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I have no problem with Guaranteed Income, paid by people freely giving to those in need. If everyone spent as much time donating their time and money as they do

I have no problem with Guaranteed Income, paid by people freely giving to those in need. If everyone spent as much time donating their time and money as they do jaw jacking that "someone else should do something", we'd solve world hunger by now. I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul. Stealing is stealing, no matter how you butter it up, and no matter if Peter will miss it, and no matter if Peter has enough that it doesn't matter. Repeat: Ends do not justify the means. It's sad that so many people think the only answer is to steal from whom they consider rich. If this rule were applied equally globally, everyone complaining would have _a lot_ removed from them, as the World Poverty Level is defined at an income $1.90/day or $693.5/year. The upper bound on worldwide wealth is only bound by energy and raw materials, which we have nearly unlimited supplies of both. My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023. You skip the extreme overhead of government's and every crooked politician grabbing a handful out of the hat and every special interest taking a cut. If you want to help, the answer is found in basic charity that everyone should be doing.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anthonypasq 4y ago
[flagged]
- jeromegv 4y ago
  It's also the mentality that somehow someone receiving money from the government is "stealing", but leaves totally out of the equation people that have extorted a crazy amount of wealth on themselves by enduring dangerous and poor working conditions for their workers. When you see companies depending on government to provide welfares or NGOs food banks to their OWN worker because how low the salary is. But that is fine.
- 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
  If not theft, would you not agree that it's certainly excessive? Did you support government giving your tax money to the banks in 2008 or the automakers in 2009? If you didn't support it, did you still pay your taxes? If so, why? fwiw, I think the "taxes are theft" argument is often used as a response of exasperation against what appears to be systemic misuse of public money. I suspect that the vast majority of people who would repeat that, would also agree that some form of the "social contract" is necessary. They probably just disagree on what specific level of government involvement makes sense. ie: rather than expanding the size of government, why not reduce the size of government. Wouldn't that free up more productive labor that could grow the pie for everyone? Maybe government doesn't need to be picking winners and losers in a free market - or at least less so than they currently do.
  - anthonypasq 4y ago
    people that say taxation is theft categorically do not believe in the social contract. this isnt a friendly debate about when government spending becomes expensive, they literally dont think taxes should exist. its like claiming a full blown Stalinist simply disagrees with the level of private ownership people expect. now as to whether its just some refrain out of exasperation, maybe pick some words that accurately explain how youre feeling instead of saying something moronic and expecting everyone else to read your mind as to what you were actually trying to say.
    - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
      > people that say taxation is theft categorically do not believe in the social contract. I have not seen any evidence to support that. In fact I see plenty of evidence against that. Most people have nuanced opinions on most subjects - myself included. That's not to say that there aren't some people who think that way, but all? Most? No, I don't think that's a fair assessment. > this isnt a friendly debate about when government spending becomes expensive, they literally dont think taxes should exist. its like claiming a full blown Stalinist simply disagrees with the level of private ownership people expect. Your reaction seems extreme. So what if they legit think that - that seems like an opinion that could be debated, not a crime requiring punishment. As for the rest of your reply - I think name-calling is inappropriate. Maybe focus on substance?
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  Get used to people having different opinions than you - it will help you greatly in life.
  - anthonypasq 4y ago
    dont you have bossa novas to write or something?
Baloo 4y ago
Thing is the 'wealthy' depend on exploitation far out of sight to sustain their lifestyles. A real global guaranteed income would not be 'stealing', it would be a step towards correctly remunerating those at the bottom of the labour force / supply chain. That being said, it's a tragedy that it will never happen and the worst offenders are the ones with the most luxurious lives, squirreling their ill-gotten gains away into overseas trusts.
nebulousthree 4y ago
Look at it this way: Guaranteed income is a non-zero income floor that corrects for past, ongoing, and potentially future theft indiscriminately.
Aloha 4y ago
At some point everything.. anything that alters the status quo can be considered 'a taking'. The way you're framing it, is any form of taxation is a taking. I have no particular issue with welfare, because fewer poor people benefit all of us, even if you do not happen to see the benefit of it - you still receive the benefits from fewer people living in poverty. I have a favorite quote from LBJ - "We dont ask much, the average American does not demand much, but we have a right to expect in this rich country, if we're willing to work from daylight to dark, we have a right to expect a job, to provide food for our family, a roof over their head, clothes for their bodies, an opportunity to have our children educated, and the right to worship god according to the dictates of our own conscience. Poverty not only strikes at the needs of the body it also taxes the spirit and undermines human dignity. It is not enough for the congress to pass laws, we will not will our war against poverty until the conscience of the entire nation is aroused. We will not succeed until every citizen regards the suffering of neighbors as a call to action, we will not overcome until every child in every city and every town joins its parents to help us mobilize its resources. Not in a day, and not in a year will these goals be reached, but if we begin the effort, if we approach the task with great enthusiasm and not with cynicism these achievements will be the glory, the glory of your generation. So I have come here today to ask for your heart and your hand to ask you to join us in a similar cause. Help us to build a better land, help us to built a greater society, help us open wide the doors of opportunity and we invite all to come in and when have done this it will one day be said of America that she was a burning and shining light in mans journey on earth." The issue is, we've made the system too unfair - it's too hard to succeed, once you're below a certain point you dont have bootstraps to pull upon. The costs from poverty cost all of us something, and make for dangerous men. Voting to tax yourself to provide for them is a cheap form of insurance.
it_citizen 4y ago
Nobody got their wealth just by themselves. Just replace "stealing" by paying back what you owe to society for providing you with everything you needed to make money: a safe environment, the rule of law, infrastructure, maybe education and healthcare, public investments into fundamental research etc... Then if our society decide to give a part of what you paid back to Paul, that's a political question but it is not fundamentally unfair.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  I like to add that I'm personally incredibly thankful to the Government for creating the earth we live on, the sun, the moon and all the stars.
