Taxes ARE Theft (but so what?)

Brian

One of the oft-made claims by self-styled Libertarians is that ‘taxes are theft’ (and are therefore ‘bad’). This kind of assertion underpins most of the Libertarian position, and also the bulk of any anti-tax/pro-small-government arguments by folks of any political stripe. Unfortunately, it’s rare to hear this position defended as the self-styled Libertarians don’t seem all that well-read with regards to their own literature.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Ayn Rand was gaining prominence, but there were no Philosophers backing her corner, partially because she spouted utter drivel and partially because to side with Rand was engage in self-loathing (Rand was notoriously anti-Philosophy/ers).

Enter Robert Nozick, with his tome “Anarchy, State and Utopia”. Nozick is well-regarded in Philosophy for articulating what was inarticulate, and defending the generally indefensible. Nozick sketched out the Libertarian claims, largely as a response to John Rawls’s defense of Social Justice, and, well… His arguments are not obviously terrible (as much as we may disagree with them). His arguments are certainly compelling, if you have a tendency to ignore all counter-arguments to your position. But hey, that’s the human condition, right?

So let’s dive in. And hold your nose (and your breath), because Nozick doesn’t make the argument that ‘taxes are theft’. Nope: “Taxation of earnings from labor is on par with forced labor.” Yeah, he went there.

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Catching up, and a study in contrasts

Hey all,

I was in Kamloops and Kelowna this weekend giving talks, so I didn’t have much time for blogging. I’ll get caught up soon, but for now (if you missed it), be sure to read Edwin’s post from late Friday.

Also I want to relate a quick story that I think is pretty cool. When I was in Philadelphia in summer 2011, I went to a place called “Geno’s” for Philly Cheese Steaks. Geno’s is a Philadelphia institution, where you supposedly get the ‘authentic’ cheese steak experience (complete with ‘Whiz’). Of course, because the guy running Geno’s is a fucking asshole, these decals festoon the order window:

Various decals admonishing you to speak English, because this is America, and endorsing Donald Trump for president.

He also sold ‘freedom fries’. Seriously.

Anyway, fast forward to a few days ago, I had to go downtown Vancouver, and as I got out of the train station, I was greeted by this food cart:

A food cart selling Philly Cheese Steaks with lettering in both English and Chinese

I’m pretty confident saying Vancouver for the win on this one. I can’t read (or speak, or understand) Chinese, so I’m secretly hoping the Chinese lettering says “Fuck you, Geno’s, you xenophobic knuckle-dragger! Also, Donald Trump would be a terrible choice for president, and your endorsement of him undermines the credibility of your political opinions!”

But it probably just says “Philly Cheese Steaks”

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The Need for Utopia

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Adam Swift, in his article “Would Perfect Mobility be Perfect?”* posed the following question to researchers of social inequality and advocates of social justice activism: should social justice be concerned with achieving ‘perfect’ social mobility** and therefore ‘perfect’ social equality, or should we simply accept that such a goal is fantasy and instead focus on ‘sufficient’ social mobility? In other words, should those who are concerned with social justice waste our time with utopian ideals, or should we instead focus on the nitty-gritty of more realistic struggles?

Swift argues that the energy spent pining after the ever just-beyond-the-horizon goals of a social justice utopia blinds activists to the realities ‘on the ground’; that hoping for the day when all people can be free to pursue their dreams prevents activists from engaging in more grounded projects aimed at ameliorating more immediate problems.

This question, at least in academia, isn’t a rhetorical one. Many graduate-level courses (and not a few undergraduate-level ones too), especially in sociology, concentrate on the prosaic ‘nuts and bolts’ of contemporary social science research, and leave the more big-picture style thinking to advanced theory courses or to the individual student to discover on their own. For the most part, this approach is a sensible one, as social science researchers are expected to contribute to the ever-growing bodies of research that make up the vast bulk of contemporary social science literature. The rapidly expanding constellation of academic journals demand that researchers publish more or less constantly, and for many of them, their advancement and salaries depend on producing a corpus of published work that sometimes makes it seem as though modern academia is a game of quantity of quality. The demands on researchers are so great that more than a few will succumb to searching for the ‘SPU’ or ‘Smallest Publishable Unit’; researchers will report even the tiniest, most inconsequential findings – regardless of relevance to any overarching research program – if there is even the slightest chance that such a report could find a place in a journal or two. In a very real sense, social science researchers are often guilty of missing the forest for the trees. In such an environment, where the minutia of our individual sub-sub-specialization can seem to overwhelm us, is it any surprise that many give up on the search for utopia?

