HeavenlyPossumTaxation is theft.
Rents are a form of tax.
Voron@HeavenlyPossum if taxation is theft, then no roads for anyone 🤷‍♂️
I’m not sure why we’d need taxes to fund roads, since roads existed before taxes.
@HeavenlyPossum really? You would have to go all the way back before feudal times 🤔 no even further, so yeah there were tracks made by cart wheels that were called roads before taxes, those awesome Roman roads were even paid for by taxes
- Roads predate states. States are much older than either the Roman state or the medieval period. We don’t need taxes to have roads.
- States don’t tax to fund spending.
- Coercion is bad. If people have to be coerced into doing something, it’s probably not worth doing. If it is worth doing, then people will probably do it without being coerced.
- The usefulness of coercion to you is not a good justification for coercion.
@HeavenlyPossum yup dirt tracks predate states, not a fan of drive on dirt tracks
“People living thousands of years ago didn’t have asphalt” is not a particularly good argument for the state.
@HeavenlyPossum well, pragmatism never works with idealists
The observation that people in nonstate societies without taxes still have roads is empirical, not idealist.
@HeavenlyPossum ok show me a place today without any taxation with roads that are functional for my Honda Fit
Not sure if your dork car can handle roads in places like Chiapas, but, again, your argument seems to boil down to “men with guns should extract resources at gunpoint to fund amenities for me and my dork car” which still isn’t compelling.
@HeavenlyPossum not compelling “to you”, changing societies requires something be compelling to a fairly large number of people
So to be clear, you’re acknowledging that you’re happy men with guns coercively extract resources and compel labor so you can comfortably drive your dork car around?
@HeavenlyPossum To be clear you are offering no viable solution other than going back to living in huts and living as hunter gathers.
Give me a viable alternative
Give me a viable alternative
Can you identify where I’ve said that?
@HeavenlyPossum can you identify where I have said the stuff about extracting money with guns?
👆
That’s your interpretation so I gave you mine, fair is fair.
.
Like I said give me your viable alternative, you haven’t so I have to fill in the blanks 🤷‍♂️
👆
That’s your interpretation so I gave you mine, fair is fair.
.
Like I said give me your viable alternative, you haven’t so I have to fill in the blanks 🤷‍♂️
What do you think taxes are? How do you think the state compels people to pay taxes? Does the state threaten to, say, tickle you if you don’t pay your taxes? Or maybe something a little harsher?
My alternative is “people freely and voluntarily engaging in cooperative effort,” but a critical identification of taxes and rents as theft does not rely on presenting an alternative.
@HeavenlyPossum thats an ambiguous theory, you like empirical stuff right?
Give me a functional example
Give me a functional example
Chiapas, Zomia, Tristan da Cunha, any time you and your mates get together and buy each other a round.
@HeavenlyPossum are you talking modern current Chiapas
@voron “Chiapas” is a synecdoche for the parts of the state that were liberated by the Zapatistas
@HeavenlyPossum how were the Zapatistas funded? How are those ares funded? Is there a firewall between the funding the Zapatistas get/got is there a firewall between all external funding & resources?
@HeavenlyPossum I’ll look into it Btw
Oh whew I was really worried there for a sec
@HeavenlyPossum because there are taxes in Chiapas right now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipalities_of_Chiapas
