Thursday, May 16, 2013

A tax on men

There is a university town in the north of Sweden called Umeå. The town council of Umeå has an equality committee and this committee has raised for debate the idea of introducting gender taxes, specifically a tax on men. What's interesting is the justification given for placing special taxes on men:
Umeå will be the municipality in Sweden working most to be equal. A municipality in which women and men have the power to shape their own lives and society on equal terms, with as much influence, with an equal opportunity to live a financially independent life.

If you're wondering why I write so often on Sweden, it's because they express liberal principles so clearly and openly.

A general aim of liberalism is individual autonomy. By autonomy is meant being able to self-determine one's own life and being independent. Equality means that individuals have the same level of autonomy: the same "power to shape their own lives" and "an equal opportunity to live a financially independent life".

The Swedes are convinced that you get autonomy and independence via careers and money. Therefore, equality for women means that women should be equally committed to careers as men and should receive at least as much money as men do.

And so the Umeå equality committee is absolutely convinced that it is a gross injustice if women spend any more time with their babies than men do. Men must take an equal share of parental leave if equality is to exist.

Similarly the Umeå equality committee believes that justice requires that women be made perfectly financially independent of men through a guarantee of equal earnings, even if this means taxing men extra to reduce male take home pay.

And so you get ideas like this:
Umeå municipality's overall gender equality objectives are: To create opportunities for women and men have the power to shape society and their own lives.

An important factor is economic equality and economic independence. Therefore, we might begin to investigate the introduction of a gender tax?

Would a gender tax designed so it would be about men paying higher taxes because there is still an unexplained pay gap of around seven per cent in favor of men.

But there are more reasons that makes an average of 4,500 kronor per month, the difference in income between men and women. It's about the choices we have to do and how these choices are valued. Women still take the majority of parental leave and work part-time to a greater extent and more unpaid work at home. Women lost in their wallets for life.

The injustice of it is necessary to talk about and take responsibility for.

Should we be economically equal and financially independent? How will we get there? Is an equality tax the only option? Or are there other ways?

Closing the pay gap, to challenge the structures and actively work for an equal distribution of unpaid housework, breaking the gender segregated labor market, to ensure that fathers are taking a larger share of parental leave, to challenge our own beliefs and dare to see things for how they actually looks and not how we think it looks.

...A municipality in which all women and men have the power to shape their own lives and society on equal terms, with as much power and with equally loud voice so that both women and men are able to live a financially independent life, whole life.

Most Western countries are following the same ideas, even if they are less upfront in spelling them out.

I find it a particularly sterile vision of society, one in which it is assumed that women lose out when men commit themselves to a provider role and in which the aim is not a closer, complementary union between men and women but maximum independence.

It is a vision, too, which assumes that motherhood is a negative factor in a woman's life, a potential impediment to acquiring money and independence, that must therefore be delegated equally to men.

This kind of liberalism, when boiled down to its essential aims, is really about career and money. It doesn't rise to anything more than this. It is a low and dispirited expression of Western culture.

13 comments:

  1. I would LOVE to see such a tax implemented in one town or city in Sweden. It would be interesting to see how many single men would move out and leave the town to women and married couples only.

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  2. Everything I've read about Sweden suggests its government is infatuated with loony left politics. Which must make it quite unpleasant to live there at times.

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  3. I would LOVE to see such a tax implemented in one town or city in Sweden. It would be interesting to see how many single men would move out and leave the town to women and married couples only.
    It is like this already in some cities in Australia.
    During lunch hours I observed everyone in my local city being mostly young women.
    All the men work far afield as tradies in the area. So during working hours the entire city area is void of working men.

    I think a man tax would result in where ever it is implemented losing all of its male population.

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  4. Women must be financially independent of men by being more financially dependent on them. Got it.

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  5. This is the thinking and mentality of the envious and parasitic.

    It has to end. Those who do more and accomplish more owe NO one else an answer or an apology.


    This simply justifies those who are envious and haven't achieved what the want to TAKE it from others---with an easy justification to boot.

    This is exactly the hell that communism unleashed--just in slow motion.

    Equality is envy in disguise.

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  6. This is really a corrupt notion of 'equality of outcomes' rather than a sense that men are women are equally valuable.

