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PostSubject: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 08, 2016 9:26 am

An attempt at an objective analysis. Please comment or disagree as needed.

I propose an idea that reduction in tax rates, especially on large wealth and income holders, leads to economy-wide destabilization effects including increased inflation and prices, market volatility, and increased public and private debt. The amount of public spending by government does not decrease in line with decreased tax rates; any reduction in top tax rates and resulting decrease in revenue to government is made up by borrowing and shifting costs around and onto the public. Reduction in income tax leads cities to hike property tax rates, sales taxes, fees and other costs to make up the difference for example, as well as puts increased pressure on the bottom line. Increased pressure drives competition and can improve efficiency, but also has the effect of shortening timelines for project planning and execution and creates incentives to cut corners to remain in or under budget (e.g. Flint water crisis), as the budget becomes the primary concern and not the actual project or spending itself. A shift toward capitalization of public spending in this way affects the ethos of what it means to spend money on public works and governance, shifting the emphasis from the works and governance to the bottom line cost and narrow economic gain. Conservative political ideology follows suit along this route of capitalization as the idea of what government and public spending exist for is changed from emphasis on societal value and public long-term good to an emphasis on a business-oriented return on investment capitalization of public funds.

Such a shift de-emphasizes what money is spent on and emphasizes instead the money itself, with the natural result that taxes are demonized as "taking money" from people without recourse or interest to what that tax money would be used for or how well it is being used, or how necessary the uses toward which it is to be put may be. Decreasing tax rates is a regressive policy that has little or no effect on most people, who exist at the poverty level or lower middle class level, and has only a significant positive effect for those in upper middle class and upper class. The reduction in revenue to the treasury is significant despite saving only a tiny amount of money, or not saving any, on the taxes the poor and lower middle class pay. Due to the reduction in revenue and resulting increase in debts and fees, shifting costs to consumers, and short-term borrowing including interest payments, the entire system becomes subtly more expensive over time, as we have seen in America. Prices increase drastically over time, there are artificial bubbles in the stock market and commodity markets right now, and inflation measured by cost of goods and services is higher than the official inflation numbers. Costs of starting a business, buying an education, buying a house or car, these are all hugely increased over the last decade or two. In part this is all caused by the subtle economic shifts that occur in a society that de-values the idea of public spending and taxes and has successfully demonized taxation to the point where low tax rates on the wealthy lead to a host of detrimental consequences for the society as a whole, again which includes mostly people who are at or near the poverty line, or relatively low middle class.

As a percentage of GDP government spending has increased only very slowly from around 15% in 1950 to around 25% today. Govenment spending will start increasing more quickly soon as interest payments on government debt increase. The main concern is official government debt and continuing large deficits, which issue is most easily and effectively addressed by increasing tax rates in a progressive fashion. However the opposite has occurred, and what used to be 70% or higher tax rates on upper income earners have fallen to around 39% today. This has the effect, since public spending has not decreased but increased gradually over time, of shifting more tax burden on lower income earners and on debt spending, as well as those other insidious effects I mentioned such as bubble economies, shifting costs to consumers, inflation and rising prices, and an overall "capitalization" of what it means to spend money in public works and social goods. And while the top tax rate decreased by as much as 50% of its original value from the 1950s-today we have the second top tax rate also decreasing slightly from around just over 40% to around 30%, and then the second lowest tax rate (lower middle class) actually increasing from around 20% to 25%.

