Not that libertarianism is the same as conservativism but most of everyone becomes more and more conservative as they age. Moreover, the young computer guys are now middle-aged/old computer guys and are probably making significantly more money than when they were younger.
Personally, I've gotten more and more libertarian (though maybe less isolationist in terms of foreign policy) the more and more taxes I am forced to pay. Every time I see my paycheck and the taxes I pay I die a little-bit inside. Though if I could even decide where a small fraction of my taxes went, I think I would be a lot happier with the whole situation.
FWIW, I've gone the opposite. As I'm aging I find myself caring less about myself and more about how we treat the worst off. Decades ago I described myself as a moderate, today I label myself a socialist. I make hundreds of thousands annually, but I want more taxes. Honestly, after a certain point I feel greedy and unethical making as much as I do. When I see my paycheck, I look at the taxes I paid and I think, "I was just there for someone in their time of need. Glad I could help."
I expect I'll get some votes from folks who find my mindset different from their own. But I think it's healthy to talk about this stuff calmly. Even though I strongly disagree with you, it's good to know how others feel and you expressed it without being dismissive or pejorative towards folks like me. Thanks!
Respectfully, why do you feel taxes are the best avenue for your philanthropy rather than donating personally to one or more organizations/causes? It seems like the former would result in far more waste and ultimately less getting to the cause of your choice.
Part of it is because the cause of my choice is not where the money should go. I want a functional safety net, good schools, strong infrastructure, and a million other things to ensure a healthy society. I'm not sufficiently educated to donate money in a way that ensures all that stuff gets funded. I accept that some inefficiencies exist but also the government is funding things I need but have no idea about.
Also, I can make only so much impact on my own. Advocating for taxes gets many people to give.
Exactly. Another aspect to it is that taxes eliminate the free-rider problem.
If I, as a socially-minded millionaire, make a lot of philantropic donations, but my neighbor, the not-so-socially-minded millionaire doesn't do that and instead uses their money to fund a think tank that lobbies for the abolition of social welfare, then we have a problem.
Rather than engaging in philantropy, it is more rational for me to fund a think tank that lobbies for the expansion of the social welfare system.
If your millionaire neighbor is genuinely less "socially-minded" than you are, it's not clear whether she would actually be "free riding" on your philanthropy. "Free riding" generally means getting a benefit that you strategically avoid paying for, not just having different preferences.
Now, there might nonetheless be a case for taxing your neighbor millionaire a bit more, but it would have to be somewhat different. (For instance, you might think that having more millionaires around creates negative externalities in the form of way too much corruption, rent-seeking etc. from aspiring millionaires. This would indeed be the kind of thing that taxes could correct.)
The power of "matching funds" is actually an underappreciated force in making voluntary, non-tax based provision of public goods more feasible. "Matching funds" is how threshold-based crowdfunding ala Kickstarter works: if you're a pivotal funder (i.e. your contribution pushes the funding campaign over the threshold), you get "many times your contribution in matching funds"! This effectively means that everyone involved wants to be a pivotal funder; it becomes a self-sustaining outcome. (Proposals have been made to extend this principle to non-threshold-based funding, see e.g. https://www.snowdrift.coop as one example.)
I think folks here would not disagree with your overall mindset, so much as the assumption that giving even more money to the government and forcing even more red tape on the business sector would be "good" for the worst off. It seems to be an incredibly common assumption though, and even conservatives are increasingly adopting it these days (see e.g. their attitudes to international trade) - so I'm not sure I could fault you for that. Thanks for your input!
I especially don’t mind the local taxes. But all taxes are part of civic duty. I mean I’d rather be the financial contributor to the government than some foreign or private interest. Both of those should be considered bribes. My money goes without ties.
This is an extremely rosey view of the government. Private interest groups aren’t bombing people after all. There are a ton of amoral ties to how your taxes are spent.
This is the problem. People are so ready to believe government is hopelessly corrupt that they assume all aspects of it must be evil and should be taken away or “cancelled.”
There are actual agencies that fight, deter/avoid, and persecute corruption within the government. But people believe the worst so they’ve accepted the worst behavior from government.
This should be a moment where people learn how actual government agencies work and what exist. Like this https://www.oge.gov/
For decades, the US government has been a shining example of republican democracy with actual oversight and minimal corruption.