    I note the disparity in pay seems close to that quoted in other Western nations. It seems remarkable that so many men scattered all over the globe could manufacture such a consistent level of purposeful 'discrimination' evident in these pay-gap claims. It really begs the question...

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  7. "If you're wondering why I write so often on Sweden, it's because they express liberal principles so clearly and openly."
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    You're convincing me. This is a very clear example of what you say.

    And you nailed the main point: this "is really about career and money. It doesn't rise to anything more than this. It is a low and dispirited expression of Western culture."

    This is no way to live, even if you could make it work in a material sense without unjust taxation.

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  8. CamelCaseRob: "I would LOVE to see such a tax implemented in one town or city in Sweden. It would be interesting to see how many single men would move out and leave the town to women and married couples only."
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    This is a reason why the politically correct love to impose their solutions at an international or federal level. So you can't run away.

    Communism was embarrassing, because the way they stopped people running away from the "worker's paradise" was to shoot men fleeing. The walls and barbed wire were a commentary on the system.

    Federalism, properly implemented, also shows up the evils of political correctness. Any time the politically correct impose noxious measures in one state, people will start fleeing to other states, and that will be a reproach to your system.

    The politically correct have come up with three answers to this.

    One is to impose everything at the highest level possible. You can't flee, because the same conditions apply everywhere.

    The second is mass immigration. I keep hitting this, but it's such a big issue it affects nearly everything. You can destroy your white population but that's OK because replacement populations flood in to take advantage of your welfare state. In this case, you could have a man tax, but if you had open borders there would still be a lot of men: non-whites flooding in to take advantage of federal welfare, men who didn't have jobs and wouldn't be paying the man tax.

    The third is the intolerant tribal moral community of academia and the mass media. Though problems multiply, they refuse to address them, or they spin them in an anti-white way that occludes the point. It wasn't enough for the Berlin Wall to exist and have a body count; Reagan had to say "tear down this wall!" This the tribal moral communities of academia and the politically correct media will not do.

    The fourth way (bonus!) is phonies like Tony Abbot: the fake alternative to liberalism, the kept opposition that won't fix anything.

    That is how the politically correct are able to impose such bad "reforms" without being discredited by the spectacle of people fleeing, and by real alternatives being shown to work better.

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  9. I have been to Umea. Before I arrived, the women whom I visited (so I later discovered) had been (ab)using the local men as unpaid Gigolos. I wonder how Umea Town Council would tax that!

    I thought the place sterile, the men unnaturally quiet and submissive - Manginas who needed some Cojones.

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  10. Ann-Marie Slaughter has a new article in The Atlantic. She calls for the U.S. government to introduce policies and programs such as universal daycare, extensive paid parental leave, and payments to primary caregivers. Essentially this would be a tax on men, given that men work longer hours and earn more money. It would also necessitate more mothers entering the workforce and working longer hours to offset the additional taxes coming out of their husbands' paychecks.

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  11. A general aim of liberalism is individual autonomy.

    Sigh. When are you going to stop accepting their claims that their intentions are good, and accepting their mendacious definitions of words like autonomy?

    By autonomy is meant being able to self-determine one's own life and being independent.

    Being dependent on the state is, by definition, NOT being independent, and NOT being able to determine your own life.

    WHat would they do differently if they openly stated they wanted to destroy white men instead of blathering about autonomy and thus deceiving the stupid?

    Nothing.

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  12. Nah,

    I keep thinking that what is really at stake here is that you believe that the problem is socialism/leftism and that classical liberalism/right-liberalism is OK, including its emphasis on individual autonomy, whereas I see the problem as being the emphasis on individual autonomy linking both wings of liberalism.

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  13. I keep thinking that what is really at stake here is that you believe that the problem is socialism/leftism and that classical liberalism/right-liberalism is OK, including its emphasis on individual autonomy, whereas I see the problem as being the emphasis on individual autonomy linking both wings of liberalism.

    Classical liberalism is "OK" in the sense that it can work, for at least so long as it does not degenerate into modern Leftism.

    The problem is that you keep equating the "individual freedom" of classical liberalism with the "individual autonomy" of modern Leftism. They're not the same. When a modern Leftist says "autonomy" he does not mean the same thing at all as when a classical liberal said it. Not to put too fine a point on it, when the modern Leftist uses the word, he is using it dishonestly in order to delude people.

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