The idea that any people who believes in a minimal state must also believe they have no obligations beyond those necessary to the preservation of their rights, that they may do what they please without care for others, and that they have no conception of the common good, is not entirely accurate. Proponents of the minimal state simply don’t believe the state should (nor could) decide what one ought to believe, to dictate how we should treat or what we owe others. Such choices are best left to personal morality, whether derived from religion, philosophy, tradition, etc.

I would argue the opposite: that statism leads to the moral bankruptcy you describe. Paying a tax in the hope the state will work for the common good is no substitute for morality. Such behavior delegates moral obligations to others. Statists want the state to care for others precisely where they themselves refuse to. Really, I cannot blame them. Why should they feel an obligation to their fellow man when they already pay the government to do it for them?

I think you’re right, a deterministic world implies an infinite universe. If the present state of the universe is the effect of its anterior state, a finite universe would never arrive at any present state at all.

Can and will China promote communism once it becomes the leading economic superpower?

What are your thoughts?

Yes it can and will. The realization of communism is the highest ideal and ultimate goal of
the Party.

I wonder if this would cause someone to stop and think more when considering procreation and putting more people into the world.

First, they would wonder what was wrong with the writer. Second, they would wonder why they are being forced to acknowledge his beliefs. Third, they wouldn’t sign it.

Lockdowns are unjust, cruel, stupid, and designed for the purpose of protecting their own interests, which in many cases is their “universal” healthcare systems. Where quarantining was once a method of containing a virus, now it is a method of containing an entire citizenry, whether they have a virus or not. The use of prison terms to describe it, at least, was not euphemistic.

But it also reveals the incompetence of the state. Forcing the citizenry to stop working, to put them under house arrest, and to deny them the basic freedoms they were all promised was not the best method of containing a virus—it was just the easiest one. How quickly they sacrificed our most basic human rights to their ignorance.

In some developed countries minimum wage is determined by collective bargaining rather than law, and one could argue employees there get better wages and benefits because of it. Bargaining has been the mainstay method of determining renumeration since time immemorial, after all, whether there is law, taxes or not.

I agree that bargaining for renumeration necessarily includes taxes wherever taxation exists, but people do not do so because it is right and moral. They do it because they have to or risk punishment. This to say nothing of under-the-table employment or black markets, where taxes need not apply at all.

So the assumption that only law can determine renumeration is a false and one. Worse, it risks filling heads with the stupid idea that one cannot haggle over wages with employers and should run to authorities instead.

The notion of “common resources” seems to me unappealing. I live in a very vast country. I don’t claim any ownership over the territories and resources of the Inuit peoples, for example. I would not go there (nor could I) and take their resources just because I claim to have some share over it, because I just so happen to live within the same border. Their land is owned by them, not the common public. It was once the state’s land, sure, all of which has been acquired by the divine right of kings and conquest, but I can no less work to receive my own parcel without stealing anything. The only one who stole land, in fact, is the state.

But again, this is all beside my point, which is that taxes are immoral.

To abuse Nozik’s argument, In order to pay a tax one is forced to labor for the benefit of others. If 20% of my income goes to the government, that means 20% of my labor is forced to serve the benefit of someone else. If 100% of my labor is forced to serve the benefit of someone else, we might call that some degree or other of slavery. Nozik calls it forced labor.

I don’t believe “forced labor” suffices, simply because I am not forced to work. In my own case, the government simply comes along like a loan shark and demands I pay what is owed to him (an amount only they can define), or else I receive some sort of punishment. So I prefer “extortion” or “theft”. Either way, this transaction is an immoral one because there is no consent and it is enforced by coercion.

For a moral right to exist to pre-tax income, the moral worth of the person and the services ought to be valued and thereby lead to a just and fair distribution of work and pay. There is no such valuation, so whatever you get paid is not the morally correct outcome. So if the outcome is unjust, you cannot claim a moral right to the results of that unjust outcome.

