Thank You, Anonymous Tumblrina! (College Tuition)

So, as is usual for the cause-heads of Tumblr, there's a post going around cheering for some Tweet from some jackoff who thinks Republicans oppose Obama's "free community college" giant cartload of horseshit empty symbolic gesture because, you know, they hate the poor.

After all, those rich folks, they're not paying their fair share.

I mean, they're paying 92.5% of all the taxes paid in this country, but fuck, why settle for 92.5% when they could just pay for everything and you can just have a free ride everywhere, right?

But at any rate, Free community college!

Yaaaaay!

After all, poor people should get to go to poor people college, right? But why should they get to go to real schools?

I'm pretty sure, at some point here, people will begin to take offense and defend the honor of their awesome community college.

And that's fine and good, but if you have any shreds of honesty you know good and goddamn well that if your community college is so awesome, it's a huge, glaring exception.

So, here's the thing that makes me burst into flames when I read something as goddamn ignorant as that Tumblr post, which Lovely Wife conveniently saved for me. (Fair warning: Lovely Wife is a fanfic writer. Learn to cope.) 

That is, we already pay for college. You, me, the pimply teenager at Burger King, all of us, pay taxes, and a goodly portion of that to the states we live in, whether as income tax or sales taxes. And guess what's publicly funded? State colleges.

So, University of Minnesota? University of Pennsylvania? Texas A&M, University of Texas, FSU... All of those are great schools, and they're also ALREADY TAX FUNDED.

It's not like there's a giant rich people conspiracy. There's a giant government which wants you firmly under their thumb. That's not - quite - the same thing, although boy are the government wonks trying to turn it into the same thing.

As a side note, that thing would be called a "hereditary aristocracy," and was a big part of what the Revolutionary War was all about, but who studies history? History is for squares, and, like, conservatives.

So.

The current apparatus is miserable. The public universities take taxpayer funds, and then charge astronomical tuitions, which the government will happily give the student funds for, provided the student is willing to enter perpetual debt peonage; the student then finds out that they also have to pay astronomical prices for textbooks "because publishing textbooks is really expensive" as opposed to, you know, how-to books on computer programming which are a dime a dozen in any bookstore and teach at least as much as a college course on computer programming.

At least that trend is starting to reverse itself with regard to the books; more and more schools are putting the textbooks up as a free download for the students, which is a step in the right direction.

But the question needs to be asked:

What,

Directly,

The FUCK,

Are Student Loans,

Even About?

I mean, I'd love to know.

Remember that these are schools funded by tax dollars. I'm not talking about private schools; private schools can charge astronomical tuitions if they really want to, and if your family can afford it, or you are willing to take on that kind of debt, awesome for you.

But public universities have no such justification.

There is no good reason - none whatsoever - that public, and publicly funded, universities should not be free to attend for residents, full stop.

Obama is making an empty symbolic gesture, by saying that he wants the worst schools in the country to be available for free. Yes! Give me the worst education I could have, for free, instead of the education I have been paying for all of my adult life through tax dollars and therefore should already receive for free, and I will cheer for you, because...

...Well...

"OMG FREE SHIT YAY!"

And then when someone points out that maybe instead of lustily tackling the shitty free thing, you should be going after the much better thing that you already also deserve for free...

...Well...

"WHY DON'T YOU LIKE FREE SHIT, YOU MUST HATE THE POOR!

...

SHITLORD!"

...Only because I find "shitlord" to be a hilarious insult and one so devoid of meaning or importance that the only reason I don't shoehorn it into conversation at work is because I'd get fired.

I guess what I'm getting at, O nameless Tumblrina, is that you're misdirecting your angst and concern for the poor against Republicans, when you should be aiming it at Obama, for trying to sell you a deliberately chosen shitty thing, instead of what you actually already earned.

But thanks for spurring me to write this.

Lovely Wife interjected, to warn me to add that we're not rich, because "they will accuse you of being rich."

"I don't give a fuck what some random Tumblrina thinks. If they don't read this blog, or yours, enough to know we're not rich, then they have no right to expect us to care about their opinions."

But since she mentioned that...

