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[Friday]

I miss living off-grid. Did for a few years in a house that was designed for it, with all the modern inconveniences ;). Waterwheel powered the generator, so there was electricity to spare... But the heating and cooking was backed up with wood fired oven & fireplaces. House was extra insulated by all the cords of wood around it! Copper boiler in the Russian style bath house (including drawing an extra bath for the bannik!). Cistern on the roof collected rainwater for flushing & showers. Both could be sluice filled from the river if the resv was running low. Fridge and freezer upstairs, but cold storage, and an ice block room in the sub basement meant it was more out of ease than necessity... It was good living. Conversely, had all my utilities shut off for over a year in the city, and that was a pain in the ass. House simply wasn't designed for it. Made the best of it, but it was far more like camping in a very posh tent, than living in a house!

 

[Anarchy]

I for one love that I am paying taxes...

but is extracting money by threat of force the only way to achieve the desired end?

or is it only one of many possible ways?

and if so, is it one of the better or one of the worse ways?

Perhaps it is almost completely counter productive in terms of helping those who are having the hardest time - what if the state as "Robin Hood" is merely a cloak for a plain and simple robber - who steals from the poor and gives to the very richest of all, and in the process, causes many unintended consequences which make life even harder for those who are already struggling?

 

[Anarchy]

Now you really have me thinking! Something that ties the copper in the environment up in a form that's unavailable to the sheep?

It's an interesting subject

The trace element with the strongest effect on copper uptake is molybdenum, which occurs in some granitic intrusions and becomes mobile in neutral to alkaline pH.

We actually have zinc mineralization in this area, but unless there is mine waste spread around, it tends to be at a low level in the soils and water.

Lead poisoning actually used to be a big problem in this area, from old mining and smelting operations (some of them dating back to the 1350s and before), but most of it seems to have ended up in less bio available forms such as sulphates and chloro-phosphates, rather than oxides and carbonates.

The thing which seems to make the difference with copper here is the solouble iron sulphate in the water, and the insoluble oxide that it forms when it comes into contact with oxygen. that rusty stuff is very good at binding and tying up other elements.

One thing I didn't say earlier, but which is relevant, is that if we give copper suppliment to sheep which are drinking water from a treated supply, they start to drop dead from copper poisoning.

For the ones that are drinking from natural springs and streams, the effect is pretty amazing, they do well and have lambs where previously they were poor and a significant number never had lambs.

 

[scout86]

but is extracting money by threat of force the only way to achieve the desired end?

In a perfect world? No. In this world? Maybe?

There are a lot of people who are willing to share and to look out for others. There also seem to be a lot of people who are willing to say "I've got mine, you're on your own." There are people who hate to take help, no matter how much they need it. There are people who seem to think the world owes them a living. And all kinds in between, I guess.

I have a feeling that, if we ran things on a free will offering basis there's a lot the might not get done. We'd definitely have to operate on a much smaller scale, where everyone involved knew everyone else who was involved. At least I think it would have to be something like that.

 

[sun seeker]

but is extracting money by threat of force the only way to achieve the desired end?

In addition to this point (to which I would answer "no, as long as that end is generally desirable"), there are several other points we could raise about taxation. I'll just mention one of them for the moment.

We tend to think we have an obligation to pay taxes because they support social programs and institutions. That was at one time a fair point. The problem is that most countries are now bankrupt. While some taxes, such as property tax if I am not mistaken, do still go to support institutions like schools and hospitals, the bulk of our income tax is now used to pay the interest on the national debt, a debt that by its very nature is impossible to ever finish paying. I don't know whether that is the case in the Netherlands, but I would expect so.

 

[Neverthesame]

I am sympathetic to @Anarchy, with regards to the notion of having ones hard earned money forced out of our hands, with little to no explanation or justification. The only explanation one can seem to get is something along the lines of "for the greater good". Which sounds a lot like "because I said so" from a parent to a disobedient child. Now you can of course, look into the paper trail of government spending yourself. As most of us know, you will find a fair amount of mis-management of funds. From kickbacks, military funding, infrastructure underspending (until some vital aspect of basic day to day urban living is so dilapidated it needs to be replaced at 10 times the cost of repair). Why? Seemingly because some narcissistic arse can get a bigger paycheque.

While it is true alot of other places are far worse. I have yet to hear of someone being hung for not paying their phone bill. At least not when I was in the UK. Or here in Canada. I do not know of any other place on earth that does taxation better. Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that the current system is severely damaged, if not broken. I just don't have a better idea.

