BEING COST CONSCIOUS IS COMMUNIST
We aren’t socialists; we are just better at accounting
What’s the difference?
The difference is that capitalists are still in charge but things aren’t as bad.
The caveat obviously being that things aren’t as bad yet. We’re headed there.
We can still prevent worse things from happening, unless we succumb to the defeatism
Wait till Americans hear that Danes don’t need to calculate their taxes and pay a fee to file them.
A fee to pay taxes? Why not include it in the taxes at that point? It’s just ridiculous.
Similar to that time I went to the local garage, my car needed a new 12v battery. Fine, it got swapped for a new one. On the receipt, it had the costs broken down. The garage had the audacity to include a line for: “Charging battery 20 Euro”.
The “fee” is using a private tax preparation service. In theory skippable, but it’s just a pain to do.
Once upon a time, maybe forgivable, private sector embracing useful technology before the government was ready, but now the government actively resists making it easier to file taxes, and coincidentally the tax prep companies give a lot of money to politicians…
i used to prep tax. i had a five page schedule of fees.
i was also known locally as the dude with the most fair bills. that schedule was so long because i didn’t bill for shit i didn’t do.
Why not include it with thw taxes?
With Americans, the answer is always some private entity mixed in the middle that will make money out of it.
Yeah when they talk about single payer healthcare saving us millions of dollars, those millions of dollars saved are dollars that wouldn’t go to the insurance companies and more specifically to the pockets of people who pay lobbyists
well what did you expect
me with my business: selling uncharged, possibly unchargeable batteries
“dISCOUNT?”
But 90% don’t even know libraries offer free help filing your taxes yet.
But libraries are cOmMuNiSm!
libraries have books in them, they are afraid they will catch the woke virus…
Here in Sweden you generally don’t even need help. Naturally there are people with disabilities, or complex financial situations, but that’s not most people. For me personally, filing taxes means I log on to the tax office’s website, skim through the details to make sure there’s no egregious clerical error, and then I click a button to sign off on it. It takes about 5 minutes a year.
If you deal in stocks or buy/sell property a lot it might get a bit more complicated. I think my roomie had deductions because of how much they drives for work, so that added like 5 minutes for supplementary information.
I’m convinced the U.S. makes it complicated for predatory reasons.
Intuit (the company that owns turbotax and creditkarma, among others) has been lobbying with H&R Block for decades to make taxes as complicated as possible so you have to use their software. They just got a massive win from the trump admin too. The fed is shutting down the governments free file website. So now the monopoly is the only choice
Fuck Intuit
Is there any developed country that does that other than the US for the typical (i.e. not self-employed) worker?
Canada
Similar line of thought regarding public vs private service providers. There’s nothing preventing public services from being as good as or better than private ones, but private ones will always want to extract more value than they provide as profit (which is the extra money left over after paying for everything, including staff). Plus they pay a whole team of people whose whole job is about maximizing profit, which can come at the expense of the quality of the service.
And with public vs private healthcare, there’s a whole health insurance industry extracting wealth from the public for the privilege of limiting their healthcare options (otherwise the healthcare providers would be the ones doing the fleecing by recommending unnecessary procedures, which probably still happens anyways). And on top of that, there’s an attitude of “just try it, even if it would be illegal, consequences are always avoided by backing down before it gets to court”.
I wonder if the first guy is just engagement farming or genuinely confused. Either way, there probably are plenty of people who are so “brainwashed” that they can’t fathom that “happiness” and “tax rates” aren’t linked by some law of nature.
I really wish people would wrap their heads around this
We aren’t socialists
You are socialists, Social Democracy is socialism, it’s just a fucking word. America is socialist too, so is every country in the world that has post, police, fire, military - any services everyone needs that everyone pays for through taxation.
The difference in America is that the capital class has realized that the money generated through taxation looks very nice when it is lining their pockets instead - so they spend untold amounts of money on bribing politicians and generating propaganda designed to convince us that certain things, primarily education and healthcare, are not the same kinds of things as post, police, fire and military.
They have been very successful in convincing a majority of Americans that socializing them would lead to the loss of their money, their freedom and even their lives - even as they take the very same money, freedom and lives for themselves. This is because on the whole Americans are, for a variety of reasons also perpetuated by the capital class, deeply stupid.
and were also subsidizing these same people who are not paying taxes, thats the kicker. but conservatives are taught to accept that being not taxed is benificial for them
This is totally false, socialism is when the workers own the means of production and has nothing to do with state services, not everything socialists tend to want is socialism.