Hey, Nameless Tumblrina, you're gonna get another whole post tomorrow, just for you. I doubt Lovely Wife will link it, but just in case, I'll make sure I title it appropriately.

Using Game Of Thrones To Make A Point (SPOILER WARNING / S05E02) (Societal Trust)

First, I will begin here by briefly discussing the recent episode of Game of Thrones without spoilers, so that the preview on Facebook doesn't spoil anything. Further, I am going to discuss the events of the episode (I hope,) without spoiling anything later on. I will try to remain within the context of the episode as much as I can.

Since I watch GoT two days after everybody else, but I've read the books, I have a strange dichotomy when it comes to new episodes. My friends will all come talk to me about it, wanting to know if I've seen it yet, and of course the answer's no, but at the same time I know most of the events that will have happened.

Fun.

So, this most recent episode, "The House Of Black And White," featured pivotal moments in the lives of five characters, although their effects in a couple of cases are a long way off.

Have we gone far enough beyond the preview now?

I wonder.

Without anything that isn't given away in last week's preview, Arya Stark's pivotal event is the most obvious; she finally arrives in Braavos, and thus at the eponymous House, which you may have guessed to be an assassin school. It's more than that, but we'll leave that for later.

The characters whose pivotal moments were the most immediately apparent were Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen; he becoming Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and she making a political mistake so vast that it warrants this entire post.

So.

The build-up for the mistake is that one of her loyalists, Mossador, murders a prisoner awaiting trial; the prisoner was a Son of the Harpy, and a pawn of the former slavemasters of Mereen. Having chosen to give the prisoner a trial, however, Daenerys knows that the rule of law cannot be subverted by simple emotion if true justice and freedom is to prevail in her domain, and accordingly, she brings Mossador before the people, denounces him, and has him executed in accordance with the law.

The mistake she makes in doing this, of course, is that she doesn't make the case for law to her audience; the former slavemasters don't care, and the former slaves see only that she has killed one of their own. In an instant, she goes from beloved leader, to threatening despot.

It's an awful moment, and one I'd been waiting for, because I wanted to see how it would play out on TV.

But watching it, I felt that not everyone would take the message that I took from it. Accordingly, I felt the need to explain.

A while back, I wrote an article entitled Tribalism, in which I discussed the idea of trust in a society, and the ways tyrants control their populations by splintering them into smaller, more easily controlled groups.

What I didn't do, there, was include the value of the rule of law itself in that discussion.

So.

As I said, the true error Daenerys Targaryen made was that she didn't make her case to the public. 

Her audience consisted of her loyalists, most of whom remain so dependent on her continued success, as with any ruler; the freed slaves, who see her as a symbol of their freedom, but also as a symbol of their fight against the oppressors who had ruled them before; and the former rulers, who see her not as a new ruler, but as an obstruction.

She has a strong, fine sense of justice. But very little in the way of political instinct.

What really happened there was an opportunity to demonstrate herself as a just ruler for all; not merely a figurehead, not merely a liberator, not merely a usurper, but a valid, worthy leader in her own right. And she failed because she didn't want to make a speech, or didn't think she had to.

In any society, the rule of law must be universal or it has no value.

In other words, for the law to have meaning to anyone, it must apply to everyone.

In the United States, we're seeing a gradual dissolution of that idea, as the very rich, the famous, and the politically connected move farther and farther away from law, and accountability, while the law is most stringently enforced against those who have no means of recourse.

Nobody is liking the consequences of that, regardless of whether or not they connect the dots between that dissolution and the results.

Riots against the police. Police shooting innocent people. Police killing suspects regardless; their job is to detain and arrest, so that the courts can do their job. It is not assassination.

And whether you believe the cops are 100% innocent and pure as the driven snow, or 100% literal Satan and Hitler love babies, or like me, think they're likely humans and therefore subject to having both good and bad amongst their number, you have to acknowledge that the popular opinion of the police in this country is rapidly turning more and more negative.

What do you imagine happens to the rule of law when the trust of the average citizen in the apparatus built to sustain that rule fails?

First, the citizens stop believing.

Then they stop participating.

Then, the rule of law itself fails.

Then the society fails.

No force can bring down a society more quickly or thoroughly than a lapse in the trust of its citizens for the legitimacy of its government and laws.

