It’s tax relief. The tax relief you get depends on the rate of tax you pay. You’re using money that is already taxed. If you do not earn enough money to pay tax, you probably won’t get tax relief on your donation.

I missed it. After having read it, it doesn’t appear that you’re avoiding or evading taxes at all. Availing oneself of the tax system is not the same as avoiding taxes in my eyes.

I favor the rule of the people; you favor the rule of a few. I favor democracy; you favor representative government. I favor sovereign persons; you favor the idea that people get to exercise their sovereignty at the ballot box one day every few years. Ironically, I am a democrat, you’re a republican.

Report a person or business you think is not paying enough tax or is committing another type of fraud against HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

This includes:

• running a business without telling HMRC
  
• not paying enough Income Tax or National Insurance
  
• making false claims for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme
  
• making false claims for Child Benefit or Tax Credits
  
• not being registered for VAT when they should be
  
• not charging VAT or other taxes on goods or services they sell
  
• not paying VAT or other taxes on goods or services they buy
  
• hiding money, shares or other assets in an offshore bank account
  
• other types of tax avoidance or tax evasion
  

https://www.gov.uk/report-tax-fraud

According to the government, your words alone might make any scrupulous tax man report you to the authorities, submitting you to investigation, which is itself a punishment. I think you’re right to avoid taxes as much as possible, and am confident it is all above board, but I’d be careful because the government is forever set on closing the tax gap.

A system whereby your neighbor can report you to the authorities for avoiding taxes is just another layer of threat among the rest of them. That you are arbitrarily subject to their whims is unavoidable. What you do today may be a crime tomorrow.

But, but but,... is not tax only possible if there is private property? And therefore a feature of non-communist regimes?

Taxes are necessary for any regime that cannot generate its own revenue. The exploitation of both the labor and finances and the property of its citizens is inherent in a communist regime, but not exclusive to it.

Tax evasion and tax fraud aren’t crimes in the UK?

You also disclosed that you profit from tax collection insofar as you draw from the government’s finances.

The problem with the argument @Tzeentch and @NOS4A2 are putting forward (as I believe we've discussed before) is that property rights are not intrinsically connected to violence.

The government could, quite easily, simply take what it believes is its property without any violence at all. I could just remove the money from you bank account. It could rock up to your house whilst you're out, break in, and take your stuff. Or, it could do so whilst you're in (since the same proscription applies to you - you can't use violence against them to make the stop).

It sounds like you can base it on non-violence, but it still revolves around property rights, when it comes to taxes.

States have certainly streamlined the activity of taking people’s money to the point where violence isn’t necessary. But tax evasion and tax fraud is still punishable by law and carries with it a range of life-altering penalties, from fines to prison sentences.

So though people may have been convinced that paying taxes is some sort sacrificial duty to a higher power, at bottom the threat of being kidnapped and imprisoned against one’s will still remains.

With the monopoly on violence comes the monopoly on crime. If any one, or any group, were to engage in any of the activities of government, including collecting taxes, they’d be imprisoned as criminals. Does that not say anything about the nature of their behavior?

Somehow and at some point people were convinced that voting was tantamount to democracy, that marking a piece of paper every few years constitutes the rule of the people. This is not any kind of rule of the people that I can employ in any seriousness, so I refuse to believe that since a man was nominally voted into power he has any legitimate authority over other people.

By bureaucracy I mean the state machinery and its employees, dependant as they are through the appropriation of other people’s labor and money. And we can agree that the appointment of these people will not make everyone happy.

There is a difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate authority. One's status as an official, or employment within a bureaucracy, is not good enough to justify the legitimacy of their own authority. It is for this reason that their job is thankless.

Society should be vigilant but delegating that vigilance to some job-holding bureaucrat, subject to the whims of a political class, is to be the opposite of vigilant.

