> The value of a dollar is less than 1% of what it was when my grandparents were young. A 99% tax over 80 years or so.
You could view it as a tax. Or you could simply view it as erosion. How much would your car be worth after 80 years….

– You could, but… it turns out that time is not the only factor involved. The “taxers,” per my first comment, are taking action to make this happen, AND getting benefit from it. (Creating dollars and spending them on projects that gain them some benefit.) Hence my insistence that “tax” is more appropriate.

> Before there was currency and gold there were barter systems. Did people expect the goods that they exchanged for other goods to retain their value if they weren’t traded?

– Which is why, of course, that they used silver, gold and copper - things that did not easily corrode.

> It’s the same with fiat currency. Should you still expect to buy the same amount of goods for, say, a plumbing job you did 30 years ago as opposed to one you did yesterday?

– See above.

Maybe there ought to be a statute of limitations on what society owes you. (With the exception of retirement benefits, of course…)

– I don’t think “society” (whatever that is) owes me anything at all. I just want it to leave me alone.

PR

You could view it as a tax. Or you could simply view it as erosion. How much would your car be worth after 80 years, whether you ever drove it or not? Maybe it would be a priceless antique, but only if not everyone still has their 80-year old cars in their garages.

Before there was currency and gold there were barter systems. Did people expect the goods that they exchanged for other goods to retain their value if they weren’t traded?

It’s the same with fiat currency. Should you still expect to buy the same amount of goods for, say, a plumbing job you did 30 years ago as opposed to one you did yesterday? Maybe there ought to be a statute of limitations on what society owes you. (With the exception of retirement benefits, of course…)

You have a lot of pre-decided opinions supporting your arguments. You don’t really state them, but you do assume them to be true.

The old Objectivists used to say, “check your premises,” and I think that is a good idea.

I’ll just comment upon your past paragraph: “about locking up people who don’t comply with paying their share of their wealth to the community—that’s how they got Al Capone, isn’t it? Getting rid of taxes wouldn’t always get us rid of thugs, I’m afraid…”

No one “got” Capone because of anything having to do with taxation. He was just a thug who got a big opportunity because of Prohibition. There are always such twisted people on earth, and they do not decide to become evil because taxation takes a different form.

And, in actuality, taxation was rapidly on the rise during Capone’s time.

I’m not trying to be rude here, but you really do need to examine what you believe and why. It seems to me that you are defending emotionally-precious territory rather than searching for what is true.

PR

But then there are also the people who have been steadily claiming that there is no energy crisis at all and that there is plenty of oil around to keep things moving as they used to who have been grabbing the most authoritarian power of them all, introducing a war on an abstract concept, claiming untenable executive powers, re-introducing torture and the detaining of people without a fair trial, lining the pockets of their cronies with tax dollars while letting the common infrastructure go to hell…

So as far as the real world is concerned, it is actually people who say everything is hunky-dory on the energy front who are the most visibly authoritarian types…

As for (all) trade being voluntary, no it isn’t. That is, unless you consider the option to perish as a voluntary matter. I buy food I trade. But I do buy food in order to survive. It may not appear urgent to me if I live in a surplus economy, where food is cheap and plentiful and available from many sources, requiring not too much sacrifice from myself in order to acquire it. But ultimately I buy food or shelter or clothing because I’m *forced* to have these things (if I wish to live). I trade because I must. And that becomes nowhere as apparent as in situations where there is suddenly a scarcity of essential goods, in which what I must sacrifice in order to survive is much higher.

Usury or gouging are forms of theft that don’t seem to show up on your radars at all because you’ve spent all your life in a place where the present abundance of resources have kept them in check.

I think the idea that all trade is voluntary and not a matter of life and death can only be hatched by people who have never had it rough, who have always had the middle class existence in a huge Goldilocks zone, where goods flow from rich to poor, from energy source to energy sink, and they’re right in the middle.