Roughly, Socialism is a way to reach the state of perfect Equality of Outcomes called Communism, which requires an Revolution of The Proletariat where the Means of Production are siezed - so, an autocratic stage - to get there, and said stage is where all the so-called “Communist” countries are stuck - there is no nation in the World were everybody had the same, and there never was.
Social-Democracy is about how to get as much Equality as possible with the expectation that Equality Of Outcomes (in other words, Communism) is an impossible utopia because people are different, have different capabilities and have different levels of wanting to have things, and to do so without going through autocracy but rather using Democratic means.
So Social-Democracy aims for Equality Of Opportunity rather than Equality Of Outcomes (i.e. everybody gets the same chances rather than everybody has the same things), has things like higher taxation for people with higher incomes, wealth taxes and higher inheritance taxes (basically, the idea that those who can most afford it pay the most) to try and flatten wealth inequality and instead of seizing the means of production in the whole Economy, has a mixed system were in areas deemed essential for life or to provide equality of opportunities the state provides for peoples’ needs (so for example, Public Education including University level, with a meritocratic selection processes) whilst in areas not deemed so (say, the manufacture and sale of soap) there’s a Capitalist market system though with strong regulation and oversight for things deemed important for people’s quality of life (for example, to stop Environmental damage).
Of course, even the most effective Social-Democratic systems have been highly subverted and undermined by the push in the Neoliberal Era for “Free Markets”, “Low Regulation” and other such ideas designed to put the Power Of Money above the Power Of The Vote (by making the structures controlled by the vote de facto have less power over most of that which affects people’s lives, than those controlled by Money).
That doesn’t mean that Social-Democracy in its original form is a bad idea, it means that even in so-called Social-Democrat countries what they have is a system were Capitalism is currently dominant (having taken over a lot of “essential for life” domains which should still be controlled by the State, and nullified regulatory oversight in many areas that although not essential are important for people’s quality of life), though still less so than in nations were when Neoliberalism started spreading Social-Democracy was weaker or even non-existent.
Further, Neoliberalism spread faster and deeper in places were Corruption was higher since it mostly works by buying politicians to sell Public companies, change the Laws to remove State participation in and oversight of important areas of the Economy and to weaken Regulatory oversight both by weakening the actual Regulatory Authorities directly and by making the fines for breaking regulations be smaller than the profits of doing so.
All this is why, for example, the US is way more fucked up than Denmark.
Roughly, Socialism is a way to reach the state of perfect Equality of Outcomes called Communism, which requires an Revolution of The Proletariat where the Means of Production are siezed - so, an autocratic stage - to get there, and said stage is where all the so-called “Communist” countries are stuck - there is no nation in the World were everybody had the same, and there never was.
this is completely wrong and i challenge you to find a socialist who agrees with you.
since none of that is even vaguely correct the rest is not even worth reading.
edit: I read the rest and was correct, read socialist theory, that was well worded nonsense completely divorced from even one thing socialists believe and if socialists believed any of that I would not be one… but they don’t, this is completely wrong.
- It’s dictatorship of the proletariat, which sounds autocratic until you realize that marx considered capitalism a dictatorship of the bourgeois, essentially this refers to which class gets what they want and has nothing to do with conventional dictatorship. It is actually less autocratic because proletariat control generally means a massive expansion of democracy.
- Of course not, communism is the end of history that would happen long after the workers own the means of production and we live in a post scarcity world where currency no longer makes sense. The argument is not just make everything equal the argument is that given the conditions of society there will be no point in currency and thus class divisions.
0/10 you did not even read a small amount of marx. Or any socialist philosopher at all. I genuinely don’t get how people get this confident without reading any primary sources, you are VERY propagandized. If you want to make me look like a complete buffoon and prove me completely and utterly wrong show me any socialist philosopher agreeing with you.
Oh, I’m a member of a small leftwing party in my home country and there are plently of old people there who were once Communists and still are anti-Capitalists who fought against the Fascist Dictatorship and in the Revolution against Fascism in 74, who agree with me. It’s only tankies and Chinese Propagand muppets who do not.
Your “it’s not autocratic” interpretation is just you chosing to reframe the definition of property in such a way that confiscation by force of that which some people own doesn’t count as the state taking their shit.
