5 ms·

> Not true at all. It entirely depends on what you're building. No it doesn't. He's making the same argument terrorists sometimes use to justify their actions.

by majelix 13y ago

> Not true at all. It entirely depends on what you're building. No it doesn't. He's making the same argument terrorists sometimes use to justify their actions. We're not innocent -- that by paying taxes, voting, and otherwise being a member of our society, we're culpable for what that society chooses to do. You don't get to pick and choose what your taxes fund; in large part, that's the whole point of taxation.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
There's still a difference. When I am in a room, I contribute to the humidity of that room. Now imagine me turning on the faucet or boiling some water.... and then saying "I can't turn them off, it would make no sense, I would contribute to the humidity either way!". I'll just go ahead and say if people can't think at all, so that they only know the difference between "nothing exists" and "everything is the same", then whatever they're building can't be that good, and chances are great we'd be better of without it.
- etherael 13y ago
  Sure, there are degrees of contribution, and direct is clearly more intentioned than indirect, but at the end of the day the beast doesn't care if it's fed willingly or unwillingly, and the vast majority of government funding is involuntary. If it's going to die, it needs to be unable to feed, what people are willing to contribute is irrelevant when its primary income is violently coerced. I have thought long and hard about that underlying argument and at the end of the day I both could not find a flaw with it, and was subsequently compelled to become a globally nomadic anarcho capitalist, just to avoid being forced to contribute to what amounts to only a fairly tame by comparison lackey of the US.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Have you thought long and hard about how you will avoid contributing to the corporations that also stand in the way of complete liberty? Or is it just the government you're afraid of?
    - etherael 13y ago
      Yes, it was extremely complex and I consider myself quite ingenious for accomplishing this breathtaking feat of ingenuity, but here's the trick; If you disapprove of anything about a business, it turns out that you can actually choose not to support them economically. When you make this choice they lack the ability to send thugs in costume around to kidnap/torture/murder you. Further, if enough people in a free market agree with your evaluation of that business, it will actually stop existing rather than grow larger and larger fuelled by continuously increasing external security threats and various other negative externalities provoked by the kinds of things that aggravated you about it in the first place. Fascinating stuff. These incentives for behaviour are responsible for some amazing feats throughout history, too. When you can't just kill people for refusing to support you, you often end up needing to provide actual value. Not always mind you, some particularly unscrupulous businesses can become joined at the hip with the state and feed from the same larcenous trough, but at that stage it's hard to actually distinguish where they end and the state begins, thus your normal actions to avoid support to the state hit this particular shambling hybrid just as hard. That's actually the difference between state and non state actors typically speaking, one you don't get to tell you're not interested in without risk of death. Mindblowingly complex stuff I know.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        As enjoyable as the sarcasm is, you've only eliminated direct contribution to corporations that you know that you disapprove. But you have already stated that you oppose even indirect contributions to government. Why the contradiction? Do you oppose indirect support to things that take actions you disapprove of, or not?
        jlgreco 13y ago
        You are confusing the concepts of degree and knowledge. Knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly... these lay on difference axises. I could excuse those who unknowingly willingly contribute to an atrocity (Paul Stabenow of the Tesch & Stabenow corporation is arguably an example). The unknowing unwilling are similarly hard to blame. Examples for this escape me at the moment though I am certain that there are examples in history of people compelled to work who did not know what they were contributing to. If I had to guess, I would say that workers for the Tesch & Stabenow corporation in the company's later years could perhaps fit this category. Examples of the knowing unwilling could be the workers at Mittelwerk. They knew what they were contributing to and were forced to continue. Knowing willing could arguably include Wernher von Braun, though some would (mistakenly, I think) put him on the edge of knowingly unwillingly.