My right to live does not require a government action or expenditure. We decided to create a judicial system because we recognized that generally it is far more efficient and peaceful if we have a system that provides for a remedy if our life is threatened, harmed, or ended. The existence of the government does not establish our right to live; it’s there to provide a remedy and hopefully a deterrence.
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“I’m not being condescending. And now I’m going to contradict myself in the next sentence!”
In any case, if I were to “grow up”, what would I suddenly realize on this issue that I’ve failed to do now due to my immaturity?
By implying my argument has no merit whatsoever, and I would realize the error in my ways by “growing up”, it certainly does sound condescending.
Health care is quite a big issue, and quite a big expense. And to say “you’re about as capitalist as Canadians get”, and then comparing yourself to the “typical” urban American, you seem to be confirming that “extreme” capitalist Canadian is fairly socialistic.
Your post contains my response. Providing a remedy and deterrence requires action and expenditure.
In any society where there is a social contract, one is obligated to contribute to the general welfare in ways that may not benefit oneself directly. In many cases, this is true with regard to redistribution of wealth.
The question then becomes one of whether or not you want to live in a society based on principles of mutual aid and support, one in which there is a social contract, or one in which it is “every man for himself.” If you chose the former, then you are obligated to contribute to the general welfare, in this case through redistribution of wealth. Although, in the U.S., the tax rate is almost flat, when you account for all taxes, so the whining of the right on this score is just more whining.
If you chose to neglect the social contract, and claim that it is “every man for himself,” then here, also, you have no cause to complain. Without a social contract, there is no reason why I shouldn’t take your property by force, through the agent of the government if I can.
This is actually an old paradox. The rich and powerful have always wanted to take as much for themselves as possible, while leaving the rest with as little as possible. The ruling class is always waging this vicious class war. On the other hand, though, they don’t want *us to wage the class war, since, as Percy Bysse Shelley pointed out “You are many, they are few.” And, if the many started playing by the same rules, the wealthy few would soon be up against the wall. So, what has to be done is to justify the vast inequalities in wealth.
One way this is done is to claim that efforts at redistribution of wealth is slavery or theft, or whatever. But, this amounts to nothing more than saying that there is no social contract. In that case, then, there is no reason for the many to accept the rules of the few, and nothing to keep them from taking the wealth of the few by force.
This would only be the case if the “social contract” was the source of our rights. This is not the case. Since the “social contract” is a contract under which we, the people, give up some of our rights to the government in exchange for its services, if there was no such “contract” in place all rights would revert to the people. You would not suddenly be able to steal without moral consequences.
To open another angle that I somewhat touched on in the OP:
To those advocates of “human rights” which include entitlements, does the idea of forcibly taking from one to give to another not strike you as a philosophical violation of the rights of the person who’s resources are being taken?
Perhaps it’s not a violation so long as the entitlements are ones you favor?
How would you feel about a “right to a personal yacht”?
Although I personally do not hold these views, it is my experience that most people who support entitlements believe in a hierarchical system of rights, one underwhich one person’s right to health care would outrank someone else’s right to property.
You don’t need anywhere to go. You don’t like being part of a society that taxes you for benifiting from it? Declare your land your own country! Refuse to pay tax. Send your army (you with a gun!) to defend erisloverlandia against the IRS invaders from America. Express utter surprise when you are “kidnapped” and imprisoned by an American court!
There is, I believe, an accepted set of human needs. These include shelter, food, water and clothing. I’m not sure tht they include health care, but, one can certainly not go on living for a long time without it.
Private yachts are somewhat different to these things. Do I need to explain it to you, or have you figured it out for yourself?
Well, you wrote in the prior post, “All rights require government action and expenditure to be realized.”
I disagree that they are required. They are not. We’ve merely decided that a justice system is generally the more efficient method. Unfortunately, it isn’t always so efficient either.
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A lot of people toss around this idea of a social contract as if it is a given. Could someone please direct me to the text, I’d like to read it over, especially the part about how it’s my obligation to contribute to the general welfare. A contract is an agreement, and requires acceptance by both parties. I am aware of the Constitution, which is acceptable as a contract, even though it is not. The Constitution also has provisions for changing it.
