Taxes and political economy

[Franko]

There are a few tremendous means of commerce and governing. I must say.  I've witnessed a few and have determined that a free-market (capitalism) and a (veiled) democratic means of governing is the best way to pacify a nation.

 

[Franko]

Take it easy on me....I haven't been on Facebook in almost a year...

 

[elwing]

Swiss, private but mandatory health insurance (insanely expensive, btw, I pay more than $300 a month), public schools dominate (but I hesitate to call them "good"), higher education is free and of better quality than the schools for younger kids, if you are employed you and your employer have to pay into a social (i.e. people with high salaries help pay for the retirement of people with low salaries) retirement system for you (you are pretty poor if you have to live exclusively off it).

well actually the system works pretty good... the only major problem is about private insurance... there is virtually no concurency and they basically just encourage good risks to change of insurance every year to be able to keep the reserve made for you... but all in one, we are pretty well protected in case of accident, illiness or when we retire...

 

[klapse]

GM was a large company that went bust (until govt saved it). So was Lehman Bros. Nokia lost most of its value. Big companies do fail. And that is a good thing.

 

[klapse]

This is Marxism 101. Exactly what communists preach

I am not following you at all. What sentence are you referring to that is "Exactly what communists preach"?

That workers should receive 100% of the "Surplus Value" that their labor creates. In capitalism this surplus value is reflected in profits.

 

[WizardStan]

That workers should receive 100% of the "Surplus Value" that their labor creates

Ok, but that's a thing that YOU said. What does that have to do with anything that you were addressing in what _wb_ was saying? You made this bizarre leap from "minimizing worker pay is normal in capitalism" to "if you think workers deserve everything then get off the project you communist!"

 

[Franko]

What a ridiculous social "argument" that you are involved in.  Our countries are constantly evolving...or in Sweden's case Volvoing.....(crickets).....okay, no laughter, but we all learn from eachother and I'll say THIS ------> commerce <-------- THAT'S what drives human interaction and social change and erases hate and bigotry - TRADE.

 

[comradekingu]

Id say self sufficiency is more important than trade. Trade can and has created a lot of social injustice.

Volvo belongs to GM now, and thats the reason nobody is happy about it over here.

Paying taxes for public services like health care, education, roads, railways etc. is a very good idea and I don't mind doing that at all. Paying taxes for the personal wealth of a king (this was proportionally a bigger issue in the middle ages, but we still have a king here today so not that much has changed) or to subsidize the rich, big business and wars, that sucks.

Taxes in themselves are not the problem, it's what the collected taxes are used for. I would gladly pay much more taxes than I already do if they were used for better purposes, and I live in a country with one of the highest tax rates of the world.

Kings arent the problem either. What belgium (and Norway now) has, isn't a king, its a monarch.
Real queens/kings were around when the ancient democracy of scandinavia was invented, courts of law etc. Taxes built roads then too. The foreign influence of judeo-christianity ruined europa for a while, not kings. http://www.worldology.com/Europe/dark_ages_imap.htm Notice how the viking age wasnt the dark age for northern europe. Christian rulers get a bad rap for also being kings. There are exceptions to the rule, but largely thats true. I favour a king over a tribal society.

A king is supposed to go in first when there is war, ideally without armour, otherwise it is the phesants army duty to kill him. If you wage war on any other premise, you are not king.

What taxes are used for is 100% the point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index Same correlation to standards of living. (done right)

The good part of the world to be in is synonymous with healtcare. The exception being the US, which is now realizing, and its not like everyone can be the US in terms of global trade. Global trade make it sound like parasitical activity just evens out somehow. Luckily there are governments around the world with enough connection to their people to put a stop to it soon.

-Most taxed country in the world, Norway, where people gladly pay their taxes, (and complain about small things the government does like there is no tomorrow)

 

[klapse]

That workers should receive 100% of the "Surplus Value" that their labor creates

Ok, but that's a thing that YOU said. What does that have to do with anything that you were addressing in what _wb_ was saying? You made this bizarre leap from "minimizing worker pay is normal in capitalism" to "if you think workers deserve everything then get off the project you communist!"

There is a misunderstanding here. WB used the term "exploitation" which marxists use to refer to capitalist profits. Any profit at all is exploiting the workers, according to Marx. That was what both _wb_ and I are referring-to. It is understandable that you thought I was putting words into _wb_s mouth, but I wasn't. We are referring to a previously defined concept.

 

[bzar]

Didn't Marx argue for dividing the surplus according to contribution? One could say taking capital risk is a form of contribution, so the owner of the means of production would be entitled to some fraction of the surplus, but not all of it as it stands in capitalism. There are values between "all" and "none".

 

[Binky]

What belgium has, isn't a king, its a monarch.

Erm?

Monarch is a term that definitely includes kings.

I think what you mean is that many countries now have ceremonial monarchs rather than governing ones.

Id say self sufficiency is more important than trade

Trade (or at least exchange of goods and services) is vital for human development. If everyone were to build their own house, grow their own food, etc, overall standards of living and productivity would fall.

