Note that tax evasion/fraud[1] is illegal, which may be difficult to distinguish in some cases.
[1] not to be confused with tax avoidance
[2] services like national security, various types of infrastructure, verification and enforcement of safety regulations (e.g. no melamine in your food). You may not like all of these services - I certainly disagree strongly with some - but citizenship is not à la carte[3]. If you don't like some things your tax money is going to, I encourage you to participate in the political process so your opinions are heard, or even run for office yourself.
>If your poor, the IRS won't throw you in jail. However, if you have a reasonable source of income, you will be asked to pay your share of the services you're using.
This is false. The government does not ask. The government demands and punishes non-compliance with expropriation of private property and or prison.
Of course. You still have to file tax forms, and if you have the money you have to pay it. The situation I'm referring to is how not having the money to pay taxes is only a civil offense. Failure to file or filing fraudulently are, of course, offenses that risk jail time.
> This is false.
I suspect you're conflating filing the tax paperwork (i.e. 1040 and related forms) with the actual payment. These are separate requirements with different potential punishments for non-compliance.
> The government does not ask.
Obviously.
So the income tax is a grotesque violation of Human Rights and should be abolished.
To even categorise refusal to disclose one's personal income as "fraud" (which is an entirely different behavior) is political language to rationalise this human rights violation.
In your ideal world, when you legitimately owe someone money and you're past due, what should happen when you refuse to pay, and you're willing to escalate as far as possible? You seem to object to the idea that repeated noncompliance can increase the severity of punishment. But what's the alternative? To not enforce small crimes at all?
Or in other words: You started the discussion by saying it's terrible to "threaten to throw someone in prison" for X. The normal interpretation of that phrase is that the direct punishment you get is prison. But that's not true, the direct punishment you get is a fine. The sense in which you could go to prison is equivalent to the statement "the law is actually enforced". You have to fight pretty hard to end up in prison over it. It's not a violation of human rights to have some fees for things, and it's not a violation of human rights that laws are actually enforced.
I'm arguing that this interpretation is wrong, as it ignores the violence and force that ultimately backs all government mandates.
The violent/forceful quality of government mandates is why we should not be making morally legitimate behavior, like refusing to honour a debt that one did not voluntarily assume, or refusing to surrender one's privacy, a civil or criminal offence.
(And to predict a common argument, I do not consider taking someone else's property without the use of force to be a violent act.)
But let's not get hung up on a semantic argument. I am drawing a distinction between what you are calling "theft of body" and theft of anything else. I can use whatever terms you like, as long as you accept the distinction. (I will use "violence" and "theft" for now.)
Most people think violence is bad because it causes direct physical suffering. Theft alone causes no such direct suffering. It may cause suffering as an indirect outcome, but this depends on a lot of factors. To take an absurd example, if one person owns all the resources, and refuses to let others access them, theft will lead to better outcomes than letting everyone else starve to death.
Now it gets murkier when the inequality is less pronounced, but many people would argue that taking some resources from the rich to help the poor leads to better outcomes in a similar way. If you want to argue against that, you need to talk about outcomes as well. Just asserting that something is a "human rights violation" is not going to be very convincing to people who don't believe the action has bad outcomes.
This is unlike the force used against those who refuse to comply with income tax laws and hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade, which is morally unjustified.
> Most people think violence is bad because it causes direct physical suffering. Theft alone causes no such direct suffering. It may cause suffering as an indirect outcome, but this depends on a lot of factors.
That's an immature standard for morality. Theft is wrong. It's depriving someone of something that they are morally entitled to. You're not entitled to alleviate your suffering with someone else's resources. And theft does absolutely cause direct and immediate suffering for the victim.
> To take an absurd example, if one person owns all the resources, and refuses to let others access them, stealing will lead to better outcomes than letting everyone else starve to death.
There is absolutely no proof that violence backed theft against the rich leads to a higher standard of living in the long run.
And even if there were, social outcomes cannot in any sane justice system justify violating someone's rights.
In the scenario I'm describing, it's a certainty. Without theft, everyone starves to death because they have no property which would enable them to acquire food. If they steal from him, they survive.