For example, where there are 2 workers with the same skill, it would be morally correct if the one that's starving gets the job. Since the market system is incapable off taking such moral issues into account, you cannot claim a moral right to whatever earnings you make as a result.

I am unable to see how the market system prohibits such hiring. Any employer can easily decide the “moral worth” of a person, and decide who to hire based on his own conscience or on the possibility of just outcomes. People can, and have, run companies that explicitly hire the homeless or convicts, for example.

The government, on the other hand, confiscates and distributes wealth based on amoral factors, such as income. They take the money because you have it, not because you are more deserving or in need of it or the outcomes would be more just. Also, where I live I have two different sales taxes on general goods and services, the provincial sales tax (5%) and the general sales tax (7%). Everyone has to pay them, rich and poor, young and old, with zero valuation of moral or even financial worth. Considering these I would argue the opposite. It is the government that is incapable of taking moral issues into account. How could they? We are little more than SIN numbers to them, after all.

For fuck sake. It's not your earnings, we've been through this. You can't just make things the case by ignoring all contradiction.

Your earnings do not belong to you. Some portion of them belongs to the government.

Right, and slaves once belonged to their masters by law. The point isn’t whether they do or don’t, but whether it is right or wrong to do so, something you’ve consistently avoided.I think of all the times those in power claimed they had this or that right to take from their subjects, and I picture you there cheering them on.

This reply doesn't address what I raised. If you have no moral right to those earnings, there's no plunder or confiscation going on.

Why would I have no moral right to my earnings? I didn’t quite understand that part.

You can not vote for them.

I don’t see why I’d want to.

Begging government is taking on the task. If you want a hammer do you attempt to make one yourself, or do you ask the blacksmith?

I don’t beg the blacksmith for a hammer. We agree to a price and I purchase his services. This is free exchange. It would be comparable to government only if I had already payed the blacksmith and now had to beg to receive a hammer.

There's no underlying moral right to pre-tax income because that would mean people should be paid based on moral worth of their services and their own moral worth or needs. But that's not what's being established in the market.

The underlying moral principle is that it is wrong to confiscate and plunder the earnings of someone else.

In your hypothetical regulation free society you're screwed.

I’m not so sure of that.

When I compare power-hungry individuals occupying a corporation vs a government, I prefer the mercantilist to the dictator. At least I can refuse to work with or purchase the services of the mercantilist, while I have no such choice under state power. On top of that, there is no comparison between corporate power at its worse and state power at its worse.

As for environmental concerns, we should note that governments have also contributed to our current situation, and that we have arrived to it under the yoke of state power. Anything else is counterfactual, so at best we can speculate at what might have happened otherwise. The desire for change, however, has always occurred from the bottom up. That we have to beg our governments to address these concerns instead of taking on the task ourselves is just another hurdle to seeing it through.

That we're not not programmed with the means to do so? Why would assume we are? We're just animals evolved to behave in a certain way. Why would you assume our programming just maps 1-to-1 onto the way the world "is"?

We have the means to directly observe and interact with the world. There is no veil between me and the rest. With such a vast plane of interactivity at my disposal no assumptions are even required here.

Yes, the government confiscates a share of my earnings and does so legally. Yes, I have no recourse within their justice system to argue this is my property, and that they are plundering my earnings for their own benefit. That isn’t in dispute. What I am disputing is the underlying ethics of paying taxes.

Why on earth would you expect that. The other contractee knows full well what tax is and fully expects the appropriate percentage of whatever they agree to go the government. Why would you assume they would want you to have all of it?

I’m not doubting the fact that taxes exist and that we have to pay them. What I doubt is the underlying ethics of taxes.

By sophistication, I mean the idea that what we see is roughly what exists. That's a huge lack of sophistication.

Why? In my mind it takes an unsophisticated leap to believe some barrier or other exists between the seer and what is seen. What is it exactly that prohibits me from seeing what exists?

It's not your property. Flat out and simple. It is the property of the government, by law. The same law by which anything is the property of anyone.

