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DuplexFields

Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.

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joined 2022 September 05 05:51:34 UTC
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DuplexFields


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 05:51:34 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Wellness Wednesday for February 19, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
40’s, American. Nissan has motors that last as long as Toyota’s but cabins which feel spacious on even their smallest cars. The Versa is going away soon, but if you can get a late model Versa internal combustion with a manual transmission, you’ll have a dependable, affordable 4-banger equivalent to that Corolla.


Just be careful with the temperature dial; if the strings snap, it’ll be $2k to pull the dash and replace the heater core.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sorry, I mean we expect most nonhumans we meet to have some variation of a snout, and we generally believe we can understand their emotions by their facial expressions and eye gaze.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
NATO was (since the 70’s) a Disneyland vision of Europe propagated by American thinktanks and intelligence, propped up by US aid and USAID. A place for young PMC progressives to take a summer break, as real as Cabo or Cozumel.


The Ukraine war is the culmination of Europeans believing that fantasyland. A million dead with almost no gains and Nordstream 2 gone. Do not believe my country’s military/industrial decisionmakers. We cannot hold your borders locked in their postwar positions forever.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Another piece of the puzzle: humans and wolves domesticated each other so much that our neurologies meshed and matched. We humans expect snouted faces.


Being autistic means a statistically higher chance of being furry or faceblind or both. I theorize being faceblind to humans leaves the expectation of snouted faces intact, leading to a default mapping of lemurian preprioception onto canine heads and humanoid bodies.


Evidence: Many pieces of furry art of anthropomorphic felids are actually a dog with feline features. Having lived with a cat, they’re far more alien than all the dogs I ever had. Even My Little Ponies have evolved from cutesified dwarf horses to basically dogs with hooves. (The gallery at the top is what I’m referencing. For Generation 5, they deliberately reduced the horse-like haunches of G4 to dog proportions to reduce the “male gaze” appeal.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Perhaps a new phrase is needed: "indulgentia pro abstinendo" "Indulgence for abstaining".


Trump is the chief law enforcement official in the country, and also the top immigration enforcer per the Constitution, which gives the President the power to control immigration and repel invasions, including the power to limit or suspend entry of noncitizens. It's his purview to drop charges when Adams is flipping/informing on a colleague in corruption.


EDIT: The case against Adams is fascinating. I listened to this Lawfare Daily podcast on the case, and it sounds like the FARA law is one of those broad laws designed to cast a wide net with a miasma of interpretations. I'd like to see a huge crackdown on straw donors, but this case is obvious lawfare from the start.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How does Georgism avoid the nightmare scenario of giving no rest and pushing everyone to a higher and higher level of efficiency which results in a Malthusian state for all who cannot keep up?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If I go into Walmart and text someone to come buy something from me there, Walmart is within its rights to have me ejected, and my customer. Why? Because it's their space. Similarly, if I arrange with a barber to meet her at the local Supercuts where he isn't one of their barbers, they'd tell both of us to leave, and if we didn't, call the police. This is a "threat of violence" which is fully justified by the property rights of the business. I assume you consider these "the collective coercion of justice" too, along with the very idea of property rights?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It does end up approx. the same monetarily, which is why the FairTax people call it “revenue neutral,” but Alice’s product’s final price includes the sum of all the income taxes of all the producers who made it a product Alice could sell to Bob.


Bob’s paying the income tax of the materials manufacturing laborers for the time-slices during its manufacturing in addition to paying for their work-product. He pays for the income taxes of all the delivery workers moving materials around countries and continents until it gets to Alice’s store. And he’s paying for a tiny chunk of Alice’s income tax.


The huge savings of the FairTax come in enforcement reduction and compliance reduction. Right now, Alice has to spend some time doing her business and personal income taxes, Bob has personal income tax, so does Caleb the miner, Dan the driver, Edward the shelf-stocker, and so on. And if any one of them gets it wrong by fraud or mistake, they get a penalty up to jail time.


