Taxation is a form of slavery.

originally posted by: lakenheath24
We do. Its called elections. Who is on your local skool board.

a reply to: TzarChasm

F*** the elections. Putting a middle man/woman between taxpayer and the projects those tax dollars pay for. Instead of electing people, we should be electing projects for funding and then hold an open conference to discuss the technical aspects of those investments. It should not be a "you elected me so deal with it" type of conversation.

Who or whom would chair this open conference? A vote perhaps? And who is involved in the discussions? Everyone? Someone?
So if the project is a national grid upgrade for all 48 contiguous states, do we need to hold a conference and listen to all 318 million individuals involved? May take a few days no?
How do we come to a conclusion of said conference? How do we get a decision on said investment?

Seems......backwards.



a reply to: TzarChasm

a reply to: CitizenZero

“If you wish to keep slaves, you must have all kinds of guards. The cheapest way to have guards is to have the slaves pay taxes to finance their own guards. To fool the slaves, you tell them that they are not slaves and that they have Freedom. You tell them they need Law and Order to protect them against bad slaves. Then you tell them to elect a Government. Give them Freedom to vote and they will vote for their own guards and pay their salary. They will then believe they are Free persons. Then give them money to earn, count and spend and they will be too busy to notice the slavery they are in.” Alexander Warbucks

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

What else can I say? That about covers it.

Yep. Couldn’t have expressed it better.
Bravo.
a reply to: Klassified

a reply to: CitizenZero

Survival and/or laboring is a form of theft which taxation reclaims.

If you take something for yourself then you owe every living thing a portion in return.

originally posted by: CitizenZero

originally posted by: AaarghZombies

originally posted by: CitizenZero
Modern slavery is a great deal more subtle than it once was. Most of us are not out there tilling the soil with whips at our backs, sure, but we labor for a ruthless master nonetheless.

“A ruthless master?” you inquire. It couldn’t be any other way. Every state in the history of human-kind has formed to serve no other purpose than the exploitation of the vanquished by the victors. Centuries later, long after the victors and vanquished have perished, the means of exploitation remain. They remain, in this case, as the forced appropriation of another’s labor, an activity we euphemistically call “taxation”. If we citizens were to apply the same method, we’d be jailed for extortion.

Philosopher Robert Nozik formulates taxation like this: “taking the earnings of N hours labor is like taking N hours from the person; it is like forcing the person to work N hours for another's purpose”. Thus, he says, taxation is a form of forced labor. I’m inclined to go further. If we were to imagine falling upon a spectrum between freedom and slavery, it seems to me that our condition in this relationship lands closer to one end than the other.

Anyone who laments watching a vast percentage of their earnings disappear each year might feel the force of this. But for those who rely on this exploitation, whether to fund their own survival or to fill the void where their charity might have been, raising taxes and strengthening the means of exploitation are causes worth fighting for. The liberty-minded should refuse to cede any moral ground here because tax-advocates want forced labor, extortion, and exploitation. They advocate for slavery.

Tax cannot be considered to be a form of slavery as it's returned to you in the form of services such as the police department, and highways.

Actual slaves labored and got nothing in return for it except for the occasional whipping and the toe of their master's boot. They also couldn't choose to live in low slavery jurisdictions, get rebates or deductions on their slavery for business expenses, and the amount of slavery that they experienced wasn't commensurate with how hard they labored.

Slaves were given food and lodging. It was a common argument of anti-abolitionists that slaves in the US had better conditions than the poor in Europe.

The thing about slavery is that slaves don't get a choice. They can't choose what they eat or where they are lodged. If they labor harder they don't get better food or better accommodation.

Paying tax is a choice for you. You can simply reduce your income until it falls below the margin for paying tax in your citystate, or you can choose to take your income in a form that isn't taxable. For example, if you grow your own food rather than laboring for money that you exchange for food. That way you don't even pay sales tax.

I think that we can more or less agree that a lot of anti-abolitionists were struggling to find justifications for slavery that didn't really hold water. Do you remember the ones who claimed that Africans couldn't be counted as fully human, or that the existence of slaves in Biblical times meant that slavery could be justified in modern times?

originally posted by: TzarChasm

originally posted by: lakenheath24
We do. Its called elections. Who is on your local skool board.

a reply to: TzarChasm

we should be electing projects for funding and then hold an open conference to discuss the technical aspects of those investments. It should not be a "you elected me so deal with it" type of conversation.

Didn't California try something similar?

The problem with what you are suggesting is A) There are just too many things going on at any one time to vote on even a fraction of them, let alone all of them and B) People are idiots.

Sometimes you need people do make decisions for you, often because people don't understand economics or how to balance a budget, or what the costs/benefits of particular projects are. Which is why most free and democratic countries have civil services that make these kind of choices. People who are politically neutral and who understand all of the above.

If we left things up to the people, California would have the greatest infrastuuructure and welfare system in the world, and a gazillion dollar budget deficit that the voters would be 100% convinced was going to be covered by "taxing the rich". Most of whom would have moved states when they saw a 99% tax band being aimed at them.

a reply to: CitizenZero

Extortion!

That's a word I'd associate with the Banking System.

a reply to: lakenheath24 that is what the taxes on gas were supposed to be for. Since they can not seem to do that I am fine with tollroads and bridge tolls.
If there were more Bobs to rough people up for breaking into homes, there would be a 'lot' less crime.

a reply to: AaarghZombies

I understand that there are ways to avoid taxes, just as there are ways avoid being enslaved. I shouldn’t have to run from society, become homeless, and refuse to work for my survival in order to avoid what I consider extortion and forced labor, just as the slave shouldn’t have to hide and escape from wider society to avoid being enslaved. Though I can see that, as a practical matter, moving and finding tax havens would reduce the pressure, but none of that resolves the moral issue that taxation is extortion and forced labor.