsibility to make sure anyone has healthcare.

I, and many others, disagree.

If people think it should do so, I'm all in favour of them trying to set up a scheme that will do it, and try and fix any errors within this. What they can't do is then force everyone else to participate or otherwise use the powers of government that exist to protect people from violence inflicted by others for different purposes.

The government has many responsibilities other than to protect people from violence. You yourself advocate central banking and various regulations to improve the economy.

The question is: whose security? The security of you, if your burglar gets free money rather than having to steal yours? In that case, yeah, welfare payments might provide security. Of course, it's blackmail basically, and the fact that stealing, although wrong, is rewarded rather than punished.

But security for those who actually receive it? Certainly not - receiving welfare destroys lives just as much as not receiving it does. The latter makes life harder physically, the former destroys any sense of purpose and self-worth one might once have had.

Whether welfare enhances the security those who receive it depends on the program and how its setup. Childcare subsidies generally help increase their parents' labor market participation, improves the quality of the childcare for those children already receiving care, improves the future human capital of those in childcare, and generally it helps increase the birthrate in a society where parents face most of the costs but few of the benefits having kids. Publically funded education has created a skilled labor force worldwide. Police protection and court services for those who couldn't afford these services if they were voluntary. Public pensions helps ensure economic security in one's old age if and when pension plans go bankrupt or the stock market is down.

Where does violence come into it? I'm all for encouraging the best out of your workers, but beating them up is a tad, inhumane?
Not violance by private entities against one another - violence committed by public entities against private ones. If I can be fined or go to jail because I don't pay the minimum wage, the government is threatening violence against me in order to force me to pay something I wouldn't have paid in absence of this violence.

An employer will never see any reason to pay anything more than the minimum they can get away with at any given moment.
And an employee will never see any reason to get paid anything less than the maximum they can get away with at any given moment. That's how the system works and has to work. The efficient outcome is reached when everyone makes a compromise with everyone else to get what they want and aren't unhappy with the choices they make.

In a time of high employment this is fine. In times of unemployment, however, it gets very bad very quickly, as the depression in the US showed.
If anything the depression demonstrated that employment isn't a given, and that if employers don't provide it, no amount of legislation is going to help. The answer isn't to force people to provide jobs - that's not what businesses are for.

More importantly, there is still the conceptual problem with minimum wages. If they are higher than market wages, there'll be greater supply of labour and lower demand than there would have been at equilibrium, so you end up with an oversupply of labour - unemployment. Whether or not this relationship is strong enough to be reliably detected given the multitude of other influences in the real world is debatable, but at the very least it should mean that if you support minimum wage laws, it's a topic you'd want to stay away from.

However virtually all the countries listed have collective agreements which we assume are legally binding. The only difference in effect is that the wage varies by industry (which some minimum age laws do anyway) and that it's reached by a process of negotiation rather than decree. In which case it comes down to how much you feel a corporate opinion is a valid contribution to national policy.
Not all of them do, and they certainly aren't legally binding everywhere. It is however usually bad business to go up against monopolistic labour cartels, so the agreements are generally honoured.

My point stands nonetheless: minimum wage laws are unnecessary, even if you think minimum wage standards should exist.

So they old friends doing each other a few backhanded favours? I o not honestly believe that CEOs and directors pay in general is in any way related to their performance, and much more to their "networking skills".
Which is a disgrace. I actually agree with you that this happens far too often, but the offense isn't against society, you and me or the employees of the firm, but against the owners. Luckily, we have seen a stronger trend towards shareholder activism in recent years, and when an activist hedge fund or private equity partner thinks a CEO is overpaid, they're certainly going to set things in motion to rectify the situation.

Which has nothing to do with society in general, because no one but the shareholders lose because a CEO is overpaid.

This still fails to take into account people who never pay tax, such as those born disabled, mentally ill etc. or who become so before taking up work.
One could also have a program targeted at such people, basically like a government-run charity. As long as people pay for it, they can set whatever they want (within constitutional limits).

It would also tempt those on very low incomes to not take up adequate protection in order to have a more livable take home amount, as now happens with health coverage in the US, bringing us right back to the social stability and security headaches I mentioned previously.
And that's their own decision. I don't presume to know better how they should run their finances, and even if I do, I certainly don't presume to have the right to walk in there and force my views on them.

What's with the gun barrel? We're talking money, not drive-bys.
All government action is based on the power to commit violent acts against people. If I don't pay into a welfare system right now, that's called tax evasion and they'll send me to jail. If I resist going to jail, they'll hit me. If I resist further, eventually they're going to be shooting at me.

Don't have any romantic illusions about what it is to advocate the government doing something. In this case, it is the poor getting security because armed people take money for them to use, and the rich getting security because armed thugs essentially take protection money. Neither of them are what I would call real, lasting security, especially since violence is necessarily involved.

Buy houses?
The other direction - securitise them and load them onto balance sheets by the billions.

The people who actually borrowed the money are finding now that the market works, just as it did before. They took on loans that were ultimately too much for them, meaning they didn't do their own sums right. Many of them will now lose their houses. And in this case the people who lent them the money also find that their sums were wrong, and will themselves now suffer and lose businesses.

Not everyone who lives in a "financial centre" works in a bank. They require a how slew underpaid workers, from cleaning, catering, hospitality, maintenance, transit, etc. etc. etc.
And to the extent that these people get paid, they will be able to live in places. If, say HK property prices became so high that all these people had to move away, you'd find that cleaning or hospitality services in HK would become a lot more expensive, allowing the people who can offer these services to earn enough to live there. Things tend to balance each other out - ying and yang, supply and demand.

Also these cities happen to be people's homes. Their family were born there and they have a right to live there.
Nobody has a right to live anywhere for free. There is limited space, especially in places like HK, and if you want to have a roof over your head there, you need to justify it by compensating others, by earning the right and providing a reason for why you and not many millions of others should be occupying a given piece of land.

Other people work there in professional but lowly paid roles due to the distorted relationship we have with money. London is also centre of the arts, but many artists are poorly paid. Cities and regions don't exist only for one industry, and that industry has no right to effectively hijack a city for it's own speculative joy ride.
You should check out for just how much of Britain's wealth London and the finance industry is responsible today. There would be no Britain without it.

At any rate, what you're proposing is that high-paid people should not be allowed to bid up the prices for property close to their work. Even assuming people wouldn't find other ways of bidding up prices in order to secure such a place, the results would be unconvincing. Rent control has been tried and comprehensively rejected by reality. In 1989, arch-capitalist and foreign minister of Vietnam Nguyen Co Thach said that the Americans couldn't destroy Saigon, but the Vietnamese government managed it with rent controls. Even Paul Krugman, who is hardly what you'd call liberal or neoclassical agrees (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E4DF153FF934A35755C0A9669C8B63).

HK and Singapore meanwhile are not cities, but also entire nations (or in HK's situation, a de facto nation) and so this argument is even less valid.
I think it's more valid, because there's less space for expansion, and it makes sense that the limited space should be occupied by those who contribute most to the production of economic wealth.

A private health care system exists in the UK, and in my (admittedly end user) experience seems to co-exist alongside the NHS relatively easily.
But go beyond the end user stage, and you get to things like legislated prices for medication and so on. Those are huge distortions.

The problem is that as an opt out you describe the fact that for some it'd be a high cost exercise means they are likely to withdraw from the system, further narrowing it's collection net and forcing rates higher still. As I said earlier, only a mandatory spread keeps the per capita costs affordable, and ensures people a the bottom won't opt out of having any kind of provision.
What is and isn't affordable depends on the person you're looking at. At any rate, if the government can't provide a working healthcare system without waving guns at everyone, then people shouldn't opt in, and they should make do with something else.

I knew you'd respond with something along the lines of the Usian Bolt comparison. But private education IS about getting a better education than the people in public schools and not about getting a better education in fixed terms. Public education is good enough to educate you properly, people send their children to private schools to beat the public school kids into universities and jobs.
Yeah, but I covered that already. Just because you abolish private schools doesn't make the need for parents and students to find separation disappear. There are good public schools, and there are bad ones. Parents will still do whatever they can, and that will still be more for rich parents than poor ones, to make sure their kids get the piece of paper they think they need. Your quest for egalitarianism would still fail.

Someone still has to take out the trash, and we all know what schools they are going to come from.
I wouldn't have thought you this cynical. Is the only difference between an investment banker and a garbage man really just a piece of paper?

The truth is that Western democracies are brilliant places to be rich.
So are the various corrupt dictatorships of the world. If I want to develop a piece of property, here I have to pay people for the land, in China I just ask the local official. In Equatorial Guinea, I can go and hunt poor people with a gun if I felt the urge, and nobody would bother me.

Granted, in western democracies rich people are free to express political opinions moreso than they are in Russia, China or Africa - but that's the same for everyone.

This isn't a business transaction. You don't pay tax for a good deal.
What do you pay tax for? I am often told that it's "because I use all these government services". That's true, but it also means that there must be a direct relationship between the services I use and the taxes I should be paying.

If there isn't, that justification doesn't work and I want to hear the alternative. And preferably a better one than "nothing is really yours, we are just gracious enough to let you hold on to half of it for us".

I, and many others, disagree.
And though I respect your right to do so, I don't see what gives you the right to use force to make me comply with your belief.

The government has many responsibilities other than to protect people from violence. You yourself advocate central banking and various regulations to improve the economy.
I do, but there are signficant differences. The policies I propose facilitate rather than redistribute. They fix information problems and allow people to do their economic activities more effectively and efficiently. They don't judge anyone to be right or wrong a priori (they may judge someone wrong if they break a regulation though) and they don't take responsibility off anyone's shoulders.

Childcare subsidies generally help increase their parents' labor market participation, improves the quality of the childcare for those children already receiving care, improves the future human capital of those in childcare, and generally it helps increase the birthrate in a society where parents face most of the costs but few of the benefits having kids.
How does that improve the security of the recipients though? I also reckon that the benefits you mention apply to rich people as well as poor ones, so I think this sort of policy is more an attempt at market intervention in order to produce some sort of general outcome (ie more kids) rather than shift economic surplus from one group to the other.

That presumes that the government has any idea what the ideal number of kids in society is of course.

Publically funded education has created a skilled labor force worldwide.
Again, not really about providing security to the recipients, nor targeted at the poor in particular. In Germany for example, there are virtually no private schools.

Police protection and court services for those who couldn't afford these services if they were voluntary. Public pensions helps ensure economic security in one's old age if and when pension plans go bankrupt or the stock market is down.
Those things all aren't aimed a redistribution. Even if there were no poor people the legal system with all its baggage would still be around, and pensions are becoming less and less necessary. In Australia the people receiving the traditional state pension are dying out, and the system now only caters to people so incredibly useless that they couldn't manage to take part in a forced superannuation scheme, that is they literally couldn't earn a couple of hundred dollars a week for a long enough period.

These people are few and far between, and I expect the public pension system to become an extremely minor detail in a decade or so. Modern financial techniques basically allow guaranteed returns (that is, 10-11% for example) with a very high degree of probability, regardless of the current market situation. As we're seeing right now, everything has its limits, but standard Australian pension funds are regulated against taking too high risks anyways, so they're in generally good shape.

And though I respect your right to do so, I don't see what gives you the right to use force to make me comply with your belief.

Its the same right that gives you the right to force those who don't recognize your rights to your property to comply.


I do, but there are signficant differences. The policies I propose facilitate rather than redistribute. They fix information problems and allow people to do their economic activities more effectively and efficiently. They don't judge anyone to be right or wrong a priori (they may judge someone wrong if they break a regulation though) and they don't take responsibility off anyone's shoulders.

Your policies still come down to guys with guns forcing people to comply. Even your basic policies of violence reduction calls for guys with guns. It is irrelevant whether or not your policies facilitate rather than redistribute. Hell, many of those who wish to redistribute also call for policies that facilitate. They aren't mutually exclusive.

How does that improve the security of the recipients though? I also reckon that the benefits you mention apply to rich people as well as poor ones, so I think this sort of policy is more an attempt at market intervention in order to produce some sort of general outcome (ie more kids) rather than shift economic surplus from one group to the other.

It provides more economic security those those who have children. Perhaps you are thinking of physical security against violence which wasn't the type of security talked about originally. It does redistribute resources from nonparents to parents whether rich or poor.

That presumes that the government has any idea what the ideal number of kids in society is of course.

Incorrect. All it calls is for is the view that below replacement rate birthrates is bad for the future of the economy.

Again, not really about providing security to the recipients, nor targeted at the poor in particular. In Germany for example, there are virtually no private schools.

Ummm...... having better human capital does improve the economic security those who possess it. Also, targeted programs redistribute fewer resources than programs that have a broader coverage: http://74.125.95.104/search?q=cache:YwBe6-_0-_cJ:www.socsci.aau.dk/ccws/students/Palme%26korpi.pdf+Paradox+of+redistribution&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Those things all aren't aimed a redistribution. Even if there were no poor people the legal system with all its baggage would still be around, and pensions are becoming less and less necessary.

Their aims are irrelevant. They redistribute.

In Australia the people receiving the traditional state pension are dying out, and the system now only caters to people so incredibly useless that they couldn't manage to take part in a forced superannuation scheme, that is they literally couldn't earn a couple of hundred dollars a week for a long enough period

These people are few and far between, and I expect the public pension system to become an extremely minor detail in a decade or so. Modern financial techniques basically allow guaranteed returns (that is, 10-11% for example) with a very high degree of probability, regardless of the current market situation. As we're seeing right now, everything has its limits, but standard Australian pension funds are regulated against taking too high risks anyways, so they're in generally good shape.

Australia has mandatory contributions funds combined with a means tested safety net. So people are forced to provide for themselves in old age and given money if they can't. How aren't they public?

It seems strange that you seem to put emphasis on personal responsibility but want to change the entire tax system to cover up for their inability to understand a fairly simple concept.

Which still didn't answer the question but whatever.

OWN the media. If this really was class warfare, why would the people who OWN the media allow them to get away with it? The truth is that Western democracies are brilliant places to be rich.

Because it pleases their market it gives them what I like to call the "Today Tonight demographic" (if you aren't Australian then you will more than likely not understand), but perhaps you can ask the people who own the market why they allow it. But when you read articles about why it is bad for CEO's to earn $25million a year or why people who it is bad for people to belong to an exclusive club or how bad it is for people to send their children to private schools.

The fact of the matter is that some media outlets in Australia do have remnants of the old class warfare which are still around in society, just because it is different in your country doesn't mean it is the same in my country.

Oh relax

No I will not relax, how about you just be a bit more careful, it isn't hard to do.

Keeping up with the Jones/class warfare = All ways of people trying to dominate one another by owning more pish, right?

Seeing as the earning of money to buy shit is mainly about proving you're better than people and have a superior quality of life, this is why the economy works.

Well I was looking it from those people who have less and are unhappy with it and think that people who have worked hard during their life don't deserve more, such as when people complain about the CEO earning $25million a year and how terrible it is when they are only earning $90,000 a year, or people who are really just against the apparent elite, which may only be people earning $150,000 a year.

Not violence by private entities against one another - violence committed by public entities against private ones. If I can be fined or go to jail because I don't pay the minimum wage, the government is threatening violence against me in order to force me to pay something I wouldn't have paid in absence of this violence.

The government is not forcing you to hire that person. It merely states that, if you do, you must pay a certain amount.

The efficient outcome is reached when everyone makes a compromise with everyone else to get what they want and aren't unhappy with the choices they make.

