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“It’s great to be around people who understand. I don’t get how the left won’t just admit that income tax is theft. Who cares if it’s for a good cause?" Said t

“It’s great to be around people who understand. I don’t get how the left won’t just admit that income tax is theft. Who cares if it’s for a good cause?" Said the guy who drove to the festival on the trillion dollar road network.

sneak 12y ago
Tax is theft even if used to benefit the person it was stolen from, which was the point of the very next sentence.
jonnycowboy 12y ago
In this case he should be for a pay per use roadway (toll road).
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Police services, fire services, subsidizing families who can't afford food + gas + monthly bills, subsidizing students who can't afford school, the ability to help offset a recession (issue extra tax refunds)... The existing system has many advantages. What are some advantages of taxless governance?
  - obvious_throw 12y ago
    You are positing as axiomatic that subsidizing the indigent is an automatic good. Citation needed.
    - lhc- 12y ago
      I mean obviously, it would be better to just let them die in the street. Then there would be no more poor people, right?
      - MCRed 12y ago
        False dichotomy. When the government takes up to %50 of a poor person's income in taxes (both direct and indirect), the claim that not taking half their income would result in them dying in the street seems a bit silly.
    - randallsquared 12y ago
      You want a citation for an axiom?
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      That particular citation traditionally arrives on a pitchfork.
  - fauvenoire 12y ago
    The advantages would be similar to having economic competition bringing your groceries to the market versus central planners running grocery stores. In places like Venezuela, they run out of toilet paper. In places like the US, I have more access to foods, spices, and technologies than any king of antiquity.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - MCRed 12y ago
    The brilliant thing about "the existing system" is that no matter how bad a job it does, those failures are used as an excuse to justify taking even more money to "fix" the problem created by the system. You seem to assume that all of those services would not exist without the current system. This seems to assume that there's only one possible way to fund things. There are historical examples of all of these (except "offsetting recessions") being funded privately, and arguably producing much better results. As for "offsetting recessions", the recessions and general economic malaise we experience are directly attributable to the current systems distortions of the market, particularly the monetary system. Naturally, the current system spends a great deal of effort telling people that the current system is the best system. This is not unique to the USA. People in most countries, from Saudi Arabia to North Korea, from Bolivia to New Zealand, think their country (and its "system") is one of the better ones. In large part this is because one of the first things any government takes over is education. I believe that if the US had held to the system it was intended to have in the constitution, we would have eliminated poverty by 1940, the great depression never would have happened, and everyone's effective purchasing power would be an order of magnitude better. The poverty line is $16k or so, right? If people today who earned $16k had the purchasing power of someone who earns $160k, then they wouldn't exactly be poor. That difference can be accounted completely by the distortion in economics and poor finance and operational results of the US government. And it is getting worse.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      if the US had held to the system it was intended to have in the constitution What was the intended system?
      - MCRed 12y ago
        If you read the constitution, there's a section called the Enumerated Powers Clause that gives the federal government very specific, limited powers. If we had kept to that system, the federal government would not be swallowing the economy, and we'd be much better off. Consider this- the federal governments debt alone (including unfunded liabilities) is more than the amount of US dollars in circulation.
  - sp332 12y ago
    Efficiency. Actually let me back up, to me a property tax makes more sense for police and fire services. But for the rest, it's more efficient to just give money directly to families than to fund a government agency to do it for you. And issuing tax refunds wouldn't be necessary in a recession - after all, it's not really an economic stimulus, but removing the economic drain that taxes are in the first place.
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Are you sure the root of economic problems like 2008 was taxation? EU colleges are compelling, because their students graduate without a burden of debt to be repaid over a decade or more. It's unlikely any private system could fund all students in a country for no returns (other than the benefits of an educated population).
      - sp332 12y ago
        No... I'm just saying that tax refunds are not really an advantage of a tax system. In a non-tax system, you have that advantage 100% of the time.
    - mercurial 12y ago