 

[comradekingu]

Its more that kings exclude monarchs. Yes. 

Traditionally a kingdom, either Maternichal or Patriarchial has been a excersize in finding the strongest person, and the strongest mate in competition.

Brutal power isnt arbitrary to this, as time has shown, but inbreeding with other royal families definately is. Todays monarchy is a joke if compared to the need and the governing of a real kingdom.

In the kind of society that can facilitate putting up a sock puppet "king" it doesnt really help to make it a king-governed reign. So there is clearly a divide between kings and monarchs.

We have a idea of "my king" here, which the current constitutional monarch decidedly is not. Same as "my government" means you are responsible, which is what seperates a good from a bad one i suppose.  To take down a bad government is no more difficult than taking down a bad king. To me it doesnt matter that they are called two different things, because they are in effect the same. Paternalistic. Dont know of any places the people has the power where there was a need to overthrow something.

When something is overthrown by the people thats usually a good thing, unless its the judeo-christian kind.  Watching the arab spring unfold only to become worse. Arabs havent contributed anything to world society since the kush. Wiping out people on an even larger scale will follow, it always does.

Have a hard time accepting wiping out people is a willfull acceptance of religion though, which makes that argument hard to make, but i suppose power to the power to be. If people are responsible for their government they are equally responsible to eradicate ideas that force themselves on others. If one doesnt fight for ones culture, judeo-christianity is happy to replace it with voilently, given the chance.

But that is watching it with nordic eyes. If the ideal standard of living is a fixed goal, then i suppose best of luck.  Glad we are done with it for now here in europe though. Both the direct conflict of the balkans, but also the 1000 year span of judeo-christian prevelance.

It even manifests itself in trying to falsify history. Trying to assimilate culture. However 1000 years is not long in the governing of civilization.

There is a  distinction to make between culture, as something that is shared, and ideas that have been forced upon someone to.

I think that is important to keep in mind, because in trying to progress, if that isnt kept in mind, one will repeat how it regressed society to something we loathe.

Global trade today is the same imperialistic, cultural cancer. Gaging its greater effect is whats important.

I said _more_ important. Standards of living for who? Happiness is higher in many nations where standards of living is lower. Being exploited is bad regardless of standard of living it produces. Productivity in this regard isnt paramount, thats looking at it from the wrong end. It is the acceptance of a inherrent logical flaw.

B-Zar: If actual risk was what governed capitalism then capitalism would work. Implementing communist ideals in a capitalist society is asking to get trashed. Doing it by force is isnt the communist idea, nor does it work. Its the same thing as forgetting egoism and implementing alturistic ideals, which communism isnt.  Either by revolution or by revisionism, it is important to keep in mind both sides.

Overtaking the stagnant (non-risk) factors of society after they have played their part is what marx argued. Notice how the maoists in nepal are fighting to implement capitalism, because they are a pre-industrial society.

 

[WizardStan]

Any profit at all is exploiting the workers, according to Marx. That was what both _wb_ and I are referring-to

Was it really? Can you quote something to back that up because I clearly missed where _wb_ said that.

 

[_wb_]

Any profit at all is exploiting the workers, according to Marx. That was what both _wb_ and I are referring-to

Was it really? Can you quote something to back that up because I clearly missed where _wb_ said that.

Well yes, klapse is right about that point: according to Marx (and also according to me), from a macro-economic perspective, capitalist profits are in general the result of exploiting workers as there is no other mechanism that actually creates profits. Trade does not generate profit by itself: of course one trader can profit from a transaction, but what is gained on one side of the transaction, is lost on the other side. Globally it's a zero-sum game. Labor is the only thing that actually creates surplus value. The price of labor power (i.e. the wage) is normally lower than the value of the resulting labor; the difference (after accounting for raw material costs and amortized production infrastructure costs etc) is profit. Marx defined the degree of exploitation as the ratio between unpaid and paid labor. If it is zero, then workers get all the fruits of their labor (this is e.g. the case for the self-employed); if it is 100% then for every dollar paid in wages, the net profit is one dollar (so if the company would be run as a non-profit organization, it could have paid two dollars in wages instead of one).

In the case of EvilDragon, DragonBox and the Pyra, I don't think there's a lot of exploitation going on. EvilDragon is a self-employed worker, not a capitalist. Maybe he employs some people, but so far I don't think his has made much of a net profit, so I don't think there's any significant exploitation there. As far as I can tell from this distance, ED is more or less running DragonBox as a non-profit organization. The only parties involved that could be capitalists, would be the 'investors'; I don't know the specifics of their investments, but I suspect that the kind of return on investment they were promised compared to the actual risk they took would qualify them more as charitable patrons than as capitalists. They could probably get 'better investments' elsewhere (higher ROI, less risk), and the fact that they invested in Pandora/Pyra is probably more like a kind of implicit donation than a real capitalist investment. I also suspect that most of these investors are from the working class in the marxist sense of the term, that is, they get their primary income from labor, not from the return on their investments.

