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Comment by tc | Hacker News Reader

No, he doesn't get off that easy.

I sympathized with that line of reasoning much more before reading Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government. Now I'm convinced that he should either resign or be held as equally complicit [1].

http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

[1] He should either be willing to defend the current system, or he should stop being its agent. Enforcing a law brings the same moral responsibility as writing a law.

Timely, in another thread we are celebrating Google for ceasing to be an agent of the Chinese government. We should never allow moral actors to absolve themselves of responsibility by pointing to a far-away law.

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I think he got to be the IRS commissioner by either 1: believing the laws are just or 2: being willing to enforce unjust laws.

3. Not caring whether the laws are just, but being willing to enforce them?

I'm not sure you can call the collection of taxes unjust. Obviously the system needs a lot of work but the overall idea (collecting revenue to fund government and shared services/infrastructure) is a sound one and integral to the operation of a modern democracy.

Plus if he resigned they'd just hire someone else. This isn't a position that would be hard to fill and he'd have accomplished nothing.

It's not the collection of taxes that is unjust, but a system so complex that most well educated professionals can't do their own taxes without paying more money. Almost all the tax preparation costs are a pure drain on society which directly relate to the complexity of the tax code.

PS: I happen to pay a little extra taxes each year as a combination charitable donation and audit protection. As an added benefit I spend less time doing my taxes, but most people seem to dislike the idea. Multiply that savings across society and we would have both lower taxes (on average) and more free time.

Accountants need to eat too.

As with any other job or profession, if society no longer has a need for accountants, they will have to find something else to do. In my view tax accountants shouldn't be necessary for the vast majority of individuals. I view them (as a profession, not as individuals) as just another middleman leeching value from the supply chain, enabled by a complicit government. Let them work for people and businesses who have too much money to manage alone, and let the common person (which in this case I'll define as anyone with less than 5 sources of income including bank interest) have a simple tax system that he or she can manage alone.

They are our representatives. We (assuming you are also a voting US citizen) voted them in. Are we not equally complicit?

Not sure where you are finding that he claimed that it was unjust. His stated objection was that it was too complex, which is far from unjust. I agree with your point that if he felt it was unjust he should resign or take specific action, but that is not his objection.

If a law is too complex to be understood by the majority of people, then that is a form of injustice.

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