      > But for the rest, it's more efficient to just give money directly to families than to fund a government agency to do it for you. Is that so? I'm sure that in many areas, this would immediately exclude many people of wrong colour/country of origin/sexual orientation. One thing that a normal democratic system is the protection of minorities.
      - sp332 12y ago
        Well, it could help. The problem with a democracy is that if the majority is bigoted, then the money is taken from a less-bigoted minority and applied unequally. And in any kind of government, if an elected or appointed official is bigoted, then policies set can get biased too. It's certainly a possible improvement, but it's not an absolute one.
  - oleganza 12y ago
    Police, fire etc. are all instances of "insurance". The only difference is that some insurance is voluntary and some is forced upon you and you have to pay. The real question is: what is the moral basis for violently making people pay for certain services and pay voluntarily for others. Communists are at least consistent: everyone should be forced to pay for all services and all of them are provided by benevolent all-powerful Bureaucracy. Why should we have x% of communism and not 100% or 0%?
    - sillysaurus3 12y ago
      It seems like the moral basis for forcing payment of police and fire services via taxes is to prevent thugs and fire from being disastrous. It wouldn't work to let a housefire burn just because the owner couldn't afford a fireman, because the fire could spread to the whole neighborhood. Similarly, if police required payment on demand, then thugs would prey off those who can't afford this protection.
      - glenra 12y ago
        You don't actually need to force payment for fire. Fire protection is provided by private voluntary for-profit companies in many areas and it's a valuable enough service that when you borrow money for a mortgage the insurance company generally requires you to have fire insurance and the fire insurance policy in turn requires a fire service subscription, so the free market has created a system where most people just by default are subscribers and the subscription payment is taken out of their mortgage payment with no government force involved at any stage. Then if there's a fire and you're somehow NOT a subscriber you can still call and have them to put out the fire anyway so long as you're willing to reimburse the full (retail) cost of doing so (which is quite expensive!) or your neighbors can call to have them come and stand by to make sure the fire doesn't escape your property to protect the rest of the neighborhood. Police protection is a similar thing - best paid for by subscription in advance rather than on a case-by-case basis.
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    Not having the advantages and disadvantages of the existing system sold to us as a bundled package, perhaps? You really have to consider the whole budget, in its entirety, and compare the amounts spent on those things you find to be worthwhile, and those things that you abhor, along with the actual results yielded from that spending. Different people will have different opinions, and therefore produce different numbers when calculating the net value of government, by subtracting disadvantages from advantages. Pretend that government is a cable company. Some people like the social justice channel, and the safety net channel, and the environmental protection channel. Other people like the foreign wars of choice channel, the temperance channel, the religious non-interference channel. And some people like the robust infrastructure channel, the rule of law channel, and the tedious indie film channel. (Someone has to, I suppose.) Most customers would prefer to only pay for channels that they typically watch. But then some of the less popular channels would have to be dropped. The cable company executives really like those unpopular channels, so they work together to ensure that customers cannot buy the channels they actually want unless they are bundled with all those other channels. And they set the price really high, because all those cool guys walking away from explosions on the war channel and the heartwarming tales of people overcoming adversity on the social justice channel cost a lot of money. When people don't like the real cable company, they can get satellite, or an over-the-air antenna, or tv-over-fiber service, or online streaming, or buy and rent DVDs, or pirate shows. But in this metaphor, you could still get those things, but you still have to pay for the cable bundle anyway, whether you like it or not. Can you see any advantage to not forcing a person who hates watching football to buy the NFL Sunday Ticket, even if you really like watching football? Remember, that guy is making it less expensive for you to watch.
  - glenra 12y ago
