[TRG] On Taxes and the SFP

Day 2,899, 19:22 • Published in USA USA • by J.A. Lake

So taxes are back in the news!

Naturally this has prompted questions about what the SFP and BSP plan to do about those taxes, against which we have railed for quite some time (go ahead and click different words for examples! That's how many articles I could find in a few minutes of searching, from BSP and SFP). There have been discussions on our forums about taxes, the Revolutionary Committee has discussed taxes quite frequently, and I know I've personally exchanged many PMs on the topic of taxes and the SFP's positions regarding lowering taxes.

Contrary to the depiction of the SFP in the aforementioned article, there is little to no unity of opinion, and certainly no directive from above on how we should think about taxes. Opinions on taxes range from raising them higher still to lowering them below their previous rate. Some of us want no taxes, some of us want max taxes, and some of us live somewhere in between.


Much like that droplet of dye in the larger bottle of water, our disunity (however well-intentioned) means we are politically unreliable on this issue, as on others. This isn't meant to be an insult to the anarchist nature of the party. This is a statement of fact.

That brings us to the topic of our ironclad, lockstep relationship with the Black Sheep Party. That... does not exist in the real eworld. We're more like friends with benefits- we chill, and when the need arises we help each other out.

Will taxes create that need?

My guess is they will not. The SFP has entertained some ideas that would involve maintenance of the tax rate as-is, and has even launched a discussion or two on revising our anti-high tax stance. Unlike the Black Sheep, there is little in the way of consensus here.

The reasons behind this are many. A common thread is that few people seem to believe we can lower taxes anymore. As each month passes, resolution wanes. Goals have changed from lowering taxes outright to learning to live with astronomical taxes until they're allowed to go back to a lower rate. Some now advocate raising taxes, as I previously mentioned. Some may call this evolution, but it's a kind of regressive evolution that invalidates our claims to be revolutionary. We're closer to social democrats than anarchists.

Is this bad? It depends on context and your definition of bad. It's a core tenet of the SFP to allow free thinking and nearly-total autonomy among its members, even those in Congress. This is excellent insofar as it allows for free and easy exchange of ideals, however one could also argue that in the realm of e-politics and the condensed amount of time available for the political process that the disunity that makes the SFP great also hobbles the SFP, politically speaking. If it takes time to unify behind an idea through discussion and debate, the time for our input could be past by the time we reach that point of agreement.

Look at taxes, for example. It's been months since the tax hike and we still are in discussions about what our positions are on high taxes.

Naturally there will be the argument that the "SFP has no party line." Perhaps that is not always for the best, for many of the reasons outlined above. Perhaps it would be better if we had a few positions we agreed as a Party to take beforehand, so when it comes up we can respond more or less immediately, as a united front.

Such positions would have the added benefits of preventing too much drift on key points of policy on the Party-wide scale, as evidenced in our positional evolution on taxes and dictatorship in the past few months.

There is the SFP's Party Program. It does say that we will seek to abolish the defensive dictatorship (among other unaccomplished and forgotten goals). We have backed down from that position, to the point that one of our own is now seeking to run for Dictator.

If a so-called Party Line were to be established, we have to make it binding in a way that the Party Program has now demonstrably failed to be. That is of course fundamentally at odds with any notion of autonomy and anarchism. Perhaps a happy medium can be found? That will, paradoxically, require some discussion.

We have to ask ourselves though: if we want to hit a target would it do to all be facing separate directions?

I can already see the criticism coming. "You're so good at pointing out problems, Lake, but where are your solutions?"

What solutions can I offer? Inside the SFP we have weaved a tangled web of anarchic free will, conformity, e-US-Forums-metapolitical (one-T metagame) ambitions, hatred of the metagame, desire to play the metacongressional game, revolutionary thought and writing, and belief in changing the metagame from within the metagame (why not take a dump in a diaper to make the diaper less dumpy?). There's no way to change one thread to a satisfactory extent without being caught in the rest of the web.

The best solution would be a binding party program, a paradigm shift to a new mettagame (distinguished from the eUS-Forums-metagame: note the extra T), and a touch of soul-searching. We may need to step back and compare SFP of today with SFP of a year ago. Playing politics is eroding the Party and our ideals. We campaigned on lower taxes and no dictatorship, but we allow these discussions to get mired in metapolitics and shrug when they get ignored, muttering "We'll get 'em later" to ourselves.

Where is that revolutionary spirit? When did we decide to kowtow to the whims of the people we've decried as "oligarchs" and the "American Bourgeois Class"? Why is playing within the system against which we fought now a goal of the party? Why is revolting or restoring democracy not on the table unless we can push it through the many-times-damned metagame?

tl;dr- that's why the SFP can't be counted on to be 100% for lower taxes, and why the SFP is certainly not in an alliance with the Black Sheep. The SFP has vastly different views on every issue and conducts a lot of debate. Saying we're 100% for or against anything is a ridiculous assertion. Also discussed was the nature of the SFP's political iffy-ness on many issues and the drift from our Program.