Sure, there are degrees of contribution, and direct is clearly more intentioned than indirect, but at the end of the day the beast doesn't care if it's fed willingly or unwillingly, and the vast majority of government funding is involuntary. If it's going to die, it needs to be unable to feed, what people are willing to contribute is irrelevant when its primary income is violently coerced.
I have thought long and hard about that underlying argument and at the end of the day I both could not find a flaw with it, and was subsequently compelled to become a globally nomadic anarcho capitalist, just to avoid being forced to contribute to what amounts to only a fairly tame by comparison lackey of the US.
at the end of the day the beast doesn't care if it's fed willingly or unwillingly
I totally hear what you saying and as a matter of fact, I used to be very depressed by this. And maybe I'm being a coward. But I also think that billions of people need to be organized somewhat to live together, even millions or thousands. We need plumbing, we need roads, hospitals, and even taxes. To some degree, at least. I mean, come on, even though there are bad doctors, it's kinda cool that I can just look one up in the yellow pages and have a great chance of getting competent treatment. Or eat fast food without dying of salmonella or something. It's not perfect, but I don't want medieval times back either. Yeah, I'm probably a coward ^^
Still, to me the problem isn't so much that there is government, but that it's not a mechanism for people to govern themselves, but like something external we accept to be broken and our enemy, instead of us. That it's a shitty government, run by people who wanted to get in for all the wrong reasons - instead of by everyone, all the time. Mr. Taxman [1], who just lies to you before election and there is fuck all anyone can do.
As Chomsky said, governments have one "defect", they are theoretically democratic -- corporations have no defect, they're pure tyrannies. So unless you become some kind of super inventor / investor, and so rich that you and others of your calibre could really move things around, well.. you'd still have your voice I guess. And that might be enough, there are surely ways to not pay into the wrong hands and still affect people, so I'm not knocking it at all. If you can pull it off, good luck! And write a book/blog about it, too.
I'll take a pure tyranny I can choose whether or not to participate in over a democracy that demands my submission on all collective decisions any day of the year. I don't even really understand the reasonableness of the counterpoint to that position I have to admit, people take that position just come across as faintly unhinged.
> was subsequently compelled to become a globally nomadic anarcho capitalist, just to avoid being forced to contribute to what amounts to only a fairly tame by comparison lackey of the US
This is a really interesting story, and I'm going to be giving it a lot of thought. One problem for me is that I do computer science research (I'm a grad student), and I'd like to keep doing something somewhere similar after I graduate (but self-employed), but if you're working on generic low-level computer stuff that can be re-used by everybody ad infinitum, the state will use it. I'm not a Linux kernel developer, for example, but that's a good analogy. I don't see a good way to stop supporting the state without giving up on doing computer science research. I'd appreciate any thoughts.
So, you don't have to pay taxes (except for things like sales tax) to any state? As an American, I think I'd have to renounce my citizenship (they still make you pay taxes when you are overseas), which would probably have a number of negative impacts for me personally, such as possibly making travel difficult.
Overall, I'm not so sure that I agree with your conclusions, but I'm still thinking about it. Yes, I am supporting the state, but not willingly, and not quietly (though I am not vocal about my opposition to the system in my corporeal life, which wouldn't do any good anyway in my work environment, and would probably do much harm). Actually, I'm the victim. Is a Jew working in a munitions factory in Nazi Germany morally obligated to commit suicide rather than try to ride out the war? I would say "no," and I would tentatively say that about the actual situation I am in, for the same reasons.
My bigger concern about supporting the system as I do is that it is self-defeating (of myself). In the limit (i.e., in communism), there is no possibility for productive labor, because 100% of your earnings will be taken by the government and used against you. We are not in that situation. Still, US government action seems to be moving in the direction of making it impossible to start and run small businesses; this is already the case in some sectors, like telecom. When all there are, are large corporate giants under tight regulatory control (which is literally the model adopted by Hitler and Mussolini), we are all worker drones; it would be equally (un)productive for me personally to work a a cashier at Wal-Mart as it would be to be a software engineer. (Because you get paid approximately the same in both cases and true innovation is illegal or impossiblein both cases.) I fear that we are not all that far from that situation.
Have you thought long and hard about how you will avoid contributing to the corporations that also stand in the way of complete liberty? Or is it just the government you're afraid of?
Yes, it was extremely complex and I consider myself quite ingenious for accomplishing this breathtaking feat of ingenuity, but here's the trick;
If you disapprove of anything about a business, it turns out that you can actually choose not to support them economically. When you make this choice they lack the ability to send thugs in costume around to kidnap/torture/murder you.
Further, if enough people in a free market agree with your evaluation of that business, it will actually stop existing rather than grow larger and larger fuelled by continuously increasing external security threats and various other negative externalities provoked by the kinds of things that aggravated you about it in the first place.
Fascinating stuff. These incentives for behaviour are responsible for some amazing feats throughout history, too. When you can't just kill people for refusing to support you, you often end up needing to provide actual value.
