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Political Philosophy
BigWillieStyles
Expert flipper of tablesInside my mind...Registered User regular
Expert flipper of tablesInside my mind...Registered User regular
What's your political philosophy? Why do you believe what you do? Can you adequately defend it to random people on the Internet? If you answered "yes" to that last question, this is the place for you!
What about me? My personal intellectual hero is F. A. Hayek, founder of modern microeconomic thought. I like to call myself what he ended up calling himself near the end of his life: fiscal libertarian.
Most issues can be posited in fiscal terms (even most social issues, outside of abortion.)
My belief is simple: I trust the power of spontaneous order in a mostly free market capitalistic system. This means significantly less regulation and taxation than the current U.S. economy has.
The tax code really needs to be simplified, one page is all it really needs. (Sorry, accountants, you'll be far less useful if that were to happen.) The corporate tax code really needs to be cut.
In contrast to Frank Underwood of House of Cards, I think money is more important than power. Both money and power grant a person a measure of freedom. Unfortunately, the freedom power grants you comes at a steep price: constant vigilance. Because power is fleeting. You got to be on that shit 24/7 to keep that power. The freedom that money, and I mean multi-billions here, is the freedom to do whatever you want. If you become a billionaire running a hedge fund, you never need to work another day in your life and can do basically anything you want from then on. Form a band, spend your days whittling, take up painting, whatever. So much more freedom than power grants. Power might grant more influence, but no one really has the power to shape the world around them exactly. To think you do is the Fatal Conceit.
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."--F. A. Hayek
Discuss away.
What about me? My personal intellectual hero is F. A. Hayek, founder of modern microeconomic thought. I like to call myself what he ended up calling himself near the end of his life: fiscal libertarian.
Most issues can be posited in fiscal terms (even most social issues, outside of abortion.)
My belief is simple: I trust the power of spontaneous order in a mostly free market capitalistic system. This means significantly less regulation and taxation than the current U.S. economy has.
The tax code really needs to be simplified, one page is all it really needs. (Sorry, accountants, you'll be far less useful if that were to happen.) The corporate tax code really needs to be cut.
In contrast to Frank Underwood of House of Cards, I think money is more important than power. Both money and power grant a person a measure of freedom. Unfortunately, the freedom power grants you comes at a steep price: constant vigilance. Because power is fleeting. You got to be on that shit 24/7 to keep that power. The freedom that money, and I mean multi-billions here, is the freedom to do whatever you want. If you become a billionaire running a hedge fund, you never need to work another day in your life and can do basically anything you want from then on. Form a band, spend your days whittling, take up painting, whatever. So much more freedom than power grants. Power might grant more influence, but no one really has the power to shape the world around them exactly. To think you do is the Fatal Conceit.
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."--F. A. Hayek
Discuss away.
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Money is probably more important that power, yes, but largely only because those with power listen to those with money.
You can't have a one page tax code that is sensible. If you think you can, then try it
I'll make the same suggestion I make to every libertarian, which is to read The Jungle.
EDIT: Also, this.
EDIT2: Also also civil rights.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."
"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."
"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable"
I think you're seriously underestimating how complex it is to collect taxes from 200ish million people. I agree that the current tax code is absurdly complex, but it was made that way through a million iterative changes that all responded to some deficiency that was there. The tax code can be simplified but not down to one page, come on.
I also think you're conflating money and power. Once you get to the level you're talking about, they're really interchangeable. You have several billion dollars which is always gonna come with power, and the fact that you're powerful means it's much easier to collect more money. It's the root cause of a whole hell of a lot of social problems
Also: left-anarchism is pretty cool. I wouldn't call myself one, but I think the philosophy has a lot of useful ideas that could be used to make life less shitty for a lot of people
hitting hot metal with hammers
This is also the case because the government isn't allowed to just do stuff anymore, so it has to legislate through tax incentives for the most part.
But.
Indeed. Attempting to legislate via the tax code has made the tax code a clusterfuck.
It might be better to simply say fuck it and try to pay for stuff directly. Though god knows I'm sure the rich would still find a way to hide their money.
Could you explain this in greater detail?
Wouldn't be difficult. Everyone pays X% of their income in taxes, no deductions. 9% would my preferred rate for everybody. 9% rate for corporations.
And those bad things could happen at the time of The Jungle because the Internet didn't exist and everybody didn't have a computer with a camera on it in their pocket. And the states are free to regulate how they wish. I just don't think the federal government should do most of what it does. Because it doesn't have to do most of what it does. If it only did what it MUST do, we'd be a lot better off.
The Tragedy of the Commons, while interesting in theory, doesn't hash as much in practice like the people who favor the theory think it does.
