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Comment by vocatus_gate | Hacker News Reader

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Great empty platitude there. Socialism is about economic democracy and worker self management + ownership, although the term has become increasingly nebulous in recent years. Classic socialism, as in what was spoken of by those like Marx and Kropotkin, had nothing to do about some redistribution of money. What is related is social democracy and conservatives using the label for any social spending they don't agree with.

Same could be said for startups!

Only startups actually have to raise their capital in an entirely voluntary manner, with all the due diligence and stipulations that entails. Government just takes it. It's the difference between your wife shopping for groceries with your credit card and an armed gunman sticking you up the ATM telling you to comply or die.

Where are all these people buried who have been shot for not paying their taxes?

It's the threat of violence. Like I said, you either comply or die. Just try resisting your eventual imprisonment and find out. Of course people are well aware of what the threat ultimately entails and as such choose to comply, but this makes it no less immoral.

You'd think, if that were the case, that at least one person would have been killed for not paying their taxes in U.S. history. Can you cite a single example? Otherwise you're employing empty rhetoric.

Eric Garner

Given the couple hundred million people who are compelled to pay taxes every year, if they truly faced a "comply or die" ultimatum you would expect over the decades to see thousands (at a minimum) of killings.

Eric Garner and quite a few others are terrible examples of police brutality that minorities face in the enforcement of what should normally be non-lethal actions under any circumstances, even total non-compliance. Lethality here is a method of racial and/or class suppression, not so much enforcement of specific laws (e.g. jaywalking, loitering, cigarette tax compliance).

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