/biz/ - Business & Finance

It depends. Profit in a zero-sum game is theft. In a non-zero sum game it is legit.

>>13480989
describe an example of a zero sum game fren; admittedly I don't know what you're talmbout, gnomesaiyan?

>>13480976
They are both theft. The only thing that isn't theft is subsistence farming, since the soil doesn't have rights so you can take things from it if you want

Profit is exploitation not theft.

>>13481001
Options

>>13481196
>Profit is exploitation
Is it? if a game has a mechanic and you use it does that mean you are exploiting?

>>13480976
Profit is greed and greed is the root of all evil.
Defining it as theft is too narrow a definition.
Ideally, taxation is an incentive to keep citizens involved in the administration of the government providing the structures and guidelines for the society which one might reside. This applies to monarchies as well as democracies and dictatorships, except that the ideologies of the people proliferate societies in radically different ways.
But yes, essentially, profit is bad and taxation is noble, in principal.

>>13480989
why are you just talking out your ass

>>13481119
>the soil doesn't have rights
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/toledo-ohio-just-granted-lake-erie-same-legal-rights-people-180971603/
Even if you don't accept that as valid, the future inhabitants of that soil have rights. Only because you're stupid enough to perceive time in a linear fashion doesn't mean you're entitled to rob the future inhabitants of their prosperity.

>>13481520
>Even if you don't accept that as valid, the future inhabitants of that soil have rights. Only because you're stupid enough to perceive time in a linear fashion doesn't mean you're entitled to rob the future inhabitants of their prosperity.
Does this mean owning land is gonna be banned like slavery was?? Fuck, this is going to affect my investment strategy

>>13480976
Obtaining profit does not require coercion, obtaining taxes does. /thread
>>13481520
>Profit is greed
No profit is the additional wealth created by voluntary exchange. Earning a profit to sustain yourself is the least-evil way of living. The only alternative is brigandry.

>>13481574
what the fuck is wealth than big boy?
And why is that wealth somehow necessarily entitled to a select few?
Every successful business enterprise is a result of countless actions, substances, and conditions that are beyond the control of whoever who happens to take home the profit.
The notion of profit is, without a doubt, an effective motivator, but for you to assert who exactly is the right recipient of that profit is negligent at best, and likely, simply malicious theft.

>>13481520
>profit is bad, taxation(theft) is good
I can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to live in your clown world skull, friend

>>13480976
Neither is theft. Theft requires that the other party does not consent, and in the case of profit you have explicit consent via written contract and in the case of taxation you have implicit consent via social contract.

>>13481119
If an executive paying a voluntary employee $30,000 a year as a minimal average and personally pocketing 1/300th of that or so is to be considered theft then it's disingenuous perhaps to assume that an organization one belongs to by geographical happenstance alone that takes 30% of that same employee's income directly (38% if you consider the payroll tax only made possible by that employee's existence) and tithes that employee for the products and services they purchase from others throughout their life at gunpoint is necessarily the moral agent here.

Of course a critic would rightly point out that this is still oversimplifying things because the company itself is certainly making far more money on the labor of the employee than just what the CEO takes home-much like the employee's relationship with the government the employee is at the mercy of how the company chooses to spend that surplus money, but at the least comes with the expectation that the money will go towards maintaining the company's viability and therefor that employee's employment. The average corporation has a net operating profit of 8% of their gross income, that 92% is therefor going towards paying other employees' salaries as well as those employees working for that company's business partners, their distributors, service providers, research and development, raw materials etc., all being relationships voluntarily maintained excluding in instances of outright monopoly I suppose.

>>13481666
If you were allowed to keep close to 100% of your income and only had to pay semi-voluntary consumptive taxes such as sales tax, gasoline tax and so on how much of your income would you voluntarily part with if the same rules applied to everybody? What is a fair amount of money that an individual should pay and why do you think that is?

>>13481724
>social contract
A contract implies a consensus/agreement between two or more parties; "THE" social contract is illegitimate and could be fixed.

>>13481701
sick burn bro, please continue to be a useful idiot for those who already own property and capital through no actions of their own

>>13481724
your notion of consent doesn't account for the ways inherent imperfect information can lead to less than perfect accounts of consent.

>>13481912
I can't even discern what it is you're talking about. Is that like a flat income tax? That shit's retarded.
Whatever it is you are asking is beside the point.
Taxes are in place to incentivize the participation of a governments citizens in the rule and stability of the country. Higher taxes should be in place on the people who want most to participate in the rule of the country. Lower taxes on those who you do not want to motivated to be involved.

Let's talk about how easy it is to throw communists out of helicopters, instead.

>>13482018
>anticapitalists are communists
imagine having the intellectual capacity of a goldfish
or worse yet, an american.

>>13480976
Profit may be greed(y) but it's not theft.
Taxation is simply "theft" because I'm pretty sure no one ever agreed to be taxed, they were just born, and your cannot really opt out of the social contract without moving out of the country in which you were born (and likely going to another country and paying taxes there).

>You go to shop
>Gib shop your munny
>Shopman gib you thing you want
>Munny goes to pay for store's upkeep and some is taken as profit
It's definitely not theft when a cool guy who doesn't afraid of anything like Louis Rossman makes profit, is it?

So what is the problem here?

The problem is the same with all monopolies
When the store you went to to buy things at makes too much profit and wastes it on stupid things, it will go out of business to other, more effecient businesses in the market
Unless for whatever reason there are none
But on the other hand, they are making something out of nothing and are the only ones doing it.
On the third hand, the government has a monopoly on force.

Thinking of either as theft is just a dumb simplification to make them sound catchy and imply that they are Big Bad.

