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Comment by typednothing | Hacker News Reader

If paying taxes were part of morality, it would require to fix the tax rate once and for all. Otherwise, such moral rule would simply hand out a blank cheque to the ruling class, which could ask for whatever taxation amounts. No society could survive like that. Hence, as it stands, in the context of man-made law, taxes cannot be part of morality, and tax dodgers are not doing anything immoral.

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fix the tax rate once and for all

Do you mean fix as in "repair" or as in "hold in place"? This usage is ambiguous.

The ruling class already, by definition, determines the taxation amounts. Society is surviving like this. Your assertions to the contrary are false. QED.

I do agree that taxes cannot be part of morality. I think it is crucial to differentiate between tax evaders who are breaking the law and tax avoiders who use legal means to reduce their tax liability.

There is a hidden assumption in this argument that there must be a "ruling class". That means you assume that democracy is literally impossible - that it is impossible for everyone to have equal votes and thereby protect their interests. That's not a small assumption!

What's to stop someone else from saying "actually instead of the ruling class, taxes will be set by whoever is the absolute dictator." Well, that assumes there is one. What justifies that assumption? Assuming there must be a ruling class is equally mistaken, in my opinion. There simply isn't one. Everyone votes, rather than some "class".

The super rich have a very big problem.

How to maintain the status quo? If you cannot appease the general public, there will be revolution, and the rich will not stay rich for long.

But how to appease them? Offer them a vote, create the concept of democracy.

Then What? Control the figure heads. (Think dirt, bribery, monetary influence both directly and indirectly).

Immediately, the problem is reduced from impossible to difficult. From controlling millions/billions of people to controlling dozens. And with money, difficult things become less difficult.

All that to say, off course there is a ruling class (think dynasty like Rothschild etc). You have to to think on a macro scale for this. They rule, not directly, but by influence. And we will never see them operate, by design. In the real world, money buys influence, wherever you are and whoever you are. I think the OP was referring to the super rich, who are able to pull politicians strings.

The vote is only one aspect of democracy. The public get to vote in order to feel appeased, but its more than that. The rich get to influence in order to get richer, and the politicians get to feel powerful. Off course, the general population are not supposed to know about that previous sentence.

Now off course, we see the interaction between the public and the politicians (well, except for Theresa May yesterday), in fact, this is usually highlighted to maximize the public's feeling of appeasement by building a certain "democracy hype" (can be seen before most elections).

In reality, democracy is just the "peaceful" amalgamation of all three aspects:

- public feeling good. Fooled, but working the hamster wheel as hard as possible trying to amass EARNED wealth.

- politicians not feeling good, but powerful and usually richer.

- mega-rich feeling good, powerful and richer.

Which then leads to there being those 3 types of people.

- Laythe

But remember where democracy came from: the no-aristocracy, one-man-one-vote model of democracy is primarily a child of the French Revolution. (The US revolution created a cozy oligarchy, complete with property qualifications; democratization came later.)

Prior to that revolution, the only way to join the French aristocracy was to be the child of an aristocrat; no amount of amassed wealth could make you noble, and the French aristocracy had even persuaded themselves that they were biologically superior to the commoners. (Hitler and Himmler really liked that notion; they even envisioned turning the SS into a new ruling aristocracy, not least for France.)

The French Revolution blew the lid off all this, and made it possible for earning wealth -- in one generation or several -- to be enough to rise in station. This was always possible in England, and this is probably why the UK has never had a French-style revolution: no "insurgent elites," no men and women frozen out of the circles of power despite being qualified to enter.

So democracy isn't a sham; or, at least, it wasn't originally one. There was a time when all of the factions you describe -- working stiffs, professional politicians, and the ultra-rich (especially rich Jews!) -- were more or less genuinely oppressed, and settled on democracy as a solution that gave all parties at least some of what they wanted.

(This assumes a traditional reading of the French Revolution, of course; I've seen a revisionist reading that it was the work of a small elite that never enjoyed popular support. But I'm skeptical of this; if popular sentiment was really anti-Revolutionary, why did France have so many more republics?)

I like what you are saying a lot. But I really dislike that you sign your posts.

I'm interested why that disturbs you?

I personally couldn't care less, but it is contrary to HN guidelines:

"Please don't sign comments; they're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

oh - thanks.

EDIT: you updated your comment considerably since my reply! The below was a reply to a simpler version of the parent comment. I don't disagree with what you've just written.

