How the Quakers Became Unlikely Economic Innovators by Inventing the Price Tag (aeon.co) 233
Belying its simplicity and ubiquity, the price tag is a surprisingly recent economic development, Aeon magazine writes. For centuries, haggling was the norm, ultimately developing into a system that required clerks and shopkeepers to train as negotiators. In the mid-19th century, however, Quakers in the US began to believe that charging people different amounts for the same item was immoral, so they started using price tags at their stores to counter the ills of haggling. And, as this short video from NPR's Planet Money explains, by taking a moral stand, the Quakers inadvertently revealed an inefficiency in the old economic system and became improbable pricing pioneers, changing commerce and history with one simple innovation.
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Who were those who invented the ".99" marketing gimmick? I don't recall...
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Who were those who invented the ".99" marketing gimmick? I don't recall...
Even worse, how about how the price of a gallon of gas always ends in .9 cents? They’ve been doing that forever...
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If you think government is not worth paying any money for, move to government-free Somalia and enjoy all your "freedoms.' Also, Libertarians should note that if Putin wants to actually keep all his stolen money, he wants to keep it in
Re: Question (Score:3)
The 9/10ths of a cent gasoline tax came from a governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s after he campaigned on a promise to not raise a taxes a"single red cent." Since reality (aka the deep state) requires paying for government services, he raised taxes 9/10ths of a red cent.
If you read a story like this and think to yourself "yeah, that's probably true" then it's painfully obvious that your bullshit detector is not just out of service but has been stripped for parts and sold off to fund a pyramid scheme.
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People in the past were far worse off by most accounts... We just love painting the past in rosy colors.
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I blame the Garden of Eden Myth. Things were better in those days...
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I just did some research on your claim, because it sounded absurd. Turns out it is both absurd and false.
Not exactly absurd or false. There's some truth to the parent's assertion:
https://www.marketplace.org/20... [marketplace.org]
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From the fifth:
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No it still sounds absurd and false. None of that is evidence that a PA governor raised gas taxes by .9 cents in order to not break a promise to not raise the 1 cent. After all it's the wrong decade, it's the wrong government, and it's the wrong motivation - none of it supports the absurd and false claim.
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Perhaps if Radio Shack had priced everything $.99 instead of $.95 they'd still be in business today.
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I expect it had multiple inventors.
Because people look at the highest order of magnitude in the price, then going further down they will use more rational comparisons to justify the price vs what you get.
The gasoline station. are the worse with 9/10th of a cent in their price.
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Shit I forgot about that, I fucking hate that.
Frankly I think it should be made illegal - after all it's false advertising.
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It isn't false advertising. Its price is $0.99 if you pay them a dollar they will need to give you a penny back.
Actually in US the part that I hate more isn't the $0.99 but the fact everything is +Tax I much rather know this item will be $1.07 out of my pocket vs $.99 * 1.08 rounded to the next cent. Being that I live near the border of two other states, and a country border. The Tax rate ranges from 5%-8%
If you are going to bother putting price tags where you cannot negotiate the price. We should at least
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And the reaction to that is to change the prices periodically (say, monthly) - and for each product or product line have an occasional month where they're sold at the "regular" price.
I have watched that on some food items I consume a lot. A frozen-food entree at one chain grocery: $4.99k "regular" price, $3.50 (2-for-$7),
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* items recently marked up 50%
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That can still be made illegal. It is fairly difficult to get around e.g. the Danish rules.
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So we basically have a haggling system where only one party haggles.
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There is usually a discount for products bought in bulk. The $4.00 12 pack of soda, could sit on the shelf for weeks. vs. buying 4 12 packs at $2.50 will allow 4x the product to go off the self, and allowing putting in more space for the product. Prices on the store products are in essence paying rent for their shelf time. Faster moving products need less rent. Selling in bulk is an easy way on average to lower the length of time per product. Freeing the space to refill.
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Why should the government interfere with private business transactions! *shakes fist*
There, beat the Libertarians to that comment.
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They've pretty much gone away once people actually discussed Free Markets (what they actually are), the actual complexity of economic systems, how businesses game things, inefficiencies inherent in products preventing free market forces from ruling the day, the importance of careful regulation in maintaining free markets, etc. When someone says anything simplistic they usually get spanked for it.
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people can walk up or work the ATM from the back seat. You know, the seats few people use these days.
Re: Question (Score:2)
America first? (Score:5, Interesting)
What the Quakers actually said was "my price is the same for any man, be he a pauper or a king".
