Which side champions 'individualism' more - liberals or conservatives?

Great Debates
241

Well, I’ll generously assume that this latest version is now the syllogism, even if it differs from what you said earlier.

Are fines theft? Somebody is convicted of a crime, the court sentences them to pay a fine with the threat of force behind it. By your (1), this is theft.

For that matter, are civil judgments also theft? I get sued, lose the court case, have to pay damages… theft?

Seems to me a broadly-defined “theft” concept loses some of its emotional weight. Theft bereft of heft, as it were.

242

In addition to your suggestions, one can pretty easily “live under the radar,” doing a lot of bartering instead of working for folding money.

It’s kind of sad, because they’re screwing themselves, by excluding themselves from the Social Security program. I get that they hate Social Security, but it’s still sad that they are entitled to monetary support in their old age which they are minimizing by not contributing.

I guess it’s a sign of integrity when people allow themselves to be harmed by their ideologies. (But I know several conservatives who, in hard times, have swallowed their pride and taken public food and health benefits.)

I also wanted to throw in here that taxes are not enforced at gunpoint. No IRS official has ever held a gun to a taxpayer’s head and insisted on payment. The only way you get to the gunpoint stage is by ignoring a number of court orders, and finding yourself under arrest for contempt.

And, yes, an arrest for contempt is enforced at gunpoint.

Taxes…just aren’t. It’s a stupid and wrongful claim, and just as absurdly hyperbolic as the “theft” claim.

243

Oregon and Montana have no sales tax. I suppose you could operate as a roving mechanic or cottage industrialist, only taking cash for your product or service, but you could not have electric service or municipal water supplied, because there are taxes on that stuff. You get your water out of the nearby river, and the diesel van you live in would be fueled with untaxed heating oil that you buy from people.

Living wholly tax-free would not be easy or comfortable, nor should it be.

244

Rechecking my list, I see you’re right. For personal comfort and given the choices of Oregon, Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire and Delaware… maybe Oregon has the most temperate climate, though I see it can vary quite a bit since it’s a fairly large state. I don’t know about Delaware - it looks like it’d be pretty humid and prone to the occasional Atlantic hurricane.

Waymore’s been using a “so you’re saying ‘love it or leave it’, right” as a passive-aggressive defense mechanism, but it’s clear that he can avoid (or at least hugely reduce) the amount of “theft” he suffers if he’s willing to put up with some hardship.

Personally, I’m okay with saying “pay your legally required taxes or get the fuck out”, because I don’t care whether he loves something or not.

245

I disagree. Failure to pay taxes has consequences, and at the end of those consequences is being arrested and imprisoned, and if you refuse to cooperate, there are tasers and guns involved. If those tasers/guns didn’t exist, a lot of people wouldn’t pay their taxes; they’d ignore all demands to pay taxes if, at the end of the process, the government just threw up its hands and gave up. The tasers/guns are crucial to the process.

But, and this is key, it’s the best system for minimizing the amount of coercive property transfer. Without a democratically-elected government enforcing specific versions of property rights, you quickly devolve to a system in which someone else with a lot of guns is enforcing their own version of property rights. The difference is that without the government, you don’t get a say in what version of property rights is enforced.

Yeah. He didn’t agree to these taxes, and they’re coercive, and they’re very difficult to avoid. But that’s because humans ain’t angels. Unless he’s willing to avoid humans altogether, there is no conceivable way for him to avoid all coercive property transfers. Again, without government requiring taxes, it’s gonna be Big Bubba with a Big Gun and a bunch of thugs coming by and taking his stuff, and the only way for him to avoid that is for him to become Big Bubba.

246

There’s always a bigger bubba…

247

But the guns and tasers come about because of the refusal to cooperate, not because taxes are owed. The taxes themselves are not collected by force.

Before you ever saw a gun, you’d have had to have ignored at least one court order, and court orders are enforced at gunpoint (if necessary.) But taxes themselves aren’t.