Before edit:

So why don't the ruling rich make it so that up to $100,000 everyone pays under the current tax regime, but any income over $100k is taxed at 0% (since you've already fully paid your share to the country, i.e. on the first $100K), meaning earning $500K or $5M per year gives the same tax burden?

Nobody would vote for such a tax regime. That's why we don't have it.

Your idea idea that there is a ruling class ("dynasty like Rothschild etc") that can do whatever they want is simply not true. The country is much more democratic than that. I might as well suggest that there is a secret absolute dictator who can do whatever they want. (Also not true.)

I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's pretty obvious there isn't a ruling class even close to being able to set tax rates for themselves - or they would do so. Why do you think they don't? They can't.

I think it's more insidious than that. Of course it's not done on earned income. That would be too transparent for the general public to see. Instead you create a lot of financial instruments with varying degrees of complication that all have rules for avoiding taxation while still providing yields. Even better if it takes expensive and exclusive accountants and lawyers to conceive, establish, and protect these.

This way you get to give appearance of the wealthy doing their part in a progressive tax while really only subjecting a small or zero amount of their wealth to it.

well I don't disagree with you, but I don't know that I can agree to using the term "ruling class". Does every set of influencers constitute a ruling class?

So, purely for entertainment, how much money one needs, on a population on a billion in developed countries, to influence the democratically elected leaders in 20 countries?

A lot.

Also a lot of tact. If you just leave a check on somebody's desk, you're calling him a crook, and few crooks enjoy being called crooks; it works better to hire a politician for a speech somewhere, or offer him a seat on a board of directors or a well-paid job with a charity when he leaves office, or put in a word on his children's behalf with the director of an exclusive private school, or something like that...

The Saudis make an absolute art form of this, acting as a patron to the whole of DC. There are some memorable books about this.

There's an old folk belief in the Anglosphere, that the rich are less corruptible than the poor. (In 16th-century England, the legal definition of "an honest man" was one who had an income from land and investments of ten pounds or more: maybe equivalent to $100,000-$400,000 today.) This belief isn't true, at least not most of the time; but the art of deniable bribery gives a hint of where it came from.

I'm not sure I follow this argument. I think I understand what most of the sentences mean but I don't see the logic that strings them together

I found the logic somewhat appealing (if I understood it correctly): You should always pay as little tax as you can get away with, because the true dirtbags of the world certainly are. Since money is a form of power and power is relative, if you willingly pay more taxes than the dirtbags you are willingly handing over power from you to the dirtbags year after year. Eventually you will have contributed to a situation where only dirtbags have money/power and we will live in an equivalent of pre-revolution France.

Man, is this a tragedy of the commons, but I get the thought process.

EDIT: I see that my interpretation was wrong.

Become a dirtbag, because others will too. Great.

Could a rule like "Everybody must go up to the 12th floor, jump out of the window, and die." be part of morality? No, because that would be self-defeating. In the same way, demanding that people pay a tax but not fixing at all how much that tax should be, is a broken rule, and cannot be part of morality. Nothing will stop the ruling class from incessantly increasing the tax rate, if you accept the rule. Therefore, the rule must be rejected.

Your argument only works if society gets nothing in return for paying taxes.

The rule would be bad for morality because the outcome of it is bad. I'm not sure that the same can be applied to paying taxes

> If paying taxes were part of morality, it would require to fix the tax rate once and for all. Otherwise, such moral rule would simply hand out a blank cheque to the ruling class, which could ask for whatever taxation amounts

No, you could totally say that it's moral to pay taxes, but that we don't know what the correct amount is, or that the correct amount depends on circumstances. The 'ruling class' does effectively have a blank cheque - who do you think sets the taxes?

I'm not following you. I'm not sure if you're advocating a fixed percentage or some kind of logarithmic tax rate based on how much income you earn. If the later, then the changing cost of living dictates what most people deem to be acceptable tax rates and prevents it from not changing constantly.

It's like demanding that people encrypt their communications with ROT13. That request is fundamentally broken. A system that does not work, and can impossibly work, cannot be part of morality. Hence, it cannot be immoral to dodge such request. It is simple. The specs are f*cked. So, there is no point in implementing them, because you can see upfront that the program will not work anyway.

It's not at all like that, unless you have found a way in which people encrypting their communications with ROT13 can keep the society running. Enjoy your excuse for tax avoidance :)

FYI, tax avoidance is different to tax evasion. I'm not sure why someone would need an 'excuse' for the former - it's the latter that's illegal.

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