1) your parents have money
2) you are lucky/skilled enough to make a living off a Humanities degree
Most people are not like that and a Humanities degree is a terrible choice.
There's no self-discovery when your own survival is at stake.
You can get an engineering degree at a liberal arts college, they just make you take some philosophy/arts/&c. courses also. There is enormous value in this, because people are humans, not merely workers. Liberal arts colleges should do a better job in getting their students technical skills also, though.
In my engineering degree (University of Toronto), we had about 4 free electives and humanities courses over the whole degree. I believe there would have been a lot more value in having more free electives whereby students could take more courses in the humanities (or for those not so inclined, whatever other topics that interested them).
Sure - you should have told the British to stay the fuck away from the Indian subcontinent.
That said, I agree with you. When I took my liberal arts courses, I felt like I was learning something or using a part of my brain that I didn't in my Computer Science courses. I could never really tell what it is, unfortunately, but I liked it.
Instead of taking them as granted and designing education around them?
Education is quite cheap in Europe for example -- to the point of a few thousand dollars per year or less plus living expenses (which can be near zero if you live with your parents as lots do).
Among other reasons: because it is government and the legal system which makes amassing and maintaining large fortunes possible; being poor without organized society is easy to achieve, being rich is a possible only with the order imposed on society through law. Therefore, it makes sense for the rich to be taxed not merely proportionately to their wealth, but disproportionately so.
Which is true in a sense -- though then you've organized society around your interest, and established yourself as the arbiter of law -- but not really an argument against the rich bearing disproportionately the cost for government.
If someone's at the poverty line, you shouldn't take any money. If someone's making 8+ figures, they'll be almost as well off even if you take half.
You have to tax someone, so let's distribute the burden. Everyone feels a mild impact instead of a flat percent that crushes poor people.
Unless you think we shouldn't tax anyone, then I can't help with understanding.
Any given alternative to taxation might be worse, though. It also might be better. There are a lot of ideas that already failed, and a lot that haven't yet been tried.
But none of the potentially better schemes can possibly work when you already accept taxation as axiomatic.
Of course, this doesn't mean that there is no value in attempting to determine a method of taxation that is least unfair. But given the variance in individual tastes, you may have to combine multiple models of fairness to come up with a reasonable basis for comparison.
If your tax scheme takes as much money from a person as it is possible to take without causing that person measurable harm, you're obviously going to be able to take a lot more from rich people than from poor people. But then, as everyone would end up with the same standard of living, you disincentivize excellence. So maybe you use a model drawn from psychological experiments with respect to reward-seeking behavior, and you give accomplishment above and beyond the lowest common denominator diminishing returns. Maybe someone who produces twice as much gets twice as much as their reward, but someone who produces ten times as much only gets five times as much reward. The studies on lever-pushing rats suggest that this would still work. Someone might even produce twenty times as much for only six times the reward.
I can see very few alternatives. Either you believe that no government is necessary, or you believe that government can operate without money, or you believe that government can create the money it needs to operate (with minimal negative effects), or you believe that government can raise sufficient money from something other than taxes. (But if they raise money from anything other than voluntary contributions, it's pretty much a tax. I would consider tariffs to be taxes, for example - they're just a tax on foreign trade rather than income or property.)
From what I recall of your posts, I think you take the first position - that no government is necessary. I strongly disagree, but here I will limit myself to saying that there is no evidence of this being possible. (Yes, there are plenty of examples of people cooperating without government being involved. Cooperating to the point that no government at all was needed anywhere in society? Not so much.)
Government is not strictly necessary. Government can operate without the same currency as is used in the non-government markets. Government can fund most of its core functions by creation of fiat currency. Government can be run on sources of revenue other than taxation.
(Some of these implicitly assume a certain definition of "government". Some people might say that an organization that does not tax is not a government. Others may define the "governmentness" of an organization by different criteria. My definition allows for governments that cannot or do not tax.)
That doesn't necessarily mean that any system that demonstrates such possibilities would be subjectively better than anything already seen in practice. So far, I am aware of no controlled experiment that has tested any those hypotheses. It might not even be possible to run one. Sometimes the answer to a yes-no question is "I don't know [yet]."