But obviously somebody does have to pay for 'muh roads' and more importantly all the things that go on behind keeping up a trade empire like forcing middle eastern countries to do business in dollars or else!
So evolutionarily governments have developed such that the one that pulls the most stuff out of nothing, out of the raw chaos of the natural world, wins and other governments have to inevitably follow (like China, the ussr, eastern Europe) lest they become north korea.

>>13481666
>what the fuck is wealth
Wealth is accumulated value. Pick up a basic economics textbook once in a while, you bum.
>why is that wealth somehow necessarily entitled to a select few
Look up the Pareto distribution. Why do you think wealth should be distributed in any way other than unevenly? Do you think everyone deserves the same outcome? Of course not. Some people work harder/smarter than others.If that hurts your feefees that's just too bad.
>beyond the control of whoever who happens to take home the profit
Just because some of the circumstances that made the profit possible are not exclusively attributed to the person earning the profit doesn't mean that the person who earned the profit isn't entitled to it.
Theft requires coercion (force). Being jealous of something that somebody else obtained through voluntary interactions makes you a massive faggot.

>>13480976
The concept of theft requires the concept of property and taxation is theft by definition

>>13482000
>That shit's retarded
Why?

>Higher taxes should be in place on the people who want most to participate in the rule of the country. Lower taxes on those who you do not want to motivated to be involved

I agree, people should be able to opt out of paying for things like the public school system if they want to considering the many alternatives available these days instead of being coerced by threat of force. You've hit the nail on the head here, I feel.

>>13482046
>red white and blue man bad!

Are you Norwegian perhaps? Are you still waiting for the government to give you the $195,000 surplus USD-equivalent it's taken from you over the past 30 years or so ( >$6,000 a year)? Maybe some day! Are you worried about the oil drying up within a few years and putting over a fifth of your gdp and 60% of your exports at risk?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-08/norway-is-walking-away-from-billions-of-barrels-of-oil-and-gas

>>13482018
Enjoy getting beaten to death by an angry mob.

Quality of life is generally higher in countries with high tax.

>>13481912
>"THE" social contract is illegitimate and could be fixed.
You might argue that it can be improved, but it is not illegitimate.
>>13482000
>your notion of consent doesn't account for the ways inherent imperfect information can lead to less than perfect accounts of consent.
No party can ever have completely perfect information, because we are not gods. As long as you are not committing fraud, you knowing something that the other party doesn't does not prevent consent.

>>13480976

Equality of outcome/equal representation is pure commie red evil that, if allowed to run to conclusion, results in mass starvation and death.

Total free market when allowed to run to conclusion will eventually result in abject poverty for the majority. Also not an acceptable outcome. This is why there are social programs to raise the bottom level to a poor but livable income. And why tax rates increase relative to income amount up to a max limit.

Quasi free market with some social programs is the correct system to maintain. Laws in place to ensure equal opportunity but never equal outcome. I dunno why the left in particular seem to have decided that they need to shift further left in the mass death zone of ideology. Did they forget why communism doesn't fucking work? Don't they read? Maybe I just answered my own question.

>>13482382
this

based laconsit

and in spanish lenguages it derives from "impositum" (vulgar latin), to imposte

or just "tributes"

I don't know which is worse desu

>>13482797
I meant in latin-derived languages

>>13480976
shitty argument, you are comparing the full efforts of taxation of the entire fucking government against the inflated salary of the single most compensated employee in any given organization. A fairer comparison would be to lump together the salaries of every ceo, cfo, cto, president, vice president, manager, vice manager, director, assistant director, vice executive coordinator, etc etc etc, and see what it adds up to. It would probably be something like 1-2% of the workforce constituting 10-20% of net employee compensation for the company, which is to say, a 'theft' from the average worker much closer to the rate of the taxation that the government is levying on them.

Also, even to use your own example, if I were to run around the streets and steal $120 from 250,000 people that would be sort of a big deal and enough to put me in jail many lifetimes over.

We are getting shafted hugely from both ends and trying to pin the blame on gubmint while protecting your corporate overlords is deeply fucking cucked.

>>13482437
It's noteworthy that it was until extremely recently most European countries had lower corporate taxes than the U.S. did and simply had close to or relatively higher taxes on normal earners

https://taxfoundation.org/corporate-income-tax-rates-around-world-2014/

It speaks volumes that the countries that have some of the lowest birthrates, have some of the healthiest populations (owing exclusively to personal choices like diet and exercise culture) get free drugs largely developed by American firms (60% of all novel medications who-knows how many treatments annually), have unsustainably small militaries entirely relying on U.S. global hegemony, still must be saddled with rapacious taxes to pay for the services they barely make use of. You're attributing to government which could easily be explained by the conscientious behavior of the common people.

>>13482579
(Improved was actually my first choice of words but I ran over the character limit)

I watched Starship Troopers, I can accept that force is as legitimate an authority as any-if less than completely ethical-but I also think thanks to modern technology we could have a more voluntaristic system that could result in more transparency and could maximize utility. Public school is an easy one, but there's a lot that could be done to make sure that people are paying more for what they personally use and less for what they're not. Through the vishnu in the blockchain all things could be possible sir.

>>13482809
>If I were to run around the streets and steal $120 from 250,000 people that would be sort of a big deal and enough to put me in jail many times over.

Maybe if you tell the cops that you gave your unfortunate victims $29,870 and, along with a small committee of a handful of others, personally spearheaded the initiatives and calculated risks that made this money possible to be earned in the first place the government's men-at-arms would let you off with a warning

>>13482915
>$29,870

Whoops, $29,880

>>13480976
It's pretty simple but for a retard of your caliber I will answer this for you. You aren't obligated to pay someone profit for a service. You simply do not use the service. You are, however, obligated to pay your taxes. Don't do this and you simply go to jail. They have proven time and time again they are inept at handling these tax funds and there should most certainly be a better system managing this money and where it goes