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Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

Philanthropy in a general sense? No. People can give whatever they want.

The laws that allow so few to accumulate so much, when the rest of the world has so little? Something seems off about that. Like the systems we've built aren't really working very well, not for everyone (though they're working great for a few.)

Counting on philanthropic efforts to replace services provided by government? Absofuckinglutely. You've just replaced democratically-governed society with "what a couple of rich guys think is a good idea for now". It's hard to be less anti-democratic than that.

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Is democracy good? If something has democratic support does that make it right/moral? There was democratic support for slavery in the US at one point, something to keep in mind.

If democracy is not necessarily good and does not bestow moral standing, then does the characteristic of being anti-Democratic automatically imply that it is bad or wrong?

If you believe that democracy is a good feature of government, then policy outcomes (such as, arguably, the existence of billionaires) which threaten the effectiveness of that agreed-upon-good are failures. This is not saying that that which has democratic support is right/moral, it's about allowing the existence of the institution we nominally support and allow for its uninterfered operation.

If, conversely, you don't believe that democracy is a good feature of government, there are bigger things to discuss than the impact of wealthy individuals on that process.

A lot of these discussions take this framing for granted.

> There was democratic support for slavery in the US at one point,

The murderer is not accused by the knife.

Democracy is the mechanism for decisioning. Those who wield it hold the blame, not the mechanism.

This is a helpful thought experiment that exercises what you're describing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_theft#How_many_men...]

> This is a helpful thought experiment

That "thought experiment" isn't really helpful. It just starts with a particular morally-charged framing, and creates a mechanism to push that framing forward towards a conclusion, while discouraging thought about any other principles.

You could probably construct an infinite number of other "experiments" that push towards an infinite number of different conclusions on any topic, like "How many men...does it take to give you property rights? Do you own the car if only you say so? What if a gang of five men say you own the car..."

I would disagree...

I believe the point is to illustrate that you either have inalienable natural rights or you don't -- which is usually the basis of the "taxation is theft" argument -- i.e. you either own the produce of your labor or some other entity owns it and allows you to keep a portion of it out of kindness or whatever.

Not arguing for or against just explaining the reasoning behind their reductio ad absurdum "thought experiment".

This sounds more like wordplay than an argument. It's trying to establish that the word "theft" means any forced surrender of property including tax. But it never establishes why "theft" is bad under this definition. The answers you give to the questions in that thought experiment have no practical purpose - you're just choosing a definition for the English word "theft".

The questions can be meaningful if you replace "Is it theft if..." with "Is it bad if...". Is it bad if one man steals a car? Is it bad if a majority of voters decide to take some money from the rich to build roads and help the poor? Answers to these questions lead to actionable policy. The original questions do nothing but make communication more difficult by creating personal, non-standard definitions of a word.

I can definitely see where you'd get that impression, but that's not the impression I got from it. I don't think he's trying to define or establish meaning of the word "theft" at all. He seems to simply be establishing a baseline for the thought experiment by asking a rhetorical question. Most people would agree that it is "theft" if one man steals a car.

It's similar to a thought experiment I heard regarding abortion, where you start at 1 day and say, "Is it ok to abort at 1 day? what about 1 week? month? 20 weeks? 40 weeks?"

But I could very well be misunderstanding it myself.

There's an important difference between asking "Is it ok..." (to abort/take property/whatever else) and asking "Is it theft...".

In essence, the argument is using our negative feelings about "theft" to distract us from the relevant question of "is it ok/good?".

It's a technique that works for any category of things where there's a spectrum from bad to good and you want to persuade someone that the good instances are actually bad.

To take the abortion example. You ask someone who's undecided on abortion, "Is it okay to abort the moment after birth? What about the moment before birth? An hour before birth? A day? A month? 8 months? The day after conception?"

Phrased this way, the answers are likely to change from "no" to "yes" at some point through the spectrum. The person will likely feel it's okay to kill a single celled zygote with no brain and no mind, but not okay to kill a freshly born baby, and this phrasing makes it easy to acknowledge the difference.

But you can muddy the waters by changing the question from "Is it okay..." to "Is it murder...". After all, if you consider it murder to abort a fetus just before birth, it's not obvious why you wouldn't categorized aborting younger fetuses as murder.

One reasonably answer might be that you could consider killing a fetus/embryo at any age to be murder, but that still doesn't make it wrong to kill at early stages.

A technically correct answer would be it's not murder because our legal definition of murder excludes abortion.

However, people presented with this argument often won't say either of these things, and that's why this technique is effective. It obfuscates the question we're actually interested in ("is it okay?") by breaking it into two parts. It's trying to convince you that 1) killing a fetus is murder, 2) murder is not okay, therefore killing a fetus is not okay. This is an obvious fallacy. If you change what's considered murder to include something that is okay, then you've invalidated 2). However, these last steps of the argument are usually subconscious and people miss the fallacy.

The taxation argument has the same problem. Sure, you can call taxation "theft" if you want, but that does nothing to explain why it's bad. Or we can stick to the official definition of theft, which excludes tax. Either way, they've failed to explain why tax is bad.

Ah ok, I think I understand your position better. Would it be fair to say you disagree with the invocation of the word "theft" because of negative connotations (almost everyone would agree theft == bad)? Would you say that people using that thought experiment are engaging in Argumentum ad dictionarium?

I appreciate the discussion btw :-)

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

As a mechanism of governance, it’s the best we’ve found so far at achieving prosperous, stable societies over a long time horizon. Perhaps the single biggest advantage well-run democracies offer is peaceful transfer of power.

The parent comment is just replying to say that it's anti-democratic. You're side-stepping the question with an orthogonal one.

There's no perfect political system. Despots can be good and they can be bad; they can free the serfs, or they can instigate a genocide. But unlike well-implemented democracies, despots have a single point of failure. What happens when the 'enlightened' despot is wrong?

I wasn't intentionally side-stepping, I was asking an honest question regarding what I perceived to be a presupposition of his, namely that being anti-democratic is equivalent to being morally wrong. I could be misunderstanding him tho, as I did have to infer that from his comment about "rich people" running things.

Yeah it's a good point. If we stipulate that anarchy can't work (which I don't believe necessarily, I'm agnostic on that, but for sake of discussion I'll stipulate), then I can't really think of a better system either (assuming we're actually talking about a direct democracy like Ancient Greece had).

The people can and do get things wrong, but it does seem less likely that the people as a whole will be tyrants than one or a few individuals.

> There was democratic support for slavery in the US at one point, something to keep in mind.

Only if you don't count the votes of the slaves, of course.

It seems to me that in order to conclude that, one would have to assume that everyone in the world had equal access to the very systems of whichever societies made the rich people rich. Absent that, another possible conclusion and policy goal could be to simply keep the current systems and ensure that other people around the world (as well as more people domestically) had access to those very same systems.

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