If you want to spend your money and time building bridges for electrified rail, go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. Other people clearly feel they have enough of that and would rather invest in datacenters. Who are you to say they're wrong?
This kind of absolutist individualist argument just rings more and more hollow as we see the very real consequences of that philosophy for our society.
Who am I to say they're wrong? A human being, that's who. A human being who lives in a modern society that does not have to prioritize the whims of the wealthy few over the needs of the many. We can choose to set stringent requirements on people who have that much money, and therefore power, and that is not evil. Indeed, it is the furthest thing from it.
And what happens when those people don't want to have your requirements "set" on them? Do you force those peaceful people to do your bidding with violence? Would that not make you the evil ones?
Look at the reply from the guy I was questioning. It took just two or three mild questions for him to go full Hitler, talking about how his comrades will have to "discipline" a whole generation of "oligarchs" (i.e. anyone who makes things he doesn't personally prioritize).
Collectivist thinking always leads to violence, and eventually societal failure.
There's nothing violent about using elections to make the decision to tax rich people so that we can spend (formerly) their money building roads and bridges. The idea that this is the road to Hitlerism is absurd, and thankfully this rhetorical stance no longer rings the slightest bit true to anyone within earshot of the working class.
Also, as I'm sure you're aware, I was using "discipline" as a term of art to mean "withhold our labor until their profits suffer and they are willing to negotiate". This was the strategy employed the last time we seriously dealt with concentrated capital getting high on its own supply. It is also not a form of violence. What's the alternative? Capital using force to require us to work against our will? Would you call that slavery? Or just serfdom? Which do you advocate?
> There's nothing violent about using elections to make the decision to tax rich people so that we can spend (formerly) their money building roads and bridges
The results of votes are enforced on the losers using the police, who will do so violently if required.
You mentioned the Fordist truce. The unions the auto industry dealt with weren't just a bunch of people refusing to work. They were frequently violent, and they also used stealing other people's property as a standard tactic to prevent anyone else from working also. Those were violent times.
> The results of votes are enforced on the losers using the police, who will do so violently if required.
The whims of the dictator are also enforced on the public using police.
All human rules, laws, customs, and edicts are enforced, ultimately, with violence of one sort or another. There is no way to avoid the threat of violence being the bedrock of the power of the state, and in the absence of formal states the strong would use violence to enforce their desires until they became states.
So if you're an anti-statist, just say so. (So we can all dismiss everything you have to say as coming from a place of absolute ignorance of what's needed to live and operate in the real world. If we were to abolish all states tomorrow, and erase the very memory of their existence from every human alive, by Sunday new ones would have arisen to replace them, one way or another, because they are how humans organize themselves.)
This thread started with a false dilemma: do we spend money on datacenters or "real infrastructure". It's only a dilemma if you assume governments should decide the answer, as ElevenLathe did.
Otherwise there's no need to choose between dictatorship or majority rule via democracy: everyone can spend money on the infrastructure they feel is more important, and there doesn't need to be any losers. Which is mostly how we try to do things in reality.
We can talk about how violent taxing the rich is once we have the first instance ever in history of the police locking up a rich guy for refusing to pay their taxes. Even then, sure, I'm fine with that level of violence. We would live in a utopia if that were the worst kind of state violence we had to deal with.
Go ahead and twist my normal, non-radical politics into whatever shape you want. You're the wing nut, not me. Normal people want normal stuff out of politics: functioning infrastructure, upward mobility, a future. Only the most warped, unreachable paint huffers are willing to throw away all possibility of a normal country for the "freedom" of a few dozen rapacious sociopaths. This means that we will ultimately win. Unfortunately normal people have been asleep at the switch for at least a generation, so you're probably going to be able to drag us through several hellish decades, maybe centuries, until we can right the ship.
I'm sure I'll see you in the camps, so at least we'll have that in common. Have a nice day.
Falsifying your tax return statements is not the same as a simple refusal to pay. By doing that, you are indicating that you agree to the legitimacy of the taxes in general, but would prefer to lie about whether you should personally pay them or not. These people were also all given their day in court, and convicted of actual crimes in fair trials where they had adequate representation. If this is your idea of "violence", then I don't know what to say.
He was "was sentenced to 38 years in prison". That's why most tax evaders try falsification rather than refusal.
> At the sentencing hearing in Denver District Court, Doucette fidgeted in his spinnable chair, while chained up in a green jumpsuit. He sat alone because he has insisted on representing himself in this case. Before the hearing, the judge asked him if it was OK to proceed and he said, “I do not consent and never have.”
Note the photo of him wearing handcuffs, surrounded by police.
All law is implemented through using violence or the threat of using it. You can't resolve that conundrum by claiming that holding a vote to tax rich people is somehow apart from using violence. It's just an abstraction over it.
These are basic facts, but a lot of people struggle to understand them because our society likes to pretend that there's nothing underneath the abstraction - that courts and rules is all there is. It helps them believe that if they vote to take other people's stuff, it's white and pure, that nobody is getting hurt. It's a "might makes right" argument pushed at every level of society, because it enables what you're doing here: claiming that "we" should be able to choose what is done with the fruits of other people's labour.
I say they're wrong, and I do so in my capacity as a citizen. These large pools of capital should not be allowed to follow the whims of a handful of unelected oligarchs who have clearly lost the plot. In a functioning society, this scale of decision would not be left to the whims of international finance capital, but decided via democratic means. It's unfortunate that the last scraps of the Fordist labor truce are unraveling, because it means that I and my comrades are going to have to discipline this generation of oligarchs just like our grandparents did the last really nasty one.
I would say it should belong to voters (or "society", or "the people", or whatever formula you want to use to express it), in a functioning society. Unfortunately, we're not in a functioning society, and it doesn't. On the other hand, property is socially constructed, so this political economy can be changed, though how exactly is left as an exercise to the reader -- I don't a foolproof answer.
I have savings, sure. I need them, because in the current system the alternative is to starve in the street if anything at all goes wrong with my employment, my health, etc. Many others are not so lucky. If you mean this to be a "gotcha" because I wouldn't want my savings "confiscated" to build roads and bridges, then save it. There is a difference between 1) taxing billionaires so that they're merely hundreds of times richer than the average citizen, and 2) stealing my retirement savings and emergency fund without providing any equivalent public safety net.