It does not, and cannot, matter to the law who broke it; only the transgression, and mitigating factors.

It does not, and cannot, matter to the law how connected or wealthy the transgressor is; only that the crime was committed.

And it cannot matter to a ruler, either.

In the case of Daenerys Targaryen, Mossador's actions had to bring death.

But they should not have occasioned the collapse of societal trust we witnessed in that episode.

She should have given Mossador a trial.

She should have said something.

I'll say it for her, since she didn't.

"I am your queen. You call me Mhysa, your mother. But even mothers have the duty of justice.

For Mereen to stand, to be a place for freedom, justice must prevail. The law must prevail.

A prisoner was taken; a murderer. 

But a citizen of Mereen.

If I am your Mhysa, he was my child as you are.

All my children deserve no less than a fair trial, no matter what they have done; this law applies to all, and it must apply to all, or none are safe.

Mossador took it upon himself to steal that right from my prisoner. He killed him, and in so doing, denied that prisoner my protection under the law.

But the law applies to him no less than to my prisoner, or any of you, or me.

Murder brings death.

That is the law.

Mossador is my friend. He is one of you. He has been a trusted ally and an advisor.

But for all of that, and no matter how it wounds my heart to do this, none of those things can be permitted to place him above the law.

The law must have meaning for all of us, must protect all of us, or it protects none of us.

Mossador committed murder of a prisoner in captivity.

For that, his sentence is death.

Forgive my tears, my children. I am strong enough to keep the law, but I bleed today with all of you."

I suspect that if Daenerys had said that, or something similar, things would not have gone the way they did.

Because she would have been showing the public - her enemies, her allies, and the unconvinced - that she stood for the law even when it hurt her to do so.

In doing so, she would be showing them a leader, a ruler, to follow.

Our government, in the real world, is failing on that charge.

It is failing faster than most of us suspect.

I hope that trend reverses itself, as past a certain point, the fall becomes inevitable.

I don't want to walk past and see your faces on the other side of the wire.

So, Lovely Wife Asked A Question... (Taxation)

From time to time, since we share most but not all of our views, Lovely Wife will ask me to explain why I see things the way I do.

She asked me last night why I despise so many forms of taxation, and what I support instead.

So, here goes. Please note that this is about taxation, and not intended to be an exploration of overreach of government.

First, there are currently three primary forms of taxation, and three secondary forms of taxation, used by the government of the United States to fund its operations.

Those are, individual and corporate income taxes, property taxes, fees for specific functions, fees for regulatory compliance certifications, and sales taxes, respectively.

While I primarily want to talk about the federal level, since the differences at a state level are notable, I will annotate those as I go.

First, there is a base premise that gets misunderstood a lot, or is something of which most citizens are simply ignorant, which is that in order for a tax to be justifiable, regardless of any other factor, all entities paying the tax must derive benefit from its use. This is important when it comes to state and local taxes specifically, because the argument can be made that all federal taxes benefit all citizens, thanks to the use of a general fund for all expenditures.

I personally find that argument a bit disingenuous, since the federal government routinely gives out money from that general fund in favor of things that don't benefit anywhere near everyone, but the argument itself isn't totally unsound, if the government actually operated as it was intended to.

With states and localities, however, this premise becomes more crucially important. An example of a justifiable secondary tax would be charging a fee for a dog license, which is then used to provide veterinary care for local dogs. Everyone who pays it benefits from it; nobody is required to participate. Note here that I am not suggesting such a program; merely using it as a hypothetical example.

But forging ahead, there are some major problems with each of the primary methods of taxation used in the United States. And the arguments used to justify those taxes are annoyingly, frustratingly persistent, despite being entirely specious and without merit.

Primary among those being the so-called "social contract" theory, which states that since all the things you have are things that exist in part due to the society, the fact that you live in the society means you enter your life in debt to that society for permitting you to exist.

This argument falls apart on the grounds of volition; in order for a debt to be valid, there must be a means of avoiding incurring that debt, and there must be a way to pay it off. Neither of those exists in our current system. You cannot leave the country and simply emigrate elsewhere without great difficulty and expense, which is simply beyond the means of most citizens; without means of escape, or the ability to reject the contract, the contract itself is inherently null and void. Coercion cannot carry moral authority.