I was taught that the Quakers started doing this in the early 1700's here (UK). My school was founded in 1703.
I was never convinced about the morality though. I have lived in countries where they still haggle. I bought coffee and milk from the same person nearly every day for six months, and I am pretty sure I never paid the same amount twice. Its not just about how well the customer is, or otherwise - its also about how keen the seller is to get money quick. If you are really poor, you still may get the seller to sell at a loss, rather than carry their wares home after closing time, especially if the goods are perishable. (Also true in London markets today). In the 1700's most people self employed, and were able to control their own destiny more than employees can (if you were an employee, you were not in a good position at all).
But the video is correct, in a big store, fixed prices are definitely an advantage.
And haggling school? well just try taking a taxi in any third world country - you either get it pretty quickly, or you will go broke! However, in the spirit of equality, Uber is bringing the Third world to everyone, everywhere.
Re:America first? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that you can't haggle over the price of an Uber ride and that both the driver and the rider get shafted.
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If you honestly feel like you're getting "shafted" when you take an Uber, don't. Ride a bicycle, walk, take the bus, drive your own car, or call a taxi.
"But those aren't convenient!" Well, duh. That's why Uber is popular and why they charge the fare they do.
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These are good points, and I have some experience with haggling in foreign countries. It usually works well enough, and in some ways better as you note.
But observe that even under fixed pricing some these flexibilities of haggling are still not unusual especially when dealing directly with the individual store owner. I am sure we have all had experiences with owners offering to knock something off the price for various reasons, offering informal deals in the spot and the like.
I posted above about the specia
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As to literacy, the Quakers and Anglicans would have been fairly literate, but the rest of the population was not, both in the UK and US. That probably did allow Quakers to use Excel spread sheets to set their pricing ;-)
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I'd even say that supply and demand fits the description of changing the price of perishables as closing time approaches - you're just updating the price on the fly rather than once a week or month. Towards closing time, suddenly the supply starts vastly exceeding the demand (since there are only so many customers that can come by before you close), and so the price drops.
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If that's the case then modern economics argues that yield management pricing and market segmentation don't exist.
Either it's wrong or you are.
It will be gone soon. (Score:3)
Combine it all the stores will know precisely how much they can charge you, and how much you can be forced to pay.
If Quakers thought it is immoral to charge different people different prices, model corporations think it is their primary mission to charge based on the customers' ability to pay, not based on reasonable profits.
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If Quakers thought it is immoral to charge different people different prices, model corporations think it is their primary mission to charge based on the customers' ability to pay, not based on reasonable profits.
And strangely, the consumers also think their primary mission is to pay as little as possible, not enough to give the seller "reasonable profits".
We still haggle, basically; we just do it in much slower speed.
Amazon (Score:2)
And then Amazon happened, where prices change depending on who is viewing the item.
Too bad it failed (Score:2)
These days, the price on the tag isn't the price. For many buyers, it's a starting point for negotiations because they think that the item in question isn't worth what's written on the tag. Of course, for the seller, it's also become a way for them to basically say that whatever they're selling is worth far more than it really is. But it doesn't stop there. Because there are legions of people who have no ability to create a product let alone a desirable one, they end up joining the ranks of bureaucracy
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hobbyking (Score:2)
Double Glazing sales (Score:4, Interesting)
The Double Glazing sales industry (in the UK) brought haggling back with vengeance. They insist that can't give you a quote without sending a sales guy into your home because apparently you're unable to take half assed measurements at the same level as that the sales person who does the same and says a surveyor will have to come and measure things precisely anyway. And once in, they pull discounts out of their butts, and if you send them off they'll call you with even more discounts on top of "those are all the discounts available mate" that you got already.
In my specific case, the list price went down from 9K to 3K after all the discounts and a customer retention discount (i.e. I canceled on them shortly after taking their offer). How is that even possible?!
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I had no idea doughnuts were that expensive in the UK!
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Same thing over on this side of the pond. Having both bought and sold windows back in the day, I have to say it's worse than buying a new car. When going through my one week sales training where we learned to rape^H^H^H^H serve our customers, I found out that we start at three times the price that we will actually agree to.
But you see, these were special windows. They were TRIPLE glazed, with krypton gas! (To be honest, they were sweet windows, often with a better R-value than the wall they were install
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The problem is that the discounts are often give by cutting corners. I know people who have windows sagging at the top because the window frame wasn't properly re-enforced or whatever. The windows themselves are cheap crap, the struts are bent and broken, and the only possible maintenance is to rip them out and replace.
