Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "Reporters Confront Texas Politicians Who Voted Against Sandy Relief" video.
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Taxes existed as a practice in slave economies, in feudalism, in capitalism. Political economy is not like natural phenomena—it is not discoverable somewhere "out there," but constructed within human activity—so it's a false analogy to compare socialism to gravity as you did. It may be true that some socialist tendencies have existed as part of human behavior across time (most people behave toward their friends not as capitalists but as communists or anarchists), but those tendencies did not constitute the prevailing social organization, and certainly not with modern material conditions.
Socialism, as it was conceived in the 19th century, is the control of production by the workers in an industrial economy. Socialist theorists pointed to concurrent or older peasant and religious communes as partial examples, not as models of imitation.
"Taxes on production and laws regulating production amounts to ownership and control of production."
No. I can't even imagine how you arrived at that conclusion. Taxes and regulations qualify ownership; they do not constitute it. And again, taxes on production predate any socialist theory or praxis by hundreds if not thousands of years. Not only that, but they are an instrument used by governments/economies highly antithetical to socialism, such as absolutist monarchies, slave economies, and capitalist economies. Was Henry VII a socialist because he put restrictions on the wool trade? Was Louis XVI a socialist because he instituted price controls on grain? Was the church socialist because it collected a tithe? Stop misusing words to make a bad argument.
Moreover, it's not even clear that a socialist society would rely on taxation as a method of funding, especially in one that tends toward the abolition of currency. In a sense, the persistent need for taxation in capitalist society points to a failure of the distribution system, which socialism attempts to amend. If an adequate, just, and egalitarian distribution system exists, there is no need for taxation. Another point of confusion: it's also not clear that a socialist society will have a "government" as that term is usually understood, but instead, workers' councils, federations, syndicates, etc., focussing on production, perhaps with a separate distribution council. The reason you see taxation in the so-called "socialist" countries of today, like Norway, is that they are "social democracies," that is welfare states, or capitalist countries that strive to compensate for the more deleterious side-effects of capitalism through government spending. The operant word there being "capitalism."
Also, fuck this new comment format.
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+monte68x They believe the critique is of socialism, but it's really a critique of authoritarianism, something that is evidenced in the many attempts to critique, reform, or abolish the authoritarian aspects of capitalism. Perhaps authoritarianism v. libertarianism is a more natural opposition, or one that is easier to grasp, than the more complex opposition between economic systems like capitalism v. socialism, and that is why capitalism is largely unopposed while authoritarianism is almost universally decried: people just haven't learned to equate capitalism with authoritarianism. Meanwhile, socialism and authoritarianism have become virtually synonymous.
The thing I disagree with you on is the equal ability of those economic systems to be either authoritarian or libertarian. It seems to me that some economic systems are inherently more disposed to one or the other. Capitalism tends to be authoritarian (even in its more liberal expressions, that liberty is highly restricted to a class of the few), while socialism tends to be libertarian. When capitalism tends toward genuine libertarianism, it either highlights existing contradictions in the system or generates purely theoretical absurdities like anarcho-capitalism. When socialism tends toward authoritarianism, as it did during the dogmatic reigns of Stalin and Mao, it regresses, even by their own admission, to statism and capitalism or quasi-capitalism.
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