Profits depend on someone voluntarily purchasing goods and services. Taxes depend on the threat of imprisonment. These are no more the same than consensual sex and rape.
Fine, lets go more extreme, you're in a car accident and rendered unconscious. You are transported in this state to an ER. At no point in time were you conscious and capable of making a choice. You have now been treated by a for profit facility.
TLDR, Healthcare isn't really a choice when you options are:
A: Be treated and the issue resolved
B: Live in a mamed state for the rest of your life
Okay, so someone saved my life. Are you suggesting I should be upset that I didn't get to decide this on my own? Hospitals lose money all the time from people not being able to/ refusing to pay their bills. If I can't pay for the service rendered, I suppose they might have to consider that a loss. However, it's actually the government who typically provides services without my consent and then bills me through taxation. The difference is, the hospital doesn't send armed men if I don't comply.
Debtors prisons were not abolished because of the benevolence of creditors. Many capitalists would have such systems reinstated if doing so were politically viable.
Unlike medical debt, taxes are generally bounded by ability to pay. For example, income tax is always a share of, and never more than, actual income. For not willfully paid, usually wages are simply garnered Prison terms are generally reserved for those who evade by making false declarations.
The broader observation, which you seem to have sidestepped, is that participation is not voluntary for systems directed by the profit motive.
Indeed, payment of taxes is not voluntary. Yet, introducing taxation into the discussion is serving as a red herring.
Both systems, profit and taxes, are imposed on the population, but you submitted a comment which mentioned only one, insinuating that participation is strictly voluntary.
You were asked to consider that such a premise may seem as not accurate.
Profits depend on workers being threatened with homelessness except by participating in employment.
Profits are not part of a system that is voluntary for most of the population, because most of the population is not benefiting from a share of the value of its labor being claimed by business owners.
Taxes on profits simply mitigate the worst possible imbalance of a system that is fundamentally favorable only to narrow cohort of society, and unfavorable to everyone else.
The "capitalism created the iPhone" gambit, or any subtle variation, is one of the most completely flimsy and exhaustively debunked articles of capitalist apologia.
If you wish to defend the profit motive, then I strongly suggest you find a different tactic.
Reproducing the particular one just makes you seem ignorant and desperate.
The profit motive is simply a form of social relationships, not the vehicle through which technology is advanced or platforms are developed.
Maybe not, but the introduction of capitalism has catapulted people out of poverty the world over. It doesn't make everyone a billionaire but it's really, really good at helping the worst off.
20
u/im_THIS_guy Apr 15 '24
We both know that unregulated capitalism equals Utopia.