You've yet to give an account of why the 'rightful' amount you're owed in return for your labour is exactly your gross wage and not exactly your net wage. Would this mean if you got a pay rise you'd give the extra money back?

Right, and slaves were the property of slave-holders by law. Appealing to law isn’t at all convincing.

If I sign a contract for a certain wage in exchange for my labor, I would expect the full amount to be paid.

The government can help you to solving problems or... It is them who create those.

I think there are far more subtle problems we will soon have to contend with, if we’re not already. We don’t just hand over our money when the government taxes us; we also hand over our independence and responsibility to one another.

I cringe whenever state proponents pretend taxation is the moral and compassionate thing to do, as if paying a tax was akin to taking care of the ill and feeding the poor. But really they’re handing that responsibility to someone else, in this case some faceless, centralized authority, who may not even exist in the community, let alone know what’s best for the people there. I wager many tax-payers would be more inclined to help the needy in their own community if they weren’t already paying the government to do it for them.

The infantilization of entire generations will become an issue wherever this paternalistic system is disrupted, just as in any relationship where one side is dependant on the other. If the government is forced into austerity, usually by its own overspending, the services the population has grown to become dependent on could be lost.

Well, I think I started a potentially good dialogue on that. After all, it seems to be the case that most of our taxpayer money goes into servicing the public in some way either through medical care or retirement programs or public infrastructure. I think the public usually wants what is being funded by the government and that seems to be a good consideration. Also, taxation doesn’t really make a particular individual less wealthy than another individual only because of taxes under most circumstances. So, it seems that taxation doesn’t disrupt the natural dominance hierarchy of our society that much at all either. So, I’m not entirely sure why people would use the strong language of calling it theft.

I call it theft and use strong language because my property is confiscated without my permission. I do not know whether my money goes to some pensioner or if I’m helping buy some Raytheon missiles.

And when a big polluting industry moves into town and starts polluting the entire town, then everyone would have to relocate to another town. And when multiple industries move into your state/province, then you can re-locate to another state/province.

Eventually you will run out of places to relocate. OK, maybe outer space, but even there pollution is a problem.

Surely a solution to the problem exists outside of government intervention. Perhaps once we relocate we can innovate a cleaner and more cost-effective method and put our former neighbor out of business, without having to give more power and money to some intervening bureaucracy.

Governments are notoriously awful at managing the environment. In the city where I live, our sewage has been pumped into the sea for decades, for example. Our federal government ships much of our plastic to third-world countries.

When we believe the government will take care of these issues, we thereby hand over our responsibility, believing they will take care of it.

In this imperfect world that we live in laws are required.

I’m no anarchist, so I think some laws are a necessary evil. But the only laws required are the ones that defend human rights and limit state power.

How do you know I haven’t listened to the other side?

Have you?

Also, you are making your own assumption about it not being racism based on equally weak foundations.

I am just unable to call an entire institution racist without knowing what was said and who said it. I presume innocence, sure, but only because I feel impartiality is more just than quickly believing any accusation. If I’m wrong I will say so.

Get real, like being “worried” about skin colour is just an innocent pondering. Please.
You got the non-story right though. Who cares.

Get real. Without hearing the other side of the story you have nothing but the claims of a disgruntled family member who has openly admitted to mental health issues.

Yes. There are countless ways to deliberate and compromise that do not require legal intervention. Absent that I would have to relocate. And if you need laws to convince you to avoid spewing toxic fumes into your neighbor’s yard then maybe the society isn’t the problem.

We’ve learned that the family members of mixed race couples are not allowed to talk about what their children might look like. We call that “racism” in 2021. This is the biggest non-story of the year so far.

Pointing to oneself and recognizing this as a unity body requires an intersubjectively shaped concept of one’s body. Before looking in a mirror, a child’s model of their body is piecemeal. The reflection for the fist time shows the body as a unitary phenomenon, but it also requires that the child recognize that others see them in this way, from the outside in. Schizophrenics often lose the ability to know where their body leaves off and the world begins, and many brain injuries can change our sense of whether and how our limbs belong to us. Now can this be? It is because concepts concerning the unity of the body involve complex correlations of perceptions and actions in the world. The unity of the body is an achievement , not a given.