Instead of the IRS paying agents to hunt down three hundred million potential tax criminals, the FairTax would lay off the IRS as its backlog gets cleared, sunset the income tax amendment, and introduce a revenue service which would only investigate the tens of millions of businesses. Nobody who isn’t an independent service provider or retail manager would ever have to worry about the tax man again, and the FairTax would be automatically calculated at point of sale (the cash register), listed on the receipt, and sent to Washington DC each day or week.


The FairTax is actually set lower than the current revenue collection by the IRS, but the automation and reduced enforcement will result in the same net revenue for the federal government despite lower taxes.


Since it directly taxes the economic trade of value for value, instead of income or wealth which are both proxies for economic activity, the wealthy have no legal way to save a chunk of their profits before the government takes their cut.


It would even decouple revenue from labor, which will become a bigger and bigger problem as more of the income-taxed economy becomes automated.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's no fundamental difference between taxes and theft, unless it’s designed from the ground up not to be theft. And that’s what the FairTax proposal would do: remove the famous libertarian / anarchist-capitalist moral complaint against taxes. Don’t want to pay taxes? Don’t be a business owner in the great market of America.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Did you know that modern supermarkets often have the company delivery workers stock and face their product? The wide world of markets is so much larger and fuzzier than simple selling platforms.


I had many of these philosophical realizations when I saw how a flea market operates. There's an entry fee for the customers, and a booth rental fee for the vendor. At the Expo New Mexico (nee NM State Fairgrounds) flea market for example, there's a flat $25/day fee for the vendors. This, and the membership fee at Costco, helped me realize a market can charge both the customers and the vendors, getting some revenue from either the expectation of economic activity or the consummation of same.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, good points.


Defining differentiating lines between independent contractor, commissioned producer, employee, slave, etc., is vitally important to labor relations. Often it comes down to pay structure. Are they only paid room and board (food) in exchange for labor? Slave. Are they paid a sum, part up front and part upon completion, for an artwork? Commissioned producer. Are they paid wages with 1.5x for working more than 40 hours in a week? Employee.


In a perfectly free market, or in a criminal "black market", power dynamics are more likely than negotiations between peers. The meta-market of government can, by dint of owning the market (both jurisdiction and coin), restrict the types of allowable employment, business categories, products, services, etc. This is similar to how a salon can choose to restrict its hairdresser contracts to those with certain qualifications and manners, require they follow a dress code, and kick out unruly trespassers who aren't planning on being customers.


Interestingly, the "insurance" rackets of mobs are criminal meta-markets: they keep away the rabble and the other gangs' toughs for a cut of the profits, occasional access to the shop's environs for criminal dealings, favors unspecified, etc. (As a minarchist, I prefer a republic that prevents criminal meta-markets, of course.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, assuming neither salon has an exclusivity clause in their contract.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for the good catch. I was thinking more of tribal kings ruling city-states in the Bronze Age, or their sword & sorcery fantasy equivalents. How it worked historically after Rome pretty much had to be different from my thumbnail sketches.


The parts about armies were merely add-on justifications for the most recognizable and widely agreed-upon expense toward which taxes go.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
FairTax as the fairest tax


The concept of a market as a business fascinates me. It's a business that's a container for other businesses.


The ur-example is a hair salon in a strip mall (business apartment). The manager of this strip mall business (who may or may not be the proprietor/owner of the business) rents one of the suites to the proprietor of this salon. The salon in turn furnishes each of the salon booths and rents them to the individual hairdressers, each one an independent contractor. This salon has a single payment system where the money is divided between this hairdresser and the salon, but any tips you give the hairdresser are theirs to keep. (This example is not how all salons operate.)


In this example, is the hairdresser paying the salon a booth rental out of the total cost of the haircut, or is the customer paying the salon a fee for getting a haircut there instead of having the hairdresser come to her home and cut her hair in the bathroom?


I've decided it makes the most sense to call the salon's cut a "market fee", a part of the price which the customer pays but the hosted business doesn't get to keep. It's a true three-way transaction, not a pair of two-way transactions.


So how does this become a conversation about taxes?


Three simple models of taxation


Philosopher Robert Nozick famously came up with a way to philosophically justify private property in a society, but failed to find a way to justify taxes, which derive from private property, other than the sheer necessity. (His Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a magnificent book.)


