Тег: Tax

A little bit more about taxes and death

Sperry’s article about why there is no point in opposing taxes was actively discussed in the comments of the telegram channel, which was largely the goal of the publication. In short, the text is about how, one way or another, even in a free market, a sum comparable to government taxes will be squeezed out of you anyway and spent on roughly the same things the state would have spent it on; and since there is no difference, why be outraged?

The article shows two extremes. One extreme is the organization of an enterprise requiring a vast amount of unskilled labor in conditions where manpower is in huge abundance. Appealing to historical examples, Sperry reminds us that in such cases it is usually more profitable to pay workers mere pittance, and preferably not in money, but in food tokens, while suppressing discontent through organized violence. The other extreme is the organization of an enterprise requiring a handful of highly qualified specialists who are exhausting to find, and who must be kept from being poached by competitors. Here, the employer not only pays them a hefty salary but also provides substantial bonuses, from a simple coffee machine in the break room to fitness gyms, expensive health insurance for the employee’s entire family, flexible work schedules, and company stock options.

In both extreme cases, Sperry makes it clear that the worker is not free and is forced to eat whatever they are given. In one case, tokens for miserable food at the plantation store instead of a simple human wage. In the other, an unwanted fitness gym instead of a simple salary increase. But why, exactly, does this happen?

For it to be profitable to coerce labor through violence, that labor must be very monotonous, concentrated in space, and not involve active movement. Only in this case can one get by with mobile armed overseers, who must be very few in number relative to the workers; otherwise, the cost of the thug no longer pays off. Thus, tending bushes or mining raw materials are perfectly optimized for mass slave labor, but grazing livestock is not particularly so. But, one way or another, in a free market, if you put together a gang of thugs to organize forced labor, you will have to be the leader of those thugs. Relax for a moment, and tomorrow you will find that your foreman has taken your place, and you are already being driven to pick bananas.

Naturally, the planter is not interested in such an outcome; he wants his property rights protected and the workers, even if armed, to know their place. And here, the state comes to his aid. The state becomes the guarantor that the security foreman will moderately and diligently perform his job for hard cash rather than seizing the plantation for himself. In exchange, the state takes taxes, and with them maintains an army and police. From this moment on, the planter is doomed. Tomorrow the state will raise land taxes, introduce inheritance taxes, nationalize latifundia, or otherwise optimize the privileged class because it consumes too much, and its “dekulakization” will inevitably be popular among the people. It turns out that for a share of his profit, the planter receives the same tokens for protection, just as his workers receive tokens for food. And the quality of the tokens’ provision will arbitrarily decrease as the issuer’s appetite grows.

So, either you are a stern Spartan who personally arranges krypteia with colleagues so that the helots know their place and do not think of rebellion, or you degenerate into an effeminate sybarite who has outsourced his functions of coercion, and the question of your abolition becomes effectively decided.

And what about the second extreme case? Generally speaking, in a free market, mega-qualified specialists will not eat whatever they are given. The employer sets up a fitness gym in the office because the specialist specifically wants that. He is too lazy to go lift weights after work; he wants to have the option when the urge hits, and if the employer is not ready for that, there are competitors. And if the worker grows tired of the fitness gym, they will have no problem putting a bar next to it—just keep working, sweetheart. You don’t want anything extra, just more money? Here is more money, and work from home if you like. Of course, all these measures to increase loyalty benefit the employer only if the specialist genuinely enjoys their work, but it cannot be otherwise; otherwise, they would not have acquired their outstanding qualification.

However, even if a corporation’s main engine consists of a few mega-professionals, it still cannot do without a team of mid-level employees; someone must handle the routine. And these people are the ones who don’t get to choose between fitness, a bar, or cash in hand. Firstly, it is above their rank. Secondly, a benefits package reduces profit and therefore reduces the profit tax. Salary, on the other hand, requires payment of payroll tax. Therefore, it is often more profitable for a corporation to pay its rank-and-file employees less in cash, and instead provide benefits in kind, which, of course, evokes associations with food tokens in the plantation cafeteria.

