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On November 11 2017 11:34 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 13:52 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
Why is the bartering village using dollars? Remove the dollars, try again.
What objective system of valuation are you using to show that you're producing more value than the fast food worker from your day? Remembering of course that you're already justifying the getting more money than them by the fact that you create more value so you cannot complete the circle and use the more money to prove the greater value. Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same. But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily. To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"? That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of. I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag. I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever? Being gifted money is outside the realm of an economic system. You'd want to look at the genesis of that $10MM, and figure it the person who earned it did something productive enough to warrant the $$. Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair? Yeah.. it kind of is. After that person dies someone inherits the vineyard. Someone has to own it, and since it is still productive it generates income for the inheritor and society (taxes, consumption). The inheritor part certainly feels less fair. Though everyone working in the US inherits some of the previous generation's legacy and that probably feels unfair to people in poorer countries too. No perfect solutions at the extreme to solve.. it's a balancing act.
Gifting money is totally a thing.
My point was simply that the person who was gifted the money isn't "working harder/more efficiently than others" who get paid less or "earning" $150,000/yr but that would be their income. An example of Kwark's point of income not connecting to the "work" with which one "earns" income.
Surely Mozu and others can see why that person didn't "earn" their income by being more efficient or working harder than the majority of Americans that get compensated for actual work at a much lower rate.
EX: Bill gates gifts me 100 million dollars at random. I make a rudimentary investment. Now I make more money than anyone here no matter what you do for a living. Maybe that will make it easier for people to understand I didn't earn the privilege of being the wealthiest person on the forum with the highest income?
+ Show Spoiler +If you make more than $1m a year gtfo this site and do something with your life
EDIT: Also this:
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So instead of negotiating a better deal for America, we are choosing not to take part at all. I believe LegalLord was saying a few weeks ago that this was for the best for some reason. Guess it’s no biggie to cede some of our presence in the Pacific over to China for no gain.
I understand that parts of TPP weren’t good for certain US sectors but having no trade deal at all with eleven other nations seems like a worse option here.
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I still don't understand what the point of leaving that agreement was
Political rebellion is great and all but nobody has the power to vote global trade away
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Not being in TPP doesn't mean trade with those nations won't exist.
The reason for leaving tpp is that Trump has to be consistent with his rhetoric on 'economic nationalism', despite it long being considered a really bad idea by most economists. Trumps economic policy is heavily influenced by Peter Navarro, a guy few had ever heard of before but seems to have been the only economist around defending this kind of nonsense (from the right's perspective. You can also find some similarly misguided economists on the left).
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On November 11 2017 16:08 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 11:34 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same.
But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily.
To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"?
That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of. I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag. I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever? Being gifted money is outside the realm of an economic system. You'd want to look at the genesis of that $10MM, and figure it the person who earned it did something productive enough to warrant the $$. Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair? Yeah.. it kind of is. After that person dies someone inherits the vineyard. Someone has to own it, and since it is still productive it generates income for the inheritor and society (taxes, consumption). The inheritor part certainly feels less fair. Though everyone working in the US inherits some of the previous generation's legacy and that probably feels unfair to people in poorer countries too. No perfect solutions at the extreme to solve.. it's a balancing act. Gifting money is totally a thing. My point was simply that the person who was gifted the money isn't "working harder/more efficiently than others" who get paid less or "earning" $150,000/yr but that would be their income. An example of Kwark's point of income not connecting to the "work" with which one "earns" income. Surely Mozu and others can see why that person didn't "earn" their income by being more efficient or working harder than the majority of Americans that get compensated for actual work at a much lower rate. EX: Bill gates gifts me 100 million dollars at random. I make a rudimentary investment. Now I make more money than anyone here no matter what you do for a living. Maybe that will make it easier for people to understand I didn't earn the privilege of being the wealthiest person on the forum with the highest income? + Show Spoiler +If you make more than $1m a year gtfo this site and do something with your life EDIT: Also this:
I actually think Danglars has conceded a point here that is not true. Gifting and inheritance are not outside of the economic system, but are, largely, the incentives that cause moderately wealthy people to push to become extremely wealthy, or even moderately more wealthy. That is, the ability to give and leave money to heirs (or other people) is a but-for cause of a significant amount of the wealth that we are talking about.
