Comment by nine_k
3 days ago
What's the point of surveilling the movements of average citizens' money? They usually don't hide anyway. I suppose tax evaders were the target all along, with a smattering of criminal operators, e.g. drug dealers. Terrorists were but a pretext to produce moral panic.
You justify surveillance in the wake of terrorist attacks, etc. and when public sentiment toward government is mostly good (the financial surveillance here is an example)
You make moves to constrict the available information and permitted behavior of residents and citizens in excess of what is defined by law through pressure on culture and public marketplaces, etc. and not legal action by government. (e.g. the stuff going on with erotic content on Steam recently, but not limited to stuff like that). You start with more questionable and controversial things like e.g. sexually explicit content, then progress to all content or ideas that are inconvenient to your regime.
You boil the frog of authority over the public at a rate where only a minority starts noticing problems and looking for solutions in educating themselves using politically inconvenient media (and flagging themselves as enemies in the surveillance tools) or taking action that is inconvenient to you
You start making court cases against these inconvenient people and start deporting them or incarcerating them. First with e.g. illegal immigrants or foreign national students that are saying things that are unpopular, but slowly escalate to all the people that disagree with you.
If you don't think all these things are well established, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Yes. Sadly, 9/11 is the classic case of terrorists having won :(
Is it though? I mean the US supported Bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians. Essentially we had a pet snake and complained when it bit us.
I think that the same case with Hamas which I believe was a mossad creation.
Most of these problems are self inflicted.
Well, no, not really - Bin Laden's stated goal was to commit attrocity so great against the American people that they will have to look into who those people are and why they did it, at which point hopefully they will discover their own government's work in the middle east and rise up against the government in protest.
Obviously, that didn't happen - I don't think your average American had any interest in looking into any of it, they just went "Arab people bad, let's invade", and of course accepted even greater invigilation and intrusion into their daily life and travel than ever before, all in the name of "safety". So yeah, terrorists made our lives miserable - but they failed to achieve their goals.
It's not really that, though. The people who won are those in power, at home. They were handed a pretext to increase their control and surveillance of their citizens.
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> What's the point of surveilling the movements of average citizens' money?
The most important is taxation. People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue.
Another reason are policy options. For one, there are certain decidedly "non-terrorist" goods and services that the government might not want you to purchase. Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
> People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue.
Is it though? The entire bottom 50% of the population paid something like 3% of total federal income tax, by intentional design of the tax system. Babysitters don't owe any significant amount of taxes whether they report it or not and under some circumstances (e.g. EITC) their effective rate can even be negative. Forcing them to report the income can't seriously be the justification for all of this mass surveillance.
> Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
That doesn't have anything to do with physical cash. You could do the same thing by borrowing at a negative rate and investing the money in any security/asset/commodity. Which is why negative interest rates are crazy and never really happened.
> People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue.
This money was already taxed when the individual who pays the babysitter received it. It's questionable whether the society as a whole benefits from taxing babysitters.
> Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.
I'm not sure you'll gain much support for bespoke policies like that. Just reading this passage made me feel an urge to hide some cash under the mattress.
>This money was already taxed when the individual who pays the babysitter received it. It's questionable whether the society as a whole benefits from taxing babysitters.
Replace babysitter with any government regulated and licensed profession and the motives become clearer. The government gets power by forcing things above the table because once above the table you can be forced to transact with who they want and how they want and those parties then become dependent upon government to a degree.
There's no such thing as cash under the table land surveying, for example.
> This money was already taxed when the individual who pays the babysitter received it.
And the money the retail clerk gets paid was already taxed when the customers spent it at the store. No, wait, it was already taxed when they got paid it! No, wait, it was already taxed when the customers of their employers spent it! No, wait——
...This whole idea of "money getting taxed multiple times" being a bad thing is absurd. Of course any given dollar going through the economy is going to get taxed many times. It's not about the dollars; it's about the transactions. And, ultimately, it's about funding the government so it can actually provide services, from sanitation all the way up to the military.
(Note that this is not an attempt to say that "the more taxation, the better"; that's obviously absurd, too. There are different levels of taxation that make sense for different people, different countries, different transactions, and different economic circumstances. There is no one simple magic rule you can follow that will always make things better when it comes to taxation, any more than there is with anything else economic or political.)
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Yes lets tax these small transactions so that we can go back and give the tax cuts to the billionaire class.
I think that capitalism has strayed away from its original goal. We have basically parasites in the current ecosystem leeching off of either land rent or being billionaires imo.
But no it feels like we don't discuss it, we will all be ever so radicalized about something that happened on twitter etc. that we are forgetting the issue of classes.
Once again, Georgism/land value tax is the superior tax policy. Simpler enforcement.
