Serious question - was this person downvoted because of the particular argument they presented, or because of the quality of the argument? Maybe it's the latter, and I'm just biased. Hacker News bills itself as a civil, open minded discussion forum, and by and large it works out great. However I certainly feel that certain views are not very accepted. If the "taboo" views were explicitly laid out, that would be fine. At least we'd know where it stands.

> Serious question - was this person downvoted because of the particular argument they presented, or because of the quality of the argument?

If it was posted in response to a an "Ask HN: What should we do with federal income tax policy?" or "Ask HN: How would you reduce the power of the IRS?", it would be on topic and less worthy of downvotes (of course, both of those threads would probably be flag worthy as improper for HN, but that's a different issue.)

Even for the first of those contexts, its really inadequately argued. But, in the context of the actual thread, its basically off-topic noise.

For this particular comment, probably just that it doesn't add anything. Saying something akin to "get rid of taxes, and the IRS will have less power" is pretty tautological and not really relevant to most of the arguments linked (which are far more ... creative ... and bold, in terms of claiming that the US/IRS already doesn't have power to tax people).

I agree it's not very insightful or anything, but there are plenty of boring comments lying around that don't get downvoted that much. I imagine it's partially fueled by people's frustration with this viewpoint. But I guess it's hard to uproot bias entirely.

Green accounts tend to draw more fire as well. Trolling through sockpuppet accounts seems to be more and more common around here, so people might be trigger happy.