Justice: Take from some, give to others

DeathSyn
all government policies harm us when they take from some of us to give to others of us
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DeathSyn
typhon: many green people believe that
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starbomba has set topic: <rak`lil> education really hasn't worked
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DeathSyn
rak`lil: sure, but good luck finding land to put it on
DeathSyn
anywhere you try they'll zone you of it as fast as possible
DeathSyn
i've never heard of anachron's housing exploits
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DeathSyn
apestate: aww damn
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DeathSyn
bougyman: i know a company that does well at slabs, don't know if they do pier and beam, but you can ask them
DeathSyn
like they're 3 generations in
DeathSyn
to doing foundation repair
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AbCdEfGhI is now known as Real_Roan
Real_Roan
Vote for me !
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Real_Roan
Hi Rak.
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infspire
DeathSyn is obnoxiously ignorant.
infspire
"all government policies harm us when they take from some of us to give to others of us"
infspire
Look at this idea.
infspire
It's just blatantly false.
infspire
Libertarians have been shown to have the highest average IQ and lowest empathy of libertarian, liberal, and conservative.
infspire
Use some IQ, man.
infspire
Look at your qualifiers: "all".
infspire
Any policy which takes from some to give to others is harm.
infspire
What do I need to do to show an all-statement is false? Find a single counterexample.
infspire
What's a single counterexample?
infspire
A government policy that redistributes the wealth of those found guilty in a court proceeding as means of restitution for that person's specific crimes against those specific individuals, i.e. fraud.
infspire
This policy takes from "some of us" and gives to "others of us", and is therefore harmful, according to DeathSyn.
infspire
What a fucking dummy.
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infspire
I strongly despise libertarians.
infspire
My first political party was the Libertarian Party in the United States.
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infspire
I understand libertarianism very well.
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infspire
The core of my worldview today is "human and animal welfare" -- that's what I'm trying to optimize.
infspire
I think human welfare's best optimization strongly includes rights-based ideologies, which is a deep ally of libertarianism, i.e. I retain an important libertarian core.
infspire
But, they are some of the most obnoxious people.
infspire
They genuinely have mental disabilities in many cases.
infspire
So, like, above, I just showed an instant counter-example to a standard libertarian thought.
infspire
Libertarians are genetically pre-disposed to include qualifiers like "all" because they generally strongly dislike reasoning empirically, it seems, as it feels unclean to them.
infspire
They just *love* first principles, even when those first principles clearly don't work.
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infspire
So, you might think my criminal justice reparations example is narrow. It is taking a clear philosophical principle, "Those that gain by criminally hurting others should not prosper from that hurting, and the victims should have the hurt undone", which is a widely, but not universally held position in our society.
infspire
If you get a typical libertarian drunk, a surprising amount of them will secretly tell you that they don't think victims of crimes should be compensated.
infspire
Because they secretly think it's anti-evolutionary, i.e. criminals are smart and strong and victims earned their fraud by being foolish.
infspire
This is one of the things that happens when you have very little empathy.
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infspire
But, you can take that core principle and start expanding it.
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infspire
What about companies that emitted large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere in the last 100 years. The science indicates that has materially harm, stochastically, the lives of individuals who never came into transactional contact with those companies.
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infspire
Should government policies work to "take from some of them" to give to "others of us" in that case?
infspire
The answer seems to be 'obviously yes', drawing on the rich precedent of torts.
infspire
I guess this example class missed DeathSyn's libertarian high IQ/low empathy cognitive profile, too!
infspire
So, they're doing terrible at the high IQ part, as you can see, and they're terrible at empathy from a genetic predisposition (at the prior level).
infspire
So, what is their political reasoning good for?
infspire
So, we've identified two classes under which government policy should take from some of us to give to others of us.
infspire
Are there any other classes?
infspire
Sure.
infspire
What philosophical principle is libertarianism largely optimizing for? Liberty/individual determination of their life/etc.
infspire
Is there any thought about different ways of optimizing that? Yep, e.g. Laffer curves.
infspire
That is, maximum liberty may not be achieved by aiming for maximum liberty, by corollary to Popper's paradox of tolerance argumentation.
infspire
There is considerable political thought that unabashed 'liberty' leads to a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of very few entities, which then leads to neo-feudalism or fascism, strongly decreasing liberty.
resident
Anybody here trying out a tedious first draft of a dissertation in the form of a tellingly one-sided discussion.
infspire
But, this philosophical thought continues, if you somewhat decrease liberty, you can avoid those liberty sinks and maintain a higher effective liberty across multiple decades/generations.
infspire
On this philosophical basis, government policy might reduce the liberty of some to ensure its average value does not drop too low.