Looking into things such as crowd funding, ie: Patreon. While a good idea, is wrought with problems when looking large scale, or for basic needs. Primarily being, crowd funding only works if you are able to generate a crowd willing to fund you. Putting people who are not natural salesmen, at a significant disadvantage.

 

[Anarchy]

There are several strands to this.
Legitimacy - the idea that theft (and other actions which would be considered crimes if they were committed by individuals) is somehow just when carried out by a state.

The "no alternative" to force.

The idea that some essential goods or services could never be provided unless there were a state (or other monopolist) providing them coercively.

Then there are various arguments about efficeincy of provision (the idea of omniscient knowledge of what is needed where, and in what quantities and form) and of "morality" - I've actually heard BBC talking heads come out with the argument that coercively taking money from people in the name of "public service" is somehow more moral than providing a service and allowing people to choose whether they use it, because the latter might result in an evil profit being made, or might use grubby advertising as part of its funding model.

I'll go for the legitimacy one first. others can follow.

If we assume the consensual and constitutional arguments for state, that th individuals in a community have delegated certain powers to an organization, that will then specialize in providing certain services, rather than everyone having to provide them for themselves...

We come up against the interesting point that none of the individuals had a right to steal from others or to initiate force against others.

If none of them had the right to do such things, how could they then legitimately delegate a right they didn't posses, to others to carry out in their name?

Saint Augustine (AD 354 - 430)'s view of states expressed in Chapter 4 of his "City of God" is very astute:

Chapter 4.—How Like Kingdoms Without Justice are to Robberies.

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”

 

[Anarchy]

I for one love that I am paying taxes...

Because other people's tax money is what allows me (and others!) to receive disability aid.
Without it, I would not have been able to work through much of my problems at a pace that is acceptable for me.

So... you can see them as abusers. I see them also as caretakers.
Depends on your perspective.

I think I'd better first differentiate between people who are in need of help, and the means by which help (or hindrance) is delivered.


I don't think that there is any doubt that there are people, like you and me, who need help. I've managed to get through the past few years with odd jobbing on the farm. Not everyone has that option, or could put up with doing it, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it either. When I was particularly into isolating, I don't think the cattle appreciated being fed under cover of darkness.

So some form of help is needed - but in what form?

Under the present system, charity would not work, for the following reasons.

• somewhere in the range of 40% to 50% of the product of people's labour is taken by the state, leaving very little for charitable use.
• The purchasing power of people's money savings is constantly being invisibly eroded by money printing (the figure for the united state Dollar is an approximate 98% loss in purchasing power since the foundation of the fe'ral reserve system in 1916), leaving even less available for charity.
• payroll costs and minimum wages mean that it is not possible to provide jobs on a charitable basis to people who are not up to performing at a high level.
• Import restrictions and regulations mean that the costs of goods in the shops (and costs of living) are higher than they otherwise would be.
• The number of people employed administering those and other restrictions means that the productive work force producing useful goods is smaller than it otherwise would have been.

Examples of past practice usually get criticized on the basis of a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, that we enjoy a higher standard of living now than in the past - and this must be because of the state (the cockerel crowing made the sun rise).

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution (with its origins in the free cities of the Netherlands), standards of living have increased at a slowly compounding rate of about 3% per year. Arguably the state with its thieving, its inefficeincy, its restrictions and its wars and corruption, and its bailout of worthless banksters and cronies, has hampered the gradual accumulation of things which actually make life easier.

We see the things which the state has spent stolen money on, but by deffinition we do not see the things that the money would have gone into if it had not been stolen. This is described beautifully in Frederic Bastiat's "parable of the Broken window" repeated, via Henry Hazlitt in Amanda's video here.

Link Removed

Charity was certainly well developed before the states used stolen and counterfeited money to co -opt support for those who needed it (and some like bankers who didn't need it) . There are some fossil example of this, such as educational charities, the Shriner's hospitals http://www.shrinershospitalsforchildren.org/ , and various buildings with carved stone over the doors saying things like "free school" or "Carnegie Library".

What would that charity infrastructure look like now, if the state had not co-opted so much of the resources from society? we will never know.

The reasons for the state co-opting charity are not necessarily good ones.

Recordings and writings by some of the leading "progressives" before the second world war, echo the national socialist propaganda poster which I linked to in the first post (the likes of George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Margaret Sanger etc are on record fawning over Hitler and Musolini's policies), that the less productive in society should be euthanized.

but how to identify those individuals - how to get them onto lists?

In the discussions of the time, state alms was to be a bait to identify those people and get them onto lists for them to be weeded out of the human garden.