Laura Knight-Jadczyk
In the previous post, we learned that Philip Goff proposes that the fine-tuning of the cosmos indicates that the emergence of life is one of the goals of the universe. He further proposes that the emergence of rational organisms from particles with agency is also part of the purpose of the universe. These two pieces of evidence lead him to suggest that we can choose to make ourselves and our world better by achieving the highest state possible for our form of existence and our commitment to that aim – which he identifies as the Aim of the Universe – can transform our ethical situation, i.e. make us ‘good’. It was at this point in his discussion that he indicated that “true ethics is not about helping your kin alone – the exclusive concern of the Mafia boss – or helping your nation alone – the exclusive concern of the fascist. True ethics is a concern to make reality better.”
Yup. We are to make reality as good as we possibly
can and this goal trumps humanism. Just
to clarify that, at the present time, the term ‘humanism’ generally refers to a
‘focus on human well-being and advocates for human freedom, autonomy, and
progress. It views humanity as responsible for the promotion and development of
individuals, espouses the equal and inherent dignity of all human beings, and
emphasizes a concern for humans in relation to the world.”
That is, Goff is proposing that we go beyond humanism into, I suppose, transhumanism except that his concern is for ‘the reality’ and not the human beings inhabiting it with their petty family and tribal concerns. Possibly some transhumanism enters into his concerns, but it seems that he is mainly aimed at Globalism and the agenda of those such as Klaus Schwab and the WEF. This becomes even more evident with the discussion he opens in his section entitled “Owning and Belonging”. In this section, he does bring forward a number of thorny social and economic issues. He notes:
In Europe in 1913, the top 10 per cent owned 89 per cent of all private property, whilst the entire bottom half of society owned just 1 per cent.
Well, that disposes of 60 per cent of society and 90 per cent of private
property, which would leave 40 per cent owning the 10 per cent that is
left. It is a little confusing when he
then says:
”…during the 20th century, a remarkable, and historically
unprecedented, transformation took place: a middle class emerged. That is to say, a significant proportion of
the wealth at the top was transferred to the middle 40 per cent between the top
10 per cent and the bottom 50 per cent. In
2020, this middle group owned about 38 per cent of all property, whilst the
share of the elite 10 per cent at the top had significantly come down from 89
per cent to 56 per cent. The bottom half
of society benefited a little but not a lot from this transition: moving up
from owning 1 per cent to owning 6 per cent.”
This transition was not due to capitalism, which had already existed for
hundreds of years. It was due to the
specific form of capitalism that emerged in the post-war years, which involved democratic
control of the market, through active trade unions, strong regulation on the
movement of capital, and high taxes on the wealthy. The top marginal rate of
income tax in the US between 1932 and 1980 averaged at 81 per cent. In the UK during the same period, the average
of the top rate of tax was 89 per cent.
These taxes did not dampen economic activity. On the contrary, this time
was referred to as the ‘global age of capitalism” … high taxes on the wealthy succeeded
in making society much more equal without negatively impacting the economy…
…restrained capitalism was abandoned in the Thatcher/Reagan
‘neo-liberal’ revolutions of the early 1980s.
Regulation and taxes on the wealthy were slashed, with the promise of
unleashing economic dynamism that would produce wealth that would eventually
‘trickle down’ to the masses. Instead,
we got growing inequality, lower growth, and ultimately the global meltdown of
2008.
Now, I’m not an
economist, but I was born in the 50s and was an adult from the 70s onwards. I know that the term ‘made in China’ or
wherever became a household expression starting from the 70s and that was due
to the fact that manufacturers were moving their business to out of the US
mainly due to the controls touted by Goff above. It was basically an age of divestment in
America so it certainly negatively impacted the economy. And it was due to this divestment that the
Thatcher/Reagan reforms were proposed. I
personally think that ‘trickle down economics’ was something of a scam, but then,
consider that Goff above, highlights the year 2020 as being some sort of high
water mark for the middle classes? That
was a long time after Thatcher and Reagan. Something is certainly wrong with the picture he is presenting.