I have no knowledge of the truth of the hypotheses. I don't know whether a taxing government is objectively necessary or not. The anecdotal historical evidence suggests that it is not, but also that any society that lacks a government tax is eventually undermined and overwhelmed by a society that has a tax. The tax funds warfare, either as military, economic, or both. If you don't contribute to professional soldiers or financiers voluntarily, your people get conquered, assimilated, indebted, or enslaved, and have to do it anyway.
Aside from that, in most cases, it is reasonable to reason from a point where you assume one or more untested or untestable statements to be true, but you should be aware that you are not covering the entire problem space.
Assuming that taxation is necessary, it should be possible to say that there exists a system of taxation that is most fair among all systems of taxation. But you cannot then say that is the fairest possible system, because you have not even investigated any system that does not employ taxation.
So if you cannot imagine any such system for the purposes of comparison, your lack of imagination may indirectly be making the world less fair than it could be.
You don't get to steal things because that's not an equitable way to redistribute wealth, but the government might tax the rich neighbour and use the money to provide free public transport.
There is near infinite human demand. Maybe it really is infinite, and that's probably a great side discussion. Let's just say it's really large.
People want and need stuff. This is a constant.
But, there is demand backed by dollars, and demand that isn't.
Where we don't tax in a way that helps to maximize the real dollar demand, we don't value ourselves as people well enough to fund our real potential as a developing society, nation, whatever.
For our economics to work, we have got to be able to trade on the demand presented to us. What good are AD driven models delivered to a society with few liquid dollars to make the response to those ADS meaningful? What good is collecting a bunch of data on people without being able to go back and deliver something meaningful to them and get dollars in return?
Some of this can be addressed by making it cheaper to live, thus freeing dollars to fund innovation and reward those who advance us, but there are limits to that, and those limits can be artificially low when people do not have enough to present meaningful demand. I just read somewhere recently that there is basically nowhere in the US where a person can make it on less than something like $14 / hour. This varies a little, but it's fine for discussion.
When they make, say $9, they require external help to meet their basic needs and wants are largely off the table. We end up using taxes to help them get by, and they are not able to contribute back in a meaningful way. We can say that they, and their labor isn't valued well enough to present a net positive. They cost us. They cost themselves.
The people making lots of money need to get it from somewhere, right?
Our money system is debt based too. There is as much money as people can borrow realistically. When people aren't valued well enough to present plausible risk, they quite literally can't borrow and that means money isn't created that would have been otherwise.
How the taxes are structured impacts this, as does what we pay them.
In a macro sense, the number of people falling into the bucket I'll call "tepid to minimal demand", has risen from some 40 percent of us to a little under 60 percent. Wages have been flat for a considerable time, and we've also shifted away from new job creation paying "family wages" and more toward service, basic type jobs. By percentage today, far more basic wage type jobs are created than ones that pay more, in simple terms.
This has directly impacted the demand these people can present to the economy as well as their ability to take risk and or fund bigger purchases. We've innovated too, which means they can get by on less, and that's good, but there is a very strong argument for us also leaving a lot of potential on the table by keeping it all as lean as we have.
Above a certain point, say $100-200K / annual, gains are steady, and at the top, gains are significant. For most people, it's flat, or for unlucky ones a decline or very significant cut.
And here's an example:
Entertainment dollars, just to pluck one out of the air. People in the tepid demand brackets typically have what they have for entertainment. Say it's $100 a month, just for grins. That money gets spent, unless they can't for some reason like getting sick or needing to replace / repair something, because entertainment is a basic need and want like food is. Good food is a want, sufficient food is a need.
Buy a DVD, video game, new music album, see a movie, go somewhere for the weekend, buy something for a hobby, etc... all basically compete! For our growing lower tier of people, which are the majority of people, a big game release may well come at the cost of a couple of movies, or that new toy for the hobby. Everyone in that niche must advertise and differentiate to maximize their share, and overall growth comes from population growth, and the upper tiers of people.
Most notably, the real volume growth is left on the table! Those people just can't do more, so it's spent each month, month over month.
