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@NOS4A2, there's been comments on / objections to your "tax is theft" slogan.
Maybe you missed/forgot/misunderstood/ignored them.

What’s your counter argument, Tim? Maybe you pay taxes voluntarily. Except I wager you would never pay more or less than what they tell you to pay. Tell me why you are not a slave to their whims.

That's called being a citizen. The same way children are children and not slaves, even when they are "slaves to the whims" of their parents. Especially the first few years. It's really quite pathetic you're equivocating paying taxes to being a slave when we all know what a slave really looks like. You aren't it. You're just a pathetic selfish whiner.

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A slave is a person who is forced to work for and obey another.

People do not freely pay it because it is a crime if they don’t. It is garnished from their wages or taken at the point of sale, and without their permission. So this nonsense about paying it freely for the good of all, as if people are getting together with their neighborhood to throw money in a pot for a community garden, is fiction.

Go freely give your money to the government,Tim. That’s the only way you can escape the canard you’ve built for yourself. You believe the lie, you spread the lie, so why not be it?

That's called being a citizen. The same way children are children and not slaves, even when they are "slaves to the whims" of their parents. Especially the first few years. It's really quite pathetic you're equivocating paying taxes to being a slave when we all know what a slave really looks like. You aren't it. You're just a pathetic selfish whiner.

The power parents have over their children is legitimate; the power the government has of the people isn’t. One can be justified, the other cannot. You’re probably employed by the government, living off another’s wealth, so I’m not surprised.

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Who pays for foreign wars? You benefit from cruise missiles dropped on wedding parties. You’re just getting together with your sensible community to build military bases on someone else’s land.

Go freely give them your money, Tim, instead of pretending that you do.

Taxation is legitimate as well. Proxy powers over children as well. Both are legal concepts, both are laws.

Wages and contracts are legal concepts, protected and enforced by states. They are not moral concepts. Your claim to your wages are protected under law, while morally you are most likely not supposed to be the beneficiary of most economic transactions. This is because economic transactions are not moral transactions, and only moral claims can considered to exist intrinsically. There is therefore no moral claim to wages under a contract, let alone to pre-tax wages. The whole taxation is theft, is a conceptual mess devoid of morality or historical knowledge.

There were and are plenty terrible, immoral, and dubious legal concepts. Slave codes, for example. When morality and law contradict one has to lose either his moral sense or his respect for the law. I’ve chosen to retain my moral sense, and gave up quite easily my respect for the law or anyone who practices it. Any appeal to law is just a routine fallacy, anyway, so I’ll just disregard them.

But economic transactions concern morality wherever they involve human interaction. Theft, robbery, extortion, plunder, exploitation etc. are both economic and immoral transactions because the exchange involves the treatment of others. Sharing, charity, or any fair dealing are both economic and moral transactions, and for the same reasons. When you offer me something in return for my labor, and we both agree, and the transaction is satisfied, that’s a moral transaction. The inclusion of laws and contracts, as far as economic interactions go, is immoral because it is to involve a third-party and its coercive powers in the transaction.

@NOS4A2, so run with your idea.
No more taxes (and whatever it's all called) in your or that :point: country.
Then...? First the cartels move in then the dictatorships? Explicate what you think would happen, now that your state has done away with this kind of supposed theft and slavery.

*cough* I just noticed that we may be in the wrong thread here

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It is relevant because Trump is proposing to eliminate income tax.

So what did the US do before the 16th amendment? What does Monaco or UAE or Bahamas do without income tax, for example?

There are two means by which a state can generate wealth: by exploiting the labor of others, like a criminal, or through production, like everyone else. So why not quit exploiting people and start producing? Why not charge people for these so-called services?

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When you offer me something in return for my labor, and we both agree, and the transaction is satisfied, that’s a moral transaction. — NOS4A2

Wrong. Agreement is irrelevant. We could agree because you threatened my wife, or because we're family and I'm partial, or simply because I like you and not the next guy. These are merely economic transactions, not moral ones. You need to be deeply steeped in a capitalist society to equate economic transactions with moral ones, so the mistake is understandable but it's a rather simplistic and unexamined position. That's where almost everything goes wrong with most of your thinking.

