No idea is so good that it can be forced on other people

If the study of ethics is to be defined as other-regarding actions, then there is no rational justification for imposing one's sense of ethics on another. In other words, if one person wishes to convince another that an idea is right, he or she contradicts his or her claim of ethical action the moment he or she initiates the use of force upon another person. If the altruist wishes to demonstrate the value of understanding ethics as other-regarding, he or must do so him- or herself, with only the aid of willing participants to assist him or her. If the individualist wishes to demonstrate the value of understanding ethics as self-regarding, he must do so only on the basis of mutual consent. If he forcibly acquires the wealth or property of another, and then claims it is his rightful self-interest, it means he has pulled an unwilling participant into his experiment, and thereby has negated the principle of self-interest. Self-interest can only be justified with the consent of all involved parties, and other-interest can only be justified with the consent of all involved parties.

Ethics can account for scale

If an act is wrong for one person to do to another person, then adding people to either side of the equation only adds to the injustice. That is to say, if it is wrong for me to rob or hurt you , then it is wrong for you and your friends to rob or hurt me, and it is wrong for my political party, company, charity, baseball team, or rock band to rob or hurt you. 1 death is 1 tragedy. 1 000 000 deaths are 1 000 000 tragedies. Do not be fooled by Stalin's ethical evasion, or anyone else who follows the same line of argument for that matter.

Ethics and living

An ethical system cannot be ethically promoted by living beings if it does not operate from the premise that life is worth living. An ethical system operating from the premise that life is misery, life is suffering, or life is solely the antechamber of death is best demonstrated by the commission of suicide. To insist that the suicide of others is good for anyone but yourself is an act of naked and unforgivable hypocrisy.

Ethics and evidence

Epistemology has separated human thought from human experience in an unsustainable manner. It is rational to operate from evidence, and it is irrational to operate from the premise that your own mind is proof to other minds of existence. Sense experience, contemplation, and action are all proofs of existence, the act of doubting existence is self-contradictory.



I have let my counterparts dictate the terms of debate, both here and elsewhere, but this is my first official shot across the bow of ethical orthodoxy (on Giant Bomb at least ;)), and if you wish to discuss any of the ideas presented, please do so without invoking the thoughts of others. I am merely asking that you allow your own mind to process these words, but obviously I have no power to impose such a decision on you, and wouldn't want such power.

 60 years ago today, the Kuomintang (National Chinese People's Party) and its Generalissimo, Tsiang Kai-Shek fled the Chinese mainland for Taiwan, killing thousands of people on arrival. This event coincides with Mao Tse-Tung's declaration of the founding of the People's Republic of China, to be governed by the Communist Party of China. The 60 years hence have been full of turmoil (and, unfortunately, bloodshed as well), but on the whole, this event is of major historical significance, and over all has been a good thing for China and Asia as well. This may sound surprising coming from an unabashed, vocal proponent of free market capitalism (which I am), but China is far freer today than it would be had the Communist Party of China never come into existence. To understand how and why, one needs to have an idea what pre-Republican China was like, this blog post will hope to shed some light on a small but important segment of world history, and to help Westerners (particularly our American friends) understand why China exists today in the way it does.
 
Prior to the annexation of Poland, World War II was already unfolding in the Pacific Theatre. Imperial Japan was expanding precipitously, it held Taiwan, Korea, a network of islands throughout Southeast Asia, and had begun to penetrate mainland China as well. The Japanese had taken Nanjing (in a horrific and violent event some of you might have heard of), and had begun to install puppet provincial governments throughout China. During this time, the Third Communist International had strong-armed the KMT and the CPC into an agreement known as the United Front Policy, whereby the two sides would forego their Civil conflict (which had started prior to the most recent of Japanese invasions) in order to evict Imperial Japan from China. The actions of the Imperial Japanese Army during this occupation were aimed at crushing opposition, but what they actually did was stir up national sentiment, and create an environment conducive to the expansion of the CPC's popularity. Thanks to the CPC's effectiveness in Guerilla combat, the IJA found themselves in a quagmire, and the resources consumed in (futile) attempts to pacify China were diverted from those which were needed to fight a far graver threat to their imperial designs, the United States military. Together -- yet, separate paradoxically -- the Chinese and the Americans (with some help from ANZAC and the British military) defeated Imperial Japan, and crushed their empire.
 
