Great article by Walter E. Williams that helps explain why socialism is a fundamentally evil concept.
I'd go even further and say it's also insipid because its supporters actually believe that supporting socialism actually makes them morally superior.
Imagine there's an elderly widow down the street from you. She has neither the strength to mow her lawn nor enough money to hire someone to do it. Here's my question to you that I'm almost afraid for the answer: Would you support a government mandate that forces one of your neighbors to mow the lady's lawn each week? If he failed to follow the government orders, would you approve of some kind of punishment ranging from house arrest and fines to imprisonment? I'm hoping that the average American would condemn such a government mandate because it would be a form of slavery, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another. Would there be the same condemnation if instead of the government forcing your neighbor to physically mow the widow's lawn, the government forced him to give the lady $40 of his weekly earnings? That way the widow could hire someone to mow her lawn. I'd say that there is little difference between the mandates. While the mandate's mechanism differs, it is nonetheless the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.
Imagine there's an elderly widow down the street from you. She has neither the strength to mow her lawn nor enough money to hire someone to do it. Here's my question to you that I'm almost afraid for the answer: Would you support a government mandate that forces one of your neighbors to mow the lady's lawn each week? If he failed to follow the government orders, would you approve of some kind of punishment ranging from house arrest and fines to imprisonment? I'm hoping that the average American would condemn such a government mandate because it would be a form of slavery, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.
Would there be the same condemnation if instead of the government forcing your neighbor to physically mow the widow's lawn, the government forced him to give the lady $40 of his weekly earnings? That way the widow could hire someone to mow her lawn. I'd say that there is little difference between the mandates. While the mandate's mechanism differs, it is nonetheless the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.
Read the whole thing: http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2008/11/19/evil_concealed_by_money
But in a way its still insurance right?
See I didnt know what my taxes pay. I know I get FICA.... and not sure exactly what it is and never got a clear answer when I asked.
FICA is Social Security and Medicare.
Social Security is matched by the employer, but anything including UI is factored into the value of labor--nothing is charitable.
This is a very good point.. after all you can only get UI if there is a legit reason for getting fired ( Ive had to collect when I got fired for taking 2 days off in 5 months both for specailist apointments out of town for my kids, didnt have the FMLA so pretty much because it didnt fall under FMLA ( need 1 working year by law ) I got the UI ) so I guess your right ... you do have to work in order to qulify and on top of that you need to make enough money to get it
It is all factored in. A company has X dollars to pay for work. Every hidden tax (and the employer side of FICA, Medicaid, UI, etc. are hidden from employees) is factored into the equation. So they pay you less based upon what they have to pay the government.
So they pay you less based upon what they have to pay the government.
It's a bit more difficult than that.
What the company pay a given employee is a sum X between two values A and B, with A being the least amount the employee is willing to work for (or minimum wage) and B being the highest amount the company are willing or able, whichever is lower, to pay.
Hidden taxes lower B, but do not lower A. Hence they might or might not lower X, depending on the situation.
It's possible that hiddex taxes are bad for employees who are good negotiators and who are therefore more likely to have a wage higher than their A.
One extreme case is hidden taxes lowering B below A. But whether A would simply follow the lead or not, I don't know.
And with taxes it's even worse.
At the federal level is that the community comes together and decides that some people, but not themselves, will be forced to donate.
I like Robin Hood but people don't remember history. He wasn't robbing from the rich to give to the poor. He was robbing from the tax collector and giving it back to the people.
Re: Slavery
Forcing one individual to work for another individual is slavery.
Taxation, on its own, isn't evil.
The issue is how those taxes are used.
If taxes are used to provide services that everyone uses to some extent (roads, schools, police, fire, etc.) that can be argued to be reasonable.
If those taxes are used to give money to specific individuals, then that is evil because the money that was taken in taxes essentially means that person worked for that other person.
To use the little old widow example, if society decided that the government was going to start providing lawn care for all Americans, I would vote against it but there's nothing inhernetly evil about that because we all can potentially make use of this service.
But the government giving the little old lady money directly to hire someone to take care of her lawn is evil.
Liberals probably mistake Robin Hood for Dennis Moore:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLkhx0eqK5w
Well, technically we all can make use of social welfare as well. It's just that we don't want everyone to be on the dole. We might arguably want everyone to have a nicely cared for lawn though.
We definitely do want everyone to be defended against foreign attacks, protected against violation of their rights by fellow citizens and others, and helped against fires. Hence we keep an army, a police force, and fire brigades.
I think there are four categories:
1. Services only the government can provide by definition. This includes your army, courts of law, a police force etc.. These are services that no private citizen can legally provide.
2. Natural monopolies and efficiency monopolies. These are services that are either unique or would actually suffer from competition. These are your roads and fire brigade. It also includes public safety legislation (having competing FDA would destroy the purpose of the FDA).
3. Services provided to everyone where there is no inherent problem with everyone making use of them. These include a lawn care service and public health care. Education is also part of this, although first and second level education might be considered part of category 2.
4. Services provided to everyone where there is an inherent problem with everyone making use of them. This is social welfare. While everyone CAN stop working and apply for these programs, society would collapse if it happened. (This is in contrast to category 3 services. Society does not collapse if health care is nationalised and everyone makes use of it. Neither is it dangerous if everyone goes to state schools.)
