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[silverspawn]

Also I'm very curious what ideology you think I have if not minimizing bureaucracy

[silverspawn]

oh also lower the voting age to 0

[silverspawn]

- remove all minimum wage laws

[silverspawn]

The dream would be a society where you can employ someone without any obstacles. You just sign a contract and they start working, and as long as no one thinks it got violated, the state does not get involved at all.

[faust]

I have numbered these for ease of reference.

1. have the most draconian CO2 tax anyone has ever seen
2. UBI or low-wage subsidies
3. remove most welfare programs (not all)
4. have a high tax on purchased goods, especially non-essential ones, especially especially luxury goods
5. remove most other taxes (not all)
6. open borders
7. legalize all drugs and tax them as high as possible without seriously incentivizing a black market
8. criminalize most forms of advertising

1. is against the BMV
2. is against the BMV (not having this would be less bureaucracy)
3. is aligned with the BMV
4. is against the BMV (especially so with the distinction essential vs non-essential vs luxury)
5. is aligned with the BMV
6. depends. Open borders would probably require some form of bilateral agreement with all other countries, unless everything is organized under a world government, but then that is also not really aligned with the BMV.
7. Legalization is aligned with the BMV, taxation isn't
8. is against the BMV

Based in this sample, I would question that you prioritize the BMV particularly highly.

What is the single principle that most closely approximates this list of not "minimize bureaucracy?"

I don't know but I don't think "minimize bureaucracy" does any better than, say, "make sure rich people remain rich in perpetuity".

Do not abolish the police isn't something that would have occured to me bc it seems very obvious that you do need the police.

I mean what seems obvious to you probably says the most about your ideological background. It doesn't seem obvious to me.

[silverspawn]

1. have the most draconian CO2 tax anyone has ever seen
2. UBI or low-wage subsidies
3. remove most welfare programs (not all)

1. is against the BMV
2. is against the BMV (not having this would be less bureaucracy)
3. is aligned with the BMV

Oh come on. Saying UBI is against the BMV is like saying nuclear reactors are against the "minimize CO2 worry" norm because they produce CO2. We need to have redistribution, and among all the ways that do redistribution, UBI is the one with the least amount of bureaucracy, which is why I like it.

Ditto with 7 (you need a way to generate income, and taxing drugs is a low-bureaucracy way to do it), ditto with 4 (this tax requires less bureaucracy than any other tax afai,, which is why I like it)

[silverspawn]

I refuse to believe that you can honestly look at this list and not agree that the overall package aligns really closely with reducing bureaucracy

[silverspawn]

And ditto 1, we need to fight climate change and taxing CO2 is one of the simpler ways to do it, and it also generates income

[silverspawn]

I refuse to believe that you can honestly look at this list and not agree that the overall package aligns really closely with reducing bureaucracy

Especially because it's *also* what I'm telling you. I mean we're literally only debating my personal motivation here, not whether any of these policies are a good idea, and I have some privileged access into what my motivation is. So even I were wrong about a VAT being much simpler than another tax, it wouldn't matter. And if I did think another tax was simpler, I'd probably prefer that one.

[Awaclus]

Oh come on. Saying UBI is against the BMV is like saying nuclear reactors are against the "minimize CO2 worry" norm because they produce CO2. We need to have redistribution, and among all the ways that do redistribution, UBI is the one with the least amount of bureaucracy, which is why I like it.

We don't actually need to have redistribution. I agree that we should, but that's an ideological position; the extent to which we should have it is also debatable.

[silverspawn]

Oh come on. Saying UBI is against the BMV is like saying nuclear reactors are against the "minimize CO2 worry" norm because they produce CO2. We need to have redistribution, and among all the ways that do redistribution, UBI is the one with the least amount of bureaucracy, which is why I like it.

We don't actually need to have redistribution. I agree that we should, but that's an ideological position; the extent to which we should have it is also debatable.

sure, but given that I think we definitely need redistribution -- a lot more than we have rn in fact -- would you agree that UBI is one of the less bureaucracy-y ways to do it?

[Awaclus]

This is very reductive. It might be true if we were talking about some messenger app like WhatsApp, but Twitter is a social media platform and you post there because you want your ideas to reach a lot of people. That just cannot happen if you move somewhere else.

Sure, but freedom of speech does not give you the right to a large audience, it only gives you the right to say whatever you want to the people who actually want to hear it, and to those people it gives the right to hear what you're saying. As long as you aren't getting censored by Internet infrastructure providing companies, that works out exactly as it should.

[silverspawn]

(and even if not, am I really lying about thinking so?)

[Awaclus]

This is very reductive. It might be true if we were talking about some messenger app like WhatsApp, but Twitter is a social media platform and you post there because you want your ideas to reach a lot of people. That just cannot happen if you move somewhere else.

Sure, but freedom of speech does not give you the right to a large audience, it only gives you the right to say whatever you want to the people who actually want to hear it, and to those people it gives the right to hear what you're saying. As long as you aren't getting censored by Internet infrastructure providing companies, that works out exactly as it should.

That being said, I do think there is a spectrum there — the larger and less specific a community is, the more of a social responsibility it should have to protect unpopular but legal speech there, at least to some semi-reasonable extent, and instead provide tools for individual users to block topics/users they don't want to see in their feeds. That shouldn't be enforced by the state though, but rather, by the users.

[Awaclus]

sure, but given that I think we definitely need redistribution -- a lot more than we have rn in fact -- would you agree that UBI is one of the less bureaucracy-y ways to do it?