I’m also aware that
the middle class was present in late feudal societies and that the middle class
mainly drove the French Revolution and became the new ruling class. Things are not as simple as Goff suggests in
his brief review of economics. His source for these statistics is Thomas Piketty’s “A Brief History of Equality” (2022).
Piketty has a somewhat
checkered career based on the Wikipedia bio about him. There we read:
Piketty specializes in economic inequality, taking a historic and
statistical approach. His work looks at the rate of capital accumulation in
relation to economic growth over a two hundred year spread from the nineteenth
century to the present. His novel use of tax records enabled him to gather data
on the very top economic elite, who had previously been understudied, and to
ascertain their rate of accumulation of wealth and how this compared to the
rest of society and economy. His 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
relies on economic data going back 250 years to show that an ever-rising
concentration of wealth is not self-correcting. To address this problem, he proposes
redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth. […]
In November 2023, Thomas Piketty called for a ban on private jets to
fight against climate change and called for a progressive carbon tax in
response to a report highlighting the disproportionate amounts of carbon
emissions by the richest 1% of people.
Oh boy, a real live
WEF acolyte.
Goff continues:
Historically, Western European countries sucked wealth from other
nations through military conquest and empire.
True, and it is still
a problem.
However, rich countries continue to steal from poorer countries through
the more nefarious means of tax havens.
A multinational corporation can profit in, say, Nigeria, but avoid
paying tax in Nigeria by shifting profits to a tax haven.
True enough. What Goff and other so-called geniuses don’t
seem to catch on to is the fact that this would not be the case if taxes were
reasonable across the board.
But Goff and others of
his ilk are going after the problem in a more dangerous way:
What can be done? One of the
biggest barriers to change is the myth of natural, inviolable property
rights. The wealthy resent the kind of
taxes that did so much good in the post-war years, because they feel that the
taxes would be taking ‘their money’ off them. In the most extreme version of
this sentiment, fans of the 20th century Russian-born American
pop-novelist Ayn Rand declare that ‘taxation is theft,’ at least if it is used
for anything more than funding the police to protect property rights. But even politicians on the centre-left tend
to start from the assumption that the need to fund public services or – heaven
forbid – redistribute income must be balanced against a concern about the state
taking too much of ‘our money.’
The conviction that the money I get in my pay-packet before the
deduction of taxes is, in some morally significant sense, ‘min,’ although
almost universal, is demonstrably confused.
As we discuss in the appendix of this chapter, ‘P.S. Is Taxation
Theft”,’ there is no serious political theory according to which my pre-tax
income is ‘mine’ in any morally significant sense. Nonetheless, the illusion of having a sacred,
inviolable right to one’s pre-tax income is hard to shift. It’s a deep part of our socially conditioned
way of seeing reality. Anyone who has
raised children knows how early and with what force they begin to declare
‘Mine!’ This is one reason why the
political struggle for justice is inseparable from the spiritual struggle to
break our social conditioning. In our
quest for spiritual advancement, we need to see the myth of sacred property
rights as part of the enemy we’re battling, both in ourselves and in
others. […]
In the hard copy of Goff’s book that I have, the above mentioned essay “Is Taxation Theft” is at the end of this final chapter. It is not present in e-book or PDF copies that I also have. You can, however, read the entire essay online here: Is Taxation Theft?
As I said, I am not an
economist and most of what Goff is writing about is outside of my range of
knowledge and even interest. So, I asked
for feedback about it on our online forum.
You can read the entire discussion here: Philip Goff Discussion
Meanwhile, two
responses stood out for me and I will include them here. The first is by forum member ‘Ryan’:
Goff claims that the morality of natural property rights is conditional
upon a society respecting that morality – i.e. the exact moral constructivist
argument he claims not to use when he says:
(Please note, our focus here
is specifically on social constructivism about property; we are not considering
a more general position according to which morality as a whole is a social
construction.)
