[freeopinion]

Charity is the only thing that can save us. Tax is just a different take on charity. We all agree to pay into the community chest to provide for a pubic commons. Resistance to progressive tax is resistance to a type of charity. One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent.

If charity won't save us taxes never will.

[ako]

Tax is not charity, tax is payment for community products and services. You have things you pay for individually, and things you pay for as a community.

Charity is when you pay for things you dont need yourself, tax is when you pay for things you need being part of a larger group.

[NonHyloMorph]

You can decide to be ccahritable or not. But it is expected that you contribute to the society, from whose efforts, infrastructure, labourpower, guarantees of a legal order etc. you profit, if you are an entity that is about profit. You can also be charitable on top and for most people, that is what it means to be charitable. If you do give less then you would owe anyways, and work towards enabling yourself to do so, it's quite a framing to then call it charity.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/06/us-exemptio...

[timacles]

I’m sorry to get incensed but I’m shocked in 2026 there are people who think tax is charity. The decades of corporate propaganda and brainwashing and corruption have really played a number on society’s understanding of basic concepts.

Tax is a mechanism for the distribution of wealth in a society. USA GDP is 38 trillion dollars and yet 85% of citizens own a tiny fraction of it. Where is all that money going? The government is on the verge of bankruptcy due to extreme debt.. to whom?

Large corporations are bleeding the society and the government dry but tax is a charity. Please educate yourself and propagate this bs

[bit-anarchist]

The amount of misconceptions in the comment is what is truly shocking.

Tax is not a "mechanism for distribution of wealth" anymore than it is "charity". That's its own form of corporate propaganda/brainwashing only governments and their cronies can provide. It's, in the best terms, a fee you are forced to pay to whoever owns the monopoly over force. In other terms, legalized stealing. This stolen wealth may be redistributed to the poor, but it would be no different than doing charity through stolen money.

GDP is not a measurement of wealth, thus can't be owned.

The government (presumably USA's) chose to be in debt. It didn't have to. It also won't be bled dry either, unless by complete incompetence, as it has plenty of ways of paying it back.

I suppose you are correct in that large corporations are sucking society dry, but that includes the government as well.

[timacles]

Ok bud your libertarian ideas are fascinating, it’s a shame this website doesn’t have too many high school stoners that would like to explore them.

[bit-anarchist]

Sure, but GDP not being a measurement of wealth is not a libertarian idea. Its creator warned us against using it as such when invented.

[freeopinion]

If it soothes you at all, you can think of it the other way around. All members of a society have a duty to pull their own weight. But everybody stumbles. So sometimes we have to pull more than our "fair share" and sometimes somebody else pulls part of our "fair share". But we all agree to it. Anyone who doesn't agree or who is deemed by the community to be dishonest in their contributions is exiled from the society. When we codify like that, we call it a tax.

Now, nobody expects the 95-year old cancer patient to chop their fair share of firewood for the winter. So we can levy a tax to pay somebody to chop for them. Or we can just schedule a community chop for next Saturday and try to make sure everybody has enough wood. What do we do with the slackers who don't show up on Saturday?

We figured out a long time ago that cash is a very useful tool to facilitate trade better than bartering can. And we can extend that into community contributions. We don't have to track how many potatoes and apples somebody grew and contributed to the widow fund. We don't have to figure out if 5 carrots and two hours of wood chopping is a fair contribution. We can just convert it all to money and require everyone to chip in the same amount. Except for the cancer patient and the widow, and the guy who hurt himself chopping wood for the cancer patient.

Oh, and the Microsofts and Amazons. They only have to contribute 1/100th of what everybody else chips in.

But those are the rules. We just codified them so that we can stop feeling peeved because we haven't seen Ricardo at the last three community chops. So we started keeping score. And yet, somebody is always still feeling peeved. Perhaps they don't like the rules that let big corps off the hook. Perhaps they think wood chopper boy is faking that foot injury. Maybe they think cancer is a hoax perpetrated by big Pharma. People complained when contributions were an honor system. They complain when contributions are codified into a tax system. Some people dodged when it was an honor system. Some people dodge when it is the law.

