The Political Thread

[The Legendary Shark]

I'm proud to be a taxpayer. When I watch the news and look at all the things I've helped pay for it makes me all warm inside, things like smart bombs, dumb bombs, hydrogen bombs, neutron bombs, napalm bombs, germ bombs, water bombs, cluster bombs, phosphor bombs, shrapnel bombs, cruise missiles, torpedoes, bunker busters, dam busters, tank busters, depleted uranium bullets, dum-dums, landmines, attack jets, attack helicopters, attack drones, howitzers, mortars, battleships, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, frigates, cruisers, weaponised viruses, assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, pistols, chain guns, gatling guns, hand grenades, tasers, lasers, masers, phasers, sonic cannons, water cannons, long range cannons, short range cannons, mid range cannons, dynamite, thermite, gelignite, MBTs, APCs, AUVs, AFVs, self-propelled multiple rocket launchers, amphibious assault vehicles, armoured cars, bayonets, knives, truncheons, axes, clubs, ceremonial swords, sharp sticks and half bricks - to name but a few.

Once we've used all this shit to wipe out everyone else in the world we'll no longer need it and will be able to put our taxes to work on the next phase of the plan - feeding the hungry, housing the homeless and curing the sick. Oh yeah, I'm a really proud taxpayer, me.

[Jim_Campbell]

Oh yeah, I'm a really proud taxpayer, me.

Ludicrous straw man. Well done.

Cheers

Jim

[The Legendary Shark]

Ludicrous. Exactly.

[COMMANDO FORCES]

So you helped pay for that lot, bloody typical. My taxes go on all the stuff that helps society

[TordelBack]

I'm positively inclined to taxation as a general system as well, but I don't think it's wrong to point out the flaws (even to the point of logical fallacy) and try to think about alternatives.  It's easy to imagine that the situation we live in now is in some way eternal and inevitable, but the only thing we can be sure of it is that it most definitely is not.  There have been many social structures and many ways of moving necessities and surpluses around them, and there will be many more.

[Frank]

So you helped pay for that lot

I don't know how many tax contributions the Shark will have made lately to either the defence budget or the hospitals and staff responsible for saving his life on a number of occasions, so his conscience is clear and his position perfectly coherent on those matters.

He and Amazon's UK staff are free to benefit from living in a society where other peoples' income tax and NI payments make universal healthcare provision and the infrastructure which means folk can have shoes they bought on the internet delivered to their door, upon which they depend, possible. They're welcome, but if they feel uncomfortable with this arrangement there are plenty regions of the world (not exactly nations, per se) they can go to where rugged individualism and self reliance are the principles upon which society is (dis)organised.

[JamesC]

So you helped pay for that lot

I don't know how many tax contributions the Shark will have made lately to either the defence budget or the hospitals and staff responsible for saving his life on a number of occasions, so his conscience is clear and his position perfectly coherent on those matters.

He and Amazon's UK staff are free to benefit from living in a society where other peoples' income tax and NI payments make universal healthcare provision and the infrastructure which means folk can have shoes they bought on the internet delivered to their door, upon which they depend, possible. They're welcome, but if they feel uncomfortable with this arrangement there are plenty regions of the world (not exactly nations, per se) they can go to where rugged individualism and self reliance are the principles upon which society is (dis)organised.

But surely, even if you wholeheartedly agree with our system of taxation, you can still have criticisms of the way that system is being used?

[Frank]

even if you wholeheartedly agree with our system of taxation, you can still have criticisms of the way that system is being used?

I don't think our current tax legislation is fit for purpose, but even if that changes we'll still all be responsible for making sure our elected (and unelected) representatives don't piss our money away on floating duck houses, extraordinary rendition flights to Diego Garcia, and Trident.

[The Legendary Shark]

Hey, if my society says I should die if I can't pay then I'll die. Why would I want to live in a society like that anyway? My mind does boggle at the suggestion that one is only allowed access to society if one can pay for it.

One way I like to look at it is to reduce the entire population of the world to just two people. If one of those two people needs help and the other will only provide help if the first pays for it then I make a judgement based on that. If the first person needs help to paint his house then the other is perfectly entitled to request payment but if the first person needs help to extinguish a house fire then the other is not entitled to withold help unless payment is made. If you saw somebody bleeding to death in the street and refused to help unless you got paid then that, in my opinion, would be wrong. What is acceptable between two people becomes no more or less acceptable because it's between two hundred, two million or two billion people.

This culture of "pay up or fuck off" is anathema to me. As I said earlier, authority never asks for permission and that is wrong in my book - as wrong as me going through your wallet and taking whatever I want without asking. We must free ourselves of this mindless obedience we've fallen into and start thinking about doing things with honesty and honour.

[JOE SOAP]

Personally I'm just glad to see TLS on top literary form.

The Leg. Sha. or Times Lit. Supp.?

[Jim_Campbell]

My mind does boggle at the suggestion that one is only allowed access to society if one can pay for it.

Ludicrous strawman is ludicrous.

The essence of this is distilled perfectly in Blanc and then Marx's "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

The point is not that everyone should pay, or be excluded from the benefits of society, the point is that if no one pays then there is no means of delivering the benefits of society. Exchange of goods and services in your village is all well and good if your roof needs fixing and you have something the roof-fixer wants, but it doesn't get hospitals and schools and suspension bridges built.

