Apple to Testify Before Senate on Tax Evasion/Avoidance

[Surrealistik]

Per the title.

Wish I were surprised at the depth and breadth of these allegations, but given the massive off-shoring they've been notorious for I can't say that any of this comes as a shock unfortunately.


Articles:

Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/apple-senate-report-offshore-tax-structure_n_3308741.html?ref=topbar

Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/us-business/apple-parked-billions-in-ireland-to-avoid-taxes-us-senate/article12030686/

New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/senate-panel-is-expected-to-castigate-apple-on-tax-tactics.html?_r=0


{SCRUBBED}

[dehro]

not that I'm opposed to breaching those kind of subjects, but, doesn't this stray dangerously into forum-unfriendly waters?

[The Giant]

You may discuss the story if you steer clear of all political implications, including any hopes for legislative changes that may occur as a result. But consider this a Warning for the thread; anyone who crosses into politics will get an Infraction.

[Karoht]

1-Apple was never the nice company everyone thought they were. All the public saw was the trendy devices, no one seemed to question the little things. Like where the products where being produced, environmental factors, etc. This will drag the Apple brand through the mud, and quickly, as the scrutiny increases. Rich people are fine, rich people who don't pay taxes are kind of a hot button right now.

2-While I don't hold my breath for any particular legislative changes, nor will I speculate on such (both as per the Giants warning and the forum rules), I will speculate that other lawsuits will come out of the woodwork and soon. If someone wanted to counter-sue for things like recent copyright issues (even if it was just to annoy apple and their lawyers), doing so in the middle of a major government audit would likely be the time to do so. Truthfully, I expect to see some representative of Apple talking to the press, looking like someone has a very large thorn twisting away in their side.

Between the two, I see Apple likely to undergo some massive changes at the end of all this. Chances are good that with their next big product release, we will see some serious rebranding efforts.

Truthfully, I feel bad for them. The decision to not pay those taxes is going to hurt a lot of people who had nothing to do with such. The harm will likely be large and long lasting.

[Don Julio Anejo]

Me? I just find it ironic that Apple claims they "provide over 500,000 jobs in the United States" when the number is closer to 50,000 and the vast majority are iNerds working at Apple Stores for minimum wage, with maybe a few hundred to a few thousand design engineers/marketing/admin staff. That in no way supports the American economy, it takes away from it.

That's before you even get into any of the tax evasion (seriously, how is it even possible to claim their taxes in Ireland?).

[warty goblin]

I think I'm at a point where the headline 'giant multinational corporation does bad thing' is about as surprising as 'man walking through piranha filled river dressed only in bacon reduced to skeleton.' Which is to say, it's unfortunate but about as surprising as sunrise.

[HalfTangible]

Me? I just find it ironic that Apple claims they "provide over 500,000 jobs in the United States" when the number is closer to 50,000 and the vast majority are iNerds working at Apple Stores for minimum wage, with maybe a few hundred to a few thousand design engineers/marketing/admin staff. That in no way supports the American economy, it takes away from it.

That's before you even get into any of the tax evasion (seriously, how is it even possible to claim their taxes in Ireland?).As someone with no job, I thoroughly disagree. Minimum wage jobs may suck, but they're still jobs. You still get a paycheck, which is more than than one can say for someone without a job.

Sure, it's not a major boost to our economy to have a ton of minimum wage jobs, but it hardly takes away from the economy.


I think I'm at a point where the headline 'giant multinational corporation does bad thing' is about as surprising as 'man walking through piranha filled river dressed only in bacon reduced to skeleton.' Which is to say, it's unfortunate but about as surprising as sunrise.

This PARTICULAR "bad thing" is kind of surprising, though.

[137beth]

I think I'm at a point where the headline 'giant multinational corporation does bad thing' is about as surprising as 'man walking through piranha filled river dressed only in bacon reduced to skeleton.' Which is to say, it's unfortunate but about as surprising as sunrise.

I disagree: I'd be very surprised if a man dressed only in bacon decided to walk through a piranha filled river. I am not surprised when a giant multinational corporation does __.

[Emperor Ing]

Uhh...as far as I can tell Apple hasn't broken any laws. They simply take a lot of completely legal tax deductions and are being paraded in a show-trial to be made an example of for their "bad citizenship."

[Don Julio Anejo]

As someone with no job, I thoroughly disagree. Minimum wage jobs may suck, but they're still jobs. You still get a paycheck, which is more than than one can say for someone without a job.

Sure, it's not a major boost to our economy to have a ton of minimum wage jobs, but it hardly takes away from the economy.
Actually, it does - it puts a drain on the local economy. A store will always sell more merchandise than it will use to pay its employees (otherwise, it's unprofitable and will close down at some point). Therefore, all the money from locals buying shinies will go to two places: A) China where all the shinies were made, and B) rich people's bank accounts, seeing as Apple hasn't paid (much) corporate tax in the US (paying it in Ireland instead) despite being headquartered in California.

On a macro scale, this means Apple takes away more out of the United States than it puts in. Therefore, it can be construed as exploiting the country for corporate gain, a common problem with colonialism. The only difference is that the country being exploited is the one the company is in.

On a PR side, it means Apple cannot claim to be supporting the American economy, whether by providing jobs or by any other means.

[Worira]

Uhh...as far as I can tell Apple hasn't broken any laws. They simply take a lot of completely legal tax deductions and are being paraded in a show-trial to be made an example of for their "bad citizenship."

Making sure you do all your puppy-kicking in a country with a puppy-kicking loophole in their legal system doesn't make you any less of a puppy-kicker.

[warty goblin]

I disagree: I'd be very surprised if a man dressed only in bacon decided to walk through a piranha filled river. I am not surprised when a giant multinational corporation does __.

Personally, I never try to get into the head of somebody who dresses entirely in raw meat. Either they're Lady Gaga, or things are liable to get really scary.

[Emperor Ing]

Making sure you do all your puppy-kicking in a country with a puppy-kicking loophole in their legal system doesn't make you any less of a puppy-kicker.
That's utterly preposterous! Since when was the mortgage interest deduction and charitable contributions deduction the moral equivalent of puppy-kicking? Even insofar as you could compare the two?!

[Rawhide]

Let me pose a question to anyone upset at any of the companies doing this. If you went overseas and earned $100,000, but then realised that if you brought it back home with you, you'd only have $65,000, what would you do?

[Anarion]

Let me pose a question to anyone upset at any of the companies doing this. If you went overseas and earned $100,000, but then realised that if you brought it back home with you, you'd only have $65,000, what would you do?

I'd come home, probably. Having to live in Ireland to keep my cash seems like a big sacrifice. You'd have to add a 0 or two to your number to make it worthwhile.

That said, there's a wiki entry for the Double Irish arrangement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement) and Apple is hardly the only company taking advantage of it.

[snoopy13a]

I'd come home, probably. Having to live in Ireland to keep my cash seems like a big sacrifice. You'd have to add a 0 or two to your number to make it worthwhile.

That said, there's a wiki entry for the Double Irish arrangement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement) and Apple is hardly the only company taking advantage of it.

I think it helps if you add a Dutch Sandwich. I believe that pretty much all U.S. tech companies use these arrangements.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Double-Irish-With-A-Dutch-Sandwich.html?_r=0

Tax attorneys and accountants are paid big bucks to try and come up with exotic techniques such as the Double Irish. It's sort of akin to Min/Maxers in RPGs, only for real.

[Rawhide]

I'd come home, probably. Having to live in Ireland to keep my cash seems like a big sacrifice. You'd have to add a 0 or two to your number to make it worthwhile.

You could still come back home quite easily without bringing it back home with you.

[Anarion]

Tax attorneys and accountants are paid big bucks to try and come up with exotic techniques such as the Double Irish. It's sort of akin to Min/Maxers in RPGs, only for real.

Well, at least we know how to monetize the forum-goers, should that ever be necessary.


You could still come back home quite easily without bringing it back home with you.

Well, yeah, then I'd totally leave the cash in Ireland then. It takes a brave and very strange soul to straight up donate thousands of dollars to the government when it's not required. Especially since even the most altruistic could instead keep the cash and donate to a cause of his or her choice.

[Tebryn]

Let me pose a question to anyone upset at any of the companies doing this. If you went overseas and earned $100,000, but then realised that if you brought it back home with you, you'd only have $65,000, what would you do?

I'd bring the money back home and pay. Edit: No question.

[The Glyphstone]

A Double Irish Dutch Sandwich sounds either really tasty or incredibly perverted and disgusting, not sure which.

[Emperor Ing]

I'd bring the money back home and pay. Edit: No question.

Would you force others to make that decision if put in a similar situation, even if they didn't want to?

[Tebryn]

Would you force others to make that decision if put in a similar situation, even if they didn't want to?

If it's the law? Yes. I didn't say I'd be -HAPPY- about it mind you. The question posed has little relevance on the situation we're discussing though but other than that...I don't think I can get into it for forum reasons.

[Soras Teva Gee]

Let me pose a question to anyone upset at any of the companies doing this. If you went overseas and earned $100,000, but then realised that if you brought it back home with you, you'd only have $65,000, what would you do?

I know that if I was making six figures overseas I'd have to be making at least six figures back home... or I would have changed homes.

(Seriously folks you can live almost anywhere these days)

So the example in full context could be proportionately smaller.That said the basic point holds up well enough.

And if there ain't no rule broken....

[Don Julio Anejo]

Let me pose a question to anyone upset at any of the companies doing this. If you went overseas and earned $100,000, but then realised that if you brought it back home with you, you'd only have $65,000, what would you do?
This is more akin to you living at home but saying "oh, but I pay my taxes in Ireland" and then not paying any tax home whatsoever, yet having all the advantages of being a US citizen, such as making use of US infrastructure (without paying for it).

If Apple wanted to move to Ireland, they can. Then they'd have to come in and do business in the US as a foreign company, as well as still pay capital gains on whatever money they earned in the US.

This way, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

[Anarion]

This way, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

While this is true, it's something that's available and legal to all sorts of companies, not just Apple. It strikes me as something that needs fixing (hence the discussion and OP), but not something to condemn a company for as long as it's legal.

[Don Julio Anejo]

While this is true, it's something that's available and legal to all sorts of companies, not just Apple. It strikes me as something that needs fixing (hence the discussion and OP), but not something to condemn a company for as long as it's legal.
It utterly violates spirit of the law, even if it follows the letter.

And yes, I do want all companies to be held responsible.

[Rawhide]

Legal tax avoidance happens all the time from companies and individuals. I cannot condemn anyone for making use of legal measures to reduce their tax liability. I can be upset that it's possible, or that it has happened, but not at the companies for doing what anyone would.

Some examples include:
The purchasing of otherwise unnecessary equipment such as computers just before the end of the tax year.
Salary sacrifice arrangements where some of your income gets paid directly to another company rather than you (e.g. straight from the company you work for into your superannuation account, without being income taxed).
Donating money to a charity. (What? You thought companies did this purely out of the goodness of their hearts?)
Sponsoring a charity event. (See above. Also, this gets them advertising.)
Holding money in a business or different business until it is needed.
Holding money earned overseas in an overseas account or business until it is needed because transferring it back will cost more.

This isn't a discussion about whether the laws are wrong, should be fixed, or how - such a discussion is beyond the scope of the forums - but a discussion on what has happened. These companies have taken legal measures to reduce their tax liability, just like nearly everyone (companies and individuals) would.

Have you ever taken advice on how to reduce your income tax?

[Surrealistik]

Legal != ethical.

Of course, there are some that will try to play the 'Gotcha!' hypocrisy card (and have) by pointing out that most people actively work to minimize tax burden, but it is a false equivalency; there is an explicit and obvious difference between the poor to even upper middle class minimizing tax liabilities, people whose quality of life would be materially affected by not doing so, and a massively profitable multinational that can easily afford to pay corporate taxes with standard business deductions and remain massively profitable. Doubly so given its _huge_ cash stockpile of nearly two hundred billion.

While there is absolutely blame to be placed on the tax code, and while Apple, as a corporation, is legally bound to champion the interests of its shareholders, it has ultimately made the decision to go through extensive, egregious contortions and massive international legerdemain to shelter more than 92% of its estimated tax liability. Which households in America can do that? Which households in America making nearly as much money as Apple (with comparable assets and savings) would even _want_ to do that? This is especially outrageous when ~39% of Apple's profits by their own, probably understated admission, came from domestic US sales.

That all said, I can absolutely understand why they engaged in this massive tax avoidance regime, and I recognize that there may even be a legal imperative for them to do so per shareholder obligations, but ultimately Apple's actions were grossly unethical and a complete and obvious violation of the law's spirit.

[Don Julio Anejo]

Some examples include:
The purchasing of otherwise unnecessary equipment such as computers just before the end of the tax year.
Salary sacrifice arrangements where some of your income gets paid directly to another company rather than you (e.g. straight from the company you work for into your superannuation account, without being income taxed).
Donating money to a charity. (What? You thought companies did this purely out of the goodness of their hearts?)
Sponsoring a charity event. (See above. Also, this gets them advertising.)
Holding money in a business or different business until it is needed.
Holding money earned overseas in an overseas account or business until it is needed because transferring it back will cost more.

Many of these have positive side-effects. The main topic? Straight up dodging responsibility. Also, individuals that dodge taxes, even mostly legally, can often go to jail. Companies usually get away with a slap on the wrist, or fines significantly less than the taxes they're owing, and are able to dispute/appeal it a lot of the time.

Using lobbyists and high-end lawyer firms to get what you want is, while legal from a business standpoint, is unethical and in effect no different from spending the same money on bribes from a common sense standpoint and is just a different form of corruption (i.e. companies will usually get what they want anyway, irregardless if its bad for everyone else). In this case, they lawyered up a way to avoid tax on a significant number of their profits, which from a common sense standpoint is the same as hiding income.

[Emperor Ing]

That begs the question: What IS the spirit of the law? That individuals and companies making decisions about how to use their own money that they legally earned is less noble than governments taking and spending more of other people's money?

[Rawhide]

That begs the question: What IS the spirit of the law? That individuals and companies making decisions about how to use their own money that they legally earned is less noble than governments taking and spending more of other people's money?

I think we should stop here and not answer this question. It's frustrating, I know, but we are restricted by the forum rules. My hands too are tied, and it looks like from my posts that I am defending the legislation, as I cannot discuss the legal side of the issue.

I'll reiterate what I said. I cannot condemn companies or individuals for taking legal measures to reduce their tax liability. But we are unable to discuss whether these reductions should exist or be closed.

Friendly reminder of the rules and earlier thread warning, not that anyone has violated it.

[Don Julio Anejo]

I'll reiterate what I said. I cannot condemn companies or individuals for taking legal measures to reduce their tax liability. But we are unable to discuss whether these reductions should exist or be closed.
The big difference is that individuals and small businesses generally do not have the same ability to "dodge" laws as do big corporations.

[Logic]

I highly doubt that anyone would not take advantage of the things are in their best interest, and that includes shaky, but legal, tax loopholes that you qualify for.

[Emperor Ing]

Okay, so let's try and rephrase that.

The spirit of the law can be a rather subjective thing, and can often vary wildly as two nearly identical laws can be made with completely different intentions. With this in mind I don't think it's fair to condemn a company for violating what you think that "spirit" is, and you have to agree it's a waste of Congress', and the Apple Executives' time and money to have to appear on this show-trial in the Senate having committed zero crimes.

Better?

[Soras Teva Gee]

The big difference is that individuals and small businesses generally do not have the same ability to "dodge" laws as do big corporations.

Maybe not the same but do you hear about individual people voluntarily not taking the EIC every April 15th?

[Surrealistik]

I personally reject the usual tired arguments of ethical relativism and solace in legality (or arguments that falsely equate legality with ethics) that certain groups use to defend Apple's tax avoidance schemes, especially in light of the glaring and excessive amounts involved, and the sheer size of its domestic profits.

Even if there is nothing technically illegal about their actions, there is plenty that can be condemned about them as being unethical. To me what they did is only ever defensible in the sense of statutory/shareholder obligations.

Either way, it is absolutely fair for me and others to condemn Apple's practices as being objectionable on the basis that they benefited from US markets to an extent vastly disproportionate to the taxes they paid. Besides this, it's readily apparent that the tax law in question wasn't made with the intention to reduce tax liability otherwise owing by 92+% via complex international arrangements and legal technicalities. People may disagree on both counts, and they may be right that it's a subjective call, but I feel the balance of facts supports my vantage much more strongly than theirs.


Further, on the individual level, using an equivalency that's actually applicable (as opposed to tax deductions pursued as a member of more grounded socio-economic strata), I can comfortably say that were I a multi-billionaire with comparable income and assets, I would not at all mind paying taxes owed after conventional deductions, and I certainly would not seek to minimize my tax liabilities by more than 92%. Why? Because my quality of life is not impacted in the slightest by paying said taxes; not one iota. The hypocrisy/self-interest argument just doesn't fly (for most) when set to this infinitely more appropriate context.

[Don Julio Anejo]

Maybe not the same but do you hear about individual people voluntarily not taking the EIC every April 15th?
I'm in Canada, so I'm not familiar with this, but after some quick Google-Fu, it appears to me that EIC is a specific government tax credit for people to claim based on the number of children they have, and is there to promote them having a job.

So, it's in no way the same as what Apple did. A corporate analogy would be donating money to charity to write off some of their taxes, which almost everyone agrees is generally a good thing (money may not go to the government, but instead returns to people directly).

What Apple did would be akin to saying "I have 5 kids I'm supporting in Africa through Worldvision" and then claiming EIC on them.

[Emperor Ing]

I can comfortably say that were I a multi-billionaire with comparable income and assets, I would not at all mind paying taxes owed after conventional deductions, and I certainly would not seek to minimize my tax liabilities by more than 92%. Why? Because my quality of life is not impacted in the slightest by paying said taxes; not one iota. The hypocrisy/self-interest argument just doesn't fly (for most) when set to this infinitely more appropriate context.

Doesn't matter if you're a multibillionaire or not. There's no moral justification for you imposing your will on another organization, forcing them to pay more money than they otherwise would. Besides, Apple is doing is not only pleasing to shareholders but to consumers. ESPECIALLY to consumers! If Apple suddenly started paying that 92% additional tax "liability," how do you think Apple is going to make up the difference in cost?

Here's the bottom line: Those costs imposed on the company by a higher tax burden would be passed down to the consumer indirectly or directly. Money that would have been spent on R&D and reducing expenses (and thus lowering prices) are instead taken by the government to be spent on any variety of things.

[Anarion]

That all said, I can absolutely understand why they engaged in this massive tax avoidance regime, and I recognize that there may even be a legal imperative for them to do so per shareholder obligations, but ultimately Apple's actions were grossly unethical and a complete and obvious violation of the law's spirit.

I have a philosophical question for you. Is it ever possible, in your opinion, for a person or entity to be in a position where any conduct it takes is grossly unethical, no matter what it chooses to do?

I feel that you're essentially making that claim here. Apple would be called grossly unethical and indeed could be sued by its shareholders if it were aware of a legal tax savings loophole and chose to ignore it. It would quite possibly be treated as an irrational corporate act, the legal equivalent of making a big bonfire out of money (save your Dark Knight references, please).

If taking advantage of the existing tax code after one becomes aware of it is grossly unethical, Apple and many other companies have no course of action open to them that is NOT grossly unethical.

I personally have a problem with that from a philosophical standpoint.


That begs the question: What IS the spirit of the law? That individuals and companies making decisions about how to use their own money that they legally earned is less noble than governments taking and spending more of other people's money?

While Rawhide has suggested not answering this question, I do want to give a couple of quick examples in other places that I think are indicative of the variety.

The first is the Christmas Tree tax break. This is a tax exemption in the tax code that gives a discount to old growth evergreen trees over a certain age. It's structured as if it's broadly applicable, but it actually is written in a way that applies only to sellers of Christmas trees.

The second is the rules on property depreciation. This is a tax rule that when you buy big property like land or heavy equipment, every year you get to take a tax deduction that is designed to represent the loss in value of the asset and the need for repairs, even if the asset worked perfectly that year and did not need any repairs.