crabcanon 4y ago
wage labor is also theft. before you claim "but the worker agreed to it", also recognize that by being a citizen of a country, you agree to pay their taxes. if your response to people telling you that wage labor is theft is "then don't work" then you should also agree that if you don't like taxes, move elsewhere. you'll then realize that it (as well as the option to not work) are not viable options and that both wage labor and taxation are coercion. taxation with representation but also employee representation.
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  This makes no sense. Name a country you can become a citizen of, as easily as getting a new job.
  - chii 4y ago
    Not a citizen, but there's a lot of countries that you can incorporate without being a citizen, for tax purposes. liechtenstein for example. So taxation is indeed a competitive sphere (but it's only for the rich, not for the those of working wage).
    - ghiculescu 4y ago
      Liechtenstein, population 39k? I would say this proves my point. It’s not something most people can do (unlike getting a new job).
  - linkjuice4all 4y ago
    It’s like they set up a bunch of secret clubs and will only let people become members by paying for access or trading your skills and labor for permission to live there. That’s why these “taxation = theft” arguments are so stupid. Of course there is no where else you can go where you won’t get taxed because society costs money to maintain. You can try “hiding” inside a country and avoid contributing but at some point that country or society is going to notice that you’re taking and not contributing and they’ll deal with you accordingly. If you don’t have any money you’ll probably get locked up - if you do they might try to take it and lock you up anyway. And then maybe you’ll wish that someone would give you basic assistance to pay for society because you no longer can.
nemothekid 4y ago
>I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul Calling taxation "stealing" is an incredibly unserious position. >My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023 If charity was an effective case against poverty, we wouldn't need "more" charity.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Not at all, I come from France, and we've been robbed by taxation since the country started. There was a time where priests, from the church, came to collect in exchange of telling us all was well, we were at the position God wanted us to be and we should obey the local lord. Imagine paying taxes for that service and not calling it "stealing". One can challenge how tax are allocated or extracted. But it's hard because most people only care once it s so inefficient and unfair nothing works anymore. And I do wonder where the money could come for a universal income ... ourselves at best ? Foreigners at worst ?
  - bronson 4y ago
    Replying with some vague hundreds-years-old anecdote is also incredibly unserious.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pard68 4y ago
  Calling the view of approximately half the US population "unserious" is why we are where we are. People who cannot fathom or refuse to accept some widespread opinion/view/belief of another is why we are mired in identity politics and are beholden to bands of 80 year old children yelling at one another between oxygen hits and running the country into the ground. I think you ought to be more charitable to the opinion expressed by others, it's far more constructive.
  - NegativeK 4y ago
    Calling it stealing in the first place is inflammatory.
diob 4y ago
I think the issue with modern society when it comes down to it is we pretend we're not playing a long running game of monopoly when we are. There's a fixed amount of resources on Earth. It's weird to look at the new generation entering this game and say that this is the way it needs to be, when they didn't have any involvement in how it came to be. The entire idea of land ownership or resource ownership is strange when you think about it. We've mostly decided as a society that taking other folks resources by force is wrong, essentially cementing the last generation of folks that did so successfully as the aristocracy. If the nonviolent polite resource sharing society we've tried / are trying to construct is to last, resource sharing of some sort must be enforced (taxes, etc.).
carlosjobim 4y ago
> If this rule were applied equally globally, everyone complaining would have _a lot_ removed from them... You just don't get it: Everybody who is richer than me are spoiled brats, born with a silver spoon in their mouths, they should give money to me. Everybody who is poorer than me are lazy bums and drug addicts. I shouldn't have to give anything to them.
everfree 4y ago
> If everyone spent as much time donating their time and money as they do jaw jacking that "someone else should do something", we'd solve world hunger by now. Probably not. The average person generously spends maybe 6 hours a week jaw-jacking and 40+ hours a week working to make some CEO somewhere richer. There's a lot more charity time to be unlocked and donated by reducing society's systemic reliance on extracting profits than there is by telling people to jaw-jack less. > I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul. I take things from other people all the time. I call it receiving stock dividends. The McDonald's employee works for an hour, produces $15 worth of value for the company, gets paid $10.10, $3 is sent to the government and a fraction of a penny is sent right to my brokerage account. Whenever I look at my brokerage account, it always feels unfair. It really does feel like I'm stealing, and I probably am by some definition. People wake up in the morning, go to their 9-5 job, and I take part of their paycheck. Then, I walk into McDonalds and the employee makes me a burger in exchange for the part of their paycheck that I took. All because I have funny made up number with the high-bits set to "1" in my brokerage account. At its heart, capitalism requires taking something from someone else. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. > It's sad that so many people think the only answer is to steal from whom they consider rich. It's sad that so many people think capitalists make their fortunes without taking something from the working class. You probably believe that Jeff Bezos truly puts in 1,000 times more work or is 1,000 times more intelligent than his most highly compensated software engineer. > If you want to help, the answer is found in basic charity that everyone should be doing ... My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023. Respectfully, the answer to wealth inequality isn't for the bottom 90% who own 30% of the wealth to shuffle it around between each other. The answer is to unlock the other 70% of the wealth. In other words, the answer is advanced charity by the richest 10%, not basic charity by the everyday person. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with basic charity, because a little charity is always better than no charity, but I'm not about to put my signature on a piece of paper and reduce Malaria deaths in Africa by 90% like Gates did.
Incipient 4y ago
There are so, so many things wrong with this. Unless you want to directly and individually pay every single welfare worker, police officer, health inspector, road maintenance worker, and hire companies directly to fix roads, water services, etc...you don't have a leg to stand on. And if you do want to pay these people individually, you're not capable of making a judgement on the validity of taxation as a viable mechanism.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