[timacles]

> If it soothes you at all, you can think of it the other way around.

I appreciate your condescending attempt to explain your garbled Reaganomics logic.

Just by your tone, I can tell your mental framework hasnt changed in the last 30 years, despite copious evidence to the contrary of everything you say. You probably think Climate Change is a scam ... or something. By your tone, I can also tell youre a pretentious person who thinks they "just know better".

When Microsoft and Amazon use public resources and infrastructure to grow their business and maximize their profits, buy out politicians and push policies to destroy competitors margins while improving their own. Monopolize markets, expand into every vertical and then jack up costs to increase their margins. What is going on exactly? Why are trillions able to be allocated for AI R&D, but the education, and sciences and pretty much everything that might benefit the general public receives a tiny fraction? Oh right, because thats charity. Education and science and the post office need to turn a profit! Why did the banks receive a bailout on the taxpayers dollar, is that not charity... I forget did they return all of the billions on profits they made along the way?

Just ask yourself, what is a government and what is its purpose?

Whatever you're going to reply, just dont bother, because its the same arguments that have been used since the 80s to scam the public.

[freeopinion]

FWIW, I don't think climate change is a scam. I think humans need to be better stewards. I certainly don't think I "just know better". I think I have been pretty clear that I am not a fan of Microsoft or Amazon. It is puzzling how you could get these things exactly backwards about me.

I think it is helpful to have cordial discussions and even friendly debates. I reserve the right to be confused and sometimes outright wrong. I don't mind being corrected. That is one important way that all humans can learn. I don't think ad hominem attacks are helpful in advancing shared understanding.

I suspect that you and I agree on economics a lot more than you express here. I hope that in the future we figure out how to listen to each other and express ourselves in ways that facilitate a better exchange of ideas.

[gopher_space]

> One important difference between charity and tax is who gets to decide on how it is spent.

The desire for control interferes with efficiency, and this is a lesson every decent NGO operating out of Africa learned thirty years ago.

I think our real problem is that we've been dismissing working solutions with "but that's socialism" for so long that socialism is starting to look kind of amazing.

[freeopinion]

You might think that my brain is broken, but I do not think that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive. I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest. I think that people can act in a way that they think is in their best self interest when it actually isn't. Also, "self interest" can have qualifiers like "near term", "long term", etc. Self interest is frequently complicated.

Sometimes socialism can provide solutions that are in the best <qualifier> self interest for a particular issue. In those cases, a good capitalist will choose socialism when <qualifier> is their priority.

I would expect that a good socialist would utilize the principles of capitalism to execute the most cost-effective socialist solutions.

[komali2]

To be honest I think you're conflating terms.

> I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest.

Acting out of self interest has results that can be described in many ways, but is too unrelated to the economic structure of capitalism to draw the thread I think you're trying to draw.

Capitalism is a very simple definition: private ownership of the means of production in service of capital accumulation. It's a system that rewards selfishness, but selfish behavior alone doesn't lead to capitalism - there were selfish people in gift economies, and there were selfish Party leaders in the Soviet Union.

The fact is, the charity stuff you do is in spite of capitalism. It's suboptimal behavior under this system. Every dollar you donate could have instead been invested, and then leveraging compound interest, used with higher effectiveness sometime in the future. Also, in giving money away, you harm yourself as a capitalist actor - for no return of investment for your capital accumulation, you spend money. That's suboptimal behavior.

It's certainly POSSIBLE to behave this way under capitalism, you and I both are doing it, however meanwhile a lot of corporations and people aren't doing it, and because capital == power, those corps and people will have more capability of directing the systems that cause whatever issues we're donating to ameliorate.

