[mikeq101101]

>Right, because tax money, once collected, simply vanishes into thin air and never, ever shows up as the income of private companies, nor drives entire sectors of the economy.

What are you trying to argue? Taxes are good, because some part of them is redistributed back to private companies?

[harrumph]

>What are you trying to argue? Taxes are good, because some part of them is redistributed back to private companies?

I'm arguing the fact that spending by government is literally the engine of our own and all other economies, and that libertarians are hilariously delusional about this bedrock fact. Without this spending/circulation there is zero facility nor security for the conduct of commerce nor is there income for the vast majority of the private enterprise.

When you rebut, please use a privately-developed communications protocol stack to do so.

[mikeq101101]

Can you list a few sectors of the economy that are driven entirely by taxpayer money through the government?

[harrumph]

>Can you list a few sectors of the economy that are driven entirely by taxpayer money through the government?

You can begin with a symbol -- the largest single private employer on the planet, the retailer named Walmart. A fully subsidized operation that, per its own filings, depends upon SNAP payments paid to its customers for its income. In addition to being dependent upon these payments the company depends on SNAP serving as payroll subsidy for its hundreds of thousands of workers who they choose to pay poverty wages.

Then for sectors, you may move to the depth and breadth of the energy, R&D, defense, security, health care, package freight and construction sectors, who, without their single largest governmental customers, would be a small fraction of what they are, employing a tiny fraction of historic levels.

Then there are sectors that are utterly dependent upon government subsidy, such as pharma research, agra, and transportation. Add to this the rest of the economy: sectors that would grind to a halt if not for indirect dependence upon public goods -- courts, roads and communications capacity funded by taxes.

Fact: taxpayers, uncompensated by any shares of stock, pay the bills and line the pockets of stockholders in most of really existing capitalism. Socialism exists and dominates for the rich while the market discipline that libertarians live to defend is in fact something that is reserved exclusively for the non-rich. Capitalist fables about the importance of incentives and market discipline fall on their faces the second you scrutinize flows of taxation as well as flows of appropriated value taken from workers under capitalism.

[mikeq101101]

Yeah, so what you defined is a crony capitalism. We should move as far away from that as possible.

It's not moral people are forced to pay for these things.

[harrumph]

That makes as much sense as calling the earth’s tidal ebb and flow “crony gravitation”. The present situation is the rule, not the exception. And if morality is your concern, then it’s the fundamental operation of capitalism you have a problem with. As long as workers at the point of production are coerced to give up a majority of the value they create to nonworking stockholders, we have a system built upon a ripoff that propogates ripoffs — and that system is correctly called capitalism.

[mikeq101101]

Oof, argumenting by labor theory of value in 2019. Try reading more than one book.