All state systems are capitalist, the socialist ones included. I don't think the existence of one precludes the existence of others because any state that does not consider the production and management of capital is unimaginable. I avoid using that term as mucn as possible because it was a term of abuse invented by socialists and in its common use is essentially incoherent. But the increasing interventions into the social affairs of human beings proves to me that the state has a "social" rather than a "liberal" or "individualistic" tendency, and therefor socialism is the reigning ideology.

The state has never manifested as the liberal night-watchman, as far as I know, preferring to exploit and monopolize rather than protect. Instead, it increasingly expands its scope and power until finally it intervenes in all human activity. Communists promised us the state would just wither away but it became more and more totalitarian under their rule, as it invariably does. The teleology of each state is to capture society until both society and the state are indistinguishable. Notice how some can't help but conflate society and government as if they were one and the same.

One can search the entire website for the phrase “abolish the state” and find out that Mikie is the only one who ever drones on about it, hilariously enough.

So he made a choice: comply with the laws of one country - at least until he can use the legislative process to change them, move to another country, or stop doing business.
You have the same choice.

And people have the choice not to exploit their fellow man. Stop taking another’s stuff. Quit forcing another to labor for you. Find other means to satisfy your wants that do not involve exploiting others.

If you want to delegate your responsibilities to your fellow human beings to someone else, go for it. But I don’t think that favoring a piece of legislation—in other words sitting around and doing nothing—is any sign that you’re helping anyone but yourself. Until I see you out there feeding people or giving them housing, your sanctimony falls on deaf ears.

I am not in favor of stealing people’s money so Mikie can say he favors legislation, no.

Yeah, so I guess babies, the disabled, children, the elderly, etc., better get off their asses.

Until I see you feeding any of those people I will never deny them any means to acquire food. You would.

Do you think food just falls in someone’s mouth? All food is acquired with work, buddy.

Yea, if someone wants to be a slave, learns to be under the dominion of a master, and have his money taken from him without his permission, like you want, I say go for it.

If you want to call voluntary activity between consenting parties “slavery”, be my guest.

The employer is forced to deduct a specific amount or else he is breaking the law.

Then why do you?

I don’t.

The principle is that I rail against the involuntary activity between non-consenting parties, not the voluntary activity between consenting parties. Your principle seems to be the opposite.

Which happens to an extreme degree in corporate America, the “private sector.” Oddly, we never hear you railing against that. It always works out somehow that this kind of exploitation is perfectly justified.

Why would I rail against the voluntary activity between consenting adults?

An observation regarding taxes...

The places I call home have what some would call fairly high taxes. Yet, I know a few ordinary families with, say, more than one car. Societies with public transportation and self-made rich folks. And reasonable general standard of living.

Such like suggests (to me at least) that anti-taxers go by (dogmatic) ideology, but I could surely be wrong.

Personally I don’t care if your tax money built me a home made of gold and furnished me with every luxury I could imagine. It’s wrong to take fruits of someone’s labor and use it to benefit others, just as it was wrong to do it to exploit the fruits of the slave’s labor, and for the same reasons. So I wouldn’t oppose it because I was told to, or because it furthers my lot in life, but because it is wrong to behave that way towards others.

But compare your tax burden with the tax burden in the UAE or the Cayman Islands or Monaco.

No. That melodramatic representation of taxes is both inaccurate and unacceptable. People's things aren't taken; only a predetermined and agreed-upon portion of the money which was issued and guaranteed by a government agency, and which they receive in return for some function they perform that is of value to somebody who is in possession of those funds.

Yes they are taken. You agree to a wage with an employer; the government takes a portion of your income. Neither you nor your employer determine how much is taken. This occurs involuntarily, whether you agree with it or not.

It’s either/or, collectivism or individualism. There is no middle ground.

I’m not saying you’re guilty of anything, either. I’m just showing you’re not writing anything new or nuanced, that you are making the same arguments that they have, and in so doing have revealed which side of the fence you have taken. The fact that that side of the fence is a veritable rogue’s gallery of evil, tyranny, and mass murder is not my fault. You’ve blamed individualism for the same things they have. You hold the same ideas.

