Just because something is "common" or "nearly universal" doesn't make it right

Slavery was "common" and "universal" for thousands of years and it was only until the Founding Fathers that any noticeable number of people or any importance thought to question it. Taxation does nothing to hold back big corporations, all it does is shrink their profits, thus minimizing the products they can produce, the people they can employ, and the innovation they can drive. Economic transactions like employer-paying-employee-for-working benefit both sides, clearly and obviously, because if they didn't, why would the employee work? Why would anyone work, when working HURTS them? That's the question I want you to answer – if the free market is so evil, why do so many willingly participate in it? Obviously they wouldn't, if one side could only benefit at the expense of another.

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@9CJ6CB6 from Virginia disagreed…4mos4MO

Well what is and isn’t moral tends to be based upon effect and total fairness, which, overall, taxation has a more positive effect as it keeps the roads, the hospitals, the water, and the economy running in an orderly fashion. Taxation is a moral responsibility because upon being a citizen of the United States, you have already agreed to that, not to mention the currency of this nation is run and built by the nation as a whole, showing a requirement of reciprocity and collective agreement that taxation needs. Society has created that environment of reciprocity since it’s just gene… Read morerally fair play to help one another, even by coercive force, by paying a certain amount of collective funds to make basic services and necessities work, since without that, those services would either be a a lot worse or simply not exist at all. These services and infrastructure projects could not be funded by simple tarrifs or indirect taxation alone, the direct form is just an economic requirement to function in the societal level.

Holding back big corporations IS reducing their profits, though it could also be anti-trust laws that capitalism REQUIRES to function as close to “morally” as possible, though it may be at some sacrifice of profit, that profit is worthless to us all if there isn’t a guarantee that they’ll actually commit to creating jobs and funding their workers, which, in many circumstances, requires a coercive hand to ensure. The “invisible hand” of the market is created or guided by the coercive power of an iron fist, and sometimes, that is a necessary and good thing, whether that be by bailouts, worker compensation, nationalizing failing banks, or creating incentives into a certain direction.

Employer-to-employee transactions often only give the bare minimum, or very slightly above, to the employee. The deal isn’t even, it’s placed in the employers favor, and what’s leftover from the worker’s labor that isn’t necessary to the survival of the company is just inherently stealing, since the workers directly created that, or did the work to gain that from the market, thereby, that money is not liable to the employer’s ownership, but to the workers themselves. The employee only works for them because it gets them out of poverty, which, in so many ways, is what can seal your doom should you fail to find a decent job in time. The worker has to do that to survive, the company gains what it WANTS, further than what it needs most of the time. People work because if they don’t, the hurt they deal with from working already would get so much worse. Working conditions here already are insane, and that fault doesn’t lie with the government, as our heaviest times for Keynesian economics had an overall much higher positive impact for workers, and what we have now was a lot less regulations than before in many areas.

The market has such high participation because it’s the only chance people have at surviving, same way as in feudalism where so many had to heavily focus on their local markets to survive, it’s because they needed it to live. The market generally tends to be far less kind to the poor, especially in impoverished nations where the populations are used as cheap labor with the slightest chance of creating an overall profit for their country. (Often, those profits are used to recycle the whole exploitation process to further benefit more powerful nations) I’ve heard the whole “society” question a thousand times, the whole “if it’s so bad then why is it used” thing is just an old question. People often ask it as if there’s any other alternatives that have gained enough investment to work on a large scale.

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@Patriot-#1776Constitution from Washington disagreed…4mos4MO

Well what is and isn’t moral tends to be based upon effect and total fairness

No, what is and isn't moral is based upon the Bible, which is the only logical possibility, as I've already established in our prior debates.

Overall, taxation has a more positive effect as it keeps the roads, the hospitals, the water, and the economy running in an orderly fashion.

Interesting that all the services you listed can, and have been provided entirely privately, with outstanding success, throughout history, especially in the US, when 99 percent of roads were once private, 100 percent of hosp… Read moreitals were private, 100 percent of water was private, and the economy was FAR more orderly because there wasn't the Federal Reserve messing things up & creating Depressions.

Taxation is a moral responsibility

No, it's not. Taxation is the act of the government taking my money, from me. And I have a right to defend it, because I earned it, not the government. In saying that taxation is a moral responsibility, you've admitted that there's a such thing as morality, thus being forced to assume Christianity in order to have this discussion. And, as I've already demonstrated, Christianity alone can account for morality. Again, I'm not committing a logical fallacy by saying this, because we've already established it in prior debates. You can try to de-establish it by presenting a logical argument for your position, but as far as I'm aware you gave up on that weeks ago...

because upon being a citizen of the United States, you have already agreed to that,

No, I didn't. I didn't agree to anything at all. That claim is so obviously and absurdly false. Unless, of course, you're spewing the French Jacobin "Social Contract Theory" in which case the laugh ability of this argument is multiplied even further...