Donating time to dig wells in a town whose rivers are polluted by mine waste? Meanwhile, the mining company is buying politicians to let them spew more waste. Soon, a several hundred billion dollar oil and gas company is going to show up to frack, and now the wells are poisoned too.

Spending money on groceries that you give to the homeless? The Walmart you bought it from will redirect capital to its lawyers and lobbyists that let it get away with paying such low wages that its workers need to be subsidized by food stamps and your charity in order to survive.

Perhaps capitalism was necessary to get to where we are today. Marx thought so. I don't know. At this point though, it feels like we're industrialized enough that we don't need this "hyper optimal" industrialization economic structure to provide for our society. Look at how poorly resources are allocated: public health crisis in the streets of America while its billionaires horde and control truly unfathomable amounts of capital. Incredibly inefficient and ineffective system!

[samantp]

1. Capitalism: Efficient, progress, but channels all benefits to very fewer and fewer as tech progresses. Trickle down is too slow.

2. Socialism: Bureaucratic and slow, no private enterprise, finally poverty. Unless it is the special form of global efficient state capitalism (same as capitalism then); just that commonfolk of the state-capitalist nation can be happy overall, at the expense of many more unhappy citizens of countries exploited by the bully country.

3. Capitalist with Minimum-basic-services: Let anyone with strength do anything they wish as long basic needs of food, health, education, safety, etc are handled. Will lead to pacified but meek, non-interfering masses and those at the helm take care of development and throw additional goodies to the basic-service pool as per their gains/wishes (plus doors of fashion are always open for philanthropy). Latest trends seems be toward this.

4. Ideal, Private enterprise with strong oversight by democratic state: Private enterprise, be it for profit or anything else, who cares. Just have enough knobs (taxation, holidays, freebies, policy, force, etc.) in place such that development happens where needed (balance parity, environment, nex-gen research etc. dimensions) wholesomely. This is ideal, should have worked, but alas, since all elections are funded by big money, the patrons will definitely expect returns in the form of favoritism during policy formation (including a big no to state-funded elections, or big yes to curbing public agitations by weapons and state force).

In short, masses are doomed, and tech progress will expedite it!

[komali2]

Isn't the failure you note in 4 always inevitable in a system where Capital translates to power?

[samantp]

Yup.

Just that, capital translating to power is not a universal truth. Historically too, various recipes have tasted success to move up power ladders. Be it high moral values, smart statecraft, peaceful bottom-up people movements-art-science, or worse like violence, anarchy, barbarism; or a hotch-potch of all those!

Will be fun to watch how things pan out today!

[blinkbat]

"I am a very devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society."

sorry, but these cannot coexist. you are deceiving yourself.

[NonHyloMorph]

There is social market economy which can be cosidered to operate within a capitalist framework to some extent, but also to operate within a socialist framework to some extent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy. So it is worth to also think about it as continuous phenomena and not as binaries. But I agree with you: "I'm a devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society" made me think selfdeception, too.

[ninalanyon]

> I do not think that capitalism and socialism are mutually exclusive.

Of course they are not, after all my home country of Norway is largely like that.

But the capital needs to be harnessed in the service of the people at large, not concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs.

[wolvesechoes]

No. Charity depends on good will. Taxes do not.

Charity, helping the poor etc. is postulated for thousands of years, and didn't bring any effect. Do you know what did? Public policies and public investments, and proper tax regulations to finance them.

Hell, good, progressive tax policy should even be seen as beneficial for those that praise capitalism for it's productivity and efficiency, as it creates incentives for investments and better wages instead of rent-seeking and fat-growing.

Now, I am not against charity. There will always be a room for it, as there will be room for volunteering and communal activities. But it won't solve systemic problems, like growing inequality, poor housing, environmental issues, political corruption etc

[NonHyloMorph]

Even Ford realised that it was in his best interest, for his workers to "only" work 8 hours a day, since their wellbeing was the prerequisite for the labour power (they were selling to him precisely at a price point lower then it's value) that was the basis for his value production and value extraction.

