Mythbusters comments

[Hogeye]

Great web site, guys! I just perused the educational section and the "American Freedom" mythbusters. There is one change in terminology I suggest, to make one of the myth statements more accurate.

True or False: The U.S. government will pay you to buy a humongous gas guzzling SUV like this.

Technically, the USgov is not paying people; it is reducing the amount people are forced to pay the State. It should be rephrased to: True or False: The U.S. government will give you a tax break if you buy a humongous gas guzzling SUV like this. Similarly, in the explanation the word "subsidized" needs to go; "massively subsidized" should be changed to "rewarded with massive tax breaks" or some such.

[Dardedar]

True or False: The U.S. government will pay you to buy a humongous gas guzzling SUV like this.
Technically, the USgov is not paying people; it is reducing the amount people are forced to pay the State.

DAR
Thanks for the feedback Hogeye. Technically, you're right. And my first impulse was to go in and change this to be more precise. But then I remember going round and round with Doug on this a little when we put this together. Being nit-picky debaters we often go for the most precise but sometimes to get someone's attention it can be useful to be a little provocative in a headline to grab attention. As long as the flourish is defensible and I think this one is. Doug gave me the example of a salesman who advertised for a seminar and one of the things he offered to teach you would be how to get as much as 18% return on your money. What was this secret method? Pay off your credit card bills. Of course, this is not usually referred to as a way of investing money and getting a return on it but it is novel to observe that it has the EXACT SAME effect.

Similarly, while the government does not actually cut you a check for as much as $37,000 if you buy a Hummer, the fact is that, for the people in question (wealthy people who owe a lot of tax) it has the EXACT SAME effect as if they did cut you a check and thus the exact same effect of paying you to buy these extra heavy vehicles. If you look at the bank account after the event, there is no difference whatsoever.

It should be rephrased to: True or False: The U.S. government will give you a tax break if you buy a humongous gas guzzling SUV like this.

DAR
For the people who take the very easy steps to make their 3+ ton vehicle qualify, a tax break has the exact same effect as a payment.

Similarly, in the explanation the word "subsidized" needs to go; "massively subsidized" should be changed to "rewarded with massive tax breaks" or some such.

DAR
Government subsidies often take the form of tax breaks or tax incentives and are generally and regularly referred to in this way, and quite correctly in my opinion.

For instance, Dictionary.com has this description:

"Subsidy
A benefit given by the government to groups or individuals usually in the form of a cash payment or tax reduction. The subsidy is usually given to remove some type of burden and is often considered to be in the interest of the public."

D.
-----------------------
"I also dropped the bottom rate from fifteen percent to ten percent, because, by far, the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder."
--G.W. Bush, lying during the first Gore debate. The bottom 60 percent got 14.7 percent.

[Hogeye]

Okay, no big deal. I understand that, for dramatic reasons, you may not want to be technically correct.

BTW, the dictionary you cited does not include tax breaks as subsidies in its definition - the part you quoted came from commentary. Neither does Merriam Webster or Die.net. I guess the only downside to using "subsidy" in the myth statement is that everyone but liberals will reject it out of hand as false and politically biased. I.e. it is generally "liberals" who don't know (or care about) the difference between a subsidy and a tax break.

The result of a mugger stealing $15, and the mugger stealing $20 and then giving me $5 back so I can get a cab, is basically the same. I still wouldn't call that $5 a subsidy.

[Savonarola]

The result of a mugger stealing $15, and the mugger stealing $20 and then giving me $5 back so I can get a cab, is basically the same. I still wouldn't call that $5 a subsidy.

Unless you're equating said mugger with the government, I think your analogy is flawed.

[Hogeye]

Of course I'm equating the mugger with the government! Taxation is robbery. The main difference between a private mugger and the government is that a mugger is not so silly (or morally perverted) as to follow you around, telling you what to do, and claiming that the robbery is for your own good.

[Savonarola]

The money a mugger takes doesn't go to the public or to public works.

Are we really discussing this?

[Hogeye]

Where the money goes is irrelevant to the question of whether it was stolen or exchanged consentually.

BTW, the money government steals usually doesn't go to the public, either. It often goes to mass-murder, weapons of mass destruction, contracts for crony corporations, kidnapping and imprisoning subjects who eat, drink, or smoke forbidden substances, and in general to oppress the same people who were robbed!

As freethinkers, we reject the braindead bromide the government is here to help and the patently absurd we are the government. By holding reason above church and State, we are able to do a more objective institutional analysis of the State than your average flaghumper. We are not afraid to call "theft" theft.