The same can sometimes be said of social justice activism; if we need to budget our already-precious time and energy, do we choose to spend it on philosophical ruminations about the type of ideal society we wish to strive for, or do we instead quickly acknowledge that the end-goal is some form of nebulous ‘equality’, and then spend our time countering the rhetoric of bigots of all stripes, either online or in the physical world? Do we sacrifice reflection and reflexivity for the need to see ‘real-world’ results aimed at eliminating real and pressing inequalities that exist all around us? Time, unfortunately, is a zero-sum game; what we spend on one project must necessarily come from time we could have budgeted for something else.

But where Swift gets his analysis wrong is in thinking that the point of utopian thinking is to achieve the imagined end-state. Many of the foundational thinkers of modern sociology, like Marx and Durkheim, imagined utopian societies and they, like more contemporary thinkers such as John Rawls offered what they saw as roadmaps to achieving them. But implicit in each and every one of their visions was that every step towards the end-goal necessarily improved the lives of the groups of people they were concerned with helping. Marx, for example, seemed to believe that every step on the road to that stateless society would bring the proletariat closer to freedom; Rawls believed that the very act of deeply and seriously considering the shape of a perfect society from behind the veil of ignorance would grant the thinker insight into contemporary social ills. Utopian visions of the future provide us with a glimpse of the world once all the solutions provided by the utopian project have been applied. If I want to build the perfect car, or the perfect computer, or write the perfect poem, play, or script, it helps if I first have an idea of what the end-state ought to look like, because knowing that can show me the steps I need to take to get there. Many authors will say that the act of writing often includes taking unexpected turns, but I’ve yet to meet an author who didn’t have at least a sketched-out idea of the ending before they began writing the first chapter.

Utopian thinking gives us an arena within which we conceive, test, and challenge our normative frameworks; they can reveal to us the specifics of our moral codes, and can give us insight into our own problem-solving strategies. But more than anything else, utopian thinking teaches us the importance of committing to the long haul, and they remind us that in a society that values disposability and instant gratification; the diligent pursuit of deeply-held convictions has worth. Utopia is not simply about the endgame; the promise of utopia is found in the striving.

*Swift, Adam, “Would Perfect Mobility be Perfect?”, European Sociological Review, Vol 20. Issue 1, September, 2002, Pp. 1-11

** Social mobility is the extent to which a person’s chances and opportunities in life are tied to the circumstances of their birth. If a person is born into a poor family, what are their chances of ‘moving up’ in society? In a world of ‘perfect mobility’, a person’s social status and their social opportunities would be unrelated; everyone would have an equal opportunity to achieve their goals.

A petition in support of a more diverse freethinking community

Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism has created a petition on Change.org:

We support making the atheist movement more diverse and inclusive. It’s long been clear that the skeptical movement has a preponderance of white men. While we don’t disdain their participation, we believe skepticism is valuable and important to people in all walks of life, and in accordance with that principle, we consider it vital to have a movement that reflects the demographics of the society we live in. If our community continues to be dominated by white men, it will become increasingly out-of-touch and irrelevant as Western society becomes increasingly multiracial and multicultural and as non-Western countries gain economic and cultural power.

To that end, we urge the atheist and skeptical organizations to make a conscious commitment to diversity: to intentionally reach out to people of all ages, genders and ethnic backgrounds to speak at our conventions, to serve on our boards of directors, and to be the public faces and representatives of skepticism. We believe that there are talented, dedicated and eminently qualified people of every gender and every race, and that seeking them out will strengthen our movement and broaden its appeal.

