All the posers here thinking they are very smart, while never asking similar “stupid” questions about their own political ideologies.
In general, smart people ask stupid questions about everything.
As of this specific question, there are various possible answers:
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Crowdfunding;
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Custom fees as a source of income;
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Close to taxes, but paying some fixed fee, like a membership fee.
Variants which are taxes, but relevant for the question in spirit:
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Georgism;
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Only one simple income tax, only one simple property tax, no other taxes;
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Deciding every citizen’s payment into budget on a popular vote every N years (may even make it not a sum, but a percentage of property or something), as the average of submitted numbers or something.
Not a sovcit, but they do have a point in saying “fuck you” to the authority.
Not a sovcit, but they do have a point in saying “fuck you” to the authority.
No they don’t. Fighting “authority” for the sake of it stupid and meaningless because it’s so vague it’s dangerous. You fight the injustice or the lack of transparency, but what you prescribe as “authority” could be anything from schools that educate to laws that protect to support of groups you don’t belong to.
If you said “Authoritarianism”, you’d have a point.
Wait you’re calling us stupid and you think the government can fund themselves through crowdfunding.
The government tells people they no longer have to pay taxes but they can if they want. That’s your pitch is it?
I don’t.
Why can’t leftists argue without distorting their opponents’ words?
Why can’t leftists argue without distorting their opponents’ words?
This is what’s called a strawman fallacy kids
No one’s distorting your words, that’s literally what you said, you literally said the government could fund themselves through crowdfunding, it’s right there, you said it.
How the hell would that work. People already dodge taxes that they have required to pay, I WAS if you’re not required to pay taxes then they definitely won’t do it at all.
I don’t need to rearrange your words to make them sound stupid.
We aren’t distorting your words. Just rearranging them so your logic becomes clear.
Please, tell us what you exactly mean then.
How would crowdfunding work if it isn’t based on non-mandatory donations?
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Crowdfunding;
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Custom fees as a source of income;
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Close to taxes, but paying some fixed fee, like a membership fee.
these are just taxation with extra steps
What if my neighborhood can’t crowdfund enough money to keep a fire department in operation because we can’t afford to?
Just let our houses burn down?
The fire department sends us a bill?
You buy insurance like many other people, most of which won’t have a fire. You call them, they come.
Ah yes, insurance against fire. I can’t see a problem ever happening there.
Wait, that’s already a problem?
So if I get this right, your solution is to do something insurance companies aren’t willing to do.
Should they be forced to?
From where? You didn’t fund enough to have a fire department. And since you’re so clever as to not pay for support services, wait to you see the cost of your exceptional insurance…
Folks, we either have a sovcit who discovered this group or an anarchist-type just stirring up shit.
If you exchange “buy insurance” for “pay taxes”, you’re awfully close to reality!
they do have a point in saying “fuck you” to the authority.
The don’t say “fuck you” though - they say “gotcha!”. The way I understand it, the Sovereign Citizens Movement is a cargo cult. They hear about all the billionaires who barely pay taxes thanks to clever accounting and all the criminals who escape punishment on technicalities, and figure that “if the law can be manipulated - why can’t we manipulate it?”
Do they “have a point”? Maybe, in the same way alchemy had a point that lead and gold are made of the same fundamental matter and therefore one can be converted to the other. In the same way humoralist medicine had a point that the human body has various substances that must be balanced to maintain health. They’ve all had a point in that they’ve managed to glimpse at the nature of the problem - and they all fail by grossly underestimating the actual complexity of the model and the amount of effort, resources and expertise required to achieve their goals.
I wouldn’t be surprised if an expert legal team could achieve some of the things SovCits are trying to achieve. But that would require lots of hard work from them, and SovCits have managed to convince themselves that all it takes is a few magic phrases. I leave it to anthropologists to figure out how they came to think they could so easily figure out what these magic phrases are.
The way I understand it, the Sovereign Citizens Movement is a cargo cult. They hear about all the billionaires who barely pay taxes thanks to clever accounting and all the criminals who escape punishment on technicalities, and figure that “if the law can be manipulated - why can’t we manipulate it?”
Ah, there is that, yes. There are people who believe that law is some magic where they can prove anything if they know it well enough and know some secrets.
It’s not a bad belief, frankly. They want to prove something they consider right, so they believe the law would be on their side if they worked hard enough. Just naive, but not worth ridicule.
In the sense that its connection to justice is not 1-to-1 they are right, but there are no secrets that bend it, just raw real power which a sovereign citizen doesn’t possess.