[anjel]

Isn't empathy the better term here?

[ninalanyon]

The problem is that as a proportion of income the rich are much less charitable than the poor.

[freeopinion]

Please indulge me to try to clarify my thought.

Before you choose to practice capitalism or something else, you should choose whether to be a good person who contributes to society. Those two things are independent of each other. First choose to be a good person. Then employ whatever gift of intelligence you have to build super efficient systems in pursuit of doing good.

Capitalism is like gravity. Gravity isn't good or bad. It just is. Everybody takes advantage of gravity all the time to do things like walking. Some people build clever systems that explicitly rely on gravity. The current state of gravity is not making the world better or worse than the state of gravity did a million years ago.

People are doing amazing things that seem to defy gravity. But they don't defy gravity. They still rely on principles of physics that include gravity. People who understand gravity can depend on it to make things like Burj Khalifa possible.

Any interaction between people involves economics. Capitalism is just a set of observations about those interactions. Capitalists can be selfish or generous (or both). Capitalism focuses on the effects of acting in self interest. But people have to decide for themselves what is in their best interest. That decision is independent of capitalism. I think it is best not to confuse that decision with capitalism.

That might help better explain why I think capitalism is super awesome when informed by enlightened ideas of self interest. Your gripe doesn't seem to me to be against capitalism. Your argument seems to be that people have mistaken ideas about their own self interest.

[kelseyfrog]

> Capitalism is like gravity.

This is a very reified stance.

What that means is that it expouses a position that has gone through the process of reification. It is a human behavior that takes an idea, usually social, and simultaneously does two things. It forgets the authors and substitutes nature/the universe/reality as the basis/authority for its existence. We see this across human societies, and across time.

Capitalism is a product of human choices. It exists as a set of human behaviors and legal protections. It is not a natural phenomenon like gravity because unlike gravity, it didn't exist until the 14th or 15th centuries[1]. Capitalism would not exist if legal protections(namely the legal construct of private property) ceased to exist. Laws, like many other products of human production, are dependent on humans for their existence.

1. Depending on whether you want to start with the Muscovy Company or the British East India company.

[freeopinion]

Some might say that Capitalism (with a capital C) was born in Wealth of Nations. IIUC, you argue it was birthed by Muscovy or BEI some centuries earlier.

I argue that capitalism (lower-case) is as old as humans. Was not the shift away from hunter-gatherer a capitalist choice?

(Thank you for your comment. I know a discussion about capitalism is completely off-topic, and an explanation of reification is even more off-topic. But I've enjoyed you bringing it up and exploring the tangent.)

[kelseyfrog]

I debated distinguishing the behavior of Capitalism and when we actually started calling it Capitalism and went with the former.

Before we get too far into the weeds, I want to be very specific about Capitalism. I am referring it to be the ability to buy and sell portions of a company[the capacity to produce]. The conception of company as property. This didn't arise until the events mentioned. From what I gather, it's not a particularly contested definition.

Happy to correspond elsewhere! Contact available in my bio.

[komali2]

> argue that capitalism (lower-case) is as old as humans. Was not the shift away from hunter-gatherer a capitalist choice?

What's the difference between capitalism and Capitalism? Are you just describing the act of exchanging resources as capitalism? The Soviet Union fed its workers (usually lol), was that exchange of resources "capitalism?"

This isn't a really accurate use of terms, and imo is an example of the hypernormalization of capitalism, or as the op said, reification. There's a tendency in people to believe that things that existed as recently as a day before they were born, have existed for essentially forever, and are as certain as gravity. In reality, capitalism, which is the private ownership of the means of production in service of accumulating capital, is as stated very young. We have about 25,000 years of human society operating without capitalism.