This arduous process, of evicting a foreign occupying power, awakened national identity politics within China, upon which the CPC were better-equipped to capitalize than the KMT. They lacked the same foreign support the KMT had (Tsiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang were supported by the United States), but they had the local support of the average Chinese peasant, and that local resistance proved impossible for the KMT to combat.
 
During the ensuing decades, instead of recognizing the parallel histories of the CPC rise to power and the American Revolutionary War the U.S. contributed to the division of China into two states, the Republic of China, and the People's Republic of China. The PRC's domain being the mainland, and the ROC's domain being Taiwan. In fact, for the first two-plus decades of the United Nation's Existence, the "China" represented at the UN and on the UN Security Council was not sent from Beijing, but Taipei, and was seen by the Communist Bloc and much of the "Third World" as a puppet government installed by the United States. In other words, the animosity towards the Chinese Revolution by the Americans meant the Americans began to be seen in mainland China in the same light as those of the Imperial Japanese from the preceding decades.
 
Eventually relations between the two countries thawed, and China and the U.S. are now the world's biggest economies partially because they are the largest trading partners of one another, and would likely be fighting on the same side if another World War were to erupt (reason forbid).
 
Westerners are right to question the abuses suffered by Chinese citizens at the hands of their government, but Chinese citizens are right to point out that governments in the West are also committing very similar abuses on their citizens as well, and that unlike in the west the Chinese government is far less wasteful.
 
Freedom loving people in the West should congratulate their Chinese counterparts on 60 years of Republican self-rule, and if they wish to see an improvement in human rights around the world, they need to focus on their own countries and the activities of their own governments, instead of opening themselves up to accusations of hypocrisy and hegemony.
 
So, Happy 60th Anniversary of the People's Republic of China, everybody.

Help me find a new word that encompasses a lack of consideration and hypocrisy in the same word, if you please.

As I've long since promised (and long-since neglected to write), this is my thread discussing how and why taxation are forms of theft, and why adding to the debt burden of the U.S. Taxpayer adverseley affects the purchasing power of the world's working poor. This will be a long post, and I'm betting that even the people who asked me to write this to explain myself will want to consume it piecemeal (or simply not at all). Because of this, I've decided to break it down into sections:

1: A Brief Discourse on Gresham's Law

2: What is Legal Tender?

3: The Folly of “Progressive” Tax

4: The Hidden Regressive Tax

5: Aren't Tax Cuts Good?

6: Towards an End to the Slave State

You can read this in segments (or not at all) if you wish. If you wish to read a particular section, simply “ctrl+F” the beginning of the title you want to jump to (including the numbers and colons) and hit enter twice, the exact text you see above will directly connote each of the six sections.

 

1: A Brief Discourse on Gresham's Law

I have always been fascinated by 'scientific' laws that constitute attempts to frame human behaviour in either a pessimistic or optimistic light. Gresham's Law is an example of the former. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's an observation made by 16th Century banker, Sir Thomas Gresham. The observation was in regard to bimetalic standards of the English economy during his lifetime. Bimetalism is an economic system whereby there are two precious-metal-backed currencies occupying the same jurisdiction, and a government (or some other entity) attempts to codify a standard of value between the two currencies. The theory was that it enabled market-based trade of the two currencies. What resulted was defacement of the good currency (i.e.,the currency whose commodity value is more commensurate with its face value than that of its counterpart), and the eventual monopolization by the bad currency (i.e., the currency whose face value is greater than its commodity value).
 
This is why Gresham's Law is usually stated as “Bad money drives out good”. Of course, we have governments whose primary purpose is to prevent the pessimists from winning the argument, don't we? I mean, if we lived in a Hobbsean “state of nature”, and some philosopher attempted to codify a “scientific law” that said “People will murder each other” based on the observation that people do in fact murder eachother, wouldn't we want a government to come along to pass an act of legislation that said “People can't murder each other”? How this bizarre analogy relates to finance is addressed in the following section. In some ways, establishments (and nationalizations) of Central Reserve Banks represent governments' and the banking industry's attempt to combat this law, but in one very crucial way, these attempts are universal failures.

2: What is “Legal Tender”?

Defacement was the phenomenon that drove out the use of “good” money. This isn't simply drawing ruby lipstick on Queen Elizabeth or Thomas Jefferson's face, this was the process whereby a few enterprising individuals found a way to double the benefit of their money. They would shave the metal on the face and edges of their coins, collected the shavings and sold their collected weight for the metal's commodity value, and then redeemed the 'defaced' money for goods and services in the coin's notional value. This process was weakly combated by criminalization of “defacement” and then eventually the defaced money was simply phased out. 