Well, why does the corporation need the state? For the same reason the planter does: to protect the corporation’s interests through brute force (mainly by limiting market entry for competitors, plus government contracts). Naturally, as a result, the corporation also ends up vulnerable if a certain high-ranking state official decides to “dekulakize” it. What could replace the state regulator? As in the case of the union of planters, it would have to be some situational alliance of industry representatives agreeing on voluntarily observed norms and standards. If the corporation’s business itself is not based on coercion, then living without a state is still somewhat easier for it than for latifundists.

Thus, the state, by its very existence, exerts a corrosive effect on large business: it reduces the costs of violence against workers or competitors, and as a result, business acquires state-like characteristics. It is much harder for small business to latch onto this mechanism, so even within an existing state, it remains a purer market agent and therefore will survive the abolition of the state with much greater ease. This leaves the ancaps with only one question: can a society without a state maintain a high level of structural complexity and a deep division of labor in the absence of large business? Or can large business remain so in the absence of a state? I will leave this question hanging for now.

Death and/or Taxes

Sperry UNIVAC

Prologue by Ankapan-tyan
We have a new author’s column on our channel, here we will butcher the sacred cows of libertarianism. Because readers complain that it’s boring to comment on me, Bitarkha is tired of it, well, here’s food for discussion.

Yesterday I had a dispute that prompted me to write this post. I ironically described that the Viking warriors were not a professional army because they didn’t live off salaries but from what they could plunder, which elicited an ironic comment about how our modern professional army lives off what it plunders – so the difference is zero. Basically, soldiers on government service get paid a salary, the salary comes from the budget, the budget comes from taxes, and taxes are essentially theft. That’s exactly the sacred cow I want to poke around at a little.

A libertarian’s understanding of taxation is usually like this. I started working for Uncle Joe, bent my back, Uncle Joe gave me $100 for my efforts, then this left-wing (in every sense of the word) guy comes along with a stick, whacks me over the spine, takes $20, and runs off to give them to a sneering bum on the corner who didn’t work a day in his life. SOCIALISM IS THEFT! In this framing of the question, of course, it’s theft. The standard arguments defending taxes – that they will build roads – we all know, and there’s no need to discuss them. I want to approach things from another angle and show that, in some sense, any corporation steals the same $20 from every salary, and thus performs exactly the same governmental role. And so, “fair,” i.e., theft-free distribution of earned money – is much more similar to socialism than state taxation, and you don’t need to automatically shudder when you hear that word. The fact that they take our money always, everywhere – it’s inevitability; they take it with communism and with the Ancap – there isn’t really any difference between state taxes and corporate extortion.

Как это работает на практике? Возьмем случайного человека, который где-то добыл $10к и организовал, скажем, завод стульев. Он нанял 2 квалифицированных сотрудника (допустим, юриста и бухгалтера) и 8 неквалифицированных, которые клепают стулья, купил станки, помещение, доски и работа закипела. Пока все идет по плану. Допустим, все хорошо, и фирма принесла сходу чистую прибыль в $11к. Вопрос, как ее делить? Социалист сказал бы: на 11 частей, каждому по $1к, все справедливо. Но мы не социалисты и учтем, что рабочий не квалифицирован и является бурерожденным (и не вложил в то, чтобы перестать быть бурерожденным, ни копейки), а значит, легко заменяем любым бурерожденным. Значит, он заработал меньше всех, хоть и пахал с утра до ночи. Бухгалтер и юрист — не бурерожденные, их заменить сложнее, и они вложились в свое образование, возвысившись над бурерожденным, значит, им платим больше. Ну и, наконец, босс, его заслуга в том, что он выцыганил у кого-то $10к на бизнес, не каждый на такое способен, значит, ему платим больше всех. В итоге рабочие получили, условно, по $100, белые воротнички — по $500, а все прочее боссу в карман.