These services and infrastructure projects could not be funded by simple tarrifs or indirect taxation alone

Which is precisely why I want to abolish taxation – so government can't fund that BS!

Employer-to-employee transactions often only give the bare minimum, or very slightly above, to the employee. The deal isn’t even, it’s placed in the employers favor, and what’s leftover from the worker’s labor that isn’t necessary to the survival of the company is just inherently stealing, since the workers directly created that, or did the work to gain that from the market, thereby, that money is not liable to the employer’s ownership, but to the workers themselves.

Apparently you subscribe to the Marxist belief that all value is produced by labor – which is disturbingly (but hilariously) false. The marginal utility theory of value, a plank of Austrian economics, is what I subscribe to. Allow me to explain: Value is not created by the amount of labor someone puts into creating the commodity, but rather reflects how useful people view the commodity to be in satisfying their ends. For example, the latest model of iPad is not highly priced because it took someone x number of hours to produce it – it's highly priced because consumers value it. In fact, no labor at all would be expended in the production of iPads if it was not known first that society had an extremely high chance of seeing iPads as valuable in satisfying their ends. Carl Menger's 1870s work on economics should be read by every citizen of the United States, and far, far beyond – it thoroughly dismantles the labor theory of value, and in fact launched the Austrian Revolution in economics continued by F.A. Hayek, Mises, and Henry Hazlitt.

Working conditions here already are insane,

Oh don't get me started on working conditions – working conditions! So, so horrible and dehumanising. Heck, when I was a teenager I had to stand for four hours in the air-conditioned comfort of a Burger King, with POP MUSIC (I should have sued those capitalist pigs for worker exploitation!) playing the background, with a lunch break of only an hour (Oh, the humanity! How the devil could anyone eat a sandwich in JUST ONE HOUR?) ! We were WORKED TO DEATH, – heck, one my coworkers even MOVED once in a while! Oh the horror! It brings me to tears just thinking about it.

Actually, it doesn't, because I'm not a narcissistic sissy and major league crybaby.

I’ve heard the whole “society” question a thousand times, the whole “if it’s so bad then why is it used” thing is just an old question.

Old or not, don't you agree it deserves a logical ANSWER? Or can you not provide that, because you DON'T HAVE ONE?

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@9CJ6CB6 from Virginia disagreed…4mos4MO

The Bible doesn’t really have to be, rational morality can be based upon the feelings and logic of the average person long before the Bible existed. The five pillars of morality (a constructed system to analyze morality itself, which isn’t necessarily Bible based) tend to be a decent way to analyze actions and reasons for them, such as effect or fairness. The reasons we do things are based upon that in most areas, and the reason for those senses remains unknown because neither the Bible nor science can empirically prove the reason for those actions and senses since that is not a… Read more tangible thing that can be seen and understood as of yet, and while the Bible claims to be a “virtuous circle”, it lacks the overall explanation behind what god himself is, or where that god came from, drawing questions about the nature of existence that can further not be explained by the Bible itself, so we’re in the same situation no matter what, you just claim to have a further sense of an answer by using a virtuously circular argument that doesn’t explain its own existence either.

The source of most of the orderly simplicity was the much lesser amount of information and transactions in the system itself, if you are referring to pre-1900s eras. The government itself stayed small and overall intervened very little, but it allowed for extremely poor worker lifestyles due to the overall pollution and lack of good pay in most jobs themselves. The decent pay in some companies was based largely upon pressure to do so, and was meant to make more money rather than create better overall good for people. Domestically, it was still not great, and on foreign soil, it was FAR worse, with atrocities such as the Congo Free State massacres and exploitation of poorer nations, which still exist under capitalist countries, being one of the many nations who still have seen little to no benefit, since they’re supposed to be poor, because their labor is cheap. If their labor were the same price and treatment as it is here, it would become extremely difficult for industrialized nations to get the very commodities they claim to create and produce in the first place.

Taxation is very much required in our social contract, which is very much relevant and true today. The contract dictates what powers the heads of government have, the officiation of leaders, the requirements to be a citizen, heck the government itself is a social contract, it’s an agreed upon body with its own enforcing mechanisms that the people it’s in charge of have agreed upon in one way or another. Part of being a citizen is accepting the powers of the government, which does allow direct taxation, so yes, you did agree by becoming a citizen. Taxation itself is viewed as a public good, because it makes certain services and benefits, and because you have legally agreed to “sign” the social contract by being a citizen, you have agreed to allowing taxation whether your personal opinions like it or not. You can lobby and vote against taxation as much as you please, but it’s a much more stable method of providing services to all than by privatization. The greatest education system on earth, that of Finland, is entirely public run, and it is the #1 best in almost every respect. Finland has even banned private education, and yet, it remains extremely well functioning.

