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Evelyn K. Brunswick's avatar

I'm about halfway through so far, but the first thing that immediately struck me is that you are making a horrendous fallacy of definitions here. And it is seriously bad where philosophy is concerned.

Nietzsche, I am absolutely certain, would understand every word I'm about to say.

See, this essay would make a lot more sense if you replaced the word 'statist' with 'stupid infantilised conditioned slave-mentality people'. Likewise you need to replace 'oligarch' with 'resentment-motivated sociopath'. Because that's what you are really talking about here. You are absolutely not talking about enlightened people like myself who wholeheartedly understand the need - in larger social groups beyond the square of the social cognition number (22,500 for humans) - for a 'state' in the simple sense of a 'social decision-making council'. You can't have progress, let alone care for millions of people, without 'organisation'. That's part of the point of being a social animal.

Your fallacy is in assuming that 'any state' is by definition bad. And yet you also readily admit that the reason it's bad is because of the bad character of the people running it (oligarchs), and the stupidity of the people supporting it (statists). So, clearly you are disingenuously confusing a neutral system (the idea of a state) with the specific historical manner in which human states have turned out to be bad. My blatantly obvious point being that if you 'deal with' the oligarchs and you have a good enough education system, and you don't allow stupid people to have any influence over the state, then you will end up with a benevolent state.

This is one of the logical idiocies I've encountered with so-called anarchists. An anarch-system only works by 'voluntaryism' as you say. But it also requires all the participants to be spiritually and psychologically mature such that they don't need to be told how to behave well because they are in harmony with natural law. But if you had a 'state' with such mature people running it, then you have the same thing. Exactly the same thing. So I would suggest these sorts of 'anarchists' are in fact just reactionaries in the end.

A benevolent 'state' is run by agreement of the people. If you have a mature people, then it works fine.

So instead of attacking the idea of a 'state' by highlighting 'stupid people', it would be better to explain the distinction between a 'statist' and a 'stupid person'. It is a very dangerous thing indeed to confuse the way things have specifically turned out in history with the theoretical philosophy of a state.

Unless you can prove to me, beyond reasonable doubt, that it is impossible for a 'statist' to be a highly spiritually and psychologically and socially mature individual, and for there ever to be a 'state' which is managed by such mature people. I seriously doubt you can do that.

Anyway - I'll read the second half now.

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Rob (c137)'s avatar

The tax issue is even simpler.

Individuals pay no tax, except on investment profits which is non productive profit.

Companies pay taxes as they are not individuals and they only would pay taxes on profits, which is how you incentivize reinvestment in labor and equipment which are write offs.

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