Today the US economy is a massive debtor economy of continuous false bubbles of growth sitting atop a generally increasing cost of living and an erosion of public trust in what government exists to do, namely to spend money on socially-valuable and necessary projects such as defense, infrastructure, social safety nets and the functions of governance. Real costs of things like education, housing and rent, and food are relatively speaking through the roof, if you take a historical view; public debt is also tremendous and risks becoming a runaway debt situation where interest payments on the debt will top 50% of all public spending in just a couple of generations. All of this could be addressed by returning to a strong progressive tax system that would re-institute a view of socially-conscious and long-term value spending and refuse to dump costs onto the lowest income earners while defaulting costs away from the upper earners and supplementing spending with huge deficits (massive deficits for domestic government spending increased drastically under Reagan, who cut upper tax rates sharply due to his ideological views but as I mentioned already government spending didn't decrease proportionately; Reagan and his economists said this reduction in upper tax rates would actually increase revenue to the treasury, but of course the exact opposite happened). The large increase in the income gap is causing problems including a fracturing of the people into strongly polarized groups and more militant ideological a politics, where each "side" of the political spectrum tends to thinks the world is going to end unless their candidate wins. In fact he problems are far more benign and could be addressed with relatively moderate reforms to tax structure. The costs of living for most people are unreasonable and society just isn't working for the average person's anymore, and yet those moderate changes will not occur because of how the wealthy have taken over the political system and would never voluntarily tax themselves more in order to prevent continued social and economic pain and collapse for everyone else. We have effectively today an oligarchy, with a sham democracy propping it up to lend the appearance of popular mandate: so long as people vote in elections it doesn't matter who wins, because whoever wins can do whatever they want under the false idea that they possess the "will of the majority". Bernie Sanders is the only one who wants to meaningfully raise taxes on upper income earners, which would go a long way to starting to reverse the trends toward collapse, including large deficits and debt, of recent times. (This does not mean I am endorsing Sanders, only that he is the only one to talk about meaningful increases to upper tax rates and the detrimental effects the currently low rates are having).

Demonizing the wealthy isn't the way to go, that is stupid, but addressing the real problems of wealth disparities and the effects and consequences of drastically reduced tax rates on upper income earners is necessary. Society exists in part to offset and counter-balance the natural tendencies of capitalization in social and economic life; defending capitalism is unnecessary since capitalism is the default and will always take care of itself, whereas placing limits on capitalism is necessary and important. But unfortunately the popular tune today is taken over by super-conservative wealthy interests who only wish to demonize public spending and taxes, as if these were somehow way out of wack and the real problem--no, public spending is only slightly greater over time and taxes are actually less than they used to be (unless you're poor, in which case your taxes are greater, either as income on lower middle class or as sales taxes, property taxes passed on into rent costs, and fees). As I said, we now live in an oligarchy, and the vested interests control the popular image, and shape the popular outrage.
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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 08, 2016 4:35 pm

I think you got it right, in the essence; but I tend to see tax collecting as part of an ancient scheme that has only secondarily to do with maintaining conditions for the lower classes and primarily to do with the even more ancient scheme of not pissing off too many powerful people, and making them dependent enough. So tax relief as has been an issue in the US forever, is rather an electoral game than a financial strategy, unfortunately. If there had been economic strategy behind any recent US policy, I mean as a primary factor, then clearly the nation would not have this ridiculous debt. Its citizens would not massively me in debt (nor on meds, for that matter) - what I see thus is a rampant foreign policy that is so immensely costly in all of its consequences that the middle class is being ruined. These then are given some narratives about getting back a couple of hundred bucks a year in exchange for their vote. Economical sanity isn't really possible in the type of political system that the US is at this point. Money is spent on canceling out other spending. Capital is annihilated, or castrated; tied down in a value-less circuit of lobbyists bidding against each other and boardroom blackmail aimed at obscuring myriad massive public damages using massive industrial funds.

But all this is much like an animal system. It's not rational, not teleological. And on top of this mess, it is still possible to have high end technology manufacturing companies as well as a lot of booming semi- and immaterial markets; in this sense we are evolving, the lower classes are simply cogwheels at best, and the upper strata of the economy keep distancing themselves further and further from what was once, maybe a century ago, the Imaginable.

There is some value in this brutal excess, at this point Parodites' concept of the tertiary economical phase, the mega-capital that pushes the large technology booms, gives a good picture of what really is the operative logic of this excessive system.

Back to the mechanism of taxing and the sane will to figure it out; may I propose that we approach this within a teleological framework, one that does not really yet exist. A telos for the state, basically. Without such a formal element it would seem impossible to arrange a somewhat orderly tax system of which the merit is verifiable beyond 'the economy has grown .1 percent this segment.' That means nothing. It means as little as the unemployment figures; what is counted is entirely arbitrary. At this point people who have given up looking for a job are all counted as employed. I dont think there is much sanity left in the system. This is also why I would think it an enormous blessing to have a businessman run the show for a while. I think they ought to have done that right after WWII.

Having said all this I simply agree that it is unwise not to severely tax the upper layers of industrial wealth; In power, I would immediately make sure to see corporations taxed based on the physical costs they have to the public sphere, let alone the value they draw from the public sphere, such as Norway does, which taxes its oil companies about 95 percent if I remember correctly.