As it stands, as well, there is no means by which a citizen may give such great service to the country that they are deemed to have paid their debt to society; nobody is entirely exempt from taxation, and there is no means in place to permit citizens to become so. A sane means of doing this would be to trade a period of service - military or civil, but with a risk-based premium for hazardous duty - for tax-exempt status; no such system exists in our society.

The social contract theory is invalid in its entirety, simply because it is the age-old argument of original sin revamped; because you are born, it says, you owe a debt from the moment you draw breath, through no fault of you own; that debt can never be retired, can never be relieved, except for the benevolent if condescending gesture of a higher power, and for most citizens, there is no means of escape from it.

...In other words, involuntary, uncompensated labor...

So.

Property taxes and income taxes suffer from the same flaw, and corporate income taxes do as well, but at one level removed. That being, all three primary methods of taxation assume total ownership by the government of all assets, real or intellectual, in the United States.

This directly contradicts the base premise upon which our government is founded; your right to your life. Without the right to own property - and by "own," I mean "can dispose of or use in any way which doesn't directly harm others or infringe on their rights without interference," - you cannot sustain your life. Without the right to own property, the right to life is meaningless.

So. Income taxes, whether individual or corporate, and property taxes, all assume that property, and money, belong to the government first; you have "earned," on payday, only the right to keep what the government permits you to keep.

...Otherwise known as involuntary, uncompensated labor...

Corporate taxes are a bit trickier to explain for most people, but I will cut through the morass.

Corporations do not pay taxes. Their customers and shareholders do. All of those people - those individuals - are the ones paying any tax levied on corporations; those taxes are only "corporate" in name. In actual effect they come directly out of your wallet, as a consumer, in the form of increased prices - effectively a second, sneakier income tax on you.

This, incidentally, is also the reason I hate it so much when people crow about one candidate running a budget surplus, and lambast another for running a deficit. In a free society, where you have the right to own property, a budget surplus cannot be morally justified; if the government has more money than they need, it is their bound duty to return it to the citizens from whom they took it. You will note that this, in fact, does not happen; instead, each year the budget grows, until it consumes any surplus. I'd far rather have a government run at a slight deficit (although the current deficit unquestionably does not qualify under any definition of the word "slight,") than one in which the government steals too much of my money and then finds things to spend it on.

Now, regulatory fees are a whole different ballgame. It is actually fair for the government to require a fee for an inspector to verify that regulations have been followed; however, most of those regulations are absurdly specific for the simple reason that it allows for higher fees, and for no other meaningful reason. This is actually a means for a smaller body of government to fund itself, provided that the fees are not unreasonable and the regulations not unnecessary. (Delving further into this, however, calls for an entirely separate blog post.)

Fees for specific functions are risky. A good example is driver licensing; at heart, it is a simple regulatory compliance inspection. Can you drive well enough to be permitted to join other drivers, or are you a huge danger to all and sundry? However, the immense machinery that has grown up around it has turned renewing your license into a much more expensive proposition than it should be, which makes it unduly expensive for many citizens.

As well, the ever-growing insistence on using it as a means of primary identification makes the growing price of that identification a risk of disfranchisement; a voter cannot be prevented from coming to the polls by means of a mandatory fee, or the entire idea of representative democracy is false. (This is the flaw in most voter ID plans; they propose a series of good ideas, and then want to charge a prohibitively high fee. The only way it's justifiable is if it's available to everyone eligible to vote.)

And then we get to sales taxes.

Sales taxes are entirely justifiable, and come in two forms: the classic "sales" tax, or the European-style "Value-added Tax," or VAT.

You may be a bit on your heels after seeing my flat statement that these taxes are justifiable. So I will add one more comment, and then explain both.

Sales taxes are justifiable but stupid.

One of the primary functions of any duly constituted and morally legitimate government is that it protects its citizens against - what's that phrase - "all enemies, both foreign and domestic."

That seems oddly familiar, somehow.