In reality, however, it is an unequal relationship. The employer holds much more power than the employee, so the outcome is never a true compromise. If that were the case why would people work in jobs that pay an unlivable wage, when they have to work two or more jobs? Bear in mind these jobs are generally not non-unionised, so the idea of two entities (union and corporate) are negotiating from positions of strength doesn't apply here. This is where the government can effectively intervene to provide a stabilising influence.

If anything the depression demonstrated that employment isn't a given, and that if employers don't provide it, no amount of legislation is going to help. The answer isn't to force people to provide jobs - that's not what businesses are for.

That's a side issue to the main point. High unemployment creates a monopsony, forcing wages down. Without either a minimum wage or social security net, which has obvious and serious implications.

More importantly, there is still the conceptual problem with minimum wages. If they are higher than market wages, there'll be greater supply of labour and lower demand than there would have been at equilibrium, so you end up with an oversupply of labour - unemployment.
Whether or not this relationship is strong enough to be reliably detected given the multitude of other influences in the real world is debatable, but at the very least it should mean that if you support minimum wage laws, it's a topic you'd want to stay away from.

As you yourself admit, there is no detectable evidence of this.

Not all of them do, and they certainly aren't legally binding everywhere. It is however usually bad business to go up against monopolistic labour cartels, so the agreements are generally honoured.

And in countries where labour cartels do not exist, how would these voluntary agreements be agreed, and who would hold the strength to enforce them, if not for the government? And employee welfare is far from the only issue here. As I said in my initial response to this issue, the minimum wage allows the government, not a private entity to determine the welfare of it's citizens. I don't favour a monopolistic labour cartel (which are much rarer than you suggest) anymore than a favour a powerful employer. The government can make a settlement that favours society overall, rather than only a single faction of it.

My point stands nonetheless: minimum wage laws are unnecessary, even if you think minimum wage standards should exist.

For the reasons above, amongst others, I disagree.

Which has nothing to do with society in general, because no one but the shareholders lose because a CEO is overpaid.

Actually it has a very significant impact. It is culturally very corrosive, and undermines the respect held for the HoS, furthers the fetishisation of money, encourages an attitude of "get rich or die trying" (which ultimately is a central tenet of "gang-culture") and feeds a culture of short-termism as people loose sight of whatever legitimacy limited businesses ever had in the first place, in favour of worshipping the golden parachute.

One could also have a program targeted at such people, basically like a government-run charity. As long as people pay for it, they can set whatever they want (within constitutional limits).

Relying on voluntary charity, especially in a profit-driven culture is roughly akin to asking the KKK to provide security for a civil rights march. The state of charitable giving is way below the amount required for comprehensive universal provision, and is also unpredictable in comparison to tax revenues.

And that's their own decision. I don't presume to know better how they should run their finances, and even if I do, I certainly don't presume to have the right to walk in there and force my views on them.

And when these people, out of desperation, take to crime, or take to the streets, or become to ill to work (if they can find it) do we still take a hands off approach and watch everything unravel, or do we put them down? Had we taken action earlier and ensured some provision were made, such a situation could have been prevented.

All government action is based on the power to commit violent acts against people.

In the extreme end game, yes. If a criminal breaks the law, he faces the possibility of violence to restrict his actions. Short of anarchy, there never has been any other system. Your ideas too, would ultimately be expressed in violent terms.

If I don't pay into a welfare system right now, that's called tax evasion and they'll send me to jail. If I resist going to jail, they'll hit me. If I resist further, eventually they're going to be shooting at me.

Since this is the law, it is enforceable. As a citizen of any country you are obliged to obey the law. You have option of leaving the country and surrendering your citizenship at any time, should you not wish to meet your tax obligations in the future.

The police of the UK do not generally carry arms in situations involving tax evasion. You would only be beaten if you violently resisted. As I said earlier, the ideas you espouse are also, ultimately, backed up by violence.

Don't have any romantic illusions about what it is to advocate the government doing something. In this case, it is the poor getting security because armed people take money for them to use, and the rich getting security because armed thugs essentially take protection money. Neither of them are what I would call real, lasting security, especially since violence is necessarily involved.

So if we were to have no-one enforcing our laws, they would be obeyed? Not even in the greatest cultures has that happened, nor have people ever voluntarily paid taxes out of altruistic concerns. There is no meaningful comparison between criminal gangs and governments, for governments are recognised by laws, and operate according to a set of rights and responsibilities. A cartel, on the other hand, does not.

Many of them will now lose their houses. And in this case the people who lent them the money also find that their sums were wrong, and will themselves now suffer and lose businesses.

So the market mechanisms are working right by causing us a homelessness headache and sending the banking system into a state of flux? That's very reassuring. Since we were well aware that an easy credit bubble was happening long before it burst, the infinite wisdom of the market saw no advantage in tackling it before it became a crisis, which could have been prevented.

The ensuring mess of course, will now need to picked up by... state bailouts to incompetent bankers? Sweet. Actually, in this case, I debate whether or not it'd be worth letting both over-ambitious home buyers and incompetent bankers go and drown together. But however much I despise them, I care about the nation as a whole.

And to the extent that these people get paid, they will be able to live in places. If, say HK property prices became so high that all these people had to move away, you'd find that cleaning or hospitality services in HK would become a lot more expensive, allowing the people who can offer these services to earn enough to live there. Things tend to balance each other out - ying and yang, supply and demand.

Only they don't.

Nobody has a right to live anywhere for free.

Nobody said free.

You should check out for just how much of Britain's wealth London and the finance industry is responsible today. There would be no Britain without it.

And how much of Britain's research, design, heritage, art and culture is due to London? It is one of the best known cities in the world, and of it's icons and defining aspects, people know our universities, libraries, museums, galleries long before they know it to be the "home" of Barclays Capital. Those people who contrbute the most to our culture (or what's left of it) have just as much "right" to live in the city as as an 'honest' businessman.

The fact also being that our property prices are not even due to people buying homes to live in. The whole thing is a meaningless speculative bubble that serves no end than to make a few dubious foreign investors/mafiosi ('honest' businessmen) a quick buck and turning the city into a shit-tip of buy-to-let boxes, brand name pubs, bland "business parks" and anonymous shopping malls.

At any rate, what you're proposing is that high-paid people should not be allowed to bid up the prices for property close to their work.

Actually, I'm more interested in preventing speculation, particularly when it is detrimental to the architectural and cultural integrity of the city or district. This is affected by the availablility of good housing for those who contribute menaingfully to our culture. To this end, ensuring affordable housing of livable standard is also an issue (as well asbeing socially desireable in and of itself for the general population), and speculation works against that. Left unresolved, the latter leads to conflict (as China is now seeing) and this causes problems, as the Chinese have found out.

Even assuming people wouldn't find other ways of bidding up prices in order to secure such a place, the results would be unconvincing. Rent control has been tried and comprehensively rejected by reality. In 1989, arch-capitalist and foreign minister of Vietnam Nguyen Co Thach said that the Americans couldn't destroy Saigon, but the Vietnamese government managed it with rent controls.

Rent controls are different to the allocation of low cost housing. One seeks to regulate an existing supply chain, the other seeks to supplement it.

I think it's more valid, because there's less space for expansion, and it makes sense that the limited space should be occupied by those who contribute most to the production of economic wealth.

Definitely. If you can't afford to live in your country of birth, you should leave.

But go beyond the end user stage, and you get to things like legislated prices for medication and so on. Those are huge distortions.


But private hospitals survive OK nonetheless, so I don't how the NHS is being evil and stopping them from existing. The "distortions" meanwhile are merely mechanisms that are either necessary or beneficial to the NHS in performing it's work.

What is and isn't affordable depends on the person you're looking at. At any rate, if the government can't provide a working health care system without waving guns at everyone, then people shouldn't opt in, and they should make do with something else.

I can't recall a time in the United Kingdom, when the health care system necessitated guns, or when guns were called upon to ensure the revenue streams of said health care system.

If people are not willing to freely part with a modest percentage of the wealth generated in a secure and well managed nation back to it's rulers, so that they may keep it in such a state in future, then those people have no place in such a nation, and they are free to leave it.

I think that the whole concept of "income" is pretty vague. It means different things at different times. Taxable income is different from real income for example. I think that immigrants who bring a lot of capital should be welcomed assuming that they are not fugitives or terrorists or otherwise the sort of folks we do not want coming into our country.

I also think that people should be able to buy a license to have childen before they are permitted to do so. Alternatively, someone might need to demostrate that they have a high enough net worth and credit score to demonstrate that they are responsible enough to bring in children to our country.

Notice that I did not refer to "income" as the determinative factor.

Oh and in case anybody is curious about my claim that income means different things. Income for child support purposes has nothing to do with one's taxable income. Some income is excluded from income for tax purposes such as interest on municipal bonds.

Its the same right that gives you the right to force those who don't recognize your rights to your property to comply.
My property right doesn't require anyone to do anything actively. If I create some wealth that didn't exist previously, and automatically claim it as my own, nobody loses anything because of it. They simply don't gain anything, since they didn't do anything either. I don't need anyone else to exist for my property right to hold, but you do need someone else to exist for any rights to healthcare, cheap housing or whatever else you come up with, namely the person who you need to make it happen.

That's a massive difference. I don't impose any values on you by asking you to respect my property, that is my ability to live according to my own values in a way that doesn't encroach upon others.

Your policies still come down to guys with guns forcing people to comply. Even your basic policies of violence reduction calls for guys with guns. It is irrelevant whether or not your policies facilitate rather than redistribute. Hell, many of those who wish to redistribute also call for policies that facilitate. They aren't mutually exclusive.
The difference is that my policies don't set out to promote one set of values, lifestyles or activities. Facilitating means to let people decide for themselves what they want to do with their time on earth, redistributing means imposing values (eg this poor person is worthy of your time being spent on him). It doesn't matter that you can support both, one is value-neutral, the other is an imposition. The latter is where the problem lies, it's the use of government violence to further one set of people over another.

It provides more economic security those those who have children.
Then let me get to the point I was making at the start: if this security is simply due to unearned money being funneled towards you, and is entirely dependent upon the whims of the politician in charge, then you really have no security. You just swapped the insecurity of having your work valued by others for the insecurity of, well, being handed money without any attempt at justification. There is even less of a direct cause-effect relationship for receiving welfare than there is for doing paid labour, it's even less reliable. I have some level of control over how much I will get paid, I have absolutely none over how much welfare I receive.

Security that is earned can be real, security that is given without reason and cause can't be.

Incorrect. All it calls is for is the view that below replacement rate birthrates is bad for the future of the economy.
Which is not a given at all times.

Australia has mandatory contributions funds combined with a means tested safety net. So people are forced to provide for themselves in old age and given money if they can't. How aren't they public?
Only the latter actually involves taking money from some and giving it to others, and there are fewer and fewer people requiring that help. I certainly wonder just how stupid people are if they actually need to be forced to save for a time when they don't work anymore, and which they know is coming, but the point is that superannuation is your own money, being paid by you and your employer into private investment funds as a percentage of your income.

The government is not forcing you to hire that person. It merely states that, if you do, you must pay a certain amount.
It doesn't matter who the person is. It would in a market, because I could find the person who requires the least pay, but in this case everyone gets the same and in no relation to their actual skills or commitment to the work.

Anyways, to get to the point: if I would have paid $10/hour, but minimum wages force me to pay $15/hour, then $5/hour are taken from me by threat of violence and given to someone I would not consider worthy of receiving that money if it had been my choice.

In reality, however, it is an unequal relationship. The employer holds much more power than the employee, so the outcome is never a true compromise.
I don't care what a "true" compromise is. If both sides agree voluntarily, that's all we need. I don't presume to be clairvoyant and be able to read people's thoughts. And even if I did, I don't presume that it becomes my right to make laws that favour one side over another.

Look, if you go to the supermarket, you will buy the can of baked beans that you want most. That may be the one you think tastes best, or it may be the one that is cheapest. If you end up buying one, a compromise was reached between the company that sold it to you, and you, ie the price was somewhere below the most you'd have paid and above the least they'd have sold it for. For something as generic as baked beans, that may well mean that you, given the competitors available to you, were in the better position and paid less than you would have if there was only the one company around.

Do you now think that the government should step in and introduce laws to protect baked beans manufacturers from competition between each other in order to secure them some minimum price they should be getting? The principle is no different.

If that were the case why would people work in jobs that pay an unlivable wage, when they have to work two or more jobs?
Because given the skills available to them, that's a use of their time that satisfies their preferences. The baked beans manufacturer might well want to just provide one kind of can and sell it for $100 a piece, but nobody would pay that much, and they're forced to sell it for less and use the extra expertise or manufacturing capacity they have to offer additional products. Poor guys, certainly, and you'd hope that they somehow manage to make better baked beans - but not a cause for government intervention.

This is where the government can effectively intervene to provide a stabilising influence.
"Effectively" is a pretty big 'if'. But the question isn't "can it", the question is "should it".

That's a side issue to the main point. High unemployment creates a monopsony, forcing wages down. Without either a minimum wage or social security net, which has obvious and serious implications.
Yes, mainly that with labour becoming cheaper, the quantity demanded also increases, reducing unemployment in the process.

Keep labour expensive however, and the initial shock that created high unemployment continues to work its magic because the market can't repair itself. And then you end up with French or German unemployment rates for a decade or more. The people lucky enough to have jobs are happy, the people who don't...well, they're probably in a minority vote-wise.

And in countries where labour cartels do not exist, how would these voluntary agreements be agreed, and who would hold the strength to enforce them, if not for the government?
If they don't exist, it's for a reason. That reason can be questionable, like a government that kills them off, or not, like employees who simply don't see the need to start one, because they feel they've got the skills to compete based on merit.

And employee welfare is far from the only issue here. As I said in my initial response to this issue, the minimum wage allows the government, not a private entity to determine the welfare of it's citizens.
And how is that a good thing? In North Korea the government has pretty much complete control of the welfare of its citizens, but that doesn't make things any better. Indeed, given that not a single private entity determines very much at all, you have a better chance of improving your lot in a market than you do in a government bureaucracy.

I don't favour a monopolistic labour cartel (which are much rarer than you suggest) anymore than a favour a powerful employer. The government can make a settlement that favours society overall, rather than only a single faction of it.
Sometimes I do wonder whether you've actually read Mussolini or not...

Actually it has a very significant impact. It is culturally very corrosive, and undermines the respect held for the HoS, furthers the fetishisation of money, encourages an attitude of "get rich or die trying" (which ultimately is a central tenet of "gang-culture") and feeds a culture of short-termism as people loose sight of whatever legitimacy limited businesses ever had in the first place, in favour of worshipping the golden parachute.
None of which are convincing or objective. In effect, those are similar reasons to the ones people bring up against immigration: "it offends me"

Relying on voluntary charity, especially in a profit-driven culture is roughly akin to asking the KKK to provide security for a civil rights march. The state of charitable giving is way below the amount required for comprehensive universal provision, and is also unpredictable in comparison to tax revenues.
A government-run charity would work differently to a normal one. You tick the box on a tax return, next to which it says "Unemployment Benefit Program - 6%", and you pay 6% of your income to this particular program. As a result, if you become unemployed you are eligible to receive benefits during a period to be specified in the relevant legislation. If I earn $100, I pay $6, if I earn $1m, I pay $60,000. I'm still eligible to receive the same amount, so there's all the redistribution taken care of.

And that's just a suggested way of doing it. I don't really care what people come up with, as long as membership isn't compulsory. If I feel I have the skills, self-esteem and conviction to find a job when I need one without relying on hand-outs, I should not have to pay into a program of such hand-outs.