Cheers

Jim

[The Legendary Shark]

The only thing that builds hospitals, schools and suspension bridges is human beings. To think that the application of an inherantly flawed and patently artificial non-human agency (money, taxes, government) is required before anything can happen is no better than superstition. One might as well claim that Christmas is dependent upon the actions of Santa Claus and the application of magic pixie dust.

[Jim_Campbell]

One might as well claim that Christmas is dependent upon the actions of Santa Claus and the application of magic pixie dust.

I am well aware of money's nature as a consensual fiction, but it is the lubricant by which society is facilitated. I have explained at some length in this very thread why money or some equivalent system of tokens becomes both necessary and inevitable once any society reaches a certain level of complexity. At the point where each individual ceases to be directly and solely responsible for the provision of food and shelter for their family unit, some form of units-of-agreed-value becomes necessary.

Your continued insistence that with the world the way it is now it is possible to hypothesise a complex developed-world society that functions without some form of money is entirely delusional. If you want to roll human development back to a hunter-gatherer basis and posit some kind of guiding authority that will gently steer them away from a units-of-agreed-value system of exchanging goods and services, well, there's no reason why you shouldn't but it's little more of a flight of fancy than my suggesting that it's hard to build a suspension bridge without putting up some cash.

Cheers

Jim

[The Legendary Shark]

I don't disagree that money can be a useful tool but, as I have often observed, we do not use money any more but promissory notes issued and therefore entirely owned by private banks which, as you well know, do not possess the gold, silver or other assets to give their notes any real value. What I think you are basically saying (and please correct me if I've misunderstood) is that it would be difficult to build a suspension bridge without promies, with which I wholeheartedly agree. These promises are not monetary but promises given by human beings - the promise of the architect that he or she is capable of designing a safe and adequate structure, the promise of miners that they can provide enough ore, the promise of foundry workers that the ore can be refined to proper standards, the promise of steel workers that the correct components can be manufactured, the promise of the haulier to get the component parts of the bridge to the correct place at the correct time, the promise of the bridge builder that the components can be properly assembled, the promise of construction workers to turn up and do the work and so on and on. Each one of these promises is more important, more real, than the promissory notes society deems so important and legitimate.

In the post you linked to you wrote "What government money does is formalise that arrangement, enabling us to exchange labour or goods with whomever we please in return for tokens that we can trade in for food and shelter." This, to my mind, is the basic flaw in your argument; that government is an essential part of the process of building the suspension bridge and that without the foundation of government virtually nothing is possible.

Government is a myth.

I should explain that last bold statement. If you were to be driving your car down my road unaware that one of your brake lights had burned out and I was to force you to stop and demand money from you because of this, you would quite properly tell me to sling my hook. If, on the other hand, a "government" thug, or police officer, were to do the same thing you would comply. What is more, if you refused to stop for the officer you would expect to be chased down, forced to stop, ordered to pay and maybe even be kidnapped and held to ransom. You might even expect to have your car stolen and held to ransom until you paid up. If I do not have the right to do these things to you, how can the government claim such rights unless it is some kind of superhuman or divine entity?

You might argue that the government has these rights because it has passed laws to assume them but, how is this possible? Governments are run by human beings (usually the worst kind of selfish, greedy and power-hungry human beings in society) so how can they legitimately pass laws affording them more rights and powers than the human beings who elected them? Just like promissory notes, the only thing giving governments legitimacy is our faith in them and the myths they propogate to reinforce that faith - just like religion or superstition or belief in Santa Claus.

Blind faith in the legitimacy of governments, and by extension government backed money, has led to the greatest crimes and calamities in human history as any cursory examination will more than adequately demonstrate. People like Hitler and Stalin would always have been monstrous individuals but, had they not been voted into "government" and then believed by the populace to be legitimate "lawmakers" their assaults on humanity would have been no more abominable than the assaults of Ian Brady or Fred West. Harold Shipman murdering several patients was seen as utterly wrong by the public but, had he been elevated to the position of Prime Minister and passed laws allowing patients to be euthenized by the thousands he would have been seen as at least partially legitimate until the laws he had passed could be repealed.

You might further argue that the government rules by consent but this is patently and demonstrably untrue. In order for a population to be governed by consent then the government must act on behalf of Everyone, which is clearly not and never has been the case. All any government can do is impose the will of one section of society upon another, which clearly breaches consent. If our government was truly a government of consent then any one of us could ignore its requests - but it does not request, it demands. And if we refuse those demands it visits varying degrees of violence upon us. This is simple thuggery, no different from a street gang.

If a street gang were to demand all your money under threat of violence you would be seen as within your rights and even heroic for resisting. If the government were to demand all your money under threat of violence (forcible arrest and incarceration) you would be seen as criminal and even evil for resisting. Such is the myth of government.

"Government backed money", then, is as fictitious as consentual government, Santa Claus or magic pixie dust.

[Zarjazzer]

 Absence of government does not make people automatically good. It's the sort of nonsense knocked out by right wing think tanks. All laws are based on force otherwise they are just words and nothing else. This appears to have little to do with those wicked governments and everything to do with your own,  anti authoritarian personality TLS.  Pixie dust doesn't put you in prison if you break the law either.