anthonypasq 4y ago

[flagged]

jeromegv 4y ago
It's also the mentality that somehow someone receiving money from the government is "stealing", but leaves totally out of the equation people that have extorted a crazy amount of wealth on themselves by enduring dangerous and poor working conditions for their workers. When you see companies depending on government to provide welfares or NGOs food banks to their OWN worker because how low the salary is. But that is fine.
0xbadc0de5 4y ago
If not theft, would you not agree that it's certainly excessive? Did you support government giving your tax money to the banks in 2008 or the automakers in 2009? If you didn't support it, did you still pay your taxes? If so, why? fwiw, I think the "taxes are theft" argument is often used as a response of exasperation against what appears to be systemic misuse of public money. I suspect that the vast majority of people who would repeat that, would also agree that some form of the "social contract" is necessary. They probably just disagree on what specific level of government involvement makes sense. ie: rather than expanding the size of government, why not reduce the size of government. Wouldn't that free up more productive labor that could grow the pie for everyone? Maybe government doesn't need to be picking winners and losers in a free market - or at least less so than they currently do.
- anthonypasq 4y ago
  people that say taxation is theft categorically do not believe in the social contract. this isnt a friendly debate about when government spending becomes expensive, they literally dont think taxes should exist. its like claiming a full blown Stalinist simply disagrees with the level of private ownership people expect. now as to whether its just some refrain out of exasperation, maybe pick some words that accurately explain how youre feeling instead of saying something moronic and expecting everyone else to read your mind as to what you were actually trying to say.
  - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
    > people that say taxation is theft categorically do not believe in the social contract. I have not seen any evidence to support that. In fact I see plenty of evidence against that. Most people have nuanced opinions on most subjects - myself included. That's not to say that there aren't some people who think that way, but all? Most? No, I don't think that's a fair assessment. > this isnt a friendly debate about when government spending becomes expensive, they literally dont think taxes should exist. its like claiming a full blown Stalinist simply disagrees with the level of private ownership people expect. Your reaction seems extreme. So what if they legit think that - that seems like an opinion that could be debated, not a crime requiring punishment. As for the rest of your reply - I think name-calling is inappropriate. Maybe focus on substance?
carlosjobim 4y ago
Get used to people having different opinions than you - it will help you greatly in life.
- anthonypasq 4y ago
  dont you have bossa novas to write or something?