At Global Components and other such companies (in particular the ones in Asia that produce most of the raw components), there is exploitation going on, but I suspect that the degree of exploitation going on in the companies ED picked, is relatively low for the sector (if ED had any choice in the matter). At any case, from ED's perspective, that exploitation is unavoidable because he's just a consumer, he does not have the capital to do all aspects of Pyra production himself since e.g. a factory that can produce a SoC or RAM requires significant capital.

Addendum: And if you really believe that workers deserve all the profits, then you need to resign as moderator and have nothing to do with the Pyra, because if the Pyra is successful, the investors will earn a profit. Not 100% of the profits will go to the laborers. Are you ready to call EvilDragon an "exploiter"? You HAVE TO in order to be consistent with your own ideology.

I prefer to reserve the word "exploiter" for capitalists and their companies who actually have a high degree of exploitation. So no, I'm not ready to call EvilDragon an "exploiter", because a) he's not a capitalist, and B) the degree of exploitation involved in the overall production process of the Pyra is likely to be significantly lower than the sector average.

Also I don't have the intention to avoid or walk away from anything that is not compatible with the political-economical system I would prefer. If that were the case, I could not buy anything in a supermarket, I would have to quit my job, and I would essentially need to go live in an isolated cave or something. I'm not planning to do that -- I do have some ambitions to change the world for the better, but it's unavoidable that the starting point is what it is, and I think it's impossible to change the world without being part of the current society, however flawed that current society may be.

 

[Binky]

I prefer to reserve the word "exploiter" for capitalists and their companies who actually have a high degree of exploitation.

This makes a lot of sense. Especially as, while they may not actually add value, traders and businesspeople make division of labour possible.

A small degree of exploitation is, in my opinion, necessary.

 

[_wb_]

I prefer to reserve the word "exploiter" for capitalists and their companies who actually have a high degree of exploitation.

This makes a lot of sense. Especially as, while they may not actually add value, traders and businesspeople make division of labour possible.

A small degree of exploitation is, in my opinion, necessary.

Traders don't do exploitation in so far as they're just doing pure trading (that is, taking advantage of fluctuations of the price of goods around the actual value of the goods); many aspects of "trading" are better described though as being part of the service industry: e.g. transport, distribution, retail etc and then there can of course be exploitation; there is no fundamental difference between the production of tangible and non-tangible goods.

Division of labor is obviously a very effective way to increase global productivity and allows a degree specialization that would otherwise be impossible, but I don't see why (a small degree of) exploitation would be necessary to allow division of labor.

I don't think any exploitation is inherently necessary in an ideal society. Less exploitation always leads to less inequality and a more fair distribution of wealth. If you say that "a small degree of exploitation is necessary", you probably mean that there are some exploiters that you consider to be useful to society, but I would say that to the extent that they're actually doing something useful, they're not exploiting but just paying themselves a wage for the work they do. It's only exploitation if you do nothing useful, if you're just owning companies as a lucrative method to automatically convert capital into more capital. It's not the CEO or the HR manager or whatever who is doing the exploiting: these people are just well-paid workers who still do something useful (usually they are quite bad at their job, but that's another matter; they may also well be overpaid in the sense that probably they get more than the actual value they add). The exploiting is done by the people above that, the ones that just have heaps of money and convert those heaps of money into bigger heaps of money in some way -- nowadays the real economy isn't even their favorite playground anymore, they prefer the virtual economy, speculation, hedge funds etc, since they can get a higher ROI there for as long as such bubbles last.

But it's not necessarily true that the most exploited workers are necessarily in the worst position -- since "exploitation" is defined in relative terms (at least if you take that marxist definition of unpaid labor divided by paid labor). For example, the degree of exploitation in the petro-chemical industry is very high (because it is a very profitable industry) even though those workers typically earn a very nice wage (at least in western countries), while the degree of exploitation in a Chinese sweat shop could very well be quite low because even though the wages and living conditions are horrible, since that Chinese factory itself is probably not really that profitable and there's a lot of competition which tends to drive down profit. I would call both of those examples "exploitation" and I consider the latter example a bigger problem than the former even though in strict terms of company-level degree of exploitation, it would seem to be the other way around. One of the problems is that companies and product markets are globalized, while labor markets are still geographically localized, so you can't really look at it at the factory-level, you have to consider the whole supply chain and subcontractor structure.

 

[WizardStan]

I prefer to reserve the word "exploiter" for capitalists and their companies who actually have a high degree of exploitation

This is what I was referring to when I asked klapse for evidence that you and he were talking about the same thing with respect to exploitation. I am well aware of what Marx taught, I just didn't see what you said as being the absolute "any profit is the same as exploitation and needs to be eliminated" that klapse was saying you did. He had to that point carried the debate reasonably well but making such a huge leap in assuming what you said makes for a very poor argument and does not help his case at all. I hate poor arguments, possibly more than anything else.

 

[comradekingu]

The capitalist maximizes exploitation to gain profit. That is the problem, not systemic loss. To the degree this has a systemic value it isnt the problem. But again, missing the point of the bigger picture.