It's the criminal economy, stupid!

boing
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Well, I don’t know how your peer group is, but I know a lot of people making a lot less than $200K who all agree they’d like to work less and get paid less. The union most of my co-workers are members of tried to negotiate additional unpaid vacation days in the last round of bargaining. Maybe I’m underestimating how well off a person needs to be in the US to feel secure, or maybe the US culture is just actually that sick.

Your idea of a global tax rate is transparently stupid. It costs different amounts of money to live in different places. Plenty of people live on less than $1000 a year if you look at currency, but where I live that wouldn’t allow me to buy enough oats to consume the number of calories I take in a year. If wealth were more evenly distributed then these differences in currencies would even themselves out. There are tons of people living in North America who can’t afford enough food to eat who “have far more money” than lots of people living in other places who do have enough to eat.

We ought to think globally, but there is a lot of work to be done to get from here to there.

But to the point, yes, I would advocate a 75% marginal tax rate on my income bracket. Not next year - sudden big changes cause big problems - but gradually over time. Go make a scatter plot of tax home pay vs. average tax rate in developed nations. What’s the correlation?

We have to be very careful not to generalize about the wealthy because after all, some of them were just lucky, it’s not like they did anything wrong. I think the old saying is that it’s better to let 100 guilty men go free than to send one innocent man to prison. So how many of the 49 million US citizens without enough food on the table do we have to let starve so that we don’t say something bad about people who might just be lucky to get 10,000 times their share?

Yes, people think of vigilante justice as worse than no justice. It isn’t. Vigilante justice is rudimentary justice, a precursor to better systems.

No one here is literally advocating killing the wealthy (I keep that ot myself) but the wealthy have been killed by the poor quite a few times in history. If they don’t want it to happen again, they have lots of options - just make sure things don’t get so miserable for the poor that it comes to that. I’ll be right over to give a perfunctory, “Killing is wrong” if it does happen, just like it’s sad to see a drunk driver kill themselves in an accident. Too bad we live in this stupid, shitty world, but I have a really hard time feeling empathy for the most powerful people in the world when they make their own beds.

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It is might makes right. The mob is right because they have pitchforks and clubs.

Thats exactly what “vigilante” justice is. And once again, that kinda thing makes me real nervous for reasons previously stated.

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Please present some evidence that there’s anything like a powerful vigilante mob out there now, poised to torture and kill rich people. Since you’re feeling so nervous, please point to where is there any sort of current effective mass movement on the left against (to use the parlance of our times) the 1%.

When such movements have coalesced recently, such as Occupy Wall Street, none of their stated collective aims, nor collective actions, have included targeted kidnappings, torture, mass roundups, or killings of the 1%.

I’m trying to figure out how anything that’s happening today justifies your fear that some sort of dangerous leftist mob is out there.

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I’ve never understood how thats supposed to work. It still costs more to live here in Tokyo then in the wilds of Hokkaido but evening out the Yen to Euro exchange rate isn’t going to change that. Taxing me harder is just going to mean that I’ll end up with a lower quality of life than someone supporting a family up in Hokkaido as well. Back of the envelope calculation shows that to keep up the mortgage and bills and food would leave me with nothing to save at all. Considering the price of heating in the winter and cooling in the summer here I’d have to forgo when its a health risk to do so.

In some related threads there are comments to the effect of “just give me five minutes alone in a room with them” kinds of things. The general tone of lots of comments (and some editors) is that if you have (more) money (than me) you are rich and therefore guilty and should be punished.

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Again, you seem to be ignoring my argument entirely to simply restate your opinion. Mob justice: you’re against it. Got it.

I’m not asking whether it’s good or bad in absolute terms. I’m asking at what point it becomes preferable to a systematically unjust system of law.

I think we can agree that an oppressive and unjust legal system is a bad thing. I’ll agree for the sake of argument that mob justice is a bad thing.

Is an oppressive and unjust but official legal system always preferable to mob justice? Or is there a point at which those without their hands on the official levers of power are justified in obviating the official but (for the sake of argument) unjust and oppressive system of law?

Sorry to be so insistent, but I think this is the third time I’ve asked this question, and in response people keep restating their already obvious opinions against mob justice. Great. Mob justice is bad. Can we agree that the powerful abusing their positions to corrupt our society’s legal institutions is also bad? And if so, can we candidly discuss the reality we find ourselves in – the one with two bad options – instead of sticking our thumbs in our butts and tabooing one of those options because it’s not perfect?

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It doesn’t. For all the same reasons.

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Never? So revolution is never justified? Oppression is moral?

In Nazi Germany, genocide of Jews, homosexuals, and others was the official law of the land. Would an underground or resistance fighting against this official system of law be immoral? It would, after all, be a perfect example of vigilanteism – citizens deciding for themselves that their moral values trump the law.

We could pose a similar stumper about communist Russia. Would, say, breaking political dissidents out of the gulag and smuggling them out of Russia be immoral, obviating as it does the official law of the Party? Again, it’s obviously against the law for private citizens to break into a prison camp and release prisoners regardless of whether their imprisonment is just.

And could you state the reasons? It’s really frustrating to engage you in good faith only to have you respond with half- and non-answers.

