Black1014 years ago
Did the Government ask them to do that?
Which I mean, my wife believes that the government using the threat of violence to collect taxes is immoral, unethical, and that all transactions between all individuals should be voluntary and nonviolent. Which in terms of popular discourse, is very "extreme". She was thinking about running for local public office an a platform of "the government will not take away your propery for failure to pay taxes" which a surprising number of local people on Facebook supported. She's been going to Meetups and having people say "oh yeah I saw your meme, the government sucks, keep it up!" She bugs local politicans on Facebook, their ads keep popping up in her feed, so she'll ask them things like "do you think it's moral to seize someone's property when they can't pay their taxes?" which of course gets bullshit nonanswers from politicians. Nobody wants to say "I think it's moral to seize someone's house because they're behind on taxes".
An authoritarian government wouldn't like someone like my wife, and they certainly wouldn't want her getting likes on Facebook. After all, what if she DOES run for office? What if she wins? What if other people like her win?
Yeah, it doesn't own it: the relationship is more fundamental than that. Government (and its primitive antecedents) is the system that enables you to own property in the first place, and taxes (or their equivalents) are the price of admission to that system.
I wouldn't mind making taxes voluntary if it also meant surrendering property and other rights (though of course to be just that surrender could only happen after a formal renunciation of the obligation, not just a failure to pay). So you could choose to not pay taxes, but then all your property would become legally abandoned and you'd lose the protection of the law.
She's talking about making taxation voluntary.
Which seems on the wrong side of crackpot to me.
Of course anyone who goes on and on about "the threat of violence" when talking about taxes is not going to discuss the issue in good faith. "Building libraries by gunpoint" is a thought terminating cliche. They're a brand of libertarian that elevates the very concept of being required to do something they don't want to as violence against them.
They are exhausting to deal with.
Taxes are the dues you pay to live in the community you stay.
There's a lot the government should stay out of, but there's also a lot the government should be doing as well. And as long as the government should be doing things, it'll need money to do those things.
Because that's what happens when owe money that you don't pay.
You chose where to live when you bought that property. That choosing is an implicit agreement with the government of that area to pay them taxes in exchange for certain services (schools, roads, police, fire, etc). And you are part of that choice whenever elections come up. Sure, you may vote 'No' on every tax increase, but that doesn't exempt you. Because, once again, as part of the agreement you implicitly made, you agreed to abide by the decision of the group in order to live in the area.
When you owe money that you don't pay, and you refuse the normal first consequence (eviction).
Taxes aren't some special category of owed money that carries with it a unique consequence.
Do you ever wonder why you have to make such hyperbolic analogies to even come close to a point?
Look at how the Amish were able to opt out of social security.
A lot of people decided, before you were born, that people living in your location would pay taxes. You or your parents chose for you to be subject to those rules when you moved there or were born. By continuing to live there, you subjected yourself to those rules. If you don’t agree, you can move somewhere else. However, part of those rules means you may have to give up something you value in exchange—citizenship, the right to vote on the rules, property, exit taxes, etc.
Unfortunately for you, there is no desirable place on this planet that doesn’t follow this “our land, our rules” approach. Most of them are very picky about who can be citizens. Luckily for you, you’re one of the privileged few who gets to live in one of the good places. (I presume, since you’re commenting here.)
You call taxes theft. I call NOT paying taxes theft—taking from the common good we and generations before us have all worked to establish.
In a nutshell, I didn’t find your arguments convincing. You weren’t able to express how your initial idea (don’t take property from people who don’t pay taxes) would work. Instead, you made it “work” with another, grossly impractical idea that we replace taxes with service charges. Your rebuttal to my concerns about that idea (inconvenient, regressive) was that other things are also inconvenient and regressive, as if that somehow excuses an idea from being inconvenient and regressive. You could have at least tried to argue it would be less inconvenient and regressive.
The cherry on the cake, though, was your championing HOA dues. Not only does that show a profound “let them eat cake” lack of awareness and empathy for people who struggle to make ends meet, it’s functionally equivalent to a tax! It’s a fee paid by a community to support the common good of the community. And do you know what happens to people who don’t pay HOA dues? Go on, look it up.
Yeah, you’ll get sued and your house could get foreclosed.
