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   HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Sep-2023 01:05:26 JST HeavenlyPossum

   In the liberal imagination, taxes work something like this:

   “Rich people earn lots of money. Some of them use some of that money in bad ways. So the government taxes them, taking away some of their money and redistributing some of that to useful things that help people who don’t have as much as the rich.”

   In this formulation, taxes are a mechanism to make the rich “pay their fair share” and fund socially necessary public goods.

   But that’s not actually how redistributive taxes work! Instead, it goes something like this:

   “The state uses violence to facilitate exploitation by the rich of the working class. The rich take so much from the working class that members of the working class might die from destitution. To keep enough workers alive for the rich to continue exploiting, the state caps how much the rich can take, requiring the rich to give a little bit back in the form of taxes.”

   In the presence of capitalism, welfare spending is certainly preferable to no welfare spending. But that welfare spending by the state would not be necessary if the state didn’t first facilitate capitalist exploitation. The rich *do not pay for welfare.* They’re simply not allowed to steal as much.

   https://c4ss.org/content/4790

   • novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ repeated this.
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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Sep-2023 01:10:45 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum this is a good point. The rich need the state to exist because they need something to enforce their property rights. And the reason the state can enforce their property rights more effectively than they could by themselves is because it has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force (so no one really challenges its propertarian violence) and — far more importantly imo! — also because the state has the right of legitimate taxation, which means it can, without many people even questioning it, expropriate by gun and boot and baton money from the very people it is going to use violence to protect property from, to fund its property protection efforts! Without taxation to subsidize protecting their property, the rich would be forced to foot the entire bill for protecting their fiefdoms themselves, instead of relying on expropriating everyone else in society to protect themselves against that very society, and they would quickly find that the greater their wealth and the more they use it for rent and exploitation instead of actually using it themselves, the exponentially more expensive that property gets to protect. So in essence, taxation exists to socialize the costs of protecting the rich onto everyone else, and without that it wouldn't be cost effective to be rich!

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Sep-2023 01:11:39 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     I suspect a lot of people get really upset at me when I complain about taxes because a) taxes are the primary complaint by ancaps and other right wing “libertarians” and b) taxes have come to represent the state’s primary and most visible mechanism for returning to workers a tiny share of what’s been stolen from them.

     If all you focus on is the flow of wealth from rich to poor via redistributive taxes (Thomas Piketty, I’m looking in your direction), then those taxes can seem like a sizable boon to the working class. Plenty of observers have attributed growth in living standards in western countries to redistributive taxes, and they’re not wrong to note that workers have fought and bled to get even those scraps.

     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ repeated this.
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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Sep-2023 01:11:55 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     • Kevin Carson

     But these redistributive taxes are what @KevinCarson1 calls “secondary interventions”:

     “Secondary interventions include regulatory and welfare state measures that constrain those privileged actors from abusing their privilege in ways that undermine the long-term stability of the system. Such secondary interventions are intended to prevent, among other things, levels of destitution, homelessness and starvation that might destabilize the political system. They serve to make the system of privilege at least minimally endurable on a human level.”

     That is, we miss the majority of the picture when we focus only on the redistributive welfare role of the state and not its predatory redistributive functions: violently establishing and policing private property, creating and awarding monopolies, creating artificial scarcities, suppressing labor organizing, imposing taxes on workers, etc.

     Abolishing secondary interventions without first addressing those primary interventions—which is precisely what right-libertarians want—would absolutely make life worse for workers. But those secondary interventions are made necessary by those primary interventions, and, critically, they are funded by the workers who benefit from them.

     Welfare is not free money from the rich, who are rich only because they have already stolen from the working class.

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     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Sep-2023 01:19:10 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Kevin Carson

     @HeavenlyPossum @KevinCarson1 yeah, taxation is only made necessary because we have a fucked up system that leads to wealth accumulation and destitution and a lack of autonomy and independence for people and poverty traps and so on. And I would rather deal with the problem at its roots and remove the system that creates the symptoms we need taxation to ameliorate then to just be happy putting an ever-stronger Band-Aid on the problem. Especially when that Band-Aid comes with increasing possibilities for misuse and increasing centralized power. Which is why it frustrates me when fellow anarchists sing the praises of taxation and get suspicious when you're against it. Yeah in some cases — if it's actually used for good things which it rarely really is — it can be a massive boon for people, and we shouldn't abolish taxation without abolishing the state and capitalism, as you said, but a lot of anarchists seem to take the fact that taxation can be good in the context of the current system and assume that means it is an actual moral good, something that is good in itself. Which leads them to totally buy into absurd statist brainworms like the liberal justifications for taxation, so that they even push for taxation-like institutions even in a post-state society! Like when Robert Evans (who I'm a fan of) talks about how taxation is actually good and morally required because "we have to contribute back to society."

   • Embed this notice
     Kevin Carson (kevincarson1@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Sep-2023 01:24:04 JST Kevin Carson

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum Any tax on billionaires short of 99.99% is less than "their fair share," since virtually all their income is unearned extraction of economic rent.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Sep-2023 01:24:07 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     • Max

     @PossiblyMax

     David Graeber made the same point in his essay “Against Economics”—our tax systems are deliberately confusing and inefficient because they allow elites to expand the bureaucratic state while pretending to be for “small government” by making everyone frustrated with taxes.

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     Max (possiblymax@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 07-Sep-2023 01:24:08 JST Max

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum A slight tangent but it's interesting how misunderstood tax brackets are, at least how they work here in the uk (and back in NZ it was the same).

     People near a tax bracket complain that their next payrise would cause them to take less money home after tax, not understanding the new tax is only on money in that bracket. I sometimes wonder if it was structured in a way to confuse more people into shouting down taxes.

     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ repeated this.
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     FinalOverdrive (finaloverdrive@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 07-Sep-2023 10:38:01 JST FinalOverdrive

     in reply to

     • Kevin Carson
     • novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     @anarchopunk_girl @HeavenlyPossum @KevinCarson1 Chomsky-honks