Sure mate, everything is naturally owned by everybody, hence those people controlling the “Revolution” deem to be the burgeouisie are people keeping everybody else from enjoying what is actually owned by everybody, hance taking the shit of those deemed the burgeoisie is not confiscation by force, rather it’s “freeing” it and when those deemed the burgeoisie try to stop that “freeing” of those things they feel are theirs and end up killed by the force wielding structures of a government that calls itself the “Revolution”, that’s just Justice, not State Organised Theft.
Same circular logic as when America invades a country to take their shit and calls it “Bringing Freedom to that country”.
That shit is even more convolutedly self-justifying through circular logic and redefinition of the meaning of words than most Religions.
Oh, I’m a member of a small leftwing party in my home country and there are plently of old people there who were once Communists and still are anti-Capitalists who fought against the Fascist Dictatorship and in the Revolution against Fascism in 74, who agree with me. It’s only tankies and Chinese Propagand muppets who do not.
then my task should be easy, present a socialist philosopher that agrees with you. Do you want me to provide a list of ones that don’t? When you do everyone will know just how stupid I am and just how little I know what I’m talking about! Win-win.
Your “it’s not autocratic” interpretation is just you chosing to reframe the definition of property in such a way that confiscation by force of that which some people own doesn’t count as the state taking their shit.
revolution is indeed fundamentally authoritarian in that way, do you oppose the american revolution as well? Do you oppose every revolution in history? I thought you were talking about the society post revolution, which of course is not. And is what dictatorship of the proletariat refers to.
there is no reinvention of words, we use the original philosophical meanings, it’s funny that you say that, you’re the one using reinvented meanings, such as “private property”. Look it up! What do you expect philosophers from back then to do, update their wording with the times?
revolution is indeed fundamentally authoritarian in that way, do you oppose the american revolution as well? Do you oppose every revolution in history? I thought you were talking about the society post revolution, which of course is not. And is what dictatorship of the proletariat refers to.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
The next part is this: what is there in Socialism to make sure that the period of Revolution is time-limited and if within that time limit the Revolution does not reach Communism, then the Revolution none the less ends?
Consider the following mental exercise:
- Imagine somebody who deep down is an evil person with selfish intent gains enough support to start a Revolution which they claim is to bring about an new system in a country which is better for everybody (a claim such leaders always make, as that’s how they gather public support). They never exit the “Revolution” because that is actually the state which gives them power, whilst continuously claiming the Revolution is just the step necessary for a better future, it’s just that they haven’t got there yet.
- Now imagine somebody who deep down is an impeccably good person with good intent doing the same thing. They genuinelly want to end reach a better future but keep failing so are stuck in the Revolution stage because they are unwilling to let go of the dream and go back to the way things were before. Eventually the original good intention people are replaced as they die and there is no way to know for sure if those who replaced them are also well intentioned or are ill intentioned people who just sound truthfull when they claim to have good intentions.
If both cases started from a state of low freedom and during the Revolution the freedom is even lower, why would one situation be autocratic and the other not: they’re both claiming to be Revolutions to reach a better system, they both never stop being in the state they call “Revolution” and in both the leadership can change and end up being people of ill-intent - they look the same, are both autocratic and both never end.
My point was never that Socialism has overtly or covertly ill intent or that it wants to create an autocratic state (I believe it’s quite the contrary - it’s genuinelly a political theory meant to produce the “greater good for the greater number”), my point is that de facto its a plan structured in such as way that the Revolution - which is as you admit a period of autocracy - it says is required to reach Communism never actually ends because it fails to reach Communism and has no mechanisms accept a less than perfect system than Communism after a while even if it’s vastly better than the previous system) and end the Revolution. Meanwhile the power structures of the Revolution are captured by people with ill intent (who are the kind of people who seek power, especially the unrestrained power of a Revolution), which is how for example the Russian Revolution went from what it was under Lenin to the murderous psychopatic shitshow it became under Stalin.
Naive idealism in the original plan or incompetence in its execution, together with an unwillingness to let go create an ethernal state of autocracy called “the Revolution” - in other words an unending autocratic situation - just the same as ill intent claiming to be a Revolution does.
Absolutelly, all Revolutions are periods of autocracy. What makes some actual autocracies is that that stage never ends and there is no mechanism in place to de facto end it, even when the original intention was to end it but said end was conditional with reaching an objective which has never been reached in practice anywhere in the World.
