If the government stops providing services, should citizens stop paying taxes?#EvanPoll #poll
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@evan No. There is a moral obligation to obey legitimate authority, whether it serves your interests or not.
(Of course other moral obligations may override that of obeying the law; one must choose the least bad option in a clash.)
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undefined Evan Prodromou ha condiviso questa discussione
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@evan No. There is a moral obligation to obey legitimate authority, whether it serves your interests or not.
(Of course other moral obligations may override that of obeying the law; one must choose the least bad option in a clash.)
@mpjgregoire That's an interesting point! So, is there a point where the social contract breaks down? Is it 1 year? 10 years? How long is it before the entity that claims to be governing your jurisdiction, but doesn't provide the services a government is supposed to, can no longer be held as legitimate and deserving of your obedience (and tax dollars)?
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@evan taxes aren't conditional on services. The govt will be very happy to recover the taxes and may use violence to do so. So people should keep paying them.
Federally, taxes don't fund the spending on services - they create money first, and then tax back only a portion, much later. The ends don't meet, not paying will make no difference to the govt, since they don't need money.
If the govt stops providing services, the best way to fix that is to work as slowly as possible.
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@mpjgregoire That's an interesting point! So, is there a point where the social contract breaks down? Is it 1 year? 10 years? How long is it before the entity that claims to be governing your jurisdiction, but doesn't provide the services a government is supposed to, can no longer be held as legitimate and deserving of your obedience (and tax dollars)?
Depends somewhere on how you're defining the social contract.
At its most base form, a government is just paying protection money to a mafia. You pay them because they keep other mafias from fucking with you too much, and at least some amount a vested interest in not fucking their people up TOO much since they're the ones who make the money that they get to take as protection money.
So basically, until and unless you have another wannabe government group ready and able to step up and say they'll fight to be your government and work to protect you instead of the current one, you pay the government you got because they have force of violence to compel it from you.
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Depends somewhere on how you're defining the social contract.
At its most base form, a government is just paying protection money to a mafia. You pay them because they keep other mafias from fucking with you too much, and at least some amount a vested interest in not fucking their people up TOO much since they're the ones who make the money that they get to take as protection money.
So basically, until and unless you have another wannabe government group ready and able to step up and say they'll fight to be your government and work to protect you instead of the current one, you pay the government you got because they have force of violence to compel it from you.
Refusing to pay taxes is an act of rebellion, so not something to do unless you have enough other people with enough power to actually make it an effective rebellion.
@evan @mpjgregoire -
Refusing to pay taxes is an act of rebellion, so not something to do unless you have enough other people with enough power to actually make it an effective rebellion.
@evan @mpjgregoire@JessTheUnstill @mpjgregoire so, the claim to legitimacy is just having enough firepower to enforce tax collection? That seems pretty Hobbesian.
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@JessTheUnstill @mpjgregoire so, the claim to legitimacy is just having enough firepower to enforce tax collection? That seems pretty Hobbesian.
@evan @JessTheUnstill @mpjgregoire
Legitimacy in the plain English sense of the word, something like "morally valid", is something that is earned in the eyes of every individual, not claimed by force.Legitimacy in the sense of according to the law as defined by those who would execute it, well that is taken.
Don't mistake the latter for the former. Don't mistake law for justice.
I'm a fan of the notion that the purpose of a system is what it does.
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@aeva @aud @SnoopJ (Not that I am saying that Iraq was anywhere _near_ as justified as US participation in WWII was, or indeed that we should not look critically at Dresden and Nagasaki as hideous and unjustiifed war crimes that should never be repeated in an otherwise on-balance utilitarian positive effort)
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@aeva @aud @SnoopJ the closest we got to a real "victory" in the last dozen or so conflicts was in Iraq 2, and that's because it looked the most like a WWII-style conflict. For example, de-ba'athification could be the same kind of qualified success that denazification was. The jerks are still around but they are mostly prevented from being *that* kind of jerk any more, and will be for maybe 75 more years.
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My daughter just yelled "shark attack" and threw a blahaj at me.
Clearly we've trained her well
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@aeva @aud @SnoopJ You couldn't have an armistice with the concept of self-rule, have the Vietnamese stay in place, to be ruled by the French, and promise that all future generations would be satisfied with the terms of this arrangement. You definitely couldn't have that kind of surrender *after the French already gave up*. So the problem with the US is not so much that we "lose" wars, as that our conflicts are not even legible to our war machine any more, and haven't been for a century
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@aeva @aud @SnoopJ well that's really my main point: that's kinda what *WWII* was, that's what a global existential conflict between developed powers with strong ideological commitments is, but it is not what "war" has been historically and it sure as shit wasn't what the US wars in Korea or Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan were. Germans could accept an armistice, (mostly) renounce naziism, and stay in Germany, where they were, being ruled by other Germans; the war could be "won" and end
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