To prevent this process from occurring again, and to mitigate the potential harm caused by bank runs (i.e., the phenomenon of depositors en masse claiming their savings while the savings are being lent out, causing the bank to collapse), private banks came together and formed central banks, and their existence was usually codified in law. This process also replaced commodity-backed money with what is known as “legal tender”. Look on your bills, and you will notice the political symbols of your jurisdiction, and the words “legal tender” somewhere on most of them. This is what we plaebians use as currency, but it is not money in a strict sense of the word, they are political documents. That is to say, they are instruments of coercion. These notes are promises to pay, not payments themselves. And the only payment promised is the coercive power of government to collect if you fail to pay your taxes. Legal tender is not redeemable for anything in particular (that is not to say they lack any purchasing power), they do not reflect a quantity of anything, and their purchasing power continues to decay as a result of inflation in the supply of these currencies. Essentially, trading in dollars, euros, and pounds is trading in promissory notes of taxation. This is why the greater the volume of commerce you make in your jurisdiction's currency means the greater amount you are taxed. This is the crux of the next segment of this post.

3: The Folly of “Progressive” Tax

 
Many statists (on both wings of the political divide) insist that progressive taxation is the best way of funding government services in a mixed economy (anyone who says any sort of tax is a good thing for a capitalist economy needs to check his premises). The conventional wisdom goes that because the poor are just as deserving of services like plumbing, roads, education, and healthcare as the wealthy are, but are unable to afford them in the current mixed economy, taking a greater amount from the rich and a lesser amount from the poor is justified. After all, does this not mirror transactions in the markets that do operate somewhat openly? Does the wealthy man not pay more for his Jaguar than a poor man pays for his Kia? Indeed this logic seems to bare out some sense, but it does not entirely square with what ends up happening in reality.
 
Poor people buy products and services from those with the financial wherewithal to hire other poor people to provide them. As taxes on the wealthy increase, so to do the pressures increase on both their capacity to demand and their capacity to supply. For instance a tax on capital gains is a tax on loanable or funds. If that wealth was not taken from the earner of the capital gain, it could be used to invest in a new employee, a new business venture, or a new charitible project. This wealth could be used to create new wealth, and to drive up the productive capacity (and therefore drive down costs) for the economy as a whole. The other side of it is the price that is then charged to the consumer in exchange for goods and services. The cost of a good or service tends to reflect the cost associated with the endeavours that went into producing the good or service. Machinery and knowledge to make the item, workers to assemble and package it, and shippers to distribute it. When you buy something, the money you put down is paying for all of these things. But there is another cost that producers must contend with: the cost associated with being taxed.
 
In order to recoup those losses, prices on goods are driven up in the wider economy. When prices increase, the wealthy and the moderately wealthy have a portion of that wealth base in savings to insulate them from a higher cost of living. Whereas the working poor generally save a smaller portion of their income than the wealthy, and subsequently a larger portion of their earnings goes to day-to-day sustenance than that of wealthy people. This makes them more acutely sensitive to increases in the cost of living, which is a similar problem, but not identical to the problem of inflation, a subject to be discussed presently.

4: The Hidden Regressive Tax

 
Many people (understandably) tend to mistakenly equate increases in prices and cost of living with inflation. While these tend to have similar deleterious effects on the purchasing power of the working poor, they are not always of the same source, and do not always reflect the same types of government interventions in the economy. The reason why these things get mistakenly equated is because there are basically two different ways inflation is measured. The first reflects this common mistake, the second is something slightly different. Governments of various jurisdictions, and the United Nations as well keep extensive statistics on economic activity. Inflation is one of the phenomenae government statistics bureaus tend to focus a great deal on, but the way they measure it is a reflection of selection bias.
 

Governments tend to track inflation by various methods, but the most common is known as the “Consumer Price Index” or CPI. This data is based on measuring the cost of a weighted “basket” of consumer goods that the average household will tend to consume in a given period of time. But at various times, various items are not reflected in inflation. For instance, the cost of food and energy no longer are reflected in U.S. Federal measurements of CPI, and federal reserve interest rates, and other monopolistic price policies (e.g., minimum wage) are reflective of the CPI, not the other way around. This means crucial areas of the economy are blind spots when statisticians are trying to quantify something as nebulous and furtive as purchasing power. If stock prices, energy, labour, and food are not included in CPI measurements, then one's attempts to use CPI as an index of purchasing power fluctuation will fall somewhat short because, energy, industry, food, and investment are the means by which our lives are sustained, and planned for in the future.
 