    I believe it is still the case that most fire departments in the US are either for-profit or volunteer. Tax-funded departments tend to be a LOT more expensive and less innovative than private or other voluntarily-funded ones. The best new ideas tend to come out of the for-profit firefighting sector and then spread to the city-run ones. The chief advantage of paying by subscription in a market for services like fire protection is that you don't have to pay for services you don't need and there is a profit incentive for efficient and effective customer service. Private firms can't just automatically raise their rates and FORCE everyone to pay the new rate, so they have to actively LOOK for ways to save money on an ongoing basis. Police patrols are in a similar situation - when you include building security, most police in the US are privately funded, and the private ones are lot less likely to bust into your house and set your baby on fire and much more likely to be polite and reasonable and helpful. If you want more info on how either of those work, I recommend to you a book called The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without The State that goes into a fair amount of detail on how much our system ALREADY relies on successful but overlooked free-market provision of police, fire departments, courts and other services. http://www.amazon.com/The-Enterprise-Law-Justice-Without/dp/1598130447 http://www.amazon.com/The-Enterprise-Law-Justice-Without/dp/... If you want more on the practical, logical CASE for doing so - including some interesting historical precedents - I recommend a book written by the son of Milton Friedman called The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism - the new updated edition should be out in a few months. http://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/0812698606/ http://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capita...
- mjwhansen 12y ago
  He probably is. To draw a parallel, many libertarians oppose net neutrality (http://reason.com/blog/2011/06/15/ask-a-libertarian-whats-your-t http://reason.com/blog/2011/06/15/ask-a-libertarian-whats-yo...)
anExcitedBeast 12y ago
Well, that particular cliche didn't take long to show up. Just because you want to change the rules doesn't mean you don't still have to play the game. It's like criticizing someone who wants universal healthcare for using their insurance.
- srpablo 12y ago
  I disagree -- OP was just suggesting the person quoted doesn't understand or appreciate the scope of what income taxes (and many of the other 'evils' he espouses against) have provided for him and others. Like the article mentions at the end: even if the eggs are sold for alternative currencies on a State-free griddle, they've still been inspected and checked by the USDA so they're unlikely to have been spoiled. If a violent incident had broken out, how much do you want to bet they would, at some point, have called the State police, or used the State's justice system? Now, could the OP have derived a lack of perspective or understanding purely from the quote, in isolation? No, maybe the speaker knows very well that he and others are indulging in a something of a group LARP. But I think OP singling out that quote is not really to criticize the speaker, but the attitude of the festival itself: have a great time, but please remember that this is fiction, and you're offering very simple prescriptions for huge, complex problems of governance involving hundreds of millions of people, the vast majority of whom are nothing like you and don't have anything resembling your life experience. To hear simple solutions spouted as 'obvious' gospel doesn't reflect well on your ability to grasp the challenges of governance. Which is really different, imo, than just criticizing someone for playing into a broken-but-necessary system, which is what you got out of it.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    I think you'd do well as performance art reviewer if you can extract such a profound argument from Marlarkey73's single-line post. Bravo! By the way, quoted person is not offering a "simple solution". (S)he's not offering any solution. (S)he's saying, income tax is equivalent to theft, and theft is not a justifiable action, even if we can point to its benefits. This is not a different solution. This is not a difference of opinion on the best way to run the government. It's a moral principle. Now, you can disagree whether the income tax is actually equivalent to theft, or defend that theft can actually be justifiable in special circumstances, but your criticism is completely off the mark.
miscnope 12y ago
Don't know about the US, but in the UK we're forced to pay road tax (if you have a car) in addition to income tax, national insurance and council tax. So by not paying income tax, we're still paying for road maintenance via road tax and we'd still be paying for the NHS too. I don't mind tax as long as it's optional, I'll pay road tax, I don't want to pay income tax.
- justincormack 12y ago
  Road tax does not pay for roads. In the UK there is no hypothecation there is just one big tax pool.
- arethuza 12y ago
  Actually, quite a lot of different classes of vehicles, notably electric cars, are exempt from Road Tax in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-exempt-from-car-tax https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-exempt-from-car-tax
- leoedin 12y ago
  Don't want to pay road tax? Don't have a car on the roads. Don't want to pay income tax? Don't have an income!
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    Don't want to pay sales tax? Don't buy food, clothing, shelter, transportation, or medicine! The SCotUS struck down poll taxes because the exercise of a right--in that case, voting--cannot be taxed. By that reasoning, if you support a tax on something, you must believe that no one has a right to that thing. Sales taxes and income taxes imply that there is no right to engage in voluntary commerce. You have no right to earn or spend money. Property taxes imply you have no right to own property. Naturally, if this principle were carried out to its logical extreme, the government has a revenue incentive in denying people their rights. And that leads to the question: so how do people who love their freedoms pay for a government? And there is no single, objectively correct answer to that question. And there is also no good reason to mock and ridicule either the people that ask it, or the people who answer it differently.
