Right, but you're questioning a position that doesn't really exist. Pretty much everyone that is a strong advocate for labour protections would also like universal healthcare, it's just much more likely we can achieve labour protection in the short term than universal healthcare.

I'm arguing that this kind of labour protections of changing employee classification rule is a weird thing to fight for.

Just because the fix is easier and more likely to achieve but if it doesn't address the core issue, its useless.

Sure, but if that is your position you should go out and advocate for this better thing instead of bemoaning the efforts other people are making as misplaced.

This shows up anytime people try to make some sort of progressive improvement to society, people come out of the woodwork to complain that it's not the right solution, without doing anything (other than complaining I guess) to motivate a better solution.

Well, if not me, at very least maybe someone out there that read this will be inspired to do something about it.

Still better than not saying anything.

> I'm an anarchist. The license plate on my Jeep is literally "ANARCHY." I'm actually not sure I could name a political position that's more strongly opposed by more people.

You're not an anarchist and you should stop try to adopt an identity with a vivid anti-capitalist history to represent your desire for corporate feudalism with guns. Anarchists are socialists and anything otherwise is misusing the word.

You aren't harassed for your beliefs because people with your economic beliefs literally hold every branch of government.

I'm sure you'll come back with something about republicans wanting big government to police morality, but those differences mean almost nothing when your economic incentives are aligned.

> Anarchists are socialists and anything otherwise is misusing the word.

So.. you're saying that the other anarchists "own" the word itself? How does that work, exactly? Is it their private property, or merely a personal possession?

I jest, of course; I mean no offense.

The fact is, "Anarcho-Capitalist" is the most precise term for the economic side of my beliefs I've found. "Voluntarist" is the most precise term for the social side. I'll continue to use those terms until I find more descriptive ones.

> I'm sure you'll come back with something about republicans wanting big government to police morality, but those differences mean almost nothing when your economic incentives are aligned.

I'm pretty disillusioned with both major parties; I'm not going to be defending "Republicans".

I generally get along better socially with people on the political right, but that's because I grew up in a "Red State" not because of a greater number of shared beliefs.

Because there are a thousand other practical solutions people have presented that you're ignoring in deference to your ideological motive that you don't like taxes.

I’m quite happy with taxes on investment gains and income and even estates.

I don’t like taxes being used to take away property from people just because you want what they have.

> I don’t like taxes being used to take away property from people just because you want what they have.

This is just a variant of "the left is just jealous of rich people" argument. That's not an argument and I'm not jealous, I'm actually quite rich by most standards, I just don't think it's earned or justified, especially in a country with a vivid history of genocide.

> When you put it that way, the solution is obvious

When it's put in an ideologically biased way that ignores practical solutions to paying taxes on an increasing property value, it implies another ideologically biased solution that favours the material interests of the rich...

Sure.

Note that "the government has to spend that money, so here are some ways that you can manage to afford to pay your taxes" is also an ideologically biased viewpoint. (It's the current default viewpoint, but it's still ideologically biased...)

Of course, everything is ideological. I'm a socialist so I'm plenty familiar with going against the status-quo and my HN karma reflects that.

I'm arguing against hiding your ideological motive (lower taxes) under the guise of 'logical deduction' or 'obviousness'.

If anything, your HN karma reflects that your comments are largely political: > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what the site exists for.

Note that AnimalMuppet was also downvoted for the same reasons.

HN is open to sound arguments against “the status quo” (whatever you think that is). If your karma suffers it’s likely because you’re not actually making well reasoned comments but are instead just spewing ideology.

>The contract breech: Property taxes going up so fast that the only possible solution was to sell your home. Now, of course the value of the home was going up, which was what was driving the taxes. But forcing pensioners to sell their homes, disrupting/destroying a life-time of plans and work was never going to be a smooth ride -- who could have thought that it would be?

Financial instruments that prevent that already exist. If your home is worth millions of dollars it's not that hard to find a way to pay the property tax. "Having more money" is rarely a real problem.

> a sufficient number of desperate people saw it as a solution to get it enacted.

No, people who's material interests are in direct conflict with a functional society pushed for it. It passed through a combination of "think of the elders" concern-trolling and libertarian dark money.

Specifically, you could use a reverse mortgage to pay property tax. A similar solution that has been proposed is that unpaid property taxes could accumulate as a lien and thus be paid when the house is sold.

I thought this was standard-it happened to many properties after Katrina

Your solution is to make real estate into just a rental from the state.

That’s not a great one either.

I fully agree with you. This insane attitude of "my ill-gotten capital is worth more than your existence" is pathetic and sad.

Thanks man.

What's especially insane about it is that most of the folks commenting and voting are members of the working class.