    

  1. The King's Due: The king is the rightful owner of all that's in the kingdom his army protects, and so he has the right to tax your wealth as a subset of his. He makes sure to tax the wealthy more so they can't afford to raise an army against him and become the new king.
    2. 

  2. The Common Pot: The people of the community each give a share of what they all have, and usually the ones who earn more give more. This way they can pay an army to keep them safe.
    3. 

  3. The Market Fee: The country is a meta-market, paying an army to create a safe place where businesses and marketplaces can exist safely, without fear of disruption by foreign armies. They and their customers pay a portion of their economic activity to fund the army, proportional to the business they do.
    4. 



(Please note, whichever model of taxation you prefer or use internally, modern-day taxes can be seen as any or all of these. This is a simplistic philosophical model.)


In cases 1 and 2, the obligation of the nation's people to pay taxes is based on what other people want (1) or need (2), and only respects personal property if there are safeguards in place, and only while the king or the people respect those safeguards.


The FairTax is a Market Fee form of taxation which automatically respects private property by only taxing business transactions, and by allowing anyone to resell property that has already been FairTaxed once without ever paying tax on it again. It even builds in a dividend for the people, the owners of the national market, equal to the taxation they'd pay at the poverty level, making the government free on the net calculation for the poor.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
From Tucker Carlson’s interview with former State Dept. guy Mike Benz, it sounds like USAID was some unholy combo of CIA and the State Department, doing state-destabilization work neither of those relatively above-board organizations wanted to do.


DOGE is basically a Scooby Doo episode where four hackers pull a lever and fall through a trap door into the secret basement of a charity, where they discover the Illuminati are running The Matrix.


“Well gang, let’s pull the mask off this monster and see who it really is…”


“Gasp! It was old Man Kristol all along!”


All sardonic takes aside, it looks like State is bringing all the non-woke USAID charities under its purview.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Interesting! Mayhaps the Alt-Right (2016-2020) was three-foundationers who left the Left because they were getting too six-foundation Holier Than Thou? This would be a fantastic look at the Culture War in a longer write-up.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It was the morning after the election. There had been so much doomering I hadn’t really had the chance to see it as victory. Even now I’m expecting something monumental to happen (5%), while hoping Nothing Ever Happens (75%).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The predictions I made:


    

  1. Court case - they tried, but realized any sentence for “feloniously committing a misdemeanor” would be a bridge too far.
    2. 

  2. rent a mob - there are demonstrations in D.C. but the inauguration was moved indoors.
    3. 

  3. assassination attempt number three - the inauguration was moved indoors.
    4. 



Thanks for reminding me that the blackpill mentality is extremely online and conspiracy-focused; mea culpa.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I asked Google to find me the worst Kinkade painting, and it said there was "no such data" and wouldn't I like a list of the names of his most famous works, and oh, by the way...




Kinkade's last completed painting was The Gazebo Of Prayer. He died at the age of 54 from acute intoxication from alcohol and the drug diazepam.




Wow. That hit me like a sledgehammer. Was he in physical pain? Was he tired of being bullied by the art community like the Austrian painter who had similar problems with proportion and composition? Was he mentally ill and professionally medicated? I'm sure I can find the answers, but really, I don't think I want to know.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
From personal second-hand experience, the difference between a parent who tells another adult, "Oh, I would never strike my child!" and the parent heard uttering to their child, "Look at me right now or you are getting a spanking and going to your room!" is about twelve months.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's the 10% rule I first learned about in the furry fandom.


10% of people who consistently pick fiction by the advertised presence of anthropomorphic animals talk openly online about it. Only 10% of those would wear a fursuit at a con, let alone in public. And guess which ones the media likes focusing on? That 1%, which is still in the tens of thousands.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Another thought:




But in that era, nobody thought of this as a disease.




Psychological (software) and psychiatric (hardware) illnesses have historically been downplayed because of their invisibility. People fell through the cracks and died, or were caught in the social safety net and were institutionalized and forgotten. Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio, AC power, and the electric motor died penniless in a hotel where he kept pigeons in a coop. He was hailed as a great man, but had he known about his autism, he might have been even greater.