So again, this is not what I refer to when I call “inflation” a form of theft, what I am referring to is inflation of the supply of money relative to the amount of productive capacity in a given economy. By any objective measure, this rate has increased rapidly in the last couple of decades, and precipitously in the last year.

 As you can see, the rate of increase in the supply of U.S. Dollars is approaching the rate of singularity (which is in and of itself completely fucking insane). Unfortunately, the Real GDP graph (i.e., the bottom graph) doesn't go back all the way to the founding of the federal reserve, but as you can see there is nowhere near a 1:1 correlation between GDP growth and money supply growth, they are not at all related. One fluctuates wildly, while the other is in a continuous upward trend. This upward trend reflects the continuous theft of purchasing power from the private economy by the U.S. Government, its Federal Reserve bank, and the Private banks who borrow money from the Fed.

When government budget requirements fall short of its revenue, the government's recourse is to print the shortfall. This process obviously does not take the 20 dollar bill sitting in your wallet out of your wallet, but what it does do is diminish that 20 dollar bill's purchasing power. How does it do that?

Well, as you can see, the amount of legal tender in an economy has no real relation to the amount of productive capacity of an economy, so when a government commandeers currently-existing productive capacity in order to achieve an objective (such as building a road, buying your grandma her prescription drugs, et cetera), it takes the access to that portion of capacity away from the marketplace. This is how inflation is a form of theft, it is not a theft of dollars directly (like taxes are), it is a theft of purchasing power from the dollars that previously existed.
 
This is why the working poor are most adversely affected by inflation of money supply. Wealthier people, companies, and and those with superior credit ratings, when they have a funding shortfall, are able to borrow money (either from investors, depositors, or from their own currently-existing savings) to cross that gap, whereas the working poor are have no such recourse, and can only bargain collectively for an increase in purchasing power, or simply work more hours. However, the solution to this problem is not necessarily precipitous tax or funding cuts by governments, and I will explain why in the following section.

5: Aren't Tax Cuts Good?

 
The conventional wisdom on the part of conservatives is that since “all taxes are bad”, it would logically follow that “all reductions in tax are good”, and generally speaking, I tend to side with the notion that the less victims of theft there are in the world, the better off the world is, but the problem is that tax credits, cuts, and subsidies usually constitute net transfers of wealth, not reductions in state-imposed burden.

Consider, for example, the “Bush tax cuts”. These tax cuts were done in the wake of military spending increases, which increased the debt for FY 2003 by $60 000 000 000 and was estimated to add to the deficit $340 000 000 000 by the end of the Bush Administration. In other words, the wealthiest were required to pay billions of dollars less in taxes for a few years (which is a good thing, but only marginally) at the expense of everyone (and, as illustrated earlier, the least wealthy most acutely) for years to come (which is a very very bad thing). This means, on the balance, this tax cut actually increased the amount of theft the government would need to commit in order to fund its future operations, which illustrates that cutting taxes isn't always a way of mitigating the amount of theft a government commits. If simply cutting taxes is not the solution, what could be? Let's discuss this matter in the final section.

 

6: Towards an End to the Slave State

 
 As I have asserted, cutting taxes are not the cure-all to the problem of the ever-diminishing value of labour. Government spending must be decreased, commensurate with these cuts in taxes, and eventually federal reserve systems of finance need to be phased out, but what can we replace it with that wouldn't lead to total anarchy and chaos?

As I have insisted in the past, liberty and anarchy are not one in the same. Quite simply you cannot have a free society without an institution whose role is retaliation as a means of deterring the initiation of force. And it has to be one institution (per given geographic area), you cannot have a competition in this field. Competitions in the use of force are wars. No sane person thinks war is preferable to slavery. A true moralist would realize that both are evil, and ought to be avoided. But how can we go about freeing ourselves from both? Well, no one believes there is a pure, perfect, or permanent solution to this problem. But adding to the financing responsibilities of governments, and increasing their power over the private economy are the causes, and so they should be avoided.

