aminok

>An ad-hoc process controlled by an individual? Of course I'd complain.

Morally there's no difference. You just want the armed robbery to be done in a more organized and deliberative process. That doesn't change the moral quality of threatening you with violence to deprive you of your property, when you have not committed any offence to warrant such a violation of your rights.

>Actions on behalf of a democratic system are different to actions of an individual, because they have the consent of a majority of the governed.

Violating people's rights with the "consent of the majority" is just two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for dinner. The justification is just an ideological cover for violating others rights.

>How do you intend that property rights be enforced? Who decides who owns what, and what gives them the right to make that decision?

Property rights would ideally be enforced by the government, with common law, which is based on protecting people's human rights (including the right to not be robbed to provide for the poor), determining who owns what.

>Would it be acceptable for an individual who disagrees (i.e. doesn't consent) to take action on their own to reallocate property as they see fit?

I don't know, because there are many factors to consider. If the judgment is unjust, but resisting it with force leads to far more violence against the innocent, then it could wrong to resist in such a manner. The best course of action in my opinion is to strongly argue for what one believes is justice as long as the freedom of speech exists.

>Yes, I'd prefer people be thrown in prison for refusing to feed the starving, rather than them starving to death.

So I guess you won't complain when some self-righteous modern-day Robin Hood engages in armed robbery against you to feed children in an orphanage in Africa. And if you resist? Well, the consequences fall on you. Who are you to deny others who are in need your income.

That actions that are unconscionable by any normal moral standard suddenly become socially acceptable to endorse when done through the political process shows how detached political ideology has become from humanity/morality. The political ideology you endorse is sociopathic and narcissistic to the extreme.

>Why should I bother, if you're just going to change the way I was using a word and then tell me I'm sheeple?

It doesn't really matter how you define it. What matters is that they have not improved much from the position they were at when they adopted social democracy, and the reason is because their rate of economic growth has stagnated.

The way to measure the success of a policy is to see how much a country has improved from the position it was at when it adopted the policy relative to other countries.

>And since you like statistics so much, population growth,

Gee why would anyone base their views on large-scale phenomena on statistical evidence!? Why don't I just base my ideas on what's culturally popular and which notions give me warming feelings!?

>If the population stagnates, then of course you expect growth to stagnate.

You're taking an amateur approach to this, in missing all sorts of facts to arrive at your predetermined conclusion. The fact is that per capita GDP growth has slowed, not just GDP growth. Moreover, wage growth has slowed, and wages are a per-capita measure.

>Likewise this crazy expectation that human lifespans just linearly expand with improved circumstances

There's no indication that it's a "crazy expectation". The point I was making is that there is no evidence that social democracy has actually made anything better in the countries where it has been adopted. The trends in place before the adoption of social democracy were superior to the trends that came into effect after its adoption. So there is no objective evidence to support your ideological inclinations.

>but what would you expect when you're citing data from a source whose raison d'etre is specifically promoting the free market?

There's absolutely no evidence that the source's raison d'etre is to promote the free market. It's entirely possible that they want to further public welfare, and have concluded, based on empirical evidence, that the free market is the best way to do that.

>But I will leave you with this: economic growth isn't everything. That's the point of quality-of-life measures. People have a high quality of life in Sweden. Whereas China has recently had a rapidly-growing economy, and life sucks there.

More bullshit logic indicative of an amateur approach to economics and society.

China is still extremely poor relative to the West. But people in China are FAR better off now than they were 30 years ago, and that's primarily down to the massive economic development the country has experienced. Wages growing by a factor of 4-5X is hugely important to quality of life.

They don't have "vibrant economies". They have strong economies, that long ago stopped being "vibrant" (by vibrant, I mean fast-developing).

Europe and Canada have seen stagnant wage and economic growth since adopting social democracy. What are you basing your claim that these policies are working on? I strongly advise you to stop assuming that what you're told by the media and echo chambers on the internet is correct, and actually do research on these issues, by looking at statistics.

Social democracy has not worked in Scandinavia. The author of Scandinavian Unexceptionalism explains how it has harmed Sweden:

"From 1870 until 1970, Sweden was a free market success story. Sweden had the highest growth rate in the industrialized world. .. [After taxes were raised in the late 60s and 70s] Sweden stagnated":

https://youtu.be/D0hnA341AWE?t=5m23s

Sweden was the 3rd wealthiest country in the world in 1968. After it created a massive welfare state in the 1970s and 80s, its growth stagnated, and by 1991, it was 17th highest income country in the world.

Other important facts:

http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...

• Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.

• Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes.