248

…with a court order…to pay taxes. The fact that there are steps in between doesn’t cancel the fact that the process ends with guns.

249

I think the prime example of taxes is roads. My property and fuel taxes go to build and maintain roads, and I can use them fairly freely (aside from those tyrannical traffic lights and speed limits). Without taxation, I would be paying the Thruway Consortium broadband rates to use their roads, which would probably be poorly maintained by comparison, and there would be other roads not owned by the TC that I would have to pay extra to use. And the stuff I buy travels over the roads as well: we could expect graft and kickbacks between the TC and manufacturers that would almost certainly limit what we could buy or jack prices up.

Personally, I approve of taxes for open roads. And that is in Article I of the US Constitution.

250

Not going to go back and quote line by line, but you’re wrong on this one.

Failure to pay income taxes is not grounds for arrest or imprisonment. If you accurately report your income but refuse to pay, the IRS enforcement arm will not arrest you, nor will the process end with guns. They will simply levy fines, garnish your wages, kill your credit, and seize your assets. If you have no wages, no assets, there is no way they will be able to collect. Now, failure to report income will may lead to guns/arrest/imprisonment.

You really need to define how you are using the word “force”. Without a working definition, it is acting as a catchall for any action you do not like. That’s meaningless and without a definition your use of the word in this context is a failure of your argument.

How is the government exerting force? You are choosing to engage in transactions that you know involve paying taxes. That’s a voluntary transaction. Say I travel to Target to purchase the Blu-Ray of Forgetting Sarah Marshall because Kristen Bell is cute as a button! Upon finding the movie and going to the register to pay for it, I am informed the price is $19.99 + sales tax, a grand total of $21.99. Now you have stated that sales tax is theft. So if I choose to purchase this magnificent movie, in your construction someone has stolen from me. How can my choice to enjoy this wonderful movie cause some force to be exerted over me? That transaction is voluntary. Now, you may say, I don’t need to enjoy Kristen Bell, the little sprite. But this example holds for all purchases. Your assertion that sales tax is theft does not hold up to scrutiny.

Now, you complain that you would not be able to live a “normal” life. But you are not entitled to live a normal life. You are not entitled to a job, to use of the roads, to a home, to any of these things. If you would like to engage with society, that is a choice. A choice made voluntarily cannot be said to be forced, and therefore the ensuing taxes associated with those choices cannot be said to be forced. If there is no force, there is no theft.

You need to define how you are using the word “force” because in every example you’ve given with regard to taxes, there is no force involved, only obvious choices that have both positive and negative outcomes. You don’t like the negative outcomes, sure. That you still choose to be pay taxes, doesn’t mean the negative outcomes were forced upon you - you chose them because the positives outweigh the negatives.

What is truly foolish is to think you are entitled to some kind of normal life choosing to participate in society and enjoying the benefits and simultaneously think you are being forced to pay the costs. Both are choices.

So if I take the neighborhood kid’s bike by force, I have not committed theft? Who owns the bike? Since the kid who is 12 years old can’t own property, I could not have stolen from him. If a 14 year old child has a paper route and gets paid $100 for each week he works, who does the money belong to?

You previously used the example of rape. When someone has forcible intercourse with a child, has the child been raped? You have said a child cannot own property, therefore there is no self ownership for children. One person cannot own another, right?

I don’t think you’ve thought this through with respect to children and ownership.

251

Interesting–I did not know that. Thanks for fighting my ignorance here!

But let’s say they’re seizing your assets. If you refuse to let an agent of the IRS take your assets–say, they’re repossessing a vacation home–arrest may still be in the works. And if you refuse to pay the fines they levy, what happens then?

The entire system rests on the leviathan, on the state’s monopoly on force. That’s a very good thing (this coming from an ex-anarchist, btw, who was persuaded by Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature that a nongovernmental society really is a craphole). The IRS both derives its power from, and funds, that monopoly on force. Sure, everything is pretty messy and government is pretty wretched, but every alternative is even worse.

