‘Raise my taxes – now ’: the millionaires who want to give it all away
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Writing a check she can do very easily, so she gets little social credit for that.
Simpler reason: virtue signaling reaches new heights when you can force OTHER people besides yourself in doing things that will give you social credit - a bit like the ritual burning of goods and savings in some pacific tribes: if you do it yourself, you need some witnesses, and you will get less social credit than if you can social engineer a large party where everybody is a witnesses and more people engage in the ritual burning of goods.
It must not just be painful and wasteful, but also as hard as possible. It's a bit like a reverse proof of work!
It's also not correct to say that our choices are either to call taxation not-theft or descend into anarchy or socialism. I think taxation is theft because it's people with guns forcing me to pay money or else they'll send me to prison. I wouldn't pay that money if they didn't threaten me, so, seems pretty theft-like to me.
That said, I also realize there is a necessity for the government to be funded somehow. That means we need to balance the immorality of taking money that people don't want to give with the necessity of funding the government.
Thinking about things this way inclines you to certain perspectives about what the government should and shouldn't be doing. Anything that the government does should be worth stealing money from citizens to fund doing.
> Thinking about things this way inclines you to certain perspectives about what the government should and shouldn't be doing.
One of the more depressing books I've read recently was by an economist who made the case (fairly convincingly) that a society with a broad middle class is not the natural state of things, and while societies have inertia industrial ones trend towards the sort of rich/poor gap seen in the industrial revolution, absent large-scale government intervention in the market.
The book didn't particularly explore this, but the political implications of that thesis if correct seemed bleak. Getting the government to do anything effectively is an unreliable process, but, aside from enjoying a lower standard of living, the pre-WWII countries weren't politically stable (and that was when peoples' expectations were much lower).
Taxation being theft seems to mostly be a question of how you define theft (does it include legality, process, etc) but there are obvious parallels in any case. Although I suppose private property (beyond what one can defend themselves) also exists by state force.
Didn't downvote you BTW.
If the Mafia had a complex set of rules and procedures governing how they stole from you, I don't think you'd shy away from calling their activities theft. I feel the same way about the government. I don't like them. I didn't vote for them. I don't agree that they should take my money and I don't like what they spend it on. That they have laws I had no part in creating, am not aware of, and don't understand, on top of judges and lawyers I don't agree with doesn't alter the fundamental action taking place - people with guns forcing me to give them money by ultimately threats of violence.
Calling taxation theft is not really a legal statement. It's a moral statement intended to make people think about taxation. Observing that the thieves don't consider it theft according to their laws is accurate, and that would be meaningful in some contexts, but that's not the moral statement being made.
I will also state that there isn't much difference between Mafia/Organised crime/Goverments, and Sects/Religions.
Governments have predictable, well defined fee structures that can be budgeted for by businesses.
Services are delivered in a, mostly, timely fashion, or at least on some sort of predictable schedule. Many government agencies actually give out time tables for responses, people may not be happy with those time tables, but timelines are provided[1].
Organized crime makes no such guarantee. Pay once, and they can come around and ask again. Once a mark always a mark.
Governments provide stability. The next person in charge is probably not going to change things too much. Taxes aren't going to be raised too much, and changes to taxes aren't going to happen without input from constitutions.
Also the use of force is limited by laws set forth. If you own a bar next to the mayor's son's house and play music too loud, you may get a fine. And that fine may be delivered a bit faster than if your bar wasn't located next to the mayor's son's house.
But your bar won't be burnt down. You won't have your kneecaps smashed in. Your car tires won't be slashed.
This limitation of force is both a legal contract and a social contract. When the social contract is broken, mass protests take place, and steps are taken to reinforce that social contract. The BLM protests and the efforts to establish more community orientated outreach and justice programs are recent examples of this.\
[1] My local department of licensing guarantees how long it takes to mail out new license tabs, my city hall has a timeline for how long building blueprint requests take. Even many federal services have wait time estimates that they try to adhere to. People only complain when government doesn't work, but by and large it does work!
I'm not American so I can be mistaken, but isn't it written in the American Constitution that government has the power to tax citizens?
In that case it's the price to pay to be part of the community, like it or not.
Coming from Italy I can only say that mafia doesn't do what they do because some fundamental law that defines a Country and is accepted by every political party gives them the power to do it, but only because they have the means to force other people to follow their own rules, they are violent criminals, out of the law.
Also: being prosecuted in a due process and eventually arrested it's not the same thing as being killed because some mob boss feels like it.
At least, I wouldn't pay the amount I currently do. I might pay 1%-2% of what I currently pay. I think some of what the government does is valuable but most of it isn't valuable and lots of it is immoral.
well that's kinda true for everybody, I guess...
> At least, I wouldn't pay the amount I currently do.
I pay a global 43% on my salary which is not even in the 5 zeroes, but I am fine with it as long as everybody else do their part according to what they have.
