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What philosophical premise finds objection with taxation in general??
by ramraj07 3y ago
What philosophical premise finds objection with taxation in general??
- sneak 3y agohttps://youtu.be/2fvGasiOkBY https://youtu.be/2fvGasiOkBY is perhaps the best take on it I have ever seen.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoSelf-identification with John Galt?
- mminer237 3y agoPersonally, I find it problematic philosophically that others can unilaterally take your property, but I understand it is practically necessary and justified by agreement to the social contract being implied by one's continued voluntary presence in such polity.
- __loam 3y agoI like your philosophy of "taxation is theft, but roads are pretty cool"
- croes 3y agoYour property? Depends on the country but normally your success benefitted from things like your and your employees's education, police, infrastructure etc. Taxes are a way to pay back. The amount is debatable not the existence as such.
- mminer237 3y agoSure, but justifying such post facto violates the officious intermedler doctrine.
- DrScientist 3y agoYou might not have personally agreed - but society has ( as least in a democracy ). The whole point of centralised laws is it's much more efficient than negotiating with everyone you meet as to whether they will k!ll you and/or take or stuff or not. The scale of interactions in modern societies requires simplification of the management of those interactions - laws and enforcement of - what's allow or not is decided once, not every interaction.
- mminer237 3y agoYeah, like I originally said, even if you don't agree with your taxes specifically, you agree to them as part of society by continuing to exist inside in it. By my philosophy, taxes are justified as long as you have the theoretical legal right to emigrate.
- croes 3y agoIt was your parents decision which nationality you have, by accepting the nationality they accepted the rules and costs, so no officious intermedler. BTW without governments opayed through taxes things like officious intermedler doctrine wouldn't exist instead you get the good old nice-place-you-got-there-be-a-shame-if-anything-happened-to-it doctrine. Nice place you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it
- fires10 3y agoI don't understand this comment. Can someone explain it like I'm five?
- DrScientist 3y agoYou can't give somebody something unrequested and then demand payment. Otherwise people could send you parcels you haven't ordered and then charge you. So he is saying he hasn't asked for the government services but is been forced to pay for them. The obvious answer is that by being a member of society you have implicitly agreed to it's rules - you can't pick and choose. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/officious_intermeddler https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/officious_intermeddler
- anigbrowl 3y agoThe obvious answer is that by being a member of society you have implicitly agreed to it's rules That's such nonsense though, since as an individual you have virtually no impact on anything unless you were born into extreme wealth. No government that I'm aware of operates hypothecation (where you can specify what your taxes get used for), and voting for representatives based on policy commitments is crude, unreliable, and too slow to be adequately responsive. Nobody in the private sector has a job where they are only subject to performance review every 2/4/6 years. In the US, few people truly support the roughly $1 trillion annual cost of 'defense' and nobody thinks it's efficiently allocated, but any proposals to significantly cut that sum are political suicide so it's never going to happen. Much of our current political angst stems from people's intuitive awareness that their taxes are a real fact of life whereas their influence on the political process is largely notional.
- DrScientist 3y ago> In the US.... I'd argue that the democratic ties between the people and the actions of the government in the US are extremely fragile - money is more important than people now in the US electoral system. Another American disease is to then extrapolate that malaise and assume the rest of the world is in a similar position. The solution isn't to dissolve society - that removes the only mechanism ( government ) that the majority have to control the powerful, further entrenching the power of the rich. The solution is to take money out of US politics and get it working again for the majority,
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- orra 3y agoMore directly, property is a social construct. A useful one, yes, and one we consider a right. But that doesn't make tax unfair. Good luck enforcing your property rights without a society, and preferably without violence. The real world tends not to be full of absolutes. It's unhelpfully reductive to go from "property is a right" to "taxation is theft".
- anigbrowl 3y agoIf that were so, then people without any property would be exempt from tax. I'm not arguing against all taxation per se, but a lot of 'philosophical' arguments of tax proponents are as specious as those of tax opponents.
- DrScientist 3y agoWell the state can also unilaterally take your life ( depending in the country ) and certainly your liberty. And the above is a trade-off, the state polices & punishes murder and theft etc, with an aim of reducing it overall - so you are less likely to be murdered or stolen from. Then this central mechanism needs paying for. Tax is simply a way of paying for it - and it's not voluntary to stop free-riders. The reality is you need government & laws when people start living in complex societies where people are no longer self-sufficient, but rely on a complex web of interactions. Laws are there to arbitrate between people - if you live on a homestead in the mountains they may seem unnecessary - if you live in a big city, where even essentials like food and water depend on a complex web of interactions - they are essential.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kimbernator 3y ago"Property" only exists so far as there is law enforcing it and the infrastructure to support it. Taxation is not someone stealing your money, it is the buy-in to a system that allows you to reliably consider things you have to be your property.
- lawlessone 3y agoTo add to this, how to we value property? in the state issued currency..
- johngladtj 3y agoYeah, no that's not true. Property exists even in stateless societies
- ramraj07 3y agoAnd you’d be spending resources on securing it and keeping it in your hands. Taxes are to buy in to a system that lets you sit at peace and not be constantly vigilant.