Both of these rules are well-known and clearly understood by the IRS. There has never been any allegation that people who take advantage of them are doing anything wrong, and any company that assists with tax preparation would aid a person in taking these credits if they applied.



Either way, it is absolutely fair for me and others to condemn Apple's practices as being objectionable on the basis that they benefited from US markets to an extent vastly disproportionate to the taxes they paid. Besides this, it's readily apparent that the tax law in question wasn't made with the intention to reduce tax liability otherwise owing by 92+% via complex international arrangements and legal technicalities. People may disagree on both counts, and they may be right that it's a subjective call, but I feel the balance of facts supports my vantage much more strongly than theirs.


Further question. Let us hypothesize that instead of a complex loophole leading to a 92% tax deduction, there is instead a very clear and easily understood law stating that corporations like Apple should receive a 92% tax deduction while individuals should continue paying at the same rate. Would you still feel the same way, or would it be different?


Edit:


Here's the bottom line: Those costs imposed on the company by a higher tax burden would be passed down to the consumer indirectly or directly. Money that would have been spent on R&D and reducing expenses (and thus lowering prices) are instead taken by the government to be spent on any variety of things.

This isn't necessarily correct. If Apple has several other competitors, it might have incentives to leave prices the same while reducing shareholder dividends as a result of the tax, or perhaps holding less currency in reserve while maintaining the same level of R&D. Determining whether a given tax would lead to across the board price increases is a difficult prediction to make.

[Surrealistik]

Doesn't matter if you're a multibillionaire or not. There's no moral justification for you imposing your will on another organization, forcing them to pay more money than they otherwise would. Besides, Apple is doing is not only pleasing to shareholders but to consumers. ESPECIALLY to consumers! If Apple suddenly started paying that 92% additional tax "liability," how do you think Apple is going to make up the difference in cost?

Here's the bottom line: Those costs imposed on the company by a higher tax burden would be passed down to the consumer indirectly or directly. Money that would have been spent on R&D and reducing expenses (and thus lowering prices) are instead taken by the government to be spent on any variety of things.

Actually it would probably mean that Apple's massive cash hoard wouldn't compound as quickly, especially in light of their harrowing competition from Samsung et al. There are good reasons Apple's stock price collapsed from its high of $700+ and virtually all of them have to do with competition concerns. It is unlikely that Apple would seek to punish the consumer at the same time they're bleeding out market share.

Second, as a consumer, I'm not at all pleased by egregious tax code abuses, legal or otherwise which ultimately do cost me in the long term vis a vis public services.

Third, we will clearly not agree on what is moral. Society is necessarily built on some level of coercion to avoid the Prisoner Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons, so yes, I do think there are absolutely circumstances under which it is ethical to compel payment beyond what an entity otherwise would pay voluntarily; that is effectively the basis of taxation and civilization.



I have a philosophical question for you. Is it ever possible, in your opinion, for a person or entity to be in a position where any conduct it takes is grossly unethical, no matter what it chooses to do?

Absolutely, though in these cases there usually is a _less_ unethical choice and that is the course of action that should be taken. Paying tax more proportionate to benefits derived from the US market at the potential, even likely but not concrete expense of shareholders in my view is less unethical.

Further there is no true equivalency between this action and outright burning money such that no one benefits; taxes are not paid in vain.

It also may be noted that Apple sought out and vigourously researched such loopholes as opposed to focusing resources expended in this way on other less socially destructive ways to improve profitability.


Further question. Let us hypothesize that instead of a complex loophole leading to a 92% tax deduction, there is instead a very clear and easily understood law stating that corporations like Apple should receive a 92% tax deduction while individuals should continue paying at the same rate. Would you still feel the same way, or would it be different?


Defying the spirit of the law compounds but does not define the heart of Apple's unethical behaviour. As I've stated before, I understand why it acted as it did, and that there are strong legal incentives for those actions, but they are nonetheless unethical.

[Anarion]

Absolutely, though in these cases there usually is a _less_ unethical choice and that is the course of action that should be taken. Paying tax more proportionate to benefits derived from the US market at the potential, even likely but not concrete expense of shareholders in my view is less unethical.
...
...
...

Defying the spirit of the law compounds but does not define the heart of Apple's unethical behaviour. As I've stated before, I understand why it acted as it did, and that there are strong legal incentives for those actions, but they are nonetheless unethical.

Given the limits of this discussion, I must respectfully disagree, but bow out of further argument.

[Worira]

Doesn't matter if you're a multibillionaire or not. There's no moral justification for you imposing your will on another organization, forcing them to pay more money than they otherwise would. Besides, Apple is doing is not only pleasing to shareholders but to consumers. ESPECIALLY to consumers! If Apple suddenly started paying that 92% additional tax "liability," how do you think Apple is going to make up the difference in cost?

Here's the bottom line: Those costs imposed on the company by a higher tax burden would be passed down to the consumer indirectly or directly. Money that would have been spent on R&D and reducing expenses (and thus lowering prices) are instead taken by the government to be spent on any variety of things.

"Pay more money than they otherwise would" here being defined "actually pay taxes on the money they make". And you seem to be missing the option of "make a million zillion dollars instead of a million zillion jillion dollars" here. To think that actually paying their taxes would drive Apple into such dire financial condition that they couldn't maintain a functional operating budget is laughable.

[warty goblin]

Here's the bottom line: Those costs imposed on the company by a higher tax burden would be passed down to the consumer indirectly or directly. Money that would have been spent on R&D and reducing expenses (and thus lowering prices) are instead taken by the government to be spent on any variety of things.

A lot of very large corporations are making money hand over fist right now. Many of them aren't pouring unusually large amounts of it into R&D, higher wages, increased hiring, reducing prices or anything else that particularly benefits consumers. They're just tossing it into banks, or buying their own stock back to drive up the price.

The profit margin on an iPad is already (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9150045/Apple_makes_208_on_each_499_iPad) about fifty percent (http://www.slashgear.com/apples-profit-margin-down-on-new-ipad-09217712/), and they've got about a hundred billion in the bank. If Apple wanted to make things cheaper, they could do it in a flat minute. They don't, because they can make more money keeping it pricey. Which is fine, they're running a business; but I find it highly dubious that them shuffling money around to avoid paying taxes in any way benefits the general welfare.

[Emperor Ing]

This isn't necessarily correct. If Apple has several other competitors, it might have incentives to leave prices the same while reducing shareholder dividends as a result of the tax, or perhaps holding less currency in reserve while maintaining the same level of R&D. Determining whether a given tax would lead to across the board price increases is a difficult prediction to make.


Actually it would probably mean that Apple's massive cash hoard wouldn't compound as quickly, especially in light of their harrowing competition from Samsung et al. There are good reasons Apple's stock price collapsed from its high of $700+ and virtually all of them have to do with competition concerns. It is unlikely that Apple would seek to punish the consumer at the same time they're bleeding out market share.
As I said, indirect costs to the consumer. Something you won't see but it'll affect you nontheless. Besides savings exist for the purpose of paying for future expenditures, usually as a hedge against extraordinary events such as natural disasters or the like that may incur huge expenses. Companies don't just hoard money for the sake of hoarding money, i'm 98% sure Apple's executives aren't dragons. Besides there's no real incentive, nor any reason I can think of for Apple to either raid their rainy-day fund, their R&D budget, or raise their prices except to pay for costs they don't even have to incur. So I ask why even have a higher tax burden in the first place?



Third, we will clearly not agree on what is moral. Society is necessarily built on some level of coercion to avoid the Prisoner Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons, so yes, I do think there are absolutely circumstances under which it is ethical to compel payment beyond what an entity otherwise would pay voluntarily; that is effectively the basis of taxation and civilization.
Civilization exists as a means for a group to enter into mutually beneficial economic arrangements. It's a system of incentives where people looking out for their own best interests are going to do things which benefit the whole. The problem with coercion is that you lose the incentive to be competitive with others who may be able to perform the same function. If you need to "compel payment beyond what an entity otherwise would pay voluntarily" that tells me what they're being compelled to pay for isn't worth buying.

Consider this: which company is more likely to offer lower their prices and offer a better service? One that has to earn its revenue by providing the services that people want to voluntarily buy, or one with guaranteed revenue it gains through force?

And who do you trust more? Someone who's willing to put their own money where their mouth is, or someone who's willing to only put other people's money where their mouth is?


"Pay more money than they otherwise would" here being defined "actually pay taxes on the money they make". And you seem to be missing the option of "make a million zillion dollars instead of a million zillion jillion dollars" here. To think that actually paying their taxes would drive Apple into such dire financial condition that they couldn't maintain a functional operating budget is laughable.

:smallconfused: they are paying taxes. Lots, in fact.

[tyckspoon]

As I said, indirect costs to the consumer. Something you won't see but it'll affect you nontheless. Besides savings exist for the purpose of paying for future expenditures, usually as a hedge against extraordinary events such as natural disasters or the like that may incur huge expenses. Companies don't just hoard money for the sake of hoarding money, i'm 98% sure Apple's executives aren't dragons. Besides there's no real incentive, nor any reason I can think of for Apple to either raid their rainy-day fund, their R&D budget, or raise their prices except to pay for costs they don't even have to incur. So I ask why even have a higher tax burden in the first place?


Many of the US's most successful companies have record amounts of cash-on-hand right now. That would be money that is *not* being spent on anything, and has no projected plans for being spent on anything - not new infrastructure investment, not research, not even increased dividends for their stockholders. They are, in fact, hoarding money for the sake of hoarding money.

[Emperor Ing]

Many of the US's most successful companies have record amounts of cash-on-hand right now. That would be money that is *not* being spent on anything, and has no projected plans for being spent on anything - not new infrastructure investment, not research, not even increased dividends for their stockholders. They are, in fact, hoarding money for the sake of hoarding money.

And what makes you so certain that money WON'T be spent on any of those things in the future?

[Surrealistik]

As I said, indirect costs to the consumer. Something you won't see but it'll affect you nontheless. Besides savings exist for the purpose of paying for future expenditures, usually as a hedge against extraordinary events such as natural disasters or the like that may incur huge expenses. Companies don't just hoard money for the sake of hoarding money, i'm 98% sure Apple's executives aren't dragons. Besides there's no real incentive, nor any reason I can think of for Apple to either raid their rainy-day fund, their R&D budget, or raise their prices except to pay for costs they don't even have to incur. So I ask why even have a higher tax burden in the first place?

What's going to affect me more, even in the extremely unlikely event that Apple seeks to penalize the consumer by increasing prices and/or defund R&D despite a backdrop of fierce competition where they're losing ground: the slowing growth of Apple's cash hoard or the fact that they stiffed the federal government which provides valuable services to me of nearly a hundred billion?


Civilization exists as a means for a group to enter into mutually beneficial economic arrangements. It's a system of incentives where people looking out for their own best interests are going to do things which benefit the whole. The problem with coercion is that you lose the incentive to be competitive with others who may be able to perform the same function. If you need to "compel payment beyond what an entity otherwise would pay voluntarily" that tells me what they're being compelled to pay for isn't worth buying.

No, it tells me that they're being forced to act in a way that works in the best long term interests of broader society rather than in a capacity of myopic and immediate self-interest. If you're not familiar with the extremely important game theory premise of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the related economics concept Tragedy of the Commons, I strongly recommend you become acquainted. This is what societal coercion protects against, and why it is necessary.

Second, civilization can and has only ever been demonstrated to function on a large scale, to the best of my knowledge, via binding means of coercion in the form of rule of law (including but not limited to regulatory elements), and compelled taxation which supports the mechanisms of legislation and enforcement.


Consider this: which company is more likely to offer lower their prices and offer a better service? One that has to earn its revenue by providing the services that people want to voluntarily buy, or one with guaranteed revenue it gains through force?

The former typically, but the problem is that the profit motive isn't always applicable. In some cases, it is outright toxic and creates perverse incentives; private prisons encouraging recidivism as an example, the obvious unthinkable case of 'private' law enforcement/disaster response, and health care in my view. Monopolies are another instance where profit motives are undesirable as perverse incentives naturally arise to maximally exploit that situation in contrast to public oversight.

Further this is an oversimplified misrepresentation of taxation and government in a democratic state because they are (presumably, and ideally) representative. Taxes are obligatory and coercive, but the people _do_ have a collective say in how those taxes are spent and dispersed through their elected officials.


And who do you trust more? Someone who's willing to put their own money where their mouth is, or someone who's willing to only put other people's money where their mouth is?

I trust the entity who presumably champions the collective, democratic will of the people rather than (nakedly, even statutorily) their own self-interest.

[Emperor Ing]

No, it tells me that they're being forced to act in a way that works in the best long term interests of broader society rather than in a capacity of myopic and immediate self-interest.
But then who determines what "the best long term interests of [the] broader society?" And how do we know this person is correct, and how do we prevent them from abusing their power?

If you're not familiar with the extremely important game theory premise of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the related economics concept Tragedy of the Commons, I strongly recommend you become acquainted. This is what societal coercion protects against, and why it is necessary.
I know them, but I didn't feel like mentioning them because they fit into my point about incentives rather well. The Prisoner's Dilemma is an argument in favor of collusion, and the Tragedy of the Commons illustrates the folly of Collectivism and illustrates why we should have private property rights perfectly.



The former typically, but the problem is that the profit motive isn't always applicable. In some cases, it is outright toxic and creates perverse incentives;
When subjected to market forces, providers have incentive to provide products, goods, and services that are as cheap and efficient as possible. What you describe is the absense of market forces and the presence of privatization. Under these circumstances it's no wonder it's "toxic." This is especially true in healthcare. Look at Laser Eye Surgery, which is heavily un-regulated, yet cost continually goes down and efficiency goes up.



Further this is a misrepresentation of taxation and government because they are (presumably, and ideally) representative. Taxes are obligatory and coercive, but the people _do_ have a collective say in how those taxes are spent and dispersed through their elected officials.
No, we don't. At best we have representatives we elect, but there's no guarantee that who you vote for will win, and even if he does win, that he'll do what want, or that the collective of representatives won't go against the will of the collective. Imagine shopping at a grocery store. Instead of picking out what brands and what prodcuts you want when you want it, you vote for people to pick out your groceries on your behalf. The best you can do is vote for someone who you think will pick out more of the brands you want to buy. There's no guarantee you'll win, and even if you do you can't guarantee that the grocer you voted for will always pick out what you want for you, or that his picks wont be overruled by the other duly elected grocers.


I trust the entity who presumably champions the collective, democratic will of the people rather than their own self-interest.
This is hugely immoral, since it dehumanizes the individual and delegitimizes his interests.

[Don Julio Anejo]

But then who determines what "the best long term interests of [the] broader society?" And how do we know this person is correct, and how do we prevent them from abusing their power?
No-one does, however it is generally accepted that needs of the many as provided by the government such as education, healthcare (even in the US, heavily subsidized by the government), or social services are generally worth a portion of everyone's income.

It is one and often subjective thing to argue over the specifics such as what fraction of the income is owed, or where the government should spend its money, and entirely another for an individual/organization to decide (for themselves) that their needs to make/keep money trump collective needs and abstain from paying the majority of their owed taxes.

That is, people are justified in complaining that the government spends too much money on, say, defense. It is entirely another to stop paying taxes so you have more money, and use your opinion that the government spends too much money on defense as a justification.

This is hugely immoral, since it dehumanizes the individual and delegitimizes his interests.
And this implies that interests of one (arbitrarily chosen) individual are always more important than interests of other individuals that are directly or indirectly affected by his actions. I.e. as an extreme scenario, I choose to pay less taxes than what I'm technically owed, and because of this there isn't enough money in a hospital to cure a patient.

Government interests are generally more legitimate than those of an individual corporation; a government must (at least in theory) act in the best interests of the entire country, while a corporation must only do so in its own interests.

[warty goblin]

Civilization exists as a means for a group to enter into mutually beneficial economic arrangements. It's a system of incentives where people looking out for their own best interests are going to do things which benefit the whole.

No, that's capitalism, which is a particular form of economic maximization employed by some modern nation-states. It's pretty much separable from civilization. The silver that fueled Athens' golden age was not mined by people looking out for their own best interests in a system of incentives. Unless we're counting slaves trying not to get beaten as people looking out for their own best interest in a system of incentives. Which we could, but it's really got sod-all to do with taxes.

The problem with coercion is that you lose the incentive to be competitive with others who may be able to perform the same function. If you need to "compel payment beyond what an entity otherwise would pay voluntarily" that tells me what they're being compelled to pay for isn't worth buying.
Not really, it just means given the choice a person or organization will generally let somebody else pay for it. It's how we get to have nice things like roads and police and fire departments and standing armies and laws and all the other things that let businesses actually function. It's not even like a corporation is a physical entity, its entire existence is a legal abstraction, which is given meaning entirely by the force of government.


Consider this: which company is more likely to offer lower their prices and offer a better service? One that has to earn its revenue by providing the services that people want to voluntarily buy, or one with guaranteed revenue it gains through force?

For things where competition actually incentivezes lower costs and better services, the competitive option. For the wide, wide variety of things where this isn't true, I prefer the option where efficiency is the benchmark, not shareholder dividends. Profit is, in some respects, just signs of inefficiency in the market system after all.

[Tebryn]

This is hugely immoral, since it dehumanizes the individual and delegitimizes his interests.

And putting the interests of the individual or self above the collective human species is better? I mean...you tell me. You're the one making value judgments here.

[Emperor Ing]

Government interests are generally more legitimate than those of an individual corporation; a government must (at least in theory) act in the best interests of the entire country, while a corporation must only do so in its own interests.
When did it become more noble for an entity to spend other people's money it got through force, and whose shortcomings are detrimental to the whole of society, than for an entity to spend their own money that they earned, and whose shortcomings effect a much smaller group of people? If this is the case, then why have corporations at all?


No, that's capitalism, which is a particular form of economic maximization employed by some modern nation-states. It's pretty much separable from civilization. The silver that fueled Athens' golden age was not mined by people looking out for their own best interests in a system of incentives. Unless we're counting slaves trying not to get beaten as people looking out for their own best interest in a system of incentives. Which we could, but it's really got sod-all to do with taxes.
If people didn't have an incentive to form civilization, then civilization wouldn't exist at all, now would it?


Not really, it just means given the choice a person or organization will generally let somebody else pay for it. It's how we get to have nice things like roads and police and fire departments and standing armies and laws and all the other things that let businesses actually function. It's not even like a corporation is a physical entity, its entire existence is a legal abstraction, which is given meaning entirely by the force of government.
It's a fallacy to think that just because we've been seeing the government do all these things for so long means only the government is capable of it. Besides, what the government is doing right now is called "crowding out."


For things where competition actually incentivezes lower costs and better services, the competitive option. For the wide, wide variety of things where this isn't true, I prefer the option where efficiency is the benchmark, not shareholder dividends. Profit is, in some respects, just signs of inefficiency in the market system after all.
I didn't say "competition" I said "market forces." there's a difference. Besides profits are revenue minus expenses. If it's not running on a profit than the market isn't ready for it.

And putting the interests of the individual or self above the collective human species is better? I mean...you tell me. You're the one making value judgments here.
I guess I am making value judgments. But when society values the individual over the collective, they both benefit. When society values the collective over the individual, they both suffer.

[Tebryn]

I guess I am making value judgments. But when society values the individual over the collective, they both benefit. When society values the collective over the individual, they both suffer.

Allow me to say then that I'm very glad the human species nature doesn't operate the way you think it does.

[Surrealistik]

But then who determines what "the best long term interests of [the] broader society?" And how do we know this person is correct, and how do we prevent them from abusing their power?

The electorate within Constitutional or Charter constraints of a democracy. It's not a perfect system, it clearly isn't infallible, but it's the best one we have.


I know them, but I didn't feel like mentioning them because they fit into my point about incentives rather well. The Prisoner's Dilemma is an argument in favor of collusion, and the Tragedy of the Commons illustrates the folly of Collectivism and illustrates why we should have private property rights perfectly.

