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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Does one have an option to consent? If there is no consent, it's one of punishment, fines, or theft.

You could settle in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, where much local business in conducted in Town Meeting. If you want even more local governance (albeit less competent governance), that settle somewhere HOA-encumbered.

But if the aim is to pay little tax then come to Alabama! The natural lowtax experiment has been run in Alabama. The 1901 constitution was written by the wealthy industrialists and landowners with the express goal to disenfranchise black freedmen and white sharecroppers. The wealthy don't need local services paid through taxes, they can fund their own schools and other facilities and disregard the life of everyone else, so they made it very much impossible to raise local funds without going through the legislature in Montgomery, which they controlled. Now look at the shape of the state today. There is no decent infrastructure, education and roads are awful, no opportunity to profit from investment. Everyone who could leave left long ago.

You consent by buying / not selling your property. Besides which, where do you think your “rights” to “own” property come from?

It's my natural right to own property, with the caveat that such ownership is defined by my ability to defend it by whatever means necessary: socially, physically, logically, legally, etc.

Or at least that's what my country's founders might have believed and tried to establish. We might argue they're still correct in some sense even in spite of a government or society that insists otherwise.

"Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master."

To whom is that attributed?

Adam Smith.

What constitutes consent to be governed is still debated. Although, the fact there exists practically no unclaimed habitable territory left on earth. In theory means someone no longer can choose not to be governed. So in some sense it can be argued that people can't fully consent any more.

Although, you could still choose a different government by moving so not all choice is removed. However, you have odd things like the US taxing based off citizenship instead of location. Although the US is one of the few countries that will let you relinquish your citizenship and even become stateless (bad idea don't become stateless).

Also if you purchase land in the US your not getting allodial title. Also I doubt any state or country today would let you get a complete allodial title, it would probably be limited in some form.

The bigger problem here though is it really just to seize all value of property for failing their obligations by 8 dollars. I would argue that is clearly unjust considering the scale of things.

Sure you do; don't live in the place with the tax.

You consent when purchasing the titles to land to a far greater extent than the rest of humanity consents to your purchase preventing them from using that land...

Semantics.

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