I wouldn’t be surprised if an expert legal team could achieve some of the things SovCits are trying to achieve. But that would require lots of hard work from them, and SovCits have managed to convince themselves that all it takes is a few magic phrases. I leave it to anthropologists to figure out how they came to think they could so easily figure out what these magic phrases are.
Oh, you already said that.
I don’t know what you mean by “figure out” (as in what else there is to figure out), but this is indeed a common enough plot point in fairy tales.
I was talking about the emotional part where right and common sense matter more than the law. The law is supported by force, so it’s morally acceptable to use force to protect right and common sense against it. Oh, well, speaking of USA, that’s in their Constitution anyway, and what’s more important, those founding fathers they like to mention have many times said that this is a natural principle and the Constitution doesn’t create or support it, just mentions it.
You’re definitely misunderstanding this post. Yeah, there’s value in bucking authority. But you’re also just describing taxes. It sounds like you’ve read up on the modern form of libertarianism. Which is another crock.
The problem isn’t that they’re questioning authority. Generally most people (especially on lemmy) are down with that. We’re talking about the leaps of illogic that sovcits rest their entire belief system on. This post is to highlight the absurd hypocrisy in what they preach. Not to call their disobedience of authority foolish, but their methods and entirely unfounded beliefs.
You mean that they are imagining a phantom republic so resilient that they can live by its “true” laws while most people violate them day and night, and that these “true” laws make functioning of said republic impossible?
Many people believe in rule of law, yet revolutions and forceful changes are a necessity, states recognize facts made against existing law all the time, every state and system in existence has been erected by illegal violence, and with all that many say that another revolution (in hypothetical scenario, not right now) would somehow be less legal than existing systems. There’s a clear contradiction here, the only answer to which is usually that the current situation is in common interest and you can’t do that, because “fuck around and find out”.
There are such contradictions in free speech, of which everyone here certainly knows - one can use free speech to kill free speech. There are such contradictions in property rights, as everyone ridiculing ancaps certainly knows. There are such contradictions in personal freedom. There was another example but I think I’m writing too much. Got this habit while learning English at school.
But you’re also just describing taxes. It sounds like you’ve read up on the modern form of libertarianism. Which is another crock.
I’ve read up on many forms of it. Yes, I’m literally listing ways to make taxes acceptable for a libertarian.
TL;DR: Nobody employs pure ideology. If sovcits were to make their own state, they’d have taxes with the reasoning that these are necessary in practice. Same as NEP in Soviet Russia.
How very libertarian of you. Who’s going to make me pay those “not tax” taxes? Your private military? Well, my private military is bigger so I say NO to your desire for my money.
This post is not about libertarianism, idiot. Bunch of lefties overloaded me with their bullshit yesterday and now the slow ones come to have a shot, thinking those of yesterday didn’t buttfuck themselves publicly with triumphant look.
In general when you are doing such things like they did instead of normal discussion, you are robbing yourself of an ability to make a case for your wrong opinion.
- Crowdfunding;
Sounds like someone has never gone on a charity drive and hasn’t experienced how limited one could get funding from it.
Fun fact: The government doesn’t actually need to use taxes to pay for things. The amount of currency in the market isn’t fixed, and so the government actually is fully capable of “printing more money” however, this has the potential to cause rapid inflation. So, taxes are a way of reducing inflation, rather than paying for government services.
“printing more money” however, this has the potential to cause rapid inflation.
That only happens if you put all that money into circulation - if you were to, say, just give it away as a handout to the military or Israel… no inflation. Which is… exactly how they give handouts to the military and Israel.
To think… they could just as easily spend that thumb-suck money on healthcare - but that won’t murder brown people, so they don’t do it.
Since the USD is considered the world reserve currency, the government is capable of doing wacky shenanigans like that. Inflation, so long as the American people are insulated from it, could theoretically be used as a way to extract wealth from other nations. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’re actually already doing exactly that.
That only happens if you put all that money into circulation - if you were to, say, just give it away as a handout to the military
How do you give a handout to the “military” without putting that money into circulation?
How do you give a handout to the “military” without putting that money into circulation?
That’s the beauty of “trickle-down” economics - it doesn’t. Give it to the military and the parts of it that doesn’t get hoarded by MIC billionaires gets spent on things such as R&D and asset/infrastructure development and maintenance - there’s not a lot of that money “trickling” down and circulating amongst the general population.