To the contrary, both explicitly detail the importance and necessity of coercion that balances individual rights with the common good. It is a fallacy that stringently enforced private property rights alone can protect against Tragedy of the Commons (TotC); the environment is a classic example. Environmental integrity is a shared and limited resource that makes all the sense in the world to exploit on an unlimited basis at the immediate, individual level. I'm sure you would argue that polluters can be sued via private civil suits, but there are a number of issues with that view:

First of all, it is an unfortunate truism of the justice system that legal expenditures are strongly correlated with success. Money can effectively be used as a legal and coercive bludgeon. While this is true of many existent legal frameworks, preventative regulation eliminates much need for statutory disputes and bullying in the first place.

Second, it can be extremely hard to prove culpability. Can you prove that a specific factory owner is responsible for your elevated particulate levels? For your acid rain? Consequently, only the most obvious and egregious violations that occur in relation to direct defilement of private property are likely to be pursued; in the meanwhile, large scale environmental degradation continues unabated.

Third, civil suits are almost completely reactive and only weakly proactive (fear of legal reprisal). Often when the suits are filed, if they're ever filed and ever have adequate evidence to go to court, the damage is already done; people have already been harmed. This is a glaring weakness of regulatory absence as a rule.

Fourth, huge quantities of money are wasted on costly civil suits whereas regulation (especially as per #2) would preclude the need for most of them.

Fifth, the US already has a system of civil liability that can hold companies accountable. It has not stopped environmental degradation, even in conjunction with preventative legislation. This doesn't speak to the failure of regulation, so much as the greater harm that would result on its theoretical repeal. How, especially in light of the above weaknesses, would civil prosecution alone better act to protect the environment and obviate TotC?


When subjected to market forces, providers have incentive to provide products, goods, and services that are as cheap and efficient as possible. What you describe is the absense of market forces and the presence of privatization. Under these circumstances it's no wonder it's "toxic." This is especially true in healthcare. Look at Laser Eye Surgery, which is heavily un-regulated, yet cost continually goes down and efficiency goes up.

No True Scotsman doesn't quite apply here. It is self-evident that private prison systems have a perverse incentive to encourage recidivism because it makes for repeat business. It is self-evident that privatized police and emergency response feature perverse incentives that results in unconscionable disparities in protection and law enforcement; likewise with health care; people are served these essential services in accordance with their ability to pay. This isn't a result of corporatism or distortive legislation, or an absence of the free market and market forces but the incentives that naturally arise from how such services are structured, and how they make their money. And no, you can't rely on charity to make up for the disparities that would arise.

That said, there is a broad diversity of services and even sub-sections of these specific elements of society that could and probably should be serviced by the private sector, but it is absolutely wrong and disingenuous in my view to argue that there is no such thing as perverse incentives in relation to profit motive which result in and encourage grossly unethical behaviour.


No, we don't. At best we have representatives we elect, but there's no guarantee that who you vote for will win, and even if he does win, that he'll do what want, or that the collective of representatives won't go against the will of the collective. Imagine shopping at a grocery store. Instead of picking out what brands and what prodcuts you want when you want it, you vote for people to pick out your groceries on your behalf. The best you can do is vote for someone who you think will pick out more of the brands you want to buy. There's no guarantee you'll win, and even if you do you can't guarantee that the grocer you voted for will always pick out what you want for you, or that his picks wont be overruled by the other duly elected grocers.

Sure. As previously mentioned, democracy is inherently flawed, there will always be stuff the government pays for which we object to, and the individual will never be fully heard but it is still representative of the general will as a rule when properly functioning. It is clearly a bad system, but one that thus far appears superior to all the rest. I would sooner be a part of a representative democracy with a strong Charter of ethical axioms (freedom of speech, etc...) than a lawless anarchy or brutal tyranny which tend to devolve to a horrifying rule of force rather than law. The key thing is that the people do have a voice, they can effect their will, and they can peacefully change their governance.


This is hugely immoral, since it dehumanizes the individual and delegitimizes his interests.

I disagree. Siding with collective society in a chartered, representative democracy as a rule (there is nuance here; in the case of rights/charter violations, I obviously don't support society) over the individual doesn't dehumanize him and only delegitimizes or otherwise limits pursuit of his interests so far as the electorate, within the constraints of a charter of rights, determines that those limits benefit the common good. Again, I ultimately believe that individual freedoms need to have limits in order for society to function, to avoid TotC pitfalls, and to prosper sustainably in the long term, and I am steadfast in this conviction; you do not and are likewise stubborn in this view. We will never agree, nor will we convince each other otherwise. I don't think any further dispute of this point will serve a meaningful purpose.

[Emperor Ing]

The electorate within Constitutional or Charter constraints of a democracy. It's not a perfect system, nor is it infallible but it's the best system we have.
Must...resist...urge...to..get...into...this...:sm alleek:



To the contrary, both explicitly detail the importance and necessity of coercion that balances individual rights with the common good. It is a fallacy that stringently enforced private property rights alone can protect against Tragedy of the Commons (TotC); the environment is a classic example. Environmental integrity is a shared and limited resource that makes all the sense in the world to exploit on an unlimited basis at the immediate, individual level. I'm sure you would argue that polluters can be sued via private civil suits, but there are a number of issues with that view:
If this is so then i'd like to see what happens when you try dumping your radioactive sludge into someone's backyard :smallwink:


That said, there is a broad diversity of services and even sub-sections of these elements of society that could and probably should be serviced by the private sector, but it is absolutely wrong and disingenuous my view to argue that there is no such thing as perverse incentives in relation to profit motive which result in and encourage grossly unethical behavior.
So...wait. Are you saying you think people want to be abused when they voluntarily purchase products, goods, and services?


Sure. As previously mentioned, democracy is inherently flawed, there will always be stuff the government pays for which we object to, and the individual will never be fully heard but it is still representative of the general will as a rule when properly functioning. It is clearly a bad system, but one that thus far appears superior to all the rest. I would sooner be a part of a representative democracy with a strong Charter of ethical axioms (freedom of speech, etc...) than a lawless anarchy or brutal tyranny which tend to devolve to a horrifying rule of force rather than law.
I would agree, but it's by no means an excuse for complacency as totalitarian regimes have risen from democracies in the past. I'd like to say more but in all honesty we should probably cut this part of the discussion as it's a bit too close to the politics rule for my comfort.


I disagree. Siding collective society in a chartered, representative democracy as a rule (there is nuance here; in the case of rights/charter violations, I obviously don't support society) over the individual doesn't dehumanize the him and only delegitimizes or otherwise limits pursuit of his interests so far as the electorate, within the constraints of a charter of rights, determines that those limits benefit the common good. Again, I ultimately believe that individual freedoms need to have limits in order for society to function, to avoid TotC pitfalls, and to prosper sustainably in the long term, and I am steadfast in this conviction; you do not and are likewise stubborn in this view. We will never agree, nor will we convince each other otherwise. I don't think any further dispute of this point will serve a meaningful purpose.
Just answer me this: The way I see this collective vs individual dispute, it's accurate to characterize this as an equality vs liberty dispute. Do you think this is accurate?

[Surrealistik]

If this is so then i'd like to see what happens when you try dumping your radioactive sludge into someone's backyard :smallwink:

But that's the thing; environmental protection predicated entirely on civil suits can only ever work well in the most obvious and egregious cases, and only where private property is involved.


So...wait. Are you saying you think people want to be abused when they voluntarily purchase products, goods, and services?

No, I'm saying that there are essential services where the profit motive gives rise to perverse incentives to engage in unethical behaviour; I provided a couple of specific examples. It's not that people pay to be abused, it's that these essential services end up unethically distributed on the basis of one's ability to pay.


Just answer me this: The way I see this collective vs individual dispute, it's accurate to characterize this as an equality vs liberty dispute. Do you think this is accurate?

No. To be honest, it's hard to answer this without my biases showing, but suffice it to say that I don't take the side of equality so much as moderation and progress. I don't believe in unrestrained rule of the mob, but I likewise also don't believe in unrestrained individual liberties; both are adverse and destructive extremes.

[Emperor Ing]

But that's the thing; environmental protection predicated entirely on civil suits can only ever work well in the most obvious and egregious cases, and only where private property is involved.
And that's my point. If someone owns the lake and they have people pay them to use it (like fishermen or jet-ski rentals) then both parties have an incentive to keep the lake clean. Alternatively the fisherman, jet-ski rental place, and the rich guy can own shares of the lake, like joint ownership. The incentives to keep the lake clean are the same, and both situations are protected under private property rights.



No, I'm saying that there are essential services where the profit incentive gives rise to perverse incentives to engage in unethical behaviour; I provided a couple of specific examples. It's not that people pay to be abused, it's that these essential services end up unethically distributed on the basis of one's ability to pay.
Keep in mind "essential" is a meaningless term. I know what you mean, but you see people making the same argument regarding clothiers or grocery stores the way they argue about healthcare? But I digress.

Services do end up distributed based on one's ability to pay. That's how the price system works, and everywhere you go you can't escape it. It's no more unethical than anything else. Most poor people aren't going out to eat Filet Mignon every Friday night for good reason. Their ability to pay is far less than that of a family who earns a combined 7-figure annual salary. But that by no means means that if things need to be paid for, that money can't be procured. Advance payment from work, charitable grants from organizations, friends, family, associates, or even some money you saved up just in case this sort of thing would happen. This is the kind of thing that happens independent of government.


No. To be honest, it's hard to answer this without my biases showing, but suffice it to say that I don't take the side of equality so much as moderation and progress. I don't believe in unrestrained rule of the mob, but I likewise also don't believe in unrestrained individual liberties; both are adverse and destructive extremes. The way I see it, so long as the individual is free to exercise their liberties so long as these liberties are not coercive or restricting of another's liberties, that's how I see it. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, when society focuses on liberty, you don't necessarily end up with a lot of equality. But you'll get more equality than in any kind of system that has ever been developed.

[Surrealistik]

And that's my point. If someone owns the lake and they have people pay them to use it (like fishermen or jet-ski rentals) then both parties have an incentive to keep the lake clean. Alternatively the fisherman, jet-ski rental place, and the rich guy can own shares of the lake, like joint ownership. The incentives to keep the lake clean are the same, and both situations are protected under private property rights.

So in otherwords, you believe that all land should be privately owned? It's a pipe dream to be sure, and besides, even if that impossible hurdle was cleared there are still obvious issues with ambiguity and provable culpability. Say you own a vast tract of the ocean which has seen elevated pollution levels; who do you hold accountable? What about acid rain? It just doesn't work to counter macro level environmental degradation. Likewise, virtually every one of the flaws I'd pointed out remain.



Keep in mind "essential" is a meaningless term. I know what you mean, but you see people making the same argument regarding clothiers or grocery stores the way they argue about healthcare? But I digress.

Services do end up distributed based on one's ability to pay. That's how the price system works, and everywhere you go you can't escape it. It's no more unethical than anything else. Most poor people aren't going out to eat Filet Mignon every Friday night for good reason. Their ability to pay is far less than that of a family who earns a combined 7-figure annual salary. But that by no means means that if things need to be paid for, that money can't be procured. Advance payment from work, charitable grants from organizations, friends, family, associates, or even some money you saved up just in case this sort of thing would happen. This is the kind of thing that happens independent of government.

Essential is not a meaningless term; essentials are those key services that are required for an individual to enjoy key Chartered/Constitutional rights. A right to life, right to a fair trial, right to property, freedom of speech, etc... if for example, the police enforce based on your ability to pay them, then rights are by nature asymmetrically upheld, and they only have value and merit so long as you can afford them. Health care is obviously bound to the right to life. In otherwords, privatizing these things results in perverse incentives to violate or ignore the integrity and indomitably of rights.

Further, government social safety nets in most of the first world do provide the minimums required for food, clothing and shelter so these essentials are likewise covered.

Second, there are, as previously mentioned, elements that the profit motive cannot ethically service due to the issue of perverse incentive, essential or not, such as prisons.


The way I see it, so long as the individual is free to exercise their liberties so long as these liberties are not coercive or restricting of another's liberties, that's how I see it. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, when society focuses on liberty, you don't necessarily end up with a lot of equality. But you'll get more equality than in any kind of system that has ever been developed.

Milton Friedman's ideological biases aside, when society focuses on liberty to what extent? Like anything, liberty is disastrous when taken to an extreme (anarchy). Further, if we look at inequality adjusted HDI, and the Gini Index, freedom is clearly only correlated with equality up until a certain point. Obviously there is a happy medium and a balance between the broader society and individual rights to pursue and uphold, but the axioms of Constitutional and Charter rights alone do not and have never truly defined the most advantageous constraints for individual liberties so much as they do the things that should be kept inviolable.

[Soras Teva Gee]

I'm in Canada, so I'm not familiar with this, but after some quick Google-Fu, it appears to me that EIC is a specific government tax credit for people to claim based on the number of children they have, and is there to promote them having a job.

So, it's in no way the same as what Apple did. A corporate analogy would be donating money to charity to write off some of their taxes, which almost everyone agrees is generally a good thing (money may not go to the government, but instead returns to people directly).

What Apple did would be akin to saying "I have 5 kids I'm supporting in Africa through Worldvision" and then claiming EIC on them.

I (without dependents) claim the Earned Income Credit and as a result have never actually paid taxes to the government. I in fact get money back. Nor is this uncommon, its actually something of a default.

I (supposedly anyways) pay in other ways such is the madness of the American tax code. Its length is infamous and the EIC only one of the many and varied gimmes or gimmes hiding behind structural schemes like the lower rates on investments. And a few penalties around too.

The point is I do not feel motivated to pay the government money I don't have to so I claim the credit wham my taxes disappear. And I know dang well I will never feel so motivated to give anything more then what the law requires. It is completely and totally selfish and I don't expect anything less out of anyone else... because that would mean I'd have to open myself to the idea that I should maybe pay more because I'm on the wrong side of some divide that needs correcting.

So when it comes to taxes literally the only evasion or dodging I see... is well actual criminal evasion.

[Don Julio Anejo]

I (without dependents) claim the Earned Income Credit and as a result have never actually paid taxes to the government. I in fact get money back. Nor is this uncommon, its actually something of a default.

I (supposedly anyways) pay in other ways such is the madness of the American tax code. Its length is infamous and the EIC only one of the many and varied gimmes or gimmes hiding behind structural schemes like the lower rates on investments. And a few penalties around too.

The point is I do not feel motivated to pay the government money I don't have to so I claim the credit wham my taxes disappear. And I know dang well I will never feel so motivated to give anything more then what the law requires. It is completely and totally selfish and I don't expect anything less out of anyone else... because that would mean I'd have to open myself to the idea that I should maybe pay more because I'm on the wrong side of some divide that needs correcting.

So when it comes to taxes literally the only evasion or dodging I see... is well actual criminal evasion.
I, and almost anyone else, would do the same thing should this option exist. However the way you described it (i.e., "it's something of a default"), it seems to me it's still used more or less the way it's intended. While I don't know the specifics, I highly doubt you could still claim EIC if your income was, say, above $200,000 (or else all the rich people would just claim EIC as well and not pay much tax), and seems to be just another form of tax credit for lower (to mid or whatever) income brackets.

You're still not doing it in the way Apple did (a rich person claiming to support a few dozen kids in Zimbabwe through the whole "a dollar a day" thing and therefore having 60% of their tax written off).

Also, this precise example is the problem of tragedy of commons. It's benefits the individual (i.e. you/me), but it hurts the overall collective (i.e. our community) because now the government has less money to spend on useful/essential government services (we both know bureaucrats aren't going to cut their own salaries).

[ThirdEmperor]

All else aside, I hope Apple loses a ton of money. Would only serve them right after all those lawsuits they leveled against random small businesses for impinging upon their 'brand'.

[Soras Teva Gee]

I, and almost anyone else, would do the same thing should this option exist. However the way you described it (i.e., "it's something of a default"), it seems to me it's still used more or less the way it's intended. While I don't know the specifics, I highly doubt you could still claim EIC if your income was, say, above $200,000 (or else all the rich people would just claim EIC as well and not pay much tax), and seems to be just another form of tax credit for lower (to mid or whatever) income brackets.

You're still not doing it in the way Apple did (a rich person claiming to support a few dozen kids in Zimbabwe through the whole "a dollar a day" thing and therefore having 60% of their tax written off).

Also, this precise example is the problem of tragedy of commons. It's benefits the individual (i.e. you/me), but it hurts the overall collective (i.e. our community) because now the government has less money to spend on useful/essential government services (we both know bureaucrats aren't going to cut their own salaries).

To be blunt I don't care how they did it excepting that it was actually illegal.

I do not care that they are the big evil rich corporate overlord.

I do not expect corporations big small or otherwise to ever act except for their own interest. If I wish to restain a particular variation of that... I must seek redress elsewhere.

[Karoht]

"Pay more money than they otherwise would" here being defined "actually pay taxes on the money they make". And you seem to be missing the option of "make a million zillion dollars instead of a million zillion jillion dollars" here. To think that actually paying their taxes would drive Apple into such dire financial condition that they couldn't maintain a functional operating budget is laughable.

This is where I laugh as well.
The idea that paying taxes legitimately would make a company no longer profitable seems like a poor position for them to take. I highly doubt it will come up in the court case, mind you.

"But, if we actually followed the rules we wouldn't be profitable!"
I've heard this defense from truckers, contractors, tradespeople, accountants... I do tire of it rapidly.
Other companies follow the rules, pay taxes normally, and are not nearly as profitable. In theory, Apple holds a competative advantage by ignoring the rules while another company has a reduced competative ability by playing the rules.

Sports example:
A foul ball in baseball counts as a strike.
The foul line is actually the shortest distance to hit the ball out of the park, which is an automatic home run.
Team A has power hitters aiming for the foul line, the umpire is not counting their fouls as strikes, and anything that goes over the fence, even on the foul side, is still counting as a home run.
Team B has power hitters aiming for the center field (the longer distance to hit the ball out of the park), and their hits over the foul line still count as strikes.
Team A: "We wouldn't be league champions every year if we followed the rules!"

The phrase "if you aren't cheating you aren't trying" comes to mind, but sounds rather repugnant in this context.

[SteveMB]

To be fair, if one company tries to do what most people consider "fair" (over and above what is legally required) while everybody else follows the strict letter of the law (taking advantage of every loophole and ambiguity), the one company is going to be hit with a competitive handicap. They might be able to make up the difference with public goodwill; they might not.

[Surrealistik]

To be fair, if one company tries to do what most people consider "fair" (over and above what is legally required) while everybody else follows the strict letter of the law (taking advantage of every loophole and ambiguity), the one company is going to be hit with a competitive handicap. They might be able to make up the difference with public goodwill; they might not.

Which ties into statutory shareholder obligation.

But even in the capacity of tax avoidance for the sake of maximizing competitiveness with regards to those obligations, it is worth noting Apple's that methods are novel and substantially exceed those tax minimizing regimes of industry peers such as Microsoft and Google in size, complexity, scope and effect who were likewise investigated, neither of which tries to claim a complete absence of tax residency.

[Emperor Ing]

So in otherwords, you believe that all land should be privately owned? It's a pipe dream to be sure, and besides, even if that impossible hurdle was cleared there are still obvious issues with ambiguity and provable culpability. Say you own a vast tract of the ocean which has seen elevated pollution levels; who do you hold accountable? What about acid rain? It just doesn't work to counter macro level environmental degradation. Likewise, virtually every one of the flaws I'd pointed out remain.
Keep in mind part of the way the free market works is that no one person can know how it works. I can't have all the answers, and if what i'm saying is correct, then that's an argument for making me Emperor of the Universe. What I speculate might happen is that in order to gain the rights to pollute in the first place, the owners of the ocean or the air may have a contract set up with people whose pollution must be deposited somewhere. If pollution levels become too high they might ask for higher payments or reducing pollution, or that both set up an agreement with another company that is paid to clean up the air or clean up the water.



Essential is not a meaningless term; essentials are those key services that are required for an individual to enjoy key Chartered/Constitutional rights. A right to life, right to a fair trial, right to property, freedom of speech, etc... if for example, the police enforce based on your ability to pay them, then rights are by nature asymmetrically upheld, and they only have value and merit so long as you can afford them. Health care is obviously bound to the right to life. In otherwords, privatizing these things results in perverse incentives to violate or ignore the integrity and indomitably of rights.
I think you're arguing for a fundamental fallacy regarding human rights. If rights are bestowed by Man, then Man can take them away. If rights are asymmetrically applied then you're in a situation where you're taking the responsibility of individuals for their own rights and placing them on someone else's shoulders.