sp332 12y ago
Which is not funded at all by federal income tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Fina... Or in my state (New Hampshire) by local income tax either, since we don't have one.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Which is not funded at all by federal income tax. The link you provided does not support your claim -- it says that the vast majority (93.5%) of the federal funds for regular financing of the Interstate Highway System comes from specific non-income tax dedicated revenue sources, but it doesn't say where the other 6.5% of the federal funds comes from, and it doesn't address one-time investments in the system like those made through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other historical one-time efforts with large investments in the system, which are often made from general funds (which largely means income tax, either directly or through debt financing which is repaid that way.)
MCRed 12y ago
If I steal your car and then give you a bicycle, do I get to then say "you can't complain about the theft, you rode here on that bicycle I gave you!"
- metacorrector 12y ago
  i don't know exactly how this site works, and i'm not going to research it, but did you actually get downvoted for writing something mildly insightful/humorous?
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    i don't know exactly how this site works, and i'm not going to research it Then please try not to click on anything you are unsure of while you are visiting, you might unleash the killer robots and the insurance on them is atrocious.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    The purpose of the site is to gratify one's intellectual curiosity. The reward/penalty system is a byproduct of that goal.
  - MCRed 12y ago
    On this site, people often down vote things they disagree with, without regard to whether they contribute to the conversation. I think this is a problem endemic to the internet. Voting was created to combat spam, originally, but unfortunately often can effectively become censorship by democracy.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      That's actually an accepted use of vote-down on this site.
      - MCRed 12y ago
        Well that explains why it is such a worthless anti-intellectual circle jerk.
defen 12y ago
You're effectively saying that dissent on this issue is impossible, since 99.99% of Americans are in some way dependent on the road network, whether it be for food & goods distribution, their job, or second-order effects of those two things.
zo1 12y ago
Oh, and asking whether or not he wanted to pay for the road never came in to play, huh? You're essentially saying they're greedy, and don't want to pay something they are using. This couldn't be farther from the truth, and only works to further encourage those who are already blindly opinionated one way on the issue. Ask any anarcho-capitalist or libertarian if they are willing to pay for usage of a private road. And most, if not all will say yes.
whybroke 12y ago
...and parked it on land stolen from murdered Indians.
logfromblammo 12y ago
You must have eaten the "Who Will Build the Rocky Roads?" ice cream. Government-built roads are a libertarian trope, because non-libertarians always bring them up, eventually. It's almost like the Godwin's Law of a libertarian discussion, except it has competition from the hypothetical lifeboat scenario, the starving homeless person, the Keynesian economics argument, and the foreign invasion by a nuclear-armed power.
- jMyles 12y ago
  I actually preferred the Porcupine Peanut Butter. My friend went with Bananarchy.
- paulgb 12y ago
  > because non-libertarians always bring them up I usually bring up the question when I meet someone who calls him/herself libertarian and the answer is rarely the same (no true Scotsman, I know). It's a good test of where they stand on the spectrum, as well as how well they've thought about the practicalities of their politics vs. just disliking paying tax.
- whybroke 12y ago
  Has no one suggested privatizing all the surface streets? After all, if you don't like the toll on the road in front of your property, you can sell it and move to a street owned by a company that charges less. Paradise rapidly ensues!
  - MCRed 12y ago
    Another trope is "the only alternative to the current state of affairs is the worse possible thing I can imagine". This isn't even malicious, it's just an expression of the person's fears. Practically, surface streets would likely be owned and managed by a corporation, whose shares are owned by the people who live in and operate businesses in the vicinity. And you wouldn't move there without doing diligence on the situation. This is exactly the situation in many communities where the streets are owned by the homeowners association. Also happens in rural areas where several houses are served by a street that connects to a city road. The maintenance of which is paid for by the home owners in a way they agree to. Contracts to manage things where property is owned by groups of people exists in the current system can can be applied to many situations that are currently handled by the government.

