Comments on: Force and Charity

By: Peter D Jones

Peter D Jones — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 09:41:32 +0000

“It’s advocating the violent seizure of the money from rich people who refuse to give away enough money.”

In a democracy, many will have agreed to the level of taxation through their voting
patterns, so that does not count a seizure

“The fundamental reason that using force is bad is that force is an irrational way of approaching disagreements.”

To be precise, force is bad when reason is an option. You can’t reason with a madman who is gunning people down, you have to use force. Since people are not rational all the time, force is sometimes justifiable: irrationality fights irrationality

“Ideas must be judged on their merits”
an d they are during elections

“The socialist disagrees about what is the best use of the money. And he reacts to this disagreement not by offering arguments that his position is correct, but instead by using violence.”

The socialist (Or social democrat or moderate conservative…) IN A DEMOCRACY must first persuade the voting public that a certain level of mandatory taxation is needed. That is hugely different to iron-curtain socialism/communism. It a typical fallacy of libertarianism to completely ignore the whole topic of democratic consent

“To claim that people fundamentally have conflicts of interest that cannot be resolved with reasoned discussion is a large and pessimistic claim”

Who’s making it? In a democracy, the socialist and other parties argue it out and the voters decide, and are bound by their decision. if you agree tom pay an amount and then renege, that is not rational behaviour.

By: Elliot

Elliot — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:23:08 +0000

I didn’t say the rich man knows how to spend money well in any areas. I said we shouldn’t judge who is right based on irrelevant characteristics such as whether someone is rich.

It’s commonplace that in disagreements people accuse the other party of bias as an excuse for why their own arguments are unpersuasive. But accusing someone of bias isn’t adequate reason to use violence against them.

As to the general pot, I don’t see any weakness. There is a disagreement about where the money goes (to the general pot, or not). This disagreement should not be settled by threat of overwhelming violence, as it is today.

By: ThomasR

ThomasR — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:09:26 +0000

Just because a rich man has knowledge about the things that made him rich doesn’t mean he knows how to spend well in other areas.

Rich man could be ‘selfish’ in the sense of being biased in favour of his own parochial interests; he could be a status-seeking fat cat. The tax system gets around this bias by providing a blind set of rules for all.

Government isn’t able to discuss with individual rich people how their money should be spent. Maybe it could provide a menu of where rich people can put their tax dollars, although fungibility would offset this. Fungibility, come to think of it, seems to weaken the Godwin argument: the disagreement isn’t primarily about where the rich man’s money goes, but about how much is first taken and put into a general pot.

By: Rafe

Rafe — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:27:24 +0000

The general acceptance of progressive taxation (higher rates for higher incomes) indicates the way that socialist or redistributive thinking has penetrated the general population. Perhaps the fairest form of taxation would be a flat rate, the same rate for all.
It needs to be realised that people who make big money in the free market do so by providing things like cheaper goods and jobs, each of which represent practical welfare. A manager in a small firm told me that he earned a bigger salary than the “workers” but he put in lot of extra hours to keep them employed and there was not a huge gap between his hourly rate and theirs. But there was a big difference in the tax.
On the supply side of welfare, the case for voluntary and local provision is based on efficiency (local people know what the recipients actually need) and the sense of obligation or gratitude to identifiable people (the local providers and donors) rather than the anonymous mass of taxpayers, or “the government”.