Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 28908. (Read 26609407 times)

That's what your worried about? Free riders? You don't think we have free riders now? When were there ever not free riders?

Nobody is suggesting corruption can be eliminated, but corruption is less profitable when power is distributed. Democracy is an attempt to distribute power. We just want to take it a few steps farther.

Please avoid the point that you will not be donating to charities voluntarily (and will be instead passing the buck) some more.

If your painfully obvious, self serving points ever did actually go over my head, I might have to kill myself for being so stupid. Thanks for the talking head commentary, care to add something useful?

Doublespeak at its finest. You have to pay taxes or an alternative that we're not going to call taxes? You should be a politician.

When Overstock or Newegg or Amazon wants your money, they have to offer you something you want.

When the government wants your money, they offer you a small cell and nightly dates with Bubba and a bullet between the eyes if you resist.

That's the essence of it.

What is involuntary about it? It says "let's say you COULD," not "what if the rules changed." It's a voluntary option to get out of paying taxes, and I think it does a pretty good job of simulating what it would be like if we relied on voluntary contributions. The thing is, you all say that support will come from voluntary contributions, but when it comes time to actually, you know, contribute, all of you will be passing the buck. It's because it's not about the ideal, it's about the money, so stop bullshitting and acting like it's not. If the government charged no taxes, I assume a lot of you would care much less about getting rid of it.

WTF is "compelled charity"?

No, it is vastly worse, because the government is in charge of investigating corruption and has the ability to prevent others from investigating it.  Moreover, they have a LOT of guns, BIG guns, and are not shy about using them.

No, the point has gone over your head. Forced charity is not charity. Involuntary wealth redistribution is not efficient because the victims resist and evade. Wealth is destroyed in the process making everyone poorer. The size of the pie is just as important as the fraction of the slice. You don't seem to care about the poor and needy nearly as much as you care that I might possibly spend my money as I see fit and not as you think I should.

You spend your money your way and I spend my money my way. That's agreeing to disagree, but when you advocate theft against me, that makes you my adversary.

Your question is flawed because it substitutes involuntary action with involuntary action. A question such as "how much do you think you would contribute to charity if you were untaxed" would perhaps be more illuminating (though useless for totally different reasons)

Explanation

Governments aren't corrupt. People are corrupt. Why do so many people think getting rid of the government gets rid of corruption? All it does is changes where it takes place.

For comparison, let's look at getting rid of ALL guns. What happens? Does murder stop, or do we only see a sudden jump in the number of stabbing deaths? I argue the latter.

Not at all what I said and not even simply a poor representation of what I said. I'm disappointed in you.

My point is that other solutions may be more optimal but we are locked into "roads roads roads" by government action. Perhaps we would all have flying cars or 300mph underground vacuum tubes or something.

That's a bit generous.  The amount of government "spending" which is just graft and corruption is so amazingly vast that if I told you, you wouldn't believe me.  In a single incident the U.S. government "misplaced" a USAF cargo jet fully loaded with pallets of $US 100 notes.  That's just one incident, and by no means the largest.

Well, I might be wrong, but I think he's objecting to the idea of a mandatory contribution, not contribution itself. A free market for taxes, as it were. Once you put a number on it (say 30%, from the previous example) then suddenly you have a group of people looking to spend it. Government agencies, in today's society. They try to get all the money off the books every year, which means spending a lot of it figuring out what to do with the rest of it, and wasting a bunch more of it on shit that's not really wanted or needed by anyone.

Now imagine the opposite example, where there is no requirement, and everyone pays 0. Would they just sit around waiting for other people to build the infrastructure they want? That seems pretty miserable, obviously at a certain point, having clean water and electricity in your neighborhood becomes worth more than sitting in a hot dark room with your savings. You will spend that money, and there will be a person eager to provide those services at a competitive rate, because there is no central agency guaranteeing him the work, and his reputation really does matter for repeat business. The job gets done in the most efficient manner possible, as it didn't require a committee approval, or balancing it against other projects on the books, or waiting for votes, or some other bullshit that wastes everyone's time or money.

Now the reality is probably between those two things, but I wouldn't outright dismiss the idea of 0% taxes being feasible, or even better than what we currently have.

Here you show the extreme nature of your thinking and how detached you are from the real world in some kind of ideological attempt to have some fantasy society in which there is NO taxes...(or compelled  charity), and in such a world, supposedly, necessary public services will still be carried out... ... OTHERWISE, we will truly be living in a survival of the fittest, dog eat dog world... Most people would NOT want to live in such a society.

Markets never repeat, but they may rhyme.

This has been my thinking for some time. We'll see.