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What ethics do you have that makes you insist on trying to regulate the behavior of others? What is the philosophy behind it, and how do you deduce that we can

What ethics do you have that makes you insist on trying to regulate the behavior of others? What is the philosophy behind it, and how do you deduce that we can achieve peace and prosperity by forcing others to do the will of a small group in power? Who gives anyone the right to steal from Google? I'm not on board with that. There's a reason companies leave the US and it's because it has the highest corporate tax in the world at 35%. Google does not live in the US. It does not owe anything to public education, healthcare, roads or infrastructure. Google is a company that allows me to search on the internet. They get paid to show me ads. I could go on and on about what they are and the topic of "roads" would never figure. If you want to argue that the founders or the employees of Google need to care about education, healthcare, roads, that's another topic, but I'm talking specifically about corporate tax. How is Google making billions at the expense of public good? How much do they owe the public, exactly? Is Google forever indentured to the State? Will it never be free? Are you OK with never being free? I would say Google has provided plenty of goods to the public and it has paid more than its share several times over. We're all better off because it exists, and the service they provide is even free. It's free and you want to make it more expensive. It's almost as if you're angry at how much money they're making. "Keeping high profit margins" is exactly what anyone would do because as human beings we want to feel safe, and high profit margins provide the safety that you will have enough resources to change your course of action if necessary, adapting to new market conditions and consumer demands. You want to erode that safety buffer and make Google more fragile. Your wording says it all: "Google [..] could [...] drop a couple of zeros from their [...] profit". The profits are their reward for supplying something we all want. We all use it daily, it's free, it's amazing and they keep making more cool stuff, and because of that the market has rewarded them. And you're advocating stealing their reward to fix roads. But we don't even know if people want roads! They're there so that's why people use them, but who's to say we don't want something better? Well, we'll never know, because the State said "roads it is" and they're sticking to it, even when the upkeep gets harder and harder. Is the State looking into alternatives to roads? No? We went through a bunch of search companies like AltaVista and Lycos and so on and it took all this time to realize Google was what we wanted, and we've rewarded them for that. What is the State doing to foster a bunch of alternative ways of transportation in order to pick the best so we can reward it? Oh, you mean you just want roads period, and you want to force everyone to pay for this product, and you don't think there could be alternatives so that's why you're not looking into competing ideas? So let's force Google to pay for this product that was artificially designed and not evolved from market forces like Google's product were? And Google should pay up because it has so much money and it would still be profitable if it sacrificed a few zeroes? Can you please justify this line of thinking to me ethically? Here we have two organizations, one puts out a crummy product it can't maintain, and the other puts out a good product that people said they would pay for; and you're saying we should take money from the successful product and use it to build more of the unsuccessful product. Do you see what I see? Because from here it's clear the solution would be for the State to simply stop making crummy products and stop stealing from successful products, but somehow we've escalated this problem all the way to the level of global corporate taxes.