Goff’s article contains implicit bias. He begins by describing libertarians who hold the notion that taxation
is theft as “radical”. He says, “outside of academia”, as if there were
“academics” and “everyone else”. He says that the notion is “confused” because
it isn’t present in a “serious” political theory, Goff adjudicating what is
"serious" political theory, of course. Yet there are many notions,
particularly in science and mathematics, that aren’t part of a political theory
and yet are completely common sense and justified by airtight reasoning!
He makes a para-logical and para-moral judgement about the notion
because:
· it prevents ‘economic reform’, assuming that
the correct ‘reform’ would naturally exclude this notion, and its presence is
directly preventing said 'reform'!
· claims that it’s in the economic interests of
those who vote against it, with no evidence, despite that those votes are
direct evidence that those voting consider it NOT to be in their economic
interests.
· claims it ‘corrects economic injustices’, as if
those ‘injustices’ were self-evident (subjective) and a direct result of that
one notion!
His statement that 'theft can be legal, moral, or both', is presupposed
on the arbitrary laws of a particular legal system. Different legal systems are
based on different laws and customs. Therefore, taxation as a general concept
can only be referred to in the moral sense, because only that concept is
independent of the arbitrary laws it is being compared with. His dismissal of
“legal theft” is also based on circular reasoning: legal theft doesn’t exist
because the laws create legal claim! Never mind that the person has to earn the
money before it can be taxed, otherwise it’s not income!
Goff claims money is “delivered to you” via the “market”, not earned via
agreed exchange! His idea of how people obtain money is a ridiculous
abstraction. He then sets up a straw man by bringing up the justification for
payment as based on “deserving”, an ambiguous concept, rather than agreement!
He then unsurprisingly knocks "deserving" down easily, before setting
up another, subtler straw man: "entitlement".
what you are entitled to is
the result of your property rights
A completely meaningless distinction that attempts to shift the reader's
focus towards 'rights' that are legally enforced by a central authority, and
away from the concept of property obtained through ethical, mutually-agreed
exchange.
He then creates arbitrary categories, “Right-wing libertarian; Left-wing
libertarian; and social constructivist” and seems unconcerned with possible
exceptions. But as we will see, Goff isn't concerned with the philosophical
justification of individual theories from first principles.
it is not possible for one
individual to acquire exclusive rights over land or natural resources in a way
that excludes the equal moral claims of other citizens.
A side note: this conception of property rights assumes that primacy has
no moral value, which may be an incorrect assumption.
The claims of future
generations must also be taken into account, leading naturally to an
inheritance tax
It's quite possible to have a “left-wing libertarian” theory of property
that excludes this.
But Left-libertarian theories leave considerable latitude for the state
to alter the distribution of wealth, perhaps through taxation, if some take
more than their fair share of natural resources.
Goff's use of “taxation” here implicitly contains the idea of forcible
seizure - ie. theft, which Goff claims he’s arguing against! And he
automatically implies the state is the arbiter of “fair share”.
The second requirement – the
denial of equal rights over the natural world – is particularly implausible,
and something I’ve never seen any justification of from Right-wing
libertarians.
“I’ve never seen a good argument against it, and I think it’s
implausible, so it must be.” Where is his justification FOR equal rights over
the natural world, as he demands from the right-wing libertarians about
exclusive rights? Again, emotional reasoning and moral bias.
The reason is that the world
that Right-wing libertarianism theorises about is a very different one to the
world we live in today.
"RWL'ism isn’t a viable theory because it doesn’t correspond to the
'reality' we live in today."
· How exactly does the moral argument against
taxation not correspond to reality when Goff claims that it prevents economic
reform, people are voting based on it, it's causing 'economic injustices', and
politicians like David Cameron talk about it in their speeches? Sounds like
it's a pretty big part of the "world we live in today" to me.
· I'm sure Goff's beloved abolitionists heard
very similar arguments from slavers in their day. I guess they should have
realised they weren't acting ethically because it was "very different to
the world they lived in then."
But this is the case only if
the market is perfectly free, ie if the state has no influence on the
distribution of wealth. Yet there are very few countries in the world in which
this is the case. In almost every country, there is a certain amount of taxation,
at least to pay for roads and infrastructure, if not for education and
healthcare.