I do not doubt any of that. But no matter the child’s or schizophrenic’s model of his body, it’s there, visible, available, measurable, if not to him than to other bodies. I am just unable to doubt that.

Yeah. I don't know if you've noticed this in life, but just stating that something is the case does not constitute an argument. It tells us nothing at all of any shared use. This is a public forum. For discussion. It's not here to canvass opinion like some complex Gallup poll. Nobody cares if you think these things can be "acquired without appropriation, through common enterprise and free trade rather than force and coercion". The standard needs to be a bit higher than you just reckoning it. Hence the questions.

I'm asking you to demonstrate that it's the case, with examples. You know, like in a proper discussion.

I'm not asking because I want to double-check what you already think to complete my list of 'stuff NOS reckons'.

I didn’t think such a simple, common-sense notion about the difference between stolen goods and goods acquired through work and effort would be so difficult for a brilliant thinker such as yourself. Alas, here we are.

Sorry, I refuse to demonstrate that one can acquire his property through means other than theft. And I would argue if you need such a thing demonstrated you’re probably not fit for this world.

I haven’t heard of the research of extended cognition, but no I do not think we should include everything that goes into the lungs into the notions of self. There is not doubt we are situated in an environment, that we interact with it, use it and learn from it. But I do not think such a brute fact should imply our minds or cognition or some other abstraction extends beyond our body, as if I could locate my being in the water I drink. Again, I don’t quite know enough about the thesis of that theory, but the name is enough to cause me to recoil.

I don’t need to draw a contour around my anatomy when that contour is already defined by the surface of my being and the nature of my form. There is nothing artificial about this. All I need do is point to myself to confirm this, in my view.

My aim with the Hume quote was to show that the assumed pure
interiority of consciousness falls apart when analysed closely, because when we search for ourselves what we find is always reshaped by exposure to an outside. If you want to call that outside ‘physical’ then you’re maintaining a kind of dualism between interior and exterior. I prefer ‘phenomena’ or appearances’ to physical objects( as Nietzsche wrote, there is nothing behind those appearances) , because it indicates the indissociable reciprocal depends of interior and exterior, making mind embodied and embedded in a world , which itself is co-constructed by its relationships with embodied mind. In this view of mind-body-environment no clear-cut interior or exterior can be discerned.

I would suggest it’s not so much dualism as it is pluralism, the simple act of distinguishing oneself from the vast amount of objects beyond the self. In my own view the self begins and ends at the exterior surface, which can be discerned from simple observation and direct contact. It cannot extend any further outward or inward, and any notion of the self that violates this principle is illusory.

Depends on whether or not you can pay loan off on the tractor you couldn't afford in full, I guess. Technically many folks might be legally appropriating the product and labor of others through debt.
When the highly efficient firms come to price you out and your left with a mountain of debt, there will be no crying "force and coercion" as a consequence of free market action. Shit happens.

There will be no monolithic state to punish you for defaulting, just a mob of racketeers working for the transient emanation of their local government. Then you can just defend yourself with guns. Pow pow!

If that’s what I signed up for so be it. The point is I sign contracts, accept debt, and partner with others willingly and through my own free will, and suffer any risks thereby.

It’s true that we perceive all of the above, but the idea that we perceive “perceptions” and not the physical world is a step too far for me. This is the mistake of nominalizing, changing the grammatical character of an adjective or verb into that of a noun. Nominalizing allows us to construct scenarios where one will observe observations, perceive perceptions, be conscious of consciousness, as if these nouns represented things and substances.

You have access to nothing whatsoever outside of your own mentation.

Because nobody does. All things are experienced from the first person subjective experience. Unless you're claiming you do, in which case, that's something that carries a burden of proof.

