Selective enforcement is bad. The fact that the law says that you could go to prison for one year for not filing taxes on time, but that it's rarely enforced means that they should fix the law.

Using it only on "bad guys" is a recipe for the government punishing people that disagrees with them.

I believe selective enforcement is a core part of policing in the US. No police agency has enough resources to go after everybody who breaks the law, so they make examples of high profile defendants to deter others.

One of two things is true. Either they believe everyone should be doing 30 years (preposterous) or they know they are committing a grave injustice against someone.

There is no reasonable interpretation of selective enforcement.

.... or crimes occur on a continuum of "technically bad" and "omfg bad", and all instances are not identical. Nothing about your dichotomy seems true in all cases, even if it is sometimes (maybe even often) obviously true.

Thats not how the law works. It's not code, its run by people for people.

I've heard this from multiple people explaining stuff to me -- they were all Americans.

Where are you from? If it's from continental Europe, I wonder if that's the difference. We get our laws from English Common Law instead of civil law (except Louisiana).

Can we get a brit in here to see what their conception of the law is?

How courts interpret legislation and precedent differs a lot between common and civil law jurisdictions, but that's got nothing to do with how policing operates. Police everywhere can choose not to take action unless you're talking about a zero-tolerance society with Stasi-like levels of monitoring.

"Selecting policing" is just "discretion", that particular phrase is possibly US-centric but the concept itself isn't.

I would imagine how likely courts are to convict has to impact that discretion for any police force that's judged based on some sort of metric.

Or is the US the only place that really does that?

I'm sure every police force takes that into account along with other factors, there are always laws that become outdated and are arrested for less, prosecuted less and convicted of less over time. And in common law jurisdictions precedent can impact the scope of existing law and change how police will enforce it.

I'm not American.

I misread as “the” people and was confused. Sad.

Punishing someone more than they deserve in order to communicate a point to others, strikes me as a kind of political agenda, not justice.

“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Focus on ‘unusual’. All the words in this document have a meaning.

The law is a political institution

>Using it only on "bad guys" is a recipe for the government punishing people that disagrees with them.

Indeed that's exactly how it is being used if it's true that they throw the book at public figures for making political statements like Wesley Snipes.

Don't you also go to jail if you can't pay them?

Maybe possible? But generally in that case when there was no fraud, you just get a bankruptcy-resistant lien that follows you to your grave, and whatever enforcement actions accompany liens. Generally again, absent fraud, they'll work out a high-interest installment plan.

The tax code is too confusing and subjective to send everyone who makes a mistake to prison.

Jail is for people who actively dodge taxes, not someone who submitted their taxes a few days late.

That also sounds like a problem.

I don't think its selective enforcement so much as different crimes that can appear superficially to fit the same facts.

Filing late because you made a mistake will cost you interest plus possibly a penalty relating to the amount. Tax evasion is a crime which can lead to jail time. The system will decide which one fits better based on your behavior, including how cooperative you are when they investigate it.

Just like if you hit someone in the head and they die. Maybe you will get charged with murder or maybe they will believe it is an accident. There's really no way to remove these human factors from the justice system.

To be fair, the dude doesn't live in the US. There are only two countries in the world that tax citizens overseas, and the US is one of them.

I'm certainly not excusing his actions (and I'm sure he dodged taxes in many ways), but I have to say that as a Spanish citizen having lived in the US, Ireland, and now Japan, the US tax code is batshit insane.

Sure, but he also refused to pay his taxes while being a US citizen and on money he earned in the US. And did so not from a place of disputing the validity of the tax bill, but simply refusing to pay the legally issued tax bill because he didn't want to.

If US citizenship has a whole lot of advantages that mean you want to keep it, then the price is perfectly clear up front: you are bound to the US tax code.

> To be fair, the dude doesn't live in the US. There are only two countries in the world that tax citizens overseas, and the US is one of them.

The tax evasion for which he was indicted covered 2014 through 2018; while there are gaps in the information I can find quickly about his residency, in 2015 he apparently resided in Tennessee (and in 2013 in Oregon). So even if we were to accept that taxation of nonresident citizens was fundamentally illegitimate, that wouldn't invalidate all (possibly not any, again, I can't find any nob-US residency information in the covered period, only once he announced he was on the run from the tax investigation in 2019, and some before 2013.)

And even if all the tax allegations were grounded in illegitimate taxation, there's also the securities fraud charges.

I never gave consent. Just because I was born here I have to give my earnings to a system governed by representatives chosen through a binary (red or blue) funnel?

