Simple reason why I do not think taxation = theft

[ALawPoker]

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What's your problem?

Did I ever claim to be particularly good at internet debate? I even said somewhere in this thread that I'm probably not doing a good job at getting my point across. Since language is not a magic wand, it's not always easy to say exactly what you mean, especially if your idea is a little abstract. I do blame myself when I come up short, but also I realize that language is not perfect anyways. My point was if you look hard enough for a semantical error in what I'm saying, you will find it. Both because language isn't perfect and because I don't claim to have a perfect grasp of expressing complex ideas well.

This started when pvn said my stuff was "sloppy." I was basically saying that I'm attempting to express something that's hard to express. If I had a hammer to break a rock, I'd say that's a tough thing to do. But that doesn't mean that I don't agree others might be better at it.


Who are you anyways? What have you contributed to this discussion? Just felt like butting your head in and telling me I'm not communicating effectively?

Want me to take writing classes before posting further?

[nietzreznor]

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My arguments are based on the fact that there is no divine truth, and I've been very clear that my beliefs are based on my personal value-based set of principles. My whole effort has been to point this out and show this is true for both sides.

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Is the 'fact' "there is no divine truth" divine truth or not? My point wasn't that your ethical views were merely assertions (since that was your whole point) but that your 'argument' that ethical positions are merely assertions was itself an assertion. If you aren't willing to admit that some class of statements have objectivce truth and aren't assertions, then you can't make any statements concerning the objectivity (or lackthereof) of ethics, since it has the same status as an assertion.

So, yes, I have read what you've said in this thread, I read carefully every sentence that you wrote in your last reply.

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Funny how such "reason-based" posters are so quick to abandon reason when their underlying principles are challenged.

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Where have I abandoned reason?

[CallMeIshmael]

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#2 is false. You cannot own yourself, as you can't really do things with yourself that would imply ownership, like for example selling your body and mind. In the end you can't really sell yourself.

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Who does own me if I don't own myself?

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This assumes that all persons must be owned. Im not sure this is self evidently true.

[Copernicus]

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No, a moral code can be adduced as incorrect because it is theoretically unworkable and unsustainable.

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I don't think so. I think at the point of "workability" and "sustainability" we're no longer talking about right vs. wrong. Considerations of the consequences that one particular person's moral code would have on others falls under the realm of "acknowledging and coping with the reality that different moral codes exist", it says nothing of the relative merits of those moral codes. Conflict does not imply one side is right and one side is wrong.

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I'm trying to say a moral code could be seen as wrong if its adoption by the entire species would cause extinction of the species. Unrestrained murdering would fall into this category.

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There is no reason to believe that "unrestrained murdering" would cause extinction of the species, in fact it might improve the species from an evolutionary aspect.

[Nielsio]

Getting back to the original statement:

Namely the proposal that taxation != theft;



Well, theft is an act. Just like murder or rape is.

Taxation is probably better described as extortion. Because when you do not oblige to the wants of the people with the power then they will use this power to make you pay up.


But more specifically,

As an anarcho-capitalist and someone who believes in universal morality and negative rights..

..it's not so much writing a letter to someone that I have a problem with. Nor is it spendin money that you have acquired.

The problem I have is with immoral acts. Meaning that human beings come to someone's house and kidnap them and drag them off to a dungeon or cage. And the people that they do this did not pose a threat to the ones doing this to them. Nor did they pose a threat to anyone else. All that happened was that they did not pay certain amounts of money to other people that thought they had a right to it. AND they thought that they have the right to subdue other people when they don't comply. Not with an angry letter or with putting them on a blacklist or casting them out of their organization of security. No, by physically and mentally harming them.

To me that is a clear case of violent aggression which has absolutely nothing to do with active self-defense.




To conclude: only when you look at the individual acts is when the morality of the situation becomes clear. What statists and collectivists always try to do is to hide the individual acts ("just doing my job", "it's the law", "it's what the people want", "it's for the common good", "we know what's best for you", etc.).

[Brainwalter]

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This started when pvn said my stuff was "sloppy." I was basically saying that I'm attempting to express something that's hard to express.

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And by blaming the language for your inability to express it you implied that your idea is perfectly clear in your head but no earthly words can do it justice. I tried to suggest to you that English might not be to blame, but rather your writing or the idea itself. Few people here have a thread where they post 2 dozen times trying to explain their OP.

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Who are you anyways? What have you contributed to this discussion? Just felt like butting your head in and telling me I'm not communicating effectively?

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I don't know, I only have ten posts in this thread to your fifty, sorry for butting in I guess. For the record though, (since you missed it or ignored it) I was the first person to tell you that accidental manslaughter is a poor analogy for someone who acts intentionally but doesn't consider their action to be immoral. Then after you did it again I was the fifth person to tell you that. I'm also someone who's read the entire thread, and ignoring the hijacks (which aren't your fault mostly) it's basically 100 posts of people not understanding you and you trying to explain your previous posts, so...