sneak 12y ago

Tax is theft even if used to benefit the person it was stolen from, which was the point of the very next sentence.

jonnycowboy 12y ago

In this case he should be for a pay per use roadway (toll road).

sillysaurus3 12y ago
Police services, fire services, subsidizing families who can't afford food + gas + monthly bills, subsidizing students who can't afford school, the ability to help offset a recession (issue extra tax refunds)... The existing system has many advantages. What are some advantages of taxless governance?
- obvious_throw 12y ago
  You are positing as axiomatic that subsidizing the indigent is an automatic good. Citation needed.
  - lhc- 12y ago
    I mean obviously, it would be better to just let them die in the street. Then there would be no more poor people, right?
    - MCRed 12y ago
      False dichotomy. When the government takes up to %50 of a poor person's income in taxes (both direct and indirect), the claim that not taking half their income would result in them dying in the street seems a bit silly.
  - randallsquared 12y ago
    You want a citation for an axiom?
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    That particular citation traditionally arrives on a pitchfork.
- fauvenoire 12y ago
  The advantages would be similar to having economic competition bringing your groceries to the market versus central planners running grocery stores. In places like Venezuela, they run out of toilet paper. In places like the US, I have more access to foods, spices, and technologies than any king of antiquity.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- MCRed 12y ago
  The brilliant thing about "the existing system" is that no matter how bad a job it does, those failures are used as an excuse to justify taking even more money to "fix" the problem created by the system. You seem to assume that all of those services would not exist without the current system. This seems to assume that there's only one possible way to fund things. There are historical examples of all of these (except "offsetting recessions") being funded privately, and arguably producing much better results. As for "offsetting recessions", the recessions and general economic malaise we experience are directly attributable to the current systems distortions of the market, particularly the monetary system. Naturally, the current system spends a great deal of effort telling people that the current system is the best system. This is not unique to the USA. People in most countries, from Saudi Arabia to North Korea, from Bolivia to New Zealand, think their country (and its "system") is one of the better ones. In large part this is because one of the first things any government takes over is education. I believe that if the US had held to the system it was intended to have in the constitution, we would have eliminated poverty by 1940, the great depression never would have happened, and everyone's effective purchasing power would be an order of magnitude better. The poverty line is $16k or so, right? If people today who earned $16k had the purchasing power of someone who earns $160k, then they wouldn't exactly be poor. That difference can be accounted completely by the distortion in economics and poor finance and operational results of the US government. And it is getting worse.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    if the US had held to the system it was intended to have in the constitution What was the intended system?
    - MCRed 12y ago
      If you read the constitution, there's a section called the Enumerated Powers Clause that gives the federal government very specific, limited powers. If we had kept to that system, the federal government would not be swallowing the economy, and we'd be much better off. Consider this- the federal governments debt alone (including unfunded liabilities) is more than the amount of US dollars in circulation.
- sp332 12y ago
  Efficiency. Actually let me back up, to me a property tax makes more sense for police and fire services. But for the rest, it's more efficient to just give money directly to families than to fund a government agency to do it for you. And issuing tax refunds wouldn't be necessary in a recession - after all, it's not really an economic stimulus, but removing the economic drain that taxes are in the first place.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Are you sure the root of economic problems like 2008 was taxation? EU colleges are compelling, because their students graduate without a burden of debt to be repaid over a decade or more. It's unlikely any private system could fund all students in a country for no returns (other than the benefits of an educated population).
    - sp332 12y ago
      No... I'm just saying that tax refunds are not really an advantage of a tax system. In a non-tax system, you have that advantage 100% of the time.
  - mercurial 12y ago
    > But for the rest, it's more efficient to just give money directly to families than to fund a government agency to do it for you. Is that so? I'm sure that in many areas, this would immediately exclude many people of wrong colour/country of origin/sexual orientation. One thing that a normal democratic system is the protection of minorities.
    - sp332 12y ago
      Well, it could help. The problem with a democracy is that if the majority is bigoted, then the money is taken from a less-bigoted minority and applied unequally. And in any kind of government, if an elected or appointed official is bigoted, then policies set can get biased too. It's certainly a possible improvement, but it's not an absolute one.
- oleganza 12y ago
  Police, fire etc. are all instances of "insurance". The only difference is that some insurance is voluntary and some is forced upon you and you have to pay. The real question is: what is the moral basis for violently making people pay for certain services and pay voluntarily for others. Communists are at least consistent: everyone should be forced to pay for all services and all of them are provided by benevolent all-powerful Bureaucracy. Why should we have x% of communism and not 100% or 0%?
