Thats a strange stance to me. I would say the society wouldn’t become immoral until said immoral activity was accepted by society. Immorality should be shunned by society.
Did the slaveowner allow the slaves to leave whenever they wished to? That is the difference between slavery and a freely agreed upon contract.
I understand that, boo hoo, it is just too tough for you to leave this oppressive society. You can get a job elsewhere. You could try to convince your family that they’d be better off “free.” And people move from their friends all the time to change jobs. If you can’t lift a finger for freedom, don’t blame us. Oh, you can’t find a truly free and working society to move to over the whole earth? That might be a clue.
You’re welcome to try this. If it goes nowhere, maybe you should ask yourself why.
BTW, owning oneself might be philosophically valid, but not practically valid. How do you think slavery started, anyway? Even today, even in the US, there are cases where the rich and powerful enslave the poor and weak. And who stops this? The government you hate so much. Without it, and without the taxes to pay for it, even money that you wind up with a slave collar around your neck, and all your cries of “help, I’m being oppressed” are not going to help.
Let me get this straight. You’re using the internet, which was largely the creation of government. Which you pay for by working at a job that doubtlessly depends on government infrastructure (roads, bridges, water, air traffic control, etc.). And you do this after consuming foods that can pass government inspection, transported in ways that meet government requirements, and contain nutritional information required by government. And you’re using medications that are often the product of government-subsidized research and are subject to rigorous govermental testing and approval. The fact that you have lived so long is part in fact due to government safety standards for cars, government placed traffic control devices, and government screening of your fellow drivers.
Now after all of this, you want to claim that it’s extortion to insist that you pay for what you’re getting? You’re like the guy who sits down at a restaurant and after eating is amazed that the food isn’t free. There is a difference between extortion and not allowing someone to steal from the rest of us.
How does your society define morality or enforce it without laws, police, courts etc.
What if not every member of your society agrees with the same definition of morality? I mean philosophers have been debating that since the dawn of civilization. How do you account for that? Do you dictate morality to your society from on high? Will there be a vote? What if not everyone agrees with your dictates, or the will of the majority? What then?
So, if someone breaks into your house and starts stealing stuff, and does not threaten you, you can’t use any force at all to stop them? Government at its core is most of society uniting to defend ourselves from the worst among us.
I have different definition of a moral society but thats neither here nor there.
I would draw a distinction between the coercion you mention (Mill?) and real deal coercion enforced by guns and cages.
Well it should be anyhow
As i’ve mentioned, defense of property is defense of self.
I don’t accept that taxation is extortion. I asked if the change terminology made any difference, any you haven’t answered as far as I can tell. (That’s ok - the answer is “no, it doesn’t make a difference.”) And I’m not interested in arguing about the characterization of your opinion. Apparently you’re willing to use a lot of loaded language but you’re not willing to accept people’s response to that language. If you don’t like the way people react to your characterizations of taxation as slavery and mob extortion, express your view differently. Acting surprised about it is pointless.
But this is obviously an activity that’s accepted by society: we’re talking about a situation where most of the society wants to do one thing and one member of the society doesn’t want to do it. It seems to me that in your view, it’s now immoral for society to take that action.
The OP is not a moderator.
You are person C. Go away.
I’m beginning to think that you don’t know the meaning of the words you are using. I see on preview that you have invented a meaning for self defense that includes defending property. How do you think that would work out for rental property in another city from where you live or goods in transit between a buyer and a seller? Will we revert to stage coaches with rifle-wielding drivers in your utopia?
This isn’t appropriate for Great Debates. Stop it.
No it isn’t, I just said so. Now you can’t argue using that premise.
I can’t summarize your argument. Please help me do so, by picking one of the following as representative of your view:
[ul][li] I approve of Daddy Baboon extorting half the banana on his daughter’s behalf. That’s all folks; I’m just trying to help you understand the definition of “extort.”[/li][li] Taxing son to pay daughter is NOT extortion. Taxing first cousin to pay nephew IS extortion.[/li][li] Oh please! We need not draw a line regarding kinship degrees. It’s just Me and Mine and The Others.[/li][/ul]
The OP is right. Taxation is extortion, of the “pay up or we’ll break your legs” variety.
And government is not voluntary. Most (all?) countries simply don’t accept immigrants without jumping through ridiculous bureaucratic hoops. Not even counting the high cost of migration that most people simply can’t afford. Restricted immigration/emigration is a huge issue that needs to be corrected before “Don’t like it? Leave” is an acceptable response to government criticism.
The social contract is also bullshit. I didn’t sign any such thing.
Voting is essentially pointless. My vote has far less chance at affecting change than my lottery ticket has at making me a millionaire. And even if it had a significant influence, the choices are mostly indistinguishable. The things I hate about my government are things all candidates agree on. So voting would be a waste of time even if it wasn’t completely ineffective.
That said, government by extortion may or may not be a “necessary evil”. We simply haven’t tried anything else. People are afraid of change. No matter how badly they are screwed by the status quo, they will defend it against all but minor changes.