No-one ever haggles for a 20 year warranty, or even believes that the cowboys who did the work will still be around then.
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On that subject specifically, I've had a similar experience. We had a regular builder quote too, and he quoted what we ended up paying with one of the 'specialist companies'. At the time we thought his quote was way too cheap and were (erroneously) worried about the Fensa certificate and whatnot from him, so discarded him from our decisions.
In short - this seems to be a phenomenon of the 'big' double glazing vendors. The rest of the country has pretty much ignored it and carries on regardless. In hindsight,
Doesn't really eliminate haggling (Score:2)
It's worth noting that the equivalent of haggling is also creeping back into online stores, where merchants will charge different prices to different customers to help them better gauge how close they are to the true market price. Contrary
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If I could sell the same volume at twice the market price I wouldn't make more money? Of course, if I'm a big enough seller then my price *is* the market price, or a big influence on it.
Not necessarily. It depends mainly on the elasticity. If dropping the price by 5% means you shift 10% more units you're ahead.
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Profit is maximized at the market price assuming most customers are close to perfectly informed, and the fairness of single prices saving the few uninformed customers from being screwed over.
Since profit at market price is not really something that most companies find reasonable, they focus on minimizing customer information and charge the highest prices to the least informed customers. This is particularly evident in strictly financial companies that do not actually offer a tangible product, such as insura
Price Tags (Score:2)
However, once the price goes up
That includes:
Travel (Airfare, cruises, hotels)
Cars (fixed price hahahahhaha)
Houses (never saw a price tag affixed to a house)
Jewelry (not at Target)
Appliances
and the list goes on
Not a church-going man,but.... (Score:2)
From being probably the first church to oppose slavery, embrace modesty and humility as core tenets of their faith, giving equal voices to women, praying at the funeral of the mass-murderer who targeted their church and killed many kids (I could NEVER be that good, though I do yearn to be...) they have demonstrated what I consider to the "best of faith".
A far cry from the Televangelist assholes who seem to dominate here in
Quaker 4 lyf (Score:2)
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On top of that - I have a minimum I am willing to sell my product for. My customer has a maximum they are wi
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Just wait until your rich customers realize they can get a better price by playing poor. Likely already happened, but wait until they all figure it out.
Re: Immoral? (Score:2)
It makes sense to give discounts to non-profit organizations, and it usually improves your karma.
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Ethics and moral and logic do not mix together.
They are different concepts.
But if you believe you can charge a millionaire who happens to stop at your diner $1 one for a bottle of water, because you know he would simply drive off and buy elsewhere if you charge $10 (but you know he would not because he probably would shrug and pay $10) and then again you charge a poor guy who is about to collapse of thirst $100 because you know: he can not go anywhere, you have no ethics and no moral.
Oh, I should have excha
Re:Immoral? (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the Testimonies of the Religious Society of Friends (Friends, to Quakers, but most people call them Quakers) is equality. Another is honesty and others include integrity, truth, and simplicity. Friends believe in doing their best, in other words, not doing shipshod work. If they have an item they have produced for sale, say, for example, a chair, then, as part of their belief in integrity, they will have put their best work and used quality material in making that chair.
With that in mind, at one point, and I don't know if this started with just one Friends' Meeting or how it spread, but the consensus was that if you've worked diligently on a chair and one person comes into your shop and offers you $10 for that chair, but the fair value (considering labor and materials) is $5, then it's being dishonest and acting without integrity to take the additional $5 because that person was not a good negotiator. It's taking advantage of their lack of time or inability to negotiate. On the other hand, if a Friend has put in conscientious work and has to make a choice between selling it for $3 or not selling it, that's not fair to them.
The consensus, for a while, had been on a fair price for a fair amount of work and materials. From there, it wasn't far to go to reach a conclusion that if $5 is a fair price for that chair, then, barring changes in costs for materials (or maybe labor or cost of living), then gaining more or accepting less through dickering is less than fair, to either the shop owner or the customer.
While I know many will say, "Well, if they don't take all they can get for it, they're idiots!" If your focus is on the accumulation of wealth and possessions, then, from that point of view, that may be true. But if your intent in life is not material, but on personal improvement, growth, and following your spiritual beliefs, than there is much more to be gained from turning down the extra money offered than there is in accepting it. Friends are big on fair gains as opposed to grabbing what you can when you can. (Which is why they don't gamble and generally are quite careful in selecting what stocks they will invest in.)
Remember, this may not seem moral or immoral to you or others. That's okay. For Friends, their concern is in doing what they believe is right.