How can topics as complex as transgender rights, or abortion be all boiled into a single digit of information.

And then I'm stealing if I don't consent to a system I by all statistical means have no control over!?

If you don't want to pay taxes, you can live off the grid. It's really rather simple if you think about it- if you're off the grid you're using none (or very very few) government resources like roads, utilities, banking networks, etc. With that, you're also not making any money meaning there's nothing to tax.

You can also move.

No, you can't just move - the US collects taxes from citizens even if they live and work outside of its borders. You could renounce your citizenship, perhaps, I don't really know if/how that works.

If you feel so compelled to remain a US citizen that you don't want to renounce your citizenship, then again, you are choosing to pay the costs expected of being a US citizen.

And what if no other country wants to accept you? Perhaps you have leprosy or advocate crazy political views or something. When someone immigrates illegally as a child we don't dare kick them out because that would be evil and cruel, though their country of origin would accept them back. But if you're just born here, with even fewer options, the logic gets flipped on its head and you're supposed to accept the social contract under total duress.

As for McAfee, I would guess he did explore his legal options and they were probably no easier to swallow than the path he took. E.g. personal bankruptcy if he could even afford the taxes before he would be allowed to renounce.

I don't know what you're expecting to accomplish as a rugged individualist if you're incapable of holding your own land against more organized outside forces.

The only thing ‘outside forces’ want the land for, is the right to tax the inhabitants.

Huh. Both "welcome newcomers" and "denounce those who leave" are norms. That's interesting.

Is that sarcasm? I don't know many people who'd describe the US immigration system as welcoming. But sure, hypocrisy is often the result of nice consistent reasoning. Bend the law in favor of those we want to favor and against those we want to disfavor. Goals like integrity and fairness require a more consistent process however.

Not sarcasm. More a thought about "ratchet" dynamics, memes, and Markov chains, with some anthropologically-flavored cynicism thrown in. If you're a meme named "B", and you can make P(A -> B) >> P(B -> A), then you're going to have more mind-babies. The steady state distribution will have more "B". So norms that favor A -> B over B -> A are interesting.

Not sure if "meme" (US civil religion) or "organization" (US government) is the better description of the actor here.

Also a thought about how apparent inconsistencies, or hypocrisy, can sometimes be explained by finding an underlying true "motive" that explains the various "inconsistent" behaviors. (One example: People who are liberal in their adopted country but conservative in their home country, can be understood as simply being self-interested.) Though in this case the "actor" is not really a person, but an organization or memeplex.

> I don't know many people who'd describe the US immigration system as welcoming.

That's a fair point, which undermines the idea. Well, it's debatable, but I get what you mean. Yes: The (blue-state) norms ("welcome everyone!") don't match the reality (actually it's pretty hard). Say, if you're a high-skilled student from India you wait years in a queue; that doesn't seem particularly "welcoming". (On the other hand, it's easy to win the visa lottery if you're from Kazakhstan. I digress.) On a relative scale we might still call the US welcoming though; its identity is much more built around immigration than other countries' identities are, citizenship requirements are much lower than many other "developed" countries, and even the language -- a mishmash of Romance and Germanic, with a phonetic alphabet, inherited from a trading empire -- is easy to use at a basic level (though its inconsistencies do pose problems for mastery), which again helps spread/assimilation. And in the US you at least can't openly act like your country represents a specific genetic/ethnic group (unlike in many other countries, where that identification is tacitly and unapologetically assumed).

It's the "cultural/mimetic dynamics" aspect that was interesting. The "P(A -> B) >> P(B -> A)" thing.

That this is additionally connected to tax revenue is also interesting. Money enters. Which is another fascinating subject.

These things -- populations, memes, capital flows, births, deaths, conversions -- all flow and swirl and transmutate around, like the weather. I am on the lookout for absorbing states.

It is interesting to view as a kind of state machine though I don't know about treating it as a meme. Certainly a cold calculation. I've long thought that US immigration queues reflects the simple fact that from an individual perspective, if the average person wants to join a group far more than the group wants them to join, there will necessarily be a difficult hurdle to enter and a long line. I suppose this is pretty obvious, but an important fact of life. Also a different case of P(A->B)>>P(B->A). And highly-skilled students from India probably know better than we do how the high-tech pay rates in the US compare versus other places they might more-easily immigrate to.

Even if you renounce citizenship, you still pay exit taxes..

trying not to get robbed by the government is now stealing?

You must have defined "stealing" interestingly