So minor changes it will be. We’ve already come a long way from absolute monarchies and entire classes of people being considered sub-human. But we’ve got a long way to go. Just because government could be a lot worse doesn’t mean it isn’t still pretty bad.
That said, I don’t have a solution to the problem. But that doesn’t make the OP incorrect.
Nonsense. If I am starving, and you have inherited a massive estate full of food from your father the dictator, and I knock you down on my way out of your house with a loaf of bread for my family, it is you who have acted illegitimately, not me.
Frankly, the OP reads like it’s been written by someone who just recently discovered libertarianism and is exactly the sort of thing that gets people to label libertarianism as impractical. I say this as a libertarian myself who has issues with taxation, at least as it’s currently implemented. I absolutely agree with the idea that a government should serve by the will of the people, that coercion is antithetical to that ideal, and taxation is gather coercively thus, in that simplistic way of thinking, it seems to be that taxation isn’t meaningfully different from extortion. I also think the idea that it’s a necessary evil misses the point as well.
The thing is, there’s different types of services that the government provides, they have varying scopes and costs. The “A and B vote to take X from C” works as a counter example on a small scale, but it doesn’t meaningfully scale to larger issues, which are the sorts of thigns governments exist to deal with. For instance, at a national level, we get defense spending. Sure, there’s a few people that are completely against any such spending, but they’re a tiny minority, and there’s really not anywhere they can go to avoid that, short of moving to one of the few countries that has no defense spending but really is just depending on others for it anyway. Should our nation not have national defense because a fleeting minority are against it? Assuming you agree we should have it, is it fair that though everyone depends on it, that not everyone should contribute to that cost? So it makes sense that even those few people need to pay for it.
So now, it sounds like extortion, but we can’t just evaluate taxation on a single issue. There’s other costs at a national level that the overwhelming majority want, and those need funding too. So, chances are, even if someone is against one of those things that the overwhelming majority wants, they probably DO want some of those other things and so, theoretically, almost everyone should really voluntarily pay taxes because most or all of those taxes are going toward services they want.
But that’s not what we actually see, people hate paying taxes, and even ignoring government inefficiency, they think it’s wasteful. That issue isn’t so much with taxation as it is that we’ve implement certain services at higher levels that is appropriate. A huge number of things the federal government is doing don’t have that overwhelming majority of support, rather they’re often passing with barely above 50% support, sometimes even with public opinion against them. If so many things are getting funded that way, we no longer have a theoretical “cost of membership to society” where I feel like I’m getting cost effective services for my taxes, chances are I only actually want 50% of those services or possibly even less.
And that’s really the source of the problem. If I want a car, it’s MSRP is $10k, it’s free-market value is $10k, and I think it’s worth $10k, but everywhere I go they only have a version with a bunch of other features I don’t want and are asking $20k for it, of course I’m going to be bitter about it. And if I absolutely have to have a car to get to work, I’m stuck paying $20k, and I’m going to feel like they ripped me off. But car dealers address this by providing these features as options and the customer can weigh the cost and features associated with the options.
And that, I think, is where the libertarian idea of decentralization of government would have a huge affect on fixing this issue with taxation. There’s a lot of services that a lot of people want, but how many people actually think everything the government is spending money on is good? Now, it’s still not quite that simple, because there’s some things that really can’t be decentralized in a meaningful way but don’t have the overwhelming support that they would really need to prevent most people from feeling ripped off.
So yeah, I think taxes make sense, but we just need to reconsider what we’re spending the taxes on. If it’s not something that needs to be national and it doesn’t have overwhelming national support, why not let the states handle it, or even at a more local level?
I know. I was just using a little sarcasm to try to illustrate how ridiculous the OP is in this thread regarding his preemptive efforts to eliminate his need to answer certain uncomfortable questions arising from his premise.
Seriously? Even with the first 3 arguments gone, (which you didn’t refute, you just refuse to acknowledge them), I have another for you.
You get actual protection for your taxes. Extortionists only protect you from themselves. The government at least tries to protect you from all comers. The only time you don’t need a government is when you’re living somewhere no one wants to live, and they still come in pretty handy then.
However, I refuse to debate this until you’re at least willing to debate reasons 1-3.
Yay! I win now!
So taxes are an imperfect solution to a really complex problem. If it was THAT bad, surely you could think of just one better idea?
Also, your gripe about voting is tired. Sorry, but you are not entitled to more than 1/population of a vote, and if you can’t find a distinction between your options, you are not paying attention or you are too radical to appease.
Put a bullet through the head of someone picking your pocket and see how far that defense would get you. Or do you want to go back to hanging thieves?
The government passes a law that says, “Anybody who donates one million dollars a year to a political party is allowed to extort money or real estate from up to 50 people a year by any means he desires.”
How do you respond? After all, extortion is now legal.
Even without such a ridiculous situation, it could be argued that threatening to sue somebody is a legal form of extortion. It costs a great deal of money to hire a lawyer for a court battle, and juries are unpredictable. Major corporations will often settle with people for a relatively small amount, precisely for those reasons.