LWDT VI: Kropotkin's Bread Dead Redemption.

[Ostroeuropa]

How about we starship troopers this shit then?

70% tax rate above a million in order to earn citizenship and the right to donate to political parties

Citizenship is a big NO, but you might be onto something with political donations, at least, for the mega rich.

*Shrug*
No donations about 5000 to any pacs or politicians and so on without paying a 70% rate on all income above a million dollars. Take the Heinlein concept of "Citizenship by ordeal" designed to make the voter base realize that their citizenship is valuable and important because they paid a high price for it, and to select only those who have demonstrated a tendency toward "The wellbeing of the group above the wellbeing of themselves as individuals", and apply it here to political donations.

[Petrolheadia]

Citizenship is a big NO, but you might be onto something with political donations, at least, for the mega rich.

*Shrug*
No donations about 5000 to any pacs or politicians and so on without paying a 70% rate on all income above a million dollars. Take the Heinlein concept of "Citizenship by ordeal" designed to make the voter base realize that their citizenship is valuable and important because they paid a high price for it, and to select only those who have demonstrated a tendency toward "The wellbeing of the group above the wellbeing of themselves as individuals", and apply it here to political donations.

Well, in this case, here goes me.

For me, a country is a service - I just want the best value for money.

[Ostroeuropa]

*Shrug*
No donations about 5000 to any pacs or politicians and so on without paying a 70% rate on all income above a million dollars. Take the Heinlein concept of "Citizenship by ordeal" designed to make the voter base realize that their citizenship is valuable and important because they paid a high price for it, and to select only those who have demonstrated a tendency toward "The wellbeing of the group above the wellbeing of themselves as individuals", and apply it here to political donations.

Well, in this case, here goes me.

For me, a country is a service - I just want the best value for money.

Ask not what your country can do for you...

[Petrolheadia]

Well, in this case, here goes me.

For me, a country is a service - I just want the best value for money.

Ask not what your country can do for you...

If you don't ask what you can do for your bank or phone operator, why do the same for your country?

[Ostroeuropa]

Ask not what your country can do for you...

If you don't ask what you can do for your bank or phone operator, why do the same for your country?

A country is not a business, it should not be run for the profit of the government. It is a collective composed of all its members.

[Petrolheadia]

If you don't ask what you can do for your bank or phone operator, why do the same for your country?

A country is not a business, it should not be run for the profit of the government. It is a collective composed of all its members.

So what? It still offers a, for a lack of better word, product (national services) for money (taxation).

[Ostroeuropa]

A country is not a business, it should not be run for the profit of the government. It is a collective composed of all its members.

So what? It still offers a, for a lack of better word, product (national services) for money (taxation).

Civilization is not a shopping trip. It transcends individuals and benefits the species. The feckless appeals to individual benefits that modern politics espouses have led to the decline of our society. You not only have rights, but responsibilities.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

Regardless, the typical Strasserist is basically just a Nazi in denial.

Strasserism is one of the major neonazi currents.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

How about we don't do dumb shit? Y'know, not robbing the rich in broad daylight?

Wealth should belong to the community. You can't rob people of something they don't own.

[Western Vale Confederacy]

How about we don't do dumb shit? Y'know, not robbing the rich in broad daylight?

Wealth should belong to the community. You can't rob people of something they don't own.

Yeah, that train of thought could be easily manipulated to justify full-blown theft.

[Frievolk]

Wealth should belong to the community. You can't rob people of something they don't own.

Yeah, that train of thought could be easily manipulated to justify full-blown theft.

It kinda was, long before some guys with bushy beards thought "you know what would be fun? Everyone sharing everything in the community without nobody actually owning it"

[United Muscovite Nations]

Then you're thinking wrong.

Why should someone have to contribute a disproportionate amount just for being hard working/lucky?

Yeah, because the Donald was the hardworking one in that analogy.

[Hanafuridake]

Why should someone have to contribute a disproportionate amount just for being hard working/lucky?

Yeah, because the Donald was the hardworking one in that analogy.

Maybe the single mother should have asked her father for a small loan of a million dollars?

[Democratic Communist Federation]

Yeah, that train of thought could be easily manipulated to justify full-blown theft.

That is the view of capitalists, yes.

[Ostroeuropa]

Wealth should belong to the community. You can't rob people of something they don't own.

Yeah, that train of thought could be easily manipulated to justify full-blown theft.

You do realize that modern capitalism was built on theft of the commons, right?

Where land everybody used and nobody owned for centuries was just fenced off by rich people who said they owned it now, with no compensation paid to the peasants.

