Dardedar wrote:Indium Flappers wrote:Simple fact. Stilley did go to jail for not paying his taxes.
I don't know why you are too dense to grasp something this simple. Not paying your taxes is not a sufficient condition for going to jail. Not being able to pay your taxes is not a sufficient condition for going to jail. Ever. You have to engage in deceit and fraud while avoiding taxes due. That's what Stilley did and then he advised and taught others how to break the law and engage in the same fraud. I can't make this any more simple for you.
The claim that "You have to engage in deceit and fraud while avoiding taxes due." is false. If I send a letter to the IRS explicitly stating that I, for whatever reason, will no longer be paying them any taxes of any kind, and then I proceed to do so, I am not deceiving them or anyone else through this action. I am openly breaking the law.
My current understanding is that the IRS devotes little energy towards prosecuting those who do this, and that it is rare for tax resistors to go to prison for openly refusing to pay taxes in this way. But it is rare for people to go to prison for not paying their taxes regardless. The
IRS website gives a figure of 279 non-filer investigations initiated, and of 233 cases leading to a sentence, in FY 2013. But that their enforcement of the law is so rare doesn't change the fact that the law carries with it the threat of enforcement, which in the case of this and other laws enforced by the government means a threat of violence.
Whether or not one is ok with someone deceiving the IRS is a separate issue, obviously, but regardless, you can not pay your taxes, not deceive the IRS or anyone else in any way, and still go to prison, according to the law.
Dardedar wrote: Since we are disputing whether or not his actions were fraud or theft,"
That's already been determined in a court of law. You can pretend words mean what you want them to mean, and laws don't matter because you don't recognize government and society, but like most of the things anarchists burp up, nobody cares. I certainly don't.
Not caring about something isn't an argument. Try again.
Dardedar wrote: If you believe the government legitimately owns tax-money because the law says that it does,
We the people have come together and built a civilization, and we have, collectively assigned our agent, our government, to make rules and laws on our behalf.
This is a nursery tale, not an accurate historical account. It is either false or irrelevant. If you are claiming that every individual whom you consider to have an obligation to pay taxes has, as an individual, agreed to pay taxes or agreed to act according to the law, then your claim is false. If you claim is that some fraction has come together and agreed, and that this fraction enforces the law against some other fraction, then your claim is irrelevant.
Dardedar wrote:It really doesn't matter if you acknowledge this or if you do not.
I don't make a habit of conceding falsehoods, because then not only would you be wrong, but I'd be wrong too. How horrible would that be?
Dardedar wrote:Stilley fought the law, and the law won. Maybe someday you'll have the courage of your convictions and then after mooching on the work and labors of others as much as possible, we'll get to pay the bill to have you babysat in the big house.
Maybe someday I'll end up in hell for breaking the ten commandments. Then maybe I'll be able to answer David's earlier question on whether I think the ten commandments involve a threat of violence or not.
I'd feel more like I've "won" in life if I've lived by my principles than if I've followed some edict set up for me by someone else. Whether they "win" by forcing me to act according to their edict doesn't matter to me as much.
Dardedar wrote:then by the same logic the government has the right to kill anyone the law says it can kill,
Be careful to not muddle a moral question with a legal question.
If theft is a legal matter and not a moral matter, why isn't killing a legal matter and not a moral matter?
Dardedar wrote: if you judge the actions of government officials the same way you judge the actions of anyone else, then the government doesn't have a valid claim to the funds it extracts through taxation.
Excellent, you've restated your conclusion again. Now if you could only support that mere sentiment.
I already supported it with my explanation of Rothbardian property rights.
Dardedar wrote:Not that it would matter since it would be of no consequence. Our tax laws are well established by our representative government, and they will remain no matter how much it causes you pain to have to contribute back rather than just take.
It doesn't represent me, but anyway if anarchists overthrew this government and no one had to pay taxes anymore, you'd just want to try to create another one. The practical necessity of having to pay isn't what makes you feel obligated.
Dardedar wrote:Dardedar wrote:2) if you can't pay your taxes, you will not go to jail for not being able to pay your taxes (please make a note of it).
So? Irrelevant.
It's relevant to the claim that people go to jail for not being able to pay their taxes. They do not. Ever. Please make a note of it.
Why don't you just admit you have your head up your ass on this point and move on? Or you could keep digging.