And when these people, out of desperation, take to crime, or take to the streets, or become to ill to work (if they can find it) do we still take a hands off approach and watch everything unravel, or do we put them down? Had we taken action earlier and ensured some provision were made, such a situation could have been prevented.
If people take to crime, they'll be punished accordingly. I don't buy into the "I'm poor, therefore I'm allowed to mug you" philosophy. At any rate, if the program exists but people don't sign up for it, you'll simply have to get used to the idea that people don't care enough for others to spend significant amounts of money on them. And as offensive as that may then be to your beliefs, it doesn't give you the right to make them.

Your ideas too, would ultimately be expressed in violent terms.
They would, but I am under no illusions that this is the case. As a result, I seek to apply it evenly, not favouring anyone against anyone else, upholding negative rights rather than positive freedoms where possible.

Since this is the law, it is enforceable. As a citizen of any country you are obliged to obey the law. You have option of leaving the country and surrendering your citizenship at any time, should you not wish to meet your tax obligations in the future.
Wait, don't I have the right to live where I was born?

There is no meaningful comparison between criminal gangs and governments, for governments are recognised by laws, and operate according to a set of rights and responsibilities. A cartel, on the other hand, does not.
At this point, the rights and responsibilities set out for governments are the most faint skeletons of constitutions around. A constitution should seek to limit as well as define government, but at present they are written so vaguely, or are so old, that questions like "is it right to steal from some to give to others" are not even addressed.

And other laws are written by the government itself. The Cosa Nostra also has such a set of rules. The only difference between an armed gang and a government is a constitution, and at present those are too weak.

So the market mechanisms are working right by causing us a homelessness headache and sending the banking system into a state of flux? That's very reassuring.
I'm not one of those "the market is perfect" types. I'm under no illusion that financial crises keep happening and that this will continue. The mistakes lie in psychology probably moreso than the market, but that's how it is. The link in my signature about centuries of financial crises explains things further.

The problem is of course that governments can't really do anything about it either. If these things were predictable, the market would be able to do it - as it is, government officials sat by just as helplessly as bank managers did. So either you get rid of the financial system and condemn the place to economic growth unlikely to be enough to even match population growth, or you swallow the pill and accept that every so often shit hits the fan and the idiots will get weeded out.

Since we were well aware that an easy credit bubble was happening long before it burst, the infinite wisdom of the market saw no advantage in tackling it before it became a crisis, which could have been prevented.
If you were well aware of what was going to happen, you should (in order for the market to work) have made a killing off it. As it was, you had no idea, along with most other people. If you want to know more, read the link in my signature called "Confessions of a Risk Manager".

Actually, in this case, I debate whether or not it'd be worth letting both over-ambitious home buyers and incompetent bankers go and drown together.
That's what I'd support. The problem with banks is that they've got people's savings in them, and if those disappear, that sucks more than a bail-out.

Only they don't.
So there aren't any cleaners, caterers et al in Hong Kong?

Nobody said free.
Whether you set the price as "low" or "zero" doesn't make a difference in principle.

And how much of Britain's research, design, heritage, art and culture is due to London? It is one of the best known cities in the world, and of it's icons and defining aspects, people know our universities, libraries, museums, galleries long before they know it to be the "home" of Barclays Capital. Those people who contrbute the most to our culture (or what's left of it) have just as much "right" to live in the city as as an 'honest' businessman.
Yeah, and culture is subjective. If what they do is appreciated, they'll get rewarded for it. If people can actually take it or leave it, they won't.

The fact also being that our property prices are not even due to people buying homes to live in. The whole thing is a meaningless speculative bubble that serves no end than to make a few dubious foreign investors/mafiosi ('honest' businessmen) a quick buck and turning the city into a shit-tip of buy-to-let boxes, brand name pubs, bland "business parks" and anonymous shopping malls.
So do you propose a special department of, ideally plain-clothed, policemen to patrol the city, walk into houses and apartments and check whether the people who live there are actually the owners?

Actually, I'm more interested in preventing speculation, particularly when it is detrimental to the architectural and cultural integrity of the city or district. This is affected by the availablility of good housing for those who contribute menaingfully to our culture.
How come you get to decide what's meaningful and I don't?

Left unresolved, the latter leads to conflict (as China is now seeing) and this causes problems, as the Chinese have found out.
The problem in China is that there are no property rights. Those poor people owned their homes and land, until corrupt officials declared that ownership null and void and sold the stuff to developers in exchange for a bribe. That's not what's happening in London, and it's not what I'm proposing. If the developer wants a poor person's house, they'll have to pay as much as the poor person wants to sell it for. And ideally, that leaves the poor person a newly rich person.

Rent controls are different to the allocation of low cost housing. One seeks to regulate an existing supply chain, the other seeks to supplement it.
Public housing estates...haven't you been running that particular experiment for some time in Britain?

Definitely. If you can't afford to live in your country of birth, you should leave.
I sense sarcasm here, but I don't understand why.

But private hospitals survive OK nonetheless, so I don't how the NHS is being evil and stopping them from existing. The "distortions" meanwhile are merely mechanisms that are either necessary or beneficial to the NHS in performing it's work.
Who knows, maybe private hospitals survive better with the NHS than without it. That's not the point, the point is that through these mechanisms the NHS changes prices for a variety of inputs into healthcare and whatever private operators also exist can't reflect economic reality either, because they're operating in an artificial environment created by the NHS.

If people are not willing to freely part with a modest percentage of the wealth generated in a secure and well managed nation back to it's rulers, so that they may keep it in such a state in future, then those people have no place in such a nation, and they are free to leave it.
Again, how come they get to be owners of my property and livelihood, but I don't? What gives them the right to present me with a "take it or leave it"?

I don't believe I claimed that it did. But poverty doesn't imply crime or just generally not caring about one's neighbourhood. Back before emancipation in the south, black neighbourhoods in the US were even poorer than today, but people cared quite a lot. They knew each other, forces like local churches, regular community events and so on kept people together and though tough, at least life there wasn't physically dangerous.

I just accidentally inhaled a sip of water. Ack.

I just accidentally inhaled a sip of water. Ack.

well it's true, it wasn't physically dangerous.

Unless, you know, you count "being a slave" as somewhat risky.

right to have children based on income. I would like this maybe even factor in a test to determine intelligence as well.

In that case, I assume you're not planning to spawn.

The government has no innate responsibility to make sure anyone has healthcare.

Which government?

Let the government generate its own income, it has the resources and the opportunity to create the ideal environment for its enterprises to flourish. Why should it have to suck the wealth away from the common man?

It's curious to me that you seem to view "the government" as some sort of outside entity, one that owes you things, but to whom you owe nothing. In the very most basic sense, I think the idea of government is "Hey, look, we're tired of everybody fighting with each other and getting nowhere. Let's pool our resources, agree to stop trying to kill each other and steal each other's food, and in turn we'll each get the same guarantee. If anyone in our group tries any funny stuff, there'll be consequences. Cool? Cool. Now let's go find some people without a group and kick their asses together."

At least, that was roughly the idea behind the Five Nations and their constitution.

well it's true, it wasn't physically dangerous.

Unless, you know, you count "being a slave" as somewhat risky.

Open to interpretation, I guess. I bet some of those slave quarters were done up real nice, and it's probably true that slaves didn't kill each other very much, 'cause that's lost income for the owner.

Open to interpretation, I guess. I bet some of those slave quarters were done up real nice, and it's probably true that slaves didn't kill each other very much, 'cause that's lost income for the owner.

man, being a slave must have been awesome

My property right doesn't require anyone to do anything actively. If I create some wealth that didn't exist previously, and automatically claim it as my own, nobody loses anything because of it. They simply don't gain anything, since they didn't do anything either. I don't need anyone else to exist for my property right to hold, but you do need someone else to exist for any rights to healthcare, cheap housing or whatever else you come up with, namely the person who you need to make it happen.

That's a massive difference. I don't impose any values on you by asking you to respect my property, that is my ability to live according to my own values in a way that doesn't encroach upon others[/QUOTE]

You're imposing. your values of a particular set of property rights on others using guns to force others to comply with those particular property rights. There's no real difference at all. You do need others for your property rights to hold. If only you existed property rights have no meaning because no other being with the potential to hold property exists. You also need others to comply with your rights.

The difference is that my policies don't set out to promote one set of values, lifestyles or activities. Facilitating means to let people decide for themselves what they want to do with their time on earth, redistributing means imposing values (eg this poor person is worthy of your time being spent on him). It doesn't matter that you can support both, one is value-neutral, the other is an imposition. The latter is where the problem lies, it's the use of government violence to further one set of people over another.

Your imposing transparency on entities that would provide the amount transparency that market would spontaneously create. You are enforcing the view that people should have access to this information and that these entities should deliver this information. That is far from value neutral.

Then let me get to the point I was making at the start: if this security is simply due to unearned money being funneled towards you, and is entirely dependent upon the whims of the politician in charge, then you really have no security. You just swapped the insecurity of having your work valued by others for the insecurity of, well, being handed money without any attempt at justification. There is even less of a direct cause-effect relationship for receiving welfare than there is for doing paid labour, it's even less reliable. I have some level of control over how much I will get paid, I have absolutely none over how much welfare I receive.

Property rights, those that are enforced, are created by a combination of governments and custom. There's also the fact that one's earnings in the workforce depend on those who pay for it. You have some control but not full control. By your logic no one is ever secure because these rights depend on whims of politicians. the population at large, consumers, and employers.

Security that is earned can be real, security that is given without reason and cause can't be.

Welfare programs have reasons and cause.

Which is not a given at all times.

Elaborate. Low taxes and zero subsidies for those who raise children would result in drastically decreased birthrates since the direct costs and opportunity costs have drastically increased. This will lower the future supply of workers, consumers, and taxpayers in the economy leading to lower economic growth.

Only the latter actually involves taking money from some and giving it to others, and there are fewer and fewer people requiring that help. I certainly wonder just how stupid people are if they actually need to be forced to save for a time when they don't work anymore, and which they know is coming, but the point is that superannuation is your own money, being paid by you and your employer into private investment funds as a percentage of your income.

Your point? Most pay-as-you-go public pensions are determined by a formula so that what one paid in and what one receives bears some relationship. As you concede this people to save more than they would voluntarily. That the money is "yours" in irrelevant since "you" didn't choose to save it for your retirement. The safety net is part of comprehensive pension package.

My property right doesn't require anyone to do anything actively. If I create some wealth that didn't exist previously, and automatically claim it as my own, nobody loses anything because of it. They simply don't gain anything, since they didn't do anything either. I don't need anyone else to exist for my property right to hold, but you do need someone else to exist for any rights to healthcare, cheap housing or whatever else you come up with, namely the person who you need to make it happen.


That's not entirely fair, is it? What if you didn't create some wealth that didn't exist previously? What if you own a limited resource such as oil or diamonds? You're asking someone else to give up their claim to it. And they may not agree that they and the rest of their community don't have a right to it.

And you say "whatever, I own these" and smile a little smile. They can't then go off and create some oil for themselves.

Which still didn't answer the question but whatever.

It does. Those people have only themselves to blame. Switching to a system of more responsibility to protect them from themselves makes no sense.

Because it pleases their market it gives them what I like to call the "Today Tonight demographic" (if you aren't Australian then you will more than likely not understand), but perhaps you can ask the people who own the market why they allow it. But when you read articles about why it is bad for CEO's to earn $25million a year or why people who it is bad for people to belong to an exclusive club or how bad it is for people to send their children to private schools.

The fact they allow it speaks volumes. Private schools aren't banned, the wages of CEOs aren't capped. This "class warfare" isn't any such thing - it's more like "occassional class whining that is of no consequence". You can't get any more bourgeoise than owning the media and if this was of any consequence the owners of the media would step in.

The fact of the matter is that some media outlets in Australia do have remnants of the old class warfare which are still around in society, just because it is different in your country doesn't mean it is the same in my country.

Oh, I'm sorry, I feel so silly now. I didn't realise it was "the fact of the matter". If I'd know you'd unilaterally declared it so I would never have embarassed myself by venturing my own opinion. And you'll find the people who own the media in your country often own the media in my country.

No I will not relax

That much is clear

It does. Those people have only themselves to blame. Switching to a system of more responsibility to protect them from themselves makes no sense.

But it doesn't explain why a flat tax is wrong.

The fact they allow it speaks volumes. Private schools aren't banned, the wages of CEOs aren't capped. This "class warfare" isn't any such thing - it's more like "occassional class whining that is of no consequence". You can't get any more bourgeoise than owning the media and if this was of any consequence the owners of the media would step in.

Well I said remnants of the old class warfare in the media, where even elements of the government still have these feelings.

Oh, I'm sorry, I feel so silly now. I didn't realise it was "the fact of the matter". If I'd know you'd unilaterally declared it so I would never have embarassed myself by venturing my own opinion. And you'll find the people who own the media in your country often own the media in my country.

Oh really, gee is there any other words of wisdom you want to point out to me? I would never have know that, thanks for letting me know that the same people who own the media in my country owns the media in your country. Fuck man you learn something everyday. :rolleyes:

But despite all that even papers owned by the same person presents the story in vastly different ways, I remember reading recently the same story one of these papers presented the story in a more negative light and was more align with the view of the union, the other paper presented the story in a more positive light almost praising the the initiative and presented the views from the principals association who supported the move. Two papers owned by the same person yet different views on the story, yes but I know I am wrong there is no such thing as a class struggle in Australian society and their are no remnants of that in the Australian media.

But it doesn't explain why a flat tax is wrong.

It doesn't disprove every single possible argument that can be ventured in support for the flat tax. But it does show your specfic argument about productivity to be worthless.

Oh really, gee is there any other words of wisdom you want to point out to me? I would never have know that, thanks for letting me know that the same people who own the media in my country owns the media in your country. Fuck man you learn something everyday. :rolleyes:

Yeah, I know, it's pretty obvious. So it's kind of odd you were insisting things were so different in your country.

But despite all that even papers owned by the same person presents the story in vastly different ways, I remember reading recently the same story one of these papers presented the story in a more negative light and was more align with the view of the union, the other paper presented the story in a more positive light almost praising the the initiative and presented the views from the principals association who supported the move. Two papers owned by the same person yet different views on the story, yes but I know I am wrong there is no such thing as a class struggle in Australian society and their are no remnants of that in the Australian media.

All it proves is that there was no real consequence to the owner of the papers by printing those views. It doesn't mean there can't be any difference. Extrapolating that Australia is subject to "class warfare" from a difference of opinion is a quite breathtaking demonstration of reasoning gone wrong.

I just accidentally inhaled a sip of water. Ack.
Yeah, I just saw that. Emancipation is the wrong word, what I actually meant was the period post-emancipation, pre-civil rights movement. I watched a documentary about gospel music a few days ago, and one of the things that struck me was how well these communities worked compared to many predominantly black neighbourhoods these days, despite greater poverty and a lot more injustice.

Which government?
Any government. Government is a concept that gets abused a lot by do-gooders with agendas, but what they say and claim shouldn't be confused with it.

You're imposing. your values of a particular set of property rights on others using guns to force others to comply with those particular property rights. There's no real difference at all.
Of course there is. If I sit here by myself and say "I don't want to post in this thread anymore", I'm not imposing anything on you. Yes, you won't be able to have this debate anymore and that may well annoy you a lot, or have even worse consequences, but that doesn't mean that by refusing to associate with you I am somehow presuming that my values should hold for you.

That's what property rights are: freedom of association, completely and without caveats.

You do need others for your property rights to hold. If only you existed property rights have no meaning because no other being with the potential to hold property exists. You also need others to comply with your rights.
If nobody else existed, then property rights wouldn't matter. That doesn't mean they wouldn't exist or wouldn't hold, it's just that there would be no need for them.

