Then pity those with no family, or who cannot provide for their own despite their efforts.
Theres a difference between a moral obligation one might have to help his fellow man and requiring there to be a legal obligation to do so.
I think your pity would be better directed at the 10s of millions (or was it 100s of millions) who died in the last century because some people used this principle as the basis of government.
Hell - just noticed those numbers should read **negative **, so,
Economic: - 3. something, Social - 5.something
Would not like anyone to think I was more right authoritarian than Shodan! 
And there would be a difference in the level of suffering between where there was a legal obligation to pay taxes in order to meet genuine need, and where there wasn’t. Especially since even enforcing property rights is essentially “helping your fellow man”.
I will reserve my pity for the dying, not the already dead.
Economic Left/Right: 6.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.03
But this is exactly the correct formulation. As long as the program you are proposing is based on pity, charity or some such thing, then it is fine. The problem with the satement “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” is that it raises the need of one above the free choice of another. What if we restated the proposal like this, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his worth.” Where I mean “what he has earned” by worth. Or perhaps I mean something like “from each according to his ability and choice”.
Ought we to be able to choose to pay no tax?
Well, strictly speaking, yes.
But that may be a discussion for a different place. Let me just say this by way of explanation. If we were to impose a voluntary tax on financial contracts such that contracts could be entered into without paying the tax, but those contracts would not be legally enforceable, then we might have a voluntary form of taxation. Such a system would not support vast transfers of wealth, perhaps, but some might argue that that is not a legitimate function of government.
Perhaps we could put welfare on the same footing. What if we instituted voluntary participation in Socail Security and Welfare. You can opt not to pay payroll taxes, but if you do you are not eligible for benifits. We could include automatic inclusion in the program for anyone who did not earn enough to pay any taxes. It would then be up to supporters of the program to convince enough people on a continuing basis of the program’s benifits in order to keep it viable. Perhaps such pressure would motivate the administrators of such programs to clean up more of the abuses.
But all that is besides the point. All I was saying is that charity should not be compulsary. There are many things that individuals should do which should not be compulsary. Even if I support compulsary taxation, I may not support its use for this purpose. I did not find your suggestion that the justice system “benifits others” to be a compelling argument in favor of welfare. Especially the way it is instituted (and one could argue must be instituted by governments) today.
That was all I was saying.
Do you believe voluntary welfare payments will meet all genuine need, or must you turn a blind eye where genuine need goes unmet?
Well, I think that it definately depends on how you measure “genuine need”. There is certainly a definition for which voluntary contributions will not be sufficient. Similarly, there is a definition for which voluntary contributions are more than sufficient.
Personally, I think that the definition should be left up to the individual. And I find it hard to believe that it would be unduly difficult to convince enough people to contribute for “genuine need”. Indeed, the current support for the welfare state could be argued as supporting evidence for such an idea. Unless, of course, you believe that the support for welfare spending has more to do with a desire to force others to pay than a genuine desire to meet “genuine need”.
SentientMeat, you’re still avoiding the central question-
Who chooses the need?
Who chooses the ability?
Does everyone need a free TV? Laugh at that, but what about dentistry? Do I need to have gleaming white teeth, covered with caps and bridges in order to keep my pearlies white, or it just having a functional set that won’t break enough? Do I need a car? Do I need my own house? Or is a community shelter enough?
As John Mace said- the inevitable result of any government based upon the idea as stated is that eventually some central group decides that they alone know the needs and the ability, and they ruthlessly crush opposition to their ‘moral’ ways. You can act all haughty about ‘the dying’ as opposed to ‘the dead’, but you’re condemning a lot of people to death.
A key problem with the statement is that “need” has no qualifiers. A guy who is truly nothing more than a bum, with no desire to support himself, has a “need” for food/shelter/etc. Should that “need” impose a moral, let alone a legal, obligation on me? Absoltutely not.
None of us “strongly disagree” types are advocating a system that **forbids ** people from helping others. We just object to one that **requires ** it.
Now, as a practical matter, I realize that welfare of some form is here to stay. I don’t have a big problem with that. But it needs to be scrupulously administered, and structured so that there is a incentive **not ** to take advantage of it. And it should be administered at the lowest (most local) political level as possible.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
Strongly Disagree. This is a rallying cry for slavery. This is the assertion that a person has no ownership of themselves…that they and their work are the property of the state. The state takes all, and distributes it according to the state’s whims, oops, I meant “the people’s needs”. No one has the right to their own property, their own life, their own liberty.
Your abilities will make you a fine ditchdigger, comrade, so get down in the ditch and start digging. You owe us. Now get to work. We will decide what your needs are. It turns out you need a few crusts of bread and a communal bunkhouse to live in. Sorry, your needs as a ditchdigger do not require shoes. Only workers whose abilities suit them to working in offices for the glorification of the people have a need for shoes. Also, your needs include having armed guards around your bunkhouse in case you do not properly give according to your ability. After all, how can your needs be met if others do not work according to their abilities? So please inform us if you notice your bunkmates not giving according to their abilities, since they are therefore stealing from you. We have ways of making them give more. All for the glorification of the people, comrade. Now get to work.