Baloo 4y ago

Thing is the 'wealthy' depend on exploitation far out of sight to sustain their lifestyles. A real global guaranteed income would not be 'stealing', it would be a step towards correctly remunerating those at the bottom of the labour force / supply chain. That being said, it's a tragedy that it will never happen and the worst offenders are the ones with the most luxurious lives, squirreling their ill-gotten gains away into overseas trusts.

nebulousthree 4y ago

Look at it this way: Guaranteed income is a non-zero income floor that corrects for past, ongoing, and potentially future theft indiscriminately.

Aloha 4y ago

At some point everything.. anything that alters the status quo can be considered 'a taking'. The way you're framing it, is any form of taxation is a taking. I have no particular issue with welfare, because fewer poor people benefit all of us, even if you do not happen to see the benefit of it - you still receive the benefits from fewer people living in poverty. I have a favorite quote from LBJ - "We dont ask much, the average American does not demand much, but we have a right to expect in this rich country, if we're willing to work from daylight to dark, we have a right to expect a job, to provide food for our family, a roof over their head, clothes for their bodies, an opportunity to have our children educated, and the right to worship god according to the dictates of our own conscience. Poverty not only strikes at the needs of the body it also taxes the spirit and undermines human dignity. It is not enough for the congress to pass laws, we will not will our war against poverty until the conscience of the entire nation is aroused. We will not succeed until every citizen regards the suffering of neighbors as a call to action, we will not overcome until every child in every city and every town joins its parents to help us mobilize its resources. Not in a day, and not in a year will these goals be reached, but if we begin the effort, if we approach the task with great enthusiasm and not with cynicism these achievements will be the glory, the glory of your generation. So I have come here today to ask for your heart and your hand to ask you to join us in a similar cause. Help us to build a better land, help us to built a greater society, help us open wide the doors of opportunity and we invite all to come in and when have done this it will one day be said of America that she was a burning and shining light in mans journey on earth." The issue is, we've made the system too unfair - it's too hard to succeed, once you're below a certain point you dont have bootstraps to pull upon. The costs from poverty cost all of us something, and make for dangerous men. Voting to tax yourself to provide for them is a cheap form of insurance.

it_citizen 4y ago

Nobody got their wealth just by themselves. Just replace "stealing" by paying back what you owe to society for providing you with everything you needed to make money: a safe environment, the rule of law, infrastructure, maybe education and healthcare, public investments into fundamental research etc... Then if our society decide to give a part of what you paid back to Paul, that's a political question but it is not fundamentally unfair.

carlosjobim 4y ago
I like to add that I'm personally incredibly thankful to the Government for creating the earth we live on, the sun, the moon and all the stars.

crabcanon 4y ago

wage labor is also theft. before you claim "but the worker agreed to it", also recognize that by being a citizen of a country, you agree to pay their taxes. if your response to people telling you that wage labor is theft is "then don't work" then you should also agree that if you don't like taxes, move elsewhere. you'll then realize that it (as well as the option to not work) are not viable options and that both wage labor and taxation are coercion. taxation with representation but also employee representation.

ghiculescu 4y ago
This makes no sense. Name a country you can become a citizen of, as easily as getting a new job.
- chii 4y ago
  Not a citizen, but there's a lot of countries that you can incorporate without being a citizen, for tax purposes. liechtenstein for example. So taxation is indeed a competitive sphere (but it's only for the rich, not for the those of working wage).
  - ghiculescu 4y ago
    Liechtenstein, population 39k? I would say this proves my point. It’s not something most people can do (unlike getting a new job).
- linkjuice4all 4y ago
  It’s like they set up a bunch of secret clubs and will only let people become members by paying for access or trading your skills and labor for permission to live there. That’s why these “taxation = theft” arguments are so stupid. Of course there is no where else you can go where you won’t get taxed because society costs money to maintain. You can try “hiding” inside a country and avoid contributing but at some point that country or society is going to notice that you’re taking and not contributing and they’ll deal with you accordingly. If you don’t have any money you’ll probably get locked up - if you do they might try to take it and lock you up anyway. And then maybe you’ll wish that someone would give you basic assistance to pay for society because you no longer can.

