I would voluntarily pay higher taxes for more services. How else would you purpose large infrastructure projects to be handled? It's precisely scale that's needed to get good ROI. Look up the word monopsony. Also consider the word network, and it's effects, in "transportation network", and consider how scale plays into that as well. As for the rest of your ideas, citation needed.

In theory so would I. But in practice the government keeps spending more and more money without providing more or better services so it's just not a good investment. If the government wants to build infrastructure they should pick a couple of big projects and complete them on time and on budget. Then maybe I will be willing to fork over more taxes for more projects.

Operation Warp Speed had a pretty good ROI for the USA, no?

Yes and most of that came from removing regulatory delays, raising the obvious question of why they were there in the first place.

You're forgetting coordinating at scale, and giant piles of money for parallelization of the building the manufacturing infrastructure. You think regulation was holding us back? How about the infrastructure to make the vaccines?

No I'm not forgetting about that. It's just that manufacturing was never the time constraint on how fast a vaccine could be produced. It's regulatory time. The manufacturing process was also shortened (and parallelized, as you pointed out), but you can see from this chart that the main savings was shortening a 4 year regulatory process to 6 months. https://media.defense.gov/2020/Aug/13/2002476369/-1/-1/0/200...

Consider the meaning of necessary vs. sufficient conditions. You're confusing the two.

It would be interesting to have a "tax rewards" system, so that people didn't

You paid $10k of taxes this year? Here's for you a free pass to all national parks.

You paid $50k? Here's the card - similar to the one police officers give to their wives - that lets you get off minor infractions.

Small tokens of appreciation often go long way.

Why should poor people (assuming they are poor through no fault of their own) not have equal access to services?

If anyone was serious about democracy they would give tax payers the option to select the services they are willing to pay towards. Tick the box to pay towards a new Aircraft Carrier, a new Hospital, Vaccines, Making viruses more deadly etc.

Direct democracy is a bit hard to manage - because people are generally too dumb and can't see the forest for the trees.

That aircraft carrier might be the big weight in a trade negotiation or prevention of a regional conflict which could escalate.

Representative democracy should work better, because you (the voter) judge based on the outcome, and vote, rather than try to understand every possible policy (which is going to overwhelm any individual anyway).

I doubt distrust in govt is based on lack of services vs taxes paid. It’s a propaganda war being lapped up by Trumpists and far right crowds worldwide because it fits their view - no govt unless they win.

Depending on where you are you can make a voluntary donation to the government. In some places it’s actually similar to a charitable donation so has a tax writeoff.

However in response to your point and in fairness to OP you can’t in the overwhelming majority of places decide where your money goes. It’s just pooled and used for whatever government wants to do with it. This is what most people have a problem with.

Personally I can see the merit in having some shared system but it should voluntarily always. Compelling people’s money through state sanctioned force which includes fines and imprisonment is sick. It promotes a parasitic relationship with government where people don’t feel part of it. Instead they feel smothered by it.

It would be cool if you had to pay $X in taxes, but there were different sliders for allocating where your taxes went (10% to infra, 20% to green initiatives, etc). That way people can support things that they believe in, and they feel more invested in the outcomes.

Sounds good at first, but it's actually deeply anti-democratic: You're giving people more influence on the state depending on their income and wealth. That's like wealth-based suffrage.

Makes sense. The percentage that you have to freely allocate could be a function of the amount being allocated. For example, someone with $1M income has only 20% of their taxes for free allocation, while someone with $50k income can freely allocate 100%.

So in other words, it's OK if the rich get less representation, because they're rich? But it's not OK if the poor gets less representation - because of political correctness?

Unless taxes are regressive, the rich still get more representation in that example.

It would also be cool if people had long, complex, ongoing conversations (and meta-conversations) about feasible improvements like this to the design of our governments. Petty polarizing arguments arguments are soon much more appealing though. :(

Hmmmm, -2.

From this, would it be logical to conclude that at least three people believe that this is not a good idea?

What stops you from sending a check to IRS now?

It's essentially the same kind of alienation Marx talks about. Replace "workers" with "taxpayers" and it perfectly describes the situation. Even if taxes did go towards useful things, the average taxpayer is simply too detached from their rewards.

There's a lot I don't agree with Marx on, but I think he was right on the aspect of alienation.

There is a difference. Capitalists are not allowed to arrest and/or kill for non-compliance.

Well... (noting the date) not anymore at least.

Capitalists are in control of the state, so of course they do. Try taking over your workplace, the police will come for you.

> Try taking over your workplace

aka, try stealing, and you get arrested.

So the ruling class (capitalists) have defined what theft is and have armed bodies to enforce it.

Profits aren’t somehow defined as theft, despite all value being produced by the labour of workers, who are paid a fraction of the value they produce.

> all value being produced by the labour of workers, who are paid a fraction of the value they produce

only if you believe that the capital being used to produce value - including the wages being paid upfront - are valueless.

Is that capital also not produced by workers, in the past? It’s a form of crystallised labour.

Also, does a fixed initial investment entitle one to a fraction of all future (variable) value produced? Why?

All investments entitle one to all future productivity produced from said investment. This is the central idea of ownership.

The new capital is _produced_ by the workers, but it was done with initial capital that is _owned_ by the capitalist. So unless you agree that these initial capital is not worth anything (despite it being required), how can _all_ capital belong to the workers that made it? After all, the workers agreed to receive their wage in exchange for producing, using the seed capital supplied by the capitalist.

The initial capital entitles the investor to a fraction of all labour, in perpetuity? Without any further work or investment?

Yes, this appropriation is central to the capitalist idea of ownership. Another word for that is theft.