Rights don't come from man, they come from nature.


Further, government social safety nets in most of the first world do provide the minimums required for food, clothing and shelter so these essentials are likewise covered.
At what cost?


Second, there are, as previously mentioned, elements that the profit motive cannot ethically service due to the issue of perverse incentive, essential or not, such as prisons.
As I said in my first point you can't predict how any given actor in a free market may act. Free market prisons, for example, may not act the way you would expect a prison to act, and I would encourage you to think about how a prison may structure itself to house people who break the law while simultaneously providing its service in such a way that people want to voluntarily pay revenue towards it. I think we can agree that people wouldn't voluntarily pay for recidivist prisons, right?



Milton Friedman's ideological biases aside, when society focuses on liberty to what extent? Like anything, liberty is disastrous when taken to an extreme (anarchy). Further, if we look at inequality adjusted HDI, and the Gini Index, freedom is clearly only correlated with equality up until a certain point. Obviously there is a happy medium and a balance between the broader society and individual rights to pursue and uphold, but the axioms of Constitutional and Charter rights alone do not and have never truly defined the most advantageous constraints for individual liberties so much as they do the things that should be kept inviolable.
:smallconfused: I literally just described to what extent liberty is focused on. To repeat, we do nothing to restrict anybody's ability to do anything so long as they do not threaten or restrict anyone else's individual liberty. Besides i've always known freedom is only correlated with equality up to a certain point. I'd argue in fact that in more cases than not that freedom and equality are at odds with one, and human history is a litany of examples where focusing on equality over liberty ends up with a whole lot of neither, because in order to reach equality, X and Y need to determine what Z can do to W.

[Traab]

A Double Irish Dutch Sandwich sounds either really tasty or incredibly perverted and disgusting, not sure which.

Its either depending on if you are at a deli or at the back room of a video store. As for this, meh, like someone said earlier, I am no longer surprised at this sort of thing. Loopholes are almost by definition shaky things to deal with, so seeing companies take it too far in some way isnt a surprise to me. I only tend to do more than shrug when there are human rights violations going on, or we learn that the latest toy craze is designed using radioactive lead chips dipped in arsenic for paint.

[Soras Teva Gee]

This is where I laugh as well.
The idea that paying taxes legitimately would make a company no longer profitable seems like a poor position for them to take. I highly doubt it will come up in the court case, mind you.

"But, if we actually followed the rules we wouldn't be profitable!"
I've heard this defense from truckers, contractors, tradespeople, accountants... I do tire of it rapidly.
Other companies follow the rules, pay taxes normally, and are not nearly as profitable. In theory, Apple holds a competative advantage by ignoring the rules while another company has a reduced competative ability by playing the rules.

Sports example:
A foul ball in baseball counts as a strike.
The foul line is actually the shortest distance to hit the ball out of the park, which is an automatic home run.
Team A has power hitters aiming for the foul line, the umpire is not counting their fouls as strikes, and anything that goes over the fence, even on the foul side, is still counting as a home run.
Team B has power hitters aiming for the center field (the longer distance to hit the ball out of the park), and their hits over the foul line still count as strikes.
Team A: "We wouldn't be league champions every year if we followed the rules!"

The phrase "if you aren't cheating you aren't trying" comes to mind, but sounds rather repugnant in this context.

If its not illegal then they followed the rules.

In your example the problem is not with the baseball team at all, but the blind umpire not calling a foul. Which would never hold up for long in this day and age of televised everything and recorded footage. And would be blamed according. Everyone love to yell at officials even when they don't have cause, being actually justified the guy might get lynched by a mob.

Exploiting a "loophole" is like hitting down but just inside the foul line. If you can master that strategy you aren't cheating, you are playing smart by aiming for the shortest distance.

You can argue from there that MLB should adopt a regulation specifying a smooth circular arc shape for all official fields. That of course would be a billion dollar project for the sport, so there would be understandable resistance. And I double dog dare you to try it in Boston.

[Karoht]

Exploiting a "loophole" is like hitting down but just inside the foul line. If you can master that strategy you aren't cheating, you are playing smart by aiming for the shortest distance.I agree with you completely here.
To clarify my position, the difference between the analogy and real life is, in the analogous hypothetical baseball game, the ref/umpire is blind but it would be noticed quickly and caught quickly if it came under any sort of scrutiny. In real life, the 'refs' likely don't have a ruling on the case that they can action. They know of the 'foul' but it isn't covered by the playbook, so to speak. However, to comment further would be speculating on future legislation (which was warned against), so I'll halt that there and keep it to my hypothetical for safety sake.


And I double dog dare you to try it in Boston.And alter even one square inch of beautiful Fenway? Perish the thought! I'm not a baseball fan at all and even *I* would see that as a crime.

[Tavar]

The way I see it, so long as the individual is free to exercise their liberties so long as these liberties are not coercive or restricting of another's liberties, that's how I see it. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, when society focuses on liberty, you don't necessarily end up with a lot of equality. But you'll get more equality than in any kind of system that has ever been developed.
What are liberties? You say the word a lot, but there isn't a clear meaning I can see.

[Worira]

the owners of the ocean or the air

yes I can't see anything that could go wrong here

[Don Julio Anejo]

I'm a hypothetical lake owner. I find it way more profitable to let everyone build factories on the lake shore and dump as much toxic waste as they want inside, as long as it doesn't affect performance of other factories on the shore. I don't give a crap about a few dozen farmers that can no longer use polluted ground water. They have no way of forcing me to clean up, seeing as I have much better lawyers and there is no hypothetical environmental regulating body, seeing as that responsibility falls on me as the owner.

I also don't care what happens to the lake, or the atmosphere several decades later since ill be very rich and long dead, so I have no incentive to stop the factories from polluting air or waterr.

[Karoht]

I'm a hypothetical lake owner. I find it way more profitable to let everyone build factories on the lake shore and dump as much toxic waste as they want inside, as long as it doesn't affect performance of other factories on the shore. I don't give a crap about a few dozen farmers that can no longer use polluted ground water. They have no way of forcing me to clean up, seeing as I have much better lawyers and there is no hypothetical environmental regulating body, seeing as that responsibility falls on me as the owner.

I also don't care what happens to the lake, or the atmosphere several decades later since ill be very rich and long dead, so I have no incentive to stop the factories from polluting air or waterr.
Grats, you just described the real life logging industry, among others. Quite accurately I might add.

[PlusSixPelican]

Making sure you do all your puppy-kicking in a country with a puppy-kicking loophole in their legal system doesn't make you any less of a puppy-kicker.

Sigging this. Like, so much.

Moving on, doing Lawyer-Fu, using chicanery, or employing some kind of Double Dutch Irish Deli-Style Tax Evasion Spectacular; for the purposes of evading taxation is money laundering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering) if I've ever seen it.

[Surrealistik]

Keep in mind part of the way the free market works is that no one person can know how it works. I can't have all the answers, and if what i'm saying is correct, then that's an argument for making me Emperor of the Universe. What I speculate might happen is that in order to gain the rights to pollute in the first place, the owners of the ocean or the air may have a contract set up with people whose pollution must be deposited somewhere. If pollution levels become too high they might ask for higher payments or reducing pollution, or that both set up an agreement with another company that is paid to clean up the air or clean up the water.

You can't have the answers here because there are none, or at least there are no good workable answers. Handwaving doesn't make this any less true.

To start, universal, private ownership of all things is beyond improbable.

Second, enforcement and culpability issues are staggering. What you essentially are glossing over amounts to a nigh intractable legal quagmire that will be in a constant state of dispute and upheaval, to say nothing of the other deficits I've outlined.

In summary, it's an improbable, unproven system with serious, obvious and egregious deficits that has not been been demonstrated to work better than the current hybrid systems of regulation, criminal and civil liability.


I think you're arguing for a fundamental fallacy regarding human rights. If rights are bestowed by Man, then Man can take them away. If rights are asymmetrically applied then you're in a situation where you're taking the responsibility of individuals for their own rights and placing them on someone else's shoulders.

Rights don't come from man, they come from nature.

But rights do come from man; man creates rights and enforces rights. Man can indeed take rights away; whether that's ethical is another matter entirely. Many rights may be near universal and a common denominator of the first world, but they are not rooted in nature, and nature certainly does not respect them; men do. They amount to ethical axioms that are derived from popular, sweeping consensus. Even when enshrined in Constitutions and Charters they are not inviolable; they can be repealed and amended with adequate albeit overwhelming consensus.

Further, you would make people accountable to defend their own rights? By 'coming from nature' are you asserting that they are the product of darwinism/survival of the fittest conflict rather than that they are inherent axioms independent of human conception? Either way, how does requiring people to take responsibility for the upkeep of their own rights make the application and integrity of those rights any more symmetrical? In fact, it would do the precise opposite because you are allotting rights purely on the basis of one's individual ability to defend and uphold them. What you are describing is _anarchy_ in effect.

Which upholds and preserves rights more consistently? Democratic first world countries with rule of law or de facto anarchies without where people are largely left to fend for themselves?

Are you telling me that anarchy is preferable and more ethical and just than democratic governance?


At what cost?

The collected tax dollars used to upkeep those programs. You may believe that upholding fundamental rights with taxes is unethical, but the vast preponderance of humanity seems to disagree with you.


As I said in my first point you can't predict how any given actor in a free market may act. Free market prisons, for example, may not act the way you would expect a prison to act, and I would encourage you to think about how a prison may structure itself to house people who break the law while simultaneously providing its service in such a way that people want to voluntarily pay revenue towards it. I think we can agree that people wouldn't voluntarily pay for recidivist prisons, right?

No, you can't predict outliers, but you can predict general behaviours and baselines which are fairly consistent. That's precisely why capitalism works; because the vast preponderance of people _are_ self-interested, and do tend to act accordingly and thus predictably. Joker types that cause harm for its own sake, and altruistic Mother Teresas who live almost entirely for others are the exceptions to the rule.

Private prisons have a strong perverse economic incentive to encourage recidivism (which has been repeatedly demonstrated) so that most will adopt that behaviour. They also have a strong perverse incentive to understaff their prisons and give prisoners the absolute bare minimum in accommodations and sustenance (another behaviour repeatedly demonstrated). It is also worth noting poor conditions are further strongly correlated with recidivism. Yes, there are those who will be repulsed by such unethical behaviours, but what if they are unaware of the conditions? What about the mitigating effect of PR? Are they willing and/or able to pay more for less abusive prisons? Public outcry goes on all the time about the working conditions of corporate factories and suppliers, and yet precious little is done or fundamentally changed. The bottom line is that when perverse incentives arise, they will be acted on.



:smallconfused: I literally just described to what extent liberty is focused on. To repeat, we do nothing to restrict anybody's ability to do anything so long as they do not threaten or restrict anyone else's individual liberty. Besides i've always known freedom is only correlated with equality up to a certain point. I'd argue in fact that in more cases than not that freedom and equality are at odds with one, and human history is a litany of examples where focusing on equality over liberty ends up with a whole lot of neither, because in order to reach equality, X and Y need to determine what Z can do to W.

To which I replied that I fundamentally disagree with a strictly Constitutional/Charter based approach being the definitive framework for the extent liberty should be pursued, and what restrictions society should impose on the individual. It is overtly simplistic and doesn't provide an adequate foundation for law that is in the best interests of society. The fact is that the most prosperous nations as measured by inequality adjusted HDI such as Australia (a particularly auspicious example in that it also tops HDI lists without inequality adjustment), are marked by a morass of laws and regulations that don't specifically and directly relate to or derive from Charter rights. Again, Constitutional/Charter elements define the bare minimum of law, the most inviolable sections; they are the floor, not the ceiling.

Further, of course freedom and equality aren't always at odds with each other; there is overlap just as there are divergences. I in fact even explicitly acknowledged such correlation existing up to a point. I am also not championing unconditional or absolute equality, so much as uniform and vigourous upkeep of human rights and evidence based legislation and regulation that a cost/benefit analysis determines to be of net benefit to society and which are Constitutionally/Charter consistent.

[Anarion]

Going to pop back in with a quick point (I hope).

Everyone seems to be assuming that this is "cheating" because it's unintended, it's complex, it's a loophole, etc.

However, what if all the political stuff we're not talking about here goes through its processes and we come out of it with the law unchanged? Would you all change your minds? Would you be displeased at the outcome? Would you assume corruption?

[Surrealistik]

Going to pop back in with a quick point (I hope).

Everyone seems to be assuming that this is "cheating" because it's unintended, it's complex, it's a loophole, etc.

However, what if all the political stuff we're not talking about here goes through its processes and we come out of it with the law unchanged? Would you all change your minds? Would you be displeased at the outcome? Would you assume corruption?

Keep in mind that a lot of the outcry about this also has much to do with Apple paying taxes that are felt to be disproportionately low relative to the benefits it derives from the company's exposure to US markets; it's not just about them exploiting an unintended loophole.

Yes I would be displeased, and yes, I would view a lack of change after all this as probably (though not necessarily) attributable to corruption. Unfortunately, any further discussion of such corruption is beyond the purview of these forums.

[Emperor Ing]

You can't have the answers here because there are none, or at least there are no good workable answers. Handwaving doesn't make this any less true.

To start, universal, private ownership of all things is beyond improbable.

Second, enforcement and culpability issues are staggering. What you essentially are glossing over amounts to a nigh intractable legal quagmire that will be in a constant state of dispute and upheaval, to say nothing of the other deficits I've outlined.

In summary, it's an improbable, unproven system with serious, obvious and egregious deficits that has not been been demonstrated to work better than the current hybrid systems of regulation, criminal and civil liability.
Yeah uhh...when did I say we should have privatization of everything?
And for the record, there ARE answers. They just come from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. If you want an idea how it will work, I suggest you look at Supply & Demand and the Price System.



But rights do come from man; man creates rights and enforces rights. Man can indeed take rights away; whether that's ethical is another matter entirely. Many rights may be near universal and a common denominator of the first world, but they are not rooted in nature, and nature certainly does not respect them; men do. They amount to ethical axioms that are derived from popular, sweeping consensus. Even when enshrined in Constitutions and Charters they are not inviolable; they can be repealed and amended with adequate albeit overwhelming consensus.
Individual liberty can be waived away by popular consensus? That's a tyrannical if not totalitarian mindset.



Further, you would make people accountable to defend their own rights? By 'coming from nature' are you asserting that they are the product of darwinism/survival of the fittest conflict rather than that they are inherent axioms independent of human conception? Either way, how does requiring people to take responsibility for the upkeep of their own rights make the application and integrity of those rights any more symmetrical? In fact, it would do the precise opposite because you are allotting rights purely on the basis of one's individual ability to defend and uphold them. What you are describing is _anarchy_ in effect.
You operate under the assumption that "symmetry" is what's desirable and not economic outcomes that improve the quality of life for the maximum number of people. Besides, when did I advocate social darwinism? I'm talking about personal responsibility. Besides, the only way to guarantee "symmetry" is to empower someone to take rights away from somebody else. X and Y decide what Z can do to A. That's not symmetrical.



Which upholds and preserves rights more consistently? Democratic first world countries with rule of law or de facto anarchies without where people are largely left to fend for themselves?

Are you telling me that anarchy is preferable and more ethical and just than democratic governance?
Okay i've been willing to let it slide before but...what IS it with you and anarchy?! Apologies but you're really arguing against a straw-man here. I don't mean to sound condescending but I think a more fair question would be "what would you suggest to keep your ideal society away from



The collected tax dollars used to upkeep those programs. You may believe that upholding fundamental rights with taxes is unethical, but the vast preponderance of humanity seems to disagree with you.
The question you answered is "who pays for it?" And even then you run into a moral conondrum, since you're using force to make someone pay for something they may not agree with. The question I asked is "At what cost?"



No, you can't predict outliers, but you can predict general behaviours and baselines which are fairly consistent. That's precisely why capitalism works; because the vast preponderance of people _are_ self-interested, and do tend to act accordingly and thus predictably. Joker types that cause harm for its own sake, and altruistic Mother Teresas who live almost entirely for others are the exceptions to the rule.

Private prisons have a strong perverse economic incentive to encourage recidivism (which has been repeatedly demonstrated) so that most will adopt that behaviour. They also have a strong perverse incentive to understaff their prisons and give prisoners the absolute bare minimum in accommodations and sustenance (another behaviour repeatedly demonstrated). It is also worth noting poor conditions are further strongly correlated with recidivism. Yes, there are those who will be repulsed by such unethical behaviours, but what if they are unaware of the conditions? What about the mitigating effect of PR? Are they willing and/or able to pay more for less abusive prisons? Public outcry goes on all the time about the working conditions of corporate factories and suppliers, and yet precious little is done or fundamentally changed. The bottom line is that when perverse incentives arise, they will be acted on.
If there's public outcry than I can guarantee you those people aren't going to be paying for those prisons, which now have to operate in the free market, correct? I said this before, but keep in mind there's a difference between "privatization" and "free market." I have no doubt what you're describing is a private prison in a highly regulated and probably subsidized market. In that scenario, a private prison would indeed have those incentives.




To which I replied that I fundamentally disagree with a strictly Constitutional/Charter based approach being the definitive framework for the extent liberty should be pursued, and what restrictions society should impose on the individual. It is overtly simplistic and doesn't provide an adequate foundation for law that is in the best interests of society. The fact is that the most prosperous nations as measured by inequality adjusted HDI such as Australia (a particularly auspicious example in that it also tops HDI lists without inequality adjustment), are marked by a morass of laws and regulations that don't specifically and directly relate to or derive from Charter rights. Again, Constitutional/Charter elements define the bare minimum of law, the most inviolable sections; they are the floor, not the ceiling.

Further, of course freedom and equality aren't always at odds with each other; there is overlap just as there are divergences. I in fact even explicitly acknowledged such correlation existing up to a point. I am also not championing unconditional or absolute equality, so much as uniform and vigourous upkeep of human rights and evidence based legislation and regulation that a cost/benefit analysis determines to be of net benefit to society and which are Constitutionally/Charter consistent.

Hold on a sec. You said...

Even when enshrined in Constitutions and Charters they are not inviolable; they can be repealed and amended with adequate albeit overwhelming consensus. ...earlier. If they aren't sacred and involiable, then why should we care whether or not they are upkept in a "uniform and vigorous" manner? What's the problem with bestowing and taking them away at a whim, either by popular election or legislative fiat?

[warty goblin]

Individual liberty can be waived away by popular consensus? That's a tyrannical if not totalitarian mindset.

I don't think its a mindset so much as an acknowledgement of the fact that the side with the greater numbers generally has an advantage. If the other residents of my apartment building decided that maybe they should steal all my stuff, there's nothing I can personally do about it. The only thing that protects me from their desire to make off with my possessions is an even larger number of people who will punish them for doing so; e.g. the police.



You operate under the assumption that "symmetry" is what's desirable and not economic outcomes that improve the quality of life for the maximum number of people. Besides, when did I advocate social darwinism? I'm talking about personal responsibility. Besides, the only way to guarantee "symmetry" is to empower someone to take rights away from somebody else. X and Y decide what Z can do to A. That's not symmetrical.
Symmetric or not, it's also literally the only thing that lets a society function in anything resembling a coherent or just fashion. Otherwise Z gets to do unto A whatever the hell they feel like, unless A has the personal force to repel them. In which case A does unto Z. Its only the capability for B through W to intervene that keeps Z from brutalizing A.

And technically so long as the standards the rest of the alphabet apply to Z and A are identical, it's still symmetric. There's no asymmetry in fining Z a thousand dollars for stealing A's car if A would receive the same censure for the same act.


Okay i've been willing to let it slide before but...what IS it with you and anarchy?! Apologies but you're really arguing against a straw-man here. I don't mean to sound condescending but I think a more fair question would be "what would you suggest to keep your ideal society away from
Because what you're advocating sounds an awful lot like anarchic capitalism? Maybe I'm off base here, but when you start to question whether taxation and the legal ability to censure people and corporations is moral, I don't think it's that far off base to call it anarchy.


