Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

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Taxation.. isn't.. theft, basically by definition, so that argument is a non-starter.

It's (in the US) constitutionally allowed, which is analogous to "we agree to be taxed to support our government". It's true that you may not have personally agreed to it, but that doesn't really scale anyway. The constitution 'stands for' our mutual agreement - which is why we're allowed to change it.

Even if you don't like that argument, you have to appreciate that it works for many people and so you won't get much of anywhere declaring "taxation is theft" like that's obvious and unquestionable; you just lose 98% of everyone right there. (okay, maybe 95 or 90. I don't know anymore.)

A different argument: In an anarchy, taxation would be theft. In our system of government (being US-centric again), it is not. You can argue that you'd rather live in an anarchy/minarchy/whatever, and that's fine, but it's silly to declare that taxation is theft universally because in the current system that's not really true.

The basic moral foundation of most anarchist philosophy is universal. States do nasty things such as wars, theft, murder, violence, torture, jailing, spying, destruction, etc. If you apply a universal moral standard these things are still considered wrong, even if an organization called a 'state' is doing it. Even if many people believe it's ok for this organization to do it. It doesn't matter when a moral standard is universal.

A good way to think of anarchists are pacifists. Pacifists think all violence is universally wrong. Most people are not pacifists although and feel like violence is OK in some instances. Many of these non-pacifists would also agree in an ideal world that pacifism is what humanity should follow. But they recognize they don't live in an ideal world and thus are not pacifists.

Anarchists are really the political equivalent of pacifists. No force or coercion is ever acceptable in any circumstance is the basic foundation of anarchism, everything must be voluntary.

So according to that political philosophy taxation is still theft or extortion, just like self defense is still violence and soldiers killing in war is still murder to a pacifist.

Well, that's fine, and it's totally cool if we have different moral frameworks that we make our moral judgments based on.

But if you walk into a room and make a statement about the just-ness of something, it's implied and assumed that you're talking about "in our state", not "according to the government system I wish we were using".

It really irks me when people have the opinion "I think a better government system would be X" but conceal it with playing-dumb arguments like "y is wrong!", where y is a thing allowed in our current government Y but not in X. Like, if you want anarchism, don't say "taxation is theft", say "anarchism is good because taxation is theft in anarchism". Taxation isn't theft right here, right now.

And if taxation is theft in your moral framework, fine, whatever, we can't really unify our positions unless you convince me that your moral framework is better than mine. But even still! start with "my moral framework is good", not "this thing we disagree on, I'm going to make blanket un-qualified statements about it and pretend they're obvious and universally agreed upon".

> Anarchists are really the political equivalent of pacifists. No force or coercion is ever acceptable in any circumstance is the basic foundation of anarchism, everything must be voluntary.

Most of the anarchist groups I used to know a couple of years back where full of force, coercion and exploitation. They just used psychological tricks and peer-pressure instead of physical force.

These things can happen. The victims within the anarchist groups just had the problem, that whenever they were trying to defend themselves, the (inofficial) leaders were able to use political rhetorics to declare them wrong and keep them in line.

It was always the power-hungry egoists shaping these groups. Some were ok, but some weren't better than sects. All-in-all I haven't seen less free people in my life.

I have no idea how anarchist groups work like, I have never encountered one. I'm not an anarchist myself, just like I'm not a pacifist. But I understand where they & their derivatives are coming from.

Many human organizations have similar problems, I'm not really surprised it happens in an anarchist group as well.

Me neither. Like I said the victim in anarchist groups just had it harder to defend themselves, because of rigid political rhetorics.

> The basic moral foundation of most anarchist philosophy is universal.

They claim their moral foundations are universal. I have yet to see a comprehensive proof that they are in fact universal and overcome the is-ought problem outlined by David Hume.

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