Join 📚 Favorites And Reflection Questions
A batch of the best highlights from what Todd's read, .
Can you name people who are critical of your beliefs, profession, or life choices who you consider thoughtful, even if you believe they're wrong? Or can you at least name reasons why someone might disagree with you that you would consider reasonable (even if you don't happen to know of specific people who hold those views)?
The Scout Mindset
Julia Galef
In fact, there’s absolutely no reason a modern state should fund itself primarily by appropriating a proportion of each citizen’s earnings. There are plenty of other ways to go about it. Many—such as land, wealth, commercial, or consumer taxes (any of which can be made more or less progressive)—are considerably more efficient, since creating a bureaucratic apparatus capable of monitoring citizens’ personal affairs to the degree required by an income tax system is itself enormously expensive. But this misses the real point: income tax is supposed to be intrusive and exasperating. It is meant to feel at least a little bit unfair. Like so much of classical liberalism (and contemporary neoliberalism), it is an ingenious political sleight of hand—an expansion of the bureaucratic state that also allows its leaders to pretend to advocate for small government.
Against Economics
David Graeber
No government can exist without using force. It is impossible to imagine a state that does not use police or military force. In short, there is no government that does not kill. There is no government that does not compromise with capitalism, mammonism, and injustice.
Beyond Pacifism: Seven Theses on Christian Nonviolence by Eberhard Arnold
plough.com
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise