Taxes and wealth transfers are something that a reasonable person can be angry or even resentful of.
If someone went into your house and robbed you, you might be angry. You have bills, dreams, and children to care for. A lot of people would even want to kill the thief.
These policies have the same effect, but you are powerless to defend yourself.
> The fact is that the government, like a thief, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
Yes, but I like civil society, infrastructure, paved roads and what little social safety net we have in this country, so...
> If you refuse to pay the tax, people with guns do not come for you.
Seriously? People get put in jail for tax evasion all the time. Certainly lots of guns involved in that process.
> money taken from your savings accounts
Not theft?
> public goods and services, to be shared by all of us
No. Tax money is distributed to favored interests. It is not shared among all.
So what portion of your property do I have a right to? Which part of your home or possessions may I come and direct to my purposes? Or to "the rest of us" even? May I go to your fridge and distribute some fruit to your neighbors or to the homeless? How is a claim to income different than a claim to your other property?
You pay taxes because someone with guns tells you to. In return they try to protect you, such that you keep paying them.
Beyond that, you probably wouldn’t pay taxes. You’d buy something. It would be much more efficient to buy some shared solution to a problem, as opposed to let someone take your money by force to solve some problem that may or may not impact you.
> you're selfish because you've directed your anger at the poor
Who said I'm angry at the poor? I'm not. I just think there is a certain intelligent logic in how taxation and representation are rhetorically linked. I also think a majority-rules democratic system where a majority pay $0 in taxes in unsustainable. I think the decisions made in such a system will be stupid and short-sighted, leading to massive deficits, economic collapse, and maybe even political instability in the long run.
Leave your emotions aside for a moment. I am simply trying to discuss what is wise. I am not advocating eating the poor. However, I see that you already have your mind made up and have no desire for discussion.
In addition, you're imputing a ton of motives and positions to me that I did not state. You're in attack dog mode for no reason, and there is no way that I can intelligently engage you if you've already painted me as an evil misanthrope.
The number of people who pay no net taxes in this country is much larger than the number that get their clothes from dumpsters. You're painting a dishonest scenario and smearing me with dishonest motives.
In general I don't enjoy talking to people who think that those who disagree with them are evil. I can say that I didn't enjoy this conversation.
> I have no problem someone buys a $10million apartment in NYC and keeps it for a holiday in a year, if it say, costs $1 million in taxes per year and pays for a lot of other apartments, public transit
aka, you want a wealth tax that you yourself are not subject to, in order to pay for services that you yourself _do_ utilize. Implied here is that these services would be paid for by such a wealth tax, and thus, your own tax is either reduced, or used to pay for even more services which you can utilize.
This is just another way to frame a selfish desire, but making it sound good because it targets somebody rich. A populous opinion imho.
Tax should be levied fairly. Wealth tax is not a fair tax. The current tax system is pretty progressive, and there just needs to be patches to the loopholes, rather than institute wealth tax, which just causes inconveniences for the wealthy at best, and causes them to move their wealth at worst (leading to worse economic outcomes).
> Why would anyone oppose a simple system like this?
Because you want to make people angry and upset at least once a year at the government? Because you want to remind people that taxes are something the government takes, instead of letting them think of taxes as money they never earned to begin with.
I love paying my taxes, but if you think taxes are bad (and lots of people do), then the current U.S. system makes total sense.
> Paying my taxes is a point of pride for me. It's a repayment for all those years I was poor and the government paid for me to live and go to school.
Spoken like someone who wasn't on the receiving end of bombs, troops, torture, imprisonment, or theft to enrich the already rich - you know, the bulk of government spending.
I pay my taxes in order to avoid being a victim of state violence, but when I do, I say a prayer for the victims of my failure to be strong enough to do the right thing, which is to deprive the state of the means to do evil.
> When people don't feel their taxes are fair, they start to evade those. They might be also just greedy bastards, but I don't think that's necessarily commonly the case.
No, normal people do not. Tax evasion is a serious crime. People don't start doing criminal acts when they just feel something "isn't fair".
> Paying taxes is not politics. Being stressed about that is just the same as being stressed about any other personal administration task.
I think it's very much related because as soon as you talk or think about taxes you immediately correlate it to forcefully giving the government a large amount of your hard earned money.
And now it becomes political because you might not see directs benefits of that, so now you wonder why you pay so many hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxes over your life, but there's potholes in your neighborhood for years that could break a car's axle and thieves are breaking into houses with police who don't care enough to solve the mystery, all while you continue to pay some of the highest state tax in the US (percent wise).
And it snow balls from there. You begin to wonder why so much has to be spent on things you don't necessarily agree with and before you know it, you're ruminating on this stuff to the point where your heart is racing and you want to move to a private ungoverned island.
Thinking about stuff like that is super disappointing / demoralizing to me, so I try my best to avoid it as much as possible. I know avoiding bad things is usually terrible advice but this is one case where I'm more than happy to not play the game or only play the absolute bare minimum to enjoy my life the best I can.
> We should tax the crap out of everyone’s estates because it’s aligned with the American value of equal opportunity. Do you want to live in a society where everyone has a fair shot?
I do not understand this sentiment one bit. To think that we should implement equality by pulling people down to the mean is, frankly, insane. That does nothing to help anyone - its a stance based solely on anger and jealousy. Your policy would literally decrease the average quality of life.
Would you be happy if everyone was destitute? At what point do you realize that actual quality of life matters more than perfect equality?
We achieve equality by bringing people up, not tearing them down. If you think we need more tax money to accomplish that goal, I would argue that we have much more of a budgeting problem than a tax income problem, but I understand the sentiment. But to think that the appropriate tax vehicle is to explicitly destroy lives is not an American ideal.
> Higher taxes on you are just society shifting their priorities away from your interests
We shouldn't be prioritizing anyone's interests via an institution with the right to licit first use of force. We have the technology now to charge people directly for the government-provided services they use. If you use it, you should pay for it. Until we start doing this, society is never going to price things properly and prices are the fastest mechanism for a society to communicate what is important.
Unilaterally taking away IOUs someone has accumulated without recompense merely deprioritizing someone's interests. It's theft.
> it could just be the rebound from society over-subsidizing your lifestyle.
what aspects of my lifestyle do you believe society over-subsidizing?
>>>>> how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we're threatened with imprisonment instead of violence?
If the mafia takes away 20% of your income (and also the people around you), and then comes back to you 2 years later to report what they did with the money: "Your money and the one from your friends helped me buy this new house on the lake, and this private jet. I had to use some to pay the workers because I'm not enslaving people"
If a country takes the same amount of money and comes back to you 2 years later: "Your money was used to build this new road to improve the local economy, also we were able to save 3 persons from a fire thanks to this new fire truck, and treat 2 people at the hospital. Feel free to use that new road, and don't worry if your house gets on fire, the firetruck will be there in a few minutes"
Do you see the difference? The taxes were here trying to help you and the citizens of the country you live in. They also spent that money buying 2 fighter jets and tanks? That's unfortunate, that would be useful if there was some way to make your voice heard. That new house and jet the mafia built, you will never have any benefits from it.
So: how is taxation different from extortion, besides that we're threatened with imprisonment instead of violence?
A: One of them, in essence, is trying to help you, the other one does not care about you.
> Income Taxation is in no way voluntary exchange like that
Take a weekend off and calculate how much 'fees' you would have to pay for 'private defense services', infrastructure, judiciary, police and all the other things if they were made private.
> The fact is that the government, like a common thief, says to a person: Your money, or your life
What religious delirium.
> But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
The dastarty act of providing military, police, firefighting, law, justice, social services - all the things that make you live in a modern society instead of living in the former late feudal society where you wouldn't even have the social rank in order to be able to talk against your feudal lord in public like this.
There is no magical, divine, extraterrestrial or supernatural force that provides this modern society that you live in, and all the rights and freedoms that you have in that society. We, the people, have managed to make that happen through the mechanisms we invented. And one of those mechanisms is the state that is owned by its people.
> It may be that the disagreement you're encountering is based on your acceptance of the premise that taxes are collected at gunpoint.
Isn't that true, though? I mean, the IRS doesn't send around a tax-person who carries a pistol or rifle or whatever, but the whole system is founded on the idea that "if you don't do what 'society' has agreed is the law, bad things (tm) can and probably will happen to you".
Paying taxes isn't optional in the same way that getting a driver's license is optional. So it's literally true that taxes are collected through the subtle but ultimately real threat of violence. Maybe you won't be executed, maybe you won't be beaten, but you will be made to do things against your will like go to jail.
Sure it's the extreme logical conclusion, but it's also the accurate one if you try not to pay.
Taxes and wealth transfers are something that a reasonable person can be angry or even resentful of.
If someone went into your house and robbed you, you might be angry. You have bills, dreams, and children to care for. A lot of people would even want to kill the thief.
These policies have the same effect, but you are powerless to defend yourself.
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