Legality is something objective. Legitimacy is subjective. However, when something is illegal, it's likely to be illegitimate for a lot of people. Using inside information is stealing. If I work for a company and I'm the first to know that something bad is going to happen to it, it's not fair (nor legitimate, nor legal) that I use that information to profit personally. Basically, I'm stealing from other investors. If outsiders knew that, they would be disinvesting (since they knew to be in disadvantage) and that would hurt the company. So, using inside information is stealing from other investors and, ultimately, stealing from the company.
Your comment is so fallacious (and basic) that if Phransisku doesn't destroy your argumentation, I will.
Do you think you're destroying property when you drink a beer?? Ok, go destroy some property now Like lgf said, you remain with full rights over your property...so much that you are "forced" to keep them. But you also have responsibilities. Should you be able to simply disown junk in the middle of the street? Should you be able to simply disown a company bleeding losses? Should you be able to disown all your assets for your family to catch them when you're about to be convicted for a white collar crime? See? My proposition has real advantages for dishonest contexts and no real impact on normal situations. But still you don't like to fight dishonesty. Repeat that 10 times more. Maybe if you do so it becomes true. Yeah, but aside from that there's no problem with Capitalism. People earning money without working? How could that harm the Economy? Am I? How, if I am against bequests?
It's only difficult for your libertarian mind. If you have a barrel with 2 holes (in one water comes in, in the other water goes out), you own the water in the barrel. The State may get a bit of the input flow and a bit of the output flow (those are taxes) but it should never go directly to your barrel (that would be confiscation). Those are your belongings and neither the State nor anybody else (via thefts, bequests, etc.) should get them. When you die, your descendants won't care about the input flow of your barrel, once it will be dry (because you don't work anymore). They will only care about your barrel. That's appropriation of other man's wealth, something a totally disapprove but in which I find great opposition from communists and libertarians.
Sorry I won't read your story. Actually, I won't read any big posts from you until you start reading mine (really reading them), making arguments and using logic. For now, you don't deserve that much attention from me.
Why would a family get ride of the only house they own? That doesn't make much sense. People should always keep in mind what they've conquered by themselves and what came from others. And they should always be able to get back to the situation they were before that external help. This is a matter of honesty and sustainability.
Good quote. If the transaction price rises 10x or 20 x the original market price then it is an indicator that the price of that good has risen relative to the price of other goods. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/transaction-price.html I assume that when you use the term "transactional price" you actually mean the price paid at the point of sale? So are you saying the price of an item can't rise 10x or 20x the estimate of its highest price? If this does happen it doesn't make S+D useless, all it does is show that the market can act irrationally or in other words, contrary to tentative judgments, conclusions or opinions. It's what makes the S+D model useful but wrong at times. That's clarified it, you are in favour of the State appropriating my property then, whether it be my earnings, or the money I choose to spend, the State places itself between the seller and buyer and demands a cut of that transaction. In other words, according to your theory, whilst a transaction is occurring ie I'm being paid or I'm paying for something, there is some mystical space in time where the money that is changing hands belongs to neither the person giving nor the person receiving, it is the property of neither and therefore is free game to be appropriated. Or is it you don't think income is property?
@phransisku, same question above with an image. In this picture we have a customer on the left paying cash to a service provider. Obviously the cash is the customer's property, it's in his hand and we presume he has earned it. It is not the service provider's property until the cash is passed over and both parties are happy to conclude the transaction. Please explain to me how the cash in the picture becomes the property of neither party.
They can't give you back the same beer once they have drunk it. So yes, they have destroyed it. Any potentially bad situations associated with disowning property in those circumstances is already captured by the fact that your actions are infringing on the negative rights of others. Littering in places owned by other people is infringing their property rights. Abandoning property in a manner that could reasonably be expected to harm someone else is criminal negligence against the person of others. The only problem with "disowning" (or closing) a company that is "bleeding losses" is if they are legitimately contracted to certain obligations because they have possession of other people's property (eg like a bank loan or an accumulation of unpaid labour services). Hence, in such a situation they are losing other people's property and therefore infringing on their property rights. If you have committed a white collar crime, then the property in your possession that you are trying to give away to your family is not legitimately owned by you in the first place. Since you cannot give someone else better title to property than the title you have, the property cannot legitimately be transferred to your family. So again, this is just another case of infringing on other people's property rights. There are many ways of transferring or disowning property without infringing other people's rights (not least of which is simply giving it away but that is a proposition that you find horrendously evil for some reason unless it happens to be the State that is giving it away ). See? My proposition is fully internally consistent with what it means to have property rights and how one goes about acquiring, trading or disposing of legitimately owned property. The only way people can legitimately earn money without working is by gifts. I have yet to see how people working to give gifts to others could possibly harm the economy. I refer you back to your own statements: "In Portugal you need to apply for a bequest in case there is no will. And if the bequest ends up to be a negative number you must pay the bill." "2 - I'm not sure. Probably, the kids will have that debt to pay in the future." "If there is a legacy (...) the debt is still valid and the new generation will pay it."
Not necessarily. As I said, only those cases where there is an actual victim or breach of contract is it stealing and in such cases there's no need for giving it the special name of "insider trading". Most clients of a law or accounting firm would not want them phoning hot tips to their buddies on Wall Street whilst dealing with sensitive information nor would they want them having a conflict of interest whereby they could make more money by trading the market and working against the interests of the client than for the interests of the client. Hence it is fairly standard practice that anyone in possession of sensitive/confidential information signs contracts prohibiting such actions. If they do so anyway then they are liable. Beyond such circumstances, for insider trading to be a crime requires there to be a victim. As Murrary Rothbard and others have pointed out, there is no actual victim (and indeed they generally benefit those that you claim to have bilked). Ditto shorting of stock.
Your definition of destruction: when one can't give it back. For me, destruction implies improper use. A beer is meant to be drunk. If I drink it, I'm just using it, not exactly destroying it. And, if I'm using it with the consent of the owner, I have nothing to give back. No, they aren't losing other people's property. As you like to say, they are just following a contract (for example, a bank loan), which was accepted by both parties. If the bank has loaned the money (and it must be prepared for the case of payment default) the company is doing nothing wrong if they're just using it for business as usual (even if it's not lucrative anymore). And, in fact, that is true. The bank has accepted the risk of payment default. However, what the bank was not expecting was for the owner to forsake the company from night to day. If you are steering a boat, you can't all of a sudden run away and leave the crew adrift. You have responsibilities. As for the other cases in general, negative rights must be successfully defended. You can't just simply say they must be respected and do nothing, hoping for it to become true. Tracking and charging full rights and responsibilities of ownership is a very effective way to protect negative rights. I find it odd that you're not interested on that... What about if I spent/wasted it all and the assets I'm passing to my family have nothing to do with that? What about if the crime is only discovered after the transaction is done? In Portugal there are plenty of such cases and the State can't retrieve what is already on the name of other people. That is an absurd and such thing would never happen if wealth transactions weren't possible in the first place. So far you haven't been able to point a single problem of tracking and charging full rights and responsibilities of ownership, while at the same time you haven't also been able to disprove the clear advantages it presents: - people not owning what they haven't worked for - people not living at the expense of others - environmental accountability - economic accountability - successful asset confiscation due to white collar crimes - etc. With that attitude, the only ones you end up defending are the super rich and the corrupt. They rub their hands when they see "soldiers" like you naively fighting for their perverse interests, like peons on a chess board. You sound like a child living in the wonderland. You need to see a lot of the real world then. Those "gifts" you're talking about, sometimes they are empires of companies, lands, valuable assets and millions in cash. And sometimes they weren't obtained through work but bequests and marriages of convenience (based on dishonesty and with the eyes on the prize). And sometimes those large bequests and wealth through marriage were in turn obtained through other bequests and marriages. So that we have plenty of cases of fortunes that go from generation to generation over many decades or even centuries (and many of those people never work in their lives). Don't you think that all those people from all those generations not working and living like kings could "possibly" be bad to the economy? I said that was the portuguese reality. When did I say I agreed with it?
Can trolls be banned or at least "asked" to post under their real user names? That way I'll know who to spit on the next Stackers meet if they dare to show up. Thanks.
Why would I want to steal that money for me????? WTF??? :lol: :lol: You say you believe that no one should take the property of another. You say that the government is entitled to take a portion of your income or your expenses. You use an analogy to explain your position showing that a person's property is the water in a bucket, there is an inflow (income) which you say the government is entitled to appropriate a portion of and there is an outflow which the government is also entitled to appropriate a portion of. Your argument must rest on the premise that neither income nor expenses are the property of anyone, for if it were private property it follows according to your position that no one should be able to take any of it. My question to you is at what point in time does someone's income become neither the property of the person paying you or yourself? Likewise, at what point in time is the money you use to pay your expenses neither yours nor the person you are paying? For your position on government appropriation to hold true there must be a point in time where no one owns the money exchanging hands for the government to be able to legitimately lay claim to a portion of your income or expenses. I'll repeat, for your position to remain consistent, there must be some mystical space in time where the money that is changing hands belongs to neither the person giving nor the person receiving, it is the property of neither and therefore is free game to be appropriated by the State and then redistributed. You can't consider income to be anyone's property for if you did, you would be a hypocrite. And further, to consider that income (or the expenses being paid) is the property of no one is ludicrous. So you don't have much of a leg to stand on. :/
Now you're explaining your question and using the word "portion" rather than simply saying that the (whole) cash in the picture becomes the property of neither party. Sadly, I need to play your dirty game (making you an equally fallacious question) in order to make you talk. And now, answering your real question, the money you spend is yours until the moment you actually spend it. That money is yours by right and no one (not even the State) should take it (like the water that is inside of the barrel). The moment you spend it (the moment the water goes out of your barrel) it's not yours anymore and you, as a consumer, become unrelated to it from that moment onwards. You receive a product or a service and that's what enters in your barrel and, again, no one should take it from you. The money that was spent becomes the property of 2 entities responsible for the good or service provided: the "individual" (person or company) that created the product ; the platform/environment/system that allowed that product to be created and sold. Like when you publish an ebook on Amazon, you will not get all of the revenue. Some will go to Amazon - the platform that allowed you to publish your ebook and that brought you customers. If you don't like Amazon's T&C (if you don't want to live in Australia) you can instead publish your ebook on Apple's iBooks (you can emigrate to New Zealand). And, if you don't like it too, you can publish it on Barnes&Noble or Kobo or Smashwords or other platforms (you can emigrate to USA or Canada or UK or whatever the country you like). You can even not publish it on any platform and create your own blog/site to sell your ebook and all the revenue will be for you (you can go to the wild and do your life there, and all of your earnings and spendings will be for your own) but I assure you that the revenue will hardly be as good. As you can see, the concept I described here isn't new. It exists on every State of every country in the world. It also exists on several markets and business models. It is fair, it makes sense and no one forces you to be part of it. What you suggest is for Amazon to not charge any royalty over the ebook sales because somehow they only have to do with the writer and the reader. They should be able to use the platform for free and Amazon would content itself with donations - what people would voluntarily be willing to give. That's insane.
Are you on medication? Edit: I better get rid of what I said otherwise it'll be a holiday again for me.
So you don't consider income to be the property of the receiver, you believe there is indeed a point in time in every transaction where the cash exchanged is both the property of the producer and the State. You base this position on the belief that the State is partly responsible for the production of goods. In other words, you believe that without the State there would be no market, or at best only a poor shadow of one. Let us thank the State for the State amen. This belief is akin to a religion. This belief is rooted in misanthropy and flourishes in the minds of those who crave central control. The State did not provide the platform/environment/system that allowed the product to be created or sold. Individuals meeting their own self-interest in communities did. Platforms such as Amazon are voluntary, I can choose to utilise their services or not and both Amazon users and non-users will not force me against my will to take one position or another. Proponents of democracy (like you) on the other hand do not allow for voluntary participation in the "platform", it's either their way or it's not and if you don't like it you can either piss off or you have to put up with it. The two "platforms", Amazon and The State are diametrically opposed. The T+C's of using Amazon to make money are agreed upon voluntarily by the parties engaged in the transaction, the T+C's of the State are not voluntarily agreed upon, they are imposed by a few and there are ramifications for generations to follow. The State places itself between the parties, claiming credit for something it hasn't done (providing an economic platform or more commonly known as the market) and lays claim to the property of those involved in the transaction. And thankfully, at least in the Anglicised countries, more and more people are becoming aware of the unfair burden that such a system places upon its citizens. The citizens of Continental Europe and their long held love affair with authoritarianism will take longer. Edit to add: and here we are gone full circle again. :/
The issue with this explanation is that it rests on an assumption that the State and its ownership of property is legitimate, which as has already been discussed at length, it isn't. Further, let's be generous and, as I said right back near the start, let's allow the old Classical Liberal position that the State exists to create a stable civil society by operating a military/police/courts for the enforcement of rights (ie let's allow the State to have a regional monopoly on the use of force - or, at the least, to be a final arbiter of force - and we do so to allow a peaceful civil society to exist). In making this concession I agree that there will be a small level of taxation enforced to supply these services (somewhere in the order of 5% of GDP). However, it by no means follows that there is any legitimacy in using that monopoly on the use of force for the State to attempt to create positive rights or to do any other function beyond being an enforcer of people's rights and/or a final arbiter of disputes. All other functions are violations of people's rights. Separately, I'd appreciate if you guys stop banging on about "free to go live in the wild" nonsense. As I said many pages back, the State has illegitimately claimed the entire continent of Australia and much of the surrounding oceans (ditto for almost everywhere around the world). Although I can try to live as a nomad in certain parts of the 7+ million square kilometres, in most parts it will be illegal for me to even forage for food. In all places it is illegal for me to try and build my own house or for a group of us to go and build our own town using our own resources or that which we obtain by trade. There is absolutely no basis for the State's claims of illegality except that which they can enforce at the point of a gun. The only respect that the State will have for us to go live separately is that which we can similarly enforce at gunpoint against them. Only if we have a civil war will we possibly be allowed to peacefully live our lives as we see fit. As I said, Statists don't want our cooperation for mutual benefit, they just want us to acquiesce to their demands.