Your imposing transparency on entities that would provide the amount transparency that market would spontaneously create. You are enforcing the view that people should have access to this information and that these entities should deliver this information. That is far from value neutral.
Why not? I'm not telling anyone how they should live their lives, what their goals should be or how they should achieve them. I'm just providing a framework in which everyone can make these choices for themselves, and to the extent to which it is required to work, I impose rules. I don't think I prevent any particular choice or put any particular value above another doing this.

Property rights, those that are enforced, are created by a combination of governments and custom. There's also the fact that one's earnings in the workforce depend on those who pay for it. You have some control but not full control. By your logic no one is ever secure because these rights depend on whims of politicians. the population at large, consumers, and employers.
Exactly, and that's the problem many libertarians have with governments. To the extent to which the recognition of our choices, efforts and livelihoods has been made to depend upon the approval of professional populists, we are diminished as human beings.

Nonetheless, there are stages of this. I can still depend more securely on an income earned with a skill than on a welfare cheque provided by the current left-leaning government.

Welfare programs have reasons and cause.
It's just that they only exists in the heads of politicians, and can change from one day to the next. They're not real causes, they're not causes that can be objectively demonstrated. The only exception is voter approval, which is just as fickle as the people who chase it.

Elaborate. Low taxes and zero subsidies for those who raise children would result in drastically decreased birthrates since the direct costs and opportunity costs have drastically increased. This will lower the future supply of workers, consumers, and taxpayers in the economy leading to lower economic growth.
Well, are we aiming for an absolute level of aggregate economic activity, or do we want greater wealth per head? Do we suffer from some sort of massive surplus of young people who can't find jobs?

Your point? Most pay-as-you-go public pensions are determined by a formula so that what one paid in and what one receives bears some relationship. As you concede this people to save more than they would voluntarily. That the money is "yours" in irrelevant since "you" didn't choose to save it for your retirement. The safety net is part of comprehensive pension package.
How is it irrelevant? It's not redistribution from one person to another if it's my own money.

Germany still has a pension system in which young people pay into the scheme, and that money is used to pay the current pensions for old people. That's redistribution, and it sucks for everyone. There are so many old people that each one gets very little money, and that has little relation to how much they paid in originally anyways. The costs on young people's budgets are going up and up, and they know perfectly well that they can't count on receiving jack when they end up retiring.

Australia's system on the other hand doesn't have a separate pension scheme. Pensions for poor people or those who retired before the superannuation system are paid directly from the normal budget and normal tax revenue. Many of those will die, and hopes are that the other cohort will also become smaller as the superannuation market develops and improves. The rest is run basically separately from government, through the finance industry. As long as funds meet certain criteria and follow a given set of regulations (mainly with regards to risk, which I think seems a tad excessive, even today), they can function as superfunds and people can freely choose which one to give their money to.

That's not entirely fair, is it? What if you didn't create some wealth that didn't exist previously? What if you own a limited resource such as oil or diamonds?
Oil or diamonds aren't worth anything until someone does something to them. The difference between a patch of land underneith which there is some oil, and a functioning well is the wealth that one creates.

You're asking someone else to give up their claim to it. And they may not agree that they and the rest of their community don't have a right to it.
Well, first of all they need some claim on it. If it's a very primitive society, maybe they have no rules beyond "the gods gave it to us" or something. That's fine, and there is no problem with the idea of communal property rights. But if they can't turn the patch of land into a diamond mine or oil well, then there is no wealth there beyond some basic land valuation. And if that's the case and I know how to get the stuff off the ground, chances are we can find some price in which I buy the land and still make a killing.

The tricky question is of course that paying a price implies that there is some wealth there, even if it's just an option value. And if there is, and these people didn't create it and the land is just jungle, then why should I care that they're talking about their gods? Ultimately it's not the capitalist that claims something for no reason, because he or she is quite aware where his or her time goes and where the property right appears along the way.

And you say "whatever, I own these" and smile a little smile. They can't then go off and create some oil for themselves.
I don't own them until I create some value. The only question to be answered in this scenario is whether the original inhabitants have any property right despite not creating any.

Anyways, to get to the point: if I would have paid $10/hour, but minimum wages force me to pay $15/hour, then $5/hour are taken from me by threat of violence and given to someone I would not consider worthy of receiving that money if it had been my choice.

You are not forced to do anything, since you are not being forced to hire anyone. You could choose not have the job done, or to do it yourself.

Look, if you go to the supermarket, you will buy the can of baked beans that you want most.

This analogy doesn’t work. There is never a monopsonic situation between shopper and supermarkets, though there can be between supermarkets and manufacturers.

Do you now think that the government should step in and introduce laws to protect baked beans manufacturers from competition between each other in order to secure them some minimum price they should be getting? The principle is no different.

In some cases yes. Wherever a private monopsony or monopoly exists, then one party will usually need protection in order to maintain a stable relationship.

Because given the skills available to them, that's a use of their time that satisfies their preferences. The baked beans manufacturer might well want to just provide one kind of can and sell it for $100 a piece, but nobody would pay that much, and they're forced to sell it for less…

That you don’t see any difference between a corporate entity and a human being is somewhat disturbing.

"Effectively" is a pretty big 'if'. But the question isn't "can it", the question is "should it".

Short answer, yes.

Yes, mainly that with labour becoming cheaper, the quantity demanded also increases, reducing unemployment in the process.

Employers don’t hire workers for the fun of it. If there is no need for the labour, they won’t hire, however cheap it might be. If your model were accurate, then areas with lower labour costs would soon see booming recruitment. This is far from reality in the majority of situations. One example is Rhondda (http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/LeadAreaSearch.do?a=7&r=1&i=1001&m=0&s=1219925830546&enc=1&areaSearchText=rhondda&areaSearchType=13&extendedList=false&searchAreas=). In addition many third world countries with low labour costs have ongoing high unemployment.

Keep labour expensive however, and the initial shock that created high unemployment continues to work its magic because the market can't repair itself. And then you end up with French or German unemployment rates for a decade or more. The people lucky enough to have jobs are happy, the people who don't...well, they're probably in a minority vote-wise.

As you said before, there is no evidence that the minimum wage = high unemployment.

If they don't exist, it's for a reason. That reason can be questionable, like a government that kills them off, or not, like employees who simply don't see the need to start one, because they feel they've got the skills to compete based on merit.

Or because employers discriminate against them, another fairly common reason, particularly in the US and south east Asia. Honest businessmen are no less likely to resort to strong arm tactics than the government.

Indeed, given that not a single private entity determines very much at all, you have a better chance of improving your lot in a market than you do in a government bureaucracy.

That depends on both to what extreme you follow either system and what you regard as “improving your lot”.

Sometimes I do wonder whether you've actually read Mussolini or not...

Yes. I disagree with him on some major points.

None of which are convincing or objective. In effect, those are similar reasons to the ones people bring up against immigration: "it offends me"

I guess that depends on where ones personal values and loyalties lay. I would rather loose a CEO than see them in a house that makes Versailles look second rate. I put value on ethics and cultural vitality over profit. Enterprise is useful only in so much as it provides a source of revenue to further our cultural achievements. It is not an end in itself.

A government-run charity would work differently to a normal one. You tick the box on a tax return, next to which it says "Unemployment Benefit Program - 6%", and you pay 6% of your income to this particular program. As a result, if you become unemployed you are eligible to receive benefits during a period to be specified in the relevant legislation. If I earn $100, I pay $6, if I earn $1m, I pay $60,000. I'm still eligible to receive the same amount, so there's all the redistribution taken care of.

The redistributive aspect is of little concern to me. That some are rich and some are poor is merely the way of things. The net is there to ensure that everyone is able to survive and live a civilized life without recourse to criminal acts, nor tempted to rebel. I don’t see it’s function to make everyone “equal”.

The problem with what you propose is that with mandatory taxation, you can project with reasonable accuracy what revenue the treasury will receive. When people can opt in and out of the system at will, there is no way to predict. Also, more importantly, you get a “paradigm shift”, as they like to call it. Taxation becomes an optional “lifestyle accessory” like a “premium” bank account or frequent flier card rather than a set of legal obligations and responsibilities between the ruler and ruled.

In addition it undermines the principle that tax revenues aren’t personal investment funds, and it is not a right of the individual to dictate how they are spent.

And that's just a suggested way of doing it. I don't really care what people come up with, as long as membership isn't compulsory. If I feel I have the skills, self-esteem and conviction to find a job when I need one without relying on hand-outs, I should not have to pay into a program of such hand-outs.

I’m good and well trained with a weapon. I feel I can handle myself well on the street and can look after myself. I don’t need police protection, so why should I pay toward it?

I don’t drive. Why should I pay towards the maintenance of expressways?
I don’t think we should be in Iraq. Why should I pay for the war?
I’m a deep eco nut. Why should I pay for sanitation and rubbish collection when I compost everything?
Etc.

The whole thing pretty soon reaches the point of absurdity as if such a system were introduced no one would ever agree on what should and shouldn’t be mandatory.

If people take to crime, they'll be punished accordingly. I don't buy into the "I'm poor, therefore I'm allowed to mug you" philosophy.

I happen to agree completely. However, from the points of view of both justice and in maintaining order and balance, there should be some punishment for breaking the law, we should prevent such situations from occurring in the first place as far as possible. Protection nets play a major role in this in preventing disorder from occurring in the first place.

At any rate, if the program exists but people don't sign up for it, you'll simply have to get used to the idea that people don't care enough for others to spend significant amounts of money on them. And as offensive as that may then be to your beliefs, it doesn't give you the right to make them.

The right of the ruler to tax the ruled in order to run the nation is a core part of the so-called social contract and is applied in virtually all states that aren’t blessed with vast amounts of mineral wealth. It is not the case now, and rarely has been historically, that the ruler must allow the ruled to choose what the taxes are spent on.

Obedience to government includes the duties of keeping the laws, not undertaking anything contrary to them, performing what is ordered, abstaining from what is forbidden, shouldering public burdens, whether offices or taxes; and in general everyone is obliged not only not to contravene public order in any way, but to contribute to it positively according to his circumstances.

Quote:Your ideas too, would ultimately be expressed in violent terms.

They would, but I am under no illusions that this is the case. As a result, I seek to apply it evenly, not favouring anyone against anyone else, upholding negative rights rather than positive freedoms where possible.

I seek (or rather, prefer a system where the ruler seeks) to establish a system whereby the actual violence needed is minimised in the first place by keeping society as stable as possible, and focused on it’s path. That has to be won, it’s not the default state of things. As such a nation is ruled actively, not passively, and both the low and high levels of society need a “firm but fair” hand, a mix give and take or carrot and stick in order to be productive, content and loyal. Left alone they will drift slowly but surely into chaos, as we have seen throughout history from the earliest times to the present day.

Wait, don't I have the right to live where I was born?

Not if you are a criminal who cannot obey the law (i.e. pay any taxes owed)

At this point, the rights and responsibilities set out for governments are the most faint skeletons of constitutions around. A constitution should seek to limit as well as define government, but at present they are written so vaguely, or are so old, that questions like "is it right to steal from some to give to others" are not even addressed.

This is a situation which could easily be remedied, however, either through a constitution, or simply over time through the development of a vibrant cultural life that has a strong sense of it’s rights and responsibilities and the accumulation of individual laws, as has happened in the UK.

The problem is of course that governments can't really do anything about it either. If these things were predictable, the market would be able to do it

Only these things are predictable. It was obvious before the most recent collapse that the lending situation was unsustainable, yet the bankers adopted a head in the sand attitude, whilst governments in both the US and UK were also fully aware of the situation yet appear to be either incapable of effective action or so wrapped up in non-interventionist ideals that did little besides shifting round a few deckchairs. The warnings had been sounded loud and clear for a long time before the inevitable happened.

If you were well aware of what was going to happen, you should (in order for the market to work) have made a killing off it. As it was, you had no idea, along with most other people. If you want to know more, read the link in my signature called "Confessions of a Risk Manager".

It was splattered across all the papers that easy credit was out of control and that bad decisions were being made. As for making a killing, why would I do that? I’m not interested in making money. If I found finance interesting I’d take an Economics degree and work for HMRC.

That's what I'd support. The problem with banks is that they've got people's savings in them, and if those disappear, that sucks more than a bail-out.

Exactly.

So there aren't any cleaners, caterers et al in Hong Kong?

HK has a social housing system.

Yeah, and culture is subjective. If what they do is appreciated, they'll get rewarded for it. If people can actually take it or leave it, they won't.

Determining the worth of any aspect of culture by how much someone is willing to pay for it is pitiful. Using your logic would make Big Brother one of the greatest cultural achievements of the modern era. You might as well put the crown jewels on Ebay and be done with it.

So do you propose a special department of, ideally plain-clothed, policemen to patrol the city, walk into houses and apartments and check whether the people who live there are actually the owners?

Well I guess that’s one possibility, though I was thinking more in the velvet glove realm of tax penalties for re-selling of real estate within in a certain time after the initial purchase.

How come you get to decide what's meaningful and I don't?

If you mean within the realm of arts and culture, I don’t. The term meaningful is used only to mean an actual contribution (I.e. anyone who works in the cultural fields). Whether or not they are any good is for the literati to determine.

That's not what's happening in London, and it's not what I'm proposing. If the developer wants a poor person's house, they'll have to pay as much as the poor person wants to sell it for. And ideally, that leaves the poor person a newly rich person.

China is merely speculation taken to a new level (in every possible way). Speculation has led to numerous problems in the west too, particularly alienation, coercive buying practices, legal intimidation and planning laws that allow areas to be carved up in the first place.

Public housing estates...haven't you been running that particular experiment for some time in Britain?

As does Singapore. HDB designed estates are regarded as model of urban housing design world wide. Simply because the government provides the housing doesn’t inherently make it bad. The UK has also managed to turn around some of the estates that were deliberately run into the ground in the 80’s.

Quote:Definitely. If you can't afford to live in your country of birth, you should leave.
I sense sarcasm here, but I don't understand why.

I find the idea that only rich people are allowed to belong to your nation rather amusing. Did it ever occur to you what would happen to the social pyramid if you decided to remove the lower layers. You get a truly horrible mess. They are there for a reason. They ensure everything above stays in place, and provide the labour that makes public and private undertakings feasible. You may not like them living near you and they may not be pretty, but they are necessary, and as citizens of the nation, are as much a valid part of it as you.

Again, how come they get to be owners of my property and livelihood, but I don't? What gives them the right to present me with a "take it or leave it"?

What gives you the right to benefit from their works, yet contribute nothing toward them? What gives you the right to stand in the middle of a nation that others have built and claim to be an island?

Yeah, I know, it's pretty obvious. So it's kind of odd you were insisting things were so different in your country.

You said that there was no elements of class warfare in the media because there isn't in your country's media outlets, despite the fact that some are owned by the same people, you said that there was no elements of it, I said there is elements of the old class warfare in my country so yes things are different in my country if there is no elements of it in your country.

All it proves is that there was no real consequence to the owner of the papers by printing those views. It doesn't mean there can't be any difference. Extrapolating that Australia is subject to "class warfare" from a difference of opinion is a quite breathtaking demonstration of reasoning gone wrong.

I never said there was a real consequence, and I never said there was all out class warfare in Australia, I said there were elements of it in Australian society even if it is just bitching and the media helps to fuel these thoughts that is all I claimed.