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    It seems like the moral basis for forcing payment of police and fire services via taxes is to prevent thugs and fire from being disastrous. It wouldn't work to let a housefire burn just because the owner couldn't afford a fireman, because the fire could spread to the whole neighborhood. Similarly, if police required payment on demand, then thugs would prey off those who can't afford this protection.
    - glenra 12y ago
      You don't actually need to force payment for fire. Fire protection is provided by private voluntary for-profit companies in many areas and it's a valuable enough service that when you borrow money for a mortgage the insurance company generally requires you to have fire insurance and the fire insurance policy in turn requires a fire service subscription, so the free market has created a system where most people just by default are subscribers and the subscription payment is taken out of their mortgage payment with no government force involved at any stage. Then if there's a fire and you're somehow NOT a subscriber you can still call and have them to put out the fire anyway so long as you're willing to reimburse the full (retail) cost of doing so (which is quite expensive!) or your neighbors can call to have them come and stand by to make sure the fire doesn't escape your property to protect the rest of the neighborhood. Police protection is a similar thing - best paid for by subscription in advance rather than on a case-by-case basis.
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  Not having the advantages and disadvantages of the existing system sold to us as a bundled package, perhaps? You really have to consider the whole budget, in its entirety, and compare the amounts spent on those things you find to be worthwhile, and those things that you abhor, along with the actual results yielded from that spending. Different people will have different opinions, and therefore produce different numbers when calculating the net value of government, by subtracting disadvantages from advantages. Pretend that government is a cable company. Some people like the social justice channel, and the safety net channel, and the environmental protection channel. Other people like the foreign wars of choice channel, the temperance channel, the religious non-interference channel. And some people like the robust infrastructure channel, the rule of law channel, and the tedious indie film channel. (Someone has to, I suppose.) Most customers would prefer to only pay for channels that they typically watch. But then some of the less popular channels would have to be dropped. The cable company executives really like those unpopular channels, so they work together to ensure that customers cannot buy the channels they actually want unless they are bundled with all those other channels. And they set the price really high, because all those cool guys walking away from explosions on the war channel and the heartwarming tales of people overcoming adversity on the social justice channel cost a lot of money. When people don't like the real cable company, they can get satellite, or an over-the-air antenna, or tv-over-fiber service, or online streaming, or buy and rent DVDs, or pirate shows. But in this metaphor, you could still get those things, but you still have to pay for the cable bundle anyway, whether you like it or not. Can you see any advantage to not forcing a person who hates watching football to buy the NFL Sunday Ticket, even if you really like watching football? Remember, that guy is making it less expensive for you to watch.
- glenra 12y ago
  I believe it is still the case that most fire departments in the US are either for-profit or volunteer. Tax-funded departments tend to be a LOT more expensive and less innovative than private or other voluntarily-funded ones. The best new ideas tend to come out of the for-profit firefighting sector and then spread to the city-run ones. The chief advantage of paying by subscription in a market for services like fire protection is that you don't have to pay for services you don't need and there is a profit incentive for efficient and effective customer service. Private firms can't just automatically raise their rates and FORCE everyone to pay the new rate, so they have to actively LOOK for ways to save money on an ongoing basis. Police patrols are in a similar situation - when you include building security, most police in the US are privately funded, and the private ones are lot less likely to bust into your house and set your baby on fire and much more likely to be polite and reasonable and helpful. If you want more info on how either of those work, I recommend to you a book called The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without The State that goes into a fair amount of detail on how much our system ALREADY relies on successful but overlooked free-market provision of police, fire departments, courts and other services. http://www.amazon.com/The-Enterprise-Law-Justice-Without/dp/1598130447 http://www.amazon.com/The-Enterprise-Law-Justice-Without/dp/... If you want more on the practical, logical CASE for doing so - including some interesting historical precedents - I recommend a book written by the son of Milton Friedman called The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism - the new updated edition should be out in a few months. http://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/0812698606/ http://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capita...
mjwhansen 12y ago
He probably is. To draw a parallel, many libertarians oppose net neutrality (http://reason.com/blog/2011/06/15/ask-a-libertarian-whats-your-t http://reason.com/blog/2011/06/15/ask-a-libertarian-whats-yo...)