The question you answered is "who pays for it?" And even then you run into a moral conondrum, since you're using force to make someone pay for something they may not agree with. The question I asked is "At what cost?"
It's only force that allows for people to charge for stuff in the first place. If it wasn't for the police, jails, etc, who's gonna pay for an iPad when they can just walk into the store and take one? Like it or not, law, order and the cohesion necessary for an economy to function are maintained and predicated on force.



If there's public outcry than I can guarantee you those people aren't going to be paying for those prisons, which now have to operate in the free market, correct? I said this before, but keep in mind there's a difference between "privatization" and "free market." I have no doubt what you're describing is a private prison in a highly regulated and probably subsidized market. In that scenario, a private prison would indeed have those incentives.
Here's the thing, there's pretty good demonstration of what free markets do when not constrained by regulation. There was the Great Depression, our current economic problems to name a few. And those are just the first world problems, do you want me to start in on the third? Letting people and companies do whatever they want is generally very bad policy, because the highly asymmetrical distribution of power ends up causing lots of bad outcomes for lots of people.

Free markets running at below perfect efficiency - which they always will - are a positive feedback loops. Funny thing about positive feedback loops is that they always crash. Free markets are also a method for generating maximum wealth, but not for distributing it in order to actually enhance people's lives.



...earlier. If they aren't sacred and involiable, then why should we care whether or not they are upkept in a "uniform and vigorous" manner? What's the problem with bestowing and taking them away at a whim, either by popular election or legislative fiat?
In order to maintain something as inviolable, you've got to actively keep people from violating it.

[Anarion]

Keep in mind that a lot of the outcry about this also has much to do with Apple paying taxes that are felt to be disproportionately low relative to the benefits it derives from the company's exposure to US markets; it's not just about them exploiting an unintended loophole.

Yes I would be displeased, and yes, I would view a lack of change after all this as probably (though not necessarily) attributable to corruption. Unfortunately, any further discussion of such corruption is beyond the purview of these forums.

See, this is where I get into some difficulty.

There have been a lot of arguments about fairness and cheating in this thread. As well as bits and pieces of democracy, constitutions and so on.

But, if your argument is ultimately that you don't care whether this is legal or illegal, you run into a problem because the argument becomes divorced from any kind of democratic support. You don't actually care about the will of the people or the importance of government weighed against business. Nor do you care whether someone is thought to be cheating or whether the activity is accepted by the public and the government. You care that a very wealthy business has to part with more of its money than the law currently requires.

And that's quite a bit harder to justify.

[Surrealistik]

Yeah uhh...when did I say we should have privatization of everything?
And for the record, there ARE answers. They just come from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. If you want an idea how it will work, I suggest you look at Supply & Demand and the Price System.

By 'everything' I specifically mean all the land, water and airspace.

And none of the answers you or other groups of similar persuasion have provided with regards to TotC issues, particularly environmental ones in a true laissez faire market, have ever been nearly satisfactory or adequate in my view, and are riddled with obvious flaws. Those five issues I'd brought up earlier are about universal to their ideas of private enforcement and liability.


Individual liberty can be waived away by popular consensus? That's a tyrannical if not totalitarian mindset.

It can, it has, and it probably will be in the future; it is an observation, and a truism, not a mindset. I've never agreed with the ethics of violating fundamental rights, even in the case of mob rule, and I've explicitly said so earlier, but that doesn't make those facts any less true.


You operate under the assumption that "symmetry" is what's desirable and not economic outcomes that improve the quality of life for the maximum number of people. Besides, when did I advocate social darwinism? I'm talking about personal responsibility. Besides, the only way to guarantee "symmetry" is to empower someone to take rights away from somebody else. X and Y decide what Z can do to A. That's not symmetrical.

No. I posit that certain limits on individual freedoms, limits that are apparently greater than what you feel to be fair or just, result in economic outcomes that optimize a society's quality of life and development, _not_ that equality or symmetry for their own sake are desirable. Equality and symmetry are not the primary goal so much as the well being of society; the former are generally pleasant byproducts when or if they happen as a consequence of the latter's pursuit.

The exception exists with respect to fundamental rights which in my view must be uniformly and consistently upheld and protected for all. On this, symmetry and equality are of course paramount; it is plainly unethical to afford someone a greater accord of fundamental rights (again right to life, freedom of speech, etc) than another.


Okay i've been willing to let it slide before but...what IS it with you and anarchy?! Apologies but you're really arguing against a straw-man here. I don't mean to sound condescending but I think a more fair question would be "what would you suggest to keep your ideal society away from

From?

And anarchy is appropriate here; having everyone take responsibility for the enforcement and upkeep of their own fundamental rights is unquestionably tantamount to anarchy. If there's no institution to more or less fairly upkeep your right to free speech, your right to life, liberty, due process, private property, fair trials, etc, and you must champion these things on your own, then you're either clearly in the midst of an anarchy or something very comparable.


The question you answered is "who pays for it?" And even then you run into a moral conondrum, since you're using force to make someone pay for something they may not agree with. The question I asked is "At what cost?"

Who pays for it? Monetarily everyone (who isn't evading and can afford to). What is the cost? The taxes society collectively agrees to. Again, you seem to have an issue with a limited coercion of wealth exacted with the purpose of funding a state mechanism to uphold basic fundamental rights; I and clearly most others do not.


If there's public outcry than I can guarantee you those people aren't going to be paying for those prisons, which now have to operate in the free market, correct? I said this before, but keep in mind there's a difference between "privatization" and "free market." I have no doubt what you're describing is a private prison in a highly regulated and probably subsidized market. In that scenario, a private prison would indeed have those incentives.

People pay for things with strongly if not directly associated elements they find ethically objectionable all the time, all over the world in a variety of conditions and circumstances; that is exactly my point. Further, in spite of consumer outrage, and even economic consequences that result from this outrage, unethical behaviours caused by perverse incentives and the profit motive remain in a big way all over the world. When you have a perverse incentive, it _will_ be acted upon by some party. By contrast, you are making the completely and totally unsupported claim that in some manner of true free market, perverse incentives that encourage and create unethical behaviour would be perfectly sorted out by protest. Are you really making the assertion that such moral outcry as well as the threat of it would always and completely counterbalance those incentives? That strikes me as ridiculously implausible.

Eliminating regulations and government oversight doesn't mean that those perverse incentives go away. It doesn't mean that moral outrage and consumer activism suddenly becomes strong enough to act as a perfect moderating force. In fact, if anything, the abolition of such regulations in all probability means the net creation of even _more_ perverse incentives, or their compounding, as one of their primary limiters are removed. Further, even if consumer backlash is largely or even completely successful as a corrective force, there will always be people who think they can get away with unethical practices and will attempt to do so, harming god knows how many in the interim. A glaring problem with such backlash, besides its unreliability in practice, is that it is, like civil suits, chiefly reactive and only weakly proactive, and even at its best, presents gaping holes for people to be hurt, abused, and exploited in the interim before an offender is punished or put out of business.



...earlier. If they aren't sacred and involiable, then why should we care whether or not they are upkept in a "uniform and vigorous" manner? What's the problem with bestowing and taking them away at a whim, either by popular election or legislative fiat?

The objective reality is that fundamental rights are not inviolable, and that in the vast majority of the world, enshrined rights _are_ in fact alterable and can be repealed with adequate popular support, even if the thresholds required are unlikely and overwhelming. This lack of true imperviousness however, does not in any way obviate or render hypocritical my belief that fundamental rights _should_ be inviolable and upheld in the manner I'd described.



But, if your argument is ultimately that you don't care whether this is legal or illegal, you run into a problem because the argument becomes divorced from any kind of democratic support. You don't actually care about the will of the people or the importance of government weighed against business. Nor do you care whether someone is thought to be cheating or whether the activity is accepted by the public and the government. You care that a very wealthy business has to part with more of its money than the law currently requires.

And that's quite a bit harder to justify.

My stance is not concerned with legality as I recognize that legality != ethics or morality. Plenty of extremely heinous things were once legal, and even popular.

Your summation of my view is overtly simplistic such that it excludes the core point. I care that an extremely successful and wealthy business has not paid nearly what it owes society for the benefits that business has derived from society; it has engaged in a deeply unjust exchange, and I view it as a complex variant of fraud and theft.

[Don Julio Anejo]

Keep in mind that a lot of the outcry about this also has much to do with Apple paying taxes that are felt to be disproportionately low relative to the benefits it derives from the company's exposure to US markets; it's not just about them exploiting an unintended loophole.
Basically, that's my main beef. If Apple did very little business in the United States and only had to pay taxes because their head office was there, I would have no problem (as long as they paid proper taxes in other jurisdictions). But as it stands, they make 39% of their revenue (number mentioned earlier in the thread) from the US market, but put very little into it. Therefore, the way I see it, is economic colonialism.


Yes I would be displeased, and yes, I would view a lack of change after all this as probably (though not necessarily) attributable to corruption. Unfortunately, any further discussion of such corruption is beyond the purview of these forums.
Also completely agreed. I would most likely see it in the same light as what happened during bank bailouts, but I can't talk about this either.

My stance is not concerned with legality as I recognize that legality != ethics or morality. Plenty of extremely heinous things were once legal, and even popular.
Also, this. I'm a strong believer in intended spirit of the law and I'm generally more concerned with why the law is in put in place than what it says. If something clearly violates letter but follows spirit, I have no problem with it.

[Emperor Ing]

By 'everything' I specifically mean all the land and airspace.

And none of the answers you or other Libertarians/anarcho-capitalists have provided with regards to TotC issues, particularly environmental ones in a true laissez faire market have ever been nearly satisfactory or adequate in my view, and are riddled with obvious flaws. Those five issues I'd brought up are about universal to their ideas of private enforcement and liability.
I DID answer it. The problem is you've reached a conclusion and demand that all answers that aren't yours are different. The way you prevent the other farmers from having their sheep graze the lands is to OWN the lands, and deny them access. Sure it's not the only way. You can have a third party decide whose sheep gets to eat where and how much, but I find that empowering a third party with no incentive towards any sense of fairness or any financial stake in the shepherd's failure or success is simply not the best way to have things run, especially when there are perfectly viable alternatives that are more fair, just, and mutually beneficial.



No. I posit that certain limits on individual freedoms, limits that are apparently greater than what you feel to be fair or just, result in economic outcomes that optimize a society's quality of life and development, _not_ that equality or symmetry for their own sake are desirable. Greater equality and symmetry are not the goal so much as greater overall well being generally a pleasant byproduct when or if they happen as a consequence.

The exception exists with respect to fundamental rights which in my view must be uniformly and consistently upheld and protected for all. On this, symmetry and equality is of course is paramount; it is plainly unethical to afford someone a greater accord of fundamental rights (again right to life, freedom of speech, etc) than another.
Well good news. I'm offering you an alternative to worrying about whether or not fundamental rights are being consistently and uniformly upheld. Simply leave the individual alone. The reason I argue that fundamental rights are fundamental (as in they come from nature) is because i'm making the argument it's immoral and inhumane to deny these rights, whether it's an individual acting against an individual or a government acting against a smaller community. Each of them are assuming a superiority to another they simply are not superior to. Quite frankly I don't think there's a moral argument that justifies the 100% of society minus one to unanimously agree to restrict on the rights of the one.


From?

Derp :smalltongue: forgot to finish that sentence. What I meant to say was "I don't mean to sound condescending but I think a more fair question would be "How would you keep your ideal society away from anarchy?'"



And anarchy is appropriate here; having everybody to take responsibility for the enforcement and upkeep of their own fundamental rights is unquestionably tantamount to anarchy. If there's no institution to upkeep your right to free speech, your right to life, liberty, due process, private property, fair trials, etc, then you're either clearly in the midst of an anarchy or something very comparable.
Would you like me to answer the question I presented just above? :smalltongue:



Who pays for it? Monetarily everyone (who isn't evading and can afford to). What is the cost? The taxes society collectively agrees to. Again, you seem to have an issue with a limited coercion of wealth exacted with the purpose of funding a state mechanism to uphold basic fundamental rights; I and clearly most others do not. The right to goods such as food and clothing aren't basic, fundamental human rights. They're goods. You have the right to get them, certainly, but TO them...no. We call that a "Nanny State."

Besides now you're answering "What pays for it" not "at what cost." That's all I want to know. At what cost do we take money from productive citizens to subsidize poor citizens? We can measure how much money is collected annually, but invisible is the societal cost of this wealth redistribution. How much technological innovation could there have been but for money that would go to R&D being taken and spent somewhere else? How many lives could have been saved but for the resources to produce a life-saving drug being taken out of medical companies' budget because of taxation? How many families would have been fed but for the job that cannot exist because the company doesn't have the money to expand its operations?

I'm not arguing for zero taxation. Not in the slightest. I'm simply demanding a cost-benefit analysis to taxation and the programs, especially the welfare ones, that they fund. I can guarantee you we can find numerous examples of government spending that money in ways that are far less productive than if that money had stayed in the hands of private citizens. I can list examples but that might be getting too close to politics.



People pay for things with strongly if not directly associated elements they find ethically objectionable all the time, all over the world in a variety of conditions and circumstances; that is exactly my point. Further, in spite of consumer outrage, and even economic consequences that result from this outrage, unethical behaviours caused by perverse incentives and the profit motive remain in a big way all over the world. When you have a perverse incentive, it _will_ be acted upon by some party. By contrast, you are making the completely and totally unsupported claim that in a _true_ free market, perverse incentives that encourage and create unethical behaviour would be perfectly sorted out by outrage. Are you really making the claim that such moral outcry as well as the threat of it would always and completely counterbalance those incentives? That strikes me as ridiculously implausible.
Perverse incentives are a direct result of companies being protected against market forces that would otherwise give them incentives to act morally and ethically. To be more specific, you hate Evil Corp's business practices and ethics (or lack thereof) and given you don't have alternatives, you have no choice but to buy it. Now what if Bob Inc. came along and offered the same exact product for the same price but their business practices agreed with your morals and ethics comfortably. Who would you buy from? Obviously that's anecdotal, but it's worth remembering that that exact question is going to be proposed to thousands if not millions of people who will face the choice of buying from Evil Corp or Bob Inc. Unless the societal ethos favors Evil Corp's practices (in which case you shouldn't have a problem with since the majority rules) Bob Inc. is gonna come out on top, and Evil Corp has to do something to stay competitive. What will Evil Corp do?

There's four options.
1) Cut their losses and sell Evil Corp.
2) Offer a better product for cheaper
3) Clean up their act
4) Infringe on Bob Inc.'s private property rights to undermine them.
There's other options but for the sake of argument let's assume these are the only four.



Eliminating regulations and government oversight doesn't mean that those perverse incentives go away. It doesn't mean that moral outrage and consumer activism suddenly becomes strong enough to act as a perfect moderating force. In fact, if anything, the abolition of such regulations in all probability means the net creation of even _more_ perverse incentives, or their compounding, as one of their primary limiters are removed. Further, even if consumer backlash is largely or even completely successful as a corrective force, there will always be people who think they can get away with unethical practices and will attempt to do so, harming god knows how many in the interim. A glaring problem with such backlash, besides its unreliability in practice, is that they are, like civil suits, chiefly reactive and weakly proactive, and even at its best, presents gaping holes for people to be hurt, abused, and exploited in the interim before an offender is punished or put out of business.
When a business starts, its founders want to make money. In doing so they put themselves, their reputations, and their fortunes at risk. This risk is what gives businesses incentives to make their consumer base happy, because that's the only way, in a free market system, that business can make money and the workers can make money. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, because the consumers are being given products and services that improve their quality of life while the business becomes wealthy and successful. While the market punishing bad behavior is indeed reactive, those that try to invoke its wrath risk being worse off than they were before beginning their business, so it really is irrational to even try and behave in ways that will anger consumers. Yes, people will try and behave unethically, that's human nature. It's why we can't get the crime rate to zero. But those people will be punished by the market with failure.

Besides, isn't law enforcement in general reactive? :smalltongue:



It can, it has, and it probably will be in the future; it is an observation, and a truism, not a mindset. I've never agreed with the ethics of violating fundamental rights, even in the case of mob rule, and I've explicitly said so earlier, but that doesn't make those facts any less true.
I brought this down here because it ties in nicely with this.


The objective reality is that fundamental rights are not inviolable, and that in the vast majority of the world, enshrined rights _are_ in fact alterable and can be repealed with adequate popular support, even if the thresholds required are unlikely and overwhelming. This lack of true imperviousness however, does not in any way obviate or render hypocritical my belief that fundamental rights _should_ be inviolable and upheld in the manner I'd described. Well again I have good news. The right to life, liberty, and property are inviolable, and they are all granted to man equally in the state of nature. They can be restricted and infringed upon by Man, certainly, but such acts aren't to be given any legitimacy. It doesn't matter if a murderer, a king, a parliament, or the 100% of society minus one does it. It's immoral, illegitimate, and inhumane.

(Yes, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is an infringement of natural rights.)


Basically, that's my main beef. If Apple did very little business in the United States and only had to pay taxes because their head office was there, I would have no problem (as long as they paid proper taxes in other jurisdictions). But as it stands, they make 39% of their revenue (number mentioned earlier in the thread) from the US market, but put very little into it. Therefore, the way I see it, is economic colonialism.

The government didn't create Apple's market! They have to pay taxes at all because that's the law.

[Tavar]

I DID answer it. The problem is you've reached a conclusion and demand that all answers that aren't yours are different. The way you prevent the other farmers from having their sheep graze the lands is to OWN the lands, and deny them access. Sure it's not the only way. You can have a third party decide whose sheep gets to eat where and how much, but I find that empowering a third party with no incentive towards any sense of fairness or any financial stake in the shepherd's failure or success is simply not the best way to have things run, especially when there are perfectly viable alternatives that are more fair, just, and mutually beneficial.

Who decides who owns things, and enforces said ownership?

And from earlier, What are liberties? You say the word a lot, but there isn't a clear meaning I can see.

[Anarion]

My stance is not concerned with legality as I recognize that legality != ethics or morality. Plenty of extremely heinous things were once legal, and even popular.

Your summation of my view is overtly simplistic such that it excludes the core point. I care that an extremely successful and wealthy business has not paid nearly what it owes society for the benefits that business has derived from society; it has engaged in a deeply unjust exchange, and I view it as a complex variant of fraud and theft.

What I'm asking is why you have any right to decide what fraud and theft are. If society, through its elected representatives, were to decide not to make it illegal in the future, and to condone the behavior, knowing its consequences, why are you, or me, or anyone else in this thread, in a position to contradict that?

[Don Julio Anejo]

I DID answer it. The problem is you've reached a conclusion and demand that all answers that aren't yours are different. The way you prevent the other farmers from having their sheep graze the lands is to OWN the lands, and deny them access. Sure it's not the only way. You can have a third party decide whose sheep gets to eat where and how much, but I find that empowering a third party with no incentive towards any sense of fairness or any financial stake in the shepherd's failure or success is simply not the best way to have things run, especially when there are perfectly viable alternatives that are more fair, just, and mutually beneficial.
So you propose to either ban access to commons entirely (so no-one can graze), or overgrazing to the point where commons can no longer support sheep because a potential oversight organization may be biased?

Quite frankly I don't think there's a moral argument that justifies the 100% of society minus one to unanimously agree to restrict on the rights of the one.
Oh? How about when that one infringes on rights of others? I.e. in an extreme case, that one is a murderer? Or he should be allowed to go around and murder other people, because restricting him from doing so violates his rights? Government and society is there precisely to prevent or contain situations like this.

The right to goods such as food and clothing aren't basic, fundamental human rights. They're goods. You have the right to get them, certainly, but TO them...no. We call that a "Nanny State."
Sure, but we DO have a moral obligation to provide for those that can't do so for themselves. Whether by handing out change to paupers at a church parapet, by providing work houses, or simply with welfare checks and food stamps, but we do have this obligation. The question is distinguishing someone with an actual need from someone merely gaming the system to get free benefits, but this argument is inherently political.