"Socialism means social justice and equality, but equality of rights, of opportunities, not of income," the 77-year-old president said in a speech that was taped and later aired on national television. "Equality is not egalitarianism.
- President of the Council of State and President of the Council of Ministers General Raul Castro, Republica de Cuba

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-07-11-castro-address_N.htm

Of course there is. If I sit here by myself and say "I don't want to post in this thread anymore", I'm not imposing anything on you. Yes, you won't be able to have this debate anymore and that may well annoy you a lot, or have even worse consequences, but that doesn't mean that by refusing to associate with you I am somehow presuming that my values should hold for you.

That's what property rights are: freedom of association, completely and without caveats.

Incorrect. The freedom to associate depends on property rights, not the other way around. Within the boundaries of the given property rights regime one can do what wishes with one's property.


If nobody else existed, then property rights wouldn't matter. That doesn't mean they wouldn't exist or wouldn't hold, it's just that there would be no need for them.

This is pretty abstract metaphysical grounds we're arguing, but I would say the existence of property rights proceeds from the existence of conscious beings.


Why not? I'm not telling anyone how they should live their lives, what their goals should be or how they should achieve them. I'm just providing a framework in which everyone can make these choices for themselves, and to the extent to which it is required to work, I impose rules. I don't think I prevent any particular choice or put any particular value above another doing this.

Because you do tell people how to live: You force commercial business owners/entities to be more transparent than they would otherwise be(its possible they'd be as transparent but your taking the option to be less away), with bankruptcy laws and limited liability corporations you reduce the risk people can take, with inalienable self-ownership you take away the ability of hardcore BDSMers to form slave contracts and the ability of people to sell themselves to pay off debt(possibly through being killed and then having one's organs harvested for the human organ market), with legal tender laws(without which fiat currency central banking is impossible) people can't refuse not to use the national currency, ect. This is apart from the obvious inability of people not to be rapists, murders, thieves and such.

Exactly, and that's the problem many libertarians have with governments. To the extent to which the recognition of our choices, efforts and livelihoods has been made to depend upon the approval of professional populists, we are diminished as human beings.

So libertarians have problems with human existence itself? Property rights don't just rest on whims of politicians they whims of fellow human beings.

It's just that they only exists in the heads of politicians, and can change from one day to the next. They're not real causes, they're not causes that can be objectively demonstrated. The only exception is voter approval, which is just as fickle as the people who chase it.

The same could be said for every property right or public policy ever. People disagree on what should be rights and what shouldn't and even if they agree on the same rights the reasons often differ. Natural rights are scientifically verifiable. Social sciences can't make predictions within their fields nearly as accurately as the hard sciences. Logical arguments rely on the existence of nondemonstratable axioms/premises.

Well, are we aiming for an absolute level of aggregate economic activity, or do we want greater wealth per head? Do we suffer from some sort of massive surplus of young people who can't find jobs?

With the first more the latter with a look at the long-term. After all, if no more children are born the costs, direct and opportunity, don't have to be paid leading to more wealth in the short term. Of course as time goes on the economy shrinks as new workers, entrepeneurs, and consumers aren't born. As to the latter, we don't seem to be.

How is it irrelevant? It's not redistribution from one person to another if it's my own money.

Germany still has a pension system in which young people pay into the scheme, and that money is used to pay the current pensions for old people. That's redistribution, and it sucks for everyone. There are so many old people that each one gets very little money, and that has little relation to how much they paid in originally anyways. The costs on young people's budgets are going up and up, and they know perfectly well that they can't count on receiving jack when they end up retiring.

Australia's system on the other hand doesn't have a separate pension scheme. Pensions for poor people or those who retired before the superannuation system are paid directly from the normal budget and normal tax revenue. Many of those will die, and hopes are that the other cohort will also become smaller as the superannuation market develops and improves. The rest is run basically separately from government, through the finance industry. As long as funds meet certain criteria and follow a given set of regulations (mainly with regards to risk, which I think seems a tad excessive, even today), they can function as superfunds and people can freely choose which one to give their money to.

Whether a pension system is resdistributory is irrelevant to whether or not is a "public". Had there been more births and less of an increase of average longevity in Germany the system would not have the redistributory effects it has. Also, I find a system of mandatory savings invested in superfunds combined subsidies for the poor to be similar to the healthcare systems such as France. Germany, or Switzerland where some level of health insurance is mandatory and where the poor are subsidized. The insurance is publically regulated, privately run, and mandatory.

I've just realised something: if someone took me, and made a negative mirror image of me, it'd be you. On pretty much every position that matters, we're going to be on opposite sides. Anything that matters to me is irrelevant to you, and vice versa. Even Andaras had the, albeit tenuous, link to the ultimate marxist goal of a utopian world, but you have nothing but order, the nation and obedience for all eternity. It's not even like you really see individual rights or freedom as values in and for themselves, it's not like you defend minimum wage earners because you really see their position as humans diminished...you support them because it helps the stability of the nation.

So let's see where we can get here and in the future, given that we may not even be speaking quite the same language here...:tongue:

You are not forced to do anything, since you are not being forced to hire anyone. You could choose not have the job done, or to do it yourself.
And if I was gay and it was illegal, I could also choose simply not to be around other gay people and instead do whatever gay things one does to myself. That's not a valid cop-out - the thing I want to do is have a relationship, whether romantic or commercial, with another person, and the government violently steps in and dictates the terms of this relationship to us. That's the thing I'm finding disagreeable with here, and the option of simply not having the relationship at all is not a justification.

This analogy doesn’t work. There is never a monopsonic situation between shopper and supermarkets, though there can be between supermarkets and manufacturers.
There is no monopsonic relationship between buyers and sellers of labour either. Not only have people in general more than one skill that can be used to earn money, but there also exist more than one employee in any given locale. Furthermore, people have the ability to change locations if required, which further broadens the array of potential employers.

If people don't have skills that separate them from the rest, they're very much in the same position as the baked beans maker: their product is bland and can be replaced by many others like it. And as such, the price is dictated more by the buyer than the seller, as a clear reflection of the preferences and available resources in the economy. Bentley can charge higher prices for their cars than Toyota for the same reason that an investment banker can charge higher prices for her labour than a assembly line worker - a more unique product that has attributes that make it difficult to replace and valuable to the person who buys it.

A baked beans maker doesn't have to be in a monopsonistic market to be a price taker. If there are no attributes that distinguish its product from that of another firm, it will not be able to charge any more than the price for a generic can of baked beans, as determined by the behaviour of the numerous buyers.

In some cases yes. Wherever a private monopsony or monopoly exists, then one party will usually need protection in order to maintain a stable relationship.
You will find that such cases are extremely rare, and that there do exist agencies that do nothing but look for these. Minimum wages are however an area that is extremely far removed from this, and has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Not even the proponents of minimum wage laws seriously argue that it's got anything to do with the market being uncompetitive.

That you don’t see any difference between a corporate entity and a human being is somewhat disturbing.
A corporate entity is nothing but a nexus of contracts between human beings. What hurts a corporation hurts human beings, and what helps it, helps them. That's what annoys me about the types who go on about "corporations" as though we're supposed to associate something negative with the word.

Short answer, yes.
And that's an utterly unconvincing one. Of course, I now also realise that from your position it matters not one iota whether or not I am actually convinced, since my thoughts or opinions don't matter to you, and using force to ignore them is not something that bothers you on an ethical level.

Employers don’t hire workers for the fun of it. If there is no need for the labour, they won’t hire, however cheap it might be.
That's true. But employers ultimately produce stuff, and they have to decide on a mix of capital and labour in order to do it. It may be that capital is extremely efficient and cheap to use, and labour simply isn't very attractive. Then its price would have to fall a lot to make it competitive compared to using machinery. That would still happen if there were no interferences, but there might be some quite extreme events in the adjustment period.

More problematic is if employers don't want to employ because they don't want to produce stuff. If funding costs are high, they have loans to pay back or they simply don't think they'll be able to sell any extra output, then the relative prices of capital and labour don't matter as much, and both would have to fall a lot to make them decide to expand capacity, or use existing capacity more fully.

But those are usually temporary, or very extreme circumstances, and if they occur, minimum wages are certainly not the way to fix them. And more importantly for the point you were making, it also doesn't make for a monopsony.

If your model were accurate, then areas with lower labour costs would soon see booming recruitment. This is far from reality in the majority of situations.
These things are ceteris paribus, of course. There are outside factors: just because labour is cheap in Zimbabwe doesn't mean I want to build a factory there. There is no doubt labour costs are an important part in the decision on whether or not to start a project that provides jobs, but it's not the only one.

In addition many third world countries with low labour costs have ongoing high unemployment.
That's because they have no formal economies, the reason being that property rights are ignored.

By the way, I didn't really find the figures that support your point about Rhondda. 6% unemployment isn't that bad, in the grand scheme of things.

As you said before, there is no evidence that the minimum wage = high unemployment.
That's not what I said. I said that the link is difficult to show, statistically, because there are so many outside influences that are very hard to isolate. Ultimately the theoretical models, which work well in a huge variety of other situations, make a pretty solid case.

But I'm not about to base a big argument on this, as it's ultimately a technical point. If you can provide a decent counter, feel free though.

I know quite a bit about the German case, as I've watched a prolonged period of malaise that was ended (for the time being, anyways) with a comprehensive set of labour market reforms that involved cutting safety nets, forcing people off welfare and strong pressure on the aforementioned labour cartels to keep their wage demands in check. As a result, real wages largely stagnated compared to other European countries, but with unemployment also having fallen quite drastically at the same time. As I said, with a limited amount of economic surplus to be distributed in the form of wages at any one point in time, it seems to be a question of more people at the same or lower wages, or fewer people at higher wages.

Or because employers discriminate against them, another fairly common reason, particularly in the US and south east Asia. Honest businessmen are no less likely to resort to strong arm tactics than the government.
Well, how can they do that? They can either use it using laws against trade unionism, or by actually getting physical themselves. Both happens, and both are ultimately violations of individual freedom - even though conceptually I'm still somewhat torn on the former, since we seem to accept laws against price-fixing producer cartels readily for their economic merits, but don't do the same for laws against price-fixing labour cartels.

At any rate, I strongly oppose strong arm tactics if they involve physical violence or the threat thereof, or otherwise pressuring people into relationships by using means that go outside the relevant commercial arena.

That depends on both to what extreme you follow either system and what you regard as “improving your lot”.
Well, if my living standards are determined by a government, whether directly or by using the law to proscribe the conditions a business must offer me, then there is one power that I cannot escape and that I depend upon completely. If there are more than one employer, and I can leave one to go to the other, then that gives me a much better chance to influence my living standards, since I have some degree of negotiating power.

Yes. I disagree with him on some major points.
Still, you'd have to agree that the quote in question could have come straight from him. I think you're the most clear illustration of any underlying link between socialism (the statist kind, anyways) and fascism I've met as of yet.

I guess that depends on where ones personal values and loyalties lay.
Exactly, and that's the problem. If you're going to use something as objective and final as a law backed up by physical violence, then I'd like to see the reasoning behind it being similarly objective and definite. I don't want personal values or loyalties to come within fifty paces of a code of laws. One of the biggest achievements of philosophy has been the dismissal of people who would say "I am the state", and such the division between the whims of one person and the machinery of violence that is the government. I simply want this to continue going forward to its ultimate conclusion.

I would rather loose a CEO than see them in a house that makes Versailles look second rate. I put value on ethics and cultural vitality over profit. Enterprise is useful only in so much as it provides a source of revenue to further our cultural achievements. It is not an end in itself.
Versailles wasn't build for culture, it was build by a very, very rich man who wanted to show off. There is no difference between Versailles or Paddington Station: both are great reflections of their times, grand achievements of architecture and engineering and build in no small part to satisfy the hubris of the men with the deep pockets. Who happened to have earned his money by providing other people with value rather than by threatening them with death is of little importance to this.

The problem with what you propose is that with mandatory taxation, you can project with reasonable accuracy what revenue the treasury will receive. When people can opt in and out of the system at will, there is no way to predict.
That depends. If this is really a big enough problem to risk the program running properly, I certainly don't see an issue with making the signing up last a minimum period.

Also, more importantly, you get a “paradigm shift”, as they like to call it. Taxation becomes an optional “lifestyle accessory” like a “premium” bank account or frequent flier card rather than a set of legal obligations and responsibilities between the ruler and ruled.
And what would be wrong with that? That is precisely what I want the government to be: a special type of counterparty with certain abilities to do things other counterparties can't do. Nothing more than that, nothing more important than that.

In addition it undermines the principle that tax revenues aren’t personal investment funds, and it is not a right of the individual to dictate how they are spent.
And how much better the world would be if we could get rid of that principle!

I’m good and well trained with a weapon. I feel I can handle myself well on the street and can look after myself. I don’t need police protection, so why should I pay toward it? [...] I don’t drive. Why should I pay towards the maintenance of expressways? [...] I’m a deep eco nut. Why should I pay for sanitation and rubbish collection when I compost everything?
There are some parts of government expenses that people are very difficult to exclude from. There is a clear case for them to exist, and if a government was to exist at all, these are the things it would have to be doing. And those things would be handled by a basic flat tax rate, simply because it is not technically feasible to charge people for them any more fairly.

Anything above that, especially anything involving redistribution, goes to my voluntary scheme.

I don’t think we should be in Iraq. Why should I pay for the war?
You shouldn't. The Venetian Republic had a good system regarding war: if the Doge started one and was judged to be losing it, not only would he be put to death, but also all the councillors who voted for it.

Bring that back and be in awe at how peaceful the world would become.

The whole thing pretty soon reaches the point of absurdity as if such a system were introduced no one would ever agree on what should and shouldn’t be mandatory.
There is only one time at which the mandatory things would be decided, and that would be the writing of the constitution. As I said, there are some extremely basic things that are by their nature different from other current functions of government. Those would be mandatory, the rest not.

Protection nets play a major role in this in preventing disorder from occurring in the first place.
And even if they did, that means you can try and convince me that it is in my interest to pay for such a safety net. If you fail, I'll have to deal with the consequences, as will you. But even if I were wrong, that wouldn't suspend my basic rights as a human being, including being able to hold an opinion and act according to it, including the use of my property (itself just an extension of my wits, time and effort).

The right of the ruler to tax the ruled in order to run the nation is a core part of the so-called social contract and is applied in virtually all states that aren’t blessed with vast amounts of mineral wealth.
The social contract bears no resemblance whatsoever to a contract. And if you're going to talk about Hobbes, if you ask me he was desperately trying to preserve a perverse system against a new train of thought that actually valued human beings and their cognitive faculties.

At any rate, a contract requires parties freely choosing to agree to it, without coercion and with the realistic option of not agreeing to it. I have never in my life agreed to a rule that said "if you don't give us an amount of money to be specified by us at will, you will be going to jail", just as I never agreed to the bully taking my lunch money by virtue of having been in the same school as him.

Contractarianism has its merits, but in small, egalitarian communities. In anarchist communes. Contractarianism is actually a central tenet of what I'd call an ideal world. But that just makes it worse when people start talking about what's going on right now as though it had anything to do with it.

It is not the case now, and rarely has been historically, that the ruler must allow the ruled to choose what the taxes are spent on.
If anything, that's more of a reason to do it. You know, tyranny and absolutism gave way to parliamentary systems and eventually universal suffrage. What I'm proposing is simply the next logical step.

Left alone they will drift slowly but surely into chaos, as we have seen throughout history from the earliest times to the present day.
If those are the options, I will take chaos without a second thought.

And you do know who Jean Domat wrote for, right?

Not if you are a criminal who cannot obey the law (i.e. pay any taxes owed)
Says who? What gives that guy the right? I was born here just as much as he was, I am no less a descendent of my ancestors than he is. The only difference between us is that he's got thousands of armed men and women at his disposal, and I don't.