anExcitedBeast 12y ago

Well, that particular cliche didn't take long to show up. Just because you want to change the rules doesn't mean you don't still have to play the game. It's like criticizing someone who wants universal healthcare for using their insurance.

srpablo 12y ago
I disagree -- OP was just suggesting the person quoted doesn't understand or appreciate the scope of what income taxes (and many of the other 'evils' he espouses against) have provided for him and others. Like the article mentions at the end: even if the eggs are sold for alternative currencies on a State-free griddle, they've still been inspected and checked by the USDA so they're unlikely to have been spoiled. If a violent incident had broken out, how much do you want to bet they would, at some point, have called the State police, or used the State's justice system? Now, could the OP have derived a lack of perspective or understanding purely from the quote, in isolation? No, maybe the speaker knows very well that he and others are indulging in a something of a group LARP. But I think OP singling out that quote is not really to criticize the speaker, but the attitude of the festival itself: have a great time, but please remember that this is fiction, and you're offering very simple prescriptions for huge, complex problems of governance involving hundreds of millions of people, the vast majority of whom are nothing like you and don't have anything resembling your life experience. To hear simple solutions spouted as 'obvious' gospel doesn't reflect well on your ability to grasp the challenges of governance. Which is really different, imo, than just criticizing someone for playing into a broken-but-necessary system, which is what you got out of it.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I think you'd do well as performance art reviewer if you can extract such a profound argument from Marlarkey73's single-line post. Bravo! By the way, quoted person is not offering a "simple solution". (S)he's not offering any solution. (S)he's saying, income tax is equivalent to theft, and theft is not a justifiable action, even if we can point to its benefits. This is not a different solution. This is not a difference of opinion on the best way to run the government. It's a moral principle. Now, you can disagree whether the income tax is actually equivalent to theft, or defend that theft can actually be justifiable in special circumstances, but your criticism is completely off the mark.

miscnope 12y ago

Don't know about the US, but in the UK we're forced to pay road tax (if you have a car) in addition to income tax, national insurance and council tax. So by not paying income tax, we're still paying for road maintenance via road tax and we'd still be paying for the NHS too. I don't mind tax as long as it's optional, I'll pay road tax, I don't want to pay income tax.

justincormack 12y ago
Road tax does not pay for roads. In the UK there is no hypothecation there is just one big tax pool.
arethuza 12y ago
Actually, quite a lot of different classes of vehicles, notably electric cars, are exempt from Road Tax in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-exempt-from-car-tax https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-exempt-from-car-tax
leoedin 12y ago
Don't want to pay road tax? Don't have a car on the roads. Don't want to pay income tax? Don't have an income!
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  Don't want to pay sales tax? Don't buy food, clothing, shelter, transportation, or medicine! The SCotUS struck down poll taxes because the exercise of a right--in that case, voting--cannot be taxed. By that reasoning, if you support a tax on something, you must believe that no one has a right to that thing. Sales taxes and income taxes imply that there is no right to engage in voluntary commerce. You have no right to earn or spend money. Property taxes imply you have no right to own property. Naturally, if this principle were carried out to its logical extreme, the government has a revenue incentive in denying people their rights. And that leads to the question: so how do people who love their freedoms pay for a government? And there is no single, objectively correct answer to that question. And there is also no good reason to mock and ridicule either the people that ask it, or the people who answer it differently.