The actuality (or not) of morality in practice does not affect the
existence of a moral principle! And yet Goff claims that less than perfect
adherence to such principles disproves natural property rights via their own
presuppositions! UTTER HORSESHIT.
In theory, Right-wing
libertarianism does entail that people have a moral claim on their pre-tax
income, and hence that taxation is theft, but only in hypothetical societies
where there is zero or minimal state interference in the economy.
NO, NOT IN HYPOTHETICAL SOCIETIES, BUT AS A PREEXISTENT MORAL PRINCIPLE
EVERYWHERE! THAT’S WHAT MORALITY MEANS! Goff comes out of the closet as a
totalitarian postmodernist libtard here.
Even if the most radical forms
of Right-wing libertarianism are true, it remains the case that you have no
special moral claim on your gross income.
“Even if it’s true, it’s false.”
His whole article
is essentially what Lobaczewski called a "paramoralism" - an attempt
to justify an incorrect statement via an appeal to morality. He basically argues backwards from the point
he's already determined to reach, and sets up straw men along the way, while
studiously ignoring the real crux of the question, which he just declares
irrelevant by fiat.
His idea that it
is immoral to consider you have a property right to the income you receive is context-independent
and applies only to an imaginary world of formalisms. What's more, he
completely projects these unconscious presuppositions onto the idea of natural
property rights, claiming that they only exist in the imaginary formalism of a
'perfect libertarian utopia'!
The second response
that I want to share here brings in other philosophical issues. This one is written by forum member ‘WhiteMountain’:
I think the big problem here is the guy who wrote this article is a very
staunch utilitarian, to the point he cannot even contemplate someone who
believes in deontological thought, at least in the field of economics. I felt
like tearing apart nearly every paragraph in false assumptions which he did not
even take 2 seconds to question himself. I am a huge fan of Locke, and I have
massive libertarian tendencies. That being said, I also think that
anarcho-capitalists are highly naive in many respects at the same time.
Deontology is basically the philosophy best illustrated by Kant that basically says you treat PEOPLE AS THE ENDS and NOT A MEANS TO AN END. It is in this spirit, although it is more often couched in religious statements on "God Given rights" that naturally predominated at the time, that Locke's and other natural rights philosophies are in the same spirit as. Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill basically argue the MEANS JUSTIFIES THE ENDS for the most part - society and governments are justified in doing whatever is necessary to optimize the collective utility functions of society as a whole. And clearly that is where the author is coming from economically. Then there is sort of the hybrid called "rule consequentialism," that I hold to, that basically says that you treat people as the ends not arbitrarily but because it actually leads to better ends the utilitarians want in the first place. More on that later.
But from a deontological point of view, as pure anarchists will point
out, all government is immoral. And that is for the most part provable. So when
he says "But this is the case only if the market is perfectly free, ie if
the state has no influence on the distribution of wealth," yes that is
exactly what a lot of these people believe. The problem is that the world does
not exist in a vacuum. If there was no government, in the anarchy people like
Jeff Berwick long for, most likely some group of thugs would appoint themselves
through some "social contract" that they only signed as leaders and
oppress people. Maybe someday we can get to a point we have private
institutions form a moral anarchistic society as many write about; I am HIGHLY
SKEPTICAL about that as there are numerous issues that arise. I think people
with common sense will agree with me on that one.
But when you start from the perspective that all government is
inherently immoral, violating fundamental tenets of the nonviolence principle,
the question that the libertarian philosophers are making it how to you make it
the "least immoral" possible. The least violence via takings like
theft. And that is where it actually resonated with most people. That gets back
to my primary point - this is really more about a deontological worldview where
individuals have rights not to be treated as means to an end giving rise to
rights like freedom of speech in addition to the least amount of taxation
necessary to maintain a state versus a utilitarian worldview where bureaucrats
can do whatever they want as long as THEY DETERMINE the best outcome for
society. And generally it will be psychopaths determining that...