На практике, однако, наш эталонный план не взлетит. Почему? А потому что быть бурерожденным никому не нравится, как и видеть, что ты сорвал спину, таская доски и занозил руки, пиля их, и так 30 дней, а получил за это в 10 раз меньше того, чья работа сделать пару звонков корешам-богатеям и пару раз подмахнуть ручку. Так что работать такая схема будет только при условии того, что рабочим вообще больше податься некуда — все работодатели вокруг такие же гниды, а на заводе дежурит ЧВК, всегда готовая вломить дубинкой по почкам тем, кто заикнулся о ереси социализма, то есть о профсоюзе, праве на забастовку, праве на защиту труда и хотя бы на один выходной в неделю.

Были ли такие примеры в истории? Неоднократно, в основном в эпоху дикого капитализма 1880 – 1920х. Union Stock Yard & Transit Co — Чикагские скотобойни; United Fruit Company, устроившая натуральный ГУЛАГ на плантациях в Гватемале и Колумбии; угольные титаны США, дубинками полицейских забивавшие под землю рабочих. Я уже вижу, как анкапы торжествующе потирают руки: так их, давить этих комми-паразитов, расстреливать из пулеметов, чтобы неповадно было воровать у босса честно заработанный навар. В общем, да, ровно так это и было, Банановая бойня в Колумбии закончилась тем, что UFCo попросила правительство послать солдат с пулеметами и расстрелять нахер всех бастующих и требующих человеческих условий труда, что и было проделано. И это не единственный случай. Но постойте… попросила… э-э, кого? Правительство? Разгоняли демонстрации у нас кто? Полицейские и армия…? Компании, при этом, налоги-то щедро отстегивали (а кроме налогов, еще и на лапу президентам банановых республик и их государственным генералам и солдатикам, чтобы веселее стрелялось в народ).

It appears that to establish an ideal benchmark Ankap—where the boss takes 99% of the profits and the commoner works from dawn till dusk for UFCo brass tokens, not even receiving a penny (when previously they exchanged tokens for a bowl of porridge in the cafeteria – and continued working)—we would require the most powerful repressive apparatus to instill fear of Henry Ford in those unconverted to capitalism. This would ultimately result in something suspiciously similar—like that very socialist Gulag which capitalists frighten us with—while simultaneously having precedents for constructing even worse projects, such as rubber plantations in the Amazon. We would need to divert enormous sums from this apparatus, otherwise we’d have to sleep with a saber by our bed and a pistol under our pillow, awaiting the arrival of slaves. It is preferable to use a state that we want to eliminate, which feeds its army through taxes.

Let’s remove these horrors and consider it from another angle: we are good and principled Ankapists; we don’t desire a repressive state apparatus nor do we wish to decimate our workers weekly with police force and feed them plastic porridge. We believe that in an ideal Ankap world consisting entirely of corporations, suppressing worker unrest would cost us more than creating human working conditions—it’s a debatable point, let’s just ignore it for now. And there are so many companies that if we offer miserable work for pennies, even the last bum will be hustled by a neighbor-corporat who splashed out on gloves for him to avoid scratching his hands from logs. Consequently, we would find ourselves without workers. This is the main point of those who argue that the state with its leftist unions, taxes and laws about an 8-hour workday spoils everything; in Ankap each worker will live like a king. Let’s assume this is true, okay.

But what does that mean then? It appears we would need to invest in a safe lathe, goggles from sawdust, gloves from cuts, a respirator from the smell of glue; and if we are building a complex company with complex labor, it’s desirable for our workers to have everything, including a fitness center, free psychotherapist and dentist for their son—otherwise smart people won’t come to us, they’ll go to those with better conditions. We see that Apple and various other IT giants actually compete to offer their expensive employees even more bonuses (let’s not discuss the fact that workers in Amazon warehouses will be fined half their salary if they went to the bathroom longer than once a day). But these same bonuses for employees—medicine, vacation, even education—they come from somewhere? Yes, they come from profit, that very profit which could be spent, for example, on the same wages.