Besides now you're answering "What pays for it" not "at what cost." That's all I want to know. At what cost do we take money from productive citizens to subsidize poor citizens? We can measure how much money is collected annually, but invisible is the societal cost of this wealth redistribution. How much technological innovation could there have been but for money that would go to R&D being taken and spent somewhere else? How many lives could have been saved but for the resources to produce a life-saving drug being taken out of medical companies' budget because of taxation? How many families would have been fed but for the job that cannot exist because the company doesn't have the money to expand its operations?
You're equating someone that makes a lot of money with productive. This is a logical fallacy - one can inherit his wealth and do little beyond party and spend money made from exploiting another segment of the population, for example. You're also assuming corporation R&D acts in the best interest of humanity. It does not. It acts in the interests of making the most money for a corporation. No pharma firm needs a drug that cures cancer. It's simply unprofitable. What they need is a very expensive drug that can, for example, arrest metastasis without actually doing anything to reverse it. This way, a cancer patient in effect becomes a drug addict for the rest of his life. Vast majority of medical breakthroughs came from publicly funded research centres and universities. Hell, I'm working in one right now.

You're also assuming that money paid in taxes would be spent to expand operations. What if company decides its operations are sufficient at the current level (i.e. it makes luxury goods, and producing any more runs the risk of devaluing the product), and money paid in taxes instead goes to support the rich heiress's cocaine and party habit? A company has no incentive to act in anyone's best interest except its own. A government does at the very least in theory, but any shortcomings are a result of other factors like corruption or inefficiency, not its basic purpose.

I'm not arguing for zero taxation. Not in the slightest. I'm simply demanding a cost-benefit analysis to taxation and the programs, especially the welfare ones, that they fund. I can guarantee you we can find numerous examples of government spending that money in ways that are far less productive than if that money had stayed in the hands of private citizens. I can list examples but that might be getting too close to politics.
It's just as easy to find examples of the reverse; i.e. excessive luxury at the hands of executives funded at the expense of poor people. Same story with examples.

Perverse incentives are a direct result of companies being protected against market forces that would otherwise give them incentives to act morally and ethically. To be more specific, you hate Evil Corp's business practices and ethics (or lack thereof) and given you don't have alternatives, you have no choice but to buy it.
Generally, this is the case due to either corruption, a monopoly, or a combination of both. I'm actually a very strong opponent of "crown corporations" (i.e., for-profit organizations run or owned by the government), because they do not have any accountability (if they do well, execs get money; if they do poorly, government bails them out). Can't go into specific details, though.

The government didn't create Apple's market! They have to pay taxes at all because that's the law.
What the government did, however, was create an environment where Apple could conduct business. They built roads and ports for transportation, provided education for both engineers who made the products, as well as for consumers so they could utilize it, created a generally stable society where people don't just walk into stores and grab iPads because they feel like it.. This is what taxes pay for.

Can the corporations do it? Sure, but it's extremely inefficient. It's much better if large-scale projects (such as the road construction/maintenance) are centralized, planned and managed by one entity, and that's precisely what the government is - a big corporation that provides infrastructure and social services to its clients, aka citizens.

[Anarion]

So you propose to either ban access to commons entirely (so no-one can graze), or overgrazing to the point where commons can no longer support sheep because a potential oversight organization may be biased?


You're characterizing the tragedy of the commons argument wrong. The tragedy of the commons is based on the premise that individuals are selfish and will take as much as they, individually, are allowed, even if it destroys the resource in the long term.

The traditional "solution" is to privatize the commons so that one person has the right to keep others off the land. The reason for this is that when a single person has the entire stake in the resource, he or she will have an incentive to maintain it for the future rather than use it up. The owner is assumed to be someone who will make productive use of the land because if the owner does not, someone else will buy it.

The entire setup includes an economic rational actor assumption. If a given individual is given ownership over the land and derives pleasure from the suffering of others by destroying the resource or preventing anyone from using it, the hypothetical breaks down.

[Tavar]

Or just charging enough for access so that everyone else must become his employee's/sell everything they have to him.

And, well, any time I see the words "economic rational actor assumption" I replace them with "utterly perfect person" in my mind. So, basically, about as grounded in reality as the Harry Potter series.

[Emperor Ing]

Hey, anything is possible. Maybe the Shepherd wants to eat the grass.

[warty goblin]

What I'm asking is why you have any right to decide what fraud and theft are. If society, through its elected representatives, were to decide not to make it illegal in the future, and to condone the behavior, knowing its consequences, why are you, or me, or anyone else in this thread, in a position to contradict that?

I think it's absolutely reasonable and justifiable to disagree with the decisions of elected representatives. A democratically elected official is not some sort of divine avatar, answerable to nobody. Nor are their decisions wrapped in ironhard certainty of correctness. They can be wrong, and election provides a method for demonstrating them unsuitable for office. Because of this I need no particular mandate or qualification beyond citizenship to have valid standing to disagree and complain about the decisions of elected officials.


I, and every other citizen have every right to disagree with somebody who holds office. That's the point of the system, that everybody gets a say, and they don't need to be a wealthy land owner with a hereditary title, or a priest or a merchant or anybody else to do so. It's a basic right as a citizen of the nation and the state.

[Surrealistik]

I DID answer it. The problem is you've reached a conclusion and demand that all answers that aren't yours are different. The way you prevent the other farmers from having their sheep graze the lands is to OWN the lands, and deny them access. Sure it's not the only way. You can have a third party decide whose sheep gets to eat where and how much, but I find that empowering a third party with no incentive towards any sense of fairness or any financial stake in the shepherd's failure or success is simply not the best way to have things run, especially when there are perfectly viable alternatives that are more fair, just, and mutually beneficial.

And yet no perfectly viable alternatives have actually been presented that are any of those things.

It's not so much that I'm closed off to the very possibility that private property and civil suits could work to the exclusion of all other forms of moderation to prevent TotC issues, it's that they've never actually been demonstrated to work, and that they have glaring, seemingly irreconcilable flaws that have never been accounted for. Again, each of those 5 issues I brought up; they are simply not addressed:

#1: Wealth is even more of a legal bludgeon as courts and judgments are weighted towards the richer party while preventative regulation doesn't exist to minimize the need for judicial action.

#2: Civil suits remain chiefly reactive not preventative.

#3: Culpability and enforcement in regards to ambient pollution is either impossible or ridiculously complex to determine with ever shifting legal quagmires.

#4: Huge quantities of money are wasted on many costly and protracted civil suits whereas regulation (especially as per #3) would preclude the need for most of them.

#5: There has been no evidence presented that a system which relies exclusively on civil suits will be better than a current multifaceted approach of preventative regulation and criminal and civil liability.



Well good news. I'm offering you an alternative to worrying about whether or not fundamental rights are being consistently and uniformly upheld. Simply leave the individual alone. The reason I argue that fundamental rights are fundamental (as in they come from nature) is because i'm making the argument it's immoral and inhumane to deny these rights, whether it's an individual acting against an individual or a government acting against a smaller community. Each of them are assuming a superiority to another they simply are not superior to. Quite frankly I don't think there's a moral argument that justifies the 100% of society minus one to unanimously agree to restrict on the rights of the one.


I brought this down here because it ties in nicely with this.
Well again I have good news. The right to life, liberty, and property are inviolable, and they are all granted to man equally in the state of nature. They can be restricted and infringed upon by Man, certainly, but such acts aren't to be given any legitimacy. It doesn't matter if a murderer, a king, a parliament, or the 100% of society minus one does it. It's immoral, illegitimate, and inhumane.

(Yes, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is an infringement of natural rights.)

That's not an alternative. What do I do about the other person who won't leave _me_ alone, who doesn't care about my rights? What if I can't uphold them under my own power? What if leaving the individual alone means smog choked skies, toxic water, economic collapse with massive collateral damage? You can argue all you like that it's unethical to violate fundamental rights, and I'll be behind you 100%, but ultimately talk is cheap; something must obligate people to respect them. It is not enough to enshrine rights; they must be enforced and defended; ethically and consistently.

Furthermore, it is inadequate to simply leave others alone beyond their rights; it is the purview and responsibility of society to arrive at responsible legislation that works for its betterment, even if it means individual freedoms are curtailed so long as their rights are respected. This is a point on which we will not agree.


Derp :smalltongue: forgot to finish that sentence. What I meant to say was "I don't mean to sound condescending but I think a more fair question would be "How would you keep your ideal society away from anarchy?'"

Rule of law; uniform enforcement, protection and provision of fundamental rights via government services funded by powers of taxation.


The right to goods such as food and clothing aren't basic, fundamental human rights. They're goods. You have the right to get them, certainly, but TO them...no. We call that a "Nanny State."

You may call that a Nanny State, but I call that an integral subset of their right to life like health care.


I'm not arguing for zero taxation. Not in the slightest. I'm simply demanding a cost-benefit analysis to taxation and the programs, especially the welfare ones, that they fund. I can guarantee you we can find numerous examples of government spending that money in ways that are far less productive than if that money had stayed in the hands of private citizens. I can list examples but that might be getting too close to politics.

Sure we can find waste in government, and it can always be more accountable and efficient. Cost-benefit analysis is a given; I have explicitly stated that I favour evidence based legislation formed with proper due diligence. That said, there is an obvious morass of subjectivity as to what is waste; what is and is not necessary, what should and should not be funded. See above for a classic example.


Perverse incentives are a direct result of companies being protected against market forces that would otherwise give them incentives to act morally and ethically. To be more specific, you hate Evil Corp's business practices and ethics (or lack thereof) and given you don't have alternatives, you have no choice but to buy it. Now what if Bob Inc. came along and offered the same exact product for the same price but their business practices agreed with your morals and ethics comfortably. Who would you buy from? Obviously that's anecdotal, but it's worth remembering that that exact question is going to be proposed to thousands if not millions of people who will face the choice of buying from Evil Corp or Bob Inc. Unless the societal ethos favors Evil Corp's practices (in which case you shouldn't have a problem with since the majority rules) Bob Inc. is gonna come out on top, and Evil Corp has to do something to stay competitive. What will Evil Corp do?

No, perverse incentives are a consequence of profit motive. If it is profitable to do something unethical in a market that doesn't prohibit that unethical behaviour it will be done (it will be done anyways even if illegal to be fair, but probably far less). Full stop. Guaranteed. People aren't obliged to shop at Walmart in spite of its questionable ethical backdrop, yet many do anyways for the lower prices (which in part arise from those questionable ethics). Walmart isn't being protected from market forces, Walmart is _harnessing_ the fundamental market force of self-interest to an extent that subsumes ethical considerations. Have Walmart's sales suffered because it operates in ways many find unethical? Sure, but this has in no way killed its business, and the fact that it hasn't has exactly nothing to do with protectionism or corporatism.

That said, all other things being equal except ethics, then yes, it is much more of a salient tipping point, but ethical abuses featured in business often feature a beneficial tradeoff and as a rule make a company more profitable or otherwise more competitive, which is _exactly_ why they happen. A company doesn't act unethically for the sake of doing so; it acts unethically because of profit motive and because there is _perverse incentive_ to doing so.


When a business starts, its founders want to make money. In doing so they put themselves, their reputations, and their fortunes at risk. This risk is what gives businesses incentives to make their consumer base happy, because that's the only way, in a free market system, that business can make money and the workers can make money. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, because the consumers are being given products and services that improve their quality of life while the business becomes wealthy and successful. While the market punishing bad behavior is indeed reactive, those that try to invoke its wrath risk being worse off than they were before beginning their business, so it really is irrational to even try and behave in ways that will anger consumers. Yes, people will try and behave unethically, that's human nature. It's why we can't get the crime rate to zero. But those people will be punished by the market with failure.

Besides, isn't law enforcement in general reactive? :smalltongue:

Yes, law enforcement is reactive, but that doesn't mean that preventative regulation lacks merit or is in some way unnecessary. Regulation remains an important element that supplements corrective action and prevents horrible disasters, bubbles and collapses. Obviously regulation is not universally successful, and its tragedy is that while we rarely hear of its successes (precisely because it is preventative) we are viscerally assaulted by its failures. However, the wholesale repeal of regulation, especially of good, well researched and considered instances will have negative consequences in balance. It is hard to imagine and quantify how many more catastrophes may have occurred without preventative regulation, and relatively easy to dismiss its contribution by pointing to its missteps, without acknowledging all the potential issues that it had thwarted well before they would have become a problem.

Further, the fact is that customer outrage as previously discussed is unreliable, variable (not all consumers will be outraged or engage in activism), mitigatable, and can otherwise be overpowered/subsumed by things like the price point of your product ala Walmart. Consumer activism as a rule is notoriously fickle, rarely long lived, and often ineffective. Totally free markets aren't likely to change this much if at all. In the end it is eminently possible to satisfy your consumers despite doing unethical things and indulging perverse incentives.

Third, a company doesn't have to make its clients happy to make money; it has to make its clients happy to _sustainably_ make money. This is an important distinction in the case of fly-by-night or desperate individuals looking to make a fast buck without any concern for the long term (or the consequences of their sub-par/adulterated products). Additionally, there is also the case of monopolies which as the sole provider of a good/service, and one powerful enough to crush/buyout any competition, are disastrous in free markets (they _don't_ have to make the client happy) and are its logical and ultimate consequence barring any kind of anti-trust legislation/regulation. It is a basic truism of economics that wealth always compounds and flows _upward_ in the long run in the absence of legislation and tax codes that arrest or reverse this trend.


The government didn't create Apple's market! They have to pay taxes at all because that's the law.

Actually it did; it upheld its underpinning rule of law and drafted much of the physical, legislative and judicial infrastructure and foundations that allowed that market to exist and be in large part so lucrative in the first place.



What I'm asking is why you have any right to decide what fraud and theft are. If society, through its elected representatives, were to decide not to make it illegal in the future, and to condone the behavior, knowing its consequences, why are you, or me, or anyone else in this thread, in a position to contradict that?

Again the law and the opinion of elected representatives has absolutely no bearing on my capacity for ethical judgements, nor those judgements themselves. I have a right to personally determine that an action is unethical, and to frame and perceive it as fraud and theft, even if my definition and interpretation deviates from what the law actually is.

[Emperor Ing]

And yet no perfectly viable alternatives have actually been presented that are any of those things.

It's not so much that I'm closed off to the very possibility that private property and civil suits could work to the exclusion of all other forms of moderation to prevent TotC issues, it's that they've never actually been demonstrated to work, and that they have glaring, seemingly irreconcilable flaws that have never been accounted for. Again, each of those 5 issues I brought up; they are simply not addressed:

#1: Wealth is even more of a legal bludgeon as courts and judgments are weighted towards the richer party while preventative regulation doesn't exist to minimize the need for judicial action.

#2: Civil suits remain chiefly reactive not preventative.

#3: Culpability and enforcement in regards to ambient pollution is either impossible or ridiculously complex to determine with ever shifting legal quagmires.

#4: Huge quantities of money are wasted on many costly and protracted civil suits whereas regulation (especially as per #3) would preclude the need for most of them.

#5: There has been no evidence presented that a system which relies exclusively on civil suits will be better than a current multifaceted approach of preventative regulation and criminal and civil liability.

That's not an alternative. What do I do about the other person who won't leave _me_ alone, who doesn't care about my rights? What if I can't uphold them under my own power? What if leaving the individual alone means smog choked skies, toxic water, economic collapse with massive collateral damage? You can argue all you like that it's unethical to violate fundamental rights, and I'll be behind you 100%, but ultimately talk is cheap; something must obligate people to respect them. It is not enough to enshrine rights; they must be enforced and defended; ethically and consistently.

Furthermore, it is inadequate to simply leave others alone beyond their rights; it is the purview and responsibility of society to arrive at responsible legislation that works for its betterment, even if it means individual freedoms are curtailed so long as their rights are respected. This is a point on which we will not agree.
You know I never mentioned civil suits once. I said private property rights, which segues into my next point...



Rule of law; uniform enforcement, protection and provision of fundamental rights via government services funded by powers of taxation.
First off, you were supposed to ask me that question! :smalltongue:
Onto my point, what good are private property rights if they aren't enforced? And how do you enforce it? Two means I can think of that are perfectly valid and legitimate, at least in my opinion, are a fair and just rule of law that enforces property rights, and a Blacklisting program. Similar to how casinos network the names and faces of cheaters to each other so they can all refuse them service, companies can pass around the names and faces of private property rights violators to each other, maybe post them on some big database, and refuse them service. Here's a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79ZosnxGKgk) that can explain it. It's worth remembering that law enforcement and blacklisting aren't mutually exclusive. :smallwink:

It's a system where individuals realize it's in their long-term best interest to cooperate with one another. That's the basis for civilization and the civil society. A fair and just rule of law provides a strong enforcement mechanism by which infringement on an individual's natural rights may be punished, but the civil society is a bottom-up phenomenon. Not the top-down. They aren't mutually exclusive, not in the slightest. I just want you to remember that they are not one in the same.


You may call that a Nanny State, but I call that an integral subset of their right to life like health care. Even though the Private Sector can provide healthcare much more efficiently and provide better outcomes?



Sure we can find waste in government, and it can always be more accountable and efficient. Cost-benefit analysis is a given; I have explicitly stated that I favour evidence based legislation formed with proper due diligence. That said, there is an obvious morass of subjectivity as to what is waste; what is and is not necessary, what should and should not be funded. See above for a classic example.
I'll be honest I have no idea what evidence-based legislation means :smalltongue: Is it what it sounds like? Besides, government has no incentive to not be wasteful, as it's not their money that's being spent.



No, perverse incentives are a consequence of profit motive. If it is profitable to do something unethical in a market that doesn't prohibit that unethical behaviour it will be done (it will be done anyways even if illegal to be fair, but probably far less). Full stop. Guaranteed. People aren't obliged to shop at Walmart in spite of its questionable ethical backdrop, yet many do anyways for the lower prices (which in part arise from those questionable ethics). Walmart isn't being protected from market forces, Walmart is _harnessing_ the fundamental market force of self-interest to an extent that subsumes ethical considerations. Have Walmart's sales suffered because it operates in ways many find unethical? Sure, but this has in no way killed its business, and the fact that it hasn't has exactly nothing to do with protectionism or corporatism.

That said, all other things being equal except ethics, then yes, it is much more of a salient tipping point, but ethical abuses featured in business often feature a beneficial tradeoff and as a rule make a company more profitable or otherwise more competitive, which is _exactly_ why they happen. A company doesn't act unethically for the sake of doing so; it acts unethically because of profit motive and because there is _perverse incentive_ to doing so.

I couldn't even begin to list through all the licensing laws, taxes, and regulations that exist, and each of them have a cost. Regulations alone consume roughly two TRILLION dollars out of the economy annually on compliance, licensing, and fees. Big businesses like Wal-Mart can take that cost, but startups that would have been able to compete with Wal-Mart are stamped out of existance before they can even begin. If the market were allowed to function, then perverse incentives would dissapear, and the company would instead have incentive to act in ways that conform to the societal ethos. Unless they want to be undermined by the company that DOES conform to said ethos.



Yes, law enforcement is reactive, but that doesn't mean that preventative regulation lacks merit or is in some way unnecessary. Regulation remains an important element that supplements corrective action and prevents horrible disasters, bubbles and collapses. Obviously regulation is not universally successful, and its tragedy is that while we rarely hear of its successes (precisely because it is preventative) we are viscerally assaulted by its failures. However, the wholesale repeal of regulation, especially of good, well researched and considered instances will have negative consequences in balance. It is hard to imagine and quantify how many more catastrophes may have occurred without preventative regulation, and relatively easy to dismiss its contribution by pointing to its missteps, without acknowledging all the potential issues that it had thwarted well before they would have become a problem.
If the regulations are good, and the rules they're enforcing conform to the societal ethos and generally makes things better, then why would you need top-down pressure to do it? Businesses have an incentive to do these things in the first place, either out of consideration for their customers or out of social cooperation. Did I mention that two trillion dollars are spent annually in regulation compliance? To put this in perspective if I gave you one...actually no. Let's make it two million dollars every day since Year Zero, you still wouldn't have the amount of money the economy spends on regulation a year.