But here's my problem; Taxing standing private capital is an abomination to me, as I have a very serious will to stability, and believe that ownership is an integral part of human self-valuing. It is the foundation of human identity, and I believe it would be best if it would not be taxed at all, as long as it is not invested in a running economic process, in which case it should naturally be taxed with trade taxes, which should be flat and so stable that they become almost invisible. I believe in permanent significant flat tax on all profits and incomes, without scales, and embedded in a constitution so as to not form an issue that permanently usurps all political processes, in the way I described that I see it above.

So the way to go about it would be mapping the US economy in sectors, and determining their value and merit, what they provide and require; but for this mapping, a solid understanding of the Technocratic 21st century market is required. In this unprecedented age, the most solid model I have to work with concretely is Parodites' model of infrequent but regular supercapitalized technology booms, the 'fallout' of which causes the 'regular' economic cycles.

In this context, a form of sane globalism might even be conceived. The US as leader of a global competition for technological supremacy, is a Master-Signifier opening up to reason an otherwise disastrously opaque Field.

The Telos to be formulated would thus come in terms of will to power - pure; the concept pertains most 'hygienically' to this top level of interactions anyway.

The Philosophy of the Future could perhaps largely amount to a sane global household. Masters of the Earth does not refer to a race of blond giants. It refers to a human cognition that is able to live on the actual Earth rather than 'in a glass cage of emotion'.
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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeWed Jun 08, 2016 6:06 pm

You're probably right about taxes and not pissing off the wealthy powerful people. No doubt this is what Reagan was elected to do, scale back progressive taxation, which is what has happened. In the USA we have very collapsed progressive taxes, people like me who can't barely even afford their own lives pay nearly the same tax rates as people who make 10 million dollars a year. That is irrational, from an economic standpoint and also from a philosophical one. But I like your distinction between business and standing wealth/ownership, and it's a tricky situation of course, since after all there is no income tax in the US Constitution at all and generally an income tax was seen as fascist and unconstitutional. But taxes are simply necessary and have a logical base in reality, and how are we going to construct a society without taxation? It would be impossible. If you make millions or billions of dollars a year you literally have no problems in life, you can throw money at any problem that arises. Quality of life is something that is bought by cash, and the real human values are above that baseline level. This is why we focus on the quality of life concerns for the poor and lower middle class, who really do have to struggle with anxiety and pain and fear and ruin every day, and basically don't have much left over for truly human concerns; there is no use focusing on worry about the quality of life of the rich, because even if you tax them at 70% of income, their quality of life is categorically the same as if you had taxed them at 39%, and is still infinitely superior to that of people making $25,000 a year. Taxes aren't "stealing people's money", that money is only a function of earning that exists by virtue of the fact that the individual lives in a society and draws vast implicit historical, cultural and social capital from the situation they are in. Ownership is always a somewhat communal thing, at the philosophical level, and taxes are just a material expression of that fact. So it is a balancing act of always trying to imperfectly balance individual and social goods and value-ownership. Tipping too far in either extreme would be stupid.

The thing with the mega-capital phase is, this tends to organize industry and finance but is not really where technological innovation comes from, at least not recently. We have Google, Microsoft and Apple, all of these huge game-changing tech companies and their products were basically started in someone's garage. The venture capital gets involved at some point, but the hard work is done essentially beyond the sphere of massive financialization. The sheer independent and genius self-valuing involved in such projects naturally attracts the massive capital to itself. Essentially we need a large middle class, both upper and lower middle class, to have the widest possible field of people to draw from, large diversity in ideas and perspectives and educations, from the massive ferment of all that to produce new innovations; and we need an economic situation that encourages and allows for that kind of experimentation and innovation, for people to be able to take risks and defer time at the 40 hour work week to pursue their own ideas.

When you concentrate capital at the top 0.01% of industry you get shit like Walmart, massive investments in super-cheap manufacturing scaled up to the global level. Just because billions of dollars are concentrated in one place doesnt mean those dollars are going to be spent more wisely than for example how the dollars that led to Google or Apple start ups were spent. And as you say, spending capital on ameliorating the adverse effects of debt is just annihilating capital in value-less circuits, and creates situations where the kind of free innovation we need isn't happening.