If you want a more equal society, you need a more free market. It is regulatory prohibitions (anti-free-market policy) on economic activity that are contributing to growing income disparity:

"Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it":

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2...

>The US with their pathological fear of their own government is not what I'd use as a particularly characteristic example of social democracy.

By every broad-based objective measure, the scale of forcible income redistribution has massively increased in relative and absolute terms in the US. The raw statistics show that the US has by every objective measure moved drastically in the direction of social democracy over the last 40 years. The same applies to every other major Western economy.

The proliferation of smartphones doesn't lead to everyone getting "propaganda from a central server". A smartphone is a personal computing device that enables far more peer-to-peer communication and interactive engagement with the world than the previous mass-media paradigm of the pre-internet age (where a small number of broadcast networks, newspapers and radio stations controlled the minds of the vast majority of the population through passive one-way communication).

I agree that the loss of privacy is a huge concern, but like I said, there are positive trends as well that you are simply hand-waving away.

>But, again, as you stated previously, not horses?

Horses as well!

> Seriously, you are moving the goalposts all over the place.

I directly addressed your argument and then I also made an additional argument that your premise is not necessarily true. That's not defined as moving the goalposts.

>We are about to face a few individuals with technology will hold massive power over everyone else.

There are plenty of counterindications to that. For instance, many forms of technology are becoming increasingly widely adopted, at a rapid pace. I gave the adoption of smartphones as one example.

>Why not include mice, they have 97.5% of our genes, as being successful? Why not all mammals? Oh, except horses, of course, because you said in a previous comment we are different from them.

I would say the success of human beings is by some metrics a success for mice, mammals etc as well..

Humans cannot be made obsolete by technology because we come to own the technology.

Neanderthals faced a different species of humans whose culture they were not capable of integrating into. Humanity right now forms one unified global culture through which ideas and technology freely flow. The rising tide of technology is lifting all boats (massive wage growth globally).

Moreover, it's not clear that your premise is accurate. Neanderthals constitute 3 percent of Eurasian human genes, meaning that their genes were evolutionarily successful (3% * 6 billion > 100% * 100,000), and this is ignoring the success of their close kin, with whom they already shared >99% genes.

Isn't that obvious? I'm not sure how I could be more explicit..

People being able to exercise their right to freely contract and control their own private property is sickening?

You'd prefer people being thrown in prison for refusing to surrender their private property rights, or for engaging in a voluntary economic interaction that some other party created a prohibition against?

Please help me understand your preference for authoritarian violence against peaceful people.

The US isn't the world. The US has many traits that are peculiar to it, and not universal to economies that are becoming increasingly automated. The world has seen more wage growth over the last 20 years than any other period in history:

http://csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-global-...

All regulations, except on natural resources like land, should be eliminated in my opinion, as they are forceful interventions against people exercising their legitimate right to freely contract and utilise their own private property. In industries where network effects emerge, the government should fund open-source protocols that can compete with privately owned options. For example, applications built on a distributed consensus public blockchain (e.g. Ethereum) could be competitive with many existing centralized services.

The Malthusian argument has never been tested for an extended period in a situation where resource usage has been decoupled from resource generation.

From the brief experiment we've had with massive forcible income redistribution (social democracy), we've seen the following:

* slow down in wage growth and improvements in life expectancy

* slow down in productivity growth

* explosion in the rate of single parenthood (perfectly in line with economic theory on how availability of resources affects child rearing choices)

But hey since 40 years of social democracy has failed so utterly, clearly we should keep blaming the free market and doubling down on social democracy.

Computers and horses don't have property rights or the means to exercise them. All of this automation is augmenting humans because we do. We've gone from 122 million people owning smartphones in 2007 to 2.5 billion people owning them at the beginning of 2017 for example.

>But as things stand now, the owners of the machines get richer, and the displaced workers get significantly poorer.

No they don't. We've had 200 years of massive automation fueled job destruction, and wages and the demand for labour are massively greater now than 200 years ago.

The last 20 years in particular have overseen the most rapid wage growth in human history.

Forcibly redistributing income from low resource generators to high resource generators creates an incentive for people with fewer resources to have more children than they are capable of supporting. This dynamic will in the long run lead to more people that produce fewer resources.

Currently government is redistributing income upward by economic prohibitions (regulatory barriers):

http://cepr.net/publications/reports/working-paper-the-upwar...

and it is redistributing downward with social welfare spending, with the US massively increasing social welfare spending since 1972:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-...