(The best explanation I’ve hear for Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is that Gregor Samsa woke up disabled one morning, and the bug thing is just a metaphor for dehumanization and dependency.)


It’s actually a good thing the rates are going up because, assuming there’s no actual rise in incidence, they’ll get care because the medical industry has got a profit motive to provide them care.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
String theory and dark matter being scientific dead ends but great cover stories for gravitics? I love it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
“The Unobservable Universe: A Paradox-Free Framework for Understanding the Universe” by Scott M. Tyson, self-published and universally shunned.


I was his friend for nearly a decade. The man was a materials scientist and helped solve cosmic ray errors in satellite electronics. Whip-smart but distractible, he was looking for a funder who wouldn’t look at his proposed experiments and think “oh God, another perpetual motion nut.”


His theories start from the concept that we got gravity wrong: instead of masses having gravity, he believes it’s more accurate to say gravities have mass. From there, he explains the Casimir effect, propulsionless motion, and free energy, but doesn’t mention in the book the possibility of gravity bombs more terrible than the Tsar Bomba.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for December 31, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm always working on philosophical meanderings for storytelling and sensemaking purposes, and this one's a doozy -- though not related to Triessentialism, so posting it here instead of my TE thread.


I've been fascinated for a while by the concept of waves: why were sci-fi writers of the 30's through the 70's so fascinated by waves, rays, and beams? Think of how Captain America was not just injected with a serum but also bathed in "vita-rays". Why did they imbue them narratively with almost magical powers? (I've since realized it's just the evolution of technobabble, and "quantum" has taken the place of "waves". But I digress.)


But this focus on waves was also present in real science. What are 3d waves like, in contrast to the simplified 2D diagrams in all the science books? What does it even mean that light and matter have wave-particle duality? The interference patterns of the double-slit experiment are fascinating, but what's the physical reality behind it all? There was always something missing, something on the edge of thought which made waves a slippery concept for me.


At some point, I had an epiphany: waves are a copy of the shape of a thing impacting a medium, propagating through the medium.


Consider a diver, executing a flawless front dive with pike. When she hits the water, she displaces the water around her, carving a 3D tunnel through the water which collapses around her as the gravity returns the water to its lowest local energy state. The wave propagates outward, its shape initially precisely mirroring her shape as it touches the water. As the wavefronts of different continuous impacts of parts of her body interfere with each other, the shape becomes muddled, approximate, and eventually the shape is lost, having averaged out to a circle through this entropy.


Consider a metal cube touching the surface of a still pool. The cube makes a square wave on the surface, which quickly becomes a round wave the further it is from directly touching the cube.


Consider a hologram, a 3D recording of a laser wavefront on a special kind of film substrate. What's captured is multiple perspectives, continuously, simultaneously, and analog. Holograms have always seemed like science magic to me, but now they make a bit more sense.


But that wasn't the doozy! I've recently been considering how systems tend to lose focus on their original purpose and turn into simulacra of what they had been.


Consider problem-solving organizations. Whether that's a system of government, a system of commerce, or a charity with a specific goal, without constant refinement or straight-up replacement, they regularly become jobs programs focusing on makework.


Consider computer operating systems which start out with purpose and clarity, but through the entropy of installations and uninstallations, become slow and befuddled.


Here's the doozy: while a focus on entropy or on individual failures in systems may be useful in modeling them, it may also be useful to model them as waves with interference. Initially, the solutions are shaped by the problems, But over time, additional concerns will round the sharp problem-conformed edges of the solutions.


This suggests what's needed for a sustainable problem-solving system is not a problem-conforming entropic wave, but a solution-propagating wave, like a flute's finely designed and well-played sound waves creating a melody.


Hm. I need to read John Gall's Systemantics. I've heard that it may shed some light on how systems fail and why replacing them is easier than fixing them.


Parting thought: an answer and its question shape each other. ("Why? Because." "How? Thus." "What? This.") But is the answer a wavefront of its question, or the other way around? Hm.