I guess political positions are different depending on where they draw the line. Liberals tend to draw no line (because it's not their own money, probably). I would draw the line between either 2 and 3 or between 3 and 4. I am definitely and positively against category 4 services being provided by government. And I am definitely and positively for category 2 services being provided by government.
Line drawn between:
0-1: anarchist
1-2: classical liberal (night watchman state)
2-3: neo-liberal
3-4: European liberal
no line drawn: American "liberal"
Robbery is theft with force, and theft is illegally taking someone elses property. Taxation is legal, and hence is not robbery. However since you seem to be repeating the mantra that taxing for redistribution isn't taxation but is slavery, are you really saying that a government policy that takes 10% on the first $20k, and 50% on any income above that isn't taxation but is slavery?! If you're still insisting that it isn't taxation then I agree, there's little chance of an intelligent discussion being possible. Even if you do acknowledge it's taxation it'd still mean you'll have then contradicted yourself (because such a tax is redistributive in nature), but at least it would be some progress.
More socialism/communism attacks? Rather amusing, since it means you're saying that the US, UK, Western Europe, and pretty well every developed country out there has a government practicing stuff WAYYY beyond socialism and is stealing+enslaving it's population (since all of those countries have some form of redistribution in their tax system). It doesn't matter what the money raised by taxation is spent on, because it doesn't affect whether it is taxation or not. Besides which it's usually pretty well impossible to work out what taxes funded the money spent by government - typically it just goes into a great 'pot' - the government gets all of it's revenue from taxes, and then spends it all (and a bit more usually) on various projects. It's fairly rare to have taxes with revenue specifically earmarked for particular projects. Hence your notion that you determine if something is a tax by how the money is spent wouldn't work even if it was the case. As for your zimbabwe mention, the issue there was more to do with property rights than taxation.
Actually he often would provide a service - for example protection from bandits (since if bandits routinely came and stole all the villagers produce and/or killed them, the lord wouldn't get any more money). Also it was taxation. Slavery would be if you had 100% taxation (which wouldn't really be taxation anyway, it would just be slavery). Any less and you don't have taxation - you could have the government taking 99% of your income, for example, and it's taxation not slavery (for example in the UK not too long ago that happened, with the rich being taxed on almost everything they made - it wasn't slavery, it was just high taxation). If the Lord is taking 50% of everything that the people living in his 'kingdom' make, that's a tax. It doesn't matter if he uses the money to line his crown and build a palace, or if he uses it to hire+equip soldiers for protection, and establish a network of roads to encourage trade. Either way, it's a tax.
The real question you should be asking is would calling tax slavery really make it slavery? (and the answer is no)
Edit: Missed out a few responses (must have had this page open from a while ago+not refreshed it), so the above may be slightly outdated
Even in the the Dark ages people with wealth still payed more tax mate. The value of labor was less then the value of stuff.
And if you refuse to pay the taxes to give to paul the nice policement will come and use force.
Hey look, slavery was/is legal in certain places/times. I guess that makes it not slavery since we arbitrarily decide to add "illigally" to the definition.
No we explained that before, that is disproportinate taxation... you take MORE from bob then you do from joe, and then you give BOTH of them roads. disproportionate taxation.. if you take from joe to give to bob and not to joe, then you are going into the realm of slavery.
No it isn't. It CAN be redistributive, it CAN be disproportinate, and it CAN be equal.
No, those countries have socialism, things like socialized healthcare and unimployment insurence... The only country that practices redistribution is zimbabwe... and if people like you get their way, the USA would as well.
No he didn't. A single lord cannot stop a group of bandits (unless he is level 20), what he would do is draft serfs and have them fight bandits... and other lords so that he could conquer more lands and more serfs.
That is a question of who gets it, the government can take 100% of your income and not be slavery, just communism as long as they take 100% of everyone else and provide for all equally as they do to everyone else, that would be disproportionate taxation. The moment the government takes from you, and gives to someone else, aka providing for his needs with your money but NOT providing for YOUR needs, then it is slavery.
Thats what he calls it.. but as long he is calling it a tax while taking money to line his own pockets then it is indirect slavery...
Cheesemakers, bee keepers, craftsmen and most importantly... merchants. Wealth is not created by subsistance farmers, which is what most people were back then.
this again comes to the definition of wealth... the nobility were a TINY fraction of the population, the nobility lived by "taxing" people to pay themselves. Some went to building their private armies with conscripts as well, which they then used to fight each other for more land and power. Or provide aid to their leige (aka, higher ranking noble) in his fights.
But society was not made up of nobles and farmers. Farmers were the most common, and nobles the most rare, but there were many in between.
The Founding Fathers were not subsistance famers. Do you even know what subsistance means?
lol. The bottom 50% of the US population controls 3% of the nations wealth though YOU (directed at Stevendedalus [major] and other socialists [minor]) might think its bad but the bottom 50% of the WORLD only controls 1% of the total wealth.
So not only do US citizens get a bigger slice of pie then the rest of the world, our so called poor controls 3 times the percent of it here verses the truely poor.
Wow, what an achievement to have slightly better inequality levels than dictatorships and various countries/regimes which look to keep the wealth within a tiny elite while the majority of the population struggle to survive.
the old satire in the 50s that Commie equality means everybody is destitute
Satire?
I think the satire was the propaganda that told us different.
Have you seen eastern Europe in 1990?
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