Moral claims are about who deserves what but market transactions are not concerned with moral outcomes at all. We can be fairly certain that whatever economic outcome we have, it is in fact an immoral one because rarely do people get what they deserve. That's a logical consequence for morality not having a market value and to the extent governments enforce certain (moral) standards, they are always introduced as a cost from an economic perspective, whereas a moral act benefits a society. Which really is just another example that the economic system not only does not aim at moral outcomes but actually encourages the opposite.

The Bangladeshi is paid too little for the pants he sows, his neighbour is affected by the toxic dyes that are unregulated there and you pay an exorbitant amount for the same pants considering the low quality (which fall apart after about a year), while being brainwashed to think the quality is acceptable and you need new pants next year (no wait, every other season) to stay fashionable. This conduct killed local tailors who couldn't compete fairly and in the end everybody is worse off. But hey, everybody "agreed" to the underlying transactions; so it's all fine and dandy and you can rest easy that as long as the market runs free, everybody gets what they deserve.

And this is today. Back when we had unregulated markets, it was down right horrible. But maybe read a bit about the industrial revolution and, later on, robber barons, etc.

, so run with your "tax is theft" idea.

So what did the US do before the 16th amendment? — NOS4A2

See: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/historical-highlights-of-the-irs#:~:text=From%201868%20until%201913%2C%2090,of%20Internal%20Revenue%20was%20created.

The Bangladeshi is paid too little for the pants he sows, his neighbour is affected by the toxic dyes that are unregulated there and you pay an exorbitant amount for the same pants considering the low quality (which fall apart after about a year), while being brainwashed to think the quality is acceptable and you need new pants next year (no wait, every other season) to stay fashionable. This conduct killed local tailors who couldn't compete fairly and in the end everybody is worse off. But hey, everybody "agreed" to the underlying transactions; so it's all fine and dandy and you can rest easy that as long as the market runs free, everybody gets what they deserve. — Benkei

I do, however, see a slight pushback from people in western societies. One would think out of moral grounds, but that rarely produce promising sustainability. No, it's rather that people have started to get fed up with the trash quality that's ever so increasing in all products. So they seek something more expensive but lasting. If this trend is growing, we may very well see the rise of tailors again, not just for suits and fine clothing, but for more common casual clothes. Based on the premise of actual quality and discounts for fixing damaged clothes by the same tailor. If a tailor were to set up a store for high quality T-shirts that actually last longer, I'd bet that they would need to expand their business fast as there would be far more customers than initially prepared for.

I speak out of personal opinion here as well. For years I've always looked for the most decently priced product and viewed the expensive ones as some unnecessary luxury. But when checking older products, been auctioned out or just found in the attic, they have lasted for decades and still outperforms new products. Older tools are much more robust and get the job done for longer. And so I took a look all those luxury level versions of products that can be bought, only to realize that the best brands just do one thing good and that's caring for the material and work that went into making the product.

Taking inflation into account, it's basically buying old sustainable products that have been updated for today. So all these cheap products that are mass produced and won't last a year is not just because modern technology help reduce prices, but rather that they've cut through normal rising inflation by cutting corners in production.

I've been looking for a good office chair since my old one broke. There's a lot of options, but most of them are plastic and will fall apart after maybe 3-4 years. So I'll go to the prestige brands instead, find something made by actual hands who cares for the material. It will cost me a small fortune just for a damn chair, but it will maybe last for a majority of my lifetime I have left. If people were to split out the up front cost of something by the estimated lifetime of the product, people wouldn't view things as luxury brands anymore, they would look at it as a personal investment.

People stare too much at the price tags and not at the value of something. But if that's changing, we may even end up in a more sustainable world in the end, without much of morality or anti-capitalism driving it.

I will support my local casual clothes tailor if they ever showed up. I would never go anywhere else.

Wrong

I suggest there is moral and immoral behavior. You suggest there needs to be moral outcomes. This seems to be the principle upon which we differ, leading us to wildly different conclusions.