At some point I will have to conclude that you simply don’t have an argument to make.

Edit:

While we’re at it, isn’t civil disobedience a form of vigilanteism? Again, it’s citizens deciding for themselves that their moral values trump the law of the land.

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Sometimes. But if you think the U.S. is a meritocracy that supports such luck, here’s an Economist cover for you:

20060617issuecovUS400.jpg400×526 165 KB

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I was responding to @tlwest’s idea that we ought to globalize that. So forget the difference between living in Tokyo vs. Hokkaido, and instead consider living in Tokyo vs. rural Ethiopia. It’s bad enough within developed nations where governments try to pass one-size-fits-all laws that cover major urban centers and the most rural areas. What I was saying was that if nations didn’t have such wealth disparity, then there wouldn’t be an appearance that feeding a person in central Africa is worth a great deal less than feeding a person in Tokyo or Toronto. Feeding a person isn’t more or less worthy because we do it in a different currency.

But I disagree that higher taxes would just mean you have less. Obviously the year taxes go up you’d have less, but we don’t see that people in nations with higher tax rates have less.

Even then I would say they aren’t literally advocating killing the wealthy, they are venting frustration and - at least in North America - a lot of us do that by talking about being violent (where do all those mass shootings come from?).

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Nicely done image! But yeah, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, aye?

Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System.jpg763×990 571 KB

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The poor are tough and stringy.

Pogroms are the result of the state being run by and for a privileged class, which needs scapegoats to prevent the eating of the rich.

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Hey, while we’re on the subject of pogroms, here’s some interesting stuff I found on wikipedia:

Of the pogroms in Ukraine, about 40% were perpetrated by the Ukrainian People’s Republic forces led by Symon Petliura, 25% by the Ukrainian Green Army and various Ukrainian nationalist gangs, 17% by the White Army, especially the forces of Anton Denikin

It doesn’t even matter who you believe to be the “legitimate” government of Ukraine at the time, all the parties with a claim to it participated in pogroms. Is vigilanteism bad when the government itself engages in pogroms?

On April 26, 1881 even bigger disorder engulfed the city of Kiev. The Kiev pogrom of 1881 is considered the worst one that took place in 1881.[7] The pogroms of 1881 did not stop then. They continued on through the summer, spreading across a big territory of modern-day Ukraine: (Podolie Governorate, Volyn Governorate, Chernigov Governorate, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, and others). During these pogroms the first local Jewish self-defense organizations started to form, the most prominent one in Odessa.

Apparently at least some victims of pogroms did not have the same moral reservations about vigilanteism.

The new Tsar Alexander III initially blamed revolutionaries and the Jews themselves for the riots and in May 1882 issued the May Laws, a series of harsh restrictions on Jews.

Given the above, who can blame them? This is a similar situation to Nazi Germany where mob justice is rubber stamped by the official court system anyway.

Sorry, citing “pogroms” is apparently not enough to taboo the topic of vigilante justice. In fact, given that victims of pogroms themselves engaged in vigilanteism as a response, citing them undermines the anti-vigilante absolutism so far advocated by @Israel_B.

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I feel my answers have been clear. I am however choosing not to write out a long justification for my position as it is based on points of Jewish law and theory that arent relevant here and arent summed up easily, or at least to do so is beyond my writing skills.

Or theres the possibility that I just have my reasons. Anyway, conclude what you like.

Probably it comes as no surprise that I subscribe to The Economist. Frankly I was disappointed in the article that went with the cover. Seemed a bit too polemic rather than evidential. But thats just my perception.

As a moral principle I certainly agree with the conclusion but the premise still doesn’t really work for me. Even if for some reason, I and other people with developed world skills moved to Ethiopia and were to make a somewhat tolerable life for ourselves and even in the process improved the local economy somewhat, that in and of itself does nothing for the overall GINI rate (or however you want to measure it) of the local population, much less solve the governance and other problems that keep some places in dire poverty to begin with. Theres also the little issue of what right do I & mine have to impose our ways on anyone else?

Certainly if my national, prefecture and city taxes all go up then I have less at the end of the day. Knowing I’ll have less in the long run is a disincentive long term much less this year.

Bear in mind, I’m not “rich” by developed world standards at all but I do well enough that I know what salary I dont want to be at because it would automatically trigger a higher tax band that would mean I earn less. Heck, I’m not even all that good at personal finance but I can figure out that much. Its not that hard to see why even people who are willing to pay their fair share of taxes are also willing to game the system within the rules.

Death taxes in Japan are incredibly harsh. I can totally sympathize with some of the deceased Japanese people named in the Panama papers who wanted to find a legal way to allow their family to inherit without bankrupting their descendants.

Slightly off but on topic, if you have never seen a Japanese movie called “A Taxing Woman” you really should.

I can understand that, I just choose not to do so myself and feel uncomfortable with that venting.

Lets not go there…

I’ve never really bought the class based explanation as a root cause of violence against the Jews as a people. Can make for a convenient excuse but theres more to it than that.

I hope you realize that I’m not speaking for all Jews and that we arent a monolith.