Now obviously this is not a very realistic scenario, but my point is that strict enforcement of property rights can cause direct harm in certain situations.
And I would argue that lesser inequality still exhibits the same kind of failure mode, where the poor become incapable of acquiring resources, because they have nothing the rich need.
>That's an immature standard for morality. Theft is wrong.
Moral absolutism seems a lot more immature to me. Almost any category of act can be good in the right circumstances.
>And even if there were, social outcomes cannot in any sane justice system justify violating someone's rights.
But now you're talking about a justice system. Enforcing rules at the expense of short term outcomes can be beneficial, but only if people respecting the rules causes better outcomes in the long term.
Rights are only as valuable as the outcomes they lead to.
There is no scenario where they have the political/legal/military power to rob him, but don't have the power to feed themselves.
>And I would argue that lesser inequality still exhibits the same kind of failure mode, where the poor become incapable of acquiring resources, because they have nothing the rich need.
I would argue the ability to exert political influence is indicative of the ability to generate value. The same kind of intellectual feats are required in both cases.
Moreover, the historical trend is that of the standard of living of the poor rising. There is nothing at all in the economic trends seen to suggest the poor would be doomed without welfarism. Technological progress is creating an age of abundance, and this abundance is massively enriching every income class, in ways that are not even captured by traditional measures of economic consumption.
So no, I don't think there is any argument whatsoever for the instutionalization of theft.
>Moral absolutism seems a lot more immature to me. Almost any category of act can be good in the right circumstances.
Moral absolutism prevents the slippery slopes that the population at large has slid down over the last 100 years, where a massive share of economic activity is restricted by regulatory prohibitions that harm the economy, welfare programs have tens of millions of multi generational dependents, and income taxes demand over 30% of people's income.
Imagine how absurd a justice system would be if it let someone off for theft because the victim was rich. That's effectively what you're arguing for for the political system. I see it as extremely immature.
>But now you're talking about a justice system. Enforcing rules at the expense of short term outcomes can be beneficial, but only if people respecting the rules causes better outcomes in the long term.
I disagree. The outcome of a society accepting theft is bad, in and of itself. Theft is bad. Principles matter. Murdering an innocent person to save a thousand is wrong. Even engaging in a lesser evil, like theft, against one, to save many, is wrong.
Moreover, even if we accepted your moral framework, there would be no argument whatsoever for welfarism. Economic theory and the historical data strongly suggests minimising taxes levied to pay out welfare maximises economic development and the rate of increase in standard of living.
>I disagree. The outcome of a society accepting theft is bad, in and of itself. Theft is bad.
So what exactly do you mean by "theft" in this context?
Normally theft is defined in terms of the property system of the society it occurs within. Such property systems vary in the extent of control they allow individuals to exert over resources. Some involve limited time periods (copyright) while others require social contribution to maintain exclusive control (property taxes).
So in order to call something "theft" even if society accepts it, you have to define a property system outside of society. And to say such theft is morally bad, you have to elevate this one property system to the level of morality.
And this seems extremely dubious to me. We can say murder is intrinsically bad because life is evident in the universe, but there is no intrinsic notion of property in the universe. The only way I can consider one property system morally superior than another is to talk about outcomes, at which point we're making economic arguments, not moral ones.
As you said, let's not get hung up on semantics. It's taking property from someone that they are morally entitled to. If John gives me a widget, you have no moral right to take it from me without my consent because you happened to sign a piece of paper saying it's the law, and get Bob and Alice to add their signatures as well. Government does not have any rights that a group of people do not have. If it's wrong for a group of people to deprive you of your property, it's wrong for a government to do so as well.
>We can say murder is intrinsically bad because life is evident in the universe, but there is no intrinsic notion of property in the universe.
What about slavery? What about predation, or parasitism, where one animal lives off of the life of another? The predator/parasite robs the prey/host of their bodily resources. Property is absolutely evident. Every bit as evident as freedom/self-ownership. Animals will fight against attempts to prey/parasite off of their body, just as they'll fight against attempts to steal their kill.
First Possession is a principle observed in animals to reduce conflict, and it is the basis of property rights. It is also found to lead to a stable equilibrium in game theory experiments.