The problem in my country is that many don't and the majority of them is in the high income spectrum
I rather appreciate paying a regular, well known, fees instead of having to hand out bribes left and right to get things done.
Arbitrary bribes to keep government running is insanely inefficient. Taxes are a much more efficient system that lets civil servants get paid (a transparent wage!) and let's me get things done in my day to day.
s/theft/the price paid for civil society
The "taxation is theft" view is the narrowest sort of tunnel vision:
- Monetarist Milton Friedman is worshiped by many libertarians — but it was recently said that Friedman celebrated drivers while taking roads for granted [0].
- Now-senator Elizabeth Warren summed it up nicely in her famous 2011 living-room campaign talk [1]. Transcript: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless; keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along. [Applause]"
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Economists-Hour-Prophets-Markets-Frac...
Elizabeth Warren's point was that the folks who perpetually agitate for tax cuts — and especially the taxation-is-theft crowd — are forgetting (or intentionally ignoring) what they get in return as part of the social contract; it's as though they think that the Public-Goods Fairy will somehow magically provide all those things that they benefit from.
Actually no, they don't believe in the Public-Goods Fairy; it's worse than that: They believe that they're entitled to the profits from their activities while the public should bear the resulting costs, including but not limited to negative externalities such as pollution, addiction, and the like.
And oh, yeah, when they f*** things up — as with the practices that led to the Great Recession, and countless other examples — they lobby to have the taxpayer to bail them out and make sure they get their bonuses.
So if you want to talk about "theft," then that particular modus operandi — privatize the profits, socialize the costs — might be a better candidate
Some are so traumatised by this realisation that they reject the concept entirely and decide that their pampered lives are the natural state of the world. This obviously means that anyone insisting on payment is an extortionist.
Hence the above response.
s/not/and
But she is well known for being a philanthropist and for taking stance against "dirty money", so she probably deserves some credit.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/disney-...
She is as privileged and self-entitled as can be.
I think she is trying to raise the point, that both she and all the others should be properly taxed - and that would be fair and just. Achieving that would in fact notably help people.
A single person giving away 72M$ will not make a difference.
* - there are more poor people and there are few wealthy
The number of poor people doesn't matter -- only how much large their total pool of cash is to extract from.
My first guess was that "scrooge mcduck wealth hoarding" made you a scrooge mcduck wealth hoarder, but good to see you're ruling out the strawmen early.
Congrats on knowing the phrase "straw man" though, even if its not applicable in this case.
-- InternetHippo on Twitter
Of course there are reasonable arguments that shareholders are treated preferentially to labour in our economy and that that's as bad thing, but the basic premise of "the wealthy people have all the stuff so let's take their stuff" is just class warfare, not a reasonable argument.
> not a reasonable argument
It's only "not a reasonable argument" if you mentally substitute how cartoonishly huge, rich, authoritarian, etc. Bezos and Amazon actually are with a mom and pop shop or a guy who owns a single factory.
That is, the format of your money is irrelevant to whether you can be taxed more for it.
But I do find it laughable that educated people think that giving their money to the government is a good idea. It’s one thing to donate to charities. It’s quite another to flush your money down the drain that is the ridiculously dysfunctional US government.
Granted, there's room for improvement, but that comment reflects pretty-extreme "the glass is half empty" thinking.
It's actually freaking amazing that a continent-wide society of nearly 330 million people, of countless ethnicities, religions, and political views, can live as successfully as we collectively do. (Compare the standard of living of poor people in the U.S. with that of poor people in some developing countries.)
Proxy evidence: It's not a coincidence that — by at least an order of magnitude — far more people move to the U.S. than from the U.S. "By a wide margin, the U.S. has more immigrants than any other country in the world." [0]
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/05/18/5-facts-abo...
Are we now done pretending we don't know about the tragedy of the commons?
Yes. And she wants this so much that she is even willing to get taxed along with them.
What is your point?
Besides, what's wrong with virtue signaling if it also has beneficial consequences?
Why that is not an apparent option is beyond me.
People who “give to charity” at this scale have enormous tax breaks that are beyond comprehension. Giving that money to the IRS gives you ZERO tax breaks. This one fact should tell you everything about the people we are talking about.
(What's wrong with someone getting tax breaks if it means they have to put money to a good cause to get it?)
However, one of the ways rich people keep control of their wealth is through all sorts of trust.
I highly recommend that people go Google “ charitable remainder trust” or GRATs and learn about them.
When billionaires give to charity, they are almost always getting something huge in return. They get to sorts of positive press as well.
I’m not arguing for or against any particular policy here, just that when billionaires ask for higher taxes, they’ve already gamed the system. It’s a way of looking good without actually doing good fat least, nowhere near as much as it looks).
[1] https://pay.gov/public/search/global?formSearchCategory=Dona...
Anyone got a rough estimate of what his workers made?