I’ve talked about the value of diversity a number of time on this blog: [Read more…]

Movie Friday: My right-wing conspiracy theory

I am not one easily given to conspiracy theories. I usually assume that any major injustice or monumental political shift is due to an accumulation of human stupidity, rather than the genius machinations of a secret cabal. After all, as Karl Rove has taught us, most of the people who are rumoured to be political ‘geniuses’ are usually just lucky and have good PR. It’s usually safer to assume that the snake has no head, given how spectacularly bad human beings are at keeping secrets.

I do make two pet exceptions though. The first is for H1N1, which I think was seen as an opportunity to test our public health readiness infrastructure. We knew pretty early on that the disease wasn’t particularly fatal, but it was a good chance for us to see what would happen when a serious flu (like H5N1, for example) breaks out, in a natural experiment. This isn’t a nefarious conspiracy – I don’t think government labs ‘cooked up’ a fake disease or any nonsense like that – but I think they held back on telling the public that there really wasn’t anything to worry about.

The second conspiracy theory that’s been cooking in the back of my mind is that conservatives are secretly brilliant. That they’ve been playing at being buffoons as part of a trans-generational practical joke on liberals, who are just too slow/outraged to get the joke. How else do you explain the fact that Michelle Bachmann is sitting on the House Intelligence Committee? That kind of irony doesn’t just happen by accident – that’s satire on a grand scale.

The problem is that liberals still haven’t clued in after all these years, and they’re having to get more and more obvious in the hopes that we will catch on. For a recent example, we can turn to (where else?) Fox ‘News’: [Read more…]

Idle No More: Deep Green Resistance Has Red Roots

A post by Jamie

I’ve been following and learning from a number of radical grassroots indigenous activists for quite a while now. I don’t remember when I encountered the first, who has been a source of inspiration and encouragement to me since our first contact on Facebook. But before long, I was getting to know a bunch of people who are proud of their indigineity, the lands their ancestors taught them to protect as though it were their next of kin, and all the life depending on that land — including people like me, by which I mean not related by blood to the First Peoples, and always learning new things about indigenous cultures. So when news of the pipelines and FIPPA deals the Harper government wanted to bury under the streams, rivers, lakes, and homes of many of the blood kin of my indigenous friends first broke, I found out about it through them. Not from the news. Then a whole lot of Occupy Vancouver activists (most of whom are white and apparently haven’t the foggiest clue beyond a very superficial understanding, of exactly what they are actually saying when they declare “unceded Coast Salish territory” at the beginning of their speeches) started their predictable and ambitious surge of hippy speak, wheat-pasting, vegan food, flyers, and public musical jam sessions, to try and raise awareness of the pipelines. Finally, it started to appear in the news, in between reports of Trayvon Martin being murdered while George Zimmerman was allowed to keep all his Nazi regalia company in the privacy of his own home for weeks, Shaima Alawadi’s murder being pegged at first as a hate crime until it was determined she was killed by her husband, and Bei Bei Shuai being sentenced to prison after her late-term pregnancy was interrupted by a suicide attempt (the baby was delivered and died a week later). But the Occupy activists just kept on truckin’ through all this extraordinarily depressing news that mysteriously never seems to be about white people getting put in prison, or even worse, in a coffin.

[Read more…]

Shades of Black Atheism

Bridget Gaudette, co-founder of Secular Woman and blogger at EmilyHasBooks has started a series called “Shades of Black Atheism” where she has invited black atheists to share their stories. This week, the subject of her series is lil’ ol’ me:

Twenty-eight years old and living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Ian was raised as a Roman Catholic by a father who is a former priest from Guyana (a small South-American former British colony). His mother was an Irish/German Canadian convert to Roman Catholicism, but his family was what he described as “averagely religious,” attending church on a weekly basis. Ian went to Sunday school as well. The family celebrated the major religious holidays, but their “lives were not suffused with gods.” Perhaps it is for that reason that Ian’s being an atheist has not affected his relationship with his family. He stated, “I live very far away from them, which means that my day-to-day life is fairly off their radar, and vice versa. When we are together, we focus more on spending time with each other than on things that we disagree on.”