On the subject of ownership I am coming around to this idea, in general my philosophy has pushed be away from the value of ownership and caused me to see into the errors and irrationalities of ownership and defending ownership as a categorical idea; but I agree with what you say about it, because in essence the subjectivity equals its experiences, and we are beings that 'push' ourselves outward into our experiences by literally equating ourselves with and as those experiences. We are the world that we are experiencing. The problem with ownership then is less philosophical and more practical and economic, since converting things into owned objects imposes scarcity upon them, resulting in inevitable competition and consumption-trade of values. I suppose that is good and at least inevitable. But the really valuable things, at the philosophical level, such as for example our ideas, are not things that are subject to scarcity and commodification. This is why I agree with Guattari when he said that education should be free to everyone, because teaching and learning can be transmitted to everyone for very low cost and need not be tied up capitalistically in processes of commodification, scarcity and consumption. So the idea of ownership with a very much more limited idea of consumption attached to it, is where I'm at right now.

I think the telos of the state is basically to improve existential conditions both in terms of depth and in terms of degree; in quality and quantity, the state exists to expand whatever we mean when we say "human being". Or in Parodites' terms the state exists to protect and secure the space of possibility for culture to do that existential creating. But the animalistic side is always there, where each state wars against others for survival and only secondarily fights for its own values and existential realities, secondary to the primary struggle for mere survival, like some dumb beast in the wild. It's a fucking waste, for this human being to still be living like animals in the wild, survival of the fittest mentality. So in my view at least, the telos of the state is marked in a significant way by opposing that mentality, whatever that might mean at any given point in time or space.

Speaking of space, yes we need to ramp up clean energy technologies, genetic technologies, space travel technologies, we need new revolutions in all of these areas; physics, math, manufacturing and industry, energies, humanity needs to fucking gets its ass in gear. All of this vast economic and social capital needs to be mobilized, but only in the right way: we dont need a mobilization in terms of that animalistic survival of the fittest shit that so often happens, leading to physical and economic warfare, we need a kind of globalized human baseline value standard above which capital can be arranged beneficially to the vast telos of the human species, at a philosophical level. Competition will always exist and is very important, as I said that capitalism is the base and ground and will always take care of itself, therefore we dont need to worry about spending our energy and time defending capitalism, it takes care of itself. We need to worry about that telos, as you said.

I don't necessarily believe in a telos aligned to the concept of the will to power, but I definitely believe in one aligned to the concept of self-valuing, and to the highest universality to which this present day humanity can attain.


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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeThu Jun 09, 2016 6:26 am

Of course taxes are set on the lowest levels in order to try and gain new investment and capital into the country, likewise if these taxes are too high then there is business and capital leaving the country. Probably increasing globalization and free trade agreements made it impossible to maintain 70%+ top tax rates. Although if the entire first world had similar high top tax rates then there may not be too many attractive places for rich people to flee to in order to avoid those taxes.

Taxes are also issues of necessary irrationality since the tax money collected must be spent on one person or project and not others. While everyone at the same income pays the same tax bracket (not really since there are s million loopholes and shit) not everyone at the same income level receives the same share of tax-funded benefits from government or public projects and services. So a necessary unfairness exists that is only made worse as taxes are increased, but is partly offset when taxes are used successfully to reduce inequalities. Of course inequalities aren't only necessary but good, yet we can still want to reduce the most extreme and irrational of these; namely try to provide more options and opportunities for the largest number of people to be economically, socially and existentially productive.

A tax system would only work if all income was first given to the government and then redistributed back out to people based on a complex assessment of their situation and needs. But of course that would never work. The irrationality and unfairness is a natural part of the system, as with any natural system; capitalism is nothing if not rational in this manner. Even cancer is natural, it's just also natural for a body's immune system to fight that cancer. But the real problem is that no sufficient economic theory exists, there is no philosophy of economics that can really explain and account for all this, neither is there a social telos as you pointed out. I suppose the complex catch-22 is that a society and species need to reach certain historical, technological, psychological and philosophical truths in order to be able to form a coherent social telos and a true economy, but a true economy and social telos also seem necessary for enough historical, technological, philosophical and psychological truths to develop and not simply dissipate in the larger chaos of the half-formed world.


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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeThu Jun 09, 2016 10:00 am

I suppose taxes are like a complex root system under the ground, linking trees and plants together and sharing nutrients. Taxation could try to be more organic, responsive and values-centric, but no human system is going to be able to achieve that since humans are free chaotic agents, unlike plants and trees. Leaving taxes entirely up to the individual would create a problem of the commons effect, do the only other option is some kind of semi-fixed tax system that best tries to approximate what an organic tax "root" system would look like. At least this is the modern system we have.

