"Freedom" thread or something

thellama73 wrote: akamaisondufromage wrote: thellama73 wrote: akamaisondufromage wrote: I know. But you work and pay taxes etc so that makes you as much a Libertarian as I used to be an anarchist. ? Libertarians aren't allowed to work? I don't see how paying taxes makes anyone a hypocrite. "I believe it's wrong for you to steal from me, but I cannot stop you, so I'd rather hand over my money than be thrown in jail" seems perfectly reasonable to me. Always quick to jump to the wrong conclusion. Tell me where I called anyone a hypocrite? I must have misunderstood your post then. My reading was that you were saying Rob was not a real libertarian because he paid taxes. Would you mind clarifying it for me?

He was saying that although he was poor he was still a Libertarian. I was saying that there is a difference between being a Libertarian whatever that may mean and talking about it and studying it. I am NOT calling anyone a hypocrite as I am sure that you all believe in what you are saying. I was questioning whether if your society suddenly became a Libertarian soc would he remain one?

The only thing I have ever read said by one of them was extremely stupid, arrogant and insensitive so I don't really even want to know about them.

thellama73 wrote: My ideology has every basis in logic. It is far more logical to conclude A. Theft is wrong; B. Taxes are theft; ergo taxes are wrong than to make exceptions and excuses because of some nebulous notion of "society" that you cannot pin down. How can you argue with a person like me? By trying to convince me that my premises are wrong.

You insist taxes are theft.  I say it is payment for service.  In history you find that it used to be common practice for the king's men to go out on the roads and demand road taxes, which we now call "tolls".  Our government still uses funds from the taxes for the roads, but now this process has been streamlined so that it is simply taken out of our paychecks every period without us ever having to think about it.  I prefer this to toll booths - toll booths cause traffic jams.  I would rather we stick to the streamlined system.  You'd rather go back to toll booths everywhere because it'll give you this silly sense of justice and the illusion of choice.  Good for you, keep riding that high horse and acting all self-righteous and looking down on us silly people who pay our taxes without getting pissed off about it.  How's that working out for you, being resentful every time you get your paycheck, by the way?  You want everyone to be able to say "no, I'm not going to pay for this service that's rendered by the government" - in principle, that sounds great.  But I am a realist.  I look around my neighborhood and see people throwing litter around without any regard for their fellow human being and I think "if we make taxes voluntary, our society is going to go to sh*t!  People are too damn self-centered to ever think about how if they don't contribute to things that we need (like roads and traffic lights and fire-fighters and such), our society will slip into chaos."  In principle, it would be nice if we could have everything be voluntary.  In reality, it would suck because we'd either have a lot less of the services that keep society running smoothly, or the government would start having to enforce payment (as in toll-booths) which would result in more time-consuming monotony.  You see the timeline of justice as "it must be done instantly."  I see it as a chess match - we must first break people of their stupid self-centeredness and then maybe one day they will be more ready to voluntarily contribute to society.

dtguitarfan wrote: You insist taxes are theft.  I say it is payment for service.  In history you find that it used to be common practice for the king's men to go out on the roads and demand road taxes, which we now call "tolls".  Our government still uses funds from the taxes for the roads, but now this process has been streamlined so that it is simply taken out of our paychecks every period without us ever having to think about it.  I prefer this to toll booths - toll booths cause traffic jams.  I would rather we stick to the streamlined system.  You'd rather go back to toll booths everywhere because it'll give you this silly sense of justice and the illusion of choice.  Good for you, keep riding that high horse and acting all self-righteous and looking down on us silly people who pay our taxes without getting pissed off about it.  How's that working out for you, being resentful every time you get your paycheck, by the way?  You want everyone to be able to say "no, I'm not going to pay for this service that's rendered by the government" - in principle, that sounds great.  But I am a realist.  I look around my neighborhood and see people throwing litter around without any regard for their fellow human being and I think "if we make taxes voluntary, our society is going to go to sh*t!  People are too damn self-centered to ever think about how if they don't contribute to things that we need (like roads and traffic lights and fire-fighters and such), our society will slip into chaos."  In principle, it would be nice if we could have everything be voluntary.  In reality, it would suck because we'd either have a lot less of the services that keep society running smoothly, or the government would start having to enforce payment (as in toll-booths) which would result in more time-consuming monotony.  You see the timeline of justice as "it must be done instantly."  I see it as a chess match - we must first break people of their stupid self-centeredness and then maybe one day they will be more ready to voluntarily contribute to society.

If I come to your house and mow your lawn while you're at work, and then present you with a bill, should you be required to pay it even though you didn't ask for the service, didn't want the service and had no ability to negotiate the price of the service or seek out competitors? I don't want everyone to say "no, I'm not going to pay for this service that's rendered by the government." I want them to have the option of saying that, just as they have the option of declining the services of anyone else. You complain about corporations having too much power; imagine what it would be like if they could compel you to buy their services even when you don't want them!

Do you think that forcibly taking money from people makes them less selfish and more altruistic? Your last sentence would seem to indicate so. Yet we've had taxes for thousands of years. Would you say that it has worked? I think people are far more likely to be generous and selfless if they see that other people depend on their generosity. If the government is taking care of poor people, I don't need to, but if a poor person depends on my charity to live, that is a whole different matter.

Lol. Costs less. Government. That's funny.