The best replacement for a system of taxation (after, not before dismantling monopolies in industries that do not involve the act of governance) I have come across is what is referred to by some as contract insurance. In essence, a government already has the responsibilities that secure its role as the primary deterrent against force: courts of law, criminal justice, military, and the police, and all of these convey genuine value to citizens (when they are employed justly and equitably). It is good that people get punished if they commit a crime, and it is good that a written contract can be backed up in a court of law, and these endeavours have value. However, you can't justly set up a system whereby citizens voluntarily pay to be protected from criminals, because this would simply devolve into a system where people pay to be protected from criminal prosecution. Such a system would not be free, since all the victims would be oppressed by all the wealthiest of criminals.
 
However, governments can and do receive funds commensurate with economic activity. Charging this payment on a voluntary basis, and making it more direct – i.e., insuring the obligations expressed in a contract for a deductible – can prevent a system of bribery from taking place. This is because the only contractual obligations that would be insured by the government are those contracts which both parties agree the government should insure it. Now you might say “corporations are cost-cutting entities. If they can avoid paying a cost, they will, then the government will end up with nothing, and society will end up without a government.” This is partially true. However, corporations do not shy away from all costs: they do not shy away from the cost of production, the cost of marketing, or any other cost that brings their profit margin an over-all benefit. The same would be true of contract insurance. Companies and individuals exchange billions of dollars every day in mercantile and stock markets. These transactions occur at a fast pace because the contractual obligations that underwrite these activities have the protection of Civil Law. That is to say, for example, if the millions of dollars company A paid for x amount of barrels of oil does not get them their oil, they can sue the company B for the damages incurred for having that contract breached. In other words, contracts that are actually backed by Civil Law (and not just word-of-mouth obligation) have value in the marketplace. So, a pre-defined portion of these billions of dollars could be taken voluntarily from both parties by the government, and used to fund its limited scope of programs.

Of course, you cannot replace income, capital gains, sales, property, and inflation taxes with a single system of payment over night. What needs to happen first is a cautious and prudent dismantling of government-controlled (and government-protected) monopolies and oligopolies, parallel with decreases in taxation, alongside a refusal to recognize the contract of any bank with a reserve ratio of less than 100%, and after all that, but not before, can we replace arbitrary theft of wealth with voluntary systems of payment across the entire economy.

 Now, some of you may not realize this, but I'm Canadian. I have a Canadian Passport, an Ontarian Birth Certificate and everything. If you recognize me by my name or
the content of my posts, that might surprise you. But it is in fact true. The country in which I was born has a lot of famous exports -- Maple Syrup, Tylenol 3, and Jim Carrey to name a few, but I personally think hockey is the best of the bunch.
 
What makes hockey such an awesome sport? It takes place on a(n almost) frictionless surface. Basketball is played on a wooden court, Baseball happens on grass and dirt, and football happens on astroturf or grass. All of these surfaces exhibit the property of friction when they come into contact with players' feet, bodies, or the ball to a greater degree than skates, sticks and pucks do on ice. This fact doesn't make the other sports bad, but the approximate frictionlessness of galvanized rubber and skate blades on "liquid-like ice surfaces" are what make hockey so awesome.
 
For example, at the 2009 skills competition, Andrew Cogliano of the Edmonton Oilers clocked a speed of 14.81 seconds in the fastest skater competition in one full lap around the ice, the circumference of an NHL rink is approximately 550 feet (200'x85 with tapered corners). This means he traveled at an average speed of 11.32 metres per second. Compare that to Usain Bolt's double world record at the most recent track and field world championships. Usain Bolt traveled 100 metres in 9.58 seconds (average speed = 10.44 metres per second) and 200 metres in 19.19 seconds (average speed = 10.42 metres per second). This is not to imply that Cogliano is a superior athlete to Bolt (I don't believe he is), but to illustrate just how fast hockey players can move when manoeuvring between their opponents and dashing head-long into one another.
 
Another qualitative example of why hockey kicks so much ass is the speed with which the puck is shot. In the same skills competition, Zdeno Chara of the Boston Bruins registered a slap shot of 105.4 miles per hour, setting a new NHL record (and winning US$24 000 for the charity Right-to-Play). Admittedly, the fastest fastball ever thrown (a two-seamer by Bob Feller) reached 107.9 miles per hour, but the batter facing that pitch didn't have to stop it with his body, and didn't have between two and eight dudes blocking his vision.
 
Now, obviously some arbitrary numbers are never going to be enough to make my point that hockey is awesome, but some video evidence might help.
 
What other sport can provide moments like this:
 
   and this:
 
 
  and this?
 
 
 
 
By the way, if you don't even like sports... why did you enter this thread in the first place?