Well, if by “universal” you mean “used by people who can’t or won’t contemplate the consequences of what they propose”, sure.
I do. They are called the police.
What about when I hire someone to protect me. Don’t we then become a group, or must my bodyguard surrender his right to self-preservation and think only of protecting me? (Good luck hiring someone to do that.)
That’s why you have to have lots of children. They’re small - you can throw them into the paths of the bullets.
Fair enough. But my point stands, if taxes are extortion, than all laws are extortion.
You can’t have this food without which you will starve, you can’t have this place to live, unless you fork over money, you can’t have medicine to save your life? That’s no more of a stretch than taxes. Extortion “mutually benefits” both parties and is “voluntary” in the same sense as commerce.
My point is, by phrasing it that way, you are just starting a semantic debate which is pointless. Given what you originally wrote, it doesn’t seem like that’s what really matters to you. If we could prove to you that taxes didn’t fall under the definition of extortion, would suddenly think that made them OK? If not, then that’s irrelevant. You should get to your real point, which is that taxes are bad because of whatever consequence of them you disagree with. Debating whether you can put that under some arbitrary label is both merely a semantic debate and also the equivalent of an ad hominem attack on them, which is not sound reasoning.
Just get to the point, and say what the system is doing wrong, and in what form you would change the system to make it better.
Except with taxes, the state is arbitrarily claiming a portion of your labor as its property. The food dealer is not claiming your property. He is competing with other providers of food for the product of your labor. Monopolies arise only with state intervention. You are exchanging your property with his property. If you don’t buy his food, he lowers his price or you find another provider of food. If you don’t pay taxes they can throw you in jail.
The government is nothing more than an army which has codified and sanitized its method of exacting tribute over its conquered area.
The state is competing with other states for you to live in their territory and earn the fruits of your labor there. If you don’t like the price you can leave and go to another state, assuming they’ll take you.
And yet, inspite of the free market, no state has arisen that meets your criteria. Isn’t the only reasonable conclusion that there is insufficient demand?
Nonsense
It still sounds to me like you want something for nothing. You want to live in a nation whose freedom is protected by a military that you don’t want to pay for. You’re driving on roads that you don’t want to pay for. You’re benefitting from living in an educated society, made possible by public primary, secondary, and in many cases post-secondary publicly funded educational systems that you don’t want to pay for. You want the confidence of buying food that is safe to eat without paying for the inspectors and regulations that make that possible. It’s my opinion that you’re getting far more fruit from your labor by living in a society that taxes than you would be otherwise.
Not labor, income. All of the money belongs to the government. You want to use its property, you have to play by its rules or work to change them. You are free to offer a direct barter and never pay taxes again. Using money while complaining about taxes is like letting the fire truck save your house from a fire while complaining about taxes. Where do you think the money to pay your salary came from? The state.
And it’s not arbitrary. It’s for the common good. Normally we think of extortion as benefiting the extorter, but that doesn’t happen here. The state isn’t benefiting because the state isn’t a person. It has no stake in your money. This is more akin to someone taking your keys because you are too drunk to drive. The money is not ultimately going to the state, it’s going back to you in a different form. You could claim that the state is the people in charge, but far more taxes go to other things than to their salaries. You could claim something about corporations, but in general the politicians going out of the way to help corporations are also the ones with lowering taxes on their platform.
Now you can make an argument against having a Nanny State, but this is a very different sort of evil than extortion. Or again if you insist on calling it extortion, then you have to call all laws extortion.
Pretty much the complete opposite is true.
Or… You starve to death.
Tributes go to kings. There are no kings here. The state is an abstract collective.
But even if we assume all your arguments are correct, so what? Every system is flawed, including ours, but its a lot better than what came before. Again I ask, how would you change it for the better? And how would you change it in such a way that there was a smooth transition? No one is stopping you.
OP is anarchist trollery and that is all it is.
11 pages is way too much welfare for the trollery. Let us hope the thread winds down soon.
Have you given your consent to be governed as most of us have done? If not why do you partake of the fruits and wine that our community of consenters has so marvelously produced since the Declaration of Independence was penned?
To paraphrase Mr. Romney, governments are people, my friend!
No, actually I can’t, I can’t afford to. Which I know in Libertopia means I have a right to die amonst the highwaymen and brigands, because the worst sin in Libertopia is a shortage of money which buys human rights and dignity.
Better yet, wind down your accusations (or your participation here). You can’t insult other people in this forum.
[QUOTE=jackdavinci]
Pretty much the complete opposite is true.
[/quote]
Hold on, there. It’s going too far to say that monopolies only arise due to state intervention, but that does describe a major portion of them, both at the federal level (USPS, AT&T, New Deal cartels, Civil Aeronautics Board, United States Mail Steamship Company) and the state or local (taxi medallions, state liquor stores).
No, they don’t. Monopolies are something that capitalism has a natural tendency to produce, unless the State breaks them up or prevents them from forming.
And the Civil Aeronautics Board wasn’t a monopoly, it was a government agency.
But the state also can and has caused them to form. On any list of causes of monopolization, in with technical barriers and other causes, you will find “legal barriers”.
With monopolistic effects…well, perhaps cartelizing effects would be more accurate in that case. So, I’ll withdraw that one.
Which 100 people? Some people really don’t deserve any help, at all, and we’d all be better of if Mitt kept his money.
What makes me sick are adaher’s endless straw-man comments. “Some people think everyone should be taxed at 100% and then all of it should be re-distributed by Obama, but me, I disagree with those people.” Blech.
So it’s okay if the only people who pay taxes are those who are least able to avoid them?
This is the problem with the IRS bashing. Wait until Americans start to feel like only suckers pay taxes. That’s the way the Greeks feel about it, and they have a government that can’t pay its bills. This whole idea that there’s something wrong with enforcing tax laws is outrageous. You don’t want to pay? Then I’m happy to pay my taxes as long as they are used to incarcerate you.