I posted this earlier today in the tech lemmy instance, but, they have no sense of humor and deleted it. I'm trying here.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Taxes are capitalist
Ahh yes, taxes which have existed since the first and most basic state came into being -- millennia before capitalism, even at its most primitive, was conceived of or practiced -- are capitalist.
It's kind of incredible how teenagers on the internet use the word "capitalism" the same way boomers on facebook use "communism."
My bad, just meant to argue that taxes weren't explicitly communist. I don't have any strong feelings for or agains t communism yet, maybe I'll look into it later. Just hate to see people use thr name of an economic system as a debate ender, although I suppose I did the same. Guess it's just the debater in me wishing we could have actual structural arguments on thr internet instead of throwing slang words around.
Socialism is the thing you're looking for. And in my opinion, market socialism.
Oh yes, an ideology defined by private ownership and small government intervention is also somehow responsible for the basis of government intervention - taxes.
They don't actually believe in small government intervention at all - they want the goverment to enforce private property rights and then just tax a little back, below the profits from owning that property.
The big lie is that private property is natural, and thus its enforcement is small.
(Edit: clarity)
A government which only enforces private property rights is still significantly smaller than most alternatives.
Enforcement of private property rights is a part of virtually all governments, and then you pile all other stuff on top of that hence making the government bigger.
And ofc the taxes will be below the profits, no sane person would make any investments in anything if it was above the profits.
Edit: and to add, many hardcore capitalists, like minarchists, libertarians, or anarcho capitalists, propose that you don't even need a government to enforce private property rights. They'd rather solve that issue privately.
But I'm comparing against socialism, not against most capitalist countries. We don't need to encourage investment where the factors of production are owned by the workers themselves.
The ancaps illustrate my point - it's absolute monarchy that they falsely claim is anarchy.
I don't think I follow your reasoning tbh. What exactly are you comparing? You said that capitalists favour intervening governments, which is simply not true. Not in any general sense anyway.
Anarcho capitalism is probably as far into anarchy you can go. They want to completely abolish the state and enforce property rights privately.
Or are you saying that such a society will fall into some kind of feudalism? At the core of anarcho capitalism is the NAP which is not really compatible with feudalism. In feudalism you have a hierarchy not based on voluntarism, and that would therefore not be anarcho capitalist.
Do you imply that we need a strong state with a monopoly on violence to keep us in check, otherwise we would descend into chaos? Thats a pretty bleak and pessimistic view of mankind.
I'm comparing existing states to socialism - that's shared ownership of the factors of production, not simply when the government does things.
Private property fails the NAP because it's a person taking away natural resources from everyone else, without their consent, and reimbursing them for less than its value.
Anarcho-capitalism is fuedalism, not just something that will become feudalism in the future. The king is a "property owner enforcing his rights privately" with a lot of tenants. FYI other anarchists generally don't consider ancaps to even be anarchist at all for this reason.
I agree that a monopoly on force is a bad idea. We've tried "vanguard states" already and they don't actually wither away at all. I'd prefer to see housing cooperatives and (as yet nonexistent) p2p prediction markets fill the power vacuum left by land lords. I also generally agree with ancaps that neighborhoods ought to be protected by armed people who live there; my main disagreement is who rightfully owns that neighborhood in the first place.
I do agree to an extent. Anarcho capitalism is perhaps more of a theoretical idea rather than a practical social structure. And it is not possible to uphold the NAP in an absolute sense – it is inevitable to cause aggression in some ways, through e.g. pollution or whatever. And private ownership of natural resources is, let's say tricky.
I am not an anarcho capitalist myself, but I believe society and interactions should be voluntary. But it is difficult to find a practical social structure where that is possible. I am actually rather pessimistic about people tbh, and our track record shows how bad we are at getting along and leaving people be.
(If you'll forgive me going on a tangent...)
Pollution is why I mentioned p2p prediction markets! It's an externalities problem, and any market-based solution to externalities requires the Coase Theorem - which in turn requires extremely low transaction costs.
Basically I think we should all buy climate insurance, and those insurers will have a strong incentive to pay for defense from polluters. But that sort of market will step on a few toes and needs to resist censorship. And it needs to be very very low friction.
That sounds like an interesting idea. So this is a blockchain based idea?
How is it implemented? Is there a payout depending on how the predictions turned out to incentivise positive change?
My favorite proposed implementation is blockchain based - Bitcoin Hivemind. It's a general purpose prediction market but I'd want to use it for pollution in particular.
Basically you can bet on whatever you want. Whatever it is, there's someone betting against you. Most people want insurance against bad things - so they'd bet on rising sea levels, hurricanes, etc in their region. The insurers (those betting the bad thing won't happen) now have an incentive to hedge their risks and bet on what causes those bad things (global CO2 levels).
So ultimately, buying insurance against your house going underwater would create an incentives for other users to do things to reduce pollution. How well this can actually work would depend on total transaction costs being very low, because there'd be several prediction markets between Caribbean hurricane insurance and the pollution prediction market for some factory in Ohio.
I hope that polluters rationally decide to cooperate peacefully, bet against pollution themselves, and then voluntarily reduce it. But if they don't, then someone else can reduce their emissions and get paid anonymously. It's the same mechanism as Jim Bell's assassination politics, but I think killing the physical sources of pollution would be more productive than killing people.
Ah, I see. That is quite clever. And I like the idea of implementing it in non-centralised market. This could be an actual use case for those, instead of all those pictures of cats and monkeys.
This would have to scale quite significantly for those betting against climate change to be able to affect it. Like you say, corporations could cooperate and also gain some goodwill. And venture capitalists, or just any investor, could chip in.
I really like the idea of creating direct economic incentives for positive development, at the same time as you insure those that are harmed if it doesn't go so well. And this would also be global and have direct effects, and not sensitive to populist politicians and temporary government investments like climate politics tend to be today.
Edit: spelling