*Ahem*

So, the government, by performing its primary task, has provided a venue for commerce that could otherwise not exist. As a free citizen, you are protected both from foreign invaders, and from robbers, con artists, fraudsters, and other such predators. (Granted, the government's performance in that regard has not been all that stellar. But it hasn't crossed the line into illegitimacy on that front yet.)

Accordingly, you are able to engage in trade. Sales and VAT taxes are, effectively, paying the government directly for having provided that protection; as such they are justifiable.

Sales taxes and VAT taxes, however, differ widely in the burden they place on the economy.

A sales tax, applied fairly, adds a certain percentage to the price of every transaction full stop.

As a product moves through its development stages to the market, this application happens repeatedly, and causes the total cost of that product to balloon beyond measure, until it simply becomes unaffordable.

This is one of the primary drawbacks of the so-called "FairTax Initiative," which purports to be a flat, fair, across the board tax, until the authors of the plan figure out that the way they designed it absolutely destroys any hope the poor have of ever escaping poverty, and probably of staying alive; at that point they devolve into ever-stranger methods to contort their tax plan around so that it doesn't do exactly what it's designed to do, ultimately finishing in a form that is ruthlessly unfair, lays a gargantuan burden on the rich while allowing the poor to evade it entirely, and demolishes the economy through massive cost inflation (or, in an alternate version, doesn't, but also doesn't provide enough revenue for the government to stay even marginally solvent.)

VAT taxes, however, add a fixed percentage to the full cost on the first transaction, but on subsequent transactions only tax the difference in value. In other words, selling copper ore to the smelter gets taxed; selling the ingots of copper to the wire factory taxes only the increase in value; selling wire to the ISP taxes only the increase in value. Accordingly, its impact on price inflation is much less dramatic than a sales tax, and it can be applied easily across the board without being unfair to anyone.

In fact, a VAT tax is inherently, voluntarily progressive. Luxury goods go through far more stages of improvement than do common ones; accordingly, they are far more heavily taxed, and yet...

...

...And yet, nobody is required to buy a sports car. 

Fresh produce, for example, goes through hardly any taxable stages between the farmer and the supermarket; food ingredients in general are much less developed and refined than more recreational property. A VAT tax would greatly impact the poor, by making fresh produce and less-refined, more healthy foods actually less expensive, just through the process of development and refinement, than today's endlessly processed junk foods.

And on any product, the more steps taken to improve it, the higher the tax burden becomes, while remaining entirely voluntary. Nobody is required to spend the extra money; nobody is statutorily required to undertake a higher share of the tax burden, and yet...

...

...And yet, because rich people have the ability to do so, they will tend to buy luxury goods anyway; thus voluntarily assuming a higher share of the tax burden of the nation, which both satisfies the angry poor (or it would if they thought their way through it, anyway,) and lends the tax the force of moral authority.

Another plan that has been offered, and is quite popular, is a flat tax. This type of thing is typically accompanied with a great outcry about fairness; "everybody pays the same!"

Riiiiight. Except for the fact that poor people use a far higher percentage of their income on subsistence than rich people do, which means that a flat tax has a needlessly, disproportionately high effect on poor people. Rich people love the idea of flat taxes, by the way; it means they can shrug and say "I paid the same as you, what's the problem?" and then fly away in their private jet, secure in their moral justification, while their poorer neighbors still struggle to put food on the table.

I do not support income, property, flat, or sales taxes as a means of financially supporting a government.

I do, however, support a system of primary VAT taxation supplemented with regulatory compliance certification fees limited by some sort of separate blog post about how to set that up, and direct fees for optional  services.

I do not believe in involuntary, uncompensated labor, guys.

And you may have noted my use of that specific phrase.

That's because it is the definition of slavery. And that's what most taxes are: a means of reducing your population into slavery.

Calling someone "slave" in the bedroom is hot.

Calling someone slave when you mean it is as far from hot as you can get and still be in our galaxy.

Instead of trying to justify systems of taxation that have been used for hundreds if not thousands of years as a means of controlling the population, let's think about the concept of a tax permitting voluntary association and commerce to fund the government.

Imagine a social contract in which the government provides you a safe place to exist, and in exchange, you are asked to participate only so far as you want to.

I would sign that.