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    at the end of the day the beast doesn't care if it's fed willingly or unwillingly I totally hear what you saying and as a matter of fact, I used to be very depressed by this. And maybe I'm being a coward. But I also think that billions of people need to be organized somewhat to live together, even millions or thousands. We need plumbing, we need roads, hospitals, and even taxes. To some degree, at least. I mean, come on, even though there are bad doctors, it's kinda cool that I can just look one up in the yellow pages and have a great chance of getting competent treatment. Or eat fast food without dying of salmonella or something. It's not perfect, but I don't want medieval times back either. Yeah, I'm probably a coward ^^ Still, to me the problem isn't so much that there is government, but that it's not a mechanism for people to govern themselves, but like something external we accept to be broken and our enemy, instead of us. That it's a shitty government, run by people who wanted to get in for all the wrong reasons - instead of by everyone, all the time. Mr. Taxman [1], who just lies to you before election and there is fuck all anyone can do. As Chomsky said, governments have one "defect", they are theoretically democratic -- corporations have no defect, they're pure tyrannies. So unless you become some kind of super inventor / investor, and so rich that you and others of your calibre could really move things around, well.. you'd still have your voice I guess. And that might be enough, there are surely ways to not pay into the wrong hands and still affect people, so I'm not knocking it at all. If you can pull it off, good luck! And write a book/blog about it, too. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0M__0Z1pjg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0M__0Z1pjg
    - etherael 13y ago
      I'll take a pure tyranny I can choose whether or not to participate in over a democracy that demands my submission on all collective decisions any day of the year. I don't even really understand the reasonableness of the counterpoint to that position I have to admit, people take that position just come across as faintly unhinged.
  - javert 13y ago
    > was subsequently compelled to become a globally nomadic anarcho capitalist, just to avoid being forced to contribute to what amounts to only a fairly tame by comparison lackey of the US This is a really interesting story, and I'm going to be giving it a lot of thought. One problem for me is that I do computer science research (I'm a grad student), and I'd like to keep doing something somewhere similar after I graduate (but self-employed), but if you're working on generic low-level computer stuff that can be re-used by everybody ad infinitum, the state will use it. I'm not a Linux kernel developer, for example, but that's a good analogy. I don't see a good way to stop supporting the state without giving up on doing computer science research. I'd appreciate any thoughts. So, you don't have to pay taxes (except for things like sales tax) to any state? As an American, I think I'd have to renounce my citizenship (they still make you pay taxes when you are overseas), which would probably have a number of negative impacts for me personally, such as possibly making travel difficult. Overall, I'm not so sure that I agree with your conclusions, but I'm still thinking about it. Yes, I am supporting the state, but not willingly, and not quietly (though I am not vocal about my opposition to the system in my corporeal life, which wouldn't do any good anyway in my work environment, and would probably do much harm). Actually, I'm the victim. Is a Jew working in a munitions factory in Nazi Germany morally obligated to commit suicide rather than try to ride out the war? I would say "no," and I would tentatively say that about the actual situation I am in, for the same reasons. My bigger concern about supporting the system as I do is that it is self-defeating (of myself). In the limit (i.e., in communism), there is no possibility for productive labor, because 100% of your earnings will be taken by the government and used against you. We are not in that situation. Still, US government action seems to be moving in the direction of making it impossible to start and run small businesses; this is already the case in some sectors, like telecom. When all there are, are large corporate giants under tight regulatory control (which is literally the model adopted by Hitler and Mussolini), we are all worker drones; it would be equally (un)productive for me personally to work a a cashier at Wal-Mart as it would be to be a software engineer. (Because you get paid approximately the same in both cases and true innovation is illegal or impossiblein both cases.) I fear that we are not all that far from that situation.
javert 13y ago
> He's making the same argument terrorists sometimes use to justify their actions. We're not innocent -- that by paying taxes, voting, and otherwise being a member of our society, we're culpable for what that society chooses to do. Actually, I'm not making that argument. This may be a subtle difference that is not important for this discussion, though. My argument is that as a victim of the US government, it doesn't make sense to keep supporting the system that is victimizing me. All the work I do in my life will be approximately 1 step forward, 1 step back. (Quite literally, as the tax rate is probably roughly around 50% in all, though I don't really mean it in that sense.)
jackpirate 13y ago
You don't get to pick and choose what your taxes fund; in large part, that's the whole point of taxation. Sort of. I illegally decided to refuse to pay my taxes to the federal government, and instead payed extra taxes to my state government. http://izbicki.me/blog/why-and-how-im-refusing-to-pay-war-taxes http://izbicki.me/blog/why-and-how-im-refusing-to-pay-war-ta...

