Subject:
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Uhh, back to tax again ;-) (Was Re: Is space property?)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 3 Jan 2001 01:26:33 GMT
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Viewed:
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367 times
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Christopher Weeks wrote in message ...
>
> So I'm still a little hung up on the inconsistent thing. Inconsistent with
> what? I would understand if you thought it was rude, uncaring, bad, • unfair,
> etc.
You're right. I have made two mistakes in my argument: one was to invoke the
ambiguous concept of "fairness", the other one was to rigidly stick to the
dictionary definition of "stealing" when that definition itself was
complicated by the use of the term "right(s)". Please excuse me as I
recapitulate.
You (incorrectly ;-) ) call taxation "stealing" when the tax could only ever
be considered "yours" because of:
1) Ownership laws made by a government who are legally entitled to your tax
(regardless of what they do with it), therefore you are obviously _not_
legally entitled to it.
2) An amoral (yes that's right, _amoral_) free market which ignores human
rights, which therefore grants you no moral entitlement to the money you
earn but don't need! If that sounds strange it's because you are either
confusing the moral entitlement with the legal one (in which case see 1), or
you are mistakenly thinking that "a sense of fairness" keeps market prices
reasonable when it's actually something else.
In short, you have no legal or moral entitlement to the tax being taken from
you, ergo it isn't stealing.
>
> I have proven time and again that I willing to part with money voluntarily • to
> support causes that I value even when there is no direct payoff for me.
In the bigger scheme of things, so what! The population as a whole is
nowhere near charitable enough to run a country, and the free market can't
run the country because it ignores human rights. Oops! So we have the
forcible redistribution of wealth, or.... - well, what other alternatives
are there?!?
>
> So for every $1.00 I make, $.375 goes to maintain the bureaucracy, $.065 • goes
> to fund unethical stuff, $.0325 goes to silly stuff, and the final
> three and a quarter cents actually helps people.
Are you making wild exaggerations in an attempt to support your point? Do
you have web link or something to a deeper analysis, or some data that
actually backs these figures up? Like the announcement of the U.S. budget,
where the government outlines what it's doing with your tax? That _does_
happen in the U.S., right?
>
> It's not the giving up of funds to help others that's the problem. It's • the
> armed thuggery that we all seem to accept like cows heading for
> slaughter.
The biggest mistake the government ever made was to give the mistaken
impression that the money was ever yours to keep. Hmm, it should also force
all citizens to view its budget announcements. Oh, and vote. Or would that
be immoral? ;-)
Cheers,
Paul
LUGNET member 164
http://www.geocities.com/doctorshnub/
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Message has 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Is space property?
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| (...) And I think that the removal of forced wealth reallocation, particularly when the wealth was not gained corruptly is unfair. Fixing that problem would "push things in the _direction_ of fairness." (...) There are two issues. One is that the US (...) (24 years ago, 2-Jan-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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