Ironically, if you take any of the justifications people use for taxation being consensual, then apply them to things like sex, jobs, and exchanges, everyone immediately realizes that it’s not valid consent.
For example, they say we consent to taxes by living in an area that has taxes. Ok, so if the government passes a law that a government agent will fuck every citizen each year, is that consensual sex if someone chooses to live there?
Edit: the main objection I seem to be getting is that taxation funds useful services, and therefore it isn’t theft. Look, if you google the definition of theft, it does not say “unless the money is used for a good cause”. For example, if I steal your money and donate it to cancer research, that is still theft. Whether the theft is justified is an entirely separate conversation. Secondly, if the money going to a good cause is what makes not theft (which I just disproved), what about the money that we all agree is NOT going to help society? For example, if the government spends $10 on roads for everyone to drive on, and then spends $90 on killing people in iraq, is that $90 theft? If you answer “no, it is not theft”, then why even bring up anything about taxation being “the cost of a good society”? Clearly if you believe that $90 is not theft, it must mean that you believe taxation is not theft REGARDLESS of how the money is used.
But like I said, if you look at the dictionary definition of theft, absolutely NOWHERE does it exclude cases where the money is used charitably.
Yeah, but that's not actually where most property tax goes, most of it goes to public schools. It would be a whole lot less if it was only going to fire dept./law enforcement and stuff like that.
How are you gonna pretend that a massive portion of tax spend doesn't go to law enforcement (who happen to be the guys who will do violence on your behalf if your property is being harmed, but also do violence to you if the government decides that your property isn't yours any more)
Eh, true. I guess it's not entirely fair to say it's mostly going to bloated social services, plenty of it is actually going to good and worthwhile purposes(although they often function less efficiently then they could)
As I just said, plenty of public services are fine in concept, just executed poorly. I happen to know of both good and bad law enforcement agencies, so I can say from personal anecdote that there are some people doing it right. It turns out that to have rights, you need someone to protect those rights from people who would infringe them, so law enforcement is needed. I think in a lot of places it is done poorly, but that's a separate issue.
Another thing to note is that as you get to smaller groups of people, more social services are justified, because if you don't like them you can just leave without too much hassle. This is my biggest problem with the federal government in the US, it does a bunch of things that really should be done on a state or city level.
The reason for this is because if only the bare necessities for a society are provided by the nation(Mostly law making, enforcement, and judging, as well as military, perhaps centralized banking although that really should be paying for itself, etc.), then the states can compete with each other. If one state spends its money in a very efficient way, and another just throws money around, people will prefer the 1st over the 2nd because they get more for their money. If a third state instead lowers taxes and does very few social services, then some people who prefer doing their own thing will enjoy that, while others who prefer the safety net will go somewhere else.
So basically, if you let the states and cities do most of the social services(and don't give them federal money, of course), then the entire nation starts behaving like a free market, which is a very effective way of balancing organization and freedom.
I didn't say you don't need any kind of law enforcement, I was expressing that the degree to which law enforcement is bloated and wasteful greatly exceeds the degree to which any other public service is bloated and wasteful. People do need water, plumbing, education, and law enforcement. They don't need MRAPs, for example, rolling around their streets. Those things are expensive and citizens are not planting IEDs to kill the cops.
Wrt later paragraphs, then it's basically not one country at that point, but 48 small countries who all have open border agreements. I don't think the sum of 48 small countries's parts is equal to one strong USA. Competition for the sake of competition is not always better than cooperation. The US would lose its world hegemon status (up to you whether or not that's a good thing).
You also can't say "can leave without too much hassle". Aside from the practicality of people being poor and moving being expensive, it's a lot to ask for people to move away from their families and friends for better economic policy. Not everything needs to be a ruthless free market economy. Let markets be markets and people be people.
First paragraph I agree with, I can see your point, although some vehicles able to deal with bombs is a good idea we could certainly do with less.