So it turns out that, taxes…? Well, basically yes, a corporation can, let’s say, add +10% to everyone’s salary, or not, but open a fitness center for everyone. And yes, maybe I’m a lazy bum and don’t want a fitness center; I want to blow my 10% salary at the bar instead of jogging on a treadmill. But nothing was asked of me – let Vasya handle it, we’ve decided for him, he contributes from his salary to cookies for everyone in the office, we’re creating positive vibes of kindness, don’t be stingy. But, forgive me, what’s the difference between this and a state sports complex built on my taxes? I just wanted a state tavern, didn’t I?! The only objection here is that if you don’t like it when a corporation deducts your salary for a fitness center – well, go to whoever deducts salaries for bars. Okay, but:

1. They’re deducting anyway, and maybe I want industrial cleaner!

2. They deduct +/- equally: on medicine, education, sport – yes, in general, the same as with the state, i.e., it’s all the same.

3. If you don’t like the tax policy of a super-socialist state – okay, bug out to another one where it’s different, like Argentina, which got rid of all social benefits completely, and that’s just the way it is, paradise! The truth is, taxes now go to Milei in his pocket, as well as funding the state police and security services to suppress criminal plots dreaming of state medicine – thieves, scum!

And people dream of living somewhere like Scandinavia, and their happiness index is practically the highest on the planet.

Therefore, we come to the conclusion: it’s not so important what kind of regime we have. They will steal everyone and always, if stealing means distributing money that doesn’t suit you personally, dear reader. The other thing is that all libertarians believe they will manage to get into a future where their (!) distribution will suit them. For example, if they have a child and want a good dentist for him, a therapist for his wife, and themselves – a weightlifter after work – all free of charge – then it’s reasonable to complain about the corporation that provides all this for their efforts. But this doesn’t cancel out the principle: not everyone in the world wants exactly what you want. In any case, someone will take money from someone (no matter how they are called: contributions, taxes, insurance, etc.) for something that is useless to them personally (or they prefer to take it and deal with it themselves, but they don’t let them). So, my dears, don’t panic over the word “tax,” it’s just one form of extortion that will always be with us, under any regime and any economic formation. Because the alternative to such soft power through fitness centers and free cookies – is a soldier with an M1919 Browning, a barbed wire fence, and a brass token for porridge from sawdust in the cafeteria. Inevitably, they’ll get to us forcibly—the difference is only whether it’s on a fist or a velvet glove.

Moral Realism and the Tribal Customs of Ancaps

I was sent a link to an interesting article on the god-forsaken VKontakte, where a certain Konstantin Morozov discusses the moral justification of taxation, specifically for the purpose of implementing a Basic Income, and other interesting mental constructs of the left-libertarian camp. Without irony, I was interested in understanding their logic.

In short, the author’s argument is as follows. The compulsory nature of seizure is not in itself a criterion for its injustice: this is easily demonstrated by the example of damage compensation. Thus, to speak of the injustice of seizure, one must show that property is being seized to which you have a right. But how do you determine what a person has a right of ownership to? What makes them think they have ownership rights to that which is seized as a tax? Legally, this is state property and is subject to payment. Therefore, the libertarians’ resistance to taxes is rooted not in laws, but in morality.

This raises the question of the objectivity of morality. If we stand on the positions of moral relativism, where one thinks one way and another thinks another, and both are right, then the state is just as right in collecting taxes as the libertarian is in refusing to pay them. Thus, if a libertarian wants to justify to others that he specifically is right, he will have to adopt the position of moral realism.

By tracing the immorality of taxes back to the non-aggression principle, the libertarian relies on the idea that freedom requires no rational basis; it is some kind of self-evident good toward which everyone strives. But what exactly is the freedom being discussed? The libertarian conception of freedom as the absence of coercion is far from the only formulation, not even the most popular one, and certainly cannot be considered self-evident.

Next, the author examines several possible approaches to justifying the morality of compulsory seizures for redistribution in favor of the poor: the Lockean proviso, utilitarianism, Nozick’s compensatory justice, reducing the concept of negative liberty to its republican formulation… The author does not insist on the truth of any particular argument; he merely points out that smart men know how to reason beautifully and competently with logic and facts, while frenzied Eastern European libertarians, having filled their heads with their Svetov and up their asses… remain unconvincing, narrow-minded dogmatists demonstrating an extremely low level of discussion.