252

These are excellent points. I was thinking about what Waymore said, and how it rendered certain of my classroom judgments meaningless. When I called Jerry’s mother to tell her that Jerry had stolen Mary’s change from her purse, I’m surprised she didn’t laugh at me and say, “Silly Mr. Dorkness, that’s impossible, Mary’s a minor and therefore incapable of being victimized by theft.”

253

If you actively resist, like say, repel the sheriff’s deputy, you’d probably be arrested for resisting or some other crime, but not for simply lack of payment. If you refuse to pay a fine that is levied it’s treated the same as a debt that is owed. We do not have debtor’s prisons so the only way to collect is through garnishments, liens, or asset seizures.

254

Huh. If I, say, occupy a vacation home, lying down on the front porch and refusing to leave, I won’t be arrested?

If not, that’s certainly news to me. If I would, that’s the law using force to gain my property.

I don’t have a problem with that, if that’s how it’d go down.

255

I would say the left does. The left would prefer to spend the war money on education and give each and every person a shot at greatness. The right just results in those born with money getting the shot and every one else gets to fend for themselves. You ever fend for yourself in a trailer park? or the ghetto? You will submit and follow or be greatly scarred. No one around you sees that there is more and your differences make you a target. You are lucky to be born with money to run and hide or you get affected whether you like it or not.

Most musicians are actors you despise were born with money. Almost everything in art and media now is rich people. The integrity is lost. None of them has worked for their first $$ million. They dont understand us one bit. Most movies stink nowadays too. Rich kids dont have any life experience to write about so they copy stories that have already been done.

256

That’s not quite the same. Let’s say you own said vacation home and as a result of your failure to pay, the jurisdiction that you and the vacation home is in permits the seizure of this real property. At that point, it is no longer yours and you would be trespassing. For that, you could be arrested. Again, it’s not the failure to pay that causes the arrest/imprisonment, it’s the trespass.

But if you have no property to seize, what’s the point? Fines, garnishments, asset seizures. Not guns and imprisonment. For sure, fines, garnishments, and seizures are force. Taxation itself though, no that’s not force because there is no requirement to engage in transactions which creates tax liabilities.

257

This was essentially my point (but you express it better.) For the guns to come out, you would have had to do a lot more than just not pay taxes. Resisting arrest, defying a court order, something like that.

This is true. This is how every human society works, even primitive or tribal groups. You do what the elders say, or the elders will have the young warriors thump you. It’s how we function; it’s at the level of our deepest instincts.

A good friend of mine used to be an anarchist, but slowly, over a period of decades, he reasoned out the flaws in his beliefs. Anarchism is too unstable; it tends to collapse into strong-man tyranny. It’s simply too easy for an ambitious bastard to put together a private army. The best defense that humanity has come up with is a public army – or police force – that is controlled by the citizenry. And it doesn’t always work: there are bad cops, and military coups d’etat, and other forms of failure and corruption. But it’s the best we’ve figured out how to do.

258

Yes, that’s basically why I’ve moved away from anarchism myself.

This strikes me as a fine hair to split. In the end, the state claims property that used to be mine, and if I don’t accede to their taking the property–if I continue to treat it as though it’s mine, despite the state’s counterclaim–the state comes after me with guns. You call it trespassing, I call it failure to surrender my property to the state.

259

I am reminded of this quote:

  • Thomas Paine, Common Sense
260

It is a fine distinction to be sure. But remember, the original point was that failure to pay would lead to guns, arrest, etc. That’s not true - it would likely lead to garnishments and liens. Asset seizures eventually, but only if it’s worth it. There are people out there that simply refuse to pay. Here is one example. This couple hasn’t paid what they owed for the last 30 years. No guns, just lots of garnishments.

My point with this line was to say that all of the things that are subject to fines, garnishments, and seizures are in fact voluntary arrangements and therefore the idea that the associated taxation connected with those arrangements is not theft because there is no force involved in the taxation. If you don’t want to pay the tax, don’t. But also don’t possess any assets or engage activities that incur tax liabilities.