You can argue to abolish taxation, but the overal ability of private companies to provide for services across the nation has shown to have a lot of limits, and that it requires regulation to remain effective in any sense of the word that is guaranteed to be applied safely.

Value’s production comes from labor somewhere down the line. The stock market, the product, the services themselves require workers to function, and those workers create a large amount of the products that can artificially gain more value than they are worth via marketing and selling, but regardless, the beginning source is the workers themselves, and they are liable to pay that they do the large bulk of creating, and as such, the excess value after the needs of the company are met is the property of the workers who create it. Much of the appearance of need or want for that commodity is also a result that most capitalists predicted would happen in a planned economy, via creating unnecessary stuff with faked or artificial demand, but that’s happening here in capitalist countries, another thing Austrian economists failed to understand or realize. The iPad for example, after its creation and production, they created new forms with little to no change that costed more resources and improved almost nothing about it. This still came at a higher cost of labor, and squandered the possible benefit that could have made. The LTV theory was also never built to create exact predictions, yet the current theory of MTU isn’t capable of predicting the fluctuations of prices even in the aggregate form, merely preprinting to the averages in the past as an assumed prediction model. Not to mention, the laws of supply and demand are derived from LTV, not disproving of it, since assumptions are made of the actual purpose of the LTV in the first place that miss the actual point OF IT.

Ah yes, working conditions! As an adult, whenever someone is trying to pay the rent, the bills, expenses for basic needs, outside factors such as taxes, gas, paying off debts, etc, the working conditions tend to not really pay enough to deal with this, many of the service jobs are forcefully becoming more mainstream as they’re cheap and professional jobs are becoming a lot harder to actually gain the prerequisites for, so these jobs become more populated and in turn lower the pay given to the workers, or worse, the amount of consumers drastically outnumbers the workforce’s capacity and then the pay still refuses to increase because they’re overwhelmed dramatically from how much work there is to deal with. People have to take out multiple jobs very often since rental houses are much more common and as such, that discourages individual ownership, meaning rental owners can parasitically feed thousands of dollars to themselves in often poor conditions since houses, as previously stated, are more and more rent aligned. We’re dealing with a lot of jobs, all at once, with low pay, high costs of healthcare in the private sector, increasing commodification for basic needs, and a lack of unionization to demand things from the company, so yeah, the conditions suck.

As to the society question, that’s like asking a serf why they still worked for the king if they thought society should change, it’s because we kinda have to, otherwise change is a lot more difficult.

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@Patriot-#1776Constitution from Washington disagreed…4mos4MO

rational morality can be based upon the feelings and logic of the average person long before the Bible existed.

I understand that unbelievers often have a basic knowledge of right and wrong build into the conscience. But that's not an argument against Christianity – the reason unbelievers have that sense of right and wrong, the reason they possess consciences, is because God created those. They are not biological entities that can be explained through evolution. In fact, in a Darwinian Evolutionist worldview, "total fairness" a metric you seem to use in judging between rig… Read moreht and wrong, is totally irrelevant and no one has any reason to accept it – in fact, if morality existed at all in atheistic reality, it would be based upon survival and perpetuation of the fittest of the species and extermination of the unfit of the human species – the same twisted logic that drove the Holocaust and many a "Genocide" a word you leftists love to bring up without knowledge that your beliefs contributed enormously to such horrific crimes, seldom surpassed in barbarity by any sin in the catalogue of human crime.

The decent pay in some companies was based largely upon pressure to do so, and was meant to make more money rather than create better overall good for people.

Who cares? Who cares what the MOTIVES were behind paying the workers better? What matters is that in this free market system, businesses, whether for selfish or philanthropic reasons (really it's irrelevant) paid their workers competitively more, and reaped the benefits as more people wanted to be hired by their corporation.

with atrocities such as the Congo Free State massacres and exploitation of poorer nations, which still exist under capitalist countries, being one of the many nations who still have seen little to no benefit, since they’re supposed to be poor, because their labor is cheap.

The reason all these African States are so horribly wretched, uncivilised, and poor, is because of the liquidation of the British Empire in the 1950s. Had Great Britain continued her Empire in Africa, India, and all these places, they would be significantly more civilised, and life would be far less barbaric and wretched. Look at Australia, where Britain stayed for WAY LONGER, and Canada – they have nice roads, decent education (or they used to, at any rate) Christianity, the English Language, civilisation, freedom, common law, rights, representative government, free trade, etc. Churchill was right about the Empire – and its destruction was one of the most lamentable events of modern history.