I want to live in a society where it is every man for himself, but we voluntarily chose to provide each other support. Most of us are generous and caring enough to do this despite the fact the considerable amounts of our income are drained away via taxation. No one should be obligated to contribute to the general welfare, but we should strive to have a society where we chose to do so voluntarily, and in the way we each think best. It seems to be the tendency of many left-leaning people to put their faith in the government’s ability to decide how to spend their money best. It also seems that left-leaning people think they know what’s best for all of us, and if they could just get into power, they would wield that power with enormous compassion and justice. Unfortunately, they also seem to think they need most of our money to do it.
As to the “almost flat” tax rates in the US, I would love to see the proof of that. Please do demonstrate! Perhaps you should provide your personal definition of flat too.
There is no social contract, but there are laws. Laws are what (hoepfully) prevent you from taking my property by force, even through the government. If they don’t prevent you, at least they provide a remedy. It should be noted, however, that government still does take property by force because we have some very bad laws.
This is an assumption on your part (“The rich and powerful have always wanted to take as much for themselves as possible…”) that is not universally true. Can you prove it? Who are you calling the rich, and what evidence do you have that all of them always want to take as much as possible? Perhaps my blinders have been on. Perhaps the vast amount of philanthropy in the US doesn’t really happen. Perhaps, for example, Bill Gates just didn’t give 100 million dollars to India for AIDS. Perhaps millions of people don’t regularly contribute to charity.
There is no social contract. I didn’t sign anything. I do abide by the law of the land however, but that has a mechanism for change. Thus, even though the law currently and incorrectly provides for a progressive income tax, it can be changed. If your social contract has such a mechanism, I’d like to hear about it.
Just because we need something does not imply that we have a right to it, especially if having that right means someone else must involuntarily provide it.
Aren’t we all missing the point here? The OP does not ask whether taxes are right, or justified, or wise. It asks whether they amount to slavery.
Slavery is not having any choice about whether to work or not. Having the product of your labour (or indeed any property) taken away from you may arguably be theft, but it is not slavery. You still have the choice not to work.
Taxes do not therefore amount to slavery. QED.
gex gex notes,
Quite. They will hunt me down because the slave isn’t doing his work like he should.
Interesting. So how did we survive before doctors? You know, the hundreds of thousands of years?
My point was only that the OP issue encompassed much more things than just “wealth redistribution” hence that his OP was misleading…
Completely wrong.
It is only by popular struggle that rights are won. If there is no social contract, there are no rights, only the law of the jungle.
Every right we enjoy today has been won by decades of bitter popular struggle. Never has any right been granted as a gift. Consider, for example, the right to free speech, the quintessential right. Even though there was technically the right to free speech in the U.S. constitution, the actual right to free speech has existed in this country only since the 1950’s. Up until that time, you could be imprisoned for saying the wrong thing.
It was illegal since at least 1798 to spread “seditious libel” against the state, and people were routinely jailed for speaking against the state. For example, during WWI numerous people were jailed for speaking against U.S. entry into the war, and a filmaker was jailed for making a film showing the British as the enemy of the Americans. The film he made was about the Revolutionary War. In a famous SCOTUS decision, justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion upholding the seditious libel laws and the Espionage Act of 1917 (nice Orwellian title) outlawing efforts to obstruct the draft. Holmes asserted that it was OK to throw somebody in jail for what they said or wrote, if their speech constituted a “clear and present danger” to the state.
Such disgraceful behavior of the state in restricting free speech rights was only overcome by popular struggle, after many people had stood up for their rights, been jailed, etc. It didn’t happen because a few powerful white guys decided to give the gift of free speech to the people. The people had to demand it. And, this right only exists to the extent that the people continue to demand and protect these rights. The state managers are only too happy to take away these rights. Indeed, recent legislation, ala the Patriot Act (another nice Orwellian title), is aimed at restricting civil rights. Such attacks on civil rights are always threatened by the powerful, and are only beaten back if our rights are embedded in a social contract.
Pieces of paper or laws have never stood in the way of the powerful taking away your rights. See my above post for the example of the right to free speech.
The social contract is not a contract in the legal sense, of a piece of paper that we all sign. Rather, it is implicit in the way we interact with each other in society. Perhaps the best example of such a contract is the example of money. Money is actually a very sophisticated concept, if you think about it. We all agree to accept pieces of paper, or coins, or clams, or whatever, as representing certain values, and to trade with these symbols. The state may serve as a regulator of trade, but the concept of money is something that is embedded in a social contract, and is understood by everybody who interacts with it. Without this common understanding, interactions with money would be impossible. The same is true with other parts of the social contract, such as agreeing to participate in the general welfare.
