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Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

I feel most of us have been conditioned to prefer only the mildest and most inoffensive ways of protesting as valid and consider the rest impossible. In my view, governments today ignore protests because they don't actually threaten anything. A protest with teeth might be mass absenteeism from work, refusing to pay taxes, something that actually hurts.. although in this case it's probably a bit much, when the threat of real protest is completely gone you end up with authoritarian governments.

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All the years of anti-violence rhetoric is probably harmful to democracy and human rights, because the entire point of a protest is to put up a large sign that says "Fix this problem or we will make it your problem."

Its the old MLK Jr vs Malcolm X bit. Everyone praises MLK Jr for his anti-violent approach, but that only worked because Malcolm X represented what would happen if people don't accept the non-violent solution. Gandhi preached non-violence to the extreme, and yet the government wasn't afraid of Gandhi killing himself, they were afraid of the masses of angry people that would fuck shit up if Gandhi successfully starved himself to death.

Specifically, non-violent protest works by demonstrating your ability to organize large groups of people in defiance of obstacles put in your way, very much including the law. It carries with it the implied threat that some non-trivial subset of that group would take up arms if asked.

Legal, peaceful protests really only demonstrate that your opinion has some level of popularity. Which can be useful for winning over the merely apathetic, but it does nothing against the outright opposed.

France does protests more effectively. The government is paying attention there and trying very hard to hide the fact that the emperor has no clothes.

They are protesting against the same things that would make their situation better (like increasing the retirement age)

But they're too stupid to realize that

How does increasing the retirement age help? Genuinely curious

Pensions outspend every other social expense in France

The retirees have greater disposable income than the young people (read, most people in the labour market)

And of course the number of retirees is going up every day

Retirning early costs money. A lot. Every year you retire earlier is one year of income to pay extra, and one year of capitalisation less.

To give an idea of the orders of magnitude. France is 70M inhabitants. If 20 million people receive a pension of 24K€ one year longer, that's 480B€. The French yearly budget is 843B€. In total, France has spent between 8B€ - 27B$ on supporting Ukraine since 2022 (one of the other talking points)

France has just managed to increase retirement age to 64 years, and there are voices to re-instate it to 62. For reference:

• Germany: 65 to 67 years (depending on birth year; 67 for those born from 1964)

• United Kingdom: 66 years (rising to 67)

• Spain: 65 to 66.5 years (depending on career length)

• Netherlands: 67 years

The retirement age was moved from 65 to 60 in 1982, by the socialist Mitterand government. Life expectency has increased 9 years since then, and they have been trying (desperately) to move it back up since then.

Not retiring early means that money can be spent on other things. Such as the better schooling that the French kids were asking for.

It will also help in getting the French budget balanced. Something which it has not been since 1974. The EU rules require a national debt of max 60% of GNP. France is currently at 120%. For reference, Germany is at 63%, the Netherlands are at 44%. Spain is at 100%, and slowly falling.

In my experience, the major spending of governments goes out in corruption. It is much like the Parkinson's law. Government will eat any budget they have due to corruption and only provide basic necessities. After moving up the retirement age, that money will surely flow into some rich people's pockets rather than schools/healthcare. This is what the France is revolting about.

Out of interest, what is your experience in terms of government spending? How big a budget did you manage or oversee?

Hello internet stranger. I work in compliance investigations. If you want to see how gruesome government spending is, you may look up transparency international's reports, for example: https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/france.

Every western country with a pension system is slowly getting crushed under the weight of an ever-growing share of pensioners relative to the working age population. People live to 85 now, supporting 20 years of pension and healthcare while they vote against property tax increases, building housing, retirement age increases or any cut at all to their benefits is going to wreck the finances of any country. They were using immigration to backstop the system but that's slowing down now and is anyways not a sustainable solution.

Raise taxes on the wealthy.

Not going to support the “stupid” claim, I suspect the French public do have alternative solutions to their predicament in mind, some better than others no doubt, but ill take a stab at the answer: Context: The French government is underfunded, their debt burden is not healthy and if nothing changes they’re headed towards Greek-style economic problems (ie cost of debt gets too high, nobody trusts them enough to lend them the money they need, default could mean nobody will lend them money in future, so high risk, but avoiding default could mean enforced austerity as conditions of bailouts, which would be far more painful than just a retirement age change). Answer: Increasing the retirement age increases the working population (ie taxable population) and decreases the pension burden, so it’s one of the most effective levers to ease the costs to the government. The downside of course is it’s reneging on a contract with their own population, people working their whole lives with the promise of retirement are understandably not impressed when the goalposts are moved.

So make lower income people work longer rather than tax those at the top who take in the majority of wealth while doing the minority of work...

Tax the rich to solve all problems only works for so long. Eventually everyone has to be hit with the tax stick to support pensions, healthcare, a drive for a more US independent military, etc.

If it comes to that then it comes to that, but starting with the rich still makes sense.

