Oceans Yet to Burn

neoliberalism-nightly

argumate

You can imagine a world in which the guardians of the state have a sudden epiphany and realise that involuntary taxation is theft, so they make tax payment completely voluntary, while keeping the rest of the tax code exactly as it is.

To prevent social collapse, people individually enforce the old ways by shaming and ostracising individuals who have not paid their share, and over time this spreads to become an ironclad system where no one will employ you or trade with you if you haven’t made your (entirely voluntary!) tax payments.

Amazingly, this decentralised coordination arrangement produces identical results to our current system, only it is Philosophically Pure as the essential virtues of liberty and freedom are not compromised by men with guns, etc.

Then the people realise all this shaming and ostracising is a lot of effort to go to, and decide to coordinate the enforcement of the tax code in a central authority- oh no, they’ve relapsed into a state of sin! Despite absolutely nothing changing, their community is now Impure and they have all become Slaves once more.

Perhaps this can be called the P-slave hypothesis, for philosophical slaves who will swear up and down that they are not slaves despite clearly living in a world with an income tax code.

neoliberalism-nightly

You can imagine a world in which the guardians of the state have a sudden epiphany and realise that involuntary taxation is theft, so they make tax payment completely voluntary, while keeping the rest of the tax code exactly as it is.

To prevent social collapse, the government fired corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats by the thousands, and consolidated the services they provide to be more efficient and offered them at a reasonable price.

Amazingly, the services offered were hot in demand, and the RGDP grew by 4% the next year even though there was some mild deflation. People brought more and more services for a while until for and not-for profit competitors started to emerge.

Then the government decided that they can better benefit the livelihood of their customers by split themselves into several smaller entities operating in smaller geographical regions, demutualizing into common stock corporations and spinning off some of their assets such as their road portfolio into a REIT.

mitigatedchaos

Is this before or after the Communist revolution that occurs because all of a sudden entire classes of people cannot afford basic Sovereign Services, or find that suddenly Hyper-Platinum™ GovCorp members are immune to prosecution for murdering their servants for sport?

Source: argumate politics the invisible fist

collapsedsquid

argumate

although I do feel that there is some rhetorical space for a hypothetical Ancap nation that isn’t currently occupied, namely turning a jaundiced eye to all forms of organisation: the state, corporations, familial clans, tribes, and telling them all to go to hell lest they institute oppression.

while this isn’t a super realistic scenario, in the context of ancap debates I feel it’s actually not that outlandish!

a society that wants to avoid being dominated by organisations that restrict freedom needs to institute hardcore anti-organisation memes, even to the point of inhibiting freedom of association if necessary; a truly individualistic society deserves nothing less.

discoursedrome

Technically speaking I guess you can just view any given political system as an ancap framework in which all property is already owned by Westphalian states and all other laws are just conventions they’ve established since you have a right to decide how to treat people on your own property.

argumate

Yes, the ground state that we are likely to collapse back into.

But the states-as-people-in-ancapistan concept works well, it even has polycentric law, multiple defense organisations (NATO, Warsaw Pact, alliances) and bilateral and multilateral agreements of all kinds without any top-level state that holds a monopoly on violence (as much as the US would like to play this role).

collapsedsquid

And you can see the downside, it’s the one that Hobbes talked about and is formalized in the realist school of IR. Because it’s an anarchistic, in order to survive you have to be constantly worried about the power of other players and in many cases you damage them to maintain your survival.

mitigatedchaos

Don’t worry m8, we can just replace it with one World Government to resolve these competitions and then-

No, stop killing each other over ideology! We can’t turn the entire world Communist!

Or Islamic!

No, these people have a right to free-

Source: argumate politics shtpost

ranma-official

afloweroutofstone

A few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders’ Twitter account Tweeted one of its true-but-repetitive bumper sticker slogans: “If all of you stand up and fight back against corporate greed, there is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cannot accomplish.” A number of liberals responded saying that this was totally irrelevant to current affairs. One person smugly replied: “We’re dealing with Russians and traitors today, not corporate greed. Do try to keep up.”