It also becomes not just about appeasing the rich but also trying to minimize the costs of the poor to society, although spending $100,000 a year to house a mental illness patient in government housing with medications and workers etc. seems expensive, consider the cost of an overnight at a hospital can run $2000 or more. Taxes in theory attempt to balance out costs and benefits, but of course the basic principle of spending someone else's money is so much easier than one's own money leads to growth of government and constant demand for more revenue.

But mostly Americans are so unhealthy now that no tax structure can save the healthcare system from rising costs, so many kids born with autism now and "mental illness" rampant being treated by the (B)DSM-5 cult called modern psychology, cancers in half the people. When you add increasing health problems on top of increasing cost per service for healthcare it's a picture that doesn't look good. Rather than fix the problems Obama used a Republican healthcare plan of forcing everyone to buy health insurance, which was a payout to insurance companies and is already becoming insolvent. Can taxes fix a problem like that? No of course not, the systems themselves need reforming.

And taxes are also neutral in terms of what values they taken from and what values they give to, since they're based on dollar amounts of income or financial need and you could easily take thousands of dollars from some deadbeat idiot and give it to a true artist and visionary, or you could also just as easily take thousands from a creator of cultural or economic value and give it to a deadbeat. Capitalism treats money as universal, meaning that more money equates to more value; since that ist necessarily true at all, but maybe a needed simplification for the system to function at baseline, taxes redistributing wealth based on income amounts (I.e. progressive tax rates) is going to rob the culturally rich and value-rich to convert that into mostly squandered value-less activity. But the hope is that at least some of the other direction is also taking place.

Maybe we need some kind of evaluation mechanism to gauge everyone by in order to determine their tax bracket. Ha... That's actually a really good idea.
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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeThu Jun 09, 2016 11:41 am

My idea about healthcare is very simple. I don't believe in it. I believe in dentists and surgeons and traditional house-doctors, I don't believe in a Medical System; well, I believe that it exists, but I believe that it is functional only to the Telos (not random end) of destroying the health of the population so as to sell more poisons in medicine-wrapping. I bet 50 percent of all American household and public money is spent on drugs or treatments and witchdoctors of the modern age.

If the entire system were wiped from fucking existence, and the nation would start anew, sanely assessing what is an illness and what is a health (that is the problem, modern humanity obviously hasn't a clue what health is - it is not 'freedom from discomfort' - rather it is resilience; an original American quality that they try their best to eliminate altogether from the population, without any chance of final success, by the way) then the costs of it would only amount to 1 percent of the budget maximally. Because solutions to most problems especially to things like cancer, are offered by nature in abundance; in Chinese medicine cancer is considered a state of being always the case in every organism, just a matter of degree, and a matter of keeping the real system vigorous enough to contain the thousands of 'cancergrowths' that are constantly erupting - chemotherapy only destroys the organisms capacity to fight cancergrowth. I find it easy enough to believe that this is the real aim - in any case it is the real end, of course millions of people have beaten cancer by simple dietary and exercise regimes - too many records to count, even though murders very often accompany the publications of such lists.

I call the healtcare industry the cancer-industry. Cancer is the wests best selling product. Maybe Ill make a commercial for it. "Your Country Needs You - Get Cancer Now!" Not to be an asshole but the way people carry their bodies and souls willingly to the sacrificial ovens of Bayer and Nestle and such old renowned nazicompanies (literally) that rule these markets, just makes me lose all respect for them,  and think of them as very bad jokes played on the lovely fact of existence.

The way people who have been diagnosed with cancer (the diagnosis, not the condition, is the deathsentence) or who have loved ones in that position, tend to respond to the idea that an actual cure exists and itsnt at all expensive, but requires real psychological discipline and physiological self- investment, makes me basically reject them as unfit for the animal kingdom and for the Earth. Cancer is profitable because it capitalizes on psychic lethargy and such lethargy enables cancer.

So there's that.... lol. I really do not believe, absolutely not, that with this healtcaresystem and philosophy the US has the potential, or the right, to get out of its misery. It is basically making its own financial vigor into a function of the physical rot of its population.