Go check out the rest, and be sure to read the rest of the series as it comes out. I’d imagine the best way to manage that is to follow her on Twitter or rig up one of them “RSSR” dealies you kids are using these days.

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I was a Nice Guy™

There was a piece in The Atlantic that caught my eye yesterday about the phenomenon of Nice Guys™ – men who attribute their lack of appeal to the opposite sex to a cognitive flaw in women that makes them claim that they want a nice, respectful partner, but then go on to date jerks who treat them like shit. More broadly, this is part of the “nice guys finish last” complex of memes that defines attractive masculinity in terms of emotional indifference and machismo, against which sensitive and caring men cannot hope to prevail.

There has been, over the years, a concerted backlash against this idea, as described in the article:

The notion that self-proclaimed “nice guys” might not be as nice as they think they are isn’t new. The Nice Guy™, as the figure is oftenreferred to, has been an object of sustained feminist critique over the past decade: for his less-than-flattering depiction of the women he claims to treat so well, for his passive-aggressive approach to picking up women, and for his underlying assumption that sex is an exchange—that if you’re a “good guy,” the women you’re good to should fall in love with and have sex with you…if not out of desire, then out of pity or obligation.

The author of the article then goes on to express a modicum of sympathy for men who buy into the “Nice Guy” mythplex, because there is real pain and frustration going on, and the popular critique does nothing to address it. If you’re not familiar with the Nice Guy™ phenomenon, or the feminist critiques thereof, I suggest you read the article before continuing (and definitely before commenting). I have to confess that when I first came upon the phenomenon thus named, and the way it was described by feminists (mostly women), I was strongly off-put. But there’s a reason for that…

I used to be a Nice Guy™ [Read more…]

The revolving door of white privilege

One of the most fascinating case studies to consider when trying to underline the point that race is socially constructed (rather than an emergent property of biology) is the gradually-shifting definition of ‘whiteness’. ‘White’ was a label that has seen many redefinitions over the years in North America, as people who were previously forcibly excluded (e.g., Italians, Irish, Jews) were gradually and begrudgingly included under that privileged umbrella. It is an open question as to what extent political expediency versus demographics versus socioeconomic power played in this reclassification, but one cannot ignore the fact that it happened.

Canada is not immune from this reclassification pattern either. While the original political power in the nation of Canada was divided between those of English and French descent, the threat of American expansion and the promise of abundant resources forced the government of Canada to open its doors to large numbers of immigrants. As that (mostly and intentionally white) immigration happened, the definition of ‘white’ faced some serious pressures, both political and economical, prompting a shift that matches the one happening in the USA.

It is this history that makes the following story worth a brief comment: [Read more…]

Picking your battles (and picking them stupidly)

If you follow Canadian politics news, you may have noticed that a copy of a third-party forensic audit of Attawapiskat First Nation was leaked to the press yesterday. The news wasn’t exactly good* – a large majority of expenses had no supporting documentation, which is certainly a suspicious state of affairs. The fact that the band has been under co-management and that the number of un-documented expenses dropped after 2010 (when Theresa Spence took over as chief) has not stopped the crowing of the critics of Chief Spence’s attempts to elicit federal assistance from a government that seems more interested in sending accountants than resources. They see this as further evidence of their central thesis: that the problems experienced by First Nations are the result of their own incompetence as opposed to anything that the Government of Canada has to step in and address (because fuck the Auditor General, right?)

To their credit, the only response from the Harper team so far has been to say that they agree with the findings of the audit (they’ve had a copy of it for months now), but their supporters have been bleating their triumph to the skies. Which makes me wonder: is fiscal responsibility really the moral high ground you want to stand on? The whole argument right now is whether or not the incompetence and shady practices of Chief Spence and her clique have resulted in a situation where her people are suffering, and she is to blame by virtue of her lack of fiscal responsibility.

Again I ask you, Harper supporters: is this really the hill you want to die on? [Read more…]