Civil rights? Libertarians are all for those. Just treat everybody the same. No special treatment. And, before you quote Barry Goldwater, his reasoning for voting against the CRA of 1964 was due to it taking away certain business rights away. Whether it was right to do that or not is really not the issue here.
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My preferred rate is closer to 50%.
Edit: And on the bolded citation please?
Because those fucks have a lot to answer for. Anybody here from Wisconsin want to back me up on that? I'm from a little further south, so I have not seen it first hand.
Why
@BigWillieStyles
Keynes is far better than Hayek, especially for conservatives. "Save during the good times, spend during the bad" has been good fiscal policy since the days of the Biblical Joseph.
Also if you don't think business will screw over the consumer at the first opportunity, take a look at the ways China's food industry saves money- bleach in the milk? Soy sauce made from human hair? Marinating goat meat in urine to pass off as lamb? No thank you.
Another example would be the U.S. airline industry. Passengers often must buy additional tickets when their flight is canceled, netting more profit for the airline. edit FUCK THIS GUY I share the hatred of Teddy Roosevelt, Greatest American, for the fat cats of Wall Street.
Being amoral (different than immoral), business will always gravitate towards whatever provides the most profit. It's the job of the government to ensure that business doesn't harm the consumer or the employee while doing so.
The tax code is complex because an absurdly simple code is absurdly simple to game. So laws are made to prevent that gaming. Which is further gamed. And so on.
Collecting taxes from rich people is a never ending game of relativistic Antarean HyperChess. And each chess piece is also a game of relativistic Antarean HyperChess.
this sounds like it would work really well and not cause any problems and also probably has lots of compelling historical precedents to support it
i'm convinced
Why a flat rate rather than the historically more useful progressive tax system that is used literally everywhere in the world?
But more importantly, why 9%?
Big Sim City fan?
Just give me a few examples of issues you think can't be put in fiscal terms. Let me dazzle you. That's what I'm here for.
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Maybe he's a Herman Cain fan?
This is why. That's not how this place works, nor is it how actual debate works.
You want to prove something, prove it. It's not up to anyone else to disprove it for you.
Why 9%? Let's start there.
What the Koch Brothers do is in plain view of the public. There's plenty of rich people who do really insidious things backroom-dealin'-wise. Tom Steyer. George Soros (the tentacles of his organizations' reach, damn.)
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Somehow I'm doubting that.
Just call me Thomas!
The super rich are usually Democrat while the regular rich are Republican. The upper 1% of the 1% are Democrats.
And William F. Buckley chased the Birchers out of the GOP a long-ass time ago.
Keynes' theories have been stretched to comic proportions by Neo-Keynesians like Paul Krugman, who seriously argued that 9/11 would be a boon for the economy as would faking an alien invasion.
Because the constriction of information and basic human rights in China aren't the problem there, huh?
My dad is a professor who annually lectures about the airline industry. Smaller airports are losing money hand over fist.
No, that's not the job of the federal government. States can do what they want. 10th Amendment, man.
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Because those two videos are shit?
I mean, good production values, catchy songs, but they are slanted and shady as fuck.
How much anal sex is enough?
Do these pants make my ass look big?
Why the fuck can't the writers for Castle move Kate and Rick past the getting married stage?
If you want a larger scale issue try this: What level of nationalism is ideal for determining the size and composition of a nation-state and what role does ethnicity play in the nation state, especially in light of Wilson's principles at the end of World War I?
My question was about the "outside of abortion".
I know that any issue can be assessed in fiscal terms. My question is about the exception you posited: "outside of abortion".
Why is abortion the exception?
Why tolerate the rich breaking the law, then? Why refrain from making examples? Why refrain from seizing their worldly possessions and throwing them in prison?
I really am interested. Why is 9% the best rate? Why not 10? Why not 8?
Because they are the obvious ones.
And 9% is laughably low. The current revenues are around 20% of GDP, and say goodbye to cheap borrowing as nobody will lend to the US if they have an insane tax policy
Do you really think that the internet and cellphones would prevent the jungle-like things from happening? Okay, people getting processed as meat, probably. Unsafe bacteria-riddled food going through? Nope. And that having fifty different regulatory schemes would improve over having one? (Never mind all the meat processing companies suddenly shift all their plants to the state with the slackest laws).
He's secretly Herman Cain.
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trust it to do what? This isn't a philosophy.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I mean.
Like
at all.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
This is not happening in the 1890s. This is not happening in far off China or North Korea.
This is happening today, right now, in the United States.
The free market is not made more perfect because of the internet. The tragedy of the commons, while misused as all things are, is alive and well.
Now, why in Adam Smith's name is 9% the ideal tax rate?
This is actually less reasonable then just saying you pulled it randomly from your ass.
That is... terrible. Besides if you were really a marketer it would be 9.99%!