This is just a blurb, but something that irritates me about debating with the right. A lot of the time when my anti work views come up, and I start talking about how capitalism imposes forced labor on people, they seem to deny this, but then claim that redistribution is slavery because we're forcing people to work to provide for another. Recently, one debate I got in got to a point where the dude was going on about how we had the "freedom to starve to death", but that taxes are slavery. While I understand the mindset that leads to such an approach to ethics, it seems very distorted in my worldview.
To summarize the right wing worldview, they see poverty as natural, that work is needed to make things to get out of poverty, and that property is a "natural right" and that forced redistribution is evil. This ultimately leads to a society where we all circlejerk over work ethic and talk about endlessly creating jobs rather than simply redistributing wealth as needed to make life easier for everyone involved.
With my worldview, I believe we should have some redistribution to stop people from being forced to labor to survive, while still maintaining enough work incentive for people to want to work. Kind of a "eat your cake and have it to" mindset. For me, the purpose of linking greater wealth to work...is to incentivize work, as long as people continue to work enough to meet society's needs, it does not matter to me if we deviate from that mindset. I understand that we need some work to be done, but that a rigid approach to property and work just subjects people to servitude, leads to extreme inequalities, and the problems with society as it exists.
For me, redistribution is not slavery, and here's why. Forcing one group to work while another group is free not to is immoral to me. But that's kind of the leftist criticism to capitalism, and how it grants, by virtue of ownership, all of the profits and surplus labor of the system, while others are robbed of the product of their labor and subjected to an inhumane work process in order to force them to work and then not give them what they're "owed."
I'm not saying rigidly adopting to that is good either, mind you. Again, the purpose of linking property to work is to incentivize people to work. But if we made a system where one group is forced to work to provide for another, sure, that's immoral. but what if we made a system where we redistribute wealth to everyone, thus giving everyone, including workers, the same right to not work? That's all I want. A system where a UBI guaranteed at liberating people from actual forced labor as a right to citizenship exists, and that work becomes as voluntary as humanly possible. In such a system, taxation is not forced labor. Because the choice to work is, in itself, voluntary.
It's weird, the idea that redistribution is forced labor acts as if there's something compulsory about labor in the first place. Like I "HAVE TO" work, and cant choose not to, and now my wealth is being given to someone else. But then this guy talked about how people were free not to work, and to starve.
The idea of being forced to work for oneself is not evil for them, but the idea of being forced to work for others is evil to them. Although most in practice have to work for others. I see the very idea of having to work as what's evil under capitalism. If we accomplished a system in which work was voluntary, we simply paid back our UBi as we got more money, and eventually paid into the fund, and the very act of choosing to work is as voluntary as humanly possible, then what is the harm? Who is truly being forced to work? Taxes are just part of the deal of choosing to work. And if that choice is a free choice, then why is that more immoral than a system in which everyone is forced to work to provide for themselves or starve?
Honestly, again, propertarians have what I consider to be a distorted moral compass. I kind of understand it, but it's like these guys are indoctrinated into the current system and simply do not know that there are other ways of approaching these issues. To me, taxation is a far lesser evil than being forced to work in the first place. For them, being forced to work is natural, but having to share is evil. It's insanity to me.
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