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gordonharttoday at 12:15 PM4 repliesview on HN

Objectively it’s absurd to have an organization take a significant portion of your money on threat of imprisonment just to invest it in a corporation


Replies

khalictoday at 1:01 PM

First, the form: Starting a sentence with Objectively is not a magic way to make the sentence objective. It's a declaration of your intent to be objective, which isn't the case here, you're doing a reductio ad absurdum.

Second, the actual issue: socialisation of common costs seems reasonable to me. You use it, you participate, it's not an absurd concept.

exabrialtoday at 1:05 PM

Precisely. But don’t worry a bunch of responders will soon tell you that the end justifies the means.

obliotoday at 12:28 PM

Yes, if we only look at absolute morals and first-order effects, yes.

But if we think more deeply about this from the lens of human society, we ultimately end up with something like taxes.

So we might as well just have taxes.

cmrdporcupinetoday at 12:43 PM

The state / government is the only reason they're able to have money and profits in the first place.

There literally was no state (in its modern sense) until private property and the capitalist market. Feudalism or the Roman empire had an entirely different structure. The development of the modern state happened in concert with the development of classical liberal ideology, acts of enclosure, private property, and the capitalist market system.

Capitalism needs the state, taxes, police, and the military to coordinate competing interests, maintain property laws and social order, and to ensure its own stability generally.

... Now, what Trump and Bessent and Lutnick are busy engineering is a bit beyond that -- rentier / parasitical capitalism in which the state acts more like a committee of oligarchs taking a cut for themselves than a "neutral" cabinet of technocrats seeking market stability.