Your HOA is a just like a small government. If you have kids and they inherit your house, they will be subject to its rules, just like you are subject to the rules of your country. If they don’t like those rules, they can move out, just like you can. They might take a loss, just like you might.
Anyway, again, I appreciate you making an account and engaging civilly on this. I can’t imagine we’ll ever agree, so I’ll let you have the last word.
But that aside, WincysWife isn’t arguing for a change in how money is collected, but how non-payment is penalized. The statement was that you lose access to services. My question, which hasn’t been answered, is how that is enforced when so much that the government does isn’t a simple “service” that is provided to you directly.
(It may be tempting to respond with another non-answer, such as “the government shouldn’t do those things,” but again that’s dodging the question. The government does do those things, and I’m trying to get at a real-world answer, not a hypothetical.)
It's a parody of libertarianism, but that's exactly how Ferengi society worked in Star Trek, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVa8NaYTMIQ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNCX6InQ3ZQ. There was one five minute scene I remember as a kid where Quark literally was dropping money in a box a couple times a minute to get his questions answered somewhere.
There are lots of ways to raise money that don't involve throwing people in jail or confiscating their property for not paying. Pay per service is one, but not the only one. One should be able to cancel their subscription to government services and not have to pay. The Amish already do this for payroll taxes, do they are exempt because they have a mutual aid society that takes care of their medical and retirement needs.
We already live under a regressive tax system, especially for local governments which rely on sales and property taxes. Our current tax system is not convenient, and we pay a lot for poor service.
It would be silly to make a fuss over someone using a park if they don't pay taxes, but it could be dealt with like any other trespassing. My local park is paid for by the HOA, not the government, and it's not that big of a deal. We already have a system in place for paying for the roads. We pay the gas tax, and we have a system where you have to have a driver's license and insurance, and in many places you have to pay property taxes and/or sales tax on your car, and pay registration fees. It would be a simple matter to suspend someone's license for not paying taxes. Or you could decide to allow non-tax-payers to drive as long as they pay the gas tax when they fuel up.
I'm not saying that the government shouldn't necessarily do those things, but people should have the option to get their needs met by different organizations and not have to pay if they wish. For social needs like healthcare, education, welfare, that is very easy to do, just like the Amish do. Subscribe to a different organization that takes care of those things, and they will probably have a tithe or fee requirement, and rules, and that's fine as long as the person agrees to it. The only problem with the government system we have now is that we have no way of consenting or not consenting, and if we disobey, even if we are being peaceful and aren't violating anyone else's rights, we can be thrown in jail or have our property confiscated. It would really be quite simple to fix the flaw in the system. The only reason we haven't is because we're going off of a system made by people who were thinking outside of the box by rejecting monarchy. We then rejected slavery, gave rights to women, etc. We are still figuring out how to be moral.
And since neither involves paying directly for a government service, there's nothing the government could deny in the absence of payment.
Income taxes are no more voluntary than consumption taxes.
> corporations (already masters at tax avoidance under coercive taxation) would never opt in
130 countries have already backed a global corporation tax rate.
> nor would consumers volunteer to pay more for goods and services when they could simply pay less.
They already do. A gallon of gas is $1.8 in Malaysia, $3.5 in America, and over $8 in the Netherlands.
> And since neither involves paying directly for a government service, there's nothing the government could deny in the absence of payment.
The good/service one is purchasing is the incentive itself.
Yes, that was my point. Replacing income taxes with corporate and consumption taxes in a voluntary taxation system doesn't make sense, as there's no incentive to volunteer to pay any of that.
>130 countries have already backed a global corporation tax rate.
130 governments may have backed a global corporation tax rate, but that's still coercion of taxes by threat of violence. No corporations have voluntarily agreed to anything of the sort.
>A gallon of gas is $1.8 in Malaysia, $3.5 in America, and over $8 in the Netherlands.
Those prices are set by gas companies and taxation, consumers didn't agree to those prices, and they certainly didn't agree to the taxes. I never signed a contract agreeing to gas for $3.50 a gallon.
>The good/service one is purchasing is the incentive itself.
But the government isn't providing either, a private business is. And as the tax is voluntary, that business has no incentive to deny customers who opt out because those taxes doesn't affect revenue. Rather, any business that would deny service for that reason would find itself quickly devoid of customers.
