You need to resolve what you mean by 'free'. If you have no option but to pay tax, ie your wealth is forcibly extracted, you are not free. You can't both be free and have wealth forcibly extracted.

If you wish to say that you agree with this system, perhaps you can do this thought exercise. Left to your own devices, how much money would you be prepared to gift the present system for the services they provide?

It only works if everyone pays into the system. Something something tragedy of the commons/social contract. The needle of what should/shouldn't be covered moves around.

Related thought experiment, how much would you bid (as in an auction) before birth, if you had a choice of which country you'd be born into, and which countries would be at the top of your list? What do they look like politically?

In many places you're free to opt out of the economy and thus skip all this "forcible extraction of wealth". This of course comes with the downside of not having much ownership that the system forcibly enforces.

Property rights aren't some laws of nature. They are part of the "social contract" just like taxation.

I'm glad you put 'social contract' in quotes, because it is not social or a contact. If you do not agree or sign a contract, this does not make you anti-social or something. In reverse, being forced to agree to some terms (without a choice to do otherwise), is coercion. This is immoral.

This is the situation we have - immoral use of force by an exclusive monopolist (ie the existing governance system) - but it's immoral nature cannot be made right however many people argue for it. It can never be right to exhort or force others.

There is right to roam in many countries, meaning you can just live in a forest, although you'd have to rely on foraging. Farming and hunting and building is typically banned or highly limited. Without right to roam this is often done by coercion via private property establishing an exclusive monopoly over a land area. Somebody will exhort or force you out of the hunting or farming or building or even just being in the area by exhorting or forcing.

You keep saying immoral. That's just an opinion.

If I force you to hand over some percentage of your money - I think you would agree that was immoral.

If I and 100 friends force you to hand over some percentage of your money - I think you would agree that was still immoral - the number of people agreeing to do an immoral act, cannot make that action 'good'.

If I and my friends call myself 'the government', talk about a 'social contract', establish 'the rule of law' and call that 'justice', use your money to train you and your children to believe all that at face value (education, entertainment) and force you to hand over some percentage of your money - this is still immoral. Unless I explicitely agree to the 'social contract' it is force and without consent - aka immoral.

I hadn't see the attempt to discredit Varoufakis' thoughts or arguments. What I did see is a critique of an analogy. If you like, I can agree that this is a pedantic take, but it is important sometimes, and I believe that this case is of that kind.

What the point of analogies? I know two of them:

1. an appeal to emotions: you can show some similarities between a regime and a fascism and you kinda won. Everyone knows that fascism is bad, don't they? But it is a political thing, and if you don't want to be a mindless zombie in hands of a politicians, you must know what exactly fascism is, and to break the analogy apart to see where it matches and where it breaks.

2. explanation. If you can to draw analogies between an unknown thing and a known thing, it can be easier to understand the unknown one. It can help really, but again you need to stop at some point and to figure out where the analogy breaks, where its limits of applicability are. If you try to push analogy beyond its limits you'll form wrong opinions about the unknown thing you are trying to learn.

(1) uses failure mode of (2) (overextending an analogy) to fool people. So pedantic approach to analogies is something you should have around you ready at all times.

We're already seeing it in the measures the US government is taking towards autistic people, where RFK Jr's characterisations of autism ("will never pay taxes, will never hold a job") were knocking on the door of the motivation for the Nazi Aktion T4 programme (essentially that lack of contribution to the state makes you unworthy of life). All the while simultaneously planning build a big centralised register of autistic people.

We've seen the expansionist rhetoric. We've seen the xenophobia. We've seen the disregard for rule of law and constitutional norms. All of which is being underpinned by a billionaire class who are increasingly seeing human labour as disposable, even if their trust in the future of transformer based AI may be 'optimistic' in this respect, who have aligned themselves with the executive. This represents the fusion of corporate interests with the state, albeit with a more plutocratic twist than the 20th century fascists.

This isn't a soap box, it's purely a matter of semantics. There's much less of the kind of geographic constraints and other trappings of lordship and monarchy so much as people capturing a republic and twisting its apparatus to suit an authoritarian purpose.

Putting aside your main argument, I will only comment that this example does not serve it. "Fascist", like "Marxist", are thrown around by the left and the right, respectively, to smear anything they don't like.

So while pedantry can get in the way of understanding, so can sloppy use of terminology.

> When we talk about "democratic government" how close is it to the Athenian democracy?

Like Mussolini's variety of fascism, Athenian democracy isn't really the basis for a definition of democracy. Democracy has a general definition that is not defined by empirical contingencies given that label. That puts the cart before the horse.

About as ignorant as calling Democrats communists.

GP is right that partisan slurs can get in the way of understanding.

Not that I can really blame them, because almost no one is able to really takes criticism from someone they don't trust. But they still should. It's weak, in absolute moral terms.

(and just in case it seems like I'm being super partisan here: I 100% believe the left is almost as guilty of the same thing, of not receiving criticism from others. that is the nature of this ugly thing we're in. No one has any sort of leadership who could even take the action of trusting anyone. I think both sides have been incredibly and pathetically weak in my lifetime. But if we're talking about the word "fascist"... that word is most justifiably pointed at the right. They do the anti-immigration / hating "others" rallies.)