Yeah, it's called redistribution. Right now everything is distributed upwards, so they so be taxed accordingly.

Also, we could significantly cut military spending and be fine if we stopped attacking other countries for no reason.

What countries has France attacked recently?

I didn't say France attacked anyone.

They can imagine themselves growing old which is pretty smart for young people

They cannot imagine themselves getting less than they put in because of an ever increasing proportion of non-workers.

Ironically, the younger people from whom to extract productivity to pay for the defined benefit pensions are being supplied by immigrants, who are also politically unpopular.

They are protesting again non-workers, also known as billionaires.

France’s annual spend on defined benefit pensions is north of $400B Euros and north of $300B Euros on healthcare. Seizing and liquidating the equity of everyone in France with a book value of $1B (or even $100M) would make no difference.

Maybe it would help the budget for 1 year?

Abolishing billionaires isn't about taking their money and then spending it back to them, it's about ending billionaires as a concept, because they are where all the money is going and the reason everyone else has a money shortage. If we subtract the part of the price of everything that goes to billionaires, things get a lot cheaper, and then we can afford them.

>they are where all the money is going and the reason everyone else has a money shortage.

You can look up all the government spending data, and wealth transfers from workers to non workers dwarfs all the billionaires’ combined net worths. The US federal government alone is 60%+ wealth transfers, not to mention state and local governments. These spending figures are measured in trillions of USD per year.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

The wealth of the top 0.1% would add up to much more..

Fortunately the government can’t just steal everyone’s net worth.

Today.

France has much lower per capita debt and deficit compared to the United States. I find it very funny to hear American media talk about the dire situation of French public finances.

They can because the USD is the world's reserve currency. Whenever the economic situation looks volatile, historically, organisations buy up USD and Treasuries as a its seen as a safe haven. That trust has been slowly eroding only due to the actions (and inaction) of the US admin regarding ukraine and iran

In France this week they burned down a town hall. Actually burned down - the town hall is gone - not that fake burned-down reporting they had about Seattle during BLM.

Or even just peacefully blocking the entrance to parliament and forcing them to arrest you to do their jobs.

> refusing to pay taxes,

Taxes should be optional to start with. If you pay taxes you get services, if not you don't.

How do you stop the non-payers from using public systems?

It can be like any other system where you need some proof of payment. For example passes for roads where one has to pay a toll. To minimize complexity there can be a common pass for a bunch of services: roads, libraries etc. The important thing here is that there must be a way to opt out if needed. While it does shift complexity to billing each service, it removes more complexity from things like the extremely complex tax code.

(It does raise the question if the govt should have monopoly on roads etc. but that a bigger question.)

That sounds far worse than the current system IMO. Of course we already have people not paying in as much as the should.

Who else is going to build roads that anyone can use without being nickle and dimed into poverty? Certainly not for profit corporations.

>That sounds far worse than the current system IMO.

Nope. How often do you do taxes? Are you employed and/or do you own a small business?

>Of course we already have people not paying in as much as the should.

How do you decide how much a person should pay? Conversely how can you make sure that you are not paying into the pockets of the govt for services they don't render?

>Who else is going to build roads that anyone can use without being nickle and dimed into poverty? Certainly not for profit corporations.

Road are really cheap. ( cheap = cheaper than paying taxes) More than a century ago in the US about 3000 companies existed which constructed/operated toll roads.

Democracy. Electing people who do the things we want is how we decide things and stop the things we don't like.

You didn't answer my question:

How often do you do taxes? Are you employed and/or do you own a small business?

These will determine your views.

I didn't answer your question because I have found it pointless to argue with people who don't believe in supporting the society they live in.

Good try at the virtue signaling - i.e you care about society and I don't.

A more honest answer is - "I have never done my taxes and I'm 15 years old with very little life experience".

p.s - you won't get too far if you lied to me about doing taxes, because I'll ask you specifics on what you did.

How is that working out in the US?

It's not because we have allowed the wealthy to take complete control of the system. Though, really, it was designed that way all along.

We saw in the US early 1900s how that worked out. You literally had homes burning down because people didn't pay into the right fire fighter service to put out their homes. And how do you handle medical services like 911? Should we just leave the poor to die? How do you deal with people who don't believe they need X service and then they suddenly need it?

Libertarianism sounds great on paper and always falls apart in reality the moment a community grows in size and the individual can't match the good provided by the collective.

> Should we just leave the poor to die?

You can help them personally, not just the somebody else's money.

>You literally had homes burning down because people didn't pay into the right fire fighter service to put out their homes.

You left out many details. For example many people actually used fires to cook. And then there are accounts of fire departments starting fires off on purpose to justify their existence. And why shouldn't people be held responsible for their own fire safety, just like everything else? [For the records - I have lived in places with no fire department and 911 service]

Real question for you: what cumulative[*] tax rate on your income would you be comfortable with for the services that you are currently getting?

* cumulative = income tax + property tax+ sales tax + all other taxes

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