This shouldn't be a very controversial idea to progressives, the marginal value of money is the moral argument for things like the progressive income tax. And maybe it doesn't apply to someone as wealthy as Bill Gates (although IMO his foundation, despite doing some good work, is not a very good use of his time and money, so maybe it does), but it certainly applies to the average businessman. There is a point in any economic system where kids are independent, you have put them through school, etc (although there are some that say that even these familial contributions are unearned and unfair, but I'll ignore them) and then the question really is, "why keep working?" If you have enough to retire on the reason really boils down to leaving a little more to the kids/grandkids. There are exceptions of people who dream of extravagant retirements, but really most people don't actually change. Sure if they traveled a lot before they will travel, but people who never traveled but say they want to actually aren't that likely to change their habits after retirement.
So we have this money that exists as a result of Person A's labor, and the best evidence we have is that Person A intended for that to be for Person B, and there is no reason for us to know whether the labor preceded the intent to gift or the intent preceded the labor. And if it is that the intent caused the labor, the existence of Person B and their relationship with Person A is actually equivalent in value (to society) to the gift given.
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On November 11 2017 16:08 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 11:34 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same.
But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily.
To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"?
That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of. I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag. I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever? Being gifted money is outside the realm of an economic system. You'd want to look at the genesis of that $10MM, and figure it the person who earned it did something productive enough to warrant the $$. Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair? Yeah.. it kind of is. After that person dies someone inherits the vineyard. Someone has to own it, and since it is still productive it generates income for the inheritor and society (taxes, consumption). The inheritor part certainly feels less fair. Though everyone working in the US inherits some of the previous generation's legacy and that probably feels unfair to people in poorer countries too. No perfect solutions at the extreme to solve.. it's a balancing act. Gifting money is totally a thing. My point was simply that the person who was gifted the money isn't "working harder/more efficiently than others" who get paid less or "earning" $150,000/yr but that would be their income. An example of Kwark's point of income not connecting to the "work" with which one "earns" income. Surely Mozu and others can see why that person didn't "earn" their income by being more efficient or working harder than the majority of Americans that get compensated for actual work at a much lower rate. EX: Bill gates gifts me 100 million dollars at random. I make a rudimentary investment. Now I make more money than anyone here no matter what you do for a living. Maybe that will make it easier for people to understand I didn't earn the privilege of being the wealthiest person on the forum with the highest income? + Show Spoiler +If you make more than $1m a year gtfo this site and do something with your life EDIT: Also this:
You can't pretend the value of the gift (and its time equivalent) just appeared out of thin air. If I want to sell enough of my labor to not only have take care of myself, but also someone of my choosing, what business is it of someone else's? Other than being petty, that is.
Whether or not the money is a gift is irrelevant, so we can ignore the fact that beneficiary of capital returns isn't the one who sold his labor to earn the starting capital. To answer the final question left, the fact that efficiency advantages compound upon themselves is irrelevant to the arguments I've already put forth.
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300 sealed indictments! Right after the Saudi purge... I think this is the storm folks!
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On November 11 2017 08:15 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 07:35 Artisreal wrote:On November 11 2017 05:49 Danglars wrote:On November 11 2017 05:44 Artisreal wrote:On November 11 2017 05:31 Danglars wrote:On November 11 2017 05:09 IyMoon wrote:On November 11 2017 04:44 Danglars wrote:On November 11 2017 04:27 IyMoon wrote:On November 11 2017 04:26 Danglars wrote:On November 11 2017 04:19 IyMoon wrote:
[quote]
Nobody is quoting the first part of the post because nobody thinks he will ever do that (spoiler alert, he won't)
Voting for a pedophile because you're scared of the liberals is the dumbest thing I have ever seen as a real defense. Fucking write in strange, just do a big write in campaign. If it takes a little more work to note vote for a pedophile then do the damn work.
Sorry, dead victims and fined/jailed business owners does heighten the stakes of the election. It's more of a "has done/continue to do" rather than present scared. I mean the Obama administration actually sued Catholic nuns to force compliance and took it to the supreme court. Things would be different if you were in the cross hairs and not people that think and act differently than you. Empathy is in short supply. Empathy is in short supply? Did you forget the part where I said just write in the other R? Who will easily win because its Alabama "because you're scared of the liberals" is reductive and nonsense. I stated the reasons. That's before moving on.