Give people a choice, and they'll only pay for what benefits them personally. People won't pay for schools to educate other people's children, or schools that teach a curriculum with which they disagree. They won't pay for libraries whose books they don't read, or for parks, because homeless people hang out there. People will just buy smoke detectors and not fund the fire department. People won't fund the police, they'll just buy insurance or keep a gun under their pillow. They won't pay to fix the roads unless they're inconvenienced by a pothole. And welfare and other social programs would just vanish altogether. Most people would refuse to pay any taxes at all to a government run by a political party they didn't vote for.
There's a reason taxes are collected at the point of a gun - you can't trust public altruism to fund a modern state.
"People won't pay for schools to educate other people's children, or schools that teach a curriculum with which they disagree." People donate to schools and set up scholarships for the poor. But we expect parents to pay for the needs of their children for everything else, including daycare, feed, housing, etc. And if a parent can't afford the property taxes they will be made homeless. And why should someone be forced to pay for a curriculum they disagree with?
"They won't pay for libraries whose books they don't read" People set up little free libraries, no reason it couldn't be set up in a larger scale, all paid for voluntarily without taking people's homes if they don't pay. I would say housing is more of a need than a library. And everything is practically free online already. But a library could be a service built into your mutual aid society along with the school for your kids.
"or for parks, because homeless people hang out there." We pay a few bucks every time we go to the arboretum, and if we wanted to we could pay a yearly fee to become members. Our HOA pays for the local park. No reason to steal people's houses to pay for a park, creating homeless people. Why am I paying so much money in taxes if society isn't even going to take care of homeless people? I would want my tax dollars to go to that before a park or a library!
"People will just buy smoke detectors and not fund the fire department." Well, I hope we all have fire detectors. There's no reason that fire protection can't be bundled in with your homeowner's insurance, which is required by your mortgage holder. The city has no liability if the house burns down and the fire department fails to save it. Let the homeowner's insurance, which carries the liability, hire the fire fighters.
"People won't fund the police, they'll just buy insurance or keep a gun under their pillow." The Parkland school shooting victims would tell you that the cops didn't help them, and the court ruled that the police had no obligation to protect those children, and it was fine for them to wait outside while they knew children were being shot. If you want to pay for police protection that's fine, but if someone wants to hire a private security firm, (which could be bundled in with homeowner's insurance like fire protection), or own a gun, or organize a local gun club, or whatever, that's fine. It would keep the local police department honest if they knew that if people didn't like their service they would stop paying.
"They won't pay to fix the roads unless they're inconvenienced by a pothole." In some places the government is terrible at fixing potholes and Domino's Pizza is doing it. But this should be paid for by the gas tax as I explained in detail in a different comment to someone else. If you choose not to drive, and choose not to pay for the roads, you shouldn't have your house taken, you just shouldn't be allowed to drive on the roads.
"And welfare and other social programs would just vanish altogether." Well this just isn't true at all. We used to have mutual aid societies that worked really well. But then the government put regulations on them and started government programs that did many of the same things like social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment insurance, etc. We still have insurance for many things the government doesn't cover like life insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, etc. And if people do find themselves without a mutual aid society, or insurance to help them when someone thing happens there are people willing to help. We saw how people stepped up to work the food banks during the lock-down and there was a lot of need. Food stamps doesn't pay for much and there was still need and charity stepped in.
"Most people would refuse to pay any taxes at all to a government run by a political party they didn't vote for." That sounds great to me. People wouldn't have to fight anymore. I have neighbors that are Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, Protestant, Jewish, Mormon, and we don't fight about it. We can all go to our place of worship, tithe or give money to whatever organization we want, follow whatever rules, etc. But when it comes to government policy, like what will the taught in the schools, then it becomes a fight. We had a school board meeting be done virtually last minute because the school board claimed they were afraid for their safety because so many angry parents were showing up. If we are getting to the point where we can't even have a school board meeting without fear of violence, it's time to try freedom.
"There's a reason taxes are collected at the point of a gun - you can't trust public altruism to fund a modern state." Yes, the reason is because this is the way the King of England did it, so we did it, and we're still doing it, even though it's not right. It's not like anyone has seriously considered it, tried it, found it lacking and decided to go back to the old way. That's why these ideas sound so foreign to you and you have so many questions. Few have ever seriously considered this before.