If you can’t exit Revolution in any what other than to reach a state which was never reached in the World, then de facto what you have is a process to create a neverending Revolution, not a process to reach a better state.
before we continue this argument i’d like you to first admit you could not do what was asked of you.
the answer to your thought problem lies in dialectical materialism, not in institutional design or moral guarantees.
in a marxist framework, the revolutionary period is something that cannot be extended or terminated at will, it is produced by material conditions, and the duration is not decided by any leaders, but rather by whether or not class antagonism persists.
societies develop through contradictions between productive forces and relations of production and when they become unsustainable, things intensify until the ruling class is overturned. marx would argue that such a state cannot legitimize itself forever by rhetoric alone, because political superstructures ultimately depend on material relations, and if the proletariat no longer exists as a class, the state loses its function and withers away, if the state persists, that indicates unresolved class structures, not a valid permanent transition, essentially eternal revolution is impossible under the correct material conditions
I can expand upon this more if you need but at this point it is woefully obvious you have not read a single piece of socialist literature, these questions are kinda basic and covered in socialism 101, i suspect you’ve been getting your information from jordan peterson or prageru or something in that vein, i suggest you spend some time actually reading some primary sources.
your homework:
- what is dialectical materialism and how does it explain historical change?
- why did marx call communism the end-point of history, meaning the end of class struggle rather than the end of events?
sources to read from for the answers:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm
I ll piss in the soup, but Denmark is also consistently pushing for a total surveillance of all communications in EU
Laughs in European
Because they are smarter than this clown
Have you seen what Denmark is up to with Chat Control? They are blinded by need for control. Don’t take example from a system, that wants to govern your every fucking move.
Good and bad laws happen everywhere. It’s not like there’s any shortage in the US, either. You get jailed for Charlie Kirk memes lol.
Their taxes probably go to things like education and social services instead of bullets and bombs to kill brown people in other lands.
Unfortunately if the orange buffoon gets his way they may end up wasting a lot of good money defending Greenland.
That’s just ridiculous. You don’t think that we’re spending tax dollars on bullets and bombs to kill brown people in our own land? Look up the 1985 MOVE bombing and any one of the countless events where a cop shot an unarmed law-abiding minority. We don’t need to go somewhere else to kill brown people when we have perfectly good brown people at home. Not endorsing it btw, just pointing out the fucked up thing that my country regularly does while somehow still trying to claim with a straight face that we’re not racist and “this isn’t who we are” every time we do this thing we keep doing…
I am so used to people complaining about their own country that I mistakenly thought that the first guy was Danish. And then, the second guy’s comment made no sense at all. I was like, “health insurance? co-pays? How does any of that apply to Denmark?”
I had to reread the first post several times before I could overturn my impression that he was Danish.
I think the first user is supposed to be a jelly-filled doughnut, and the second a danish.
a jelly-filled doughnut,
Oh, like a berliner?
Exactly!
Nailed it with the last sentence
Enter “Why should I have to pay for someone else’s kid!!!”
Because you live in a society, dipshit. Plus, it’s cheaper to feed him breakfast and cover his daycare than it is to incarcerate him in 20 years.
“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s kid?”
“Why should I have to pay for a park I’m not going to visit?”
“Why should I have to pay for a road I may never drive on?”
“The American Military Complex is very responsible with my money and keeps me safe from real threats.”
I will say, I have been pretty shocked to watch for president repeatedly blow up his own son’s cocaine supply. He must have switched suppliers
Well, last statement a lot of antitax are also antiwar. Ron Paul attracted some people because of his antiwar, anti intervention, and freedom regarding drugs platform.
I think that basic form of libertarian is attractive to many if you don’t look too closely at what it actually entails and if you only care about yourself and maybe people you know/family.
I generally think of it as childish selfishness we’re expected to grow out of once we learn some basic society facts.
it’s cheaper to feed him breakfast and cover his daycare than it is to incarcerate him in 20 years
But then how am I supposed to fear him and blame his hunger on life choices?
I agree and I am, if not happy, willing to pay taxes. I am starting to get less and less happy paying into social security knowing im not going to see a dime though.
I get what you’re saying but I want to make a point around this. There is a lot of cynical framing around many issues that I feel like it leads to a sense of acceptance. There is ZERO reason social security can’t be funded. The idea that this is a thing to worry about is just a narrative setup by those that want to kill it.
Social security fully funds itself through paystubs. It is self sustainable. The issue is with the cap. A cap that has been adjusted to average wages since the 1970s. The last of which was increased to $147k in 2022.
The issue is not with social security. The issue is with average wages declining while the wealth of the country is concentrated with the wealthy (who do not even earn a traditional wage).