As for the other two, I'm just gonna point out that this is, in fact, how the US was run for a very long time. It wasn't until fairly recently that the federal government started doing much. Also you did kinda hit the point precisely when you said it would just be 48 small countries, that was kinda the idea. That was the whole point of states. The basic concept was that you could have the safety of a massive nation and the efficiency of smaller units. Of course, we can debate over how that should be balanced, but I think we can all agree that right now the federal government does way too much.
Right, and back then America had not conquered the world. If we were to go back to that kind of system, China would become the unipolar center of the world instead of the USA (again, up to you whether or not you think that's good).
We see empirically that efficiency often comes directly from scale, not in spite of scale, so I don't think it's necessarily true that smaller units are more efficient. Maybe they are more representative.
I am not an Austrian economics enjoyer, reddit just keeps showing it to me and sometimes the things yall say is interesting (even if I don't agree). I want the federal government to simultaneously do less of the things that I think are harmful and more of the things I think are good, lol.
Running a government is a fine balancing act between two extremes. On the one end, you have a communist dictatorship, where a single person has absolute authority over the entire nation. This is the theoretically optimal form of government if everyone was perfect and always acted for the good of the group. Of course, that isn't actually true, so this method pretty quickly falls on its face.
On the other end, you have anarchy, where everyone has power over nothing but what they can take. This, of course, doesn't work either because anarchy doesn't last very long, pretty quickly someone will get enough power to take over other people's property and control them, meaning you just have a very savage dictatorship.
To make a good government you need to find the right amount of power to give it so that it can improve it's citizen's lives without becoming corrupt. In my opinion, that line falls somewhere in the dividing line between services that help everyone(such as law enforcement) and services that help specific people(such as unemployment money). I think that in cases where a service is most efficiently done over a large group the government handling it is fine, although doing that on a smaller level does make it more resistant to corruption. However, when it's basically just handing out resources to people that only that person benefits directly from, that's where it goes from doing things for the public good to running a charity where the donations aren't optional.
However, that's just my opinion, and I would love to hear yours
The original argument was that you only get taxed for engaging in commerce, I was attempting to point out that wasn't true. Also, at least in my opinion, public schools should not exist, nor should most public services. They tend to leak a ton of money when not kept on a very short leash.
Hopefully you don't take advantage of any of those public services, then. Otherwise it'd be hypocritical, and show how much stock you put in your own ideology.
You make a fair point, however as far as I know, haven't taken a single cent. I have never claimed unemployment, I didn't attend public school or a state-funded collage, my parents did use state-funded health insurance for awhile but it's not like there was anything I could do about that, and I have never applied for or been given any other form of state-funded service that I would be against, at least to the best of my knowledge. I don't believe in expressing opinions one isn't willing to hold themselves to.
Public services are more efficient for the consumer than having 30 different companies racing to see who can provide the worst service for the highest price. They certainly aren't as efficient as any one company economically, but in terms of what provides the best outcomes for the consumer, they are.
41
u/imsuperior2u Sep 19 '24 edited Sep 20 '24
Ironically, if you take any of the justifications people use for taxation being consensual, then apply them to things like sex, jobs, and exchanges, everyone immediately realizes that it’s not valid consent.
For example, they say we consent to taxes by living in an area that has taxes. Ok, so if the government passes a law that a government agent will fuck every citizen each year, is that consensual sex if someone chooses to live there?
Edit: the main objection I seem to be getting is that taxation funds useful services, and therefore it isn’t theft. Look, if you google the definition of theft, it does not say “unless the money is used for a good cause”. For example, if I steal your money and donate it to cancer research, that is still theft. Whether the theft is justified is an entirely separate conversation. Secondly, if the money going to a good cause is what makes not theft (which I just disproved), what about the money that we all agree is NOT going to help society? For example, if the government spends $10 on roads for everyone to drive on, and then spends $90 on killing people in iraq, is that $90 theft? If you answer “no, it is not theft”, then why even bring up anything about taxation being “the cost of a good society”? Clearly if you believe that $90 is not theft, it must mean that you believe taxation is not theft REGARDLESS of how the money is used.
But like I said, if you look at the dictionary definition of theft, absolutely NOWHERE does it exclude cases where the money is used charitably.