But this discussion probably should go in an anarchism thread.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Hogeye - Taxes are the income of government - whose services you are so accustomed to using you forget who provides them. Just for starters, money itself - the medium of exchange that allows you to purchase your needs with the fruits of your labor - without having to go to each producer and barter however much they need of whatever you do to receive whatever you and they consider to be an equivalent amount of whatever they produce. Official measurements - which means when you acquire a pound of apples from producer A, it will be the same amount as if you acquired a pound of apples from producer B. Rules of interstate commerce - which, among many other things, means you and your goods won't be taxed just for crossing a state border. And, while I don't approve of the current size, nor what we are currently doing with the military (and I truly don't approve of the size of the military budget, nor the uses the money is being put to), to maintain our sovreignty, we need a military presence - otherwise while you wouldn't have to worry about taxation or regulation from the U.S. government, you would have taxation and regulations from some other government (probably Canada - or more likely, the northern states would come under Canada and the southern states, including AR, would be Mexican).

So how, besides taxes, are you going to pay for these, and many more services the government provides that you apparently think come from the good fairies?

[Dardedar]

HOG
BTW, the dictionary you cited does not include tax breaks as subsidies in its definition - the part you quoted came from commentary.

DAR
Right. That's why I said "description" instead of "definition."

HOG
... the only downside to using "subsidy" in the myth statement is that everyone but liberals will reject it out of hand as false and politically biased.

DAR
I don't think so. It is normal to speak of the government subsidizing a group via tax incentives. Happens all the time. In this case, it is wealthy people. I have a wealthy uncle in Rogers that took this SUV tax write off. It saved him no doubt many thousands in taxes. They might as well have cut him a check. No difference.

HOG
I.e. it is generally "liberals" who don't know (or care about) the difference between a subsidy and a tax break.

DAR
When it makes no difference whatsoever in the bottomline, I certainly don't care about a semantic difference which may disturb some on the far right wanting to make a point against taxation.

HOG
The result of a mugger stealing $15, and the mugger stealing $20 and then giving me $5 back so I can get a cab, is basically the same. I still wouldn't call that $5 a subsidy.

DAR
Well you certainly could. The second definition in the American Heritage for subsidy is:

"2. Financial assistance given by one person or government to another."

Bush has vastly subsidized the SUV and heavy truck industry with this tax cut, subsidy, to the wealthy. Now they just have to figure out how to pay for the gas....

D.
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Adjusted for inflation, there's been a 14 percent decline in US funding for energy efficiency since 2002. Meanwhile, the National Renewable Energy Labs in Golden has seen its budget fall from nearly $230 million in 2003 to $201 million last year. The unit is slated for another $28 million cut in 2006, so NREL will get $10 million less than the $183 million it got in 2000, the year Bush was first elected.
-- http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/022106EB.shtml

Japan's energy consumption per person is now almost half that of the United States. Conservation fever swept the nation after the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty written in Japan that aims to reduce greenhouse gases. The United States has not ratified the treaty.
Japan now imports 16 percent less oil than it did in 1973, although the economy has more than doubled. Billions of dollars were invested in converting oil-reliant electricity-generation systems into ones powered by natural gas, coal, nuclear energy or alternative fuels. Japan, for instance, now accounts for 48 percent of the globe's solar power generation - compared with 15 percent in the United States.
-- http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/022106EB.shtml

[Hogeye]

This is a semantic argument over the meaning of "subsidy." Ask your wealthy uncle whether he got a subsidy or a tax break. Of course governments and thieves prefer the term "subsidy," since it frames them a benefactors rather than plunderers!

[Dardedar]

This is a semantic argument over the meaning of "subsidy." Ask your wealthy uncle whether he got a subsidy or a tax break.

DAR
He is too busy making money to waste time with such word games. However, he knows that, like most people in his situation there would be absolutely no difference whatsoever in his ledger book. Nor is there a difference in the cost to the government. The government can subsidize his SUV purchase directly with a check for $20,000 or give him $20,000 off of his taxes. There is no difference. The result is a targeted government subsidy.

Of course governments and thieves prefer the term "subsidy," since it frames them a benefactors rather than plunderers!

DAR
The irony here is that you want to quibble that it is not precise enough for some far rightwing sensibilities to use the word subsidy here (even though the American Heritage dictionary gives "tax break" as an example of a subsidy) while at the same time you regularly and quite imprecisely refer to democratically elected governments as "totalitarian" "nazi" "thieves" etc. If you use the word totalitarian or nazi to refer to all governments, you take away the power of the word when you actually do come across one that is totalitarian, or nazi.

D.
----------------------
Bush invited fiction writer Michael Crichton to the White House last
year to chat about his book "State of Fear," which dismisses global
warming as a conspiracy by environmentalists. Bush read the book "avidly" according to a reporter, and agreed with everything in it.
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/022006EA.shtml

[Hogeye]

... at the same time you regularly and quite imprecisely refer to democratically elected governments as "totalitarian" "nazi" "thieves" etc.

You are mistaken. I don't regularly call democratically elected governments "totalitarian" or "nazi." Please don't put words in my mouth, Darrel. (I have pointed out that taxation is a form of theft.)

[Dardedar]

You are mistaken. I don't regularly call democratically elected governments "totalitarian" or "nazi." Please don't put words in my mouth, Darrel.

DAR
Here is what I was thinking of:

"I suffer from the inefficiencies of govt monopolies and the dangers of the govt beast, from imprisonment by drug nazis to foreign terrorists the government has created."