Write-ins would fight against Moore's name (high name recognition due to his long history in Alabama) on the ballot and time is short. It's next month. You would spend half that period simply staffing before canvassing for the write in campaign. Replacing someone under accusation of child molestation with someone rejected in the primary for corruption is not a high gain. I still have sympathy for voters that still choose Moore. Too hard, better vote pedo Your rights aren't under threat, better look the other way. Great logic, friend. Ohh the irony, this coming from you. If you disagree on extreme race rhetoric, you're against black rights. If you see Christians fined under threat of jailing for religious free expression and support for Christian church tax exemption fade, you shrug your shoulders. It's pretty much expected by now. I mean it's fucking ridiculous to say the church needs the tax exemption in the first place much less it deserves it. I absolutely encourage and support churches running hospitals where state institutions fail, though that doesn't necessitate the whole institution not paying estate tax. But I prefer to give for different charities with less of a overhead. If they'd put the money to good use or would've had to report on what they use the tax dollars they don't pay for, it I'd be much less critical of their privileged status. If their services were available to all (not the religion specific services, those directed at community level, like hospitals) and would they not hinder individual freedom of non conformists and were they identical in their exemption status to those granted to any one charity, we'd be talking. But we aren't talking because none of the above appears to be the case. Hence the revision of the tax exemption is the minimum that the should be open to. Because if they provide oh so much that those tax exemptions are worth it for society they shouldn't have anything to fear. To be clear, what any one parish or local church group does may be immaculate work that enriches the community and helps the poor. A core value of christianity is sharing wealth and helping the poor. A core sin is hoarding wealth. Make your mind whether the churches of America hold up to their own agenda. e:put in quote for context cause im slower than a snail And yet some people here think that they’re never going away, don’t worry. When you bring up it as a civil rights issue, immediately we’re on to defending why it matters in the first place. When the government taxes a religious establishment based on the ceremonies it elects to hold, its telling that church how to practice religion. Like other 501(c)(3)s, they are required to report what they spend their money on when under IRS audit. But please, tell me more about how your approval or disapproval of its activities—prove you deserve a tax exemption to me—doesn’t burden the pastor and congregation’s practice of religion. The arguments are already there and freely discussed. I think it’s only partisanship that prevents widespread understanding. You have to vote in people that understand citizens don’t judge the church’s activities to justify its continued removal from tax burden. It’s their right to practice religion free of government bureaucrats not liking their services and proselytization.
You're masterfully disguising your void of content posts as something worth reading, I'm genuinely impressed by that.
+ Show Spoiler [IRS stuff if interested, though kwark…] +chrurches 'n' IRS
Congress has imposed special limitations, found in IRC Section 7611, on how and when the IRS may conduct civil tax inquiries and examinations of churches. The IRS may only initiate a church tax inquiry if an appropriate high-level Treasury
Department official reasonably believes, based on a written statement of the facts and circumstances, that the organization: (a) may not qualify for the exemption or (b) may not be paying tax on an unrelated business or other taxable activity.
The IRS may begin a church tax inquiry only if an appropriate high-level Treasury official reasonably believes, based on a written statement of the facts and circumstances, that the organization: (a) may not qualify for the exemption; or (b) may not be paying tax on unrelated business or other taxable activity. This reasonable belief must be based on facts and circumstances recorded in writing.
Additionally The IRS can obtain the information supporting a reasonable belief from many sources, including but not limited to: - Newspaper or magazine articles or ads,
- Television and radio reports,
- Internet web pages,
- Voters guides created and/or distributed by the church,
- Documents on file with the IRS (e.g. a Form 990-T filed by the church),
- Reliable information reports from concerned members of the church or the general public and
- Records concerning the church in the possession of third parties or informants.
The IRS must derive the facts and circumstances forming the basis for a reasonable belief from information lawfully obtained. If this information is obtained from informants, it must not be known to be unreliable. Failure of the church to respond to repeated IRS routine requests for information is a factor in determining if there is reasonable cause for commencing a church tax inquiry.
I couldn't find whether they actually know who the high ranking treasury official is that has to start an investigation.
To say that for religious activities a tax exemption is needed is only acceptable if you can stretch like Helen Parr.