Im going to address other issues in a new post.
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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeThu Jun 09, 2016 12:17 pm

Quick reply then, yes I am in agreement to a large extent. My own experiences with meditation and essential oils and teas alone is enough to convince me that what you say is true, illness could be cured more naturally in many cases; but there are times when these treatments don't work or when traditional medicine seems necessary, although you are correct that here it is all about treatment and not curing. I've heard of deaths related to cancer research and publications against the norm, also with respect to vaccines. It seems to be an assault of public relations but honestly I don't think it's working, there is a lot of awareness here among "average people" that vaccines are harmful, the medical industry is a scam for profit, chemotherapy kills people, alternate cures for juvenile diabetes exist than meds, but generally such things aren't said too loudly.

I would say roughly half of Americans take no responsibility in their own health, mental or physical or emotional health. So what good is a "healthcare system" in that situation? I don't even go to the doctor anymore, it's rediculously expensive even with insurance. I've had some suspicious cancer seeming symptoms and such things but I altered my diet, used essential oils, started running again and they disappeared.

I'm sure some natural cures we hear about or see online are scams, but not all of them. There's probably much more vested interest in scamming from the pharma level than from the level of regular people posting their experiences with tumeric and such things on YouTube.
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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeThu Jun 09, 2016 12:40 pm

There is always a saturated market on every side of a problem; both big pharma and the new age doctors are scamming maximally; but the simple truth is that cancer is rampant cell growth which is obviously containable by a good immune system.  Obviously when one knows what an immune system is; a self-valuing. It eliminates that which isnt of value to it. That is what it does. Cancer is simply entropy hooking into itself, a negative function of the entity itself.

Getting in touch with the body's physiology is absolutely the only means, and a perfectly efficient means, of combating cancer, which is in a sense simply distraction of the body from the being, caused by a distraction of the being from the body.
The logic is exceedingly simple.

Here's now what I wrote further in development of taxation.



The idea of taxation is something I can only address from its very roots; its historical, partially sub-teleological origins, which is basically a strong man or woman forcing people to pay to belong to his / her group, which includes the craftsmen and hunters; tax is a binding fabric of a tribe. It is the same, originally, as paying offerings to the gods. Because those offerings were simply private gifts to the public sphere, and offerings were always consumed by the collective.

So I see taxes as a kind of ritual affirmation of belonging. As all real rituals, the material function is integrated with its psycho-semantic one. The persons payment to the tribe corresponds to the persons valuing of the tribe; also, the value of the person to the tribe is in correspondence with the persons self-valuing.

I like the idea of value-to vs value-for. I can use this in my mind to carve out more of this 'healthy tribal logic; - where value-for is accumulated, and value-to is just a matter of payments, instances, not ontological conditions of any individual. In a value-to situation, the payment, the transaction is the self-valuing. It values the transactors in terms of this monetary logos.

In a value-for situation, there is no certainty of transaction, thus the transaction isnt primary, it can spontaneously occur in the case that someone, something, or some condition is worthy of it.
Obviously for a real health, humanity would have to find its way back to a meritocratic system. This ties into the example of the genius and the deadbeat. But this, again, requires that a Telos be set. We can not logically derive merit without Telos.

I think that in the most general of terms, the Telos will always refer to a condition of Health.
As Pezer would agree, this is the term which needs to be developed first. I need to do this in terms of self-valuing, and I think that your to/for term is good to take up and use. I would be able to state without a doubt that 'to' is bondage and sickness, whereas 'for' is freedom and health. 'to' fits int he analytic method, 'for' would have Russels head explode, would he attempt to grasp it.

"For"; resources are accumulated, i a joyful ritual fashion 'piled up for all to see' - so that when the Merit of some idea or personal tendency becomes evident to the tribe, a dispense is decided upon, joyfully, and the Meritable one is being given a Portion (almost Blakean standards) and thereby consecrated into the greater good of the Tribe.

Of course, from the pile of Goods, a continuous charity is issued as water trickles from a well, anyone coming to the mountain can receive bread and fruit and milk and clothing and there is shelter for anyone, granted that they accept that such public good-ness is always in public company; the price of benefiting without exceptional merit is public-ness, lack of privacy in a sense. Lack of value-privacy.

To become truly individual in such a society, and this I recognize now that I write it, as the rites of passage in real tribal life, one must 'earn' ones self-valuing, by carving out a value-space. This does not have to be of direct merit to anyone else, but it must involve a process of transforming values into higher values, wherein one occupies oneself profoundly. This itself gives self-valuing.

