Re:The Landlord's Game
by imtringued on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @05:37AM
(#26887298)
I'll bite. Governments are virtual machines, aka language runtimes, they provide a baseline for human cooperation by creating the rule of law and a political environment within which an advanced economy can exist. They can only provide these things because they conquered land via a military and protect the land and its citizens from intruders.
You can argue that there are ways of taxation that are compatible with this idea and there are ways of taxation that are counterproductive but you cannot argue that the taxes shouldn't exist because that would mean no government which would mean no rule of law and no political environment in which an advanced economy can exist. Of course, the big problem is that many governments fail to live up to their responsibility. The US and EU countries' government may be failing their citizens, but not as much as many Asian, African or Latin American governments.
Taxes are moral because taxes fund the society which allows us to live. You can debate about the level of taxation, what to tax (labour vs capital vs natural assets) and what functions that society should provide, but there are very few people claiming that national defense, or courts, or city streets, should not be funded from the public purse.
Reading your logic here one would think that your musings have lead you to become an anti-capitalist but for some reason this texts strikes me as if it was written by somebody who's far from that position.
Centuries from now they'll probably consider what we're doing now to be absolutely barbaric and adjacent to plain old slavery.