Re: Immoral? (Score:2)
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It sounds to me like the Quakers inspired Bill and Ted's famous catchphrase; "Be excellent to each other."
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"Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
As an Ex-Quaker for whom the whole God thing didn't really add up, the second
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Maybe I'm being self-serving thinking this, but it seems to be RSF has frequently been at the forefront of Christian organizations or sects in believing in or standing up for fair and/or equal treatment in many situations. (Like slavery or racial rights, women's issues, and so on.)
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I greatly dislike organized religion (though I find atheism to be equally irrational and presumptive) but damn; Quaker culture impresses me greatly.
Yeah, Friends don't aren't really an organized religion in the conventional sense. For unprogrammed meetings, you don't even have a minister telling you what to believe or think. All can speak out in Meeting for Worship equally.
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Not a Quaker myself, but I just wanted to say thank you for your thoughtful, patient and clear answer. I found it moving.
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You're quite welcome!
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Okay but how do you explain Quaker Oats???
Seriously though, thanks. I even learned a new word: dickering.
Re:Immoral? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're thinking from your point of view, not the point of view of most Friends.
Regarding paying extra for a rush, remember this was in the 1700s. Yes, it's possible that someone could say, "I need a chair now and I'll pay $10." If they had a chair in stock, it would be the same to the shop owner as someone who was not in a hurry to get it. If they said, "I need a chair by tomorrow and I'll pay extra," likely the response (in that era) would be something like, "Friend, I wouldst be glad to make a chair for the as soon as I can, but I would not be able to complete it by tomorrow." On the other hand, if he could do it and it was something he could do easily, he would still do it without an extra charge. It's not likely he would stay up, for example an extra several hours, to get a chair done for a "rush" order.
As to the "true value," yes, that depends on what people are willing to pay for it, but Friends would have been making products that people can use. Furniture, tools, maybe simple toys, but not something like a fancy high end chair with extra features. A shopkeeper or tradesman would know what the value of his product or labor was. They'd know what was going on in the market and whether people were paying $5 for a chair or not. This was at a time when people weren't dealing with newer models or new features and products that were unknown quantities that are riskier to sell. These shops and businesses would generally be shy of taking risks, so they'd be staying with a proven market.
While this led to the idea of set prices (and price tags), yes, a lot has happened since this practice started and much of it has nothing to do with Friendly views or values, but with greed or profit.
(And it's worth noting that while accumulation of material wealth was not a Friend's goal, that many Friends did well in commerce because they had a reputation for fairness, quality, and integrity. Much of their income would often be saved up because of their simple lifestyle.)
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Sorry, but I do not see, how this knowledge changes anything. Suppose, for a second, a genius Quaker invents some new way of making the same chairs faster (or with less wastage of materials). He offers to share the invention, but, as so often happens, other craftsmen are set in their ways... Or, maybe, he can just work much faster — the way Michael Phelps
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With the true value of anything being the amount, people are willing to pay for it, if you apply the Quakers' approach to pricing, you would not know (or not as well), if the customers want this kind of chair or that, or none at all.
No it'd be easier as the customers would order/pick what would have the most value because they'd get the extra surplus. Trade happens when there's a positive trade value but doesn't say how it's distributed, modern supply and demand theory says this is an adversarial system where the seller tries to gouge the buyer while the buyer tries to get it cheaper through competition. Basically you want the deal to be just barely good enough, so you pocket the most money.
The Quaker philosophy is essentially a honest
Re:Immoral? (Score:5, Insightful)
One key to this innovation is to really try to understand the motivation from a personal level. The existing practice required the Quaker store owner to try to haggle with the customer for every transaction - which consists in some sense of an effort of two parties to deceive each other about what one is willing to pay or accept. And the Quakers greatly emphasized strict personal honesty - so this was a frequent unpleasant experience that they wanted removed.
Additionally in a close knit community different people paying different prices is a source of social tension. Shop owners no doubt experienced customers - people of the community they knew - wanting the same price some other person of the community that they knew received. If this happens very often the temptation to simply set the same price in practice becomes strong. And if you do that why not just write it down and save the owner some time, and halt unwanted attempts to haggle.
Talk of "axioms" is irrelevant (and it should be noted that axioms are by their nature arbitrary). Although such an argument could appeal to a modern urban intellectual individualist, it would have appeared bizarre to an 18th Century close knit community devoted to personal moral improvement.
Interestingly the Quakers were also one the prime originators of the anti-slavery movement. Before the mid-18th century the notion that slavery might be intrinsically immoral was an extreme fringe notion. Slavery was generally accepted socially, legally, and religiously.