nemothekid 4y ago

>I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul Calling taxation "stealing" is an incredibly unserious position. >My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023 If charity was an effective case against poverty, we wouldn't need "more" charity.

xwolfi 4y ago
Not at all, I come from France, and we've been robbed by taxation since the country started. There was a time where priests, from the church, came to collect in exchange of telling us all was well, we were at the position God wanted us to be and we should obey the local lord. Imagine paying taxes for that service and not calling it "stealing". One can challenge how tax are allocated or extracted. But it's hard because most people only care once it s so inefficient and unfair nothing works anymore. And I do wonder where the money could come for a universal income ... ourselves at best ? Foreigners at worst ?
- bronson 4y ago
  Replying with some vague hundreds-years-old anecdote is also incredibly unserious.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pard68 4y ago
Calling the view of approximately half the US population "unserious" is why we are where we are. People who cannot fathom or refuse to accept some widespread opinion/view/belief of another is why we are mired in identity politics and are beholden to bands of 80 year old children yelling at one another between oxygen hits and running the country into the ground. I think you ought to be more charitable to the opinion expressed by others, it's far more constructive.
- NegativeK 4y ago
  Calling it stealing in the first place is inflammatory.

diob 4y ago

I think the issue with modern society when it comes down to it is we pretend we're not playing a long running game of monopoly when we are. There's a fixed amount of resources on Earth. It's weird to look at the new generation entering this game and say that this is the way it needs to be, when they didn't have any involvement in how it came to be. The entire idea of land ownership or resource ownership is strange when you think about it. We've mostly decided as a society that taking other folks resources by force is wrong, essentially cementing the last generation of folks that did so successfully as the aristocracy. If the nonviolent polite resource sharing society we've tried / are trying to construct is to last, resource sharing of some sort must be enforced (taxes, etc.).

carlosjobim 4y ago

> If this rule were applied equally globally, everyone complaining would have _a lot_ removed from them... You just don't get it: Everybody who is richer than me are spoiled brats, born with a silver spoon in their mouths, they should give money to me. Everybody who is poorer than me are lazy bums and drug addicts. I shouldn't have to give anything to them.

everfree 4y ago

> If everyone spent as much time donating their time and money as they do jaw jacking that "someone else should do something", we'd solve world hunger by now. Probably not. The average person generously spends maybe 6 hours a week jaw-jacking and 40+ hours a week working to make some CEO somewhere richer. There's a lot more charity time to be unlocked and donated by reducing society's systemic reliance on extracting profits than there is by telling people to jaw-jack less. > I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul. I take things from other people all the time. I call it receiving stock dividends. The McDonald's employee works for an hour, produces $15 worth of value for the company, gets paid $10.10, $3 is sent to the government and a fraction of a penny is sent right to my brokerage account. Whenever I look at my brokerage account, it always feels unfair. It really does feel like I'm stealing, and I probably am by some definition. People wake up in the morning, go to their 9-5 job, and I take part of their paycheck. Then, I walk into McDonalds and the employee makes me a burger in exchange for the part of their paycheck that I took. All because I have funny made up number with the high-bits set to "1" in my brokerage account. At its heart, capitalism requires taking something from someone else. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. > It's sad that so many people think the only answer is to steal from whom they consider rich. It's sad that so many people think capitalists make their fortunes without taking something from the working class. You probably believe that Jeff Bezos truly puts in 1,000 times more work or is 1,000 times more intelligent than his most highly compensated software engineer. > If you want to help, the answer is found in basic charity that everyone should be doing ... My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023. Respectfully, the answer to wealth inequality isn't for the bottom 90% who own 30% of the wealth to shuffle it around between each other. The answer is to unlock the other 70% of the wealth. In other words, the answer is advanced charity by the richest 10%, not basic charity by the everyday person. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with basic charity, because a little charity is always better than no charity, but I'm not about to put my signature on a piece of paper and reduce Malaria deaths in Africa by 90% like Gates did.

Incipient 4y ago

There are so, so many things wrong with this. Unless you want to directly and individually pay every single welfare worker, police officer, health inspector, road maintenance worker, and hire companies directly to fix roads, water services, etc...you don't have a leg to stand on. And if you do want to pay these people individually, you're not capable of making a judgement on the validity of taxation as a viable mechanism.