Man I wanted to write about georgism (see my comment on the parent's post where I talk about land parasites)
I am such a big georgist. Seriously, I might genuinely cry seeing how georgism isn't being implemented. it is one of the most superior policy systems but the parasites own so much that we don't even discuss about it
I was talking to my friend about georgism when he asked me if I was a capitalist/communist.. Basically in the end he just said, that he doesn't know about economics... so he doesn't know and they wanted to change the topic I feel like this might be a major hurdle where people think that economics is some huge mumbo jumbo when I feel like georgism and (index funds?) are two things that almost everyone should know given how simple they are.
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Tariffs also make sense, since all that stuff is going through and declared to customs anyway, although it might be an economically inferior mechanism.
Either way the income tax is one of the most dystopian ways to collect tax as it pretty much relies on mass surveillance of domestic activities to be implemented fairly or effectively.
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Unless you have a regular 9-5 job (bonus point if it's government), most small businesses and sole traders are evading taxes (not just optimizing). Also, your ability to increase taxes is tightly linked to your ability to collect it. So by surveying transactions, you are able to increase taxes.
Control
My point that authorities already exercised enough control over normal citizens anyway. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and never cared to have a bank account in Switzerland, let alone an anonymous bank account.
But the few certain Americans, and especially non-Americans, who did apparently bothered the US administration enough.
Nah, it's always the middle class that gets screwed. Poor can't be squeezed for more, rich have resources to fight back, the middle class ends up paying for everyone.
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I think you're missing the point. I honestly don't think the rich people with hidden bank accounts really bothered those in power that much. Why would they; those people are their friends, in many cases.
People in power want more power. They want more control, even over average, law-abiding people. They want to moralize and tell you what you should be buying and consuming. Power over others is the goal; it's not incidental. The random Swiss bank account holder is the pretext, not the reason.
If you can make private and uncensorable payments, you can pay an army.
The “only one army” concept is how governments remain governments.
If you could raise and pay a competing army, the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence becomes threatened.
This is why most states also heavily restrict private access to arms. Interestingly enough, it is also why the United States explicitly protected it: to specifically prepare for (and protect the right to) violent revolution.
> If you can make private and uncensorable payments, you can pay an army.
Just in case people thinks this is far fetched...
Several countries in latin america are actually narcostates disguised as democracies. The drug cartels make so much money they can afford to have their own military forces, not rarely trained by actual soldiers who deserted for better pay.
I live in one such country: Brazil. We have a couple massive organized crime gangs which dominate huge amounts of territory. They have their own governments, their own laws, their own tribunals, they even collect taxes from their subjects. They essentially pulled off a stealthy, undeclared secession.
I gotta admit I have a certain respect for these drug gangs... They are an example of the power afforded by real freedom. Instead of waiting for the government to solve their problems, they had the balls to arm themselves to the teeth and seize what they wanted, like it or not. They exercised the freedom to build a new system that benefits themselves to the detriment of the society that shunned them. That's the freedom governments cannot tolerate. The freedom to replace them.
Would love to read more about these shadow states, these undeclared secessions. I've often wondered about cartels in countries like Colombia and Mexico and how they interact with the Government. I never thought about places like Brazil. Would welcome any recommendations on the subject.
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This is kind of how all gangs work. The narco gangs were just so profitable they were able to take it to the next level, but even if you look at organized crime in the usa in the 40s, its still kind of a shadow state, just on a smaller scale.
17% of the USA smokes weed (makes them a prohibited possessor), 8+% are felons, DV convictions are harder to find but incredibly common, 4+% of USA are immigrants who have no right to bear arms (illegal or non-immigrant visa).
So maybe 1/4 or more of the adult USA is explicitly barred from the right to bear arms. When you consider those same people would have been much of the ~3% that had high enough risk tolerance to fight the American revolution, basically the USA has barred a very large proportion of those with the risk taking temperament that would enable them to become part of the ~3%.
They've effectively made it illegal for revolution type of risk taker to have arms unless those risk takers used the police/military as that outlet. Note this is a relatively new development -- the M1 carbine was invented by a prisoner inside a prison!
If you knew the attitude those people had towards having "illegal small arms", you'd realize that isn't much of a barrier. It's kind of like the equivalent of bit torrent for them. Often it's easier to buy an illegal gun even if they are legally allowed to than to buy it legally used or new. They only avoid it because it's a conviction escalator if caught.
Also you can own guns on a non-immigrant visa as a resident if you have a local hunting license that are pretty easy to get and maintain. Even non residents can with hunting trips.
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> it is also why the United States explicitly protected it: to specifically prepare for (and protect the right to) violent revolution.
How is the right to violent revolution prepared for and protected in the US?
You are forgetting the vast quantity of mercenaries that exists around the world. It is possible to build an army nowadays, drug dealers, and other groups can. They will not directly confront a country. Don't forget cybersecurity where relatively few people can attain a lot of power.