The reason the rich get to choose is because it is their money. Just as you can decide, today, to donate your money to the charity of your choosing. And really, this isn't any different from asking why the rich (or you or me) get to decide which car or house to buy.
If government is failing to give your money to areas where you think it should go, perhaps this is what is anti-democratic.
This presumes that most, if not all of the money gained by the rich is justly earned. I would take serious issue with this.
Case by case, you may or may not have a point. Is the alternative to have the state take the money and spend as it wishes? In such a case, is the money "justly earned" if it was taken by force?
That isn't necessarily a universally-accepted idea. Democratic systems have the machinery of accountability, but some of us are not completely convinced that it works; surely not as-advertised.
I know that some will regard the wealth of the rich as having been acquired by some means of trickery or even coercion. And that may even be true in some cases. But it is true of taxation nearly 100% of the time, as states must use the threat of force to acquire that money.
As a thought experiment, imagine that taxation became completely voluntary tomorrow. What percentage of its former revenue does the government make?
Suddenly, the government has to compete with other entities for money. Government doesn't know the competition game, so how well would it fare? It would be an interesting experiment, though it would undoubtedly cause some short-term chaos.
Of course it's possible to set arbitrary rules under which a government doesn't form, or corporations provide something better, but those rules end up being very arbitrary.
I'd love to hear about it.
>No-one descended from the heavens and imposed our current governmental system; what we have now is what people did.
"What people did", isn't what you or I did, necessarily. Are you making the classic HN error of assuming that every reader lives in your country (usually the US)? Or do you think that every government is legitimate, no matter what, so long as it is not overthrown?
>If you remove the government, people band together into organizations that behave the same way: first you get something like a union where people pay dues and get certain benefits, their decision making structure evolves, and eventually the organization decides to cover everyone and force everyone to contribute. (It's been quite amusing to watch this happening in miniature in eve online)
Eve Online is not a great example, imo, for a few reasons. First the corporation tax is built into the game's mechanics. It is assumed that this is must be how all corporations will work. But that's less of an issue than.. Two, corporation membership is indeed voluntary. It is exceptionally easy to leave a corp (minus a potential 24 hour stasis). Even if you're deep in nullsec, you can get out. If you die trying, no big deal. This is nothing like living in a modern state, where even leaving said state can be subject to prohibitive border controls. And getting shot by an agent of the state doesn't exactly follow by you ending up in a station where your clone was located. The involuntary nature of the state and the very real consequences of what it does immediately separates it from something akin to an Eve corp.
>Of course it's possible to set arbitrary rules under which a government doesn't form, or corporations provide something better, but those rules end up being very arbitrary.
I don't think there's any doubt that if a government suddenly didn't exist, or could no longer pay its bills that we'd see alternative institutions take up the slack in certain areas. But it isn't necessarily a state entity that would do so, and this is clearly a main point of disagreement here.
There are levels between "do nothing" and "overthrow". I don't think legitimacy is a binary thing.
> I don't think there's any doubt that if a government suddenly didn't exist, or could no longer pay its bills that we'd see alternative institutions take up the slack in certain areas. But it isn't necessarily a state entity that would do so, and this is clearly a main point of disagreement here.
I think (in this arbitrary and unrealistic scenario) those "alternative institutions" would be or rapidly become very governmentlike; whether they would be institutions with a flag and a seat the united nations is not terribly important. Honestly I don't see much difference even today between governments, large NGOs, and large corporations; all have similar decisionmaking processes and act in similar ways (though as I said, I think accountability is better for governments - and probably even worse for large NGOs). Some people consider a "monopoly on violence" to be a qualitative difference between government and non-government large organizations, but these "alternative institutions" in your scenario would definitely have to be willing to back up their policies with force, so they'd be governmentlike in that respect too.
It helps to think of states as machines that print money which they spend at one end and run an incinerator into which they put all of your taxes at the other.
The clear implication of this is that:
* Spending is inflationary
* Taxes are there to clamp down on inflation.
* Taxes are there to change behavior in a socially conscious way (e.g. tax cigarettes to reduce smoking // tax breaks for wind farms).
Your cash is debt. It is not something you own like a house. It is a social relationship subject to intermediation by the government under democratic oversight.
In fact, why have money at all, lets just let the government take care of everyone and not let anyone own businesses or property or anything. Oh wait, because this is a horrible idea and removes a main motivation for people to actually work and contribute to society. What you are suggesting is communism, not democracy.
Democracy doesn't mean that people can't choose to do what they want to do with their money. It just means that the government representing the people has been elected by the people (at least in a representative democracy, like the United States). It doesn't mean that the government should make all the decisions for everyone or control how they spend their money.
Here is how it works:
Since many people have more time than money, they should be required to donate a certain amount of time towards volunteering at working on public projects for the government. This could include: construction, cleaning up trash on the highway, fix roads, etc.
An elected government would get to figure out where the volunteers get to allocate their time. I think this would be a great benefit to our society.
"Just as there is only one best charity, there is only one best way to donate to that charity. Whether you volunteer versus donate money versus raise awareness is your own choice, but that choice has consequences. If a high-powered lawyer who makes $1,000 an hour chooses to take an hour off to help clean up litter on the beach, he's wasted the opportunity to work overtime that day, make $1,000, donate to a charity that will hire a hundred poor people for $10/hour to clean up litter, and end up with a hundred times more litter removed."
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...