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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

We aren't allowed to murder people either, but for some reason, most of us don't consider that to be the antithesis of liberal democracy.

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The basic principle of liberal democracy is that we have an absolute right to personal autonomy unless we violate other people's equal right to the same.

Making it illegal to offer a digital token for sale to other consenting adults, without approval from a central authority, is unconscionable.

Before endorsing yet another law that restricts our right to engage in voluntary interactions, consider this: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...

You interfere with my right to personal autonomy by bankrupting yourself throwing good money after bad in stupid investments, leaving yourself destitute and in need of additional public services.

Or do you also intend to claim that the poor should be allowed to die on the streets as punishment for not being rich?

No one has a right to force you to support someone who made themselves destitute. You're using one infringement of personal autonomy to justify another.

In which case I assume you're of the "taxes are an infringement on freedom" camp of extreme libertarian?

I don't believe all taxes are an infringement on freedom. A tax on natural resource consumption, and to a lesser extent, immovable property within a state's jurisdiction, can be morally justified in my opinion. I also don't have a problem with a head tax, conditioned on the punishment for noncompliance being exile, rather than imprisonment. A tax on private transactions is an infringement on liberty in my opinion.

On that note, it's interesting that the first 'War on Drugs' used taxes on private transactions as its avenue to prohibition. Since the government at the time didn't have the Constitutional authority (this is before the Supreme Court was utterly corrupted by politics) to outright ban drugs, what it did instead is require that all targeted drugs pay a stamp tax, and then simply refuse to issue the stamp. This shows the prohibitive nature of taxes on private transactions.

These same people disagreeing with you would bend over backwards to decry the war on drugs for the same reasons you're articulating in this case..

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