I read it as all three, myself.
People make families. Families make communities. Communities make cities, cities make countries, and countries make “society”. You have an obligation to make reasonable effort to contribute meaningfully to the social structures you belong to. You have no more right to deliberately leech off society without producing or contributing anything than you have to steal from your neighbor, and both are equally detestable crimes in my opinion.
The problem is that you can’t specifically define how to be a contributing member of society. All you can really do is make specific things illegal, and the more laws you write, the more loopholes you create. It’s extremely hard, for example, to create any sort of socialized service immune to individual abuse. It’s already obvious that people have a general acceptance of the idea of owing a debt to society, because everyone acknowledges the legitimacy of government. People just disagree about the specifics.
I’m going to go against the grain and answer this with a big, fat No.
[/quote]
Aye, there’s the rub. Here’s how I view it. We come into the world as squalling infants, with an ability to cry and suckle and wave our limbs in the air, but not much else. If we’re going to survive, we need constant care from the moment of our birth, and it will be a number of years before we have any ability to give anything back to anyone. So given the enormous multi-year investment that must go into raising a child, not to mention the 9-months that the mother donates prior to birth, it’s entirely reasonable to demand that the child eventually give something back to his or her parents and others involved in raising the child. That typically involves some measure of obedience, thankfulness, and a sense of duty. But all of that would normally be thought of as being owed to the family, not to society.
As far as the larger society goes, it does generally provide some good things to children as well. For instance, my society provided the hospital in which I was born, and without that sanitary environment I might have died in infancy. So, at first glance, it might seem that I owe to society in the same way that I owe to parents and family.
However, the contract can be broken. Everyone would agree that if parents are violent, abusive, neglectful, etc… then the child’s normal duty to them no longer holds. Similarly, if society behaves wrongly in some way, the child’s duty to society no longer holds as well.
The problem is that while we can have a decent consensus about what parents need to provide for their children, asking what society needs to provide is a much trickier question. Society has provided me some good things, such as the aforementioned hospital, plus schools, roads, etc… Yet at the same time society does some evil things. Some of the tax money that I pay is used to finance unjust wars, imprison people who have done nothing wrong, continue the existence of corrupt organizations, etc…
So, in summary, my feeling is that individuals possess the ability to set priorities and decide whether they owe support to society or not. If they decide that cooperating with the society of their birth is an unacceptable moral compromise, they should have the ability to detach themselves from the society. They might go live in the woods and be completely off the grid, for instance. Then they’d get nothing from society, but they’d also make no moral compromises with it. In America today, however, such things are very hard to pull off. To live by yourself and raise your own food and so forth requires property, which means property taxes, which violates the whole spirit of the thing.
Not certain I totally understand your POV.
So you will regretfully, having no practical choice, go on using roads, hospitals, schools etc. paid for by everyone else, but because you disagree with the direction society is heading or specific acts of injustice it is involved in you have no obligation to pay for any of it yourself? Or do you have that obligation?
I sort of agree with you and I sort of do not agree with you. I agree that the government should not be involved in “charity”. However, that makes me feel like I am morally obligated to take care of other people. If I am going to suggest that government not provide the safety net, then it would be cruel of me to not feel morally obligated to help people. I often times feel I should do more to help people if I truly want to see the government do less.
I only said that each individual should have the ability to opt out, if they decided that a normal life within the social system is morally unacceptable.
For individuals to spoon off the social system while giving nothing in return is a recipe for sloth, crime, and moral degeneracy, as can be seen clearly enough from the failure of the welfare system in America and other countries, or from the behavior of the financial industry right now.
But as you point out, it is practically impossible to opt out. What are the duties of a person who would like to opt out but realistically cannot?
Well, citizens != citizens is your problem. People are different. Allowances really ought to be made for this basic fact. So!
Let’s say everybody ought to contribute in proportion to their ability.
If we can convince everyone to take only what they need, what could possibly go wrong?