Not always mind you, some particularly unscrupulous businesses can become joined at the hip with the state and feed from the same larcenous trough, but at that stage it's hard to actually distinguish where they end and the state begins, thus your normal actions to avoid support to the state hit this particular shambling hybrid just as hard.
That's actually the difference between state and non state actors typically speaking, one you don't get to tell you're not interested in without risk of death. Mindblowingly complex stuff I know.
As enjoyable as the sarcasm is, you've only eliminated direct contribution to corporations that you know that you disapprove.
But you have already stated that you oppose even indirect contributions to government. Why the contradiction? Do you oppose indirect support to things that take actions you disapprove of, or not?
You are confusing the concepts of degree and knowledge.
Knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly... these lay on difference axises.
I could excuse those who unknowingly willingly contribute to an atrocity (Paul Stabenow of the Tesch & Stabenow corporation is arguably an example). The unknowing unwilling are similarly hard to blame. Examples for this escape me at the moment though I am certain that there are examples in history of people compelled to work who did not know what they were contributing to. If I had to guess, I would say that workers for the Tesch & Stabenow corporation in the company's later years could perhaps fit this category.
Examples of the knowing unwilling could be the workers at Mittelwerk. They knew what they were contributing to and were forced to continue. Knowing willing could arguably include Wernher von Braun, though some would (mistakenly, I think) put him on the edge of knowingly unwillingly.
I have no confusion between the two concepts. Common sense always applies for starters ("Wow, a 99¢ hamburger! Obviously those cattle were treated humanely!").
Likewise blissful ignorance is no excuse (in an indirect world) for being unaware of the reasonable impact or influence of your allocation of capital. Otherwise there's no reason to complain of indirectly helping the government by paying taxes, for all I know every single penny of my tax money could have gone to provide food for the needy and beds for the homeless and it's just your taxes that are going toward funding guns and NSA.
The whole idea that one must know that some corporations are shadier than others belies the very question I asked, since one could willingly contribute to only those aspects of government which are considered good and to none of the other ones (which are considered bad, knowingly or unknowingly).
OP has rejected that argument in its entirety though; there is no way to claim unknowing and unwilling support of bad government in that view, so why should it be permissible to unknowingly and unwillingly support bad corporations?
> for all I know every single penny of my tax money could have gone to provide food for the needy and beds for the homeless and it's just your taxes that are going toward funding guns and NSA.
It's a collective pool to which you contribute which is used for both purposes, you bear some responsibility for both actions by extension.
> since one could willingly contribute to only those aspects of government which are considered good and to none of the other ones (which are considered bad, knowingly or unknowingly).
No, they couldn't, your option to contribute to the state is violently coerced and the allocation after it is violently coerced is out of your hands. You can play games imagining your money went to a nurse instead of a CIA black ops mission to overthrow a popular foreign leader and prop up the interests of your state in the region, but at the end of the day that's all that is, a game.
> so why should it be permissible to unknowingly and unwillingly support bad corporations?
It isn't; you are responsible for the repercussions of that 99c hamburger, act accordingly. You're right that's the only consistent position, and you're right that it implies that people are responsible for the actions of the entities and organisations which they support.
If you simply ignore material reality and obvious facts so you can ignore having to deal with the cognitive dissonance that comes from contributing directly to behaviour you despise, then you're once again just playing games. It's your responsibility to make your decisions and your responsibility to examine the repercussions of those decisions, I understand that the concept of personal responsibility is completely alien to the vast majority of statist humans in existence, but that doesn't stop it being the only path I am able to accept.
The knowingly or unknowingly bit gets slightly harder however since it's not completely beyond the realm of imagination that you might trust a party with which you choose to do business to behave in accordance with your expectations and standards. However, the difference there is, once it becomes clear they've violated that trust, you retain the option to cease your dealings with them.
No matter how many times the state violates that trust, you do not acquire that option, your option is the same as it was to begin with, serve or die.
> No matter how many times the state violates that trust, you do not acquire that option, your option is the same as it was to begin with, serve or die.
You do have options though. Go somewhere that has no state, convince the people to disestablish the state (oh, and somehow prevent them from re-establishing one), or go somewhere that has a state that you would be willing to serve.
If you're actually serious the best part about this response is that you honestly consider it a mitigation.
Hey if you don't like your gang just join another one. Or convince all the other gangsters to quit the gang and all people everywhere to never start a gang again. But don't think for a minute you can stop following orders from the Don.
You can always refuse to do what the Don says... just don't be surprised at what the Don does after he finds that he has no use for you.
I wish I could tell you the world was different, but it's not. We live in a real world, not an utopia. No matter where you go there will be some variant of the 'despot with a stick', whether they call themselves guv'nah or not.
I can respect that, acknowledging that they all are just a pack of murdering thugs at the end of the day and it's not some system for the service of the people was my entire point. I will not be a slave, I don't care what that costs me, it's already made me give up ever having roots and a family so if it gets worse I'll accept that before compromising my principles.
I have thought long and hard about that underlying argument and at the end of the day I both could not find a flaw with it, and was subsequently compelled to become a globally nomadic anarcho capitalist, just to avoid being forced to contribute to what amounts to only a fairly tame by comparison lackey of the US.