> Canada and the EU disprove your statement, when people are arrested / convicted because their dog raised a paw on video, or because someone was offended by a tweet or have compelled speech laws to force one person refer to another person based on their declared preference... you can not claim to have free speech. Sorry no the EU nor Canada has free speech today.
Cancel culture is a US thing, bro.
Having lived for more than a decade in both the US and France, I'd say the former is probably a bit more dystopic in terms of how awful it is if you're poor. Also, waaaayy more mass shootings (muh gun rights!).
The only real difference in free speech restrictions between the US and France is you're not allowed to be Nazi in France. You can critique the government all you want, the whole ultra-woke pronouns is somewhat present amongst leftist types but overall if you're a public figure (eg bigshot CEO) with a habit of saying outrageous things you're probably better off being French than American, you're less likely to get completely cancelled for saying something that isn't politically correct in France, although that may change.
> Some types of Taxation could be ethical such as a Single Tax system on natural resources. Income based taxation should be viewed for what is it, theft of labor, something I assume you accuse the evil rich of doing
Let's get one thing straight here - a government is a protection racket. They take your stuff, in return give you "protection", but the exchange is never voluntary - you can't really opt out short of leaving the country. Because the government needs to know just how much of your stuff to take, they invent money - you can read Graeber's Debt if you'd like more info on this, but basically, there's a reason all primitve coins had the heads of kings on them. Because now you know that every tax season you have to give the taxman X gold coins or risk being thrown in jail, gold coins are valuable.
Now if you define a rich person as someone with a lot of resources, you'll notice two things -
1) insofar as they are exploiting the labor of others to enrich themselves, they can only do so *with the help of the government*. Employment contracts only work when you have the threat of force to enforce them.
2) the government being a protection racket, the more you have to protect, the more work it has to do for you - the government do a lot more work making sure Bobby Billionaire's 3 houses don't get robbed, his private jet works because of all the massive technical and regulatory infrastructure that exists to make sure it doesn't fall out of the sky or crash into something, and his hundreds of happy collaborators are all educated in some common language so that they can efficiently create wealth and controlled by a legal system that ensure they won't do anything that could harm his business interest then it does for Homeless Harry who lives off of rats he manages to trap using a piece of moldy peanut butter as bait.
So they "rich people should pay more taxes thing" is not a moral argument - it's just business logic.
You expect AWS to charge Netflix more than some one dev team running a website that 5 people visit per year? Because it seems logical that if you get more value out of a business, that business will charge you more?
Congrats, you believe the rich should pay more taxes, by the logic expounded in the preceding paragraphs ^_^
feel free to ask for clarification if needed, or you can try to point out any flaws in my argument if you see any :)
Cancel culture is a US thing, bro.
Having lived for more than a decade in both the US and France, I'd say the former is probably a bit more dystopic in terms of how awful it is if you're poor. Also, waaaayy more mass shootings (muh gun rights!).
The only real difference in free speech restrictions between the US and France is you're not allowed to be Nazi in France. You can critique the government all you want, the whole ultra-woke pronouns is somewhat present amongst leftist types but overall if you're a public figure (eg bigshot CEO) with a habit of saying outrageous things you're probably better off being French than American, you're less likely to get completely cancelled for saying something that isn't politically correct in France, although that may change.
> Some types of Taxation could be ethical such as a Single Tax system on natural resources. Income based taxation should be viewed for what is it, theft of labor, something I assume you accuse the evil rich of doing
Let's get one thing straight here - a government is a protection racket. They take your stuff, in return give you "protection", but the exchange is never voluntary - you can't really opt out short of leaving the country. Because the government needs to know just how much of your stuff to take, they invent money - you can read Graeber's Debt if you'd like more info on this, but basically, there's a reason all primitve coins had the heads of kings on them. Because now you know that every tax season you have to give the taxman X gold coins or risk being thrown in jail, gold coins are valuable.
Now if you define a rich person as someone with a lot of resources, you'll notice two things -
1) insofar as they are exploiting the labor of others to enrich themselves, they can only do so *with the help of the government*. Employment contracts only work when you have the threat of force to enforce them.
2) the government being a protection racket, the more you have to protect, the more work it has to do for you - the government do a lot more work making sure Bobby Billionaire's 3 houses don't get robbed, his private jet works because of all the massive technical and regulatory infrastructure that exists to make sure it doesn't fall out of the sky or crash into something, and his hundreds of happy collaborators are all educated in some common language so that they can efficiently create wealth and controlled by a legal system that ensure they won't do anything that could harm his business interest then it does for Homeless Harry who lives off of rats he manages to trap using a piece of moldy peanut butter as bait.
So they "rich people should pay more taxes thing" is not a moral argument - it's just business logic.
You expect AWS to charge Netflix more than some one dev team running a website that 5 people visit per year? Because it seems logical that if you get more value out of a business, that business will charge you more?
Congrats, you believe the rich should pay more taxes, by the logic expounded in the preceding paragraphs ^_^
feel free to ask for clarification if needed, or you can try to point out any flaws in my argument if you see any :)