I think societies face a number of challenges. Climactic conditions can cause them to die off. Disease or starvation can have the same effect. Bad results in warfare can lead to slavery or even the total elimination of entire races of human beings. While the Holocaust we already have was horrific enough, a nuclear holocaust would make it look like a bloody nose, and it is an entirely plausible possibility. Iran seems (allegedly) determined to build a nuclear bomb, and all the evidence is coming in, so a decision to bomb the crap out of them is going to be comprehensively explained up to and after the fact. Yah, I hope not, but this looks like where things are going.
I haven’t even mentioned real catastrophes like epochal asteroid strikes and the like. Point is, if you’re an asshole, you ought to know you’re an asshole and intend to be an asshole. Chances are you can only do so much harm and it won’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but the rest of us really would prefer you accomplish something useful.
We have an inalienable right to pursue happiness. Therefore, we only are obligated to produce enough so that we do not depend on others, and thus make it more difficult for others to pursue their own happiness.
I’ve known people who work only 20 hours a week and make only enough to pay the rent on what is practically a box, plus some beer money. And that’s all they need or want out of life. Technically, they are listed as “in poverty”, but I’m skeptical of such statistics given the different goals people have for their lives.
As far as tax and welfare policies go, I don’t mind them terribly, but I do think that the system creates some bad incentives. It punishes people who choose to pursue happiness through work and achievement and accumulating wealth, and subsidizes people who choose leisure and minimal effort. That’s not to imply that all or even most welfare recipients choose leisure. Just that at the margins, incentives encourage leisure over work. And when tax rates get confiscatory enough, people at the margins do things like take more time off rather than produce. Your free time doesn’t get taxed, only your work time does.
Just wanted to say, I don’t think is true except in a nearly completely illogical way.
People who make more money should pay more in taxes, because they need the system that allows them to make money more than a person who makes little money.
It isn’t punishment, it’s paying for what you need.
A person who owns a shipping company, say, needs roads, streetlights, police, fuel, product to be shipped, personnel, a coherent monetary system, educated citizens, etc, etc. a lot more than a person who lives on the beach and fishes every day for his meal and who buys little in the way of consumer goods. Poor people don’t use the system that taxes pay for nearly as much as rich people.
This is from the Unabomber thread, but it’s sort of relevant, I think.
(bolding mine, for what seem like good reasons atm)
I’m very tired right now, so I’m not going to babble on here; I’ll just hope that y’all will see the relation to the topic under discussion and go sleep for 10 hours or so.
bbl
**People who make more money should pay more in taxes, because they need the system that allows them to make money more than a person who makes little money.
**
I don’t disagree, although it’s a symbiotic relationship. Without the rich, progressives have absolutely zilch in the way of resources to make the lives of the masses better.
**It isn’t punishment, it’s paying for what you need.
**
The rich need less than you think. There are rich people in even the poorest countries in the world. the government needs the rich more than the rich need the government. And it shows in the way politics works in the real world.
But that’s neither here nor there. My point is that people pursue happiness in different ways, but the government measures happiness and well-being in only one way: wealth and income. It’s something both liberals and conservatives have criticized, but no one really can think of another way. But one thing that isn’t very helpful is subsidizing leisure while penalizing work. We should be taxing consumption, especially consumption that is harmful to society, like carbon usage, smoking, fatty foods, etc. Work is virtuous, and you don’t tax virtue. You tax vice. You get less of whatever you tax. That’s economics 101.
As for the spending side, we should reward work, not leisure. Instead of welfare, we should focus more on wage subsidies and a negative income tax. We can’t get rid of welfare entirely, of course, but we can reward work more, rather than penalizing it like we do now.
One is not obligated in the least to be productive. It may [or may not] be in each individual’s best interest to be productive, but an obligation seems absurd to me. It is society’s obligation to itself to try to make itself of enough interest to the individuals so that they desire to be productive.