Now, the common piracy argument is that infringement is equatable to a lost sale! They say billions are "lost" as opportunity costs due to piracy. But, the reality is the money coming from these lower tiers is more or less constant, again with very tepid growth due to basic factors, like population, etc...
Because we don't value people well enough for them to fund entertainment, those billions simply do not exist! In fact, we find increasingly clever ways to differentiate entertainment and package it in ways that allow for more entertainment choices being possible to more finely divide up the dollars, and give the market some fluidity and the people in that market more choice.
Say that the need for entertainment isn't matched by dollars. The overflow is self-entertainment, infringement, trade with friends, etc...
If we could somehow prevent infringement, people would simply get less entertainment per dollar, and or overflow would mean they would do other things, if they have time for those other things. This would force people to really max out their entertainment dollar potential, but that's not much. Some growth would happen, but those billions in lost sales due to competing or infringing entertainment options just aren't there.
(BTW, this is one argument for the basic income. Move most labor related dollars into a more disposable / risk friendly spending tier for this lower income bracket. Basic needs get locked in, and their labor funds luxury or innovation opportunities allowing for some serious and meaningful economic growth.)
Take two scenarios then, given this one example. There are others and they play out in similar ways, but this is long enough already...
If we structure taxes to bias toward people who can pay taxes without their meaningful life choices being impacted, that investment can lower the tax burden on those who are impacted. Say that, results in most people in the "tepid demand" tier ending up with $200 for entertainment!
That's huge! Suddenly, there are billions, though realistically that money will compete with a lot of other things, but there really is some additional dollar potential out there for entertainment, just not double. Infringement may go down, or it may not, and I submit it won't matter. What will matter is more of their demand is backed by real dollars which translates into growth for those at the top supplying and profiting from entertainment. They now can present more of their wants and needs to the economy as demand backed by dollars.
Or, perhaps they can now get some credit, and apply that income to larger or more purchases. Growth there too. New money = new growth.
The other impact is wages. When those are higher, and growth can lead to higher wages, the same sorts of dynamics apply. People end up with more liquid dollars and or credit that they can use to make their demand meaningful.
When that demand is meaningful, or maybe actionable is a better word, market effects translate that into growth and innovation opportunities we all benefit from.
In simple, human terms, we move people from choices like buying something they want or keeping the lights on. Those choices are rough, and undesirable on a human level, which is one reason for progressive tax structures. But the other one is economic.
How we compete with other nations, the quality of our infrastructure, education of our people, innovations we can fund, military, etc... depend a lot on how we value ourselves as people and what that value means in terms of real, actionable demand as opposed to costs. Moving people from presenting as a net cost to a net positive economic contributor to demand is very highly desirable, if we also value growth and a rich market in which to profit from, and as a nation, compete globally with.
Getting back to that rich neighbor. They probably got rich doing business and meeting demand somehow and profiting by doing that.
That money comes from real demand presented by people able to present it in the economy. It's longer term foolish to ignore that reality in much the same way it is to say, continue to plant crops and harvest without also returning important nutrients to the ground to avoid it being sucked dry and unable to produce well in the future.
If your society thinks this is OK, then, yes, you can. Which, when it comes to taxes, it does. There's no natural ("god given") law saying your neighbor has more right to something that others do. It's a societal contract.
Let's put it another way: if your kids are starving, and your neighbor has food for 20 people in a family of 4, can you go there and get some food from him because you need it more than he does?
Even while still calling it stealing, most people would, if not justify, then at least excuse that.
Why not question property itself? Isn't that a social construct too, the fact that we allow some people to have more than others? We are all born naked anyway -- and it's not like it's always (or even often) the more hard working or the more beneficial to the rest that get the most money.
Why not? Just because her popularity gives her a good way to print tons of money doesn't mean she's more valuable than anybody else doing honest work and getting 1/1000 as much per year.
Her wealth doesn't mean much with respect to the value of her product -- it's just a temporary perk because of people not being able to pirate books that easily yet (because they don't enjoy reading on screens, private printing is not very efficient or cheap, and not everybody has a Kindle).
Much greater authors living before the copyright + typography era never made a dime off of their masterpieces.
