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Comment by glennvtx | Hacker News Reader

Taxation is just theft, There is no fair way to apply theft.

I've been robbed and I've been burglarized. I've paid taxes mostly as an upper lower class person for a few decades and as a middle middle class person for over a decade.

Paying taxes feels a lot more like an inconvenience than theft to me. Maybe I don't earn enough to truly feel how onerous taxes are.

When something is taken from you, against your will, ( through coercion ) that is a theft. People have been conditioned your whole life to accept it, but it is still theft.

You have the option of spending at most few thousand to live in remote land that no government cares to reach, or where no government can reach, and you can truly enjoy negative freedom from governments. Most people choose to live with the coercive power alongside the many other benefits of a powerful government.

There is no such place, and even if there were, your argument is essentially, "ergo, Decedo". Government is and always has been the principal enabler of every single genocide, war, and mass atrocity in history. Einstein said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Support of hierarchical government is mostly the consequence of brainwashing, and insane.

You seem to be set on your worldview, but

> There is no such place

Not really, there is very little ability or willingness of any government to control what a single individual might do in wastelands like deserts or Antarctica

> Government is and always has been the principal enabler of every single genocide, war, and mass atrocity in history.

And assuming you are right, they are also the principal protector of property and capital. Who would you rather protect the food that you depend on while it is being grown by a farmer in a field from opportunistic hungry thieves, if not mercenaries, an if the latter, from the mercenaries themselves? I believe government meeting these basic needs are so much a better good than the alternative that it more than balances out the occasional genocide, war, and mass atrocity.

Justifying genocide, war, and atrocity because you cannot imagine a better alternative? As someone who grew up on a farm, i can assure you government has done nothing to help, they have only ever saddled us with burden, and enforced monopolies of larger factory farms, even going so far as to create special migrant visas so these companies can capitalize on slave labor, "legally". All hierarchical government is cancerous.

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