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Comment by el_nahual | Hacker News Reader

Here's a question. I find it abhorrent that 15%-30% of my tax dollars go to funding the military, dhs, nsa, etc.

If one is a pacifist, is there an argument to be made that minimizing taxes is in fact the ethical thing to do?

Your tax dollars also go to the social safety net, education, funding the arts, maintaining roads, keeping parks nice places to visit, and a whole bunch of other stuff that is generally not in conflict with pacifism. Should these babies be thrown out with the military bathwater?

The majority of these dollars in the US go to military bathwater. Perhaps there may be a way for citizens to earmark their preferences directly for where they feel their tax dollars should go. Yeah yeah go vote of course. But Congress acts too slow. I am talking about a more direct system, maybe with limits sure. But as it is, Congress has a lot of the purse strings, and maybe individual citizens could have more say-so with an improved system.

Earmarking your own dollars for what you support might make you feel better, but it won’t change anything. Money is fungible by design, every dollar of yours that’s earmarked for welfare programs frees up someone else’s for the military.

Sure, if everyone did that it would have an impact, but that seems pretty improbable.

This would not be good.

This is essentially what a nonprofit does. Then what ends up funded is what's whimsical. For example, people donate to save cute polar bears instead of saving the ugly worm that fixes the soil problems.

Then maybe not open it up at that fine grain a level. And that's too specific an example anyway, as the budgeting process is way more complex: https://www.usa.gov/budget

So really, the citizens' choice in my example would have be to designate percentages at the top level, say to DoJ, DoD, DHS, etc.

That in and of itself would put a lot of power back in the citizens' hands. Of course, I don't see this happening, but that would be transformative. And we'd see a lot of campaigning/advertising/propaganda from each Department asking for taxpayers to direct their funds to them...

But my original premise was that Congress is gridlocked and if you think they're not serving the citizens' best interests, then this is an alternative from left field.

You will never 100% agree on what your government spends its money on. Vote the ones that you agree with, lobby and campaign, these are the tools we have in democracy. And I would 10000% prefer the money to be collected and spent by a democratically accountable government (with all its flaws) than a few well-intended billionaires a-la Gates.

No. Spend more of that money on lobbying, to get funding for the military, dhs, nsa, etc cut. For added bonus morality points, spend even more money providing aid or employment training for those who lose jobs in the process.

Do not get super clever to pay less taxes, leave those who cannot avail themselves to such methods to pay more (or the government to go further into debt), and call that morality. Don't kid us, and don't kid yourself.

You might find interest in Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, where he proposes that one should not let the state do evil on your behalf. At his time he was concerned about funding slavery and the Mexican war.

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