Your description of the parts of individualism you like as “humanism” reveals only how badly you wish to avoid being associated with the label “individualism”. It does not indicate which political unit you believe exists, let alone which political unit you think ought to have rights or ought to be paramount in its relation to power and the state.

One of the greatest conceits is that only man in his government form can lay asphalt, deliver packages, pick up garbage, or care for the sick. Here in the great white north we have abandoned state-controlled air traffic control, one of the first countries to do so. It's one less thing I am forced to pay for even when I don't use it.

I can appreciate that. It was a loaded question, anyways.

Are you for or against appropriating the fruits of someone’s labor?

I can show any number of quotes from socialists, fascists, conservatives, communists, throughout the ages about the atomization theory of individualism, and the resulting fear of selfishness, hermitic lifestyle, and the anarchy that is supposed to result because of it. But again all of it rests on a false anthropology.

All of it was designed in service to the power of tradition, religion, the monarchy, the state, all of which imply subordination and obedience. So I do not care about your nuance when I can see what it is designed to protect: the sanctity and prestige of one or more collectivist and anti-social institutions. Collapse of what? The state? The church? The monarchy? No doubt it’s some amorphous institution set over and above the value of human beings qua human beings.

Conflating selfishness and individualism is a collectivist canard as old as the word itself, and flips the dictum that man is a social animal on its head. I can’t take anyone who repeats it that seriously because it posits a glaringly false anthropology, that man is a fundamentally anti-social animal—as soon as individuals were set free from the bonds of subordination and are afforded rights they’d become hermits and care only for themselves.

It was the conservatives and royalists who invented the term and the communists, socialists, and fascists that keep using it with this meaning today. Consequently it was collectivists who historically stood in opposition to freedom, human rights, individual worth, and human dignity. Apparently this meaning persists on philosophy forums.

That's what I said, both are extremes that eventually lead to collapse. And we've also seen somewhat of a pure individualistic society through the neoliberalism movement in the 80s. Most of the Millennial generation has been formed as individualists and many of the problems today are the result of individualism, even though we've not seen a nation embracing it fully, since that would almost be anarchistic.

It cannot be said that any of the problems of today are the result of individualism. Greed, egotism, self-concern, which are often associated with individualism, are all of them perennial problems, not limited to any specific political epoch, and found in collectivists as much as in individualists.

There is no individualism. There has never been any individualism. Everywhere we look the individual is subordinate to a collective state, bound to act in compulsory cooperation with people that are not his brethren or friend, and under rules that are not his own.

This is inherently built into the Westphalian system of international relations, which is essentially anarchistic. Look at which being in the world is considered sovereign. Look at which being in the world is afforded life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the dominion and jurisdiction over all lands, all behaviors, all interactions, that occur within the bounds of its property. Far from a liberal individualism, we have adopted the individualism of Carlyle, "the vital articulation of many individuals into a new collective individual". We have adopted collectivism.

The individual has no rights, but only the rights the state provisionally grants him; the state may suspend them, modify them, or take them away at its own pleasure. It's how a nominally liberal democracy can get away with subjugating its entire population, as they did during the most recent pandemic. That's why the notion of a res publica, a government for the people by the people, is the greatest stroke of propaganda ever written. It has convinced people that their master is themselves. They now believe the conditional life of a conscript, a serf, a slave, is freedom, and an absolutist oligarchy is democracy. They believe that since they get to exercise their sovereignty on an astronomical basis (according to how many times the earth revolves around the sun), every few years voting for which mammal gets to dominate them, that they too are in control.

I suspect that this condition more so than individualism has led to the problems of today.

We often forget how Western communism is, how bourgeois Marx was, and so it would inevitably erect itself on the Roman, republican model. A written constitution, the rule of law, representative government—all of it is subject to the iron law of oligarchy, in communist states as it in is the “liberal democratic” ones. In that sense communist rights and freedoms are little different than republican rights and freedoms, insofar as the sphere of allowable activity is dictated by the republican state machinery, subject to be taken away as quickly as it is given.