grecy 12y ago
> What ethics do you have that makes you insist on trying to regulate the behavior of others? What is the philosophy behind it, and how do you deduce that we can achieve peace and prosperity by forcing others to do the will of a small group in power? We live in a society where we all pay taxes and pool that money for the good of all (roads, education, police, etc. etc.) If someone is getting benefit from stuff bought by that money but no paying into the pool, they're stealing from the rest of us. If I and millions of others stopped paying income tax on our $100k salary but kept using up all of societies stuff, how would you feel about that?
- innguest 12y ago
  Have you ever worked as a waiter in a restaurant? Some restaurants let waiters keep all their tip, while others force waiters to share their tips equally in a collective pool. Those that let waiters keep all their tip argue that the server has more motivation to give better service if they see the proportional impact of their effort. That makes servers happy which rubs off on customers, making the experience better for everyone involved. It is a win-win system that encourages self-improvement and punishes slackers. On the other hand, restaurants that pool their tips see everything in terms of a team effort. They argue that because of the initial training investment, they want to make sure no details are missed and the only way to do that is by encouraging collectivist thinking. Tip sharing is preferred in restaurants that offer a richer, more complicated experience (having to educate customers on what they're ordering, answering questions about fancy food and wine and pairing them, etc). They also argue that tip sharing makes servers more fungible in that they can switch between roles - waiting, busing, serving drinks. The first system ("keep tip") is simple to explain and is self-correcting. If a server underperforms it's easy to see and intervene. The second system ("tip pool") feels "bigger", has more moving parts (tips changing hands), and requires constant surveillance by the servers themselves, not to mention some bureaucracy to manage the money division. The keep-tip system can be said to be immune to slackers because a slacker cannot adversely affect the system beyond the scope of the slacker (other than dissatisfied customers not coming back); but slackers are a huge burden on the tip-pool system, as they effectively steal money from the other servers by not pulling their own weight as much as the others. This is a disincentive for the individual waiter that is above average and could be keeping more of their tips elsewhere. Despite the differences and the different opinions we can draw from them, both kinds of restaurants exist, but in the keep-tip type, waiters can be said to have more freedom and they have the right to keep the fruits of their labor. I've informally asked my friends and they all said if they could choose between keep-tip and tip-pool they'd choose keep-tip. So it must be the case that someone else other than waiters is benefiting from tip-pool systems. Now imagine trying to change a restaurant's tipping system. You say that because the pool-tip restaurant provided training, it's only fair that they contribute to the tip-pool. Then one of the waiters proposes a new system where there is no tip-pool, and claims the restaurant would work just as well, if not better, if it adopted keep-tip. Of course the other waiters argue "we work in a restaurant where we all pool tips for the good of all (busboys, dish cleaners, cooks, etc) and if someone benefits from this environment without paying into the pool, they're stealing from the rest of us". Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

grecy 12y ago

> What ethics do you have that makes you insist on trying to regulate the behavior of others? What is the philosophy behind it, and how do you deduce that we can achieve peace and prosperity by forcing others to do the will of a small group in power? We live in a society where we all pay taxes and pool that money for the good of all (roads, education, police, etc. etc.) If someone is getting benefit from stuff bought by that money but no paying into the pool, they're stealing from the rest of us. If I and millions of others stopped paying income tax on our $100k salary but kept using up all of societies stuff, how would you feel about that?

innguest 12y ago
Have you ever worked as a waiter in a restaurant? Some restaurants let waiters keep all their tip, while others force waiters to share their tips equally in a collective pool. Those that let waiters keep all their tip argue that the server has more motivation to give better service if they see the proportional impact of their effort. That makes servers happy which rubs off on customers, making the experience better for everyone involved. It is a win-win system that encourages self-improvement and punishes slackers. On the other hand, restaurants that pool their tips see everything in terms of a team effort. They argue that because of the initial training investment, they want to make sure no details are missed and the only way to do that is by encouraging collectivist thinking. Tip sharing is preferred in restaurants that offer a richer, more complicated experience (having to educate customers on what they're ordering, answering questions about fancy food and wine and pairing them, etc). They also argue that tip sharing makes servers more fungible in that they can switch between roles - waiting, busing, serving drinks. The first system ("keep tip") is simple to explain and is self-correcting. If a server underperforms it's easy to see and intervene. The second system ("tip pool") feels "bigger", has more moving parts (tips changing hands), and requires constant surveillance by the servers themselves, not to mention some bureaucracy to manage the money division. The keep-tip system can be said to be immune to slackers because a slacker cannot adversely affect the system beyond the scope of the slacker (other than dissatisfied customers not coming back); but slackers are a huge burden on the tip-pool system, as they effectively steal money from the other servers by not pulling their own weight as much as the others. This is a disincentive for the individual waiter that is above average and could be keeping more of their tips elsewhere. Despite the differences and the different opinions we can draw from them, both kinds of restaurants exist, but in the keep-tip type, waiters can be said to have more freedom and they have the right to keep the fruits of their labor. I've informally asked my friends and they all said if they could choose between keep-tip and tip-pool they'd choose keep-tip. So it must be the case that someone else other than waiters is benefiting from tip-pool systems. Now imagine trying to change a restaurant's tipping system. You say that because the pool-tip restaurant provided training, it's only fair that they contribute to the tip-pool. Then one of the waiters proposes a new system where there is no tip-pool, and claims the restaurant would work just as well, if not better, if it adopted keep-tip. Of course the other waiters argue "we work in a restaurant where we all pool tips for the good of all (busboys, dish cleaners, cooks, etc) and if someone benefits from this environment without paying into the pool, they're stealing from the rest of us". Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.