Even more good could be done if the money were spent well, but the fact that the tax must be paid at all serves as the incentive that pushes behavior in a more environmentally friendly direction.
There are less regressive ways to incentivize change. Taking money from people hurts the people that rely on money more. Rather, investment and encouragement of particular industries is less punitive, but again goes back to valuable spending of public funds.
It would be great if someday those who want to "make a change" or "progress" society understood that succeeding at actually changing their neighbors' minds is more effective than succeeding at getting laws passed that confiscate their neighbors' wealth so that some government program may or may not end up being effective at getting to their end goal. The effort to defend political tribes is so high - imagine if it was used to help create a natural demand in various markets to achieve a given outcome.
Autonomy isn't a meaningful principle when it comes to medicine. Even patients who are doctors can't really give informed consent since they won't necessarily be knowledgeable in the specialty relevant to their treatment. And the vast majority of patients aren't doctors.
Not to invoke a slippery slope argument, but there are a lot of really horrible things that have been done without giving patients autonomy. We as a society need to consider it extremely carefully before any instance of acting against a patient's bodily autonomy.
If horrible things are being done to people, I'd pick the ones those people are doing to themselves almost every time over the ones being done to others in violation of their bodily autonomy.
Yes. Obviously you'd narrow things down and compare like to like. Anti-vaxers being the hot example of the day. Sometimes it's so obvious that we act on it, like with secondhand smoking, but I bet there's a lot more to dig into.
Right, that's the problem. The fact that doctors must ask for the consent of people who don't understand what they are consenting to.
The idea itself isn't that controversial - age of majority laws for contracts, voting, and even medical treatment clearly acknowledge the idea that some people are too young to know what they are agreeing to, so the decision should be made by someone else who takes responsibility for them (most things), or there should be no decision because there doesn't need to be one (voting).
We just need to refine our understanding to reflect the reality that as old as you may get, you will never understand some things.
Autonomy is not a problem of medical treatment, it's a fundamental principle of an ethical society.
Without autonomy, the concepts of voluntary/involuntary lose meaning, which can enable some very nasty scenarios. Exceptions to autonomy are rare and come with stringent legal duties and obligations on the responsible party. Doctors are not responsible for their patients in that way; they are service providers.
Lack of understanding should not be sufficient to undercut an ethical principle like autonomy. Imagine if I had the power to decide that you don't sufficiently understand the concept of autonomy, and must be shipped off to a re-education center.
Talking about it outside of the specific conflict, is disingenuous. Everyone understands how important Autonomy is. That's part of the issue, not a supporting argument to value it over the health of a patient. If there's no patient, there's no Autonomy either.
The point of autonomy isn't to treat the patient as the most knowledgeable person in the room, but to present the options, all considerations and drawbacks that you're aware of, answer any questions, and then ask them to make a decision. If you think that patients aren't smart enough to understand the implications of drug side effects and weigh the costs and benefits of treatment versus the original disease, then I really hope you're not a doctor. And I really really hope you're not my doctor.
Being distributed is really more of a 00s concept anyway. It makes total sense that distributed systems would be replaced with more centralized ones as the internet itself goes through a similar transition.
Sally is traditionally short for Sarah, though if someone with a longer name like Salvadora/Salvatoria were living in an anglophone society, I could also see them going by Sally.
Your criticism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. The US prison system is not intended to rehabilitate anyone, and does not do so. Usually, criminals are even worse when they are released due to the time they've spent with other hardened criminals, being abused, forming criminal connections, and learning how to do crime more effectively.
As a result, it's perfectly rational to track those people and be wary of them.
The restitution angle is at least an argument, but treating the system as transactional in the sense that you break the balance by committing a crime then pay it back through slave work in jail is perhaps one of the few ways to make the system even more dysfunctional than it already is.
>Your criticism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. The US prison system is not intended to rehabilitate anyone,
Depends on your definition of rehabilitate. From the Bureau of Prisons web site:
>We protect public safety by ensuring that federal offenders serve their sentences of imprisonment in facilities that are safe, humane, cost-efficient, and appropriately secure, and provide reentry programming to ensure their successful return to the community
>As a result, it's perfectly rational to track those people and be wary of them.
If you agree with the premise that jails are making criminals even worse, the more rational answer would be not to send them there to begin with, right? After all, if you put people in jail and release them, you are making society worse off.
It would be more rational to keep them in prison forever.
