Double taxation

Imagine you are a doctor who has an extra $10k to spend after a year of budgeting. You have narrowed down your purchase decision to two options: a pair of new jet-skis, or an investment in a local restaurant. From the jet-skis you get a return of glorious fun with perhaps a special someone, and from the restaurant investment you get a return of equity and the capital gains that comes from dividend payouts. The returns from the jet-ski option are not taxed by the government besides sales tax and licensing (you can't tax fun!), but the returns from investing the restaurant - I suppose this is responsible behavior - well, those are subject to a whole bunch of taxes.

This has always been my understanding of the argument against double taxation, that you have earned the money once by seeing patients and were taxed then, and now you will be taxed a second time if you take the responsible option of investing your money. How unfair! Let's cut capital gains tax!

Actually, it's sort of the same idea with labor.

If I have 40 hours a week to toss around, I can lay in bed all day reading blogs (patently irresponsible) or I can get a job. I've taken my time and have done a responsible thing with it and now I get taxed for it, while the government has not found a way to tax my blog reading. Unfair!

But wait, that's not double taxation. So is double taxation actually important? Why is taxing the money I make working so much better than taxing the money I make investing? Perhaps it is that time flows to use freely, while the money to invest had to be earned.

Also, I've got something on equivalence of consumption and income taxes and Say's law, but I'll post later when I'm not exhausted. 

Could democrats also like the fourth amendment?

Sometimes he binges and eats the first and second amendments, as well.

The three-hundred-plus pounds of patriotism the media has dubbed "Chris Christie" challenged libertarians in a media event last night, according to the Washington Post:

As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought.

This is really exciting for me, not because I give a shit about Chris Christie's opinions but because he points out that this strain is going through both parties. Indeed, the recent vote on libertarian representative Justin Amash's amendment to ban NSA dragnet spying drew a surprising amount of support from both sides of the aisle: 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voted for an amendment that the leadership from both parties railed against. The amendment failed (of course) but by the extremely narrow margin of just twelve votes, with even John Boehner lowering himself to go down and cast his nay.

It's good to see a paradigm of authoritarianism-vs-libertarianism on an issue, especially when it is crossing party lines. I've always felt a libertarian-Republican presidential candidate will need to draw votes from both Republican and Democratic bases in order to succeed (with some Christians and many foreign-policy hawks jumping ship from the GOP ticket). While the classical set of Paul voters would be fiscally conservative, socially liberal individuals from both parties, attracting voters on the not-being-a-police-state front is also an excellent boost for Paul in 2016.

For more analysis on Christie's remarks and what a gross statist he is there's a Reason blog post my friend Alan shared on Facebook.

Freedom from purpose

Imagine yourself going to a fabulously interesting and culturally rich city, some exotic metro area you've only seen in movies. Perhaps for a few it is New York City or Los Angeles, but I am thinking more along the lines of Seoul, Buenos Aires, or Hong Kong (developing countries are much more interesting).

You spend weeks looking through websites and blogs about the city. What an amazing place! You've planned out all the interesting destinations you will visit and each night you are deluded with dreams about the excited and fascinating people you will meet. The energy of the city is so obvious it comes alive to you even now, thousand of miles away! Your own life, though satisfying, seems like a comatose state compared to the constant night parties and day adventures of this destination metropolis.

Oh, but one thing: you are going on business and will have no time to do anything interesting.

Your trip has a purpose, you see, and you must execute that purpose. There will be a factory tour you are to take part in, several meetings with your foreign contemporaries, and every meal is planned with some manager trying to sell you their services or investor who you must woo. You know these people and they are all inescapably dull and long-winded, interested only in themselves and the most base aspects of the industry. Perhaps you will get to see a party from your hotel room as you get ready for bed, but keep the evening voyeurism brief: you've got early meetings every day you are there.

Your trip now sounds like a complete drag, and in such an awesome city! This is what it is to have a purpose in life.

Facing the fact that you have no purpose to live is facing that you were not sent here on a mission, but instead on a vacation. The natural urge with a vacation is to plan plenty of downtime, broken up by attractions and activities which allow you to fully experience and enjoy the location and context of your break. As aforementioned, you should not think of this hedonic resolution as a purpose, as your happiness is only as consequential as you are, and you are gloriously inconsequential in every way.

I guess I don't understand, to some degree, why people are so adverse to the idea that their lives are purposeless, as if they want their lives on earth to be some kind of prison sentence. Seeing that you have no purpose means there is no failure or success at life, and there is instead just living. Can anything be more liberating?

On God

I spoke before of my belief that no creator exists. This is a critical link in my chain of thought, and if I am wrong here than my arguments would be irreparably destroyed.

I have never been an athiest until recently. I was raised in a conservative Christian household and was made to go to church from a toddlerhood until I moved out of my home at the age of nineteen. Until late middle school I was a devout Christian, at which point I began to drift. I became almost completely apathetic by the age of seventeen and have considered myself "apatheistic" since then, and have always disdained any theological conversation as moot.

During all these periods of time, however, I have suffered with the question of purpose. I did not feel "called" to go into ministry as a youth and I couldn't imagine a God that would make it my purpose to run a company or fix leaky pipes. My strategy for dealing with this crisis (over a stretch of roughly a dozen years) was to continue looking for a purpose while not wrecking my life in such a way that I would be unable to complete my purpose once I discovered it. This was an emotionally exhausting period of my life. The fact that my purpose was unknown meant I could never know if sitting back and watching TV for an hour would make me fail at my purpose! It is impossible to ever relax under such conditions.