None of the above honestly tries to discuss what I find despicable in special exemptions for churches so I'll take that as a issue below your political caring capacity. To label what I said partisan only exemplifies your lack of good faith (lol) when it comes to this issue.
e: to harp a bit on this partisan business. If you simply dismiss the attempt at reviewing the tax exemption status which is applied with a very, very broad brush to "churches" like Scientology and more so disregard my reasoning for church tax exemptions being anachronistic, not up with the times (especially the for profit ones).
Where will we find our middle ground to start a honest discussion about what to do with the issue? (granted you don't regard it as one?)
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On November 11 2017 18:23 mozoku wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 16:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 11:34 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag.
I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever? Being gifted money is outside the realm of an economic system. You'd want to look at the genesis of that $10MM, and figure it the person who earned it did something productive enough to warrant the $$. Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair? Yeah.. it kind of is. After that person dies someone inherits the vineyard. Someone has to own it, and since it is still productive it generates income for the inheritor and society (taxes, consumption). The inheritor part certainly feels less fair. Though everyone working in the US inherits some of the previous generation's legacy and that probably feels unfair to people in poorer countries too. No perfect solutions at the extreme to solve.. it's a balancing act. Gifting money is totally a thing. My point was simply that the person who was gifted the money isn't "working harder/more efficiently than others" who get paid less or "earning" $150,000/yr but that would be their income. An example of Kwark's point of income not connecting to the "work" with which one "earns" income. Surely Mozu and others can see why that person didn't "earn" their income by being more efficient or working harder than the majority of Americans that get compensated for actual work at a much lower rate. EX: Bill gates gifts me 100 million dollars at random. I make a rudimentary investment. Now I make more money than anyone here no matter what you do for a living. Maybe that will make it easier for people to understand I didn't earn the privilege of being the wealthiest person on the forum with the highest income? + Show Spoiler +If you make more than $1m a year gtfo this site and do something with your life EDIT: Also this: You can't pretend the value of the gift (and it's time equivalent) just appeared out of thin air. If I want to sell enough of my labor to not only have take care of myself, but also someone of my choosing, what business is it of someone else's? Other than being petty, that is. Whether or not the money is a gift is irrelevant, so we can ignore the fact that beneficiary of capital returns isn't the one who sold his labor to earn the starting capital. To answer the final question left, the fact that efficiency advantages compound upon themselves is irrelevant to the arguments I've already put forth.
I'm not pretending it came out of thin air. I'm just pointing out that my income would have nothing to do with how hard/efficiently I worked and my family would never have to work again (with some very rudimentary planning). So we could be generations deep where generations of people haven't ever had to work but they all have a larger income than most Americans that actually labor.
It's just an example of how one's complete lack of "work" can be wholly irrelevant to their high income. Trying to adjust the world to make it so it's reasonable to say that my family wealth is the result of my families more efficient and harder work than everyone here is going to make your head explode.
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On November 11 2017 19:25 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 18:23 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 16:08 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 11:34 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount).
Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever? Being gifted money is outside the realm of an economic system. You'd want to look at the genesis of that $10MM, and figure it the person who earned it did something productive enough to warrant the $$. Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair? Yeah.. it kind of is. After that person dies someone inherits the vineyard. Someone has to own it, and since it is still productive it generates income for the inheritor and society (taxes, consumption). The inheritor part certainly feels less fair. Though everyone working in the US inherits some of the previous generation's legacy and that probably feels unfair to people in poorer countries too. No perfect solutions at the extreme to solve.. it's a balancing act. Gifting money is totally a thing. My point was simply that the person who was gifted the money isn't "working harder/more efficiently than others" who get paid less or "earning" $150,000/yr but that would be their income. An example of Kwark's point of income not connecting to the "work" with which one "earns" income. Surely Mozu and others can see why that person didn't "earn" their income by being more efficient or working harder than the majority of Americans that get compensated for actual work at a much lower rate. EX: Bill gates gifts me 100 million dollars at random. I make a rudimentary investment. Now I make more money than anyone here no matter what you do for a living. Maybe that will make it easier for people to understand I didn't earn the privilege of being the wealthiest person on the forum with the highest income? + Show Spoiler +If you make more than $1m a year gtfo this site and do something with your life EDIT: Also this: You can't pretend the value of the gift (and it's time equivalent) just appeared out of thin air. If I want to sell enough of my labor to not only have take care of myself, but also someone of my choosing, what business is it of someone else's? Other than being petty, that is. Whether or not the money is a gift is irrelevant, so we can ignore the fact that beneficiary of capital returns isn't the one who sold his labor to earn the starting capital. To answer the final question left, the fact that efficiency advantages compound upon themselves is irrelevant to the arguments I've already put forth. I'm not pretending it came out of thin air. I'm just pointing out that my income would have nothing to do with how hard/efficiently I worked and my family would never have to work again (with some very rudimentary planning). So we could be generations deep where generations of people haven't ever had to work but they all have a larger income than most Americans that actually labor. It's just an example of how one's complete lack of "work" can be wholly irrelevant to their high income. Trying to adjust the world to make it so it's reasonable to say that my family wealth is the result of my families more efficient and harder work than everyone here is going to make your head explode.