You say “believe” as if people can’t see the corruption and wars with their own eyes. It’s all there out in the open, you can see it yourself.
> There are actual agencies that fight, deter/avoid, and persecute corruption within the government.
They are doing a terrible job since our government is corrupt from top to bottom.
[edit] There’s a really good comment to the parent by
chrisco255 that was flagged for some reason. It says:
> I believe in the old idiom, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." The whole reason I want government to be small is because I know that the bigger and more powerful it gets, the more corrupt it will get. The more unwieldy it is to change.
> The U.S. government has tons of corruption. And we've seen that in recent years with the CIA and the FBI, with the spying, and mass data collection. You look at how the U.S. government treats Assange and Snowden and tell me they aren't corrupt. The fake Russiagate scandal was built on lies forged by our own intelligence agencies. The Iraq war was supposed to be based on WMDs. I could go on and on...but you've got to be naive to call the U.S. government corruption-free or anything close to it.
Wikipedia: “In 2018, Transparency International ranked the United States as the 22nd least corrupt country,[1] falling from 18th since 2016.[2] In 2019, Transparency International stated that the United States is "experiencing threats to its system of checks and balances", along with an "erosion of ethical norms at the highest levels of power.[3]”
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Of course there are other countries that are more corrupt. That's the entire point of the argument; the government (anywhere) cannot be trusted.
I assume you are not familiar with the various actions Nestle has taken in order to ensure their hegemony over chocolate production?
Corporations benefit plenty from war and famine. Some of their actions are more overt than others. If corporations were allowed to force people to work at gunpoint, make no mistake: They absolutely would. In some parts of the world, they just do so by integrating themselves deeply into the local governments. Then those corporations can point towards the big bad government as being the reason why they employed slave labor, while walking away all the richer.
Corporations are definitely also moral hazards in many cases. But even when they profit from war, I think it's some form of government or government-like agency that's actually killing people.
I'm not saying corporations should be trusted, I'm saying that the government is far worse than any corporation in terms of corruption and coming with "ties" to how your money is spent.
The government and corporations can not be clearly separated.
People from the one go to work for the other regularly[1], often as a reward for serving one-another's interests. They constantly scratch each other's backs, such as politicians awarding fat contracts to corporations and then being rewarded with a high paying job at the same corporation when they retire, or just outright bribery in a variety of forms. Governments also regularly hire highly placed executive from corporations to regulate industries.
History is full of examples of the military used to protect private (including corporate) interests, which are often seen by the ruling class as virtually synonymous with national interests. Protecting oil in the Middle East is one obvious example, but so is protecting banana corporations in South America, nevermind older examples such as using the military for colonialism and to further the slave trade.
Media corporations have been highly complicit in provoking and defending war. The newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was infamous for boasting for his paper's ability to start wars, saying, "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war." Later media magnates (like Fox News' Rupert Murdoch) and outlets have been no less influential.
Private individuals who've made their fortunes in corporations, like the Koch brothers and Peter Thiel, can also have an enormous influence on politics and the government through their donation, advocacy, and having the ear of powerful politicians.
The military-industrial complex is yet another good example where corporations and governments are deeply intertwined, to the point of corporate interests having massive influence on both domestic and national security policy. It is a truism that political representatives in many states can't vote against military spending for fear of getting kicked out of office by their constituency, who depends on this military spending for their jobs (and their profits). There's endless corruption, bribes, billions of dollars going "missing", and kickbacks in the military as well, to the benefit of private individuals and corporations. Many politicians also own a lot of stock in military contractors and companies like Halliburton which benefit from both military spending and then reconstruction spending after the wars they authorize. This is yet another massive conflict of interest.
So when you favor corporations over governments, don't be so sure they're not two heads of the same beast.
[1] - Trump himself is probably the most famous current example, since he's top corporate executive and business owner at the pinnacle of political power in the US while having massive conflicts of interest between his economic and corporate interests and those of his political office, but this happens all throughout government in every administration (though usually not quite so brazenly).
Personally, I've gotten more and more libertarian (though maybe less isolationist in terms of foreign policy) the more and more taxes I am forced to pay. Every time I see my paycheck and the taxes I pay I die a little-bit inside. Though if I could even decide where a small fraction of my taxes went, I think I would be a lot happier with the whole situation.