(0.75, -5)
Agree.
Again, it’s all in how you interpret the question. I am an economic conservative who believes my government wastes billions and billions of dollars on stupid crap. I could cut Canada’s social spending budget by billions without an ounce of guilt.
But I interpret NEED as having enough food to eat and a warm place to sleep. It seems to me that society does in fact have a collective responsibility to ensure that people at least are not starving in the cold. Spending $500,000 on a “homeless theatre collective” like my home city is absurd, but nobody NEEDS a homeless theatre collective. Nobody NEEDS the government to take money from efficient provinces and give it in gigantic, unaudited chunks to inefficient ones, thereby encouraging people not to move to find jobs. Nobody NEEDS to government to give enormous tax breaks and handouts to farmers who have full time jobs and only farm so they can get the handouts. But people do need food and shelter, and any decent country will give the poorest of the poor these things. And frankly, giving them education helps everyone.
It also seems logical to me to tax people more if they make more money - even if you support a flat tax, you’re still taxing the rich more.
So, reading the question literally, I agree with it.
I think there is a misunderstanding exemplified by this quote. The thesis/slogan under discussion does not imply that the government would be determining needs and abilities.
I am not really an expert on Marxism but from what I know, I don’t think this is accurate.
Olentzero’s quote basically tells the story. The idea of Marx was that ultimately, there would be “no government” - the state would “wither away” - and society would work so well that as a consequence, everybody’s abilities would be developed and everybody’s needs would be met.
Furthermore, I read somewhere that Marx’ slogan for the preceding period - while there still would be a state - was “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work”. Now doesn’t that sound rather less bad, on the premise that the government would have to be involved?
Anyway, my personal response to the thesis would be “disagree”. Not that the thesis is wrong. My thought is that it skirts the issue.
Abilities are not a given. They can be developed. An individual chooses how to develop his or her abilities as a personal preference with input from other people. Something equivalent applies to an individual’s needs.
The central issue I think is “motivation” (and “freedom”, and a few others…). We should strive for a society that motivates people to contribute to progress. The question would be, how do societal structures and policies encourage and motivate people to contribute. This question seems somehow disconnected from the present thesis.
My political compass
Economic Left/Right: -2.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.64
No offense, but I think that was implied.
If not by the question itself, by posts like:
or
The distinction being drawn is between the government determining needs and abilities, and the individual doing so.
It is, after all, a political compass.
Yes, we should strive for a society that encourages and allows achievement. This is almost always to the common good.
My earlier post was to the effect that adopting the principle as stated would be demotivational. A society that does not reward achievement proportionally will become a society that does not see as much achievement as it could.
The question is not disconnected - it is central.
Regards,
Shodan
More or less, yes. But those two phenomena are linked - the state withers away because society as a whole has gotten quite practiced in the art of exercising those functions the state had previously reserved for itself, thereby rendering the need for a state unnecessary.
He doesn’t state so explicitly in “Critique of the Gotha Program”, but the entire section preceding “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” could more or less accurately be summed up in the phrase you cite.
Exactly.
Roughly, yes - if you mean that the substance of those needs doesn’t change (people are always going to need housing, and food, and education) but that the form by which those needs are satisfied does (a family of five would need different housing than a bachelor in his twenties, for example).
Marx spells it out explicitly in the section of “Critique” I linked to:
In other words, not a society which expects you to work so that you can merely feed and clothe and house yourself, but one in which your work (and everyone else’s) really contributes to further social advancement.
I would argue at this point they don’t, and I’m rather looking forward to the opportunity to build a society that does.
It’s an inherent weakness of such quizzes overall (sorry, SentientMeat) - they only have so much space to work with so they have to strip away all but the most elemental content.
You could well be right. For me it’s a bit confusing, that the original meanings and intents of such slogans have shifted over time in people’s minds (assuming that I correctly interpreted the original meaning of this slogan, cf. Olentzero’s post).
I guess we agree about the central issues, if not the (current or original) meaning of this slogan. (I still tend to interpret the slogan as descriptive, not prescriptive.)
And thanks, Olentzero, for your clarification.
It’s all well and good to say that Marx predicted the goverment to “wither away”, but that has about as much validity as the tooth fairy. There has never once been an instance where the government has “withered away”. Why would anyone accept a theory which has fails to stand up to its own predictions? A small band of hunter gatherers might not need a government, but no civilization has **ever ** existed without one. It is utter foolishness to think otherwise.
If you’ll examine even the most basic of Marx’ writings, you’ll see he doesn’t predict that the state (which you synonymize with the government, although incorrectly) will wither away in one country or even one particular region of the world; he says it will wither away when the revolution becomes an international one, which is the only way revolutionary social change can be accomplished. So yes, the state didn’t wither away in the USSR or Eastern Europe, and it hasn’t withered away in Cuba or China or North Korea, because those aren’t the conditions under which Marx said it would.
Up until the English Revolution, no civilization had ever existed without a king. Was it foolish for the bourgeois revolutionaries to think otherwise?