Those people are usually against public roads. Utopia is a toll road, I guess.
They have the same problem as many people who are more "against" something than for anything: in their focused zeal to stop that one thing they oppose, they propose a whole lot of other things that are actually worse or don't make sense. They also tend to have a hard time seeing that because they're so transfixed by the thing they hate that they're blinded.
In California: why do people pay different (sometimes significantly) amount of taxes on identical houses next door to each other but receive the same level of service just based on WHEN and HOW MUCH they paid for the property?
I'm pretty sure that's already the case, though it's typically not explicitly stated.
Crimes in expensive neighborhoods often get a lot more police attention than crimes in the ghetto.
Also: Do people who don't pay taxes, e.g. homeless, unemployed, destitute, not get the benefits of police protection?
It's the government that makes the rules, they decide to make people homeless for not paying property taxes, and to charge sales tax on food, even for the destitute. In my city this winter a homeless person was bothered by the cops, they stole his blanket, and then he froze to death where they left him outside. Ask anyone who's been homeless if they fear the police or not.
* Remove access to healthcare
* Revoke driver's licenses
* Remove access to courts
I agree that while the government doesn't own you, you still operate inside the collective and have obligations towards it.
Of course, this is no reason for facebook to mark you as an extremist.
Sovereign citizens will very quickly discover that participating in society provides them with a lot of value.
US doesn't have single payer. You pay for it out of pocket (if it comes from your employer, well you're exchanging service for service instead of service for money).
> Remove access to courts
This would be unconstitutional. In the US you are entitled to a fair trial even if you aren't a citizen.
What services? Some of these are inalienable rights. Citizen or not.
My understanding is that HN has no shortage of libertarians. Maybe one of them could tell us if there’s an alternate way to enforce contracts.
Or does she rely on the coercive power of the State? The State that maintains a monopoly on violence.
I think threatening the tenant with a gun to get the money then kick him out of the flat is the way it should go for most libertarians. You'd appreciate the irony of this not being an aggression.
(there's a reason why libertarianism is almost only found in the US: it lays on the Far West myth a lot)
I'd vote for her.
Hotel California indeed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance_Act
Me and her obviously disagree, but the villification I feel I know.
(Here it is the national broadcaster who has decided my friends are evil and I am dumb.)
He doesn't pay taxes. Says he'll pay if he gets pursued by the IRS because it'll be too difficult to fight - but also refuses to participate in fiat currency. (Big on crypto - has the wife do all the fiat handling) Doesn't believe in taxation for the most part. Similar arguments about violence. I didn't really get deep into it - the wife was already pretty out there for a while. (They're both really nice and good people btw - they just have this unusual commitment to their worldview) Interestingly, I think he went even deeper on the views and she decided to reel it back a bit for herself. Suddenly she's not as hyper-capitalist anymore...
It's one of those views that makes ya wonder how you get there and how you decide to go that deep. Admittedly, he's fiendishly rich now thanks to crypto so he can live the fantasy a little bit but it is something that I cannot see someone doing if they weren't rich already.
Sometimes I see them and others and think, "coulda been me". Just didn't click on the right links, I guess. :)
Just like East Berlin and North Korea, parents will soon have to be extremely careful what they say in front of their children, because our technolords are making our children into informers.
Yeah, I'm thinking it can only produce further radicalization.
Maybe that achieves the same thing in a simpler way than changing minds. But does shrinking the userbase please advertisers?
Violent groups can be very persuasive. They often use feelings of fear, anger, and disappointment to further their cause and get others to join them. They may use arguments based on these feelings to convince you that violence is the solution, even when facts prove it is not.
...
- Extremist groups may say violence is a legitimate and effective way to achieve change, but there is no evidence it works. In fact, violence often makes things a lot worse and doesn't lead to the outcomes the group wants.
- Did you know that researchers have shown that peaceful movements are more successful than violent ones at bringing about social change?
She has become one. Completely unhinged from reality, refuses to let him into her house because she thinks he got vaccinated against Covid (Which makes him project an aura that is harmful to the female body), is convinced that The Donald won 300 EC votes and will seize power on the 4th of July (Or whatever other nonsense Q tells her), etc, etc.