When he claims stuff like "Your gross, or pre-tax income, is the
money the market delivers to you" again he makes a completely unfounded
assumption. Technically under income tax laws, ANYTHING you produce can be
taxed by the government. A person who grows simple crops for his family is not
involved in the market AT ALL. The market is not delivering ANYTHING to these
people. It is then the government that artificially puts a price on those goods
and taxes it (if they could spy enough to enforce it - thus they want drones
everywhere ). BTW see Wickard v. Filburn in the US where the government went
after a guy for growing too much wheat under New Deal artificial restrictions
even though he was only growing the wheat to feed his own animals. The
government literally argued it was "interstate commerce" even though
he was feeding animals on the farm and no money changed hands and the corrupt
Supreme Court rubber stamped it...so the government when given the opportunity
will interfere with personal property not even related to commerce and calling
it commerce!
There is a reason utilitarian thinking is bad and deontology and the
respect for "natural rights" (whether you believe they are God given
or not) matters is that there is a fundamental uncertainty in life. You never
know the second, third, fourth, fifth order consequences of an action. But you
KNOW the first order consequences - stealing from someone, killing them, etc.
with 100% certainty. For that reason deontological actions over time will
produce the best societal results. And this is how you do not have to be a
social-constructivist so "property rights are made to serve human
interests and not vice versa" The principle of not stealing itself serves
a definite human interest the author does not seem to recognize. You might
steal money from person A and give to person B thinking you are benefiting
them. Maybe it does short term, but over the long term the person becomes
dependent and purposeless in life as happens with many welfare programs. You
don't know...but in all cases you have taken from the first person and possibly
incentivized them to be less productive as well.
"this confused assumption is a major stumbling block to economic
reform, causes low and middle earners to vote against their economic interests,
and renders it practically impossible to correct the economic injustices that
pervade the modern world."
Again this is a false assumption. In many cases keeping more of one's
income IS in their best interests. I can keep it or send it to the Ukraine and
kill more people for "the greater good"? Even if you have the best of
intentions you will not know the outcome, and I can present tons of economic
examples. But I would argue it is easy to correct economic injustices within a
deontological framework because MOST of the injustices are due to utilitarian
policies that could be eliminated!
For example, patents on pharmaceuticals are GOVERNMENT LAWS for the
"common good." Not really...more like corporate enrichment so
patients can be charge $15k a month for $0.10 pills. A deontologically free
market WITHOUT this artificial construct of intellectual property would mean
competitive pricing would make medical care more affordable. And it also means
that natural supplements would be MORE LIKELY than artificial chemicals to be
the subject of rigorous clinical research! And it is not like we ever needed
patents for inventions like the wheel or the Welch longbow to be adopted in the
past. Patents interfere with the deontological order and hurt the common good,
not helping it.
How about corporations? Corporations are the greatest instrument of
wealth inequality ever created, and they were created by governments using
utilitarian arguments. Now there are also some pretty compelling arguments, but
if you are going to have GOVERNMENT CREATED ENTITIES that limit liability so
Pfizer could injure the world with vaccines and pay at most a fraction of the
damages (even without the laws on vaccine immunity, only the total capital of
the company would be at risk, not enough to compensate the world for the
damages), then by God you BETTER HAVE LAWS TO STRIP THEM OF THE MORAL HAZARDS.
That means you are MORALLY JUSTIFIED in stricter regulation and GREATER
TAXATION on them since they are not real people. Most libertarian minded people
(but not all) get this wrong. They think corporations and patents are all about
"free market capitalism" and benefit society.
I think one of the best policies we could adopt would be to replace the
individual income tax with a CORPORATE ENTERPRISE VALUE TAX on publicly traded
corporations. The income tax is EASY TO LEGALLY AVOID. I can point to people
earning 8 figure incomes in CASH INCOME publicly bragging they do not pay
income tax at all (reporting NEGATIVE accounting losses), and even get refunds.
And enterprise value tax is simple and cannot be evaded - simply take the
volume weighted price for the period of the stock and debt of the company and
add it together to get the enterprise value. Then tax that. It could even be a
graduated tax to incentivize smaller corporations, not these unaccountable
vertically integrated behemoths so we get real competition. But since the tax
is aligned with what most managers try to optimize for, it could not be evaded
and the more a company benefits from its structure, the more it pays. It is a
completely moral tax as well because the government can tax morally what it
created. People have the option of not incorporating if they do not like it.