Sure, they might have ill-gotten capital in the form of a deed (ignoring the likelihood that there's a lien on that deed) on a tiny parcel of stolen/colonized land or vested stock in the monopolist they work for, but that's a pittance in the scheme of things. They still need to sell their labor in order to meet their needs for food, shelter, community participation, etc.

We need to find a way to reach these folks. Because this thread is evidence that they think they're significantly different from the people without housing they see on the street here every day.

In the USSR, not working while being able was a crime that, although rarely enforced, carried huge social stigma; and, if you were an "undesirable" on the level of the subset of the drug addicted homeless in Seattle, neither the police nor the class-conscious workers would treat you like a human being. You'd be in forced treatment or jail (after being beat up, possibly) in a blink. An attempted clear delineation of the working class and the underclass (based on the class consciousness where the "parasites" group isn't only composed of the rich), is one of the few good things about "real leftism"... I wish the American leftists picked it up. In the USSR you could have observed a lot of different people in the same exact circumstances (or as close as the government could get them to be - standard apartments, jobs, education, ...) making completely different life choices, to really appreciate that. There were much fewer oppression/inequality/... excuses, but the result was much the same.

There's no need to have empathy towards the underclass silenced by tech money, or whatever. I never had it to start with and never will; and I feel like lots of the people you are trying to "reach" are like that to a large degree, it's just not a fashionable thing to articulate clearly these days. I personally feel completely fine voting for Sanders and other economic progressives, supporting free healthcare, public education, low-income housing, etc. while simultaneously having negative empathy towards habitual criminals and underclass in general. These are not mutually exclusive, as far as I'm concerned they are mutually reinforcing.

> Sure, they might have ill-gotten capital in the form of a deed (ignoring the likelihood that there's a lien on that deed) on a tiny parcel of stolen/colonized land or vested stock in the monopolist they work for, but that's a pittance in the scheme of things. They still need to sell their labor in order to meet their needs for food, shelter, community participation, etc.

I agree with you in spirit, that most people in SV and the tech industry in general are truly workers. However, I think the monopolists have been quite clever in offering just enough capital to those workers that they feel like an integral part of the system. Especially as they gain additional seniority, or work long enough to pay off their house, that mindset engrains itself. Add to this the democrats willingness to go after the middle/upper-middle class rather than the true elites to fund social programs, and you end up with an individualistic and anti-democratic mindset.

In a way, 'startup culture' and YC contribute to that perception, giving the workers the idea they can make it big as an entrepreneur, no matter how unlikely that really is. It's manufacturing the consent of the average wage-worker in SV for a system only truly benefits elite VC firms and a very very small number of very very lucky or very very well connected entrepreneurs.

> We need to find a way to reach these folks. Because this thread is evidence that they think they're significantly different from the people without housing they see on the street here every day.

There are a ton of tech workers ripe for class consciousness in the gaming industry, so I think that's a good place to start. I've also had a lot of luck encouraging collective action on individual teams that suffer under incompetent management. Combining a discussion of bad management with the trap of mortgage payments and immigration law has netted me a lot of progress with encouraging a more leftist worldview.

Seattle loves to pass new taxes that are "supposed" to go towards certain things (and do for a year or two), but then end up in a general fund. Just like the tobacco tax, the alcohol tax and the marijuana tax. These were all supposed to go towards roads and schools, at one point and, yet didn't.

Is there even a legal structure allowing a government to pass a tax with a particular outflow, in a way that prevents said government from later deciding to redirect the tax's revenue to a different outflow? Like how a trust works for private citizens, but at an organizational level?

You can earmark tax dollars for particular spending, but Seattle has a habit of only doing said earmarks for 2 to 3 years before going into the general fund. I'm not sure if you can make those earmarks indefinite, to be honest.

We need low cost low security jails for people who commit property crimes. Basically just wall off a few square miles and throw them in there left to their own devices.

Maybe you can try using your giant 'logical' brain to postulate why that isn't a good idea?

You're suggesting making a fucking ghetto for homeless people? Are you serious?

This thread has confirmed my suspicion that HN cares way more about money and their material interests than any sense of morality or ethics.

Many prisons in central and South America are run like this: the prisoners are thrown into a contained environment without guards otherwise, the prisoners themselves (usually visit a gangs) organize the prison economy and otherwise keep the peace (bar for some occasional riots).

This is basically the origin of Australia.

That’s not good because it gives the leaders a quality of life that they shouldn’t be able to enjoy.

Wow. That's your criticism? That they leaders aren't suffering enough? You and I have very different ideas about what incarceration is for.

There are many, it's a very old, very well thought-out tradition. Try reading Kropotkin, or from a more modern perspective, Richard Wolff.

However, it doesn't align with the current vision of orthodox Western capitalism, so it isn't particularly popular in mainstream media or culture.