I think the most rational approach, though, is to fix the prison system and provide proper rehabilitation. Accepting that we incarcerate people, and release them in a way that makes the public unsafe, is a poor option.
>but treating the system as transactional in the sense that you break the balance by committing a crime then pay it back through slave work in jail is perhaps one of the few ways to make the system even more dysfunctional than it already is.
This is a strawman - no one here is suggesting slave work, or even any work, in jail as a measure of rehabilitation.
If you stick to walking, why even bother to track you? You're not going very far from your house that way. If you board a plane, rent a car, etc, you get tracked.
Is there anyone who the Chinese government punished for tax evasion who turned out to be not cheating on their taxes? Selective enforcement is one thing. Fabricating charges is worse.
Potato, potato. In the USSR, anything you said could be interpreted as anti-revolutionary if it criticised the boss in any way; and plenty of people were privately criticising, but it was brought up only against the ones who had to be purged.
Similarly, in China today, everyone who is anyone in the apparatus is cheating taxes in some way, but it's brought up only if they become a problem for the leadership for some other reason.
Not having firsthand experience as a person who is someone in the Chinese government apparatus, it sounds like it should be possible to just pay the tax you owe. But hey, maybe that kind of thinking is why I have no political power.
Depending on what you did, you can go to jail for cheating on your taxes in the US too. Which is as it should be -- if the penalty is just that you have to pay what you owed then the expected value of fraud is positive and it's only logical to just always cheat and then only pay when you get caught.
And here in the US, people routinely violate rules about registering as a foreign agent and have for a long time, but suddenly it's an issue and we lock up Maria Butina for what seem like mostly political reasons. Our tax fraud cases are also, I'd suspect, getting only a fraction of the tax cheats.
Advertisers not using ads to inform their target potential market, but instead choosing to use them to mislead and trick the consumer, are the reason for this.
People accept that deal when they have a very strong guarantee that their $100 will still be worth $100 at the end of the term. Combining the low yields of bonds (let's be honest, your numbers are chosen for their roundness, not their realism) with the low safety of stocks is the worst of both worlds.
There's quite literally a word for low growth but reliable stocks that pay out decent dividends. "Value stocks", as opposed to "Growth stocks" where investors expect to see the returns directly in the stock price.
Not everyone thinks authoritarianism is morally wrong. They already abet plenty of other things that some people find morally wrong, like enforcing IP law, censoring all kinds of information, cooperating with police investigations, etc, some of which you can already spin as authoritarian.
>"Not everyone thinks authoritarianism is morally wrong"
The people who don't find authoritarianism morally wrong are generally elites who enjoy privilege on account of their being ranking members of that authoritarian regime.
Can you provide any examples of a 21st century authoritarian regimes where this hasn't been true? Mugabe? Bouteflika? Quaddafi? Assad? I don't think so.
Strongmen often enjoy broad popular support. They get things done. Mussolini made the trains run on time.
A cult of personality is how an authoritarian leader defends themselves from being overthrown by other members of their regime. They ensure that they are associated with all the good that their government does, while deflecting blame for the bad towards scapegoats.
Worrying about fairness or the rule of law is a luxury. A lot of people just see a weak and ineffectual government replaced with one that actually does something for them and they don't care how it was achieved.
I wish you were right. It would be much easier to defend against authoritarians if they were unpopular.
Duterte was democratically elected. He will be stepping down in 2022 and has already been voicing his support for Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
>"Strongmen often enjoy broad popular support."
"Strongman" is not even a real political term its a media term invented in the US media and first applied to General Noriega of Panama. The term doesn't even necessarily apply to official the head of state as was the case with Noriega.
And my question was regarding authoritarian regimes of the 21st century. The rise of Mussolini was very much tied the consequences of World War 1 on Italy.
Yes. That's why I mentioned him. He is a legitimately popular politician with a strong authoritarian streak.
If I wanted to give you other examples of authoritarians, I would have suggested Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They've all had their ups and downs in popularity, but mostly based on economic conditions.
China would have been the most relevant example to use, but it's more difficult to prove popularity without elections. Still, both official approval ratings[1] and anecdotal discussions[2] suggest that the government is particularly popular among those in rural areas who have seen rapid modernization.
Examples of what not being true? You jumped from "people" to "regimes" between paragraphs but the transition wasn't complete.
If you are looking for examples of people who aren't part of an authoritarian regime but still think it's not a fundamentally immoral system, just take myself. If you are looking for authoritarian regimes that satisfy some quality, I can't tell what quality you're referring to.