This is a situation which could easily be remedied, however, either through a constitution, or simply over time through the development of a vibrant cultural life that has a strong sense of it’s rights and responsibilities and the accumulation of individual laws, as has happened in the UK.
The latter isn't strong enough, it doesn't send the message that a government is not a toy. It's gotta be the former, but you can be pretty sure that a constitution that properly defines the government as what it is and should be wouldn't be what you have in mind.

Only these things are predictable.
Then why didn't anyone? It's not good enough to say "there's going to be a crisis" - the bankers had the relevant scenarios in place. Hell, they had the scenarios for a subprime meltdown in place. The thing they didn't count on was the panic spreading into highly rated, investment-grade securities, which they had planned to use as a source of liquidity if necessary.

If this was predictable, then I don't know why people didn't. There were a few punts made in the right direction previously, and those people received their bonuses accordingly, you can rest assured. But that's as far as that ever goes.

It was obvious before the most recent collapse that the lending situation was unsustainable, yet the bankers adopted a head in the sand attitude, whilst governments in both the US and UK were also fully aware of the situation yet appear to be either incapable of effective action or so wrapped up in non-interventionist ideals that did little besides shifting round a few deckchairs. The warnings had been sounded loud and clear for a long time before the inevitable happened.
Not wanting to sound rude here, but you have no idea what actually happened, do you.

It was splattered across all the papers that easy credit was out of control and that bad decisions were being made. As for making a killing, why would I do that? I’m not interested in making money. If I found finance interesting I’d take an Economics degree and work for HMRC.
If you can find me that paper, I'd me much obliged if you could find it for me. I might have to get a prescription.

At any rate, earning lots of money on a sure thing like betting on an easily predictable financial crisis surely isn't a bad thing, even if economics isn't your thing, right? Plus, if everyone knows but no one puts their money where their brains are, then the market won't work.

HK has a social housing system.
That's rather unfortunate (and not just for their poor taxpayers), because it doesn't prove anything either way. Now I can sit here and say "there'd be cleaners anyways", and you can say "no, there wouldn't" and we'd be none the wiser.

Do you have any alternative examples we could draw on?

Determining the worth of any aspect of culture by how much someone is willing to pay for it is pitiful. Using your logic would make Big Brother one of the greatest cultural achievements of the modern era.
And unfortunately, it is. We can bitch and moan about modern culture, but fact of the matter is that for a great many people, that sort of thing is the embodiment of precisely the values, shared stories and artifacts that make up culture.

If it makes it any easier, I'm sure we're not the first ones to shake our heads at such things. Throughout history there've been plenty of people who rather doubted the value of whatever cultural advances or innovations were being made at the time.

You might as well put the crown jewels on Ebay and be done with it.
You don't know me well enough just yet for you to say that. :tongue: Auctioning them off is precisely what I think they should do. They cost taxpayers a fortune in maintenance and security, providing no value whatsoever that a private owner couldn't also provide with them.

Well I guess that’s one possibility, though I was thinking more in the velvet glove realm of tax penalties for re-selling of real estate within in a certain time after the initial purchase.
You'd be missing the mark though, since the time of holding and the intention of holding have no connection. I can buy something to live in it for six months if that happens to be cheaper or easier than renting, and I can hold an investment property for 40 years before selling it.

No, I think secret police checking in people's apartments is the way to go.

If you mean within the realm of arts and culture, I don’t. The term meaningful is used only to mean an actual contribution (I.e. anyone who works in the cultural fields). Whether or not they are any good is for the literati to determine.
Why them? They're no better than you or me at telling whether something is pretty, fun or worth spending one's time or money on. If I let the literati determine what is and isn't a good movie to watch, first of all I'd never actually go because they all disagree with each other, and secondly I'd end up not having a very good time because what they like and what I like doesn't have anything to do with each other.

China is merely speculation taken to a new level (in every possible way).
That's patently false, and you know it. No property rights is not simply a logical extention of property rights, and that's quite obvious.

Speculation has led to numerous problems in the west too, particularly alienation, coercive buying practices, legal intimidation and planning laws that allow areas to be carved up in the first place.
What are all these things? Before we can talk about them, you have to define them - and more importantly, show how they can be reconciled with a free market in the first place.

As does Singapore. HDB designed estates are regarded as model of urban housing design world wide.
Let's hope not, the things are basically experimental labs for the control freaks in the Singaporean government.

Simply because the government provides the housing doesn’t inherently make it bad. The UK has also managed to turn around some of the estates that were deliberately run into the ground in the 80’s.
If it's for poor people, it's necessarily not as good as accomodation for people who could afford to live in their own places. You're not getting rid of social stratification by piling all the people of one group into the same concrete block and shutting the doors.

I find the idea that only rich people are allowed to belong to your nation rather amusing. Did it ever occur to you what would happen to the social pyramid if you decided to remove the lower layers.
As you can imagine, I'm not a big fan of social pyramids. I'd like to think that if I remove the lower layers, we can dump the whole idiotic notion and start thinking of people as people rather than parts of a geometric shape.

They ensure everything above stays in place, and provide the labour that makes public and private undertakings feasible. You may not like them living near you and they may not be pretty, but they are necessary, and as citizens of the nation, are as much a valid part of it as you.
I don't think of "them", I think of the people I deal with. I've spent enough time with truly poor people (and that's what 40-year old people supporting families on $30k a year working for a pizza chain are) to know that for all the stupid decisions they may have made (or were never given the opportunity to make because their parents made them for them) are people just like you and me. And that's how I treat them: just as everyone else, based on their merit. I pay people what I think their value is worth, and I expect them to do me the same favour. And what they go and spend their money on, and indeed whether they can afford a house somewhere is ultimately not really my business. I know a few people that I would give quite a lot of money to once I am able to do so, simply because I value them and their goals so highly when no one else does - but that would never ever make me want to justify taking other people's money to do this.

What gives you the right to benefit from their works, yet contribute nothing toward them? What gives you the right to stand in the middle of a nation that others have built and claim to be an island?
I'd happily contribute and pay for what I use. For privately provided services, I already do so by default. For government provided services, I'd do it too.

But we both know that wouldn't satisfy you. So there we go: I never signed a social contract, I don't believe I've been given the choice, and I therefore don't think it exists as valid. That doesn't mean I have to change my physical location even a single centimeter. Just because that bully declared the playground to be his doesn't mean it's true and doesn't mean I consent to a beating if I step foot in it. If the government wants to come and talk to me, and convince me that the things it wants to spend my money on are good, or that I can't avoid using them even if I tried and therefore should pay some reasonable compensation to contribute, they're welcome to do so. But as a human being, I don't do beatings, and I don't respond to them.

Oil or diamonds aren't worth anything until someone does something to them. The difference between a patch of land underneith which there is some oil, and a functioning well is the wealth that one creates.


Well, first of all they need some claim on it. If it's a very primitive society, maybe they have no rules beyond "the gods gave it to us" or something. That's fine, and there is no problem with the idea of communal property rights. But if they can't turn the patch of land into a diamond mine or oil well, then there is no wealth there beyond some basic land valuation. And if that's the case and I know how to get the stuff off the ground, chances are we can find some price in which I buy the land and still make a killing.

The tricky question is of course that paying a price implies that there is some wealth there, even if it's just an option value. And if there is, and these people didn't create it and the land is just jungle, then why should I care that they're talking about their gods? Ultimately it's not the capitalist that claims something for no reason, because he or she is quite aware where his or her time goes and where the property right appears along the way.


I don't own them until I create some value. The only question to be answered in this scenario is whether the original inhabitants have any property right despite not creating any.

The validity of these claims aside, they are values and you are imposing them. You're asking if they have any property right but by asking that question you are imposing your ideas about property values on another party.

Incorrect. The freedom to associate depends on property rights, not the other way around. Within the boundaries of the given property rights regime one can do what wishes with one's property.
That's worth another thread.

Because you do tell people how to live: You force commercial business owners/entities to be more transparent than they would otherwise be (its possible they'd be as transparent but your taking the option to be less away), with bankruptcy laws and limited liability corporations you reduce the risk people can take, with inalienable self-ownership you take away the ability of hardcore BDSMers to form slave contracts and the ability of people to sell themselves to pay off debt(possibly through being killed and then having one's organs harvested for the human organ market), with legal tender laws(without which fiat currency central banking is impossible) people can't refuse not to use the national currency, ect.
Firstly, I don't support inalienable self-ownership, if I own something I should be able to sell it or give it away.

Secondly, there's the possibility that a few of these wouldn't have to be backed up by force, since they'd simply be easier than the alternative.

At any rate though, think of these measures as traffic lights: they serve to coordinate traffic. It's fairly obvious that if this didn't happen, people would get hurt and we'd constantly end up in traffic jams. They're purely technical tools - just because it's red for one side doesn't mean that I impose a value system on them and force them to stop. I don't make a judgement on the place they're driving or the way they're getting there.

There are those people who take the easy route here and simply say that even without traffic lights there would be no crashes and everything would be fine, or that even if there were, traffic lights are wrong a priori. As you know, I don't hold either position. The one that is tricky here is the one about transparency and information sharing. But in practice, I'm not sure it really is: if a business would be put at a disadvantage by disclosing relevant information (that being primarily the prices and characteristics of their products, their solvency and ability to complete contracts and so on), it could choose not to do so. Counterparties should be able to deduce what they need to know from this, and if it turns out that a company signed a dud contract without allowing due diligence to be taken care of, that contract would be null and void and compensation could be paid. The legal system can take care of that.

I think my initial motivation for the inclusion of this information distribution clause was the Lemon Problem. An easily accessible database that lists products, characteristics and prices would be a potential solution to it - the question is whether a legal requirement for it to be set up is necessary. I'd like to think that the answer is 'no' in most markets.

Either way, I'm not doing this to impose values of any sort on anyone. I seek to introduce coordinating measures that allow everyone to act according to their own values.

This is apart from the obvious inability of people not to be rapists, murders, thieves and such.
That's just because the right of one person ends with the rights of another. Negative rights are neat like that, because they never overlap and never require having to decide between people.

So libertarians have problems with human existence itself? Property rights don't just rest on whims of politicians they whims of fellow human beings.
Libertarians are no less angry if other private people come and infringe on their property rights. They just have a better chance to respond - against the government on the other hand they're completely powerless. And then being told that they really agreed to it by virtue of having been born within that government's jurisdiction serves no cause but to annoy them.

The same could be said for every property right or public policy ever. People disagree on what should be rights and what shouldn't and even if they agree on the same rights the reasons often differ.
Yeah, but as is so often said on these pages, that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not these rights exist and what they are.

Natural rights are scientifically verifiable. Social sciences can't make predictions within their fields nearly as accurately as the hard sciences. Logical arguments rely on the existence of nondemonstratable axioms/premises.
Axioms are nondemonstratable, but also non-refutable. They can't possibly be incorrect, since even in stating them you already must presume them correct. A is A, to quote a certain someone. So we can take them to be given.

It's interesting that you say natural rights can be scientifically verified. Just to make sure we're on the same page, what exactly did you have in mind here?

With the first more the latter with a look at the long-term. After all, if no more children are born the costs, direct and opportunity, don't have to be paid leading to more wealth in the short term. Of course as time goes on the economy shrinks as new workers, entrepeneurs, and consumers aren't born. As to the latter, we don't seem to be.
And already we have the government making a decision about long- vs short term wealth.

Whether a pension system is resdistributory is irrelevant to whether or not is a "public". Had there been more births and less of an increase of average longevity in Germany the system would not have the redistributory effects it has.
Hmm, a misunderstanding of terms here? Maybe it's the way "public" is generally used whenever people want to hurt me.

Anyways, IIRC, the initial point was about how public programs destroy one's self by demoting one to a spectator and recipient of causeless and unpredictable gifts. The question is "does the Australian superannuation do this?" and the answer is "no, since the money is never anyone's but mine and is contractually guaranteed to be paid back to me in full and with interest." One is not a spectator to this, since one directly influences how much money there is, and one doesn't receive gifts or is in any way dependent upon government approval since the money is merely managed, not given away. There is still an element of being diminished in that one is not allowed to decide to operate outside the system, and that's the thing I find questionable about it. But as a whole, the question is: does the amount of money receive depend upon the decision of a politician?

If the answer is yes, there is a problem.

Also, I find a system of mandatory savings invested in superfunds combined subsidies for the poor to be similar to the healthcare systems such as France. Germany, or Switzerland where some level of health insurance is mandatory and where the poor are subsidized. The insurance is publically regulated, privately run, and mandatory.
I can't talk about France or Switzerland, but it is similar to the German system. And the thing most broken about that system is that its costs are blowing out and that the hospitals are, virtually without exception, crap, since they're operated on a not-for-profit basis. If having to keep insurance premia unrealistically low for poor people was somehow cheaper, and the hospitals would be privatised, it would probably work.

The validity of these claims aside, they are values and you are imposing them. You're asking if they have any property right but by asking that question you are imposing your ideas about property values on another party.
How so? There is only one definition of a property right: the right to own, that is exclusively use or sell, an item, piece of land or idea. Having such a right depends upon creating some wealth in relation to this property, by creating it or modifying it in such a way as to make it worth more than it was previously.

If you're asking about the "worth" part, that's best measured by a market. If people are prepared to pay more after I applied myself to it, I created some extra value. It ultimately doesn't matter whether it is because of the oil, or some other reason.

The question is whether the natives created the thing that provides value to them: the idea that the gods gave it to them. Granted, realistically they came up with the idea that these gods exist in the first place, but that's not really something that I as the demand side value. By the same token, that I may have found lots of oil there doesn't tickle their fancy. But money can make them happy by buying them other stuff, and so they don't have to care why I value a piece of jungle, they just have to decide whether the money I offer is worth more to them than the value they place on that piece. Neither of us is required to share the values of the other in any way whatsoever - as long as we find some medium of exchange and some amount of it that we're both happy with, that's enough.

I may be completely missing the point you're making though.

Firstly, I don't support inalienable self-ownership, if I own something I should be able to sell it or give it away.

Really? That time when I described the situation where person a buys all the land surrounding person b and will only let person b out if he sells himself you didn't find that legitimate even though person A violates none of person B's negative rights but you found the contract to be illigetimate, Has this changed?

Secondly, there's the possibility that a few of these wouldn't have to be backed up by force, since they'd simply be easier than the alternative.

Which ones and explain how they would be work without being backed up by force and if they don't need to be backed up by force why are they government regulations?

At any rate though, think of these measures as traffic lights: they serve to coordinate traffic. It's fairly obvious that if this didn't happen, people would get hurt and we'd constantly end up in traffic jams. They're purely technical tools - just because it's red for one side doesn't mean that I impose a value system on them and force them to stop. I don't make a judgement on the place they're driving or the way they're getting there.

There are those people who take the easy route here and simply say that even without traffic lights there would be no crashes and everything would be fine, or that even if there were, traffic lights are wrong a priori. As you know, I don't hold either position. The one that is tricky here is the one about transparency and information sharing. But in practice, I'm not sure it really is: if a business would be put at a disadvantage by disclosing relevant information (that being primarily the prices and characteristics of their products, their solvency and ability to complete contracts and so on), it could choose not to do so. Counterparties should be able to deduce what they need to know from this, and if it turns out that a company signed a dud contract without allowing due diligence to be taken care of, that contract would be null and void and compensation could be paid. The legal system can take care of that.

I think my initial motivation for the inclusion of this information distribution clause was the Lemon Problem. An easily accessible database that lists products, characteristics and prices would be a potential solution to it - the question is whether a legal requirement for it to be set up is necessary. I'd like to think that the answer is 'no' in most markets.