Taxation is very much required in our social contract, which is very much relevant and true today. The contract dictates what powers the heads of government have, the officiation of leaders, the requirements to be a citizen, heck the government itself is a social contract, it’s an agreed upon body with its own enforcing mechanisms that the people it’s in charge of have agreed upon in one way or another. Part of being a citizen is accepting the powers of the government, which does allow direct taxation, so yes, you did agree by becoming a citizen.

That's, of course, assuming the existence of the social contract, which I see no logical reason to believe in, and what this discussion was supposed to be about, making this rant all another giant Question-Begging Fallacy...

it’s a much more stable method of providing services to all than by privatization.

Hate to break it to you, but, again, that's Begging the Question – we're supposed to be discussing logically whether private enterprise or government coercion is better, not taking the latter as better without any rational reason...

We’re dealing with a lot of jobs, all at once, with low pay, high costs of healthcare in the private sector, increasing commodification for basic needs,

No, we're dealing with EXTREMELY high pay, with a tyrannical government stealing a significant chunk of it. Eliminate taxation (which I showed you the absurdity of) and wages automatically go WAY further for the working man. This is NOT rocket science...

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@9CJ6CB6 from Virginia disagreed…4mos4MO

WELP, at least you’re starting to narrow down your gish gallop a little bit. Let’s start with the “unbeliever” part, which I just find funny because that WAS our state for a while… under the assumption that everyone was connected and fighting like that. For so long, these principles were applied, even with Christianity around, and that didn’t stop people from fighting for their own selfish interest, but the thing is that cooperation of people in societies helped to destroy the need for fighting and murdering everyone else in some darwinistic way, that just… Read more changed to different societies instead, each one fighting, even with Christianity inside their philosophy, to gain supremacy over the other, and yet we still got here with pretty much the same moral code of right and wrong. The more we tried to embrace darwinistic human nature, the more we actually moved away from it as individuals. Morality grew by a convoluted series of debates between thinkers and individuals alike, creating new thoughts of how we should and shouldn’t act, the Bible being one of those same moral codes written by assumed prophets of old. The very metric that you think I claim exclusively (I don’t, there’s far more than that) was actually a contributing factor to getting us here today at all. Christian societies just put an emphasis on the unifying force of their own religion, creating a large enough society where thoughts could be shared and heard without nearly as much fear of invasion, while at the same time, the churches in charge actually held ideals back if they questioned preconceived notions of thought, same way as today. What created these genocides was the dissolution of CARING about right and wrong, (since hatred and nationalism overpowered morality) and more about the good of the nation above the individual, sacrificing the very good of the individual in most every circumstance in the process.

The pressure for companies to give them time off or to create better pay was largely forced alongside that, workers unions and government intervention was a REQUIREMENT to retain longterm standards of work, because the very businesses that fought could just as easily merge and cooperate to maximize profit, while destroying companies that dared to try and outdo them. The competitive atmosphere attacks itself if not regulated HEAVILY, because they always find some way.

The reason these civilizations were so poor was because of what the empires took FROM them. They had no reason to benefit the colonies they conquered if they could’ve served as free labor instead, their dissolution was merely a big hit to their country after it was already dealing with severe problems. Nations like Britain, Belgium, and America only created hatred and resentment in those colonies, murdering millions to maintain the economic status they fought so hard for. They weren’t going to treat them better in the future, the African continent was going to remain in shambles no matter what, because the very excuses they used to conquer their lands in the first place would’ve contradicted better treatment of those peoples in the first place, and that propaganda itself was exactly what made the problem worse after a while. Australia and Canada weren’t being exploited nearly as much, nor was the reasoning justified via “civilizing” them or discrediting their race, because the previous natives (if there were any at all) were slaughtered the same way as America with the Trail of Tears.

The social contract is quite literally everywhere in the establishment of your government, it’s a theoretical and intangible thing, but it’s referring to the permission to allow rule, though it may not be un enforced, the permission remains tbe same.

For the privatization issue, I did explain why government taxation helps make efficient services, I used Finland as an example, because their government primed their education system using taxation to create such a good school system that ranks so high.

You’re blaming TAXES for this? The theft of surplus value is FAR higher, even when compensating for the contributions the company used to continue functioning, that number remains far higher than taxes have ever been. If socialist style workplaces were implemented (it has worked in the past despite extreme economic pressure from the outside world), taxation would be negligible if not nonexistent since the surplus value goes back to you as a person, and the only portion necessary is the societal cost to the public at large, not via taxation, but by direct funding to subsidiaries that would maintain society, by no means necessarily by the state. This number is also a lot smaller, and has worked multiple times in the past, despite what many economists may claim.

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Just because something is "common" or "nearly universal" doesn't make it right

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