- johngladtj 3y agoYou're spending those resources regardless, at least you get to be the deciding how much to spend, and where, rather than having that decision taken from you
- carlosjobim 3y agoTaxation of labour is not somebody stealing your property, it is somebody stealing your work – which is a thousand times worse, since it is a form of forced servitude. There is no "system" and has never been any system, there's only people exploiting other people. An income tax is just a fancy abstraction over ancient and base serfdom. Most labourers have no property to speak of, and never had. If it's a "buy-in" to a system people should have a way to "buy out" as well, which of course doesn't happen, because there never was any "buy-in", it was "pay us your wages or we'll hunt you down". Slaves could buy their own freedom in Rome and other places, so why can't "free" people under taxation? Property rights should rank far lower than human rights. So if you want to collect taxes, go after property instead of after people. But it is the property owning class who runs the two-sided coin of capitalism/socialism, so good luck on that.
- lawlessone 3y agoLibertarians as an example. I don't agree with them. I think many of the people objecting to taxes have a rather rosy view of the times when taxes didn't exist. To me it's like similar to full communism, both of them mean well but in practice don't work well. If you get more out of a system than someone else you should be probably willing or want too contribute more to it's upkeep.
- jewayne 3y ago> I think many of the people objecting to taxes have a rather rosy view of the times when taxes didn't exist. I think they also don't know how long the history of taxation really is. Taxation is pretty much as old as civilization itself.
- lawlessone 3y agoYes, most of the periods with no official taxation are usually dark ages :( ..Or the paleolithic. Or it was called a tithe etc
- CydeWeys 3y agoOh they know, they just discount it for some reason. Also, as a general rule, libertarians seem to care less for civilization than the rest of us. Hence why they're way more likely to be attracted to self-sufficient/off-the-grid/prepper lifestyles.
- nvm0n2 3y agoThe problem with the latter paragraph is that the poor usually get a lot more out of government than they put in.
- tivert 3y ago> What philosophical premise finds objection with taxation in general?? Extreme libertarianism, which is seriously flawed, but people still fall for it (out of greed and/or seduction by an oversimple toy model that can't actually work in practice).
- sneak 3y agoI think it is philosophically sound that property rights are natural rights and that use of violent coercion to violate those rights is a basic violation of human rights. You may believe that a violation of people’s natural rights to own things and be free from violent coercion is justified in service of building a central government, but it is still a human rights violation.
- DrScientist 3y agoWhat's a 'natural right'? Surely all it is, is something most people agree on. Take ownership of land for example - doesn't really make sense - at some point it wasn't 'owned' then somebody declared they owned it and could pass that right on in perpetuity. Such a construct doesn't exist outside a system of laws ( created from an agreement from the majority of people ) - it's not some magic 'natural right'.
- sneak 3y agoI don’t believe that land ownership is a natural right, for the same reasons that I believe that personal property is. They are very different concepts.
- DrScientist 3y agoPersonal property is made from a bit of the earth - space dust that has aggregated by gravity. Again there is no 'natural right' - just something most people agree makes sense. The idea of rights was a tool to try to get wide agreement ( internationally ) on the basics that most people agree on whatever culture. It's a useful tool - but to imbue some sort of existence outside society is an attempt at a Jedi mind trick.
- stronglikedan 3y agoMorality. Income tax is theft. A lean national government can work off tariffs and fees alone. Local governments can supplement that with sales tax.
- badcppdev 3y agoWhy is income tax theft but sales tax not? Surely selling your time for money is analogous to selling an object for money
- danpalmer 3y agoSales tax has a disproportionate negative impact those at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, whereas income tax is easier to balance.
- qwerasdf5 3y agoSales tax can have exclusions, just as income tax does.
- danpalmer 3y agoSales tax can't really exclude people based on ability to pay though. I've never heard of a means-tested sales tax, it's not practical. You can exclude basics, in the UK our VAT which is similar to a sales tax is not applied to most groceries, kids clothing, etc. It's easier to just have an income/property/land/inheritance tax, things that target wealth or income, vs things that target spending. Those with less money tend to spend a higher proportion of their money, so taxing spending targets them.
- sneak 3y agoThe idea that all people have a human right to be free from violent coercion. Almost nobody would pay taxes if there weren’t the implicit threat of a man with a gun.
- DrScientist 3y ago> The idea that all people have a human right to be free from violent coercion. And do you think you'd be free of violence in a government free world? Sure, in the end, all laws are enforced by physical violence - arrest, imprisonment etc - but that just underlines the physical nature of the world - the threat of a man with a gun doesn't go away when you remove collective will.
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- notahacker 3y agoAlmost nobody would respect property rights if there wasn't the implicit threat of a man with a gun either, so the stuff would all get taken by someone else anyway.
- sneak 3y agoNegative rights versus positive rights, this is an old and well-documented dichotomy. Positive rights are a fiction to euphemize theft and slavery. From a purely logical standpoint, negative rights can be the only true rights.
- notahacker 3y ago"Theft" is something which can't even exist in the absence of consensus on which objects you have the right to compel others to refraining from using. We have that consensus, and relatively efficient enforcement of it, it just happens to disagree with you on what stuff's inalienably yours.