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I am as a voice crying in the wilderness…

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Are the inheritance taxes > 100%?

(I guess you’re talking about being able to keep hold of the property being inherited and finding alternative ways of paying the assessed value?)

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Rather than perhaps John The Baptist misquoting Isaiah, how about instead the megillah Esther.

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Missing the point.

Those agent the kind of people the establishment wants jailed.

There was never a shortage of evidence.

Note how little evidence is required to criminalize people of colour…

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That’s hard to take from a person who refuses to provide evidence for their own claims (as in, immediately preceding, “theres the possibility that I just have my reasons. Anyway, conclude what you like.”).

If you want to just state opinions here, that seems all right to me, but you’re also coming back repeatedly to engage with people who respond to them. That’s called a conversation, or discourse, or maybe even an argument. Any of those three calls for backing up what one is saying, rather than just repeatedly shrugging your shoulders and instead saying, “Well, that’s just my opinion, man. Take it or leave it.”

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No but just because you receive an asset does not mean you can immediately dispose of the asset at assessed market value either. Or in the Panama Papers case, to keep the controlling interest of a company within the founding family, stock was assigned to a holding corporation offshore. Had the descendants inherited the stock directly, the assessed value would have been effectively >100% of the value of the stock and the volume of shares would have been sufficient that they could not be sold to pay the tax bill without literally moving the market. Theres also the after effects that take place (see also following story). Had the inheritors sold all shares that would have effected the company in question and depressed the value of the company and or caused market uncertainty which would have resulted in lots of job losses.

Another story where I know one of the people: an elderly friend of mine who has lived in Japan for many decades used to rent an apartment within a large old family house. The owners of the house died and the daughter did not have sufficient income to pay the death tax on the property that had been in the family for generations. She was forced to sell at below market value to a property developer as she was unwilling to take the government high interest loan which would have been required to keep the house. The result was my friend who was on a fixed income became homeless and could not afford to rent anything at current market rates.

So yeah… Its not always about the straight percentages of a punishing tax.

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Please provide an example that would explain the details of how this is even possible, bearing in mind that at least some people here are familiar with the concept of marginal tax rates.

No, but you’re citing a tragedy that befell some Jewish people to score cheap emotional rhetorical points without providing any corresponding intellectual justification for your position. It doesn’t really matter how many Jews you’re speaking for; it just matters that the Jews you are speaking for didn’t seem to hold the same position as you.

Your feelings on that score are simply incorrect.

Had I asked: “Is vigilante justice a good thing?” then your answers would have been quite clear.

However, that is not the question I asked. And I took great pains to clarify that I was not asking, “in the context of a society with a functional and not terribly corrupt legal system, is vigilante justice a good thing or a bad thing?” Nonetheless, that seems to be the only question along these lines that you are willing to answer.

What I asked instead was: at what point at which an institutional system of justice can become so unjust, oppressive, and cruel that the people subjected to its vagaries are morally justified in seeking a new system of justice outside the terms of the unjust, oppressive, and cruel institutions?

Your answer was “at no point”, which I find hard to parse because it seems so obviously wrong to me. It seems wrong to me because it implies that the answers to the following questions are all “no”:
-is revolution ever justified?
-would citizens of Germany during WWII be morally justified in resisting the SS and the Nazi regime?
-is there a moral alternative to “might makes right”?
-is there any morally justifiable response to oppression besides accepting it?

Would you really answer all those questions with an unqualified “nope!”? If so, and if you refuse to provide further justification, I’ll happily write you off as an authoritarian nutjob. Otherwise, I think some further clarification is needed.

It seems to me that law and legal theory are extremely relevant to this question; perhaps the “Jewish” part is indeed irrelevant, but if you’re going to make universal moral claims (and this is how your one-liners come across), then the “Jewish” part really shouldn’t matter.

If there’s a moral argument to be made that the only morally justifiable response to oppression is to accept it, then I would certainly like to see you at least gesture at it, even if your writing skills aren’t up to making it convincing.

Your argument doesn’t undermine the notion that an estate tax is just. It does point out problems with the implementation of an estate tax as it stands today in some jurisdictions.

In fact, the fact that estate taxes are implemented in such a way that they are incredibly hard on the middle class, but can be avoided entirely by the upper class supports the premise that our legal institutions are corrupt and unjust.

I think it’s fair to say that none of your examples have much to say about the morality of an estate tax levied on the actually rich, since in each of your examples the problem is that the parties in question did not have enough liquid assets to service the tax bill. Which wouldn’t even necessarily be an issue with a more reasonably designed tax law, but the point still stands that this line of argument is hardly a stirring call to compassion for the wealthy.

Edit: Let me add that if there is really a justification for asserting that oppressed people should never fight back against their oppressors then I would like to know for my own edification and improvement. I am a moral skeptic! I think it is important not to accept one’s own moral principles as dogma, because that is always the first step to using those principles as a justification for oppression. On the other hand, it seems morally basic to me that an individual is entitled to defend him- or herself, and that a group of individuals is justified in banding together for the sake of self defense. If there is a good reason to doubt this moral principle, then I would like to know so that I can honestly consider it and update my moral framework accordingly!

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