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Comment by 0x0nyandesu | Hacker News Reader

I always tell people of how my mother was smuggling Soviet rubles stitched into her coat when she flew to NYC to immigrate to America and in the real world people are aghast at the unjust laws of the USSR while on the internet everyone is like "but the law".

Fuck the law. Law != Justice. Use some critical thinking skills for once.

You earned your wealth. It's not the government's.

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> I always tell people of how my mother was smuggling Soviet rubles stitched into her coat when she flew to NYC to immigrate to America...

Typically people were smuggling foreign currency (US dollars) out of the Soviet Union rather than rubles. Rubles were of little use in America. But smuggling dollars was in violation of two soviet laws at one -- any operation with foreign currency was illegal (up to death penalty for currency "speculation" at scale); and transporting undeclared valuables across the border was illegal too. People in 1978 were literally risking ending up in a Siberian labor camp while trying to board an Aeroflot plane to Vienna (transit hub for immigration from the soviet union during iron curtain).

I'm sure there's a name for this fallacy, but to put it bluntly, you can just apply logic applicable to the fucking Soviet Union for any country and law system.

> You earned your wealth. It's not the government's

A common misconception among libertarians and alike; that's outright false. Pretty much everyone in a regular developed/ing country, especially in a centrally planned economy like the USSR, has wealth because a society and a government enable it. Be it with infrastructure, education, regulations, monetary system, or whatever. For examples how important those are for any wealth generation, look at Venezuela or Turkey.

Argue with nerds on the internet and someone will always claim a 100% tax is both legal and just.

Who is arguing that a 100% tax is legal and just? Is that some weird slippery slope tuned to a million? A 100% tax can't work, so any tax is bad! Is that it?

Taxes are a great way for citizens to give back to the pool used on them, proportionally, and for governments to insentivise and discourage behaviour ( e.g. lower taxes on electric vehicles and raise them on more polluting types). Saying taxation is theft is a great way to out oneself as incredibly naïve and with approximately zero understanding of how anything related to government, politics or economy functions.

People in USSR were kept inside against their will and were used as a forced labor. They absolutely earned their wealth, not the nomenklatura.

Forced labour is pushing it, at least for the general population. They were paid, had vacations and other "benefits", and could change jobs. If those are your criteria for forced labour, wait until you hear of countries with healthcare tied to the employer, and close to zero employee protections.

But yes, they were kept inside the country, which is a separate issue.

My criteria for forced labor is being criminally charged for refusing to work.

Arguing with commies on the internet is a waste of time. The goal posts are always changing.

Money is representation of value within a society, but it only has value within that society - and to the extent it can be traded abroad. The value is protected by the legal system, by the army, facilitated by the roads, bridges and infrastructure. Just because you get a "dollar" or "ruble" in exchange for work doesn't intrinsically mean that you are owed anything. That obligation comes from the system in which you, your employer and your fellow countryfolk coexist and cooperate.

You cannot divorce one from the other.

[edit] (They earned units that they could exchange immediately or at some future time. Whether or not that amounted to wealth is based on what those