I am not going to start refuting the points from the article right now. For me, this is rather a useful warning that will come in handy when writing the brochure on ancap. In particular, I need to figure out what to do with moral realism. I define morality as a spontaneous order of entering into conflicts, and it will, of course, differ in various communities. Thus, the book about ancap acquires a sort of ethnographic character. As in, listen, there is such a people as ancaps in the world, and they have these amazing tribal customs, so unlike what is accepted among civilized people, but attractive in their own way, just as the customs of some Polynesians regarding free love are attractive to us. Will I justify why the libertarian social order is the best? Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure.

Why do minarchists prefer direct taxes to indirect ones?

Anal Magician

The question was very long, and it described in detail that indirect taxes should supposedly irritate people less, so why then do these strange libertarians prefer to deal with what irritates people more.

There are three aspects here.

First, it is easier to evade direct taxes. Once I decide not to pay taxes, in the case of direct taxes, I can achieve success relatively easily because it depends largely on me. Indirect taxes are harder to evade because paying them depends more on the activities of third parties. It is one thing to earn only “under the table,” and quite another to manage to buy all necessary goods “under the table.” The level of hassle is incomparable.

Second, the more direct the taxes, the easier it is to understand exactly how much you are paying. And the lower the uncertainty, the further the planning horizon. The ability for long-term planning increases labor productivity in the long run. In other words, it is easier for people to get rich. The more indirect a tax is, the harder it is to say exactly how much you are paying and, accordingly, how profitable a particular activity is, especially in the long term.

Third, the more direct the tax, the less information about your activities you disclose to the tax authorities. The most direct tax is the poll tax. All that is known about you as a taxpayer is the fact of your existence. If you pay a sales tax, you report the amount you sold. If it is a profit tax, you report your profit, how much you bought for, and how much you sold for. But if it is an indirect tax like VAT, you already have to report in detail from whom and at what price you bought, and then to whom and at what price you sold. The more information about your activities is known, the easier it is for the state to plan how much more they can shave off you.

There is, however, one very indirect tax, which, by paying, tells the state even less than paying a poll tax. This is monetary emission. Therefore, some minarchists allow precisely such a model for constructing the state budget: there is no redistribution of money by the state, there is simply an annual emission of money by the state in a small fixed amount, comparable to economic growth. From this money, a certain extremely narrow list of state expenditures is funded, and if for some reason the money is not enough, the state takes off its hat and goes to beg for donations, or performs a budget sequestration.

The only indirect tax acceptable to minarchists

Let’s imagine that libertarianism won in a particular country. A rich country is meant. Where will the state budget money go? Even if minarchism is meant, the budget is still much larger than what is needed for defense and protection.

Oleja)

Why be modest? Let’s take not just a rich country, but the richest one, after all, it’s so pleasant to talk about other people’s money—any socialist would appreciate that.

So, the USA. The fantastic premise is that socialists left the Democratic Party and conservatives left the Republicans, founding their own parties. The remnants of the two parties merged into the United America party, colloquially known as unionists, while many people defected to the libertarians. In 2032, each of the four parties puts forward its own candidate for president, and a libertarian wins by a tiny margin. Seats in Congress and the Senate are distributed roughly equally among the four parties; the Supreme Court, due to the greater rigidity of its formation mechanism, is represented primarily by unionists diluted with conservatives.

Disagreements between socialists and conservatives reach such a scale that conservatives are ready to vote blindly for any libertarian bill on cutting government spending and deregulation just to spite the socialists, while socialists just as zealously support any libertarian bill regarding the expansion of personal rights to spite the conservatives. Everyone except the conservatives supports measures to expand free trade. Pairs of parties barely manage to push through cuts in defense spending and the abolition of the minimum wage, and so on. In short, thanks to such a fortunate layout and the talent of their party organizer, the libertarians steer the agenda, even though they lack an actual majority.