Further, the fact is that customer outrage as previously discussed is unreliable, variable (not all consumers will be outraged or engage in activism), mitigatable, and can otherwise be overpowered/subsumed by things like the price point of your product ala Walmart. Consumer activism as a rule is notoriously fickle, rarely long lived, and often ineffective. Totally free markets aren't likely to change this much if at all. In the end it is eminently possible to satisfy your consumers despite doing unethical things and indulging perverse incentives. All it takes is a consumer activist group or even a rival company who performs ethically to create a media narrative that Evil Corp. is sacrificing babies to their Dark Gods to stir up outrage. Furthermore, what company is going to want to do business with Evil Corp. if they're acting in ways that are unethical or criminal? Blacklisting need not only apply to individuals you know.



Third, a company doesn't have to make its clients happy to make money; it has to make its clients happy to _sustainably_ make money. This is an important distinction in the case of fly-by-night or desperate individuals looking to make a fast buck without any concern for the long term (or the consequences of their sub-par/adulterated products). Additionally, there is also the case of monopolies which as the sole provider of a good/service, and one powerful enough to crush/buyout any competition, are disastrous in free markets (they _don't_ have to make the client happy) and are its logical and ultimate consequence barring any kind of anti-trust legislation/regulation. It is a basic truism of economics that wealth always compounds and flows _upward_ in the long run in the absence of legislation and tax codes that arrest or reverse this trend. Monopolies can exist in a free market, certainly. But said monopolies must continuously provide a better product, good, and service better than anyone else in order to maintain their near-total market share (Let's assume the threshold for monopoly status is 90% of the market share since the free market, by definition, will do nothing to stop start-up competition) unless they want to be undercut by smaller companies that might underbid them, or provide that product, good, and service for less. Put simply, in a free market a monopoly would only form if consumers wanted it to.
Here's a good video explaining why evil monopolies are fairy tales in free market. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO8ZU7TeKPw)



Actually it did; it upheld its underpinning rule of law and drafted much of the physical, legislative and judicial infrastructure and foundations that allowed that market to exist and be in large part so lucrative in the first place. Government =/= Civil Society.



Again the law and the opinion of elected representatives has absolutely no bearing on my capacity for ethical judgements, nor those judgements themselves. I have a right to personally determine that an action is unethical, and to frame and perceive it as fraud and theft, even if my definition and interpretation deviates from what the law actually is. And that's your prerogative as an individual with the unalienable right to life, liberty, and property. You may be wrong (and in this instance you're not) but i'll fight like hell for your right to be wrong.

[Surrealistik]

You know I never mentioned civil suits once. I said private property rights, which segues into my next point...

First off, you were supposed to ask me that question! :smalltongue:
Onto my point, what good are private property rights if they aren't enforced? And how do you enforce it? Two means I can think of that are perfectly valid and legitimate, at least in my opinion, are a fair and just rule of law that enforces property rights, and a Blacklisting program. Similar to how casinos network the names and faces of cheaters to each other so they can all refuse them service, companies can pass around the names and faces of private property rights violators to each other, maybe post them on some big database, and refuse them service. Here's a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79ZosnxGKgk) that can explain it. It's worth remembering that law enforcement and blacklisting aren't mutually exclusive. :smallwink:

It's a system where individuals realize it's in their long-term best interest to cooperate with one another. That's the basis for civilization and the civil society. A fair and just rule of law provides a strong enforcement mechanism by which infringement on an individual's natural rights may be punished, but the civil society is a bottom-up phenomenon. Not the top-down. They aren't mutually exclusive, not in the slightest. I just want you to remember that they are not one in the same.

Ah, yes, this chestnut. Well I've already shown you how property rights without a basis of preventative regulation can be an absolute disaster, particularly in the obvious case of the environment, so let's tackle the fallacy (or at best staggeringly naive improbability) of spontaneous order.

Local level spontaneous orders != functioning societies on a large scale. You can't just assert that microcosmic associations and systems are applicable and viable on vastly greater and more encompassing scales without evidence, and that rights in such a system would be respected in nearly as consistent and reliable a fashion as with a democratic, and Constitutional governmental framework. A kibbutz works just fine at the level of a small community, or even a town, but it would never work on the scale of a metropolis, nevermind a country, or the world.

For one, such a system requires that people and associations of people very broadly act on a basis of long term economic rationality, and that supermajorities remain in likewise perpetual agreement with this system. In practice, it just doesn't work out like that, and even if it does, how long does such a tentative system remain stable? Irrationality, or even straight up rational short term self-interest explosively coming to the fore are inevitable. Prisoner dilemmas exist and are acted upon. Perverse incentives exist and are acted upon. Tragedy of the Commons exists and is acted upon. Besides this there are plenty of real examples of lawless and anarchic regions all over the world and in history where spontaneous orders just don't happen on larger scales because tribalism and conflict invariably occurs; it is nearly a law of human sociological experience. Intellectual, racial, ethical, economic and ideological divisions occur; we're encountering one right now. Short sighted greed and avarice can and have often triumphed over diplomacy and negotiation to push groups into open warfare and conflict. This is as much of an impractical pipedream as communism for similar reasons.

Beyond this, let's keep it real and drop the sophistry; without the moderating force of government, coercive power accrues to those with the most and biggest guns, which in turn usually derives from economic power. Wealth for its part, virtually always consolidates in the long term without moderating forces of taxation and regulation (as does power). So then, when one or a few players have a disproportionately large amount of coercive power, what happens? What stops them from turning around and _seizing_ everything they want without regard for fundamental rights? What prevents their evolution into would-be tyrants and warlords, a common, even ubiquitous sight in regions without functional top-down control? Lots of people don't give a damn about a smaller overall 'pie' of goods and societal well-being so long as they can have the greatest share; classic Prisoner's Dilemma. Self-interest, even rational self-interest isn't what makes a society without government possible, it's what ultimately tears it apart.

In the end, the uniform protection of fundamental rights simply cannot be assured and is at best unlikely under a system of spontaneous order.

Now, if you're arguing that this should be supplemented by legal enforcement the whole thing becomes more tenable (though obviating the idea of operating without top down governance) but of property rights exclusively? Back to probable rights violations. Is the enforcement derived from spontaneous order? Back to probable rights violations.

And besides, do you ever see a society like this ever actually materializing? Who would trust it? Who would live in a nation completely devoid of governance with only vague notions of spontaneous order and long term rational self-interest to moderate?

Lastly, if you're such a strong believer in spontaneous order, does it not stand to reason that governmental systems are in fact a product of spontaneous order, and one of its most integral, long lasting and enduring outputs?


Even though the Private Sector can provide healthcare much more efficiently and provide better outcomes?

Two things:

#1: All existent private sector systems have yet to come anywhere close to first world single payer systems/UHC in terms of efficiency. It's worth noting that the most economically free 'country' in the world as determined by the Libertarian leaning Heritage foundation, Hong Kong, even has UHC.

#2: Average quality of care and life expectancies in countries with private sector health care vis a vis those of UHCs with extensive public involvement are comparable to inferior.

To preempt you, I assume your counterargument will be something along the lines of that none of these private sector arrangements operate in a true free market, that a true free market, despite its health care providers being fragmented, suffering from redundancies, and not nearly possessing the massive economies of scale and bargaining leverage of non-profit government payer monopolies, would magically and always deliver far more efficient health care via competition that is somehow affordable to everyone and in the 'rare' event it isn't, charity will invariably cover anyone at any level of care required.

The problem is that this is more utopian dogma and utterly unproven assertion without factual or evidentiary basis than fact. I would not gamble on the unlikelihood of you being right, despite the complete implausibility of a true free market completely independent of government oversight existing in the first place.


I'll be honest I have no idea what evidence-based legislation means :smalltongue: Is it what it sounds like? Besides, government has no incentive to not be wasteful, as it's not their money that's being spent.


Yes; legislation based on evidence, or at a bare minimum adequate due diligence, research, modelling and expert consultation (rather than ideology or naked pork barrel spending). And yes, government _does_ have incentive not to be wasteful; its constituency. There have been politically costly scandals over gross misuse of tax payer funds which have cost politicians their jobs that happen all the time. To assert that no such incentive exists is grossly misinformed.


I couldn't even begin to list through all the licensing laws, taxes, and regulations that exist, and each of them have a cost. Regulations alone consume roughly two TRILLION dollars out of the economy annually on compliance, licensing, and fees. Big businesses like Wal-Mart can take that cost, but startups that would have been able to compete with Wal-Mart are stamped out of existance before they can even begin. If the market were allowed to function, then perverse incentives would dissapear, and the company would instead have incentive to act in ways that conform to the societal ethos. Unless they want to be undermined by the company that DOES conform to said ethos.

2 trillion dollars? As determined by who? And for which regulations covering what? What is your source (I assume it's Libertarian in nature and thus exaggerated)? And even if this was the case and the number was accurate to the penny, how many trillions more are saved in financial meltdowns, poisonings, environmental damages, industrial accidents and all their cascading collateral damage? How many averted hospital bills? How many lives?

Small business can't compete with Wal-Mart not because it is choked by regulation, but because it (Wal-Mart) has staggering economies of scale, superior technologies, superior tax structuring and marketing teams and budgets, and engages in perverse incentives to minimize costs. The barrier to entry is billions of dollars of capital spending, not regulatory compliance. Hell, many better funded retailers that have no issue affording compliance costs can't compete with Wal-Mart for the very same reasons. This isn't a failure of markets functioning because of regulatory burden, but the very self-perpetuating economic advantages that make wealth compounding the long term inevitability that it is.


If the regulations are good, and the rules they're enforcing conform to the societal ethos and generally makes things better, then why would you need top-down pressure to do it? Businesses have an incentive to do these things in the first place, either out of consideration for their customers or out of social cooperation.

Because spontaneous order can't be relied upon for reasons stated above. How on earth would you be able to both devise and enforce quality, binding preventive edicts from spontaneous order? What stops the individual from rebelling against the decrees of spontaneous order to the deficit of all because he cares more about his personal and immediate gain than the risk of being shunned and the long term cost to society? Even if he is shunned, it may take a long time to detect his violation, by which time he has enough goods to live comfortably. What if enough individuals do it such that they can break from this benevolent spontaneous order? What if these disputes become violent? Welcome to the break down of idealized society.

Individuals cooperating on a basis of long term rational self-interest without duress can't be relied upon on a large scale and on a lasting basis. Human history has taught us that if nothing else; this is exactly why democratic governance and enshrinement of rights became prominent.


All it takes is a consumer activist group or even a rival company who performs ethically to create a media narrative that Evil Corp. is sacrificing babies to their Dark Gods to stir up outrage. Furthermore, what company is going to want to do business with Evil Corp. if they're acting in ways that are unethical or criminal? Blacklisting need not only apply to individuals you know.

Plenty of people deal knowingly and unknowingly with ethically questionable corporations on a daily basis, sometimes precisely _because_ of their competitive advantage that stems from perverse incentives and their ethically questionable behaviours. When your workers live and toil in subhuman conditions, that's money saved you can pass on to the consumer who may or may not care. Even if they do, they may not care _enough_ not to buy, thus preserving the perverse incentive. You vastly overestimate the impact of consumer advocacy/protest groups. They have had successes of course, but in balance, they have not nearly come close to destroying even a majority of perverse incentive in the global market place. Wal-Mart among many, many others (Apple, Monsanto, News Corp, etc) are a living refutation of the notion that these things can be meaningfully relied upon to change the behaviour of powerful economic players. Again, it has nothing to do with the free market failing to work, and everything to do with ethical considerations being subsumed by competitive advantages.


Monopolies can exist in a free market, certainly. But said monopolies must continuously provide a better product, good, and service better than anyone else in order to maintain their near-total market share (Let's assume the threshold for monopoly status is 90% of the market share since the free market, by definition, will do nothing to stop start-up competition) unless they want to be undercut by smaller companies that might underbid them, or provide that product, good, and service for less. Put simply, in a free market a monopoly would only form if consumers wanted it to.
Here's a good video explaining why evil monopolies are fairy tales in free market. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO8ZU7TeKPw)

Tired, predictable propaganda with the usual logical flaws and self-contradictions.

He asserts that in the absence of competition as a moderating force, a monopoly can't charge inflated prices because of consumer revolt and the destruction of reputation, yet this somehow magically doesn't apply when screening legislation/regulation, which is also subject to repeal via consumers (i.e. the constituency)? If massive consumer revolt is supposed to occur in response to abusive monopolies, why aren't people up in arms about the NY cabbie cartels? Why isn't the inflated price of pharmaceuticals the subject of such powerful, transformative outrage? Where are the politicians riding these issues to an easy electoral win? The fact is that it ultimately isn't this all-powerful natural anti-trust or policing force. Again, massive corporations have done and continue to do extremely heinous, unethical things, some worse in my view than exploiting an oligopoly or monopoly, and they are stronger than ever, not because they've changed their practices or improved their reputations, but because they have competitive advantages that allow them to dictate terms in their respective markets, even if they have to make short term concessions to the consumer.

Further, on the subject of predatory pricing he ignores several important things:

A: Economies of scale, superior capital investment and vertical integration can easily allow monopolies to price beneath smaller competition until they're destroyed _without actually sustaining a loss_.

B: Small competitors can never, as a practical matter, buy enough of the monopoly's price dumped goods for resale. This is only really an option in a matter of rough equals (in which case there's no true monopoly) Who would they resell all this inflated price inventory to anyways (especially after factoring in the added costs of marketing, distribution, administration, accounting, legal and sales) when their consumers can turn to someone cheaper?

His answers were particularly grasping and ridiculous when they came to monopolies with high natural barriers (i.e. utilities), or that otherwise have long start up cycles. The shareholders don't bail and 'cause the stock to plunge', they double down. They let their (relatively few) competitors function until they become a problem then buy them out. This is also a viable option in lower barrier industries as well; let the local supplier have its fun, but the moment it tries to challenge you in broader markets, and is otherwise successful to the point of beginning to cause you pain, buy them up. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are prime examples of this behaviour (but certainly not the only ones).

And De Beers not being able to achieve resource monopoly over diamonds in a free market? Absurd. At the point they secured exclusivity from the nationalized Russian and South African miners, they had more than enough wealth to buy out those mines and/or negotiate exclusive marketing rights nationalized or not. Government's involvement is irrelevant, and in fact, government may have even been more problematic than the private sector to secure exclusivity and monopoly with. At a minimum, such exclusivity would be far less assured due to government turnover (at least in South Africa).

In all, his arguments are just rife with the standard, indelible flaws typical to monopoly apologists. I'm not going to even get into the ridiculous to, at best, oversimplified culpabilities he lays at the feet of government later on in the video (besides forum rules forbidding it).


Government =/= Civil Society.

Absolutely disagreed as per my above responses to the notion of spontaneous order. Again, we're not going to agree on this, especially given you lack substantive evidence of spontaneous order being sustainable on a massive scale.

[Tavar]

It's a system where individuals realize it's in their long-term best interest to cooperate with one another. That's the basis for civilization and the civil society. A fair and just rule of law provides a strong enforcement mechanism by which infringement on an individual's natural rights may be punished, but the civil society is a bottom-up phenomenon. Not the top-down. They aren't mutually exclusive, not in the slightest. I just want you to remember that they are not one in the same.
If that's the case, why does this rarely seem to be practiced. If it's so obvious surely it would be in common practice, right?

[Emperor Ing]

:smalleek: wow, that wall of text is hueg like ecksbawks. I'll address it, certainly, but it's taking too much time to address it point-by-point. For simplicity's sake i'll try to consolidate it as best I can, and I apologize if you feel there's points I missed.


So then, when one or a few players have a disproportionately large amount of coercive power, what happens? What stops them from turning around and _seizing_ everything they want without regard for fundamental rights?
That.

That right there.

I dunno if you realize this but that is THE most important thing you've said. With the power of coercion what is to stop any entity from taking control of everything? What stops them from infringing on our unalienable human rights in their lust for power? What IS to prevent or at least slow down the State's natural progression towards tyranny?

It's these questions and more why I am so distrustful of government.

You're so worried about businesses becoming coercive that you're not looking at the monster that's staring you right in the face. Government has always had the the power of coercion. In fact we demand it have the power of coercion in order for it to possibly do the things they want. But the natural state of government is tyranny, and human history is filled to the brim with examples of relatively free societies that became tyrannical. The Roman Republic. Russia. The Weinmar Republic to name but a few. The reason for this is simple: it's mission creep. People begin to look towards government to solve their problems, and in so doing empower it to take more of their liberty away, or they use the instrumentalities of it to reorganize society to their utopian ideal. No matter how noble the intentions, the fact remains that those that seek to use government are using force to achieve their ends, and in the end, the immorality of force triumphs over good intentions.

As they say, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is why I am arguing against government. I seek to dispel the myth that government is an absolute necessity. Certainly government has many virtues but its danger is not to be underplayed. More human misery has resulted from overly powerful, abusive governments than anything else on the face of the Earth, ever.

About healthcare, UHC, no matter where it's tried, there's one main theme that always comes to mind.
In the absense of competition medical consumers have little-to-no incentive to innovate. That's why roughly 50% of all medical innovations come from the US, which had a non-singlepayer system. Furthermore there is no incentive to be efficient beyond the mandates from the top-down. And even then there are workarounds. For example in Britain (It's the UK! Whatever! Don't crucify me!) it was mandated that hospital-goers could wait no longer than 4 hours to see a doctor after being admitted to a hospital. As an American I find 4 hours to be a rather excruciatingly long wait in and of itself, but that's anecdotal. The fact that that law even exists seems to suggest a rather disturbing precedent, made even worse by the fact that in order to work around this, ambulances carrying patients sit idle outside the hospitals. Apparently the four-hour timer doesn't start until the patient is admitted so they circumvent the system.
BBC Article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-22135109)
I have many theories as to why the waits seem to be so long, mostly related to price ceilings on medicine, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
And life expectancies are not an objective measurement of healthcare outcomes, because those can involve a huge number of factors no healthcare system can help. For example the US has a significantly higher obesity rate than Canada, and it's no surprise that obese people die young.

About spontaneous order, spontaneous order in its basest form is voluntary cooperation between individuals whose individual best-interests are best served when they choose to work with one another to achieve ends they could not achieve themselves. A fallacy you've been presenting for a while is that the free market is simply the profit motive. While the profit motive is certainly real, the free market can only operate through cooperation. In there we see the moral basis of a free market and spontaneous order is based on cooperation in the same way government has its moral base in coercion. This moral basis is precisely how technological innovation comes about in the end. Technological innovation and prosperity which has resulted in the quality of life for more people and the prosperity of more people being raised higher than has any other system on the face of the Earth before it. In the same way that the amorality of force will always triumph over good intentions in government, the morality of cooperation will always triumph over ill intentions in spontaneous order. I gave the example of casinos refusing service to known cheaters and blacklisting as one way of possibly many ways people voluntarily cooperating with one another may exclude those that don't want to play by the rules from the system.

Since you seem so keen on proof, the Great American Experiment is an excellent example of spontaneous order.

About monopolies. Yes. The same mechanism that would dissolve a monopoly doesn't apply to legislation and regulation. You're comparing apples to oranges. Legislators are up for election every X years, while a restaraunt, as one example, is up for election 2 or 3 times a day, with voters voting with their wallets. Besides, the presence of "competitive advantages" only proves my point about corporatism. How do these advantages manifest, and how do they get them?

Government force.

I'm glad you brought up the NYC taxis, they're a perfect example. There are exactly 13,237 taxis operating in NYC right now, and I can say this because in NYC you need a license to operate a Taxi, and the city is only willing to have 13,237 licenses in operation in any one time. So in a way, monopolies have come full-circle, as they are now once again being granted by political elites, whereas in a free market the prospective monopolist has a handful of options to stamp out competition.
1) Underbid them. They can certainly afford the cost but it's only a temporary solution. Even if they bankrupt their possible competition it hurts their reputation as fewer consumers and businesses are willing to do business with them, and even more may catch onto the fact that they periodically sell their goods at a loss (which to consumers means "lower prices") so they may learn to wait and buy the goods at the company's loss.
2) Buy up competition. Perhaps the easiest way to stamp out competition, but this one isn't so amoral as having your company bought out by a larger one is considered a success by most people's standards. Best part is that if you think your company's worth more than is being offered you can always refuse the sale.
3) Destroy competition through force. Has this...ever happened? Ever?