Suddenly, millions of people who had used the commons to sustain themselves needed a job and had to move to cities and be paid wages to work in factories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

Like if I just up and decided one day to build a wall around the stock exchange and said I owned the street now, and shot any rich people who tried to use it unless they paid me money to enter, but told them I was happy for them to fuck off and work in MY stock exchange down the road where I'd give them a fixed wage instead of the profits on their investment, which now all belong to me. (So do the banks, so you have no money and need food to live. Better work for shitty pay at my stock exchange.).

Frankly it would be the funniest fucking privatization in history of the government decided turnabout was fair play and sold the roads outside of banks and so on to the communist party as their "private property" and encouraged them to defend it with lethal force while lecturing the rich that they just didn't understand the virtue of private property and should stop being socialist scum.

Maybe sell the roads around their houses too and fine them millions for using it.

Because that's how THEY got rich, doing that to the rest of us, and then inheriting that money and property from their ancestors.

[Valrifell]

How about we starship troopers this shit then?

70% tax rate above a million in order to earn citizenship and the right to donate to political parties

How about we don't do dumb shit? Y'know, not robbing the rich in broad daylight?

Please tell me you don't think the Sheriff of Nottingham was the good guy.

[Valrifell]

I can't believe Jim Sterling was a closet breadtuber/lefttuber this entire time.

[Torrocca]

Then you're thinking wrong.

Why should someone have to contribute a disproportionate amount just for being hard working/lucky?

I dunno. Why do the workers contribute disproportionately compared to the rich in taxes - often to the point of ruin or near enough to it - despite being the ones doing the hard work for society?

[Kubra]

I've been thinking, do you guys support your ideology as it "ought to be" (perfect world scenario), or as a realistic attainable goal?

Like, if you're a socialist, do you desire a communist utopia and work towards it, or lean more to Social democracy for its practicality?

be realistic, demand the impossible

[Duvniask]

I can't believe Jim Sterling was a closet breadtuber/lefttuber this entire time.

Gamers rise up.

[Hanafuridake]

I can't believe Jim Sterling was a closet breadtuber/lefttuber this entire time.

Really? He seemed pretty adamant over the years about being on the left side of the spectrum. I admit that the video game industry has made me more left-oriented too, mostly because I don't want to slave away to make a work of art, only for some philistines in business suits to claim the profits and slash me off the payroll due to the game being “below expectations,” despite making more money than ever before.

[The Xenopolis Confederation]

Why should someone have to contribute a disproportionate amount just for being hard working/lucky?

Yeah, because the Donald was the hardworking one in that analogy.

Did you not read the "/unlucky" part of my post.

[The Xenopolis Confederation]

Why should someone have to contribute a disproportionate amount just for being hard working/lucky?

I dunno. Why do the workers contribute disproportionately compared to the rich in taxes - often to the point of ruin or near enough to it - despite being the ones doing the hard work for society?

Unless you're talking about rich tax evasion, how do poor people pay more tax than rich people?

[The Liberated Territories]

And how, per se, is that problematic? Billionaires should be accounted for in paying their fair share to society so that everyone can, at the very least, live happily and healthily. There is absolutely no justification behind supporting a billionaire's hoarding of wealth.

This -

"Just how much do you have to pull in to join the 1 percent?

A minimum family income of $421,926, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which used the latest available data to analyze how the top 1 percent of earners, and the bottom 99 percent of earners, across the U.S. have fared between 1917 and 2015."

- is the cutoff point between 1% of America's population in terms of wealth and the remaining 99%. The average income for those ~321,255,000 people is 50,107 dollars a year. The average income for people above the cutoff line is already around 1.3 million dollars. That's already an absurd enough difference (it's twenty-six times greater than the average for the overwhelming majority of America); at ten million dollars and beyond, that's already somebody being paid 260 times more than the average income for people below the threshold. That's literally an insane amount that has no justification whatsoever behind it; nobody is worth 260 times as much as the average person. Nobody. People can't live comfortably in most places in America on just 50,000; there's not just the thousands upon thousands of anecdotal stories of some sort of woe being felt by the average American because of this, but there's data - in the form of cost of living, the cost of healthcare, taxes faced by the average American but avoided by the rich, and so on and so forth - explicitly showing the massive gap felt between the average and the rich. A person living on at least $10 million - which, again, we've already seen is insane for any single person to have - is never going to experience those problems that the vast majority of Americans experience, bar an exception to that. They're not going to feel a difference if they only have 10,300,000 dollars a year instead of 11,000,000 dollars a year, or so on.

Long story short, there's absolutely no justification, moral or otherwise, behind allowing this ruinous greed to persist amongst a few million while hundreds of millions struggle to get by in their day-to-day lives.

In a flat tax system, everyone still pays their fair share.[/quote]

In a perfect world, they would. But the coexistence of lobbying with the tax code ensures that interested groups will be forever trying to adjust it so that they pay a little less and their competition a little more.

[Genivaria]

Political lobbying should be utterly banned and the crime for a politician accepting a bribe should be death.
Fight me.