Annual spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):

>Pensions and retirement: 4.4%

>Healthcare: 5.7%

>Welfare: 4.1%

Annual economic growth over the time frame:

>2.7%

The only thing it has to show for giving people more "free money" to spend is a higher trade deficit, stagnant wage growth, and, I would argue, an explosion in the amount of single parenthood:

http://pinetreewatchdog.org/500-rise-in-single-parenthood-fu...

But hey, since 40 years of social democracy has failed, let's keep doubling down and giving people more "free" money.

The end result of this bidirectional forcible redistribution is the productive middle class being destroyed, and two classes becoming increasingly significant: a small upper class controlling a growing share of national output, and a large unproductive underclass that is dependent on the taxes that upper class pays, constituting an increasingly large portion of the population.

Privileged clearly implies undeserving.

It was once widely agreed upon that slaves had no rights. Just because something is widely agreed upon doesn't make it right. I would argue that the proceeds of the private trades you engage in are fully yours by right, and that no reasonable case can be made to the contrary.

To suggest that it is not a right is to imply that it is okay for a government to demand that two private parties divulge information about a private trade they engaged in, and throw the two parties in prison if they refuse to divulge this information, or if they refuse to hand over a share of the value they received in this private trade.

>Remember, by definition, your tax obligation is not yours.

What a strange debt: one that a person assumes without their consent, and which you only know about by violating their privacy.

With regard to the last point: if I trade $1 million worth of goods with another private party, you have no way of knowing I "owe" you and the rest of society anything unless you somehow get details about that private trade. If myself and the private party do not divulge any information about our private activities, you would need to violate our privacy rights and force us to divulge information about our private interactions for you to uncover the existence of this debt that we owe you.

How absurd your moral framework is..

The study wasn't trying to account for strict plant-based diets. It was attempting to find a correlation between fruit/plant intake and cancer rates.

It shows how unreliable scientific consensus about a theory that cannot be subject to controlled experimentation, like any medical theory, is.

No one should be unfairly denigrated. Your class based narrative doesn't justify treating people unfairly.

Isn't it self-evident? It harms their standing and reputation, in being cast as in possession of wealth they are not morally entitled to. It's defamation.

>Some contracts are unenforceable, and while you're free to make them, as a practical matter, they are generally avoided where there is an enforceable alternative. Because otherwise you're back in a state of nature, where the weak are at the mercy of the

But income tax law does not distinguish trades based on contracts not enforceable by the government from those based on contracts that are, so even by this contrived standard of what constitutes private trade, income tax law violates human rights.

>And of course we have the power to force people to give up their privacy and divulge details about private interactions: we do it all the time in the context of child pornography, for instance.

We do not do it all the time in the context of child pornography. We only require someone to surrender their privacy rights if there is evidence they have traded child pornography.

Income tax law requires everyone to surrender their privacy rights. Moreover, it requires that those who refuse to surrender the privacy or property rights and comply to be imprisoned.

>As individual human beings, we recognize that privacy (and personal liberty) are important values. But they are not absolutes, and we strive to balance them against our other interests, such as our health and happiness.

We do not need to violate other people's human rights to be healthy and happy, and in any case, this would not be a justification for doing so.

>It might seem unfair that we don't get to choose at birth whether we want to live in modern society, where taxes are mandatory, or in a state of nature, where we are free of the terrible burden of taxation (and also free of any chance to amass a fortune, beyond a particularly large pile of coconuts).

The alternative to human rights violating taxes like those on income is not an absence of law and civilization. Governments can exist and raise revenue without taxing sales or income.

There's never been a pre-property era. Humans have always been territorial, and even intra-group, have recognized private property. Non-human animals are also territorial and observe principles like First Possession, which is the foundation of property rights.

I don't follow. What offender?

Thr currency you receive in private trade is unquestionably your own private property. The fact that income tax law requires you to surrender your privacy rights and disclose all of the transactions you engaged in in order to collect an income tax is an indication that the activity being taxed is private.

>Property rights are weird. We all mostly agree that no one should be able to steal your phone off your desk at work. We very much don't agree that governments should not be able to tax income.

Stealing your phone or taxing your income is fundamentally the same. And it doesn't matter how many agree that it's acceptable. In a lot of countries, a lot of people agree that those who make blasphemous statements should be imprisoned or put to death. They do not see any inherent right to free speech. By your logic, if a lot of people agree that blasphemy should be punishable by the state, free speech is not necessarily a human right.

I think it's perfectly appropriate to use violence to take back the object that you crafted and someone stole from you. I don't think it's appropriate to use violence to force someone to hand over an object they crafted and which they never agreed to cede to you.