Given your advocacy for and defense of taxation, steeped as it is in statism, I fear you are willing to treat people as a means in order to achieve your desired end, namely, “moral outcomes”. As with all utilitarian thinking, you assume you know what regulations and prohibitions are required to reach a “moral outcome”, and that you’ll know you’ve reached one when it occurs—two impossible calculations. Worse, your quest for a moral outcome justifies you treating people unfairly, unjustly, and as a mere means for what is plainly some desire of your own rather than any discernible moral result. You’re willing to break a few eggs because you want to make an omelette.

You know better how one ought to live better then the Bangladeshi does, so you regulate everyone’s lives until you see the Bangladeshi living how he ought to. All of what you write indicates, to me, immoral behavior. After all, morality is has to do with conduct, not about the promise of some future state of affairs. And from what I’m reading this conduct is tyrannical. The desire to regiment people’s lives, to take from the fruits of their labor, all to satisfy some bureaucrat’s wishes, seems to me horrible, and I will oppose it tooth and nail.

You are reading a lot of Bullshit into what I said and building a straw man the size of Mount Everest.

For example, the illustration that moral standards are managed as costs in transactions is not an argument for regulation but an argument against leaving moral outcomes to markets.

Transactional agreement does not lead to moral outcomes, in fact, it leads to the opposite. For you to claim a right to pre-tax income is a moral claim but it's not supported because there was a transactional agreement. So this is insufficient for your claim. (edit) your claim that taxation is theft. If you cannot put a moral claim on pre-tax income, there's no theft in a moral sense (only in the legal sense).

I'm all for deregulation actually. Starting with all the fictitious legal persons the law allows like corporations. It will immediately lead to much more moral outcomes due to better balance between market actors across all levels of the value chain.

I’m not talking about moral outcomes. I’m talking about moral behavior. And intervening in another’s transactions and taking their property is immoral.

That income is theirs because that is the terms they agreed to with their employer.

you don't have morality only a procedure.

That you are the beneficiary of a transaction doesn't mean you should be.

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you don't have morality only a procedure.

That you are the beneficiary of a transaction doesn't mean you should be.

That is true. That one is the beneficiary of a transaction doesn't mean he should be. At some point one must prove he is entitled to the benefits. As an uninvited third party, the tax collector cannot provide that proof, therefor he should not be the beneficiary of the transaction.

It is morality wherever conduct between two or more people is concerned. In matters of trade, morality requires that people act morally and not immorally, just as in any other interaction. Fair dealing in such matters is moral. Stealing from others or extorting them is immoral.

That is true. That one is the beneficiary of a transaction doesn't mean he should be. At some point one must prove he is entitled to the benefits. As an uninvited third party, the tax collector cannot provide that proof, therefor he should not be the beneficiary of the transaction. — NOS4A2

Are you going to pretend you don't read my posts? I've already established that transactional agreement is no moral basis for a claim to the benefits of such transaction. So if you have no moral claim, it's not yet established the tax collector has no moral claim either.

You first need to prove that a transactional agreement also forms the moral basis for a claim to the benefits to that agreement. I say it doesn't exist because the transaction does not take into account moral outcomes and the economic system we live in incentives immoral outcomes as moral outcomes come at a premium.

Your only reply so far is "but I had an agreement". This does not engage in any shape or form the argument I've presented.

That’s a lie. I’ve already established a reciprocal transaction is a moral basis for a claim to pretax income. But you haven’t responded to my arguments numerous times now.

For one, I do not believe there are such things as “moral outcomes”, for the reasons I’ve already stated. I believe in moral behavior. Morality concerns behavior and conduct, not “outcomes”.

The two parties have a moral claim because the exchange concerns their property, and they acted morally towards each other by voluntarily agreeing to the exchange. The tax collector has no moral basis because he is acting immorally towards the other parties by intruding into their exchange and stealing their property. The theft of property is both immoral behavior and an immoral outcome: both parties had their property stolen from them.

You have not proven the tax collector has any legitimate claim to anyone’s income. Even where the tax man claims he desires a “moral outcome”, you could not prove that there is one.

Start a new topic if you will but stay relevant here, please.