Topic: No Taxation...Donation! - page 7. (Read 4642 times)

Blaming people for a mistake is fine.  Destroying their home over a $75 fee is not.  It may feel clever to say "Sucks to be you" but that is not a valid basis for organising a society.

What sort of mortgage company would secure a loan against a house with no fire insurance? It is the asset they seek to reclaim if you default - they want it kept in good condition.

Even if a mortgage company was flexible, the mortgage rate would increase to cover their risk.

If they were mortgage free and didn't pay, well, that's pretty dumb isn't it? If someone ends ends up losing their house due to such stupidity, they only have themselves to blame.

Really, this sort of stuff isn't complicated.

Don't you also love a group of guys walking around and talking about how flammable your property looks...

*facepalm*

Spoken like a true American..

Did you know that many authorities are deliberately inefficient? They spend more money and resources than they need for a simple reason: otherwise their budget might decrease. So when time goes the public sector only gets bigger and more inefficient. The only way to fight this waste is to starve the government by paying less taxes so it has to shut down unnecessary functions.

Two points:

1) Roads could be based on subscription models, where every subscriber has a share (and say) in the organisation. You could have annual auctions, where the costs are split over the subscriber base, for example. Getting from where we are now, the state could gift the roads to such cooperative style organisations to begin with. Later on, people may decide to only support roads which adopt this sort of model (and boycott others etc).

2) Monopolising a location is arguably an act of aggression. There is no evidence that you can 'own' a location, as you can't create that spot in time and space - you can only occupy it. If you refuse to share the location, then you are monopolising it. Therefore, you can argue that people can demand damages, if someone is seeking rent (from a location monopoly) including road owners. That isn't to say they don't own the asphalt, lights etc, but that doesn't imply ownership of a location.


Now, 1 is pretty straightforward - it is essentially pushing power down down/out from the centre. It also means that costs are localised to those who need to use those roads, based on their requirements.

2 is a more nuanced argument, but in a voluntarist society, courts will constantly be trying to define where the non-aggression principle is being ignored. I suspect monopolisation of locations would become an important issue and community land licenses may become popular (I wrote about this here, if you're interested: http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=185849&st=0).

You have to view voluntarism for its core - the rejection of using aggression to gain advantage. How things are arranged after force is removed is a matter of negotiation. While you (or I) can ponder endlessly about how things could work, it doesn't change the principle behind the philosophy and better ways will probably thought of by others anyway.

Roads are good to use as example I guess, because you can imagine problems there.
What if somebody owns a pass that is the only good way to get to somewhere (maybe because there are mountains in the way or whatever)
He could charge ridicilously high fees to let people use his way.

I could imagine a lot of scenarious abusing similar things, because if people can do it, they will do it (at least some of them).

Going cold turkey would not be good. People need to educate themselves, to understand the nature of the state and their relationship with it.

Too many think of the state as 'us' and suggest that 'we' need to do X, Y and Z. This isn't true. The state isn't society - it is the antithesis of society. Those who believe in a strong society, see that the state is not needed at all.

BTW, 'what about the roads?!' is a bit of an in joke in voluntarist/anarchist circles! There are many ways to solve the problem, as with everything.

Perhaps you could replace state tax disks (UK) with a private subscription model. Said subscription could give access to a region free of charge, with other areas requiring one off fees.

For local estates, perhaps a cooperative would be a good model, with people buying in to a portion of the road when they buy their house. This would be pretty similar to maintenance fees in apartment blocks, for example.

Still, the roads question has had entire books written about it, so don't take my suggestions as the only ones - people are ingenious and they find solutions to problems all of the time. I don't worry about that at all, tbh.

A voluntary subscription could work maybe.
But I'm not quite sure how you could sort it out.
Should you control everyone using the road built by the money of voluntary subscribers?

At least that's a way better claim than those pure anarchistic ones.

Just allow subscription to state services to be voluntary. The rest will sort itself out as/when people are ready.

You don't need to list endless "what about the X, what about the Y" etc. Solutions will be found to such problems. You just need to ask yourself whether it is acceptable to use force to make people do stuff or not.

It's interesting that these debates are becoming more frequent. A few years ago, voluntarists/anarchists were very few in numbers. Now they are all over the place. That's what I call progress.

That too.

It doesn't really matter.  Payment at the point of need is grotesquely inefficient.  A system where everything is financed that way would be too expensive to run.

Where I live, my taxes pay for this.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/12/07/9272989-firefighters-let-home-burn-over-75-fee-again?lite

Imagine all over the country, the people who lost their house, or almost lost their house due to fire. How much of the population would actually pay 'donations' to the fire department?

No worry it will never come so far.
It will be just a balance.
The state should have money only for what it is needed.

So you have an educated workforce that can keep up with technology.  If you're an employer with nothing to sift through but a bunch of dummies, you won't be able to compete.  If you're an uneducated employee, you won't be employed for long.  And in all cases, it's nice to be able to have an intelligent conversation with one's neighbors.


Because roads are the glue that bind our culture together.  Because without decent roads you'd have no cost-effective access to the goods of the world.  Because without roads you'd die of your first heart attack in an ambulance with a broken axle.  Because without tolls you can actually get somewhere - with toll roads everywhere, a holiday road trip would proceed at an average speed of about 25mph.  Because roads are a part of the strategic defense of a country.


Because you will, fool.  You think you're going to live forever, without any health problems at all?  You want doctors working on you who have little experience because nobody can afford their services?  You want that idiot who ran into the tree fixed up, so he isn't a burden on all of us for the next forty years - or do you want him to get repaired and - having learnt a good lesson - walk out of the hospital and resume whatever his contributions to our society might be (keeping in mind that he must be contributing something, if he could afford the motorcycle in the first place)?


These 'points' you raise are about what makes a society, and what holds it together.  And they are a part of what is called the Commons.  Without the willingness to pay for something we will never use, at some level, we will never get what we need to survive.  Never.  Because: "As you can see, I'm selfish, just like most of the population."

The Commons is exactly the same as an insurance policy.  You pay in - and you pay much less than any given service will cost you individually if you should happen to use it without 'coverage' - and you know that you can always get it out if necessity demands.

I've got no problems at all with taxation.  My problems are with those who do it, how they do it, and what they use the money for.

"Let me get this straight:

You want to defund Social Security.
And take people's security in the future away.
You want to defund Medicare
And take away their security now.
You want to defund Planned Parenthood
So we can have more unwanted children and more sexually transmitted diseases
You want to defund education
So that only those who can afford a private education will be educated
You want to defund HUD
And put poor people on the street
And you want everyone to be able to buy assault rifles?
What the hell could possibly go wrong?" ~Anon

He is indeed an ancap.  Its a good book - it makes what being in a libertarian society would be like very clear and logical.

It's on my list, though I thought Friedman was an ancap, so no conscription and such. But I'll see what his issues are and we can get back to it.
It's interesting that you think you know what my ideal society would look like, and you're sure that there would be a compulsory fire service.
Maybe the future will be a little different from what you can imagine.

The difficulty is proving how much Bitcoins you have.
How will a state handle this without enforcing ridicously high control on the internet?

True.  Gold-based states are as rare as unicorns and paper-based states are all over the place.  But my point that Bitcoin will be taxed like gold or any other commodity remains.

When you make everyone better you make your situation better at the same time.