That’s where we live, in case you haven’t noticed. There is this huge heat source called the Sun and there is this huge heat sink called deep space. And in between we live, in an equilibrium we haven’t created, but in which we can be mobile and creative. Everything we produce and trade is fed by our ability to tap into various power sources, which ultimately all originate from this sun or previous suns, and into various energy sinks, which is, in essence, the night sky.

As for your faulty proof by example that authority forcing redistribution of value led to decrease in value in many historical instances and that therefore all forcible redistribution of value is bad, well, may I redirect you to the example of fire being a fearsome tool of destruction and usually having been bad news in our prehistoric past? But just because fire can be used to destroy doesn’t mean that, properly utilized, it isn’t actually a handy tool to produce greater value. It is the same with forcible redistribution of wealth. Properly funneled it can be the kind of activity keeping your house at a steady ambient temperature, enabling you to lots of things with ease you couldn’t do if you were forced to wrap yourself in blankets depending on which room you are in and what time of the day it is. That’s what a society without a government-provided social net is like…

Oh, and, regarding Paul’s comment about locking up people who don’t comply with paying their share of their wealth to the comunity—that’s how they got Al Capone, isn’t it? Getting rid of taxes wouldn’t always get us rid of thugs, I’m afraid…

I don’t understand your analogy at all. How is it we need rich people and poor people to create value? How are they like poles on a battery or a power source for a car? If your analogy had any viability, then those who are “middle class” would not be producing anything at all, as they would represent a neutral wealth differential.

I think you are confused about what generates value. It is certainly not some flow of goods from rich to poor or poor to rich. Value is generated by people working to make things better, and by trades which allocate the product of work to where it has greater value.

As for costs being incurred in trade and theft, that is certainly true. However, in trade, the costs are incurred voluntarily, and therefor will not happen unless the overall value created by the trade is greater than the cost of the trade. In theft, the overall value is not an issue, just the value gained or lost by the thieving party is considered. Thus where each free trade increases overall value, it is a very rare theft indeed that increases overall value.

Even when the thieving party is a government that is claiming to be acting for the overall good - even if they happen to believe what they are saying - when those deciding where value will be redistributed are not required to balance the equation by paying the full costs of their choices with their own value, there is no reason to believe that their actions will increase overall value, and a lot of historical evidence showing that such actions almost always do the opposite.

As for your perpetual motion machine analogy - even though the car concept it starts out with seems to be a broken analogy - the point that no system can be perfect is well taken. There is probably no way to completely eliminate theft, but a big step in the right direction is to recognize all theft for what it is, and not try to set some theft in a different category and legitimize it under the guise of necessary intervention by authority.

You note that the libertarian solution to your “bathroom” problem works fine but breaks down if resources are decreased. I don’t disagree, the market will definitely fail when trade is not producing the resources people need. However, I disagree that the authoritarian solution works better as resources are decreased. I believe it breaks down even faster - that is, does more overall harm. But it will certainly look like an attractive solution to those that believe that they can muster the necessary force to steal what they need.

The moment the market breaks is the moment where one group decides that the best move is to seize the resources from others, whether they wear bandit masks while doing this or do so openly by claiming right of some greater authority. The longer everyone can continue to play fair, the better the chances that the situation will improve before serious damage can happen to many.

Furthermore, you note that innovation is the way out of a decreasing resources scenario. Well it is authoritarianism that stifles innovation.

Any innovation that might increase resources is actually a threat to existing authority that is justifying its power in “this time of emergency.” Claiming that there is not enough to go around (and that someone else is trying to get more than their fair share) is a classic way to get people to accept authority, and innovation that creates more real wealth is therefore, often the enemy of authoritarian thinking.

Do you believe that we are in a shrinking resources scenario now? If so, could it be that you have been convinced of this by people who want to claim authority over you?

http://beta.legaltorrents.com/books

So you can take this experiment into the world of file sharing.

It doesn’t matter as all groups are merging into a world communist state anyways so they are getting their wishes.

Oh and putting Hillary on the right? The map is such bs propaganda. It even puts Huckabee closer to Hitler then Mccain.