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Great, convince others to help, don't just tax them. If you can't convince a person that you're right about helping those people, and decide to simply impose an
by snitko 13y ago
Great, convince others to help, don't just tax them. If you can't convince a person that you're right about helping those people, and decide to simply impose an additional tax, then you're coercing them and treating your fellow citizens as objects to be milked, not as individuals to be convinced.
But anyway, if you have THAT many people living in poverty and you want to just give them money, there's something wrong with either your assessment of what poverty is or with the solution you propose. The point is not to give money. Money are irrelevant. If you give money, you don't create wealth, you redistribute it. The point is to help all those people create value and, thus, wealth.
- Raphmedia 13y agoI grew up in a family that was receiving money from the government (Québec, Canada). My mother was very sick, you see? Thanks to that money, she saved enough to sent me and my brother to school. Now, I make decent money. I pay lots of taxes. Every paycheck, I pay in tax what we would receive for a month when I was a kid. Trust me from firsthand experience. You want to give money to poor people. Why? Because this money is used to send the kids to school. To put food on the table. To slowly get some education. Do you really believe that people will only buy drugs with the money you give them? That they will gamble it away? Bullshit. Go out, meet some people.
- snitko 13y agoI trust you. My point is not that we shouldn't help poor people. My point is that it should be done voluntarily, not through taxation. Your example, btw, is not very ordinary. I find it hard to believe that 46 million people in the US (a number mentioned above) need the same amount of help you and your mother needed. I grew up in a family and we didn't have our own apartment for quite some time (we lived in a single room) and at some point we had to really scratch money to afford something to eat. I didn't and don't complain and I don't believe we should've forced anyone to help us (because this is what taxation is: you ask government to extract money from other people).
- astrange 13y agoAnd if you couldn't have afforded something to eat, or didn't have a room, or had to go in the hospital? Would you be proud to not complain about being homeless?
- snitko 13y agoSo what you're saying is that if I have to go to a hospital and can't afford it, it's okay for me to go and rob other people?
- consonants 13y agoTell me again how taxation is theft.
- snitko 13y agoLook, I respect and acknowledge your right to have an opinion that taxes are not theft. Would you respect the opinion of your fellow citizens, who, like me, believe taxes are theft? Because if you do acknowledge their right to think so, then it becomes obvious, that you are also prepared to ignore such an opinion, still willing to collect taxes from them. So essentially, you're like an abusive dad saying to his daughter "oh, sweetie, you can marry anyone you want", but later demanding from her she married a young man of his choice - for her own good, of course. I realize it's kind of a big stretch for people to see taxes as theft, but it's important to start seeing violence involved in this process. You can't just deny things by arguments such as "that's they way a civilized society works".
- consonants 13y agoTell me more about how the non-aggression principle absolves you of any social responsibility. You didn't earn your money in a vacuum outside of society, you earned it with the implicit knowledge that you will be taxed while reaping the real benefits those tax dollars and the rest of society provided you. It's an unfortunate opinion to hold, as anyone who opposes is violent and abusive thug in your worldview. It's incredibly childish mental gymnastics that people who feel that they owe nothing to society adopt to justify their greed while they take, take, take the fruits of our society.