The Political Thread

[Funt Solo]

It's clear that taxation feels like theft to you.

51% of the population vote to take £10 each from the other 49%

This is just you making stuff up. Although I would quite like it if I could be in the 51% group here.

enforced by the barrel of a gun

I've never had my tax collected this way. Which country do you live in? And: I don't think those guys were tax collectors.

the chance to opt-in to a taxation system

This is charity, not taxation.

---

Idea: if you want to change your governance way things are organized why not vote for a system that you'd prefer. Oh, wait ... you don't actually bother to vote, do you?

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

51% of the population vote to take £10 each from the other 49%.

I don't think that's how tax works.

That may be democratic, but it's still theft.

But you've described an entirely hypothetical situation, which I don't understand. Would you only be affected by this £10 tax if you voted against it? And be exempt if you voted for it? Then why would anyone vote against it? Or would the government promise a specific 51% demographic to tax the other 49% if the voted the way they were told? What would the logistics of that vote involve? How would they figure out who voted for what? The democratic process requires anonymity. I'm going to assume you came up with this scenario without really thinking it through.

The government is elected on the promise of tax cuts, but taxes are raised.

Yeah I don't follow the thread of logic from the previous statements, and I'm starting to suspect there isn't one.

Again, democratic but still theft. Democracy, then, does not transform theft.

Democracy does not transform the supposed theft. The provision of services for your money does. If you received state education, used a school bus on public roads to attend said education, and received healthcare, and a load of other publicly funded things, all before you were old enough to finance those things yourself, then the government aren't stealing, they're collecting on a debt. Unless you want to argue that you did not consent to being educated by the state. Which seems likely.

[The Legendary Shark]

No, I don't vote because I don't have the right to support a system that offers to impose my views on others and force them to fund what I find important - or which expects me to bow to things with which I disagree or go against my conscience if I happen to be in the minority. The barrel of a gun is the symbol of ultimate force. Stand up long enough and resist hard enough and there will be gun barrels. Maybe it's neither charity or taxation but performance related funding.

[Funt Solo]

Anti-union. Anti-taxation. Anti-socialist. Ah, a Tory!

[The Legendary Shark]

The 51%/49% thing was intended to show that democracy doesn't justify mandatory taxation, not to explain how either one works. I accept it was a clumsy analogy with little nuance, but then subtlety doesn't seem to be one of my strong points.

Let's come at it from a different direction. Imagine a community of 110 people - 10 rulers and 100 citizens. The rulers want to raise taxes in order to build a governmental palace and put the question to the citizens. 50 of the citizens vote, 26 are in favour of the mandatory tax increase for the palace and 24 against. (I don't know how this vote would be organised, or who would count the votes - maybe they'd hire an outside specialist or use a computer or something.) Assuming all the rulers voted the same way, 36 people have decided that it's perfectly fine to forcibly take money from the other 74 people who either don't want the palace or don't care. If those 36 people really want a palace, they should pay for it themselves whilst trying to convince the rest to pitch in as they go, or find another way to finance it. Just because something is voted for in a democratic fashion, that doesn't make it right. A referendum to bring back hanging (God forbid) would not make murder right, a prohibition on alcohol (God and all His angels forbid with the utmost vigour) would not make taking a wee dram wrong.

Democracy (nor aristocracy, meritocracy, plutocracy, anarchy, or any other system) cannot transmute a base crime into a shining virtue.

The end might be a Utopian ideal state that looks after everyone's basic needs from cradle to grave in exchange for mandatory fees, but that seems as likely to happen as any other Utopian ideal. (The existence of such bodies as food banks, Big Issue, and myriad other charities call into question the efficacy of the present system as well as its morality.) If such a Utopian state was the end, though, would it justify the means?

[Funt Solo]

A referendum to bring back hanging (God forbid) would not make murder right

If hanging were legal then it wouldn't be murder.

[The Legendary Shark]

Why not?

To deliberately kill a person against their will is murder. To deliberately hang a person against their will is to deliberately kill a person. Hanging is murder, there is no difference between a private murder or a public murder. Both have the same outcome.

Here's that alchemy again. At some point, a group of special human beings can decide that it's fine to murder people so long as they call it something else, like execution. That's the only thing about the act that changes - its name. A few people write some words down, wave their hands in the air, count up the votes, and suddenly, hey presto, the primary crime of murder becomes the perfectly legal tool of the state.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

The 51%/49% thing was intended to show that democracy doesn't justify mandatory taxation, not to explain how either one works. I accept it was a clumsy analogy with little nuance, but then subtlety doesn't seem to be one of my strong points.

Let's come at it from a different direction.

Here's the direction I want to come at it: I'm the God Emperor of the universe and everyone has to do what I say. And complement my groovy hairdo.

If you want to be counterfactual, at least be ambitious man.

[The Legendary Shark]

I love your groovy hairdo, your Divine Highness.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

A referendum to bring back hanging (God forbid) would not make murder right

If hanging were legal then it wouldn't be murder.

Ah now, state sanctioned murder is still murder. Tax is not theft because *ctrl{c}**ctrl{v}*

Democracy does not transform the supposed theft. The provision of services for your money does. If you received state education, used a school bus on public roads to attend said education, and received healthcare, and a load of other publicly funded things, all before you were old enough to finance those things yourself, then the government aren't stealing, they're collecting on a debt. Unless you want to argue that you did not consent to being educated by the state. Which seems likely.

[Funt Solo]

Sorry, but murder is a crime. By definition, if a state makes capital punishment legal, and then subjects someone to it, then it's not a murder. (Unless some other organization has a law against it and then it could both be murder and not murder at the same time, depending on your view of the comparative legal systems or your place within them.)

I think there's a confusion here between murder and killing. (Or tax and theft.)

I get it - one can use loaded, emotive terminology to try to support a passionately held position. That doesn't make it a correct use of English, though.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

...That doesn't make it a correct use of English, though.

Aye but linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. Unfortunately this makes it quite exploitable

[Tjm86]

TJM, there is no doubt that spreading the cost of civilisation is extremely helpful, but I question the need for it to be enforced by the barrel of a gun. The problem is that the enforcers come to see this contribution as theirs to control. Thus we get obscene banker bailouts that divert resources from more tangible things like homelessness, hospitals, and hostels.

For me the 'enforcement' side is highlighted by some of the issues that you talk about here.  As I said previously, I do have major issues with some of the ways in which we as a nation prioritise things.  Finance is considered more important than any other industry despite the very distortions you mention.

In an ideal world enforcement would not be necessary since everyone would accept the need to contribute appropriately.  Regrettably we don't live in an even remotely ideal world.  Human nature has a regrettable habit of getting in the way.

... and Mr Pops?  Felicitations and Salutations to your Splendiforously Groovy Hairdo man!

[TordelBack]

The argument that the definition of murder in English usage (as opposed to legal usage) requires it to be 'unlawful' is necessarily a relativist one. Its common everyday use exists outside any specific legal system to describe a killing that one knows to be wrong.

I'd argue that no law that permits capital punishment can be considered valid, any more than the Nuremberg Laws etc made the Holocaust legal just because they were formally enacted. The internal aura of legality within a specific system doesn't change a killing into something miraculously sanitary, it just protects the executioner from consequences. The 'law' which murder violates exists independent of any system, it's not part of a temporary code contingent on who holds power. 

In redefining cold-blooded killing as lawful execution, the murder doesn't go away through some miracle of semantics: instead, the State becomes the murderer.

[Tiplodocus]

Meat is murder.