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infspire
This notion of average well-being v. constraining minimum liberty(society) v. rights of individuals is a very hard problem and *at the center* of American political philosophy.
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resident
I understand why this would appeal to bougy.  Appeals to his intellectual vanity, such as it is.  Not sure about the rest of you.
infspire
You can observe this conflict in the United States in its dual optimization for the average @ majority wins alongside putting constraints on minimum_liberty(society) in the form of rights for individuals independent of majority welfare.
infspire
There are multiple positions that are defensible in this framework. One of them claims the following: When wealth and power accumulate in individuals above a certain level, it destabilizes the entire republic, leading a heavy decrease in average librerty.
infspire
This is the basis of the wealth taxes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
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infspire
Which leads to the proposal to redistribute some of their wealth away from them -- to decrease their power which destabilizes the republic -- to the society which increases its welfare and liberty.
infspire
In some of the proposals, e.g. 2% of wealth above 1 billion, it's not clear whatsoever the *liberty* of those individuals is being touched.
resident
Pasting one's college essays into a chat room is borderline flooding.
infspire
I'm typing this in realtime, resident.
infspire
I'm just smart.
infspire
This is my response to one of DeathSyn's comments.
resident
So you remind no one who asks.
resident
Proportionate responses.  Look into them.
infspire
resident: Sometimes a response is silent. Sometimes it is one word. Sometimes it is an essay.
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infspire
resident: It varies by context.
resident
One comment, 200 lines of scroll.  That's not a response, that's an angle for something already sitting on deck.
infspire
It is appropriate, in this case, because I am fundamentally refuting a core pillar of right-libertarianism
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infspire
Does liberty include the ability to keep all of the money you earn in a society? Or maybe liberty only includes a version of that up to a certain level. I am inclined to think the latter.
resident
bougyman asserts broadly, divests obvious associations broadly.
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infspire
So, I think a tax on the super-wealthy, which helps stabilize our republic and thereby increasing the welfare and liberty of the average person in that society, does so by taking no liberty from another.
infspire
The notion of liberty/freedom, of course, is philosophically rich and complex, though.
infspire
Libertarians generally do a terrible job at acknowledging that complexity.
infspire
They just repeat their baby axioms not recognizing -- at best -- they're in a single school of historical thought.
infspire
So, I've now identified three exception classes.
infspire
Are there any others?
infspire
Sure.
infspire
Fourth exception class: A person is not guilty of violating the law -- the first exception class -- but has merely played by the rules of society. Later, it is determined the rules of society are/were broken.
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infspire
Reasoning from typical ex post facto precedent, you would not take action against the individual. However, how might we overcome that precedent?
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infspire
What if the gains of individuals by playing by the broken rules in a society led to such an accumulation of wealth, say Jeff Bezos's 200 billion, that it also serves to destabilize the republic?
resident
Pause and wait ten beats for responses.  Resume.  Pause.  Wait ten beats.
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infspire
Now, we might use class three above to justify the wealth of these individuals constitute ill-gotten gains.
resident
When they don't arrive, shut the fuck up.  When in doubt, shut the fuck up.
infspire
resident: I put you on block for sixty minutes, as you're in an unacceptable cognitive state.
infspire
So, let's do a summary. When might it not be harmful to take from some of us to give to others of us:
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infspire
1) What is being taken from some of us was illegitimately acquired by the existing rules of our community
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infspire
2) Our wealth was acquired through means which stochastically harm a community which can be demonstrated by science, even if not represented in our criminal or civil code
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infspire
3) Trade-offs between individual liberty and average welfare or liberty in a community, i.e. liberty/wealth/welfare may have non-linear value, i.e. the 101st wealth unit may be worth less to that person than the 3rd wealth unit for another
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infspire
4) Different conceptualizations of private property/liberty at differing levels of wealth/power, i.e. maybe it's not proper to understand your wealth from 3 billion to 4 billion as property, for example
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infspire
5) A recognition the rules of society which an individual played by were broken, though not recognized at the time, coupled with some of the above notions to modify ex post facto considerations
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infspire
Think of all that of, and then consider DeathSyn's original completely obnoxious baby-like utterance of "all government policies harm us when they take from some of us to give to others of us".
infspire
You CANNOT reason from first principles in a complex world.
infspire
Why? Your mind is orders of magnitude less complex than the world it is modeling, and the information content of any rule is simply insufficient -- obviously -- to ever describe a large part of reality
infspire
"Universal rules are for lackeys. Context is for kings." - Star Trek: Discovery