Ultimately you said it yourself. What happens when one actor gains too much coercive power? It leads to tyranny. What happens when one actor has a verifiable monopoly on coercive power, yet the public demands it not only retain the sole, exclusive right to coercive power, but that they use that power to further their own noble intentions? It leads to tyranny. This is why I say that natural rights are unalienable, and any attempt to infringe on them immoral. The moment we surrender our rights to life, liberty, and property being unalienable, we've already surrendered to tyranny. Government has it's place, obviously. George Washington said that government, at its best, is a necessary evil (and at its worst intolerable) but that place is small, narrow, and clearly defined, with the limits on its power to be treated as just as sacred if not more so than the rights it was established to protect in the first place. It's not perfect and it'll never be perfect. If it's not conquered from without it will fall into despotism eventually, but I like to think that such a society will last long enough to be a shining beacon of freedom and prosperity to the world.

Well...that was a bit longer than I intended. :smallconfused:


If that's the case, why does this rarely seem to be practiced. If it's so obvious surely it would be in common practice, right? The natural progression of society is towards tyranny.

[Tavar]

So your solution is to reject the tryanny of the government, istead allowing the tryanny of the powerful.

Progress?

[Surrealistik]

About healthcare, UHC, no matter where it's tried, there's one main theme that always comes to mind.
In the absense of competition medical consumers have little-to-no incentive to innovate. That's why roughly 50% of all medical innovations come from the US, which had a non-singlepayer system. Furthermore there is no incentive to be efficient beyond the mandates from the top-down. And even then there are workarounds. For example in Britain (It's the UK! Whatever! Don't crucify me!) it was mandated that hospital-goers could wait no longer than 4 hours to see a doctor after being admitted to a hospital. As an American I find 4 hours to be a rather excruciatingly long wait in and of itself, but that's anecdotal. The fact that that law even exists seems to suggest a rather disturbing precedent, made even worse by the fact that in order to work around this, ambulances carrying patients sit idle outside the hospitals. Apparently the four-hour timer doesn't start until the patient is admitted so they circumvent the system.
BBC Article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-22135109)
I have many theories as to why the waits seem to be so long, mostly related to price ceilings on medicine, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
And life expectancies are not an objective measurement of healthcare outcomes, because those can involve a huge number of factors no healthcare system can help. For example the US has a significantly higher obesity rate than Canada, and it's no surprise that obese people die young.

First, where are you getting this number of 50%? The highest I've heard is closer to 40% though that's only with respect to scholarly articles on biomedical research.

Medical innovation is primarily a function of university quality and biomedical research funding and investment, _not_ healthcare providers and the means of providing healthcare. It has exactly little to nothing to do with your method of providing healthcare. In fact, when you account for relative spending on biomedical research, the US lags on a cost adjusted basis, spending many times more the whole of Europe yet not having nearly comparable and proportionate dominance. In fact, even with this massive spending advantage, it is still beaten out in certain categories of medical innovation: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/150823.php

Third, wait times have nothing to do with massive government bargaining power over the price of drugs (which remain substantially less costly in Canada and most other UHC nations vs US), are generally a product of triage (immediacy of care accorded on the basis of severity rather than the content of your wallet), and aren't uniformly high in UHC/single payer systems. The very idea the microcosmic UK mandated wait time caps are some kind bulletproof damnation which obviates all the superior metrics supporting these forms of health care over privitized systems is absurd. Wait times in the US can furthermore be comparable or worse (compared to UHC countries such as Germany, Norway, the UK; irony, the Netherlands and Switzerland to name a few) unless you have enough money to line jump (in the US that is).

As for more comprehensive assessments of health care performance and outcomes than life expectancy:
http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/health.aspx


About spontaneous order, spontaneous order in its basest form is voluntary cooperation between individuals whose individual best-interests are best served when they choose to work with one another to achieve ends they could not achieve themselves. A fallacy you've been presenting for a while is that the free market is simply the profit motive. While the profit motive is certainly real, the free market can only operate through cooperation. In there we see the moral basis of a free market and spontaneous order is based on cooperation in the same way government has its moral base in coercion. This moral basis is precisely how technological innovation comes about in the end. Technological innovation and prosperity which has resulted in the quality of life for more people and the prosperity of more people being raised higher than has any other system on the face of the Earth before it. In the same way that the amorality of force will always triumph over good intentions in government, the morality of cooperation will always triumph over ill intentions in spontaneous order. I gave the example of casinos refusing service to known cheaters and blacklisting as one way of possibly many ways people voluntarily cooperating with one another may exclude those that don't want to play by the rules from the system.

Since you seem so keen on proof, the Great American Experiment is an excellent example of spontaneous order.


Great American Experiment? It evolved into a Constitutional democracy with a strong, unifying federal government.

Further, anarchy is precisely what you are advocating. Beneath all these claims of enlightened, long term self-interest, it all really boils down and is reducible to a power vacuum. Human history simply does not allow for what you are describing to exist on a massive and sustainable scale; you are idealizing humanity and human nature in the same way the communists did. The profit motive may not be everything but it is the _greatest_ thing. Self-interest has always been the most compelling and universal force of human and economic behaviour, and myopic, shorter term self-interest in particular. Ultimately, the weight of evidence just doesn't bear your assertions out. If you were right, we wouldn't need to regulate, we wouldn't need government. The various anarchies in the third world (why are they third world anyways?) would be utopian societies, spontaneous order arising due to these mythic values of cooperation. But that's not what happens. They become brutal Darwinistic societies; tyrannies of the strong in the most unbound and visceral ways imaginable.

That government is necessary isn't a myth, it's born out in perpetuity by both contemporary and historic example. Has government done horrible things? Sure. But look at all the achievements that have been accrued under rule of law. Look at what all the empires throughout history have managed vs the effective anarchies of lawless badlands divided between the tribes and warlords of their time. The myth is not necessity of government, but that the absence of government can in the long run and at the national level ever be more than anything but a fragmented, strife ridden tyranny of the powerful over the weak to the detriment of society and the species.



About monopolies. Yes. The same mechanism that would dissolve a monopoly doesn't apply to legislation and regulation. You're comparing apples to oranges. Legislators are up for election every X years, while a restaraunt, as one example, is up for election 2 or 3 times a day, with voters voting with their wallets. Besides, the presence of "competitive advantages" only proves my point about corporatism. How do these advantages manifest, and how do they get them?

Government force.

And yet, if this idea of reputation and consumer outrage were such a powerful, indomitable force of market correction and moderation, that always and invariably addresses the non-competitive excesses of the marketplace, the politicians responsible for anti-competitive legislation _would_ be turfed regardless of the time interval involved, and _would_ be replaced by those promising to end said laws, but in truth, what actually happens? Nothing. The consumers and constituents clearly don't give enough of a damn, just like they don't give enough of a damn about corporations to make them reform their unethical behaviours. Again, where are the politicians running on what should be a wildly popular platform of taking down the NYC cabbie cartels? They don't exist because this whole premise is clearly nonsense.

Further, government manipulation is only one source of competitive advantage; they also arise as a consequence of economies of scale, and as repeatedly stated, perverse incentives when it comes to environmental defilement and worker mistreatment. Said government manipulation is _also_ a form of perverse incentive.


I'm glad you brought up the NYC taxis, they're a perfect example. There are exactly 13,237 taxis operating in NYC right now, and I can say this because in NYC you need a license to operate a Taxi, and the city is only willing to have 13,237 licenses in operation in any one time. So in a way, monopolies have come full-circle, as they are now once again being granted by political elites, whereas in a free market the prospective monopolist has a handful of options to stamp out competition.
1) Underbid them. They can certainly afford the cost but it's only a temporary solution. Even if they bankrupt their possible competition it hurts their reputation as fewer consumers and businesses are willing to do business with them, and even more may catch onto the fact that they periodically sell their goods at a loss (which to consumers means "lower prices") so they may learn to wait and buy the goods at the company's loss.
2) Buy up competition. Perhaps the easiest way to stamp out competition, but this one isn't so amoral as having your company bought out by a larger one is considered a success by most people's standards. Best part is that if you think your company's worth more than is being offered you can always refuse the sale.
3) Destroy competition through force. Has this...ever happened? Ever?

While government is certainly an exploitable tool of a would be monopolist, it is also the monopolist's greatest threat (at least in a democratic society) as it can instantly destroy any anti-competitive advantages it once granted with a single piece of legislation. Though such advantages do exist, true, sweeping, non-local monopolies have yet to actually be granted by government; there is an important distinction.

To preempt you, no, it is not a hypocrisy/cognitive dissonance to point out the curative role of government vs monopolies, while highlighting the fact that constituents have not demanded specific pieces of anti-competitive legislation due to popular outrage because it (popular outrage) isn't, by itself, an infallible panacea against monopolization. A sweeping monopoly that existent anti-trust laws actually address, and that the mechanisms of government allow to be effectively opposed when it becomes truly unbearable and abusive and impossible to assail from an economic angle, is vastly and obviously different from such piecemeal anti-competitive legislation, or even a local monopoly. Popular outrage to be truly effective as a corrective force in the absence of competition requires both an adequate goad (egregious, sweeping monopolies), and sufficient vehicles of conveyance (legislative power through democratic governance). Further, _if_ local and rarefied monopolies/oligopolies/cartels are somehow the irrevocable price of being exempt from and insured against sweeping national/international monopolies, it is worth paying.

That said, the _best_ solution is to stringently limit the flow of private money to politicians and to politics in order to effectively marginalize the misuse of government as a tool for abolishing competition, rather than eliminating governmental powers of regulation so monopolies can domineer completely unchecked. If it works in the majority of the first world (and it does as per the Corruption Perceptions Index (http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/)) there's no reason it can't work in the remainder.

On to your other points:

1) I'm not sure you saw where I specifically mentioned monopolies can usually employ such massive economies of scale and vertical integration among other advantages (brand recognition, marketing) that they can undercut much smaller competitors without actually losing money. Again, Wal-Mart, prime real world example.

Further, in the case of any necessary good, or good with limited viable alternatives, not dealing with the only provider is not a meaningful option, even if you loathed it.

2) A success for the business owner, a loss for the consumer who remains economically tyrannized.

3) I never suggested it, but in an otherwise lawless state of spontaneous order like the one you proposed it is frighteningly possible. And companies have indeed used underground criminal elements against their opponents or even troublesome business partners. In all though, it's not a main conduit of competition busting.



Ultimately you said it yourself. What happens when one actor gains too much coercive power? It leads to tyranny. What happens when one actor has a verifiable monopoly on coercive power, yet the public demands it not only retain the sole, exclusive right to coercive power, but that they use that power to further their own noble intentions? It leads to tyranny.

Asserting that tyrannies are inevitable is a lot to prove; in fact it's actually impossible. Is there historic precedence? Yes. Is this evidence that a democratic nation with strong Constitutional/Charter constraints will always and invariably become a tyranny? No. There's not enough precedence on the matter to even begin to make a strong case for such an extreme, extraordinary and in my view, almost paranoid claim.

[Aotrs Commander]

See, if you people would come to your senses and let me take my rightful place as the unilateral surpreme ruler of all Reality, this sort of thing wouldn't happen...

[SiuiS]

Personally, I never try to get into the head of somebody who dresses entirely in raw meat. Either they're Lady Gaga, or things are liable to get really scary.

Or?!


I'd come home, probably. Having to live in Ireland to keep my cash seems like a big sacrifice. You'd have to add a 0 or two to your number to make it worthwhile.

That said, there's a wiki entry for the Double Irish arrangement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement) and Apple is hardly the only company taking advantage of it.

The only reason I'm not already living in Ireland is because of flash poverty. So I'll invite you over to my hypothetical Irish house for hypothetical Irish tea, then?


A Double Irish Dutch Sandwich sounds either really tasty or incredibly perverted and disgusting, not sure which.

I can't see the incredibly perverted... Nor do I want to.


Many of these have positive side-effects. The main topic? Straight up dodging responsibility. Also, individuals that dodge taxes, even mostly legally, can often go to jail. Companies usually get away with a slap on the wrist, or fines significantly less than the taxes they're owing, and are able to dispute/appeal it a lot of the time.

Using lobbyists and high-end lawyer firms to get what you want is, while legal from a business standpoint, is unethical and in effect no different from spending the same money on bribes from a common sense standpoint and is just a different form of corruption (i.e. companies will usually get what they want anyway, irregardless if its bad for everyone else). In this case, they lawyered up a way to avoid tax on a significant number of their profits, which from a common sense standpoint is the same as hiding income.

There's nothing common about common sense.

There is also a very real, very old unspoken agreement between most humans; if you can fight for it and win, it's yours. Using lawyers to win their tax avoidance-y stuff is seen as more acceptable than not fighting for it and just hiding it away.


I think it's absolutely reasonable and justifiable to disagree with the decisions of elected representatives. A democratically elected official is not some sort of divine avatar, answerable to nobody. Nor are their decisions wrapped in ironhard certainty of correctness. They can be wrong, and election provides a method for demonstrating them unsuitable for office. Because of this I need no particular mandate or qualification beyond citizenship to have valid standing to disagree and complain about the decisions of elected officials.


I, and every other citizen have every right to disagree with somebody who holds office. That's the point of the system, that everybody gets a say, and they don't need to be a wealthy land owner with a hereditary title, or a priest or a merchant or anybody else to do so. It's a basic right as a citizen of the nation and the state.

The idea is more that the odds are high at the end of the day, everyone in the respective nation disagrees with you. Seeing as you are one against millions, why are you right? Let's assume you are one of the more wise people in whatever respective nation you hail from, top 75% in WIS. That means for every hundred people in the nation, only 24 or so are on par with you. Which means hundreds of thousands of your peers, who are as smart, as invested, as educated, as interested, if not moreso; all disagree.



Why are you right, and they aren't?

[Surrealistik]

The idea is more that the odds are high at the end of the day, everyone in the respective nation disagrees with you. Seeing as you are one against millions, why are you right? Let's assume you are one of the more wise people in whatever respective nation you hail from, top 75% in WIS. That means for every hundred people in the nation, only 24 or so are on par with you. Which means hundreds of thousands of your peers, who are as smart, as invested, as educated, as interested, if not moreso; all disagree.



Why are you right, and they aren't?

In this specific case, are you really implying that most of the United States actually agrees with Apple's excessive tax avoidance, or otherwise that the stances of elected representatives are always aligned with the preponderance (nevermind the whole) of their constituency? Plenty of recent examples not fit for these forums have put that to a definitive lie.

[warty goblin]

Or?!

Adjust your horror threshold upwards. You haven't known meat related perversion until you've seen to what uses a truly creative person can put a medium rare prime rib.


I can't see the incredibly perverted... Nor do I want to.
One of the joys of having worked food service; the incredibly perverted and the culinary are not really all that distinct anymore.



The idea is more that the odds are high at the end of the day, everyone in the respective nation disagrees with you. Seeing as you are one against millions, why are you right? Let's assume you are one of the more wise people in whatever respective nation you hail from, top 75% in WIS. That means for every hundred people in the nation, only 24 or so are on par with you. Which means hundreds of thousands of your peers, who are as smart, as invested, as educated, as interested, if not moreso; all disagree.

Why are you right, and they aren't?
I never said I was right in a cosmic truth sense of the word, I said I had the right, in a legal and ethical sense, to disagree. That doesn't mean the entirely of society is required to acquiesce to my opinions. Nor does it mean that I'm excused from living by the rules laid down by that society; only that disagreeing with them is entirely my prerogative.

[Emperor Ing]

I never said I was right in a cosmic truth sense of the word, I said I had the right, in a legal and ethical sense, to disagree. That doesn't mean the entirely of society is required to acquiesce to my opinions. Nor does it mean that I'm excused from living by the rules laid down by that society; only that disagreeing with them is entirely my prerogative.

Even if the 100% of society minus you disagreed with you, that doesn't make you any less right or wrong.

Also Surrealistik, i'm gonna respond to you, but you gotta admit our posts are getting a little absolutely gigantic. For that reason (and the fact it took me two freakin' hours to write my previous post) i'd rather respond to only one topic rather than three our four. I'll let you choose which one I respond to though. Healthcare, Spontaneous Order, Monopolies, or the Free Market?

[Anarion]

My point, which I keep coming back to, is that some people in this thread are attempting to justify things with respect to some very high-minded theories, when in fact they are making a personal judgment and nothing more.

There is not an objective ethical problem with what Apple is doing. The law can provide an objective standard because most of us believe in rule of law as a good thing in and of itself, but that hasn't been violated. Morality can provide an objective standard (I believe the example of murder being wrong was raised earlier in this thread). However, the morality of taxes, tax law, tax lawyers, and the corporate system is a topic that is up for heavy debate.

Nothing about what Apple is doing impinges on our concepts of fundamental freedom and liberty. It might, possibly, offend a sense of fair play and equal treatment. But there are a lot of people, some of whom are debating here, who don't think it's unfair. Turns out, its really hard to even define what fairness is.

So yeah. Everyone talking here can make a personal judgment about what is ethical and what isn't. But there's an undercurrent of "the other side is morally repugnant" running through this thread that I think should be reconsidered.

[PlusSixPelican]

There is also a very real, very old unspoken agreement between most humans; if you can fight for it and win, it's yours. Using lawyers to win their tax avoidance-y stuff is seen as more acceptable than not fighting for it and just hiding it away.

The means don't justify the ends. Just because you tried your darnedest with hard work and elbow grease (or paid top dollar) doesn't justify any kind of ethical malefaction. Including tax dodges.


The idea is more that the odds are high at the end of the day, everyone in the respective nation disagrees with you. Seeing as you are one against millions, why are you right? Let's assume you are one of the more wise people in whatever respective nation you hail from, top 75% in WIS. That means for every hundred people in the nation, only 24 or so are on par with you. Which means hundreds of thousands of your peers, who are as smart, as invested, as educated, as interested, if not moreso; all disagree.

What? I'm pretty sure more than a few people are upset (and rightly so) by this. Yanking out tax relief for working families while this happens? Are you kidding? Apparently if you make enough money, you gain some kind of immunity to ethics and shared responsibility.

The message of the day is, once again, if you're doing something wrong, do it on a grand scale.

[Anarion]

What? I'm pretty sure more than a few people are upset (and rightly so) by this. Yanking out tax relief for working families while this happens? Are you kidding? Apparently if you make enough money, you gain some kind of immunity to ethics and shared responsibility.


Woah, hang on. You're jumping to the conclusion that most of this thread has been arguing about. Is it unethical to do what Apple does? It's legal, and therefore not taking advantage of it, once discovered, is paying extra money when the government doesn't require them to do so. A lot of people posting here (myself included, though I devil's advocate all over the place) think maybe the law should be different though. Or that the law doesn't matter, and doing only what the law requires is too low of a standard to be ethical.

Saying they're immune to ethics and responsibility is jumping to a conclusion.

[PlusSixPelican]

Or that the law doesn't matter, and doing only what the law requires is too low of a standard to be ethical.
This is what I was getting at. Obeying laws, and then thinking that's enough, is like asking for a cookie (http://captainawkwarddotcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/feministcookie2.jpg?w=300&h=277) for not being a sociopath.


Saying they're immune to ethics and responsibility is jumping to a conclusion.
I was referring to the seeming LACK of ethics, and the attitude towards them. The letter of the law is not a standard for ethical conduct. Taxes are a drop in the bucket when the numbers reach into the abstract echelons Apple operates at. I'm guessing whatever they get snagged with, if anything, will be passed along all the way down the corporate ladder so the executives don't even feel it.

[Emperor Ing]

I was referring to the seeming LACK of ethics, and the attitude towards them. The letter of the law is not a standard for ethical conduct. Taxes are a drop in the bucket when the numbers reach into the abstract echelons Apple operates at. I'm guessing whatever they get snagged with, if anything, will be passed along all the way down the corporate ladder so the executives don't even feel it.

This does beg the question. Since you seem to think they aren't paying enough, how much IS enough? And how did you come to that specific number?

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff: Apparently, The Giant's warning about avoiding politics has gone unheeded. Please avoid real world politics on this forum, and interpret that concept broadly.