Taxes are democratically controlled allocation of resources. We the people get together and decide what we want to do collectively. Wealthy people giving away their money is aristocracy or oligarchy, centering power in the wealthy - corrupt, and a threat to democracy and free markets.
You only have "a right to [your] property" because the voting majority agreed that that right should exist.
Also, if democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, what do you think would happen in that situation if the wolves abandoned voting?
Not so - property rights are a large part of human rights, inherent to being human.
Others may ignore your rights and abuse your freedoms, but that does not make it acceptable, and it doesn't mean those rights and freedoms don't exist.
The wolves and sheep are aggressors and prey. Your hypothetical is an analogy for theft - the majority 'taking' what it wants by disregarding the rights and freedoms of the minority.
> property rights are a large part of human rights
"Human rights" isn't an excuse to not pay taxes, nor do they even forbid progressive tax policies.
> Your hypothetical is an analogy for theft
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am against theft and in favour of democracy, so I agree that my hypothetical of the wolves abandoning democracy was not something I thought would lead to a better societal outcome.)
A society which accepts the principle of private property might agree that certain "taking" is theft, but a society can equally decide that the "taking" of tax payments is not theft. Just because a group is a minority and strongly opposes what the majority want, doesn't make the minority's desire inherently more moral than that of the majority, even if they express their desire in terms of "rights and freedoms".
There's a sound argument for levying broad taxes on services that are widely distributed, that you can't easily opt-out of, and that are reasonably beneficial and necessary.
Roads, police, fire fighters, border security, armed forces, environment regulators, etc. I'm certainly open to debating what does and does not fall into this category for fair and acceptable taxation.
But to argue that 'we are taxing your wealth because you have too much' obviously falls outside of that category.
How about "we are taxing your wealth because the money has to come from somewhere, and we can't take it from people who don't have any"? Given the diminishing marginal utility of income and wealth[0] it makes economic sense to tax the people who have a lot of wealth at a greater rate than those who have a little.
To try to fill in the blanks and steelman your position a little, I think that the most significant difference (and potential grounds for criticism) is that a wealth tax means the same money is taxed multiple times.
I'm not sure what essential philosophical or ethical objection there is to that, though, since money is constantly changing hands and being taxed (e.g. on the way in as income, and on the way out as consumption/sales tax). Moreover, as taxation changes incentives, it should be targeted to reduce socially negative actions, and arguably "wealth hoarding" is worse for society than "income", which is currently an accepted target for taxation.
I think the biggest "fairness" argument for a wealth tax, though, is that the average US household has a net worth of $120k, and pays $10k in total taxes per year, which is equivalent to an 8% wealth tax. (Of course it's true that if the household decided to not earn any money, it could greatly reduce its tax burden, but that's not really an option for most tax payers, whereas billionaires never have to work a day in their life).
So I would tie the wealth tax to be equivalent to the effective rate that the median household pays, but allow deductions for any other payments the wealthy person paid to the government or to charities. Also, for simplicity, the wealth tax should only apply to households above a certain wealth threshold, perhaps 10x or 100x of the median.
In elections you put an X beside someone's name who has made promises that they most likely will not fulfill which is a far cry from getting together to decide what we want to do collectively.
I think it's rather bizarre that no grassroots movement has arisen to work towards the general public getting together to actually decide what we actually want to do collectively, it's genuinely a very good idea.
There are many, many such organizations. Just look around at political organizations of all stripes.
> who has made promises that they most likely will not fulfill
That's just your assertion. It hasn't been my experience, and they can always be voted out of office.
> In elections you put an X beside someone's name
You can do a lot more than that, if you use the power you have been given in a democracy. Having worked on many elections, I can say that it amazes me how much power the few people doing the work have. To stand on the outside and say you are powerless is bizarre - like standing on the shore of the ocean and insisting there are no fish.
> There are many, many such organizations. Just look around at political organizations of all stripes.
I'm referring to this: "We the people get together and decide what we want to do collectively".
To me, "we the people" means the population of the country, rather than a tiny subset who actually engage in political organization - I'm thinking (for starters) of something as simple as fine-grained surveys on various issues and policy proposals. Of course, most opinions are going to be pretty uninformed, but then whose fault is that? The population as it is, is a product of the system we've constructed to raise people in.
> That's just your assertion.
Is it a genuine point of contention that there is a substantial delta between what politicians promise and what they can be observed trying to achieve after election campaigning is over?
> It hasn't been my experience, and they can always be voted out of office.
So the saying goes. The system runtime certainly supports it, but the degree to which it is actually possible if one takes into consideration the given system state and historic behaviors makes it seem rather uncertain to me. Technically, what is and is not ~pragmatically/realistically possible is unknown.
> You can do a lot more than that, if you use the power you have been given in a democracy. Having worked on many elections, I can say that it amazes me how much power the few people doing the work have. To stand on the outside and say you are powerless is bizarre - like standing on the shore of the ocean and insisting there are no fish.
I can agree that people have some more power than they often think...but acting individually, how likely is it that one person can make significant change? Do we have substantial examples demonstrating it is possible, and few that demonstrate difficulty? And then also: how would our current state look plotted on an absolute scale of what is possible in the runtime, as opposed to what is possible in the system we've built within the runtime?
It always was. Johns Hopkins did a study, and catching covid was 6x better protection than any of the vaccines. Furthermore, your body learns how to protect itself differently from catching it.
Unfortunately if you google search, it's buried about 20 pages down. There's no profit in that.
Lemon is an infinitely better parser generator than Yacc; it solves a lot of the issues that make Yacc terrible to work with: named non-terminals, non-terminal destructors, re-entrancy, etc. It's part of the SQLite codebase. Highly recommended.