And:

"...Historically, States have been the major impediment to freedom of trade. Without States, I see highways between peoples flowing with goods, unimpeded by immigration nazis and customs agents stealing goods,..."

quote source

Okay, I was off a little. You refer to democratically elected governments as "beasts" who have created "drug nazi's" and "immigration nazi's."

Unless you have done some editing you are absolutely right about my totalitarian claim, my mistake. I couldn't find any examples of you using that word flippantly.

D.
-----------------------
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whther Nazi or Communist." --Churchhill, speech, November 21, 1943

[Hogeye]

I think I used "totalitarian" to describe Hobbe's Leviathan, which is appropriate. If you've ever been arrested for possessing forbidden substances, or seen drug enforcement agents first-hand, then you know "nazi" is an apt phrase. The same goes for the uniformed goons who prevent trade and kidnap immigrants crossing imaginary statist borders.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Hogeye, I'm not fond of the DEA myself, nor the expensive and counter-productive "War on Drugs" - another grand example of "power corrupts" - but you seem to dislike all policing entities. Is this true? There really is a need for the police by whatever name, since not eveyone is as respectful of other people's persons or property as we all wish.

[Hogeye]

Hogeye, I'm not fond of the DEA myself, nor the expensive and counter-productive "War on Drugs" - another grand example of "power corrupts" - but you seem to dislike all policing entities. Is this true?

No, I'm just against monopoly police. Just like, in the "Barbara's Questions" thread, I argued against monopoly courts and monopoly armies.

It is a very common misunderstanding of anarchism to think we are against service X currently provided by government, when of course we are actually against a government monopoly in the provision of X. I suppose that, if governments currently provided shoes, some idiots would say that anarchists are against shoes!

We can speculate about what police would be like in a stateless society. For one thing, victimless "crimes" would largely go away. E.g. Pot smokers would subscribe to a PDA (private defense agency) that didn't have laws against cannabis. Meanwhile your holy-rolling puritan could subscribe to a PDA that stoned adulterers to death. Everyone shops for their own preferred legal system, who's jurisdiction is limited to the property of its customers.

David Friedman, an anarcho-capitalist guru, speculates that pot would probably be legal in most places in a free society, but heroin probably would not be except in some big cities. (Free-market security has a libertarian bias, but of course does not guanantee libertarian results.) Currently, pot prohibition laws are a public good - if you don't like pot it doesn't cost you a thing to vote to outlaw it. In a free market, someone could join a PDA which offers pot-prohibition services, but it would cost them. Would people be willing to pay, say, a hundred dollars a year to prevent other people from toking? Many people who would coerce others when it costs nothing would be reluctant to pay for it - it doesn't really mean that much to them utility-wise. In short, there are enough pot-smokers who get positive utility from toking to "outbid" the busybodies.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

But it does cost - in tax dollars - to prohibit pot smoking under the current system. Besides, your PDAs would have to be territorial, otherwise you would end up with a version of gang wars - if for instance your non-pot smoking PDA started muscling in on the pot smoking PDA turf - arresting folks the latter was hired to protect, etc. What a governmental monopoly (i.e., official and/or established authority) on such things does is keep those turf wars to a minimum.

[Hogeye]

But it does cost - in tax dollars - to prohibit pot smoking under the current system.

Yes, but it doesn't cost the voter anything. His taxes do not go up by his vote. Any eventual costs in inflation or future taxation is shoved on the general population - he doesn't pay for the choice himself. In a private system, his security insurance goes up, just as sure as yours goes up if you want to insure a new car.

Your PDAs would have to be territorial, otherwise you would end up with a version of gang wars - if for instance your non-pot smoking PDA started muscling in on the pot smoking PDA turf...

I guess I wasn't clear. The jurisdiction of the PDAs is easily determined - by its customer's property. If the pot-smoking was done on the property of a customer of the pot-permitted-PDA, than it's legal. If the toking was done on the property of a pot-prohibited-PDA customer, then it's illegal. If it is done on the road, then the road company's PDA has jurisdiction. I've already covered why PDAs are less likely to get into turf wars than States, and how when such wars do occur, they are less deadly and destructive when done by PDAs than States.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Hogeye - you put an awful lot of faith in the essential fair-mindedness and respect for other people's property of human beings. Our policing system, while nowhere near perfect and infected with some of these same kinds of people, came into being to deal with folks whose ideas of "mine and thine" is to make "thine mine" as quickly as possible.

In the smaller communities, like the Irish tuatha, where interdependence was a survival trait, these things tend not to happen, but we haven't lived in those small communities for a long time.

[Betsy]

It's really a rather utopian concept, even though I know you say it isn't.

Remember the Y2K thing? I knew someone who was convinced that Y2K was what was going to bring on the kind of society that Hogeye describes. Only through a situation like that, which would suddenly and completely tear down the system that exists now can such a radical change in our complete societal structure take place.

It was a good HYPOTHESIS, but fortunately or unfortunately, whichever way, didn't happen...