I agree, in part. I agree that we should strive for a society in which mutual aid and support is embedded in the social contract, and that we should seek a culture of solidarity, in which we see our fellow human beings as brothers and sisters. I don’t agree, however, that a society where it is “every man for himself” is a society that would be worth living in.
If you account for all taxes, including sales taxes, payroll taxes, social security taxes, etc., and then factor in what the rich don’t have to pay in incremental taxes on the necessities of life, then the tax rate is actually flat or regressive. If you then take into account the taxes that we pay that are a way to redistribute income from the poor to the rich, such as the military budget, then taxes in the U.S. are actually highly regressive.
I agree that we have some very bad laws, such as laws which necessitate the poor to subsidize the rich through the Pentagon system. However, laws never stand in the way of the powerful from taking away your rights, unless these rights are deeply embedded in the social contract.
Occasionally, parasitic capitalists will become philanthropists after they have been robbing the public for years. These minor exceptions do not disprove the rule, however. The rule is the same as it has been since the beginning of civilization: the rich and powerful attempt to increase their power.
Without general agreement (social contract) , you could very well do what you call “steal” “property” without moral consequences. I don’t necessarily recognize that you’ve any legitimate claim about a particular element of your property or on any property at all. My morals aren’t necessarily yours.
For instance, I can think that land can’t be privately owned. A lot of cultures agreed on that. In this case, i would have zero moral reason not to use myself what you call your “property”. Or I could think that inheritance has no moral basis. That perhaps your grand-father deserved by, for instance his hard work, to keep his belongings, but that upon his death, anybody has the right to take them away and you don’t have any particular claim on them. Or I could be communist and thinks it’s immoral that you own a factory. Or as I wrote in another thread, I could be a native american and think that all the US territory has been illegaly stolen, and that the descendant of the thieves have no moral right on this land…Or I could imagine one thousand other reasons why I would disagree about your “morals” and think that taking away your property is the moral thing to do, and even that you are actually the thief. Coming back to the OP, that could include include the moral idea that the basic needs of someone poor or ill are more important than your right on any property which isn’t absolutely necessary for you, because the life of a human being is morally way more important than you being able to use some luxury.
So, definitely no…without social contract, there’s no more generally accepted “rights” which would revert to you (and that’s assuming of course that people would actually act in a “moral” way, and would take your property only if they think it’s the moral thing to do…of course, in reality, a lot of them would take it just because they want it). These “rights” that you seem to believe to immanent and natural are actually a social and arbitrary construct. They’re part of the social contract, and protected by it, and you can’t expect to keep them if you repell said social contract.
Ha! I call “whoosh” on you!
Actually, my interest in socialized medicine is fairly pragmatic and seems more and more logical when compared to the hassles Americans go through. I’m capitalist without being nuttily right-wing.
In any event, any social compact requires that somebody do some work to maintain it, and establishing 10% slavery for everyone is arguably better than establishing 100% slavery for some. You can argue the need for specific entitlement programs, of course, but maintaining that the whole damn system is out of order is a bit silly.
Ha! I call “whoosh” on you!
Actually, my interest in socialized medicine is fairly pragmatic and seems more and more logical when compared to the hassles Americans go through. I’m capitalist without being nuttily right-wing.
In any event, any social compact requires that somebody do some work to maintain it, and establishing 10% slavery for everyone is arguably better than establishing 100% slavery for some. You can argue the need for specific entitlement programs, of course, but maintaining that the whole damn system is out of order is a bit silly.
Slavery is not just about work. Here is one definition:
A condition of subjection or submission characterized by lack of freedom of action or of will.
If forcibly taking a portion of the product of my labor restricts my freedom, then it is an act of slavery. I say it does restrict my freedom, because I have life objectives. My life objectives cost money. They include food, shelter, clothing and everything else. In order to achieve my objectives, I need the appropriate amount of money, but taxes require me to work longer and/or harder to achieve my objectives. That restricts my freedom to dispose of my labor and life as I see fit. It’s not total slavery, but it is at least partial slavery. For those of you with socialist viewpoints, I’m not just talking about the “rich”, I’m talking about everyone who pays taxes.