I would say any form of organization is possible if it is free to do so from the ground up, through voluntary association, and not through the dictates of a man, a group of men, or a piece of paper.

My only real gripe is that most theories of mind and consciousness are dualistic, or fractured, whereas a human being is not. For some reason we try to reduce it to some organic or spiritual locus within the body, maybe in the brain and nervous system, or maybe just floating around jn there somewhere. But blood, oxygen, hormones, brain, bones, energy, flesh, and so on, are all so integrated into it that any large absence of one leads to the absence of consciousness, mind, and indeed the death of the entire. By the time they find their locus, consciousness is gone because they've thrown it out with the bath water.

It's the sort of thinking that leads us to utter absurdities such as brains in vats and p-zombies, and in my opinion indirect realism. There is really no reason to fracture the body in any abstract way, or include some sort of intermediary, in order to better understand the body's mysteries, especially when all conscious humans are by-and-large whole.

Oh dear. You’re annoyed at the arrogance. Excuse me while I cringe. I’m annoyed at the fence-sitting and tone-policing. At any rate, yours or mine feelings on the matter help nothing.

“Bodily” pertains to the body, you know, the structure and being of a human organism? Is that not something? Can any of this be described in any other way? It’s not like the term describes nothing, and it’s actually quite important. In fact any disruption or damage in bodily activity related to hearing, and occurring at any point in the auditory system, can lead to deafness.

We’re not brains, Frank. If you don’t want to include the ear in the act of hearing then the fence-sitting charade can no longer be maintained.

We do know that no sound called a voice is moving the membrane, moving the bones, converting mechanical vibration into electrical signals as you just tried to illustrate, so don’t go spouting off like you don’t know. Yet all of these are involved in the activity of hearing.

We do know that since there are no such waves, there are no such bodily movements as you described. No signals representing sound waves, no such signals reaching the brain. Therefor the bodily states involved in hearing a voice are different than the bodily states involved in hallucinating a voice.

If the bodily states were not different, hearing a voice and hallucinating a voice would be the same. The conflation comes from the one who confuses his one bodily state with the other, which is entirely fitting from the subjective perspective of a man who cannot even see his own ears.

If the biological act of hearing involves using the body to perceive physical sound waves, it cannot be said that a man is hearing voices in his head, because there is neither the biological activity nor the sound waves required to hear such sounds. The biological activity of hearing and the biological act of hallucinating are two distinct biological activities.

Should we confuse the two? While it could be said that from a limited 1st person perspective the experience of hearing voices resembles the experience of hallucination, it ought to consider from any other of the unfathomable amount of perspectives that there is no hearing, let alone the hearing of voices. Were we able to record the movements of the biology in great detail, down to the tiniest of acts, an accounting of all biological activity involved in one would necessarily be different than those involved in the other, and therefor there really is no similarity between hearing actual voices and hearing voices in the head.

I wonder if indirect realism and phenomenalism has served to obfuscate the biology of hallucination rather than helped to explain it.

I could also say he doesn’t hear at all, that everything is caused by activity outside the auditory systems, and that hearing is in fact a process of the auditory system as it functions in direct relationship with the rest of the world, as the biology demands. So if he’s not hearing and there are no voices, it would be incorrect to say he is hearing voices.

I get it. You directly feel a cold feeling. You directly feel yourself indirectly feeling the arctic air. But I think you’re really describing how you feel the arctic air, the ways and means with which you feel the arctic air, not your own feelings.

If x is representative of y then x by definition informs us about what y is like, no?

There is always an intermediary inserted into the logic. In this case it’s “experience”. It cannot be that a perceiver is experiencing the cold weather. That is too direct of a relationship. Rather, the perceiver is experiencing himself experiencing the cold weather. He feels the feeling of cold before he feels the weather. It’s entirely redundant.

They are not reality because they cannot be instantiated. They are without a referent. If I ask you to represent your abstraction with a single instance of it, you cannot point to anything but yourself, which is not a sensation or an experience or a sight or a taste as far as I can tell. I am left to observe only your words.