RE: Gov't Regulations vs Crypto Freedom
Grenfell Tower is located in the Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, one of the richest, most highly taxed and wealth re-distributed locations in the world. Are you even aware of the whopping amounts they rake in in so-called Council Tax alone from every resident household every month? Have you seen how that pile of garbage they call Kensington still looks (and smells)? Makes one wonder, doesn't it...
So, before claiming the oh-so marvellous good of governments and corresponding need to fund them with our money at gunpoint even more generously, you might be well-advised to do your homework first.
Taking your reasoning and your example, the Grenfell Tower disaster proves the exact opposite and is living proof of government never achieving any tangible and meaningful results whatsoever for the taxpayer at the end of the day. Curiously, it was this very government, aka the RBKC, you want to even more generously finance who screwed things up with their "renovation" of that shipwreck. They used taxpayer money to have it done more poorly than even the shrewdest and greediest private real estate investor would dare doing. For all our tax money we have to surrender, these highly-paid losers did not even know construction basics nor did they have the brains to equip the facade of a 20+ floor building with vent blocks stopping the ascent of hot air/smoke under the cover materials causing the particulars of this tragedy.
This is what you get from any and all forced-upon-for-the-common-good (i e socialist) wealth re-distribution schemes.
So let me get this straight, some disaster occurs in a capitalist nation under a right wing government following right-wing ideology and implementing right-wing policies and that's somehow the fault of the "socialist" tax system?
Most of the things that councils did have been handed over to private corporations to deal with. Housing associations now run council housing, inspections are outsourced to private companies as are renovations, etc. This has been going on since Thatcher the fucking Milk Snatcher came to power. Councils across Britain are facing massive shortages in funding due to ideological fools ignoring the evidence and not giving a shit about the consequences of their actions. Hell, these right-wing ideologues are even paying private foreign corporations to reject people's disability claims to "reduce the deficit" despite the evidence showing that they're paying more to the private corporations than they're saving from reducing claimants.
This is a government who have killed thousands of disabled people through their idiotic, ideologically imposed austerity measures and you're calling them socialist? Are you truly that delusional?
Now, no matter how much I detest these right wing ideologues in power, I'm neither stupid enough nor insane enough to think that giving private corporations direct control of society would be anything but a complete and utter disaster.
yes, you 'got that straight', more or less -- except you should hopefully be sufficiently grown-up to see that -- while the mass-media may call them right-wing -- there is no such thing as an even remotely "free-market system".
A centrally-planned EU member country like the UK (or any other so-called first-world country for that matter) may or may not be "right-wing" or following "right-wing ideologies" (not willing to nor interested in arguing about that -- nor with you, at all), but in light of all these first-world countries having a tax and related "social" cost burden of around 50% I find it a bit "surprising" that this is still not a sufficiently-"fair" share that's being contributed there...
It's easy to see how "efficient" and "useful" all that tax money is spent and how great that centrally-planned system of one NHS (oh, that's not socialist??), subsidised council housing (oh, that's not socialist??), £60m per day to those un-accountable technocrats in that un-elected soviet over in Brussels (oh, that's not socialist??) really works.
Also, thank you for calling me delusional and insane while not even having taken the time to understand my point and my reasoning. Gives those musings of yours (as well as yourself as a person) a lot more credibility :)
If you think the UK is socialist then you are clearly delusional. If that hurts your feelings, so be it. It's simply a fact as the UK is clearly not socialist.
Just because it's expensive to currently govern society, doesn't mean we should abandon the governance of society or hand over over direct control to those with the most wealth. If it cost 70% of GDP to sufficiently support society then anything less than that would see society deteriorate.
My argument is that people shouldn't pay any taxes anyway. Businesses should pay those taxes directly instead of palming them off to employees and customers. Those that earn the most from every $1 spent should have the highest tax rates.
Why are you against that? Why should those making money from the least effort have lower or similar tax rates to those who making money from the most effort? If you have two workers the same age doing the exact same job and one is extremely lazy and the other is a proper hard worker, would you say they should be paid the same amount?
Edit: In response toy your edit.
Yes, both those things are very efficient and useful. For example, look how much the UK spends on healthcare per person compared to the US. The NHS is absurdly more efficient despite the Tories efforts to get rid of it. As for social housing, just look at what's happened in the UK since Thatcher sold off social housing and never replaced it. Now people can't afford to buy homes and rent prices are getting out of hand. More social housing is precisely what the UK needs right now. That doesn't make them socialist though.
Socialism is about the relationship to the means of production, not health care, housing or welfare benefits. Under socialism, workers control the means of production and get a fair share of the profits dependant upon the amount and type of labour they perform.
A good example of socialism would be mining bitcoin at a pool. All the workers get a fair share of the rewards proportional to the amount of work they do. Some workers do more work than others and therefore get a greater share than others. Imagine if it was based on capitalist redistribution, the pool owner would keep most of the rewards for themselves.