The cap just needs adjustment to account for this. Something that has happened before and quite frankly the cap just should not exist.
The “cap” here means that if I make $147k in a year I pay about $10k in social security. If I make $1,000,000 a year I pay the exact same amount of $10k because the tax stops being considered past that amount. It’s an inverse progressive tax.
Social security keeps old people from dying in the streets. Anyone with a brain should selfishly want to fund that. I don’t want to live in a world where I see even more old people dying in the streets. I don’t care if they “made bad life decisions” and didn’t save for retirement. It’s for me. I don’t want to walk around and see that.
TLDR: don’t let this narrative be a thing. Social security has no reason to not be paid other than a neoliberal narrative that says we can’t adjust a social safety net during a time in which it’s needed the most. Don’t passively accept this framing. Be outraged. Don’t be accepting.
have you considered how many americans would be happy to pay to just go ahead and incarcerate poor kids right now
Most of them are too poor to be in a tax bracket that would “pay for it”
and they’re not even factoring in how for profit prisons are literal slave labour camps.
According to the ACLU and the University of Chicago Law school the value of goods from involuntary prison labor in the US is about two billion annually. That’s not even a rounding error as compared to the annual US federal budget.
And that argument would matter if the goal were to improve the state of the budget. But it’s irrelevant to the share holders in the private prison/slavery corporations and the politicians those corporations lobby/bribe. And that last group have the power to keep slavery going.
hi, public school worker here…it is not only legal but encouraged for districts to buy furniture, air filters, and other goods from prison labor sources. one year we even had a group of convicts come to paint the walls, they did a horrible job and people ended up with stolen money also. it blows my mind that this is acceptable.
Former public school worker here, thanks for sticking it out instead of being a quitter like me! Just curious what state you’re in? I ask cause I don’t remember that from my time teaching in Jersey
iowa, and if i had to interact with students more, i might be a former worker too, so dont feel bad. lol janitorial is fine with me after seeing what the other staff go through.
So you’re saying they should have started using child prison labour decades ago?
Tho I guess that’s contingent on if there will be a net return from the smaller cells & rations against the lowered productivity.
Im saying it’s not a big enough net boon to the economy that cutting it out would be a problem even from a pure numbers perspective (I feel gross even typing that out). I figure the problem is that people with political power do benefit from that two billion and they don’t want that gravy train to end.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting its economically necessary. I am however suggesting that the people who want to incarcerate poor kids would probably view their indentured servitude as a good thing.
My bad, agreed nobody here is saying it. I guess I’m just trying to point out how pointless it is. I remember from my CJ classes in college that potential punishments have pretty much no impact on the likelihood of someone committing a crime, only their perceived chances of being caught, or their perceived necessity of committing said crime. It’s a shame how “Old Testament” people think things should be. Outcomes should be the most important factor.
Plus that the low wages outbid other businesses easily and are heavily subsidized by the tax payer.
I know a lot of poor people who would absolutely back this measure bc their favorite politician said so
Yeah the cruelty is definitely the point for far too many. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that so many people don’t actually give a shit about the area they live in being a nice, human conducive place. Littering, gated communities, pollution, NIMBY bullshit… I could go on forever.
“Why should I pay for their burning down house?! Privatise the fire department!”
At some points in history, fire departments were privatized. It wasn’t a great plan. Fire tends to spread.
Yeah. But that kid might be black or trans. Have you thought about that?
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
When the racist white people tell you “yeah, that works there because they’re all white” they aren’t wrong. They just are not right for the reason they think they are.
Right wingers are distracted by identity politics because it keeps them from understanding their class position.
“pay for someone else’s kid” is code for “help someone I don’t think deserves to be helped”.
Conservatives are all about the hierarchy. In their minds it is an immoral act to give someone a benefit that doesn’t deserve it. To do so risks that person getting to be in the wrong place in the hierarchy. And if someone is in the wrong place in the hierarchy, that’s going to cause the bad kind of anarchy.
The idea that your taxes “go to pay” for something is where a lot of people miss the mark.
Taxes are a means of wealth redistribution. Nothing more. The government literally prints money. They don’t need your money.
Every bomb we drop is a school that didn’t get didn’t get funding. Not because you were taxed too little or too much. But because the same people that benefit from the wealth redistribution of the tax system also use that wealth redistribution to fund the Imperialism that they benefit from.
In a way everything is wealth redistribution in some form.