Why don't you just admit you're attacking a strawman? Better yet, why don't you stop attacking strawmen? If the law states that a person with an income below a certain point doesn't have to pay income taxes, then it's not that they're not paying their income taxes, it's that they don't have any income taxes to pay.
Dardedar wrote:Dardedar wrote:if you engaged in fraud while stealing from our government and avoiding taxes due, you may go to jail for your deceit, fraud and theft.
If someone knocks on my door asking if a friend of mine is home, and telling me they want to kill that friend for the fun of it, then I wouldn't feel guilty for lying to them about my friend's whereabouts.
That's nice. It would still be, by definition, lying. Does your anarchist dictionary say something different about that? No one cares. Whether you feel guilty or have a morally compelling reason to lie, is completely separate from the question of whether it is a lie, which it is. You've muddled two issues again.
It would be lying, but it would not be fraud or theft, no matter how loudly the door-to-door killer shouted that I'd agreed to let them kill my friend by not moving to a different neighborhood.
Dardedar wrote:If you barter, you should know that the value of products or services from bartering is taxable income.
Interesting. Seems the IRS is
starting to enforce this more. Good. We don't want freeloaders and moochers not paying their fair share back to the commons as they exchange value. And if they engage in fraud and deceit while avoiding taxes due, lock them up in a cage.
Nice concession.
Now on to something more interesting.
David Franks wrote:Indium wrote:I'm not trying to show that anything is moral or immoral. I don't know what you refer to empirically with those words. I'm investigating psychological phenomena. That's all. Cause and effect. Quite simple really.
Earlier, you said, "You all seem quite content with the way things are. So, if any of us can be said to have the superior 'moral code', for lack of a better term, I guess you guys win and I loose." That appears to (grudgingly) sum up a discussion of moral code, which this discussion inevitably is. You started out with psychology by way of psychosomatic discomfort, apparently not realizing that a moral dilemma is at the root of all psychological distress-- including your own exquisite case. When you started talking about theft, you jumped into comparative morality.
You sound here like you're thinking of theft as a moral concept. Is it a moral concept, a legal concept, both, neither, or does it differ depending on the context? I'm inclined to think the last one.
Responding to the bit about morality now:
I can observe psychosomatic discomfort introspectively, and infer its presence in others through observing them. For instance, if I see someone crying or having a panic attack, I can infer that they're feeling some sort of negative emotion. My inference could be wrong, of course.
Based on observations I can infer certain principles by which I can make predictions about what I'll observe elsewhere.
Besides that, I can have certain ideas which, for lack of another term to describe them, I'll call "fantastical constructs." I expect others can have these just as they can have emotions and draw inferences.
My whole thesis, in-so-far as I have one, is basically this: I feel certain ways in response to particular observations or thought experiments, I have a desire to feel some ways and not others, and I often try to act to achieve those desires. Since I can perform thought experiments, I can infer some basic principles by which I can predict how I'll feel in different situations.
What I above called a "property order" is one such set of principles. I think some people use the term "moral code" to mean a set of principles of this type as well. I believe in the existence of those sets of principles, because I can observe myself coming up with them introspectively, and I believe in the existence of the emotional psychosomatic phenomena which I analyze using these principles because I can observe those as well. (Technically the principles are themselves psychological phenomena.)
I think that some people believe in the existence of moral principles as some sort of platonic entities existing in and of themselves though. I don't understand in what way they believe morality to exist, which I expect is because they don't understand it clearly themselves, and so can't communicate it to me very well. Morality is a fantastical construct in their minds, not a set of principles by which to predict anything, and it's a meme in that it seems somewhat contagious, which is interesting.
I have described some basic principles by which I can predict how I'll feel about people's actions. The Rothbardian property order comes close as a starting approximation of that. Applying that it's easy to see how I'll probably feel about the actions of government officials, and so easy to predict that I'll feel some negative emotion, (pain,) in response to, among other things, taxation.
Now, some question arises here as to whether there's a feedback loop involved. I expect there probably is, the principle-sets, acts of introspection, thought experiments, and so on, can themselves probably causally contribute to emotional reactions to things. But I think the basic emotions are either hardwired in, conditioned, or otherwise caused by phenomena external to the brain. I don't think people feel empathy merely because they have a fantastical construct in their minds whereby they're obligated somehow to feel empathy. I think most people are biologically hard-wired to feel empathy.
"We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets."
~ The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper