The Forge Archives

OK, so screw the political summaries, what are you radical about?

Me:
taxation is thievery, there is no implicit social contract it is merely a thuggery-based protection racket.

The minimum wage is retarded.  We'd fix the economy almost completely by installing a MAXIMUM wage of about $20/hour in today's market.  But this would be only a partial step to the actual goal of having all work pay the same amount per hour.

Land is not a commodity.  All land ownership should be public.  If you grant that people have aright to exist, you must grant that they have a right to exist somewhere.  Where?  If land is owned then it is theoretically possible for it to be all owned and no longer available for the people to exist on.

The big firearms problem in America is that shooting, gun care, and responsibility should be taught from age four on in every classroom to every child.  And there should be invasive homeschool outreach programs to make sure those kids don't get left behind.

How's that?

Environmentalism.

Human rights, equality, social engineering and the economy can all go fuck themselves.  *nothing* matters as much as stopping the production of plutonium sludge, (50 million year threat) the waste of the top soil (50,000 year threat), the destruction of the ozone (permanent damage), or the loss of species diversity (~1 million year threat.)

Seriously.  Will our ancestors give a flying fuck whether or not we shot each other?  No.  They will give a flying fuck about the fact that they can't farm, can't breathe, and die from cancer at age 20.

Anyone concerned with humanity, anyone who wants to claim moral high ground, anyone who considers themselves an altruist of any stripe, should take the environment as top concern and fuck all else.

yrs--
--Ben

I try to walk a pretty strict like about "no violation of consent = no harm = no fowl = no cause for intervention", but I'm not 100% perfect on that, and it's not actually a radcal statement anyway. Occaisionally I have anarchosomethingist fantasies; I sometimes even feel like dropping 1- or 2-state solutions in Israel/Palestine, and just jumping into the no-state solution, bu which I mean dissolution of nation-states, not nukes. (I don't stick with this analysis, and I'm also not up for discussing the issue, thanks. <g>)

These sympathies did come out a bit in my homebrew space-opera setting: I tried to avoid centralized governments out in space, instead having various selections of free states, syndicate-confederations, and so on. (I think I might ultimately deprecate those however, for the purposes of setting coherency. I'll save the anti-authoritarian wet dream for later.)

Quote from: Christopher WeeksOK, so screw the political summaries, what are you radical about?


How's that?

Heh, yup.  Pretty radical alright.

My only response is:

"Thank God there's not a snowballs chance in hell of any of this ever happening."

Quote from: Valamir

Quote from: Christopher WeeksOK, so screw the political summaries, what are you radical about?


How's that?

Heh, yup.  Pretty radical alright.

My only response is:

"Thank God there's not a snowballs chance in hell of any of this ever happening."

BL>  But what about you?  Surely you must have something...

yrs--
--Ben

Actually, I'm a pretty firm believer in moderation.  There are many ideas that may work.  None that will work if taken to extremes.

So I guess my most extreme political view is that I'm extremely against extremes.


If pressed to come up with something, lets see.

I pretty much believe that speeding tickets are nothing but a form of revenue generation and do little to actually make driving safer.  So I'd be in favor of cutting out the middle man and just issueing different classes of licenses.

If speeding means I'm going to have to pay a $200 ticket, then just let me pay the $200 up front, get a special license plate that says "this guy is allowed to drive 90mph on all major interstates" and skip the whole "license and registration please" step.

Benefits: you'd get ALOT more people paying the $200 voluntarily than the cops ever catch in a year.  You can cut the number of troopers wasting tax payers money in speed traps and put them to work actually fighting crime, and it wouldn't take me 3 hours to drive to Chicago.

Hmmm...not quite up there with "maximum wage" but that's about as radical as I get.

I'm an anarchist.  Read Emma Goldman.  She'll tell you how I feel.

I personally would be content with a maximum wage as high as, say, twenty times the minimum wage, but that's a compromise.  Ten times seems way more reasonable to me.

Locking up food - in granaries, in supermarkets - is evil.  We should stop doing that.

Also we should celebrate every single kind of happy sex.

-Vincent

I think marriage, as a government institution, is wrong-headed in the extreme. Let anybody who wants one apply for a domestic partnership license, and leave marriage up to the cultural and religious institutions. It's a semantic argument, but an important one: all sorts of people have all sorts of relationships which means they rely on each other. I say, give them the ability to rely on each other legally.

As for single-vs-married taxes, I'd blow that out of the water.

---

Other radical views:
- Sales tax is the worst and most harmful tax we have in America, directly penalizing anyone who can't afford to not spend the majority of their income. (Person A, who makes $100K a year, spends 40% of their income on food, housing, and necessities. Let's say sales tax is 7% - they pay 2.8% of their income in necessary sales tax. Person B makes $30K a year and spends 80% of their income on necessities. They pay 5.6% of their income on necessary sales tax. This is retarded.
- Gas, on the other hand, should be taxed out the ass. Hugely, monstrously taxed. The money should go directly to paying for better public transportation.
- Clean water and universal healthcare are the right of all people in any nation that can afford to do so. I don't think they're natural rights, but I think they're extremely fundamental steps to the world progressing.

I'd abolish VAT (that's sales tax for you Americans), car tax, road tax and national insurance and bung it all on Income Tax.

Then I'd tax people an additional amount based on how far away from their place of work they live.

I'd tax the rich more than poor. I'd give huge tax breaks to families where someone stays home and raises their children until they reach school age.

I'd tax sales based on how far the item was made from where it was sold.

I'd tax food based on how bad for you it is.

Fuck the global economy; it only produces sweat shops, homogeny and a world of McDs anyway.

I'd remove thick children from school at twelve and send them into apprentiships.

I'd have academies for the really smart kids so they don't have to sit in class bored out of their brains while the Teacher explains how to some as absurdly simple as Algebra to the cretins all around them.

All public transport would be free at the point of use.

All new houses would have to have first class insulation and solar panels on the roof. Electronic appliances would be required to meet efficency targets.

Here is my (IMHO) moderate view that has somehow drifted to exremism in the last couple of centuries:

Citizens of a country get certain benefits from living there. In return they have certain responsibilities.

If our (US) government isn't *both* protecting the minority from the majority and protecting the majority from the minority, it isn't working the way it was designed to.

Get money the fuck out of politics. As long as the monied interests can buy representatvies, those representatives will only be representing the monied interests, not the other 99% of the country.

Abortion.  I'm staunchly pro-choice.

Sex.  If it's consensual, leave them the fuck alone.

In fact, that really describes my views on all government and life.  Unless you're taking away from someone elses ability to chose how they want they're life to be, you should be able to do whatever the hell you want.

I think it's a shame that modern human beings seem incapable of striking a balance between balance and ecology.  In the long run, I wonder if it really matters, though.

Apprenticeships, eh?

Gee.

That's a lot better than my idea of just sterilizing people I think shouldn't breed. (sarcasm monitor: OFF)

Hey, I considered putting the idea of parenting licenses in...

Radical?  How radical?  

I'm a pragmatic anarchist; I live with the system I've got but aspire for better.  But if I have some notions for an ideal community, it would be these:

We can eliminate the effect of money on politics by eliminating elections.  Let's just draw lots from the jury rolls to see who's on the county council every 4 years.  Then the council draws lots for state reps, the state reps draw lots for Senate and Congress.  Senate chooses one of their own to be President.  Congress chooses VP.

Large scale corporate capitalism should be abolished.  All businesses should be locally owned, preferably by the people who do the work. Large scale projects would be done by small companies working through co-ops.  Market economy is fine, between individual humans.  Market speculation is evil.

Communication and power networks should be owned by the citizens, just as the highways are.  

Cease all weapons sales to foreign powers and international subsidies used to buy such weapons

Only non-profit co-ops should be allowed to provide health insurance.


That's it for now.

Just call me an anarcho-syndicalist.