If you were to spend it on health infrastructure and development, the money will still not be “trickling” down - but the benefits will. A bunch of F-35s means next-to-zero benefits for people - but a functional hospital does.
That’s assuming printing money is the default solution. Taxes have existed for longer than that. The earliest taxes were literally a portion of a farmers harvest. You can’t just print more food, or gold, or whatever else. Printing money to fund government was never really an option, so positioning taxes as a solution to inflation just doesn’t make sense. It’s like saying that instead of eating at a restaurant, you could eat roadkill, which you aren’t going to do because of disease, and therefore restaurants are a way of reducing disease rather than providing food.
That’s assuming printing money is the default solution.
I’m not operating with a model of solutions being “default” or not, so no it absolutely does not. What I’m doing is intentionally ignoring the historical context of how these systems developed to observe how they work in the present moment. Doing so allows me to understand the flaws of the model where money is viewed as a resource, rather than a pure social construct that exists in the minds of those who use it. Resources are limited by physical reality, whereas money flows like a clockwork river who’s source is infinite and who’s sink has infinite capacity. Changing the ammount of money available too much, too quickly, or in particular ways has negative consequences but it is possible. Resources don’t do that.
Resteraunts are a way of reducing disease instead of providing food
I’d say they have more to do with entertainment, but they do all of those, yes. It’s just a matter of perspective.
Taxation is a big part of the reason why fiat money has any value at all. By demanding to be payed with its own currency, a government can ensure that the bills it issues will always have demand (because people will need it to pay taxes) and therefore will always have value.
There is a Planet Money (podcast) episode about this. It’s a fairly new economic theory, but actual PhD level economists have said this. Government prints money, and to bring down inflation they need to get taxes to reduce the amount of money in circulation, to control inflation. The epidsode was in the 2019 timeframe, I think.
Something that absolutely works in the abstract, but kinda hard to fit into my current model of reality.
You have to look at it from the perspective of mathematics, like systems control theory and balance / equilibriums. Money flow is comparable to energy flow. Mathematical equivalence principles allows for multiple descriptions of the same phenomenon because every externally visible system behavior can be implemented in many different ways.
So even if that’s not how the underlying implementation looks like, you can switch the system to work like that without changing anything about how you interact with it. And that allows you to analyze the system in different ways that might not work in the current system
It’s not really abstract, it’s pretty close to how advanced economies already work in practice. Fiat currency is the proxy by which goods and services are valued and exchanged. It is the underlying goods and services themselves which actually have intrinsic value, and printing money doesn’t actually change that. Deficits are inflationary and surpluses are deflationary. Growth is deflationary and recessions are inflationary. Governments in these economies will always run deficits because you can’t have both growth and a surplus at the same time. At the end of the day macroeconomics isn’t balancing a spreadsheet as much as it is about balancing the money supply and economic activity.
This is also why something resembling capitalism is pretty much inevitable in an advanced economy where scarcity is a factor governing economic behavior. If you are using a fiat proxy to mediate economic inputs and outputs, you will end up with market forces. Pretending you can centrally plan around that is naive, which is why harm reduction is the right strategy.
By printing more money out of thin air.
sovcit
I have no idea what this is… I’m going to assume, a soviet citizen?
Close enough, but no cigar… its Sovereign citizen
The Soviet Union ceased to exist long ago though
The “sovereign citizen” in Russia seem to believe that they are citizens of the Soviet Union, funnily enough:
A Russian movement of conspiracy theorists, known among other names as the Union of Slavic Forces of Russia (Soyuz slavyanskikh sil Rusi), or more informally as “Soviet Citizens”, holds that the Soviet Union still exists de jure and that the current Russian government and legislation are thus illegitimate. One of its beliefs is that the government of the Russian Federation is an offshore company through which the United States illegally controls the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement#Russia
Every country seems to have their share of those crackpots. In Germany they think pretty much the same, except it’s the Reich (the WW1 one) that’s still totally real.
Sovereign citizen. People who think the law is magic, and also not at all what it is as printed. They think if they string enough legal references together, they don’t have to pay taxes, have a magic clone of themselves that accrues debt for them and other equally insane bullshit.
It’s the government. It can just print more money.
Not even that. All your state’s comptroller1 has to do is discharge debts made to the state, by writing “discharged with prejudice” with red pen on the DOT contractor bills. But this only works on pink collection notices, not normal paperwork. State stays out of debt and the roads stay paved.
Fuxk it, I’m a citizen of the Roman Empire!