In many cases, though, I think parser combinators thread the needle elegantly - nom in Rust for instance. Or even just a hand-rolled LL(1).
Why would you say that? Yacc and other parser generators exist for a good reason: hand written parsers can be quite hairy to debug and extend, while parser generators offer a domain specific language to specify your grammar and can generate efficient parser code based on it.
What are the arguments in favor of manually writing parsers?
Fundamentally I don't think parsing is a problem that's complex enough to warrant a custom tool and language. And even if it was Yacc is the wrong tool for the job in most cases.
Since most languages are context-sensitive, you almost always have to bend Yacc, which is designed for context-free languages, out of shape to apply it.
It's a hammer but we hardly have any nails, and the nails can just be pushed in by hand without a hammer, and they're the wrong type of nails anyway so that hammer isn't really compatible, and top of that it's a really expensive hammer.
Yes - so straight away you have to leave the DSL and bypass the formal mode of Yacc. At which point why bother with it? If the first thing you need to do with your tool is hack around it, maybe the tool isn’t so well-designed?
And actions often do things like side-effect changes to the lexer state, so it gets worse from there.
If you've got the right utility functions, a handwritten parser visually maps very directly to its grammar. It won't be as concise of course, but cognitively you can work with it almost as if it were just a grammar.
PBS is kind of a hybrid, with partial public funding, but with the majority of its funding coming from other revenue sources. It gets around 15% of its budget through grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which in turn is funded by the federal government), the rest through a mix of fundraising and subscriptions. Some local PBS affiliates also get state/local support, or are hosted by a public entity like a university. That seems to have been Congress's intent, that it would be supported in part by federal funding, but not be a fully publicly run organization like the BBC.
PBS accepts large amounts from #bigAg, #bigPharma and various oligarch 'foundations'. The worry is that these huge entities shape the messaging. You won't ever hear monopolist Bill Gates critiqued on PBS or NPR for example...
That's certainly not true. NPR criticizes Bill Gates often as part of the "celebrity billionaire" group, and recently had a story about his affair with an employee.
It is fair to say that funder bias is a significant concern in the not-for-profit world, including in public broadcasting.
There's been open mainstream speculation of that "PBS sold its soul" to the Koch Brothers:
As David Sirota, the author of the PandoDaily expose, wrote in its aftermath, PBS doesn’t stand for “Public Broadcasting Service” anymore. As it becomes more addicted to big-bucks donors, it risks becoming the Plutocrat Broadcasting Service.
Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, and Robert W. McChesney are voices on the left who have called out corporate / fundraiser bias on the part of PBS, NPR, CPB, and other public broadcasters in the US. McChesney notes:
Public broadcasting today is really a system of nonprofit commercial broadcasting, serving a sliver of the population. What we need is a system of real public broadcasting, with no advertising, one that accepts no grants from corporations or private bodies, one that serves the entire population, not merely those who have high-brow tastes and disposable income to contribute during pledge drives.
'NPR’s funding from Gates “was not a factor in why or how we did the story,” reporter Pam Fessler says, adding that her reporting went beyond the voices quoted in her article. The story, nevertheless, is one of hundreds NPR has reported about the Gates Foundation or the work it funds, including myriad favorable pieces written from the perspective of Gates or its grantees.'
https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu...
'Twenty years ago, journalists scrutinized Bill Gates’s initial foray into philanthropy as a vehicle to enrich his software company, or a PR exercise to salvage his battered reputation following Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle with the Department of Justice. Today, the foundation is most often the subject of soft profiles and glowing editorials describing its good works. '
If the US government paid $1 in total to PBS, would you be surprised that PBS couldn't provide its service for free?
The US pays about 4% of what the UK pays per capita for public broadcasting.
>The US pays about 4% of what the UK pays per capita for public broadcasting.
This can't be mentioned without also mentioning that the UK enforces a yearly license (so, a tax) on anyone who watches OTA TV, and they're known to be a bit scummy and heavy-handed about it.
You can work for yourself. Why work for someone else? They just take a cut and give you scraps, look at china for example. I can't wait to move out of here.
That idea is appealing to people living in larger, more concentrated, urban environments, and a huge boogeyman for everyone else, thus becoming a big point of friction.
There is currently no real alternative to cars for people in rural environments, so we need good electric cars there. At the same time, cars in cities are completely barbaric and should not have been a part of city planning in the first place. There are good solutions that still enable people to enter cities with little problem, like largescale suburban parking with express busses/metros.
But while cars should be slowly outphased, for the foreseeable future, we will have to rely on personal transport in more rural areas, so we should do our very best to integrate it with more advanced systems in urban areas.
My wife and I just had a day in Chicago, our original plans fell through so we ended up going on a little bike ride on the new(?) e-bikes by Divvy/Lyft, the actual renting of it was complete garbage (I've never used ApplePay before, so I had to set that up, cards didn't work, etc), but the actual e-bikes were bloody fantastic, a really fantastic way to experience the city, I think we did 10-20 miles and barely broke a sweat. I think we're going to buy one/two so I can nip out to groceries and not drive
The one I ride has a box in the front that can hold 3 grownups (or a monster trip to the garden store). The motor means I can go 28 mph. On the occasional day where we have a rental car (grandma in town) sometimes I drive the kids to school and I am always surprised how long it takes. On the bike I never wait in a queue, and I always get the best parking.
Those prices are going to seriously discourage adoption. I can buy a Honda off road capable motorcycle that can go anywhere for half the money - and it would still be a better environmental investment than driving my Honda Civic!
