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army1987 comments on Checklist of Rationality Habits - Less Wrong
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You don't get to decide where most of your tax money goes, which I guess means that for a large fraction of people taxes don't count as fuzzy-buying donations.
Which is a failure mode of most people's thinking about taxes. Most of your tax money goes to boring things you don't want to concern yourself with and which you don't have any expertise in, such that you deciding exactly where the money went would be disastrous. Someone with the required expertise is doing their best to make sure the limited available money is spent carefully on those things, in most cases.
I like to think that in general, taxes are my subscription fee for living in a civilisation rather than a feudal plutocracy.
There are some specific things my taxes are spent on that I actively resent, but the response to that is to oppose those specific things, and I accept democracy and debate as the means to (slowly and unreliably) improve the situation.
I think of taxes as a “subscription fee for living in a civilisation”, too, but I think you're overestimating how useful what most of the tax money is spent on is to most of the population and underestimating the extent to which present-day First World countries are plutocracies.
Well, neither of us have quantified our estimates for the usefulness of government spending, or broken it down by sector or demographics. So, how much am I overestimating it, and in what specific ways? :)
I live in Scotland. I consider it to be a civilised country mostly. It has good free education and health care, and businesses are regulated as to employment law, health and safety, and environmental impact. I don't claim more expertise in how all that gets arranged than the people who arrange it, and I would be sceptical if you did, without seeing evidence.
The civilisation of the USA has some existential risk for feudal plutocracy, but I think it narrowly avoided one of the risk factors this week and I hold out some hope for steady improvement if it can stop shitting its pants over imaginary terrorist threats and start taking human rights seriously again. But even if I'm wrong about that, I never said that taxes were sufficient to prevent social breakdown. Just necessary.
I'm not questioning their expertise, I'm questioning their goals. I usually try to apply Hanlon's razor to single individuals, but I'm reluctant to apply it to entire governments. I'm pretty sure that spending on defence an amount comparable to (or, in certain countries, even greater than) that spent on research has a point, I just don't think it's to benefit most of the population.
In terms of what he's actually done, as opposed to what he says, Obama's economic policy isn't that different to Republicans'. Or do “issues like peace, immigration, gay and women's rights, prayers in school”¹ (to quote the article linked) suffice to make a government not count as a plutocracy?
Anyway, how much have you heard about lobbying, associations such as the Bilderberg Group or the Trilateral Commission, etc.? (Unfortunately, the people who talk about those things also tend to spew out lots of nonsense about Reptilians and whatnot, but I have my own hypothesis about why they do that.)
This is wandering away from the topic a bit. I doubt anyone could make a good case for any of:
Sure there does. A military dictatorship, for one.
Name one where the dictator and his cronies were not also embezzling the wealth of the country and living it up with their rich buddies. That's what they grab power for.
Even if the guy at the top has ideological principles that forbid such behaviour (rare) and isn't a hypocrite about them (super rare), there is always someone high up in the hierarchy who is in the market for favours, and due to the nature of a dictatorial hierarchy, essentially untouchable.
You're describing a situation in which politically powerful people become rich, not one in which rich people become politically powerful.
Do you have an example of a military dictatorship where the immensely rich were allowed to keep their wealth, but couldn't use it to exert political influence?
Well, no. Not offhand, anyway. But people can become rich after the revolution, and I can't think of any examples of people gaining "a lot of political power to try to further enrich themselves" this way. Of course, those who already have such power (due to corruption or whatever) do tend to use it to acquire wealth...
EDIT: Put much better here.
I ADBOC with the negation of those statements (provided “there exists” in the third one means “there has existed so far” rather than “there could ever exist in principle”).
That wasn't what I meant to imply.