So where will the budget funds go amidst such active spending cuts, booming economic growth, and the sale of federal property, which, although not massive, is still not insignificant? First and foremost, of course, toward paying off the enormous thirty-trillion national debt. Once the national debt is paid off, a constitutional amendment is adopted prohibiting the creation of new debt, and the Federal Reserve is abolished. After that, since the debts are paid, federal taxes are abolished in full accordance with the constitution: each state supports its own senators and jointly rents the office where the senate meets; each party supports its own congressmen and jointly rents the congress office; the places of embassies are taken by the offices of insurance companies serving the interests of their clients abroad; the armed forces work as hires for logistics companies, protecting maritime trade, as well as for oil companies, protecting rigs in Venezuela and other Sudans, and so on. States keep their own taxes, using them as they please: Commifornium goes wild with social welfare, Alaska with national parks, Vermont subsidizes schools, and New Hampshire simply places a huge porcupine-shaped piggy bank in the center of the state capital, and anyone who wishes drops in as much as they like, taking a selfie and posting it to Instagram—and once a year, the state government breaks the piggy bank, counts the money on camera, and based on the amount collected, adopts the budget for the following year.

In short, once you break it, you build it. If it’s possible to cut spending, then cutting income is no problem at all; you don’t have to worry about that.

Porcbank

Taking money away from people may not be good, but on the other hand, society wins from it

Yes, the middle class and the wealthy have more expenses, but in return, the poor get the opportunity, for example, to receive an affordable education. For instance, in the US, both education in good colleges and universities, as well as medicine, are very expensive. I see no reason why one cannot help a person now, and then they will help others through their own taxes. Yes, involuntarily. Yes, they will grumble about robbery. But life now is much better than it would be if there were no taxes.

My friend

Alas, it is impossible to reliably learn the opinion of speculative subjects about what constitutes their gain, since speculative subjects exist only in a specific human mind. One will say that society gains from taxes, another that God gains from the ban on abortions, a third that his imaginary friend will gain from a school shooting, and these will be equally reliable statements.

Therefore, it is better to proceed from what benefits, say, a specific child from a poor family will receive from the fact that education is funded by taxes, compared to a situation where education is funded voluntarily.

Since money for education is spent centrally, the curriculum is also determined centrally. Thus, the child studies according to a program prescribed from above, receives a diploma upon graduation, and after that, it depends on luck. Either the knowledge acquired is in demand by business, or it is not. If not, he has quite justified grievances against the state: you ordered me to study things for which no one is willing to pay, so go ahead and pay for it yourself. And the obedient state provides the person with a budgeted job, paying them a salary from money that is, again, collected from private business in the form of taxes.

If the state proves to be a successful entrepreneur and successfully guesses what knowledge in what volume will be in demand by business in the future, then centralized education indeed helps cover the needs of business for a qualified workforce. If the state does not guess correctly, then the money is spent in vain, the workforce remains low-skilled despite the expenditures, but at the same time, having an education, these people are no longer willing to take low-skilled jobs and instead claim high-paying work, even if it is useless, for example, funded by taxes.

The more static a society is, the more justified tax-funded education is within it. The faster a society changes, the less justified it is. If socialism were implemented worldwide, progress would slow down, and such education would become relatively effective, but is this what socialists mean when they say that society will benefit from public education? They seem to call themselves progressives rather than conservatives.

Now let education be private, and a child from a poor family chooses for themselves what they can afford. They can take a loan, receive an expensive education, and then, after landing a high-skilled job, pay back that loan in a few years. They can immediately get a low-skilled job and, in their spare time, get an education based on free courses, which are plentiful on the internet. They may not receive an education at all, but simply increase their qualifications directly in the workplace, which will lead to career growth. And finally, they can demonstrate their great talent in one competition or another and receive a private educational grant. After some time, having achieved success, they themselves will gladly invest in the endowment fund of the university that gave them such a wonderful opportunity.

As a result, we will have a system where every member of society arranges their life exactly as they themselves find most convenient. Wouldn’t it be logical to conclude that society as a whole benefits from such an approach, since each of its members benefits?

Work with your hands by day, and in the evening on Coursera—mastering corporate management