by majelix 13y ago

PavlovsCat 13y ago

There's still a difference. When I am in a room, I contribute to the humidity of that room. Now imagine me turning on the faucet or boiling some water.... and then saying "I can't turn them off, it would make no sense, I would contribute to the humidity either way!". I'll just go ahead and say if people can't think at all, so that they only know the difference between "nothing exists" and "everything is the same", then whatever they're building can't be that good, and chances are great we'd be better of without it.

etherael 13y ago
Sure, there are degrees of contribution, and direct is clearly more intentioned than indirect, but at the end of the day the beast doesn't care if it's fed willingly or unwillingly, and the vast majority of government funding is involuntary. If it's going to die, it needs to be unable to feed, what people are willing to contribute is irrelevant when its primary income is violently coerced. I have thought long and hard about that underlying argument and at the end of the day I both could not find a flaw with it, and was subsequently compelled to become a globally nomadic anarcho capitalist, just to avoid being forced to contribute to what amounts to only a fairly tame by comparison lackey of the US.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Have you thought long and hard about how you will avoid contributing to the corporations that also stand in the way of complete liberty? Or is it just the government you're afraid of?
  - etherael 13y ago
    Yes, it was extremely complex and I consider myself quite ingenious for accomplishing this breathtaking feat of ingenuity, but here's the trick; If you disapprove of anything about a business, it turns out that you can actually choose not to support them economically. When you make this choice they lack the ability to send thugs in costume around to kidnap/torture/murder you. Further, if enough people in a free market agree with your evaluation of that business, it will actually stop existing rather than grow larger and larger fuelled by continuously increasing external security threats and various other negative externalities provoked by the kinds of things that aggravated you about it in the first place. Fascinating stuff. These incentives for behaviour are responsible for some amazing feats throughout history, too. When you can't just kill people for refusing to support you, you often end up needing to provide actual value. Not always mind you, some particularly unscrupulous businesses can become joined at the hip with the state and feed from the same larcenous trough, but at that stage it's hard to actually distinguish where they end and the state begins, thus your normal actions to avoid support to the state hit this particular shambling hybrid just as hard. That's actually the difference between state and non state actors typically speaking, one you don't get to tell you're not interested in without risk of death. Mindblowingly complex stuff I know.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      As enjoyable as the sarcasm is, you've only eliminated direct contribution to corporations that you know that you disapprove. But you have already stated that you oppose even indirect contributions to government. Why the contradiction? Do you oppose indirect support to things that take actions you disapprove of, or not?
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        You are confusing the concepts of degree and knowledge. Knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly... these lay on difference axises. I could excuse those who unknowingly willingly contribute to an atrocity (Paul Stabenow of the Tesch & Stabenow corporation is arguably an example). The unknowing unwilling are similarly hard to blame. Examples for this escape me at the moment though I am certain that there are examples in history of people compelled to work who did not know what they were contributing to. If I had to guess, I would say that workers for the Tesch & Stabenow corporation in the company's later years could perhaps fit this category. Examples of the knowing unwilling could be the workers at Mittelwerk. They knew what they were contributing to and were forced to continue. Knowing willing could arguably include Wernher von Braun, though some would (mistakenly, I think) put him on the edge of knowingly unwillingly.