Either way, I'm not doing this to impose values of any sort on anyone. I seek to introduce coordinating measures that allow everyone to act according to their own values.

Rules are restraints. Restraints have reasons on why they exist. The reasons are value judgments. So here you force people to go about their lives with greater efficiency than they would otherwise. I don't think this is a bad thing but they are value judgments.

That's just because the right of one person ends with the rights of another. Negative rights are neat like that, because they never overlap and never require having to decide between people.

You don't seem to realize that negative rights depend on values for their rationale.

Libertarians are no less angry if other private people come and infringe on their property rights. They just have a better chance to respond - against the government on the other hand they're completely powerless. And then being told that they really agreed to it by virtue of having been born within that government's jurisdiction serves no cause but to annoy them.

They are relatively powerless to inflict their property rights regimes on society at large. This happens in anarchocapitalist land and minarchist country. With a large number of people one is going to come disagreements of property rights. Some might be ok with compromises with of what they think is right but most will be cowed because these illegitimate property rights are backed up by force and they'rerelativelyu powerless to change things.

Yeah, but as is so often said on these pages, that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not these rights exist and what they are.

Agreed.

Axioms are nondemonstratable, but also non-refutable. They can't possibly be incorrect, since even in stating them you already must presume them correct. A is A, to quote a certain someone. So we can take them to be given.

They are incapable of being refuted but one can come up with contradictory axioms that are also non-refutable in different logic systems.

There is the widely used classical logic which includes:

1. Law of the excluded middle and Double negative elimination;
2. Law of noncontradiction;
3. Monotonicity of entailment and Idempotency of entailment;
4. Commutativity of conjunction;
5. De Morgan duality: every logical operator is dual to another.

And nonclassical logic systems which reject one or more of the above properties:

* Computability logic is a semantically constructed formal theory of computability, as opposed to classical logic, which is a formal theory of truth; integrates and extends classical, linear and intuitionistic logics.
* Fuzzy logic rejects the law of the excluded middle and allows as a truth value any real number between 0 and 1.
* Intuitionistic logic rejects the law of the excluded middle, double negative elimination, and the De Morgan's laws;
* Linear logic rejects idempotency of entailment as well;
* Modal logic extends classical logic with non-truth-functional ("modal") operators.
* Paraconsistent logic (e.g., dialetheism and relevance logic) rejects the law of noncontradiction;
* Relevance logic, linear logic, and non-monotonic logic reject monotonicity of entailment

Source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-classical_logic)

It's interesting that you say natural rights can be scientifically verified. Just to make sure we're on the same page, what exactly did you have in mind here?

Typo. I meant can't.

And already we have the government making a decision about long- vs short term wealth.

Unlike your government make decisions on long term and short growth? So if inflation increases by quite a bit your central bank wont raise interest rates leading to slower economic growth in the less wealth in the short term but more in the long term?

It's curious to me that you seem to view "the government" as some sort of outside entity, one that owes you things, but to whom you owe nothing. In the very most basic sense, I think the idea of government is "Hey, look, we're tired of everybody fighting with each other and getting nowhere. Let's pool our resources, agree to stop trying to kill each other and steal each other's food, and in turn we'll each get the same guarantee. If anyone in our group tries any funny stuff, there'll be consequences. Cool? Cool. Now let's go find some people without a group and kick their asses together."


Where do I state, imply, suggest or otherwise intimate that I expect the government to do anything for me, or that it owes me things.

I would genuinely prefer not to have a government at all, but if we are going to have one then at least it should generate its own wealth.

As to the questions(from others) about what is to stop a government from nationalising all profitable industries - the people, thats what.

I don't believe I claimed that it did. But poverty doesn't imply crime or just generally not caring about one's neighbourhood. Back before emancipation in the south, black neighbourhoods in the US were even poorer than today, but people cared quite a lot. They knew each other, forces like local churches, regular community events and so on kept people together and though tough, at least life there wasn't physically dangerous.
But these communities were determined by the government. In fact, they were even more strict than any modern example, because if you lived in one of these communities you had, by definition, no liberty.

I've just realised something: if someone took me, and made a negative mirror image of me, it'd be you. On pretty much every position that matters, we're going to be on opposite sides. Anything that matters to me is irrelevant to you, and vice versa. Even Andaras had the, albeit tenuous, link to the ultimate marxist goal of a utopian world, but you have nothing but order, the nation and obedience for all eternity. It's not even like you really see individual rights or freedom as values in and for themselves, it's not like you defend minimum wage earners because you really see their position as humans diminished...you support them because it helps the stability of the nation.

Yes, it would appear that we are some what mirror images of each other in many ways, which is what makes the internet interesting, in my humble opinion.

Although you may compare my views those of Andaras, he and I have several fundamental differences, besides his vague utopianism, and although you may think my views to be based on statist socialism, that really isn't so. I see no benefit to society in having any form of “workers state”, or of worker/union control of the fields, factories and fried chicken restaurants of the world.

However I do actually see the minimum wage and other social welfare mechanisms (such as preventing homelessness) as being beneficial in terms of humanising and giving a basic dignity to the poor, letting them have the basics of civilised life, which is desireable. However, it is not my only concern. My first is, as you say, is to ensure peace and stability, for everybody enjoys the benefits of this, and without it, everything is lost.

As for living in a state of “order, nation and obedience for all eternity” to a degree, yes. Order is the opponent of chaos, and a state most people would consider preferable. Nation, essentially, is society, you and your fellow people. Obeying the laws of your country, is, I would have thought, merely common sense, regardless of whether or not one subscribes to a democratic viewpoint.

...That's not a valid cop-out - the thing I want to do is have a relationship, whether romantic or commercial, with another person, and the government violently steps in and dictates the terms of this relationship to us. That's the thing I'm finding disagreeable with here, and the option of simply not having the relationship at all is not a justification.

There is a difference between commercial transactions, which are legally regulated relationships in virtually all societies, and personal relationships, which really are no business of the state, though most states seem to disagree on the latter.

There is no monopsonic relationship between buyers and sellers of labour either. Not only have people in general more than one skill that can be used to earn money, but there also exist more than one employee in any given locale. Furthermore, people have the ability to change locations if required, which further broadens the array of potential employers.

There may not literally be only one employer, but a situation along those line exists, for there are in most cases relatively few employers/jobs (buyers) and many unemployed (sellers). I did a quick scan on a recruitment agency sites in Birmingham for generic entry level customer service jobs, which I imagine to be a good average for the nation as a whole. Most individual jobs have 30-50 applicants, many have over 100. Not a balanced relationship.

If people don't have skills that separate them from the rest, they're very much in the same position as the baked beans maker: their product is bland and can be replaced by many others like it. And as such, the price is dictated more by the buyer than the seller, as a clear reflection of the preferences and available resources in the economy.

This is precisely the problem, a “buyers market” is very detrimental to a peaceful society when it comes to labour relations.

A baked beans maker doesn't have to be in a monopsonistic market to be a price taker. If there are no attributes that distinguish its product from that of another firm, it will not be able to charge any more than the price for a generic can of baked beans, as determined by the behaviour of the numerous buyers.

Very true. But it doesn’t negate the need for a minimum wage. Indeed this seems rather similar to the problem dairy farmers face with supermarket buyers.

A corporate entity is nothing but a nexus of contracts between human beings. What hurts a corporation hurts human beings, and what helps it, helps them. That's what annoys me about the types who go on about "corporations" as though we're supposed to associate something negative with the word.

I think the negative connotation is usually due to the singular focus on profit, and hence the push by some for corporations to have a “corporate social responsibility” (or at least pay lip service to it). What is good for corporations is good for some people, namely those who own the corporation in question. However, that is not necessarily good overall. It would be good for BP if the Suez oil fields were given entirely to them, instead of government joint venture, but it wouldn’t benefit the nation as whole, nor even the local population.

And that's an utterly unconvincing one. Of course, I now also realise that from your position it matters not one iota whether or not I am actually convinced, since my thoughts or opinions don't matter to you, and using force to ignore them is not something that bothers you on an ethical level.

I do not think it should be any of the state's business what you think, or don't. I don't subscribe to a view that the state should dictate what people think or do in private. It seems to me to be democratic governments of the neo-con right and liberal left that seek to determine how and what people think in their own minds, and what they can and cannot say in their own homes.

What you think, or what you say in your own home (and indeed who you sleep with, how many pieces of fruit you eat per day and so on) are neither state business, or concern. It only becomes the business of the state if you seek to involve the state by taking action against it.

These things are ceteris paribus, of course. There are outside factors: just because labour is cheap in Zimbabwe doesn't mean I want to build a factory there. There is no doubt labour costs are an important part in the decision on whether or not to start a project that provides jobs, but it's not the only one.

Very true, and this is why I think that those who say the minimum wage to be the kiss of death to employment are over reacting. If you have a stable nation with good infrastructure and a well educated well fed workforce, it’s a better place to have a factory than, as you say, Zimbabwe, even if labour costs are higher.

That's because they have no formal economies, the reason being that property rights are ignored.

I think there’s other factors at play, as well as a general lawlessness (particularly corruption) and instability, political games, a poorly educated or unhealthy workforce (particularly in AIDS afflicted societies) etc. I don’t think that planting a sign in the ground saying “My Field. Don’t Touch” is a panacea, though I don’t deny it is part of a solution.

By the way, I didn't really find the figures that support your point about Rhondda. 6% unemployment isn't that bad, in the grand scheme of things.

The rate is above that of the national average (and many surrounding areas), even though other areas have higher labour costs.

That's not what I said. I said that the link is difficult to show, statistically, because there are so many outside influences that are very hard to isolate. Ultimately the theoretical models, which work well in a huge variety of other situations, make a pretty solid case.

Fair point. However, we do know that when the MNW was introduced in the UK it didn’t cause an unemployment spike.

I know quite a bit about the German case, as I've watched a prolonged period of malaise that was ended (for the time being, anyways) with a comprehensive set of labour market reforms that involved cutting safety nets, forcing people off welfare and strong pressure on the aforementioned labour cartels to keep their wage demands in check. As a result, real wages largely stagnated compared to other European countries, but with unemployment also having fallen quite drastically at the same time. As I said, with a limited amount of economic surplus to be distributed in the form of wages at any one point in time, it seems to be a question of more people at the same or lower wages, or fewer people at higher wages.

Without an insight into other trends, however, it cannot really be said that this was either positive or negative. The United States historically has had lower long term unemployment amongst the poor than other western nations (despite having a federal minimum wage since before WW2) but by almost all other indicators (crime, literacy, education, breakdown of family structures, homelessness, health, substance abuse) is far worse off. It’s led to an extremely divided nation that effectively cannibalises itself.

Well, how can they do that? They can either use it using laws against trade unionism, or by actually getting physical themselves. Both happens, and both are ultimately violations of individual freedom - even though conceptually I'm still somewhat torn on the former, since we seem to accept laws against price-fixing producer cartels readily for their economic merits, but don't do the same for laws against price-fixing labour cartels.

At any rate, I strongly oppose strong arm tactics if they involve physical violence or the threat thereof, or otherwise pressuring people into relationships by using means that go outside the relevant commercial arena.

I think the prevailing attitudes that see trade unions in a different light to corporate cartels is due to historical reasons, where industrial cartels were generally seen as exploitative of the public (customers and/or workers) whereas labour unions were seen as “fighting for the common man” as it were.

I dislike cartels of any kind. As I said earlier, I think any price disputes in min/max wages should be resolved through the government (via a process of the authorities meeting with both the industries and employees concerned and weighing both factors. The aim, after all, is peace and order, not a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” or a “Dictatorship of Business”). If an industry sector is also suffering (dairy farmers, for example) then there should be intervention, tailored to the circumstances, that will ensure stability in that sector.

Well, if my living standards are determined by a government, whether directly or by using the law to proscribe the conditions a business must offer me, then there is one power that I cannot escape and that I depend upon completely. If there are more than one employer, and I can leave one to go to the other, then that gives me a much better chance to influence my living standards, since I have some degree of negotiating power.

A state power that would prevent you from starving in the street. Let us assume that you are born into a family that performs unskilled work for sub-living wage. There is no minimum wage, and no free education. Your family, ergo, cannot afford to have you educated. So you enter the workplace to find dozens of others apply for the same job. You luck out and get it, but due to the competition the wages are rock bottom and you wind up room. Medical bills crop up, you loose the room, can’t afford the treatment. You are dehumanised, and in your anger you and others like you have nothing to loose and take to the streets, and direct your anger (justifiably, perhaps, in this case) against your ruler. Things get burned and the whole thing goes downhill from there.

Iran, Russia, France, Rome, Cyrene. Not pretty. This is what the net protects against. Social security is much like the bread and circuses. It manages living standards, by keeping those at the bottom secure and content enough that they may work effectively and feel security, and so, one hopes, not take to rampaging through the streets and burning the city.

Still, you'd have to agree that the quote in question could have come straight from him. I think you're the most clear illustration of any underlying link between socialism (the statist kind, anyways) and fascism I've met as of yet.

Maybe it came across as fascist or Stalinist, just as some of your points can sound anarchistic, but I do not assume you to be anarchist. Likewise, I am not a fascist, and certainly and not a Stalinist.

Exactly, and that's the problem. If you're going to use something as objective and final as a law backed up by physical violence, then I'd like to see the reasoning behind it being similarly objective and definite. I don't want personal values or loyalties to come within fifty paces of a code of laws. One of the biggest achievements of philosophy has been the dismissal of people who would say "I am the state", and such the division between the whims of one person and the machinery of violence that is the government. I simply want this to continue going forward to its ultimate conclusion.

Every culture has it’s own values, ethics. Whether you see it or not, they form a part of every nations laws. Why do we have laws against nudity, sex on television? Not because they are physically harming anyone, of infringing upon your rights, because those cultures feel ethically that those things are wrong.

As for philosophy being associated with the dismissal of state and personal power, this is hardly so. Philosophy has been used both ways for millennia.


Versailles wasn't build for culture, it was build by a very, very rich man who wanted to show off. There is no difference between Versailles or Paddington Station: both are great reflections of their times, grand achievements of architecture and engineering and build in no small part to satisfy the hubris of the men with the deep pockets. Who happened to have earned his money by providing other people with value rather than by threatening them with death is of little importance to this.

Not really relevant to what I was saying, Versailles being a metaphor for the height of luxury, which as it happens, was for a head of state. Which brings the point full circle.

And what would be wrong with that? That is precisely what I want the government to be: a special type of counterparty with certain abilities to do things other counterparties can't do. Nothing more than that, nothing more important than that.

I could say “It’s far more than that” and you could say “No it isn’t” so there is not a great that be added here, except that we have different ideals on what government is, or rather, should be.

And how much better the world would be if we could get rid of that principle!

Again, I’d say no, for obvious reasons. Taxes, once collected, are the property of the treasury, no longer of the individual, and it is up to the government to make the decisions regarding how they are to be spent.

There are some parts of government expenses that people are very difficult to exclude from. There is a clear case for them to exist, and if a government was to exist at all, these are the things it would have to be doing. And those things would be handled by a basic flat tax rate, simply because it is not technically feasible to charge people for them any more fairly.

Anything above that, especially anything involving redistribution, goes to my voluntary scheme.

And people would fight endlessly over what counts as essential. The amount of common ground that exists between people is actually very little.

You shouldn't. The Venetian Republic had a good system regarding war: if the Doge started one and was judged to be losing it, not only would he be put to death, but also all the councillors who voted for it.

