The grifters have succeeded 100% if you think paying taxes is honourable in any way shape or form, especially in a declining empire that fields the most onerous army in history.
If you think the State, choosing to ignore certain negative externalities through regulations — like water pollution — by not holding the guilty parties accountable and pushing up pollution targets, is going to get you clean water, as opposed to any other system where accountability is not distorted by coercitive rules that are almost impossible to challenge: I don’t know how any more naive that position could be. When pollution is not associated with having to pay for cleanup and the financial consequences are negligible, even the stock market picks up on it and publicised major pollution events don’t mean a company’s valuation plummets.
I didn’t know weather forecasts and bridges were more difficult for people not paid by taxes.
Are you suggesting a privatized National Weather Service and toll bridges would be better? If so, I have a nice bear-ridden town in New Hampshire you might like to move to.
Regulations are exactly how you deal with negative externalities.The EPA makes corporations pay for reducing pollution and cleanup. Why do you think corporations target EPA so much? Because EPA costs them money. Never hear any corporations whining about that free taxpayer-funded geological data coming out of USGS
You can’t choose where tax goes to. One penny for child murder to one dollar for cancer research is still not making the child murder acceptable. With that ratio the US would never wage war.
Taxation is not voluntary and is deployed with violence. The US also wants control of the world’s financial institutions to be able to tax any US person in the world without too much difficulty.
Charitable donations are tax deductible, your goal should be to spend your entire tax return on charity so your tax is at worst an interest free loan to the government and at best it might actually do some good in the world.
Let’s take the duty of a state, such as caring for its citizens and divide it up amongst 1000s of little groups each with highly paid CEOs, CFOs, and COOs and huge costs spent on advertising and fundraising! Oh and you get zero democratic say in these organisations or how they’re run.
I’d rather see my money going towards healthcare, education, social services, etc.
Idk man I’ve worked in social services under a multitude of government funded grants and I’m pretty sure tax evasion is extremely bad for many of the homeless veterans / abused children / etc I’ve worked with who are dependent on said grants.
Because when the Fed sends trillions of dollars into the money supply and the federal and State governments create budgets they are less responsible than people doing their best to give the minimal required amount that won’t get goons sent to their house to kidnap them?
what the hell does decline have to do with the morals of it? In any case, while there are certainly misused funds, the truth of the matter is that it is vitally important to keep society functioning, and that doing this requires a lot of money. If not taxes, where else do you propose this funding come?
An empire in decline is historically more morally degenerate and bloated by endless bureaucracy that feeds off the declining numbers of productive enterprises they can tax.
Society and the State are not the same. How can it be true that taxation is vitally important to make society function then?
Voluntary funding through free markets under common law agreed upon by all parties in contractual relationships.
The grifters have succeeded 100% if you think paying taxes is honourable in any way shape or form, especially in a declining empire that fields the most onerous army in history.
I like clean water, good weather forecasts, and I want to fix the bridges.
If you think the State, choosing to ignore certain negative externalities through regulations — like water pollution — by not holding the guilty parties accountable and pushing up pollution targets, is going to get you clean water, as opposed to any other system where accountability is not distorted by coercitive rules that are almost impossible to challenge: I don’t know how any more naive that position could be. When pollution is not associated with having to pay for cleanup and the financial consequences are negligible, even the stock market picks up on it and publicised major pollution events don’t mean a company’s valuation plummets.
I didn’t know weather forecasts and bridges were more difficult for people not paid by taxes.
Are you suggesting a privatized National Weather Service and toll bridges would be better? If so, I have a nice bear-ridden town in New Hampshire you might like to move to.
Regulations are exactly how you deal with negative externalities.The EPA makes corporations pay for reducing pollution and cleanup. Why do you think corporations target EPA so much? Because EPA costs them money. Never hear any corporations whining about that free taxpayer-funded geological data coming out of USGS
Yes, a good chunk of the American tax income goes to pretty bad stuff, but A. not all of us are American, and B. not all of that tax goes to bad stuff
The IRS is in the USA.
You can’t choose where tax goes to. One penny for child murder to one dollar for cancer research is still not making the child murder acceptable. With that ratio the US would never wage war.
Taxation is not voluntary and is deployed with violence. The US also wants control of the world’s financial institutions to be able to tax any US person in the world without too much difficulty.
Charitable donations are tax deductible, your goal should be to spend your entire tax return on charity so your tax is at worst an interest free loan to the government and at best it might actually do some good in the world.
Fuck no, charity sucks for many things.
Let’s take the duty of a state, such as caring for its citizens and divide it up amongst 1000s of little groups each with highly paid CEOs, CFOs, and COOs and huge costs spent on advertising and fundraising! Oh and you get zero democratic say in these organisations or how they’re run.
I’d rather see my money going towards healthcare, education, social services, etc.
Idk man I’ve worked in social services under a multitude of government funded grants and I’m pretty sure tax evasion is extremely bad for many of the homeless veterans / abused children / etc I’ve worked with who are dependent on said grants.
Because when the Fed sends trillions of dollars into the money supply and the federal and State governments create budgets they are less responsible than people doing their best to give the minimal required amount that won’t get goons sent to their house to kidnap them?
… what…?
what the hell does decline have to do with the morals of it? In any case, while there are certainly misused funds, the truth of the matter is that it is vitally important to keep society functioning, and that doing this requires a lot of money. If not taxes, where else do you propose this funding come?
An empire in decline is historically more morally degenerate and bloated by endless bureaucracy that feeds off the declining numbers of productive enterprises they can tax.
Society and the State are not the same. How can it be true that taxation is vitally important to make society function then?
Voluntary funding through free markets under common law agreed upon by all parties in contractual relationships.