That speaks volumes. The suggestion that we shouldn’t be talking about corporate greed right now because our real enemies at the moment are the Russian government and people in our government with personal connections to them, as though corporate power is an occasional blip on our radar we can afford to ignore sometimes, is absurd. Furthermore, if you think foreign governments are more of a problem than America’s own wealthy and powerful, your worldview may not be quite as far away from Trump’s as you think.

ghost-of-algren

Democrats are the dumbest people on earth

misanthropymademe

Russia is also a plutocracy using nationalism to distract from this insight. The fact that the two countries can point at each other means they mutually benefit from keeping up this charade.

ranma-official

The leader of our ruling party is a billionaire who owns castles and wineries and likes to pretend being a duke, all of our natural resource reserves were plundered by oligarchs, all of this was done with aid of the Clintons, and the democrats dare call Russians and not corporate greed the real problem?

mitigatedchaos

ranma-official

The leader of our ruling party is a billionaire who owns castles and wineries and likes to pretend being a duke, all of our natural resource reserves were plundered by oligarchs, all of this was done with aid of the Clintons, and the democrats dare call Russians and not corporate greed the real problem?

Well see, you’re foreigners, but -

Dammit I can’t bring myself to say it even as a joke. : /

Either way, from what I can see there are many people the narrative isn’t working on, at least on the Russia angle, though corporate greed is still ignored. Still, I think I prefer this to the Clinton timeline.

Source: afloweroutofstone

plain-dealing-villain

audible-smiles

is anyone else getting the feeling that we’ll never have a better chance at breaking up the democrat/republican stranglehold than immediately after this trump clusterfuck plummets off the cliff its headed towards? what’s our plan

plain-dealing-villain

Realistically, step one is a constitutional convention. Our system was accidentally designed to fall into a two-party system automatically.

Or you could just have another party realignment but that’s not quite the same thing.

mitigatedchaos

I’m legit hoping the Looming Party Realignment happens, with the Republicans becoming Populist Nationalists and the Democrats becoming Globalist Technocrats. It would be an improvement for both of them, IMO.

Source: audible-smiles politics

saamdaamdandaurbhed

mitigatedchaos

saamdaamdandaurbhed

This has to be the world’s most annoying thread; cousin marriage is actually really common!
In south India, where I’m from, cousin marriage has always been really common, till the recent past when some combination of Brit control, north Indian cultural dominance and urbanisation changed the norms.
I know people whose grandparents married their cousins. And, surprises galore, these people are not possessed by a singular will to always be eating.
Literally, open the wikipedia page:
“According to Professor Robin Fox of Rutgers University, 80% of all marriages in history may have been between second cousins or closer.“
“Charles Darwin and his wife Emma were first cousins.“ And then their descendants have done so much awesome shit that there’s a really long wikipedia page about them.
I mean, come one guys, find it icky as you want, norm-mandated gut reactions aren’t subject to reason, but at least open the wikipedia page before prophesying the death of society.

Something doesn’t have to result in the total death of society to be a bad idea.

According to that same Wikipedia page, Europe banned cousin marriage as a continuation of Roman law. What are the GDP/caps of nations with low cousin marriage rates vs high cousin marriage rates? Why did studies find an inverse relation between cousin marriage and Democracy?

Then, of course, there is the Genetics section of that same page, which, while it might not have much issue with the first generation of cousin marriage, makes it clear that it can become a problem if it’s ongoing in a population.

I mean seriously man,

The report states that these children are 13 times more likely than the general population to produce children with [recessive] genetic disorders, and one in ten children of first-cousin marriages in Birmingham either dies in infancy or develops a serious disability.

Do you have any idea how much money that costs? And more importantly, the wealth that money represents? We might as well create ten thousand tons of steel and throw it into the sea.

It’s noted that it could be due to other factors of population-limited breeding, but that means those other population-limited breeding norms should also be removed.

I’m just not seeing how social advantages outweigh it at the current genetic technology level. It seems much wiser to head off these problems before they start than to spend tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars on medications and possibly later cybernetic prostheses.

And I can’t leave it as an individual choice due to political reasons - the dominant Western morality won’t allow increased medical fee taxes on the child for something the parents did. If it’s allowed and becomes widespread, somehow I am going to have to end up paying for it.