Bring that back and be in awe at how peaceful the world would become.

I think murdering the ruler of my country because we disagreed over a policy decision would be a tad, extreme? Although I disagree with the war I don’t begrudge that some of the tax revenue is spent on that in principle, and neither do I think it should be down to me to decide whether or not it is spent this way.

What does irk me much more is the way these decisions are made.

There is only one time at which the mandatory things would be decided, and that would be the writing of the constitution. As I said, there are some extremely basic things that are by their nature different from other current functions of government. Those would be mandatory, the rest not.

I think you would find making such a constitution a very wearying process… Think EU constitution, writ large.

The social contract bears no resemblance whatsoever to a contract. And if you're going to talk about Hobbes, if you ask me he was desperately trying to preserve a perverse system against a new train of thought that actually valued human beings and their cognitive faculties.

Actually, I agree with a lot of his ideas, though he tends toward the mechanistic more than I would.

At any rate, a contract requires parties freely choosing to agree to it, without coercion and with the realistic option of not agreeing to it. I have never in my life agreed to a rule that said "if you don't give us an amount of money to be specified by us at will, you will be going to jail", just as I never agreed to the bully taking my lunch money by virtue of having been in the same school as him.

You will have agreed to obey the laws of Australia when you applied for your passport/visa/PR, just as I agreed to obey the laws of the United Kingdom when I applied for full citizenship. Both agreements oblige us to meet any taxation obligations, unless we are exempt or part exempt for a particular reason (student, for example). For those who remain in their country of birth it’s an implied or assumed agreement, which they can terminate by leaving the boundary of the state, as you leave your employer if you no longer agree to his terms. You don’t get to stay in his office when you have given him the finger and quit (unless you have a super-nice employer anyway)

School bullies are different, and are essentially what the state protects from. In school the state is essentially the head master (or perhaps the Head Boy), and you obey the school rules. If it’s a private school, it too, will take your (or rather, your parents) money as part of that agreement. The school bully doesn’t provide you with anything, nor does he hold sovereignty, for the school can remove him, punish him, over rule him at will.

Contractarianism has its merits, but in small, egalitarian communities. In anarchist communes. Contractarianism is actually a central tenet of what I'd call an ideal world. But that just makes it worse when people start talking about what's going on right now as though it had anything to do with it.

With the exception of Rosseau, however (whom I don’t agree with), most Contractarianism is based around the idea of the large nations.

If anything, that's more of a reason to do it. You know, tyranny and absolutism gave way to parliamentary systems and eventually universal suffrage. What I'm proposing is simply the next logical step.

What makes you think we are progressing in a direction that is beneficial? When the greatest vision a nation has is for what amounts to a glorified BMX park in Stratford as a monument to the Olympic spirit, things are definitely going south pretty fast. I’d rather obey one lion than two hundred rats of my own kind.

Our steps are taking us in a direction that is destructive.

If those are the options, I will take chaos without a second thought.

Where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short? I dislike being ruled by rats, but since they gnawed away at the claws of the lion, it’s them or chasing each other round the crumbling remains of cities , beating each other with broken bits of wood for the last piece of bread. As such, I’ll go with the rats.

And you do know who Jean Domat wrote for, right?

Louis XIV was his major patron.

Says who? What gives that guy the right? I was born here just as much as he was, I am no less a descendent of my ancestors than he is. The only difference between us is that he's got thousands of armed men and women at his disposal, and I don't.

Well, I guess this really is a discussion in it’s own right. If you’re a democrat, then the people, though them mechanisms of parliament and parties, have made a majority decision, and determined for themselves that he does. As you said about social security and voluntary taxation, if the majority decide not to pay for it, you have to accept that decision. So it is with their choice of rulers.

The latter isn't strong enough, it doesn't send the message that a government is not a toy. It's gotta be the former, but you can be pretty sure that a constitution that properly defines the government as what it is and should be wouldn't be what you have in mind.

I’ve long been in two hearts about constitutions. On purely ideological terms, I don’t like them. Pragmatically, I think they may have a role to play as a final failsafe option that serves to codify things that would be taken as a given in any case. But I agree we probably have different ideas as to what it should and shouldn’t contain.

Then why didn't anyone? It's not good enough to say "there's going to be a crisis" - the bankers had the relevant scenarios in place. Hell, they had the scenarios for a subprime meltdown in place. The thing they didn't count on was the panic spreading into highly rated, investment-grade securities, which they had planned to use as a source of liquidity if necessary.

Panic spreads, people aren’t rational, especially when it comes to two things, their homes, and their cash. Sad refelction on humanity, but it’s also true.

Not wanting to sound rude here, but you have no idea what actually happened, do you.

Nope, I’m not an economist, ergo I don’t know the exact details. What I do know is that my apartments which were worth 240,000 are now valued at 200,000. Thankfully I didn’t orgasm over how much dubious credit I could get when I brought them, because I figured the whole cheap credit bubble wasn’t going to last, so they aren’t mortgaged up to the hilt. I also know I had plans to carry out upgrade work on said apartments, and that’s going to cost more than before, so is probably not viable. And I know the government did f*ck all as said credit buble happened and house prices went stratospheric. Everything, however, has to obey the laws of gravity.

I didn’t sell the flats when market was stratospheric. I’m not hypocritical about speculation. I’ll hold them, and if I have children, they shall inherit them, the rent should see they live well. If I don’t, they will be passed to an academic institution to fund research I might not have the chance to do myself, or might not see completed in my time.

If you can find me that paper, I'd me much obliged if you could find it for me. I might have to get a prescription.

Are you saying to me that the last year or so, you didn’t suspect, if not the exact chain that happened, that somehow, this whole thing was bound to go south? Up like a rocket, down like a stone? We all knew we were sowing the seeds of our destruction, and we all too busy jerking off about how good said cheap lending was making our property market look, and borrowing our way to a laminate floored paradise.

At any rate, earning lots of money on a sure thing like betting on an easily predictable financial crisis surely isn't a bad thing, even if economics isn't your thing, right? Plus, if everyone knows but no one puts their money where their brains are, then the market won't work.

Buy commodities when the lending market is obviously unsustainable, you mean? Yeah I heard about it (my family got caught out when the yuppies got burned, so I learnt to be cautious from them) but I have enough money to get me through, and that lets me have some the time to dedicate my life to my work and the other things I love. For me, that’s it. I’m not going to chase my tail, or start reading the FT in order to add a zero to my bank balance. If that is damaging to the market, then perhaps the market overestimates how much time people like myself are willing to dedicate to it, and should factor that into their calculations.

Do you have any alternative examples we could draw on?

Most financial centres are in first world nations and so most have security nets. Given these jobs are essentially unskilled, and that very few are self employed, you will probably simply get an expansion of slums, rather than dramatically rising wages. Certainly this is what has happened in third world cities such as Manila, Jakarta, and to a lesser degree, Bangkok.

And unfortunately, it is. We can bitch and moan about modern culture, but fact of the matter is that for a great many people, that sort of thing is the embodiment of precisely the values, shared stories and artifacts that make up culture.

And you do not seek to better that? We live in an era of cultural poverty. As an economist, you see a poor country like Zimbabwe. You see it’s poverty as a problem that should be tackled. You do not shrug your shoulders and say “too bad, so sad”. Though I disagree with you on how to do so, you do seek a solution. So it is with culture.

If it makes it any easier, I'm sure we're not the first ones to shake our heads at such things. Throughout history there've been plenty of people who rather doubted the value of whatever cultural advances or innovations were being made at the time.

Very true, just See my signature. That quote is from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Sumerians were big on laments as well… But they never did know the terror of tubgirl…

You don't know me well enough just yet for you to say that. :tongue: Auctioning them off is precisely what I think they should do. They cost taxpayers a fortune in maintenance and security, providing no value whatsoever that a private owner couldn't also provide with them.

Proving my point perfectly :tongue: Once your national heritage belongs to a private individual, it’s not really national anymore, and there’s no knowing what a private individual would do. Plus, uh, we really really need the crown jewels. We can’t crown the monarch without them, nor open Parliament.

You'd be missing the mark though, since the time of holding and the intention of holding have no connection. I can buy something to live in it for six months if that happens to be cheaper or easier than renting, and I can hold an investment property for 40 years before selling it.

It is, however, short term speculation which causes the most headaches, more than medium or long term multi generation investments. That people make some money isn’t the issue. Generally, people on long term investments aren’t looking for a speedy return. Having a speculative bubble doesn’t benefit them particularly. They also are more likely to share an interesting in seeing long term and lasting improvement to the area, as that will benefit their long their investment. Short term speculation shares no such concern for the area even a few decades from now, let alone it’s long term prospects.

The tax penalty system could be implemented in such a way as to only hit the profits of a transaction, through protecting those who simply are trying to live. There’s many ways to do it, like with your proposals for voluntary contributions.

No, I think secret police checking in people's apartments is the way to go.

Fair enough. That’s always a possibility I suppose. There would have to have a suitable evil sounding acronym for this force, you do know that? :tongue:

Why them? They're no better than you or me at telling whether something is pretty, fun or worth spending one's time or money on. If I let the literati determine what is and isn't a good movie to watch, first of all I'd never actually go because they all disagree with each other, and secondly I'd end up not having a very good time because what they like and what I like doesn't have anything to do with each other.

Of course they disagree amongst themselves. It’s part of the process that shapes and refines a culture. However it adds to the variety and richness of the culture in doing so, and allows various schools within an overall culture to exist, giving it additional depth. However they give a general direction and impetus to artistic efforts, and whilst individual different a clear overall opinion can usually be found. Hence the “rotten tomatoes” style of film rating, which gives a weighted rating score based on many critics opinions.

That's patently false, and you know it. No property rights is not simply a logical extention of property rights, and that's quite obvious.

Earlier, you mentioned that a lack of property rights was a restriction on development, yet China Is developing hand over fist? Actually China does have property rights (in law), but only for certain people (in practice).

What are all these things? Before we can talk about them, you have to define them - and more importantly, show how they can be reconciled with a free market in the first place.

It’s late here, if your interested in this specifically let me know and I’ll dig up the articles I was thinking of and elaborate.

Let's hope not, the things are basically experimental labs for the control freaks in the Singaporean government.

They are used as such (though less so than is generally believed) but they serve their specified purpose of providing a fairly good standard of lying for the poor, who did face serious problems before the HDB was established (there was a market failure in Singapore in providing affordable housing, it just wasn’t happening).

If it's for poor people, it's necessarily not as good as accomodation for people who could afford to live in their own places. You're not getting rid of social stratification by piling all the people of one group into the same concrete block and shutting the doors.

Are we intending to get rid of stratification? That isn’t my intention. My wish is for a cultured, stable and ordered society with a sense of focus. Stratification is an aspect of society we have always had since the beginning, and most likely always will, and without it, society would soon degenerate into chaos. And that’ not necessarily being elitist, even being fairly lowly in the order of things, I can see it.

As you can imagine, I'm not a big fan of social pyramids. I'd like to think that if I remove the lower layers, we can dump the whole idiotic notion and start thinking of people as people rather than parts of a geometric shape.

But people are part of society, and whether you think of it as a geometric shape or any other metaphor for the concept, you are still talking about a hierarchical structure. If we you remove any of the layers, the whole system will be damaged.

I don't think of "them", I think of the people I deal with. I've spent enough time with truly poor people (and that's what 40-year old people supporting families on $30k a year working for a pizza chain are) to know that for all the stupid decisions they may have made (or were never given the opportunity to make because their parents made them for them) are people just like you and me.

But thank the gods they made those stupid decisions, because if they didn’t, who would provide the labour for the pizza chains? Rather than pity their position we need to accept that their position is necessary (not that particular people should fulfil it, but simply that some people are needed to do these jobs) and as such, to stop these necessary people tearing the structure apart in desperation, ensure they have the basics they need.

And that's how I treat them: just as everyone else, based on their merit. I pay people what I think their value is worth, and I expect them to do me the same favour. And what they go and spend their money on, and indeed whether they can afford a house somewhere is ultimately not really my business. I know a few people that I would give quite a lot of money to once I am able to do so, simply because I value them and their goals so highly when no one else does - but that would never ever make me want to justify taking other people's money to do this.

If you employ someone, as their superior you are responsible for ensuring they are protected and are holding body and soul together by paying a living wage. If you (or other employers) don’t, you are playing a part in fragmenting society, as these people will be discontent, disillusioned and eventually pushed to crime. Also, you are forcing the problem onto the government, which will ultimately mean more taxes for you, as the government will have to effectively either subsidise sub-living wages through some form of handouts, or some other way of keeping a lid on the problem.

… If the government wants to come and talk to me, and convince me that the things it wants to spend my money on are good, or that I can't avoid using them even if I tried and therefore should pay some reasonable compensation to contribute, they're welcome to do so. But as a human being, I don't do beatings, and I don't respond to them.

Though assuming you pay taxes now, the legal mechanisms, or beatings, as you refer to them, have succeeded, in that one assumes you do meet your tax obligations. Either that, or you believe the existing taxation system to be fair and agreeable.

i think that the nation-state has no right business in regulating wages or taxing incomes.

i'm a georgist, so i believe that the only right basis for taxation is economic rents on "common property"---that is, anything that is (like land) necessary for the survival of everyone AND inherently limited in supply. for these kinds of property, i'd like there to be the collective understanding that nobody actually owns land (itself, for instance), but only owns the right to use it sustainably.

i'd like to see the nation-state collecting up to 90% of the site (not improvements) rental value of every piece of real estate---as well as on the use of airwaves, airspace, fishing rights, etc.

i'd like to see no other taxes, and no government intervention in the private contract that constitutes a wage---unless it is violated by one of the parties.

I choose 'none of the above'

Since my option wasn't given, here is how I vote:

Minimum wage laws (for all or some occupations) - No
Maximum wage laws (for all or some occupations) - No
Variable tax rates based on income (instead of a flat tax) - No
Obligatory contribution to social security/child support for the needy. - No
Laws determining if you can have a child based on income. - No
A government imposed cap on the amount of money one can loan based on income. - No
Government determining where you can live based on income. - No
Laws granting other rights based on income (e.g immigration) - No
Obligatory health insurance/pensionfunds. - No
All should be equal! The state should provide all and I am happy to live in service of the state! - Go pound sand.

People are right. Minimum wage laws are stupid. If I want to pay someone slave wages, then I should freely be able to. Jobs might be hard to come by, so they should be happy to work for what I want to offer them. And of course they can't quit, because then they can't claim welfare, and no one else will hire them because they just outright quit, and who wants to employ someone like that? Especially when everyone else is paying slave wages too. So they have no choice but to work for me! Slave labor is great!

Minimum wage laws. The value of minimum wage, unfortunately, has declined over the years. If it had kept up with inflation, it'd be much higher.

Here in Italy till the '90s we had a system called "scala mobile" (the escalator, literally), which meant that the minimum wages were raised each year the same amount of the inflation rate. Since we abandoned it, the buying power of the italian workers has dropped to the lowest place in the G7. This means that the internal market has gone downhill: we buy mostly items produced in other countries, and produce mostly for export. Shit.

Min wage- Yes
Max wage- Yes
Variable income based tax- Yes
Social security- Yes
Income based loan cap- Yes
Health insurance/pension funds- Yes and run by the state
All should be equal and this can be be brought about by the state- Yes

Just a heads-up...hardware issues have knocked out my interwebs for the time being, so I can't reply. I'm still planning to though.

Sorry.

Just a heads-up...hardware issues have knocked out my interwebs for the time being, so I can't reply. I'm still planning to though.

Sorry.

:(

Hang in there. I was beginning to worry.