What if we made advertising illegal?
Also I'd say lets only tax undesirable behaviour!
So not tax:
* wages
* having a house
* adding value (VAT)
But so tax:
* land use
* polluting
* packaging (could be part of polluting)
* accumulating profits at the top
This idea has some similarities to:
"What if we looked at advertising, but not for too long?"
My cousin died to protect your right to say this. Ads are speech too.
But here's a different take: unsolicited advertising is theft. It is the "fractional penny" heist perpetrated by the industrial advertising complex upon all of us, all of the time.
Hear me out. You have a finite amount of mental attention that you can give in any given environment. Advertising companies are selling access to bits and pieces of this finite resource of yours. Sometimes they do this with your consent in advertising supported products you seek out (e.g. free YouTube or Spotify) and this is fine.
But often you have not consented to spend your attention on their ads. You probably weren't laying on the beach, staring into the sky hoping to find the phone number of a personal injury attorney being towed behind an airplane. Or the latest weight loss drug plastered on the side of a city bus. Or 15 garbage pamphlets jammed into your mailbox.
There's a reason all the dystopian, sci-fi media shows the beleaguered protagonist assaulted with personalized ads in holograms and on every surface. Because that is exactly where we're headed just as soon as they figure out how to do it if we don't legislate this shit away.
I can say "you should get the vaccine!" Companies that want to say these kinds of things have rules to abide by: and thanks fully so.
I'm much for free speech, but more in the sense that we should be able to discuss policy/politics/critique/bitch/bash/religions/etc. Not so we can make terror plans, defame, harass, bully and share child porn.
Not sure what happened to your cousin... But I'm curious now. Care to share?
My cousin served in the Armed Forces "to protect your freedom" (his words). The fact that he died during training maneuvers, does not detract from that.
But personally when I look the US' history of military interventions then I sadly have to conclude he was made to believe he did it for "our freedom". A good facade for a dirty business. In fact he did it for corporate and Israel's interests. And probably he personally did it for the money and "cool job status" too.
The recent past should tell you that a lot of what some would call legitimate critique/bitch/bash etc. others would call harass/bully/violence –to also include not speaking about it at all.
So in the interest of consistency, and publicity, I'd prefer to let the bigots of the world speak, and out themselves as bigots, so that we may then publicly speak and make fun of them for being bigots. The same goes for corporations.
If watching ads is a valid way of "paying" for youtube, then what is the service/benefit you receive for watching ads in the sky?
Only the US population seems to, on average, favour going to war.
Still feel bad for your cousin.
Children, adults, people-in-positions-of-power and corps should be held to different standards.
I've seen banks offer "quick loans" specifically to vulnerable adults. Same with the opiod crisis: some big pharmas dont mind pushing the message that "patients should talk to their doctors about XYZ". Corps can do much more harm than individuals.