He's, understandably, not very pleased with how Facebook and Twitter enabled and encouraged this form of brainwashing. Unfortunately for him, that ship has long sailed, and now he has to live on it.
I can see how it would be, actually. But I also feel like it was so recent that it would be the opposite.
I'll admit that I don't actually keep track because, you know, it's bullshit that's not going to happen.
Is it now July 4th because of the Declaration and Trump will declare us free from Biden being the puppet President of the corporation of the United States or something?
Let me be clear: the conspiracies they’re getting sucked into are dangerous and often bizarre. But if we jump immediately to extremism as the cause, I think we’re missing the bigger story here.
People are scared. They don’t know how to navigate the Internet safely. They don’t know how to filter out bullshit. They start watching carefully crafted videos and well written blog posts that take the truth - twist it hard - and suck them right in to an alternate reality that is easier to understand.
They freak out. They think there is an existential threat working against them. They think their friends have been sucked into the “evil” side of the conspiracy.
It’s tragic, and I wish it was not like this. But often these people - especially family - need love and support, and a nudge in another direction. Will this work? Maybe not. But immediate labeling and then ostracizing these people entrenches their views, and feeds the “extremism”.
And there are real extremists. People who have been looking for an opportunity to act, and the current climate provides it. Let’s not mix Mom’s tendency to believe in conspiracies with real extremism.
And the bias of the censors doesn't make them seem any more trustworthy - if anything, it just reaffirms the conspiracy theories.
Worse, it could be self-reinforcing. Let's suppose enough people make a claim that AOC is an extremist, and she gets removed. Then people who agree with her get claimed to be extremists. Unless the algorithm is very careful, it might remove them as extremists because they share ideas with a known extremist. Eventually all the Democrats get removed because they share both ideas and an organization with extremists. And then the neutrals and moderate Republicans get removed, because they share some ideas with known extremists.
And Facebook winds up with only 10% of its users surviving the purge. And so they wind up with only 10% of their revenue surviving the purge.
The cynic in me is impressed: in one fell swoop they've wrung even more free labor from their users, turned them against each other so they don't unite, and have built something to point at when regulators start asking more pointed questions. It seems as effective as it is depraved.
Except they can now monitor a lot more than just phone calls. And they have the infinite memory of data storage so they can look you up later instead of wasting live listeners on you now. And they have real-time automated tools to pop up messages in your face to influence you, or let you report other people for wrongthink.
Employees of these organizations should be raising Cain about it. If they saw it on TV they'd be aghast. But hmmm, in real life they don't seem to mind.
I agree that it is worrying that facebook is trying to determine what is acceptable / true, and what is extremist. People with that kind of position should come by that power through choice of those who consume that truth. That means politicians, editorial boards, opinion makers. Either people who were elected, or people who you can decide to tune out.
The social media companies do not have this mandate. So doing this kind of stuff is bad. But.
But, on the other hand, extremist violence is actually a widely recognized problem, and these platforms are playing a significant role. It makes sense that we try to hold them accountable. The issue is that is leaves them between a rock and a hard place. It makes sense that they want to be more proactive about this stuff. But either it should not be their job, or there should be a choice in who censors / editorializes your facebook. It should not, by default, be facebook itself.
Facebook does not like this though. Facebook does not wanna say "hey all you trump voters, please go somewhere else". It would either break their network effect, or it would force them to go to a federated system. But really, this is the only reasonable solution here. Otherwise facebook is slowly going to alienate and censor Trump voters. Turning more of them into extremist who believe themselves the victim of "the man". And in some sense, they'd be right.
Now the last thing needed is to require every person to carry a phone with them all the time with assumption that one that does not carry is suspicious.
Alright everybody, did you all finish your copies of 1984 like we talked about at the last meeting?
OK good, so we'll go around the room here and each of you give me one idea about how we can make facebook more like 1984.
OK go
Well, in 1984, Big Brother found it effective to have citizens report on eachother's transgressions. It meant effectively, citizens were paranoid of eachother and would control their behaviour for them.
Great, I like it. Get the engineers on it pronto. I want it out by the end of the month.
Or it is now defined as diverging from the views of the government and big tech?