But taking a company public results in many times greater wealth through liquidity
premiums. They are given the freedom to choose, which is what natural rights
are all about.
I could go on, but I think people get the idea. Generally speaking it is
better to tax / steal less (because you otherwise get more problems) and if you
are going to tax, tax based on the benefit that is directly received from the
government arrangement. In that case taxation is not theft, it is a fee for a
service voluntarily given up when you sign up for that service. If you don't
want to pay property tax, don't register your property, but don't expect the
government to come out and protect it when some squatters try to settle down in
it :).
Goff makes a point of saying someone who cures cancer deserves more
than, for example, a hedge fund manager. But again, think of how you as a
utilitarian matter of public policy make that happen. PATENTS were done
precisely for that reason!
So companies like Genentech with cancer treatments (and that is what you
get instead of CURES when the patent is the vehicle) that made billions of
dollars, well more than most head fund managers (while making a bunch of hedge
fund managers rich along the way- the guy seems to forget that hedge fund
managers often fund this research through their investors). But at the same
time, for them to make so much money they use the patents to charge extreme
amounts of money as I laid out earlier, which BOOMERANG to the people with
cancer who cannot afford the treatment, or the taxpayers who pay out tons of
money. And he might argue that is fine because you would not have had the cure
without it. He might argue taxpayers are lucky to pay out $15k a month for
treatments that would not have otherwise existed. Others like Bill Gates might
argue society is better off letting these people die (another utilitarian
argument in the guise of population control).
Again, I beg to differ on whether the treatment might exist or not.
Because as mentioned above, you are going to incentivize the wrong types of
treatments. Symptoms instead of cures. Proprietary medicines with more side
effects versus natural treatments with little side effects. There could be
certainly better ways of incentivizing treatments than patents. But it is a
natural though upfront. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But we
have had 100 years experience that shows us the negative consequences of the
abuse of the government interference in the market to let us know otherwise.
And so we now know without
a shadow of a doubt what Goff’s book was really about: he decided to write a
philosophical treatise to underpin the machinations of an oncoming totalitarian
world government. The effort was mostly bricolage, not very deep, and yet,
certainly, it has captured the minds of many readers and students who are
looking for easy answers to very complex problems. Toward the end of the book
he writes:
…I wonder whether a mass encounter with the living presence in all
things, brought about through widespread safe and legal use of psilocybin,
might be the only way to combat the ongoing commodification of nature which is
launching us headlong into climate catastrophe.
Here again, spiritual advancement and political progress could go hand
in hand.
And we see that he is
trying to make Left/Liberal ideas seem spiritual thereby turning it into a
religion. He adds at the very end:
We can only ignore the evidence of cosmological fine-tuning for so long.
… A radical change in how we see the universe is on its way.
At the same time, we are living through a scary, uncertain era. Nothing has filled the vacuum left by the
decline of traditional religion. …no
political philosophy has come along to replace neo-liberalism.
My hope is that cosmic purposivism may point the way to a new optimism
in human potential, a faith based not on dogmatic certainties but on a humble
and open exploration of an unfolding purpose we don’t yet fully understand. …
We have every reason to feel optimistic about the future.
I think Goff has good
intentions and is – to whatever degree he is capable – sincere. But his tendency to see human reality in such
a simplistic manner can only lead to bad results. He believes he has found a
simple solution to fix things and his writing style indicates that his aim is
to impose his own conceptual world view on others, barely hiding his
egotism. He informs us at least 3 or
more times in the book that he is a philosopher and he is trained to think and one can infer that others
should not try this (thinking) at home, more or less. His ideas are over-simplified and devoid of
psychological color, based as they are on easily available data and material
published by others. He appears to be
attempting to recast these into an active propaganda for political purposes. But, in the end, the book did not answer the
question posed as the title. Not even
close.