Trade is not capitalism, nor did the switch to agrarian society represent a capitalist choice. It's frankly a bog standard example of primitive communism. Fields were owned in common by a society, worked in common, reaped in common, consumed in common. Depending on the society, you might have elders, matriarchs, patriarchs etc that determined how resources would be allocated (e.g. successful hunters getting more, spiritual leaders getting more, assholes getting less), but those people weren't "owners" by our capitalist understanding. Nobody paid them rent.

Furthermore, one village trading with another e.g. ox for squash or whatever, isn't capitalism. Even if the ox were "privately owned," and exchanged for e.g. a dowry, the land on which the ox feeds is still owned in common, and such resources were still generally expected to be shared in emergency or for religious or cultural events. Depending on the society of course, but it's a pretty common thread throughout history - the gift economy, and primitive communism.

I think it's very important to keep clear on terms and our history, because dogmatism can cast our feet in concrete and prevent us from trying new, exciting things that are possibly more well suited for the times. One could argue that the global takeover by capitalism is evidence of its effectiveness in all aspects of organizing society, I would say it's more likely to be evidence at its effectiveness of spreading and consuming societies while regulating them just enough to prevent their collapse. Efficient? Hardly - look at the wealth disparity between Apple shareholders and the factory workers that throw themselves off buildings after making the phones that generate apple's fat profit margins. How is that efficient? Therefore I want to push back on this idea of capitalism as gravity to leave us room to explore new ideas.

[bit-anarchist]

And I would like to push back against the idea of "common ownership". Or "collective ownership" in general. How come we say that A, B and C collectively and simultaneously own a resource, but any of them may be alienated from it at any point, presuming a democratic arrangement? Ownership implies final authority, yet none of the individuals actually have it. Instead, it's like a 4th, "juridical", person, who represents the norms and laws binding the members, privately owns it in their stead.

Thus, I'd like to posit that there's no such thing as common ownership, but corporate ownership instead, a subset of private ownership, characteristic of capitalism.

[komali2]

Capitalist ownership is enshrined in law which is defined in rule (written clearly down), and is enforced via the State's monopoly on violence. All distribution of private property is outlined in contract. This includes the means of production.

When land is owned in common, the "private" ownership of a cow is less clear - after all, the cow doesn't eat without the land. The resource is thus available to be used for dowry by the individual during times of plenty, but during times of hardship, hey your cow was eating the grass of our land, we all need it, let's eat! Capitalism doesn't have this kind of fluidity. Hardship or no, private property is enforced through law, not vibes.

But regardless, focus less on the cows ("bro imagine you have two cows" is a bit of a meme outside the Chicago school of economics cult) and more on the land, which is the actual means of production here. That's the bit that's been owned in common basically universally for, as far as we can tell, the last two hundred thousand years. There's not been evidence otherwise and for eras we actually do have history for, it's absolutely the case that societies were organized along primitive communism. It's continued today in e.g. some indigenous Taiwanese tribes, possibly elsewhere as well.

Redefining a village as a corporation to fit your theory that capitalism is forever is another example of capitalist hypernormalization. It's simply not the case. Capitalism genuinely is a very new human invention, not a natural socioeconomic force emergent from human relations.

But, it sounds like you are really interested in this subject. If you want to read a much more cited and intelligent opposition to what you're proposing, I recommend Ellen Meiksins Wood "The Origin of Capitalism," historical analysis of capitalism emerging around specific property relations. Or Karl Polanyi "The Great Transformation" which discusses how though ancient markets existed, these are distinct from capitalist markets since they were more organized along kinship, religious, or redistributive lines.

[wolvesechoes]

> Capitalism is like gravity

We created capitalism, we didn't create gravity. Humans are conscious political actors and can decide how they want to organize their society.

> Capitalism is just a set of observations about those interactions. Capitalists can be selfish or generous (or both).

Capitalism it social, material and symbolical structure, not some set of observations.

Sorry, but what you write is pure ideology. You naturalize something created socially and politically.