Yes, and I basically think the state should stop spending money on most things that aren't UBI (excluding stuff like military, the justice system, etc that would actually be highly questionable to organize through a free market, but including stuff like health care and education where the only problem with free markets is that poor people can't afford it at its market price, which the UBI is supposed to fix) and channel all of that money into UBI instead.

[faust]

To expand on the vector image, we can think of politics as an optimization problem; you want to optimize results under a set of given constraints.

We may model this such that amount of bureaucracy is the variable you'd like to minimize. But that's not interesting to me; practically everyone would want to minimize for that. It's not an ideological position. I am more interested in the constraints we put on that optimization problem. And here we learn something about your ideology:

you do need the police.

We need to have redistribution

we need to fight climate change

All of these for me say more about your ideology than "I want to minimize bureaucracy".

[faust]

This is very reductive. It might be true if we were talking about some messenger app like WhatsApp, but Twitter is a social media platform and you post there because you want your ideas to reach a lot of people. That just cannot happen if you move somewhere else.

Sure, but freedom of speech does not give you the right to a large audience, it only gives you the right to say whatever you want to the people who actually want to hear it, and to those people it gives the right to hear what you're saying. As long as you aren't getting censored by Internet infrastructure providing companies, that works out exactly as it should.

That being said, I do think there is a spectrum there — the larger and less specific a community is, the more of a social responsibility it should have to protect unpopular but legal speech there, at least to some semi-reasonable extent, and instead provide tools for individual users to block topics/users they don't want to see in their feeds. That shouldn't be enforced by the state though, but rather, by the users.

Well, we at least can agree that there is a spectrum. I don't think it's reasonable to put the onus on the users who don't have the power to enforce anything. Or said differently, I would put the onus on the users but also give them the tools to implement this by expropriating commercially owned platforms and making the users the owners.

[silverspawn]

To expand on the vector image, we can think of politics as an optimization problem; you want to optimize results under a set of given constraints.

We may model this such that amount of bureaucracy is the variable you'd like to minimize. But that's not interesting to me; practically everyone would want to minimize for that. It's not an ideological position. I am more interested in the constraints we put on that optimization problem. And here we learn something about your ideology:

you do need the police.

We need to have redistribution

we need to fight climate change

All of these for me say more about your ideology than "I want to minimize bureaucracy".

ok, that's fair. I don't disagree with this characterization. But like these constraints all seem pretty basic to me.

Like if you start from a very large overton window, then yeah these principles do most of the lifting. But like usually I think the windows is much smaller, and then the main questoin is how you navigate in that window.

[silverspawn]

sure, but given that I think we definitely need redistribution -- a lot more than we have rn in fact -- would you agree that UBI is one of the less bureaucracy-y ways to do it?

Yes, and I basically think the state should stop spending money on most things that aren't UBI (excluding stuff like military, the justice system, etc that would actually be highly questionable to organize through a free market, but including stuff like health care and education where the only problem with free markets is that poor people can't afford it at its market price, which the UBI is supposed to fix) and channel all of that money into UBI instead.

In other words our positions are actually really close?

[silverspawn]

All of these for me say more about your ideology than "I want to minimize bureaucracy".

Nitpicking terminology, I don't think these are my ideology. There's an extremely strong utilitarian argument for redistribution because of the diminishing returns of wealth. Letting Climate change do its thing also seems like it has very bad consequences for a lot of people. Police is the most arguable one but I don't really have a model of how else you could have a society that works, I could maybe be convinced there. So if you really care about ideology, I think it starts and ends with valence utilitarianism

[faust]

All of these for me say more about your ideology than "I want to minimize bureaucracy".

Nitpicking terminology, I don't think these are my ideology. There's an extremely strong utilitarian argument for redistribution because of the diminishing returns of wealth. Letting Climate change do its thing also seems like it has very bad consequences for a lot of people. Police is the most arguable one but I don't really have a model of how else you could have a society that works, I could maybe be convinced there. So if you really care about ideology, I think it starts and ends with valence utilitarianism

I grant that some of these points can be traced back to a different ideological base. However I don't think your ideology starts and ends with valence utilitarianism, at the very least it includes capitalism. Multiple of the above points presuppose a capitalist system.

[Awaclus]

Well, we at least can agree that there is a spectrum. I don't think it's reasonable to put the onus on the users who don't have the power to enforce anything.

They have the power to leave and use a different platform (or indeed make their own platform if necessary). A lot of people use other platforms instead of Twitter and they're completely fine. I'm guessing usually it's actually because Twitter censors less speech than they would prefer and not because it censors too much, but I digress.

[faust]

Like if you start from a very large overton window, then yeah these principles do most of the lifting. But like usually I think the windows is much smaller, and then the main questoin is how you navigate in that window.

The is probably true by the way. Probably a result of myself being pretty far on the fringes of the current overton window.

[Awaclus]

In other words our positions are actually really close?

I guess? About taxation, I would also tax CO2 intensive consumption a lot harder than is currently done, consumption in general harder than is currently done, wages relatively lightly, inheritance relatively heavily, and capital income extremely progressively such that low amounts of capital income are lighter taxed than wages or even tax-free, and at the high end, it should get close-ish to a hard limit on how much capital income a person can earn.

[silverspawn]

In other words our positions are actually really close?

I guess? About taxation, I would also tax CO2 intensive consumption a lot harder than is currently done, consumption in general harder than is currently done, wages relatively lightly, inheritance relatively heavily, and capital income extremely progressively such that low amounts of capital income are lighter taxed than wages or even tax-free, and at the high end, it should get close-ish to a hard limit on how much capital income a person can earn.

I approximated all these correct positions without reading the news!