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Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Registered: 12-2017
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Re: THE SCHOOL TAX - What About Those With No Kids?


Medical care should be left to the free market, huh?

I am sure that privately-run healthcare provides top-quality service for the affluent. But we should never forget that all businesses within the capitalist system have an agenda above that of providing decent work for employees or good service for consumers. A hospital run wholly or partially by the private sector does not exist primarily to provide care; its purpose in life is to generate profit for its owners. The more affluent members of society have the wealth and power to ensure standards of quality are kept at tip-top levels. But what about the poorer members? They have little choice but to accept the bare minimum level of care, because if they cannot look after themselves and cannot rely on their family (perhaps because they are too busy wage labouring to provide adequate care) then their only option is to entrust their lives to whatever paid care they can get. Therefore, there is no reason for the owners of such firms to offer anything beyond the most meagre of facilities, because they know those just about managing financially and unable to rely on family or self-sufficiency for their wellbeing must accept whatever paid care they can afford, no matter how poor a service they may be offered. In other words, they are in an exploitable position and the capitalist imperative is to take advantage of them and make them pay for atrocious service. At the same time, given that such places run on as tight a budget as possible, the staff are likely to be so overworked and underpaid they may seem to act with what appears to be callous indifference. Their brutal work regime will not permit much compassion for those who have entrusted themselves to their care. They, too, are exploited. Thus is the desire to care for the vulnerable sacrificed in the the name of profit, the only real purpose of any capitalist venture.

For sure, one can find examples of wasteful bureaucracy and mismanagement in the NHS but if one looks closely this turns out to be due to the private sector stealthily taking over this public service and running it into the ground. Why? Probably to asset-strip it and make out like bandits.

The 'freedom' of the free market is the freedom to increase wealth by whatever method can be gotten away with. When one's 'customers' are the most vulnerable people in society, this inevitably leads to exploitation. The only way around this is to have social safety nets that offer some kind of protection. So pay your taxes.

12/29/2017, 4:24 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Re: THE SCHOOL TAX - What About Those With No Kids?


"I want the government to NOT be there, to stay the !@#$ away".

And, yet, you want a free market. Well, you are not going to have that without government, are you? At least not if you intent to bring about a free market in anything like actual historical precedents.

Think about it. For there to be a free market we must establish the following:

The commodification of resources. In other words turning parts of the world that belong to nobody into private property that belong to 'somebody' (an individual or group).

The commodification of money: Turning vague concepts of 'credit' into rules dictating what X is worth, what X is owed, what X, owes, transaction rules and other forms of calculation that are money.

The commodification of labour: rules governing when and how a human being (assumed to be free in most ethical systems worth bothering with) may become the property of another and therefore obliged to carry out orders.

None of this can come about without laying down rules that must be obeyed, or else. In other words, none of this is possible unless and until the law makes it so. Who makes the law? In any society emerging in anything like actual histories it is inevitably going to be the leaders of existing hierarchies that get to make the laws that must be in place for a free market to be possible. So it's always going to be 'the government' that lays down the foundations upon which a free market is built (and is then subject to the commodifying drives of capitalism, leading to cronyism unless extraordinary vigilance somehow prevents this).
12/29/2017, 5:12 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
James Jaeger Profile
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Re: THE SCHOOL TAX - What About Those With No Kids?


All of this government crap you suggest is only a result of over population. Maybe all we need is a few nuclear wars to thin out the heard.

I'm on the run ... more later.
12/29/2017, 11:49 am Link to this post PM James Jaeger Blog
 
greendocnowciv Profile
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Registered: 11-2017
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Re: THE SCHOOL TAX - What About Those With No Kids?


Extro,

One part of your post toward the end has:

"...you are not going to have...(a free market)...without government, are you? At least not if you intent to bring about a free market in anything like actual historical precedents. "

True that some arbitration between parties is needed for a modern economy, regardless of theories about extremes. That arbitration need not be a Gov, but you are right that in all modern societies it will. Even so, it definitely need not be with as much Gov involvement as we have in the US or GB.

An example from today: The EU badgers Ireland with vigor because it offers low Corpo taxes and Regs - thus Corps flee many EU Countries to nest in Ireland.

Now the EU is starting already to grumble about Pres Trumps' lower Corpo tax. Thus we can do less and still have a functioning, modern economy.

Then you make understandable restatements of real world valuation of all kinds of things in monetary terms, and how to monetize almost anything and be able to deal with ever new kinds of financial instruments, and you note that we need:

"The commodification of labour: rules governing when and how a human being (assumed to be free in most ethical systems worth bothering with) may become the property of another and therefore obliged to carry out orders."

This equates one who is obliged to carry our orders as one who is the property of another.

That would include all who become members of a police force, military, private security force or any job where employment has a clearly understood condition of strict obedience to orders as a slave. And we would have to add all prisoners to that list.

These folks are not considered slave labor by most of us, even though that terminology is getting used more and more in literature.

Any who harken back to Marx's era and think of todays workers as Dickensian factory workers can join you in that, as can any of the many who get caught up in Marxism.

Since that is a persistent school of thought, we will keep seeing the "wage slave" idea – probably right up to when some real "abundance" era finally comes into being.

In fact, wage employment is the mainstream workforce in all countries that are more developed than the most primitive. To find exceptions you have to get to a quite poor Country where you are back to fairly primitive agriculturalists making up most of a Nations' workforce.

From the most modern countries, and down to developing countries we find wage labor situations range from optimal for workers to very strict and hard. Very strict can be so bad, that even though prospective workers flock to almost any job, in some factories they need to install "suicide nets" to catch the regularly occurring depressed "leaper." - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103798/Revealed-Inside-Apples-Chinese-sweatshop-factory-workers-paid-just-1-12-hour.html

Yet as bad as the worst conditions are, we keep improving. And as we keep improving, more and more of us will be in the most optimal employment, or in independent living situations. Unless, of course, a situation as in the current EU superstructure keeps pushing more and more stultifying rules and regs on its member countries is in place.

Stay strong, Ireland!
12/30/2017, 2:29 pm Link to this post PM greendocnowciv Blog
 
Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Re: THE SCHOOL TAX - What About Those With No Kids?


Those are some great points, Greendoc. And you are right. In many ways things are improving and it is not unreasonable to hope that this continues. I don't think it is inevitable but it is possible and that is enough to warrant optimism.

I think I should have been a bit more specific. It is not the person him or herself that becomes the property of businessperson, but rather their labour power. The person does not end up being owned, rather, their labour power gets hired. This can equate to a condition indistinguishable from slavery if the person is vulnerable enough and the business ruthless enough, but it is not always so. Even so, I think that if we forget about equating slaves with brutalised human beings in chains coerced into working by the crack of the whip and instead say that any person who is not free is a slave, then a case can be made that a lot of employees are, indeed, enslaved.

What does it mean to be free? It does not mean freedom from work because that's just a part of life. To be free is to work for oneself. But how many people can truly claim this? If your motivation for submitting to employment is 'if not I will be in serious financial trouble' then you are probably working for the government or the banks, whoever you think controls fiat currency and has dumped all that debt onto the market. And the business you work for wants to extract maximum value out of the commodity of labour power, so ideally from their perspective you would do more work for less reward, indeed as much work and as little reward as they can get away with paying.

So a wage slave is mostly working for the benefit of others and only minimally for him or herself. Hence we justify using the term 'slave'.
12/31/2017, 2:31 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
James Jaeger Profile
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Re: THE SCHOOL TAX - What About Those With No Kids?


Anyone doing anything about property taxes, especially the school tax?
12/23/2019, 8:06 pm Link to this post PM James Jaeger Blog
 


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