I don’t actually care to heap scorn on Darwin. That isn’t the point. I don’t trust people to be judicious without the taboo, and the taboo cannot be restored once it’s gone.

Source: discoursedrome

argumate

Like if you have a consensus that everyone should commit $X for common good but it’s not enforced, then each individual has temptation to withhold their own contribution, knowing that it won’t count for much in the scheme of things.

If only the morally virtuous contribute and the rest do not, then over time the morally unvirtuous end up controlling most of the assets in society. Great!

mitigatedchaos

Yeah, this was my argument, but they didn’t accept it.

wirehead-wannabe

theunitofcaring

As far as I can tell, the far-right holdouts on the health care bill actually have a really legitimate demand.

So, like, there are a couple ways you can do health care. One is ‘the government decides which services are basic human rights and pays for them’, which is how most countries do it. That’s not happening in the U.S. any time soon. The debate is more between flavors of ‘the government decides which services are basic human rights and then requires insurance companies to cover them and then helps you pay for them with subsidies’.

And the Republicans are offering shit subsidies. So if they have a long list of which services are basic human rights - if they demand that all insurance plans offer genuine comprehensive coverage - then there will not be any health care plans on offer that aren’t obscenely expensive, and most poor people will have to just skip getting health care altogether.

The numbers are all made up, but imagine the Republicans give every person an $800 health care subsidy annually. Then imagine that insurance companies are willing to offer catastrophic coverage - insurance against cancer and heart attacks and getting hit by a bus and being diagnosed with a rare condition whose medications cost $10k a month - which doesn’t cover any routine expenses like wellness checks and dental, doesn’t cover therapy, doesn’t cover addiction programs - for $800/year. And they’re prepared to offer actually decent health insurance - which has minimal co-pays and covers therapy and wellness checks and vaccines and therapy and so on - for $6000 a year.

Right now, by law, they can’t offer the $800 plan, because therapy and addiction programs and wellness checks are things the government considers basic human rights and you are not allowed to offer health insurance that doesn’t cover them. So the only plan you’d be offered is the $6000 one, and if you’re a poor person, you probably can’t make that work, so you don’t buy health insurance at all.

The far-right caucus wants to make it legal to sell the very restricted $800 plan, which doesn’t cover anything close to everything you need but which is, with the subsidy, free. That’s better than no insurance and no subsidy, which is what unmodified Trumpcare gets you.

You’re welcome to be like ‘okay but the government messed up appallingly for this to even be a choice we have’, and you are 100% right. But I’d rather have a bad cheap plan than nothing.

mitigatedchaos

They could have gotten away with healthcare vouchers, but they were too ideological to do it.

Source: theunitofcaring

xhxhxhx

argumate

Trump pushed hard for a bill which failed in a way that made him look weak; sometimes mistakes aren’t evidence of a deeper plan, just regular incompetence.

xhxhxhx

I don’t disagree, but I can believe that Trump believes what he told Robert Costa when he pulled the bill:

“As you know, I’ve been saying for years that the best thing is to let Obamacare explode and then go make a deal with the Democrats and have one unified deal. And they will come to us; we won’t have to come to them,” he said. “After Obamacare explodes.”
“The beauty,” Trump continued, “is that they own Obamacare. So when it explodes, they come to us, and we make one beautiful deal for the people.”

It’s easier to walk away when you believe you can hold the Democrats hostage to their own failure. If the health exchanges fall apart, the Republicans have more leverage. They probably won’t happen – and its wrong to expect that the Republicans won’t take any blame if it does – but it’s not an outlandish belief. Paul Ryan might believe it.

That said, I hope everyone understands now that Donald Trump and Paul Ryan don’t care about health care, don’t care about Americans’ coverage, premiums, or deductibles, can’t deliver the Obamacare repeal and replace they’ve promised, and endorsed a plan that would have ended coverage for 24 million Americans and raised premiums in exchange for tax cuts on health insurers, medical device manufacturers, and the rich.

Americans will just have to wait until Obamacare explodes to see Trump and Ryan’s next beautiful deal.

mitigatedchaos

[incoherent noises about healthcare vouchers]

Source: argumate

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.