Even from the first-person point of view we come into direct contact with the outer world. I think the burden of proof lies with those who claim otherwise.

I suggest that the Whole (Cosmos) is primary over its parts, that there is One (holistic). This is Monism.

What is a whole, a One, without a boundary? Without a beginning and an end? It’s not whole or one at all. Without the characteristics of finitude there is no such whole. Therefor there is no whole, no one, and the universe is many.

Well then how did you acquire the field, if not from the common? By what means was the water kept clean, if not by the efforts of others upstream? By what means did you acquire the seed, if not from the common? How has the soil maintained sufficient fertility to grow your seed in if not by the efforts of those who have come before you? By what means is the air kept clean enough if not by the collective efforts of those other who share it?

And that's just one grain of wheat growing.

Now do that for the computer you're writing on.

I don’t get how asking these questions is supposed to lead me to your conclusion. They don’t. All of the above can be acquired without appropriation, through common enterprise and free trade rather than force and coercion, as I’ve already stated.

Yes, your argument was nonsensical. Toiling your own field, planting a seed, watering the seed, and using the sun to grow wheat for flour is somehow appropriating the product and labor of others. Few greater absurdities have been spoken.

Yes because they are brainwashed but fortunately we are not longer being ruled by a military system who forces you to make evil things. Yes we are officials but in not so bad issues inside the diaspore of time we were born. Imagine born in XV or XVI century and kill random people because a king told you just to plump his power.

True, we should make the distinction between violent tyranny and it’s softer variations. But I think it’s something we should be careful with.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a prescient chapter in his book Democracy in America called “What Sort Of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear”. He describes what he calls “soft despotism”. It’s worth a read and as valuable today as it was then:

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described, might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm#link2HCH0073

There are two ways by which one can acquire the means for his survival: through the products of his own labor or by appropriating the products and labor of others. I prefer the former and repudiate the latter. I don’t do this because some law tells me to, but because my conscience does. Therefor I afford him the right to his property, and will defend this right instead of violate it. If I wish to acquire his property I do so with common enterprise and free exchange rather than force and coercion.

So no, I do not think stolen property and plunder constitute rightful property and that one has a right to such property simply because he labored to steal it. After all, I’ve been railing against compulsion and appropriation this whole time.

This is why sometimes people give up about taxes, justice, public administration, etc... because it looks like governments build the institutions just to help their own interests forgetting the interests of the population.
So... the institutions are not bad at all. It is the selfishness of governors that poison everything they touch.

I’m not so sure about that. Good people will do evil things just because the law tells them to. They are no longer acting as men, but as officials.

the government are fully entitled to the products of all that labour.

That’s wrong and for the reasons I’ve already stated.

But... Whey they control us? Do not they believe in us? I guess it us noticeable that a considerable amount of rich people do not want pay taxes. I guess they are just somehow selfish but here we have the debate itself.

Are we really free with the money/income we earn each month? Because if we do not pay taxes the government will enforce us to do it. So we are not free at all. In this point, you are even more free buying a property than having the money in a bank.

All of the state’s institutions are directed towards preserving its own life, increasing its own power, and enlarging the scope of its own activity. Our lives, our power, and the scope of our own activity decreases in proportion. We become dependant, not independent.

At issue is not the right, but what constitutes your property. Is everything you acquire by any means yours simply by virtue of having laboured for it?

If so, then spoils of war and theft both result in rightful property.

As does tax. The government must undergo some work to acquire tax, no?

There are two ways by which one can acquire the means for his survival: through the products of his own labor or by appropriating the products and labor of others. I prefer the former and repudiate the latter. I don’t do this because some law tells me to, but because my conscience does. Therefor I afford him the right to his property, and will defend this right instead of violate it. If I wish to acquire his property I do so with common enterprise and free exchange rather than force and coercion.

So no, I do not think stolen property and plunder constitute rightful property and that one has a right to such property simply because he labored to steal it. After all, I’ve been railing against compulsion and appropriation this whole time.