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Oh there's a number of ways you could arrive at it. You could believe that it's immoral to charge somebody more than an item is "worth", for example.
It actually takes quite a bit of economic sophistication to realize that what an item is "worth" varies from person to person and the exact circumstances the person is in.
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"Because I completely do not understand, what is immoral about this..."
That's because you are amoral.
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It's either obviously immoral or it isn't. That's kind of the problem with moral truths. And even logical ones.
Re: Immoral? (Score:2)
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Go and read up on Quaker theology? Though I'm not sure axioms and logic are always the driving force of religious beliefs.
People are equal -> People should pay the same price for the same thing, doesn't seem like a huge stretch.
1. Lying is wrong
2. Encouraging others to do wrong is wrong.
3. Haggling encourages people to lie in order to get a better price.
therefore, haggling with customers is wrong.
Also seems like not a huge stretch.
Re: Immoral? (Score:2, Insightful)
why should hardworking poor people pay a disproportionately higher percentage of their disposable income in taxes to subsidize the luxury consumption of the lazy rich?
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You did give me an idea though, maybe there should be a subset of necessities that are cheaper for people of lesser means.
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US Government protects 100 trillion worth of property. It should be paid in proportion to the net worth of people who need that government.
Government expenses should be divided into two categories. Property righ
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See, government enforces property rights, that is how rich people get to keep their riches. Poor people dont benefit by enforcement of property rights. They would rather the government breaks down in chaos so that they go with pitchforks and whack the nearest rich person and take whatever he had.
Looking at what generally happens, they seem to tend to be rather too lazy to actually bother finding a rich person--and the result tends to be that poor neighborhoods end up having to spend more to get basics, because it turns out that things like grocery stores don't bother sticking around in neighborhoods where they get robbed, even the ones that are small businesses completely owned by somebody who isn't that much richer than their neighbors.
Poor people tend to be more likely to be the victims of proper
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a lot of criminals are really lazy and would rather rob a guy nearby for $2 than go to the trouble of trying to find somebody who has more money.
I doubt it's laziness in most cases, but rather a risk calculation. Given the choice to rob Mr Moneybags or Johnny Crackhead, who ya gonna rob? The one who lives in a neighbourhood where you automatically stand out as a sketchy individual, who will be taken seriously by the police, and who is going to be believed by a judge? Or the one who nobody cares about and who probably has some culturally-enforced aversion to "being a rat"?
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Poor people tend to be more likely to be the victims of property crimes than rich people when you count by incidence and not value--a lot of criminals are really lazy and would rather rob a guy nearby for $2 than go to the trouble of trying to find somebody who has more money.
Tying enforcement of property rights--which is actually one of the original three natural rights--to net worth is just screwing the poor over worse.
It's pretty amazing, isn't it?
Even as a kid, I remember wondering why burglars and such seemingly couldn't figure out how to go over a bridge. Um, the nice houses are over here ...
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If you do not fit into a neighborhood, you do not fit in. And that means there are all kinds of risks that are hard to calculate when you wander across that bridge. Some of that is police profiling, which can be unsavory at times. But the criminals know that it is harder to have a BS story that will hold up for even 60 seconds when you are not a local.
In terms of a one-off crime, yeah, you probably do better by kicking in the door of a random wealthier domicile. But as a lifestyle, robbing people who ar
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Individual liberty and rights enforcement. That will be paid by equal dollar amount per person.
Then only people with wealth will have rights, and the rest will be in jail for not paying their taxes.
Re: Immoral? (Score:5, Insightful)
An excellent idea. At the same time, we can get rid of usury.
Perhaps it's because the rich most often obtain their wealth not from hard work but through pricing differences on stocks and the borrowing of money to others? It's precisely because as a society we want these things, we allow these things to exist to improve liquidity--to avoid the wealth to merely horde their assets or see where their wealth could be used to move goods and profit from the price difference. It's also precisely we realize that that's where most of the extreme wealth comes from that we were, for a long time, willing to charge at a much higher tax rate on that wealth precisely because the earnings were not at all in proportion to the effort.
In fact, it's rarely in proportion to the economic good or social good either, but that's the problem with using taxes as a means of trying to maintain social justice. There exists no perfect tax code because it's impossible to adequately tax people fairly. A flat amount is unfair because wages for the same work vary by region; it's also unlikely to be payable by many. A flat proportional amount is unfair because nothing about proportionality is fair because neither wages nor costs are proportional by work or region. Nor is progressive or regressive taxation fair. In fact, it's basically impossible to have a fair tax rate let alone one that provide sufficient revenue to any government.