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  at the end of the day the beast doesn't care if it's fed willingly or unwillingly I totally hear what you saying and as a matter of fact, I used to be very depressed by this. And maybe I'm being a coward. But I also think that billions of people need to be organized somewhat to live together, even millions or thousands. We need plumbing, we need roads, hospitals, and even taxes. To some degree, at least. I mean, come on, even though there are bad doctors, it's kinda cool that I can just look one up in the yellow pages and have a great chance of getting competent treatment. Or eat fast food without dying of salmonella or something. It's not perfect, but I don't want medieval times back either. Yeah, I'm probably a coward ^^ Still, to me the problem isn't so much that there is government, but that it's not a mechanism for people to govern themselves, but like something external we accept to be broken and our enemy, instead of us. That it's a shitty government, run by people who wanted to get in for all the wrong reasons - instead of by everyone, all the time. Mr. Taxman [1], who just lies to you before election and there is fuck all anyone can do. As Chomsky said, governments have one "defect", they are theoretically democratic -- corporations have no defect, they're pure tyrannies. So unless you become some kind of super inventor / investor, and so rich that you and others of your calibre could really move things around, well.. you'd still have your voice I guess. And that might be enough, there are surely ways to not pay into the wrong hands and still affect people, so I'm not knocking it at all. If you can pull it off, good luck! And write a book/blog about it, too. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0M__0Z1pjg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0M__0Z1pjg
  - etherael 13y ago
    I'll take a pure tyranny I can choose whether or not to participate in over a democracy that demands my submission on all collective decisions any day of the year. I don't even really understand the reasonableness of the counterpoint to that position I have to admit, people take that position just come across as faintly unhinged.
- javert 13y ago
  > was subsequently compelled to become a globally nomadic anarcho capitalist, just to avoid being forced to contribute to what amounts to only a fairly tame by comparison lackey of the US This is a really interesting story, and I'm going to be giving it a lot of thought. One problem for me is that I do computer science research (I'm a grad student), and I'd like to keep doing something somewhere similar after I graduate (but self-employed), but if you're working on generic low-level computer stuff that can be re-used by everybody ad infinitum, the state will use it. I'm not a Linux kernel developer, for example, but that's a good analogy. I don't see a good way to stop supporting the state without giving up on doing computer science research. I'd appreciate any thoughts. So, you don't have to pay taxes (except for things like sales tax) to any state? As an American, I think I'd have to renounce my citizenship (they still make you pay taxes when you are overseas), which would probably have a number of negative impacts for me personally, such as possibly making travel difficult. Overall, I'm not so sure that I agree with your conclusions, but I'm still thinking about it. Yes, I am supporting the state, but not willingly, and not quietly (though I am not vocal about my opposition to the system in my corporeal life, which wouldn't do any good anyway in my work environment, and would probably do much harm). Actually, I'm the victim. Is a Jew working in a munitions factory in Nazi Germany morally obligated to commit suicide rather than try to ride out the war? I would say "no," and I would tentatively say that about the actual situation I am in, for the same reasons. My bigger concern about supporting the system as I do is that it is self-defeating (of myself). In the limit (i.e., in communism), there is no possibility for productive labor, because 100% of your earnings will be taken by the government and used against you. We are not in that situation. Still, US government action seems to be moving in the direction of making it impossible to start and run small businesses; this is already the case in some sectors, like telecom. When all there are, are large corporate giants under tight regulatory control (which is literally the model adopted by Hitler and Mussolini), we are all worker drones; it would be equally (un)productive for me personally to work a a cashier at Wal-Mart as it would be to be a software engineer. (Because you get paid approximately the same in both cases and true innovation is illegal or impossiblein both cases.) I fear that we are not all that far from that situation.

javert 13y ago

> He's making the same argument terrorists sometimes use to justify their actions. We're not innocent -- that by paying taxes, voting, and otherwise being a member of our society, we're culpable for what that society chooses to do. Actually, I'm not making that argument. This may be a subtle difference that is not important for this discussion, though. My argument is that as a victim of the US government, it doesn't make sense to keep supporting the system that is victimizing me. All the work I do in my life will be approximately 1 step forward, 1 step back. (Quite literally, as the tax rate is probably roughly around 50% in all, though I don't really mean it in that sense.)

jackpirate 13y ago

You don't get to pick and choose what your taxes fund; in large part, that's the whole point of taxation. Sort of. I illegally decided to refuse to pay my taxes to the federal government, and instead payed extra taxes to my state government. http://izbicki.me/blog/why-and-how-im-refusing-to-pay-war-taxes http://izbicki.me/blog/why-and-how-im-refusing-to-pay-war-ta...