So when I came to asking direct questions, for the first time, about the purpose of my life, I followed a reasonable progression. My life would have to be given purpose exogenously ("objective" purpose). In fact, a purpose would be a reason for my life to exist, so my existence must be tied to this purpose. But that implies that I exist on purpose, that some thing purposely created me. 

Here, finally, a theological discussion that was not moot. I should note that my philosophically inclined friends were aware of my aversion to theological debates, so you can imagine my surprise when I quickly and firmly answered of course there can be no creator. It came out as if it was inside me for years, just looking for an excuse to be relevant!

Am I right in thinking that no creator exists? Well, the way I think about it is this: if I was never told of a creator and only had knowledge of physical theories of humanity's origins (evolution, big bang, etc.), then would I feel the need to inject into the theories a metaphysical creator? Is there a hole that needs to be filled or an inconsistency that needs to be corrected?

I can't think of one, besides the problem of ultimate origin: what created the matter that took part in the big bang? Where did that stuff come from? But even here, I see no reason for a creator. If we invoke a creator to explain the origin of all matter, then we have simply raised to a new metaphysical plane the same issue and I can ask "where did the creator come from?".

Injecting a God into origin stories is unnecessary and contrived. This was never of consequence to me until I realized its importance in the question of existential purpose, at which point it became a paramount and critical point.

Happiness is not a purpose

I've lately been asking people to tell me what the purpose of their life is. I hope you can now understand why I write this in a blog instead of talking about it with people.

Often times, people might concede that their life has no objective purpose, but that their subjective purpose is their own happiness. This sounds novel enough: it is common wisdom that you should try to be happy! And while I agree that this is an agreeable goal while you are on earth, it should be made very clear that this is not a purpose.

Imagine a machine, let's call it a Zarathustra, and to give you a picture in your head let's say the Zarathustra is ten feet by four feet, is covered in red sheet metal, and has only a few levers and claws coming out at strategic points. It's a very mysterious machine! But I can tell you the purpose of the Zarathustra: it is to fix the Zarathustra. Not other Zarathustras (let's say there is just one in the universe). No, the Zarathustra exists solely to fix itself.

Does the Zarathustra have a purpose?

Of course it doesn't. The Zarathustra sounds like something you would find in a Ripley's Museum or some other parody emporium. No serious person would want a Zarathustra, they are totally without purpose! As is the person whose only purpose is their own happiness.

But wait, you say! I've misunderstood you. You intend to not only make yourself happy, but others happy as well! You care for others, as does every human, and the purpose of your life is the happiness of others.

Well, let me adjust my metaphor for your new critique. Perhaps we can imagine the Zarathustra machine being discovered by General Electric and the executives, in a fever of excitement, rush it into mass production. The public sees the obvious value of the Zarathustra machine, especially with the refinements that GE engineers have made: now, the Zarathustra can also fix other Zarathustras!

Soon, every household has a Zarathustra. If your Zarathustra breaks, you can simply call your neighbor and ask him to bring over his Zarathustra (hopefully they've been made smaller at this point, but I still like to imagine them as red). All the Zarathustras in the world can fix all the other Zarathustras in the world, and we can see why they were so popular!

Obviously, this too is idiotic. No person would want a machine that fixes only machines of its type and has no other functions, as the machine has still no purpose. Likewise, a person who lives to make others happy has no purpose.

So far it seems to me that the mind rebels at the idea of there being no purpose for existence. I first pursued this avenue because of the violence it seemed to hold - certainly anything that stirs such internal controversy is important to consider! But for years I avoided it, just as others avoid it now by constructing these illogical purposes.

You have no purpose and not accepting this truth is building a worldview on lies. It will be your undoing.

How I realized my life has no purpose (and neither does yours!)

I will use this as a place to record things I am thinking about since they are not suitable for most forms of conversation. I should note that I don't read philosophy so this will seem very obvious to people who do.

Thaler theorized on the idea of a dual-self model. In this model a planner-self with a low discount rate sets plans for a myopic doer-self to execute with the predictable high-jinks that come with such a wise planner trying to cope with such a boorish doer. I hoped to follow the advice of approaching this problem as a principal-agent problem and consequentially cutting deals with my doer-self for meeting goals. However, I was surprised to find that this worked very poorly, so I began to investigate.

I have never felt a sense of accomplishment or relief after finishing a goal, I decided, and it was because I still felt I was falling short of a larger goal or purpose by relaxing. I have never known what my purpose is and the idea has always haunted me. My general strategy has been to not fuck things up terribly so that when I eventually discover my purpose I can execute it.

But is it reasonable to think I have a purpose? I've been looking for one for at least ten years now, you'd think I'd at least have some leads by now. Well, I thought, what does having a purpose entail? Having a purpose implies purposeful creation. Somebody had to want me here, which is funny because nobody wanted me here. We are all products of a natural process of evolution.

Thus I was cast into the process of having an existential crisis. It seems funny now to think about how much it bothered me, but I felt it critical at the time that I keep soldiering on with intellectual honesty and curiosity. Many people, it seems, try to find a hack to avoid coming totally clean: I've created my own purpose! I reject this as intellectual dishonesty, as stupid as a car or a refrigerator designing their own purpose. And now that I've accepted what I believe to be true, I view it as strange.

A self-inflicted purpose is only for the truly sadistic. We were put on this earth either to accomplish some end or we were put here on "vacation". I believe we are here on vacation, and giving yourself some sentence to serve out while you exist is silly. You can have goals, but you need to realize that goals are not purposes. You have no purpose and you cannot change that.