Beyond the fact that, no, let the left doesn't want to tax people at over 90%, I'm unaware of anyone who in the long-term has a negative tax rate even with tax credits--maybe some corporations?--without committing tax evasion. People pay a lot more than income tax and while there are some tax credits that can grant people negative tax rates for a few years, they're not a permanent thing and the accumulation of all taxes is positive.
But you are right in one respect: those who are disabled or are mentally challenged do receive benefits in excess of what they contribute. Generally over the population, there's certainly individuals who have received a tax paid education for which they will never contribute enough in taxes or other economic benefit to overcome their cost. That's basically a universal truth of taxes: revenue is not equally collected and dispersed. In fact, if that's all taxes were, then there'd be no point in taxes. Taxes are inherently a form of wealth redistribution--I'm sure you're a big fan of the prisons and the poorhouses.
You can argue overall that certain people receive too much benefit. either because the class of benefit is unwarranted or the individual is undeserving, but with all the hand waving you're doing, I don't honestly think you even recognize where your tax dollars go or how this "theft" actual plays out. If you really want to avoid "theft", go somewhere without a government or any people.
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Found another Marxist (even if you think you aren't, your ideas are borrowed directly from concepts created by Marx, which makes you one by definition, if not by your own identity.)
Perhaps it's because the rich most often obtain their wealth not from hard work but through pricing differences on stocks and the borrowing of money to others
Ah yes, it's another "I know how to become rich, it's easy, just do X. I just don't do it because it's immoral!"
If trading stocks makes you rich, then go do it, and then tell me how it works out for you. (Pro tip: Even the best actively managed funds underperform compared to index funds because their fund managers aren't oracles,
Re: Immoral? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, it's another "I know how to become rich, it's easy, just do X. I just don't do it because it's immoral!"
Not because it is immoral, because it requires significant capital to invest. Once you have a few million cash you can basically live well forever on just the return from relatively safe investments, with minimal effort.
That was Marx's point. If you own the factory it is relatively easy to sit back and watch the profits roll in while others do the hard labour, and someone without a factory can't just start sewing their own clothes and hope to compete with that. Owning the only means to generate wealth pretty much ensures that no-one else can get wealthy.
It works in practice too, e.g. companies that encourage employees to own stocks so they have a stake in its future.
Becoming rich is actually a property of the individual
That's a vague and unconvincing statement. The children of rich people clearly have a lot more opportunities in life - better education and health, low cost loans from their parents when no sane bank would lend to them etc. Many of them end up failing repeatedly, but they have that family wealth buffer to protect them.
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Standard deduction for single no dependents is $6,350. Give a wage of $26,350 (to make the math simple and readily within the 35 percentile) gives a taxable income of $20,000. Of that, 10% is in the lowest income bracket for $932.50 + 15% for the rest for $204.00, or $1,136.50 Federal income
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How's this for you: tax everyone at the same rate, but also give everyone a fixed tax credit (equal to that rate times the mean income). It's morally fair, but mathematically has the result of a progressive tax rate that goes negative below the mean, providing cash welfare for the poor.
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Read it again, that’s not what I said.
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In the wrong thread on top of that.
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"Is this really what passes for trolling these days? Sad."
To convince the generic stable genius follower, you need only the 'A' from the 'AI'.
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"And what if I use paper maps or ask people how to get someplace?"
Ak for directions? What are you doing on Slashdot, Girl?
Ethical basis is of free software, not open source (Score:2)
No it didn't. The free software movement started over a decade before open source and began as an ethics-based social movement which was also apparently economically viable for some including founder Stallman and some businesses such as Red Hat and Cygnus. But free software never framed the issues it addresses around a business-first philosophy.
Later after seeing how software freedom posed a threat to proprietary software control over the user, the open
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That was a very long post just to do s/open source s/Free S/
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Wasn't open source the default back in the day when the money was in selling hardware and the software was just thrown in?
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That makes it too easy for the bastards to hide a high tax rate.
We should just continue to teach math, er maths.
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That makes it too easy for the bastards to hide a high tax rate.
The shelf tags in the supermarkets I shop at have the price in large numbers, and smaller text arrayed around the central price sort of like the ancillary values in a periodic table entry, giving data like package size, cost per ounce, etc.; it would be simple enough to require that the tags have total price in the largest font, but also list base price and tax amount in smaller text for the computationally challenged.