Anyway, I wasn't making an analogy. I wasn't saying "the government is like a rogue lawnmower." I was asking whether it's okay to be forced to pay for services you don't want and didn't ask for. The lawn mowing was merely an example of one such possible service.

dtguitarfan wrote: Haha, you're always getting on my case about analogies - well, that was a terrible analogy.  Here's a better one - you, have moved into a condominium where, since the inception of this condominium complex, the organization has hired a company to mow all the laws in the complex, and has "tyrannically" (in your opinion) demanded that their residents cough up a fee every month to pay for such services.  You, being Libertarian, are outraged at this.  But you go out and enjoy your freshly mown lawn which you are paying a whole lot less for than most people would end up paying if you broke down the costs of buying a lawn-mower, the gas to operate it, and figuring out how much the time it took to mow would cost.  THAT is a better analogy.

Better analogy?

1. Does this condo put residents in jail for not paying the lawnmower fee?
2. Does this condo charge some residents more than others for the lawnmower fee?
3. Does this condo charge some residents nothing at all for the lawnmower service?
4. Does this condo give some residents who paid nothing a refund on the lawnmower fee?
5. Does this condo lose exorbitant amounts of the fee through mismanagement and fraud?
6. Does this condo have expensive overhead to merely collect the fee?
7. Does this condo use part of the fee to spy on the residents?
8. Does this condo use portions of this fee to aid other condominiums?
9. Does this condo use portions of this fee to harm other condominiums?

In any event, when we lived in an apartment complex, the groundskeeping fee was built into the rent (as was just about everything else), which we voluntarily agreed to pay when we signed the lease.

The central question is: Does an entity have the right to demand payment for a product or service you don't want (or believe will be delivered inefficiently)?  If so, on what (haha) grounds?

dtguitarfan wrote: thellama73 wrote: It isn't, because I didn't move to the U.S. I was just born here. You have to physically sign an agreement when you move into an apartment complex to abide by their rules, and I have no problem with that. Exactly.  You were born into an apartment complex that's very big, and long ago your ancestors agreed to the rules of the apartment complex because they got a better deal on a bundle of services than anyone could get by buying each service individually.  And you hate that you are billed for things you didn't ask for.  But most people appreciate having these services and would like to continue having them in a bundle like that, but we'd just like to get the services improved because they've gone downhill lately.

Damn right we hate it. 

We hate being billed for offensive wars.  We hate being billed for corporate bailouts.  We hate being billed for shady IRS executives who get bonuses worth more than three years of my salary.  We hate being billed for fraudulent practices by contractors that go unchecked.  We hate being billed for agricultural subsidies.  We hate being billed for the meddling in the housing market.  We hate being billed for the IRS making spoofs of Star Trek and Giligan's Island.  We hate being billed for fighter jets and tanks being given to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt.  We hate being billed for helping Russia recruit nuclear scientists.  We hate being billed for the $27 million spent on teaching Moroccans how to make pottery.  We hate being billed for the 2 billion rounds of ammunition Federal agencies purchased for "training purposes."  We hate being billed for the talking urinal pucks in Michigan.  We hate being billed to find out if "Gaydar" is indeed a real thing.  We hate being billed for the $4.5 billion in inappropriate or abusive SNAP purchases.  We hate being billed for the Pentagon creating its own line of beef jerky.  We hate being billed for Oklahoma's hardly used Lake Murray State Airport.  We hate being billed for drone strikes in the middle east.  We hate being billed for the Alabama Watermelon Queen Tour.    We hate being billed for a soccer field in Guantanamo Bay.  We hate being billed for Pakistani Sesame Street.  We hate being billed for the $800M+ the GSA spent in Las Vegas for training 300 people.  We hate being billed for the $2.6M spent on teaching Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.  We hate being billed for the study of sexual behavior in Argentinian bars.  We hate being billed for the millions that went to banks, 21 of which, when asked, declined disclosing how the money was used.  We hate being billed for the program that teaches men in South Africa how to wash their crotches.  We hate being billed for pornography.  Yes, taxpayer money goes to porn. 

I will gladly do with private roads, schools, and mail delivery to save us from being robbed to fund bullsh*t.

Putting aside your own ideology (yes, you have one), do you agree with the government taking people's property to fund any of that stuff I listed?

It's usually derived from the right to life. You have a right to life. You need to eat to live. If you clear a wood, plant an apple seed, water the seed, fertilize the sapling, then nobody can drop by and just eat your apples. I might write more about it later when I have time, but I'm packing up for the day. If you're big into natural rights, which I'm really not so much anymore, then I think it's the weakest link in the chain of reasoning. 

The T wrote: I have a question that has always been in the back of my mind since my early days coming to these threads, and one that no article has fully satisfied in its answer. Maybe one of you has a better answer. Libertarianism holds some rights to be natural, inviolable, among them life and property. Now, life we all can understand (I hope) its origins, its value, the need for it. What about property? Why does it deserve to be put in the same category? At what point does a person acquire property in such way that it becomes a natural right? A person without life ceases to be a person, what ahout property? How can it be said that property is a natural right (which means it comes with a person by birth to put it simply) when the only thing a person brings from birth is life itself? I have thought of ways to answer this but some leave me completely dissatisfied. And much of libertarianism relies on giving property value, the value of a right. Even the issue of taxation is involved here.

When asked what is the essential right, I guess most people would say the right to your life is the essential right (you yourself have implied this, as has Equality), but I disagree.

The essential right is the right to property.  The right to life follows from your right to your property, since your body and what it contains belongs to no one else but you- it is the continued product of your volition.  If someone strikes you, he has violated your property (your most valuable property, since you determine the usage of the rest of your property).  Thus murder is a greater crime than theft, even though murder is a form of theft (illegitimately taking your life away from you).

When you choose to work for someone, you are offering your time (your life) and your effort (your literal matter converted into energy) to earn your recompense.  This recompense is therefore also your property, and rightfully yours.

That's another reason taxation is morally wrong.  It deprives you of something you spent a part of yourself to produce (an income, etc.).