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Want me to take writing classes before posting further?

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It wouldn't hurt, but all you really need to do is examine your idea, really read the posts responding to you, and seek to better explain your ideas instead of blaming the language or your readers. One question, why would you make an OP if you had an idea which you found yourself unable to convey in English?

[tolbiny]

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#2 is false. You cannot own yourself, as you can't really do things with yourself that would imply ownership, like for example selling your body and mind. In the end you can't really sell yourself.

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Who does own me if I don't own myself?

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This assumes that all persons must be owned. Im not sure this is self evidently true.

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ownership in this sense can be defined as having the highest claim over.

[nietzreznor]

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In mathematics, an axiom is any starting assumption from which other statements are logically derived. It can be a sentence, a proposition, a statement or a rule that enables the construction of a formal system. Unlike theorems, axioms cannot be derived by principles of deduction, nor are they demonstrable by formal proofs—simply because they are starting assumptions—there is nothing else they logically follow from (otherwise they would be called theorems). In many contexts, "axiom," "postulate," and "assumption" are used interchangeably.

As seen from definition, an axiom is not necessarily a self-evident truth, but rather a formal logical expression used in a deduction to yield further results. To axiomatize a system of knowledge is to show that some of its claims can be derived from a small, well-understood set of sentences. This does not imply that they could have been known independently; and there are typically multiple ways to axiomatize a given system of knowledge (such as arithmetic).

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Thanks for the recap of basic mathematical theory. I don't think this is saying what you are saying, as it really doesn't show at all that mathematics is 'subjective' or anything like that, since lots of axioms you could come up with would lead to systems that were completely at odds with reality.

In any case, I brought up math as an example of a discipline in which is more or less completely abstract (far more so then ethics!), in order to show that being abstract doesn't mean it's not objective (2+2=4 is objectively true, and it is abstract). But all this talk of axioms is beside the point, I think, since the central axiom in an ethical theory really wouldn't be 'self-ownership' or 'you can't own the earth', as they aren't really broad enough to cover all areas of ethical inquiry. Both of these statements seem more probably derivable from more fundamental premises (or 'axioms').

And, as I acknowledged in my response to you, there was a certain point at which further argumentation was basically fruitless since basic, fundamental principles can't be argued for (but, as is consistent with the piece you pulled from the wiki on axioms, some axioms will lead to better systems than others).

[John Kilduff]

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No, a moral code can be adduced as incorrect because it is theoretically unworkable and unsustainable.

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I don't think so. I think at the point of "workability" and "sustainability" we're no longer talking about right vs. wrong. Considerations of the consequences that one particular person's moral code would have on others falls under the realm of "acknowledging and coping with the reality that different moral codes exist", it says nothing of the relative merits of those moral codes. Conflict does not imply one side is right and one side is wrong.

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I'm trying to say a moral code could be seen as wrong if its adoption by the entire species would cause extinction of the species. Unrestrained murdering would fall into this category.

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There is no reason to believe that "unrestrained murdering" would cause extinction of the species, in fact it might improve the species from an evolutionary aspect.

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Maybe "unrestrained" isn't the right word, but if murdering were highly prevalent, that would cause extinction of the species, since it takes far longer to grow an adult than it does to murder an adult. If over half the population (well-mixed) were frequent murderers, the human spcies would die out. And probably it wouldn't take nearly 50% to achieve that.

[Copernicus]

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No, a moral code can be adduced as incorrect because it is theoretically unworkable and unsustainable.

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I don't think so. I think at the point of "workability" and "sustainability" we're no longer talking about right vs. wrong. Considerations of the consequences that one particular person's moral code would have on others falls under the realm of "acknowledging and coping with the reality that different moral codes exist", it says nothing of the relative merits of those moral codes. Conflict does not imply one side is right and one side is wrong.

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I'm trying to say a moral code could be seen as wrong if its adoption by the entire species would cause extinction of the species. Unrestrained murdering would fall into this category.

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There is no reason to believe that "unrestrained murdering" would cause extinction of the species, in fact it might improve the species from an evolutionary aspect.

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Maybe "unrestrained" isn't the right word, but if murdering were highly prevalent, that would cause extinction of the species, since it takes far longer to grow an adult than it does to murder an adult. If over half the population (well-mixed) were frequent murderers, the human spcies would die out. And probably it wouldn't take nearly 50% to achieve that.

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You haven't provided any further support, just equivication on your original premise. There are numerous mechanisms that could stop "frequent murderers" from causing extinction of the species. In fact the only scenarios that would result in total extinction would be access to a weapon that indirectly caused extinction in the aftermath of its use, or some sort of heritable mass hysteria/insanity overwhelming the "rational" population, in which case it is really the genetics that caused the extinction, not "murder" in and of itself.