I'll let you interject now, as I've introduced a few radical concept that I expect you to have a fair share of comments on. And without solidifying an understanding of these issues I can not proceed rationally; I have to start by discerning the basic values and valuing types on which taxation relies before I wish to develop a system that relies on taxing.
That said, once we get something like that solidified, I am perfectly willing to think from within the current system about marginal improvements. However I must have the basis of a ground-up approach before I can start somewhere in the middle, the present, the status quo. This status quo can not form the standard for anything other than a version of itself.

I know full well that there is no direct path from the current to a truly meritocratic system (in which the state is also judged and allowed self-valuing by its merit); we will have to work with the fact of huge poverty and completely de-socialized industries (merit) – but as you say, even within this condition, the simple human truths of self-value, genius and merit will continue to produce industries in garages and basements; so even absent a straight line we can develop a proper system within the current one; after all, since it is alive, a heart of soundness must exist within it. And it so evidently does. It is still a fact that humans are bafflingly awesome.

And this must always be the premise. Self-valuing essentially works by recognizing conditions as 'optimal' – i.e. Sufficient to joyfully exist in them, i.e. Sufficient to 'initiate existence' ; and existence, in health, is always initiating itself.
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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeThu Jun 09, 2016 7:08 pm

Reading my last post I realize that there is a possible contradiction between the last part and the part about exceptional merit.
Depending on the definition of exceptional, and of course of merit.
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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeFri Jun 10, 2016 8:34 pm

These ideas are incredibly deep and will take me just a little time to process.
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PostSubject: Re: Tax rates    Tax rates  Icon_minitimeSun Jun 12, 2016 4:56 pm

I think you're right about this idea that taxes represent kind of social tithing of sorts, each person pays something to the tribe/leader to be included in the social pool. More basically, taxes represent value, since money simply represents value and nothing besides-- when we pay for something we are giving a piece of our own value in exchange for what we buy. I notice in our internet-based society of today we get a lot of things for free, we don't need to pay to use most stuff online; instead we "pay" by allowing ourselves to become manipulated by advertising, we willingly subject our time to bits of propaganda as the price for buying what we want. This is problematic from a value-perspective, but probably not at all 'unnatural'.

As societies became modern and moved from local solutions to state level solutions the machinery of society became universalized and a tax system was required simply to keep such machinery going. More than a king taxing his subjects and looting neighboring territories or seizing the wealth and lands of his political rivals, modern societies systematically created administrative networks that suck funds "impersonally", like a machine, converting citizens into cash machines and inverting the original function of taxes: where taxes used to be used to symbolically participate in the social order by bestowing one's own value willingly upon that order, at the level of organic human society and human being with local emphasis, taxes became in modern society a means of the state symbolically participating in the individual and local lives of people, and removed any aspect of local-level or spontaneous organic human being-oriented solutions to problems or emergencies of feelings of unity or belonging; now it's simply an inhuman Machinic system of Administration, the society doesn't want symbolic participation from people, it simply wants their unquestioned contributions and it needs their values converted into hard cash for maintaining social structures that became universalized.

So taxes are maybe logically rooted basically in the over abundance of individual value-for, from which the larger society-culture reaped collective benefit, but now became simply a value-to disconnected from anything individually or communally human being. But in place of taxes we now have many other ways to bestow value, we can create businesses or art, politics, charity, and of course commerce. All of these are new more modern expressions of value-bestowing whereas taxation is no longer for that purpose... Much of the rest of society has become "sublimated taxation" and overt taxes themselves become simply a functional machinery of administrative impersonal need. With modern taxes the individual is literally an extension of the social structure, but those other means of value bestowing still allow for human to human, and cultural collective level, exchanges and enlargements of values and values spaces.

People today mostly want to receive value for free, this is a side effect of the structure of modern society and the impersonalization of taxation become administration need. If a person is driven by a modus of wanting more value input than they output values around them, this leads to exhaustion and death, to value-loss, since not only depletes social capital in values-arrangements, and not only capitulates to that kind of loss of straight up paying one's values for things (buying with money) but also ends up changing the individual into a simple simulation of his own self-value, because he has come to rely too much on the given values of others which, in the end, can always only partially be converted truly into one's own self-value.
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