Or you could just pay someone to manage your assets and do this one planning step and nothing else for the rest of your life...
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Trump left the TPP because it excludes China, not because of some trade deal with Vietnam. Whoop-dee-doo... vietnam!!!! well there's MILLIONS on the line there!!!! China does 578 BILLION dollars of trade with the USA & that is much more important
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On November 11 2017 22:06 A3th3r wrote:
Trump left the TPP because it excludes China, not because of some trade deal with Vietnam. Whoop-dee-doo... vietnam!!!! well there's MILLIONS on the line there!!!! China does 578 BILLION dollars of trade with the USA & that is much more important
Actually, Trump was against the TPP and thought it INCLUDED China at one point (see: the Republican debates, where Rand Paul sat him the fuck down on the issue).
Basically, he has no idea what it is and everyone has to read tea leaves to ascribe him their preferred motives, kind of like any other substantive issue.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Oh my gee, we certainly have an upswing in the pro-TPP lobby the past few days/weeks. But it is for the best that it’s gone. Yes, there is a definite price to pay to give up a deal that was meant to shore up influence in a widely important region. That factor was used in order to construct a deal that benefits multinational corporations at the expense of the other interests in the country - labor rights, the middle class, self-sufficient manufacturing capabilities, and so on. It was written in secrecy with the exception of the business interests who got a chance to put their mark on the deal, and pushed through not with the support of the population, but through attempts to squeeze it through anyways.
The arbitration courts plan is one of the stupidest creations one could imagine and represent a significant transfer of government autonomy to corporations. That alone should be reason enough to cancel the deal. And it’s not like we don’t have other trade deals - the most important nations under that TPP bloc are already in separate free trade deals with the US. The now-shelved trade deals with Europe also seem to follow the same shitty focus and it’s a good thing the US decided not to be party to those either.
It was a miracle that somehow the TPP was defeated. We got Trump for it but that was definitely one of the best upsides of an otherwise bizarre and ineffective presidency. I suppose we’ll have a push for another Clintonite to reverse it all come 2020; I can only hope any such person gets Jeb Bushed into oblivion. It’s clear that a good decision by a bad president is going to try to be overturned because some moneyed interests really wanted that deal. And they might play that same crap that no one believes where, like Tim Kaine, after spending a long time campaigning for the very deal they will do a faux heel-face turn and say that it’s “not the deal they want for American workers” - a line of BS that not a single sane individual would buy.
Fuck the TPP and let it stay dead. Without the US it is meaningless and so let it stay as such.
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Norway28674 Posts
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On November 11 2017 16:42 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't understand what the point of leaving that agreement was
Political rebellion is great and all but nobody has the power to vote global trade away
It is the extremely outdated perspective of "we can always walk away because they need us more than we need them", which simply isn't true anymore. We are being weakened by arrogance.
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They did chat about the Pink Panther movies though, which I find pretty amusing.
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Saudi Arabia making moves in the Middle East due to our weak ass Secretary of State. Lebanon PM is mia after a trip to see the Saudis.
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Norway28674 Posts
On November 12 2017 00:56 TheTenthDoc wrote:They did chat about the Pink Panther movies though, which I find pretty amusing.
yeah, I mean the fabrications were inspired by the real phone calls.
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EPT