That only makes my argument stronger, not weaker - if she's exactly the same member of the society as everyone else, she should still pay the same percentage as everyone else.
The rest of your statements are nonsensical. She provides something that I want, so I trade my money for her product - the "quality" of the product has absolutely nothing to do with it. Just like I trade my time for my employer's money.
Flat percentage is not a fair tax scheme. Equal doesn't always mean fair ( http://everydayfeminism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Untit... ).
E.g. 40% tax for someone making $1000 a month is a huge sum eating into his food, rent etc, but even 80% tax for someone making 100.000 a month leaves them with enough to live extremely luxuriously.
>She provides something that I want, so I trade my money for her product - the "quality" of the product has absolutely nothing to do with it.
The only reason you provide that much for her product is not it's cost or some inherent value you see it in, but an artificial constraint of distribution. If it was $0.2 or $1 per book you'd be equally happy to pay that instead of $10.
It's like with recorded music -- the era where people made fortunes from it was just an accident of available reproduction techniques. Artists weren't paid for that before, and people stopped spending in the era of mp3 and youtube too.
So who exactly should decide how much something costs? Do you think the author should not control how much a copy of their book costs?
No. I think competing publishing houses should print the book in different prices (any price each publishing house wishes), with a percentage of sales going to the author, and the market decides how high or low it goes. In the end, if not allowed to form a cartel, all publishers will reach a stable-ish price (differing only for different qualities of each edition, e.g. paper quality, hardcover, etc).
Else, it's like we limit a reproductible work in an artificial way as if it was an one-off item, by granting sole pricing rights AND absolute control of its sales to the author.
Sure, let them. I don't see how this is achieved by increasing taxes on them - general income taxes go to a broad variety of causes.
You seem to be saying that people who make money in the arts should be taxes more than people in other lines of work. Is that correct, or have I misunderstood what you're saying?
Obviously they shouldn't.
Besides more writers are just as poor or even more than "ordinary workers" (and most of them are also ordinary workers, and do writing as a side-job).
I only mention it, because I was caught (in the USA) in a bind when I had a stock option and had to pay AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), one of those things designed to hurt the rich. But I didn't have any money - just those options. And they had a lock-out (I couldn't sell them).
To accomplish 'massive taxes on super-rich' you'd have to create a bank-balance tax (like a property tax). And the rich would just invest in stuff then (real estate etc).
Its not simple to design taxes.
Which you could also tax -- property taxes.
http://www.businessinsider.com/jk-rowling-on-high-taxes-2012...
They have no practical skills or affinity for the profession they are trying to enter (I've heard more than a few say they would prefer working in IT after getting a "CS degree" because "programming is hard and boring").
IMO the problem comes from "government programs to fill demand from IT sector" and the converting college to high school 2.0
When I went to college you actually had to pass entrance exams and people avoided technical colleges like plague if they actually weren't interested in them - this is still true for top colleges in EU - but the trend of pushing college as a ticket to a comfy office job obviously doesn't result in a bunch of highly skilled professionals (reduced standards to allow greater number of graduates) and gives you a bunch of people who have high expectations and no practical skills - so you get angry kids on the streets.
I see where you're coming from, but don't share the moral condemnation.
Why shouldn't they be angry?
Wanting to be merely decent/half-good at a job and make a living is fine by me -- and it's the way it has worked before (which is why the expected it to hold for them too).
If only the top deserved jobs, then either we'd need the whole population to have top skills (not really doable even if possible), or just give jobs to a 10% or so.
Besides, it's not most jobs are for anything really useful in the grand scheme of things. If you leave out some vital services, most of it is empty bureaucracy, redundant services, etc.
Actually the point at which you can productive in the fields they are trying to enter (programming in this example) is so much higher than what colleges require to pass - this is the disconnect between modern "diploma mills" (government sponsored in this case - to prop education numbers and make voters happy) and historic college model. There is a shortage of programmers around here and around most EU - but of the kind that can actually be productive, not the kind that completed their 3 year degree (by attendance) and now want a well paying 9-5 job.
One of the most beautiful concepts in Finance is Future Value: 1$ a year from now doesn't have the same as value as it does right now.