This is the sort of entitlement mentality that is the luxury of people who have grown up in relatively sheltered, educated, Western middle-class society. And to expand on my statement **Snowboarder Bo **linked to, it demonstrates how in our society we are so disconected from the fruits of our labor that we give little thought to where anything comes from or how it gets here. So little thought in fact that we have the luxury of working for self-fullfillment and not survival.
Most people are productive, not because they find their work interesting, but because they need to pay for food, shelter, clothing and other essentials.
Now the “obligation” works both ways. When you work and produce, you are compensated for that labor at the going market rate. And people typically have choices and options for how they will work. So really it’s more of an open-ended agreement.
And you work very hard to remain disconnected from that reality. So what’s the difference? You yourself have said that your department is more or less for show.
Actually very few people are productive. Moving papers from one place to another is not production. Not only that the vast majority of productivity goes to things we don’t need like televisions and expensive sneakers.
It seems to me that reward is inversely proportional to production. Workers in a factory get paid the least, while hedge fund managers get paid the most.
What about the flipside - does ‘society’ (meaning all of us collectively) have any obligation to take care of the truly destitute with food, housing and medical care?
If the answer to that is “yes” (and in my opinion, it is), then we, as individuals, have an obligation to do our bit by being sufficiently productive (if able) to take care of both our own needs, and to share in the burden of taking care of others.
There are very few people who are truly unproductive. Productivity in our society amounts essentially to moving debt around. As such every person is productive in some regard. Even the person on WIC because they help move the debt from one place to another. There are very few people who are purely parasitic. The system of capitalism just doesn’t work like that. The idea that a stock broker is more ‘productive’ than a person living in a homeless shelter is nonsense. We as a society have evolved to such a state that very few people are actually involved in production and the vast majority of the rest of us are relegated to the movement of capital (debt) from one account to another. Buying low and selling high is no more productive in any actual sense than playing Halo all day.
I consider the Social Contract here in the US to argue for productivity sufficient to cover yourself, your family plus a little bit more.
Personally, my wife and I cover ourselves, plus we are paying for and raising two boys. I also target 10% of my adjusted gross income in charitable giving each year. I consider my charitable giving, plus my donated time (equivalent to 3+ days per month minimum) to cover my other societal obligations. I am teaching (and modeling for) my sons the same level of responsibility (I hope).
I utterly disagree. The only way “rich” people become and stay rich is by the graces of the government which affords them security and rights over their property. without government, they are at the mercy of both the lumpen and those richer then they.
think for a minute what socioeconomic stratum the bulk of the founding fathers of this country came from. they weren’t foot soldiers in the militia battling a case of gangrene and wondering about what they were going to eat next week. (not that i don’t agree that democracy isn’t about a billion times fairer than absolute monarchy, but that’s not my point here)
bravo on the cryptic flat tax argument.
I have a new job now, actually.
With most white collar jobs, productivity can’t really be measured in widgets made. But there still needs to be some sort of justification for the position, otherwise why does the company need to keep you around?
Companies don’t just move papers back and forth for shits and giggles. That sounds like someone who has no clue what actualy goes on in an office. All those reports and systems and whatnot are how companies attempt to collect the vast amount of business data they acumluate through their normal operations and then consolidate it so that they can make decisions on how to run the business.
And that’s why people don’t give a shit about their jobs. Because while their job is necessary, it’s not particularly important. You might have the job of consolidating the weekly TPS reports for the VP of Widgetry. But you may also have no idea about or any input into how the widget business runs beyond what you need to know to create the reports. It’s not like a small business where you see your product and your customers and can intuitively grasp the value you are providing them.
Well who really produces more? Some laborer who creates a couple hundred widgets a day or a hedge fund manager who creates millions of dollars of wealth for his clients to invest in other businesses?
But really the question is, if you feel you don’t need to be productive, who in society should be working to provide you with your daily essentials?