sp332 12y ago

Which is not funded at all by federal income tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Financing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Fina... Or in my state (New Hampshire) by local income tax either, since we don't have one.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Which is not funded at all by federal income tax. The link you provided does not support your claim -- it says that the vast majority (93.5%) of the federal funds for regular financing of the Interstate Highway System comes from specific non-income tax dedicated revenue sources, but it doesn't say where the other 6.5% of the federal funds comes from, and it doesn't address one-time investments in the system like those made through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other historical one-time efforts with large investments in the system, which are often made from general funds (which largely means income tax, either directly or through debt financing which is repaid that way.)

MCRed 12y ago

If I steal your car and then give you a bicycle, do I get to then say "you can't complain about the theft, you rode here on that bicycle I gave you!"

metacorrector 12y ago
i don't know exactly how this site works, and i'm not going to research it, but did you actually get downvoted for writing something mildly insightful/humorous?
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  i don't know exactly how this site works, and i'm not going to research it Then please try not to click on anything you are unsure of while you are visiting, you might unleash the killer robots and the insurance on them is atrocious.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  The purpose of the site is to gratify one's intellectual curiosity. The reward/penalty system is a byproduct of that goal.
- MCRed 12y ago
  On this site, people often down vote things they disagree with, without regard to whether they contribute to the conversation. I think this is a problem endemic to the internet. Voting was created to combat spam, originally, but unfortunately often can effectively become censorship by democracy.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    That's actually an accepted use of vote-down on this site.
    - MCRed 12y ago
      Well that explains why it is such a worthless anti-intellectual circle jerk.

defen 12y ago

You're effectively saying that dissent on this issue is impossible, since 99.99% of Americans are in some way dependent on the road network, whether it be for food & goods distribution, their job, or second-order effects of those two things.

zo1 12y ago

Oh, and asking whether or not he wanted to pay for the road never came in to play, huh? You're essentially saying they're greedy, and don't want to pay something they are using. This couldn't be farther from the truth, and only works to further encourage those who are already blindly opinionated one way on the issue. Ask any anarcho-capitalist or libertarian if they are willing to pay for usage of a private road. And most, if not all will say yes.

whybroke 12y ago

...and parked it on land stolen from murdered Indians.

logfromblammo 12y ago

You must have eaten the "Who Will Build the Rocky Roads?" ice cream. Government-built roads are a libertarian trope, because non-libertarians always bring them up, eventually. It's almost like the Godwin's Law of a libertarian discussion, except it has competition from the hypothetical lifeboat scenario, the starving homeless person, the Keynesian economics argument, and the foreign invasion by a nuclear-armed power.

jMyles 12y ago
I actually preferred the Porcupine Peanut Butter. My friend went with Bananarchy.
paulgb 12y ago
> because non-libertarians always bring them up I usually bring up the question when I meet someone who calls him/herself libertarian and the answer is rarely the same (no true Scotsman, I know). It's a good test of where they stand on the spectrum, as well as how well they've thought about the practicalities of their politics vs. just disliking paying tax.
whybroke 12y ago
Has no one suggested privatizing all the surface streets? After all, if you don't like the toll on the road in front of your property, you can sell it and move to a street owned by a company that charges less. Paradise rapidly ensues!
- MCRed 12y ago
  Another trope is "the only alternative to the current state of affairs is the worse possible thing I can imagine". This isn't even malicious, it's just an expression of the person's fears. Practically, surface streets would likely be owned and managed by a corporation, whose shares are owned by the people who live in and operate businesses in the vicinity. And you wouldn't move there without doing diligence on the situation. This is exactly the situation in many communities where the streets are owned by the homeowners association. Also happens in rural areas where several houses are served by a street that connects to a city road. The maintenance of which is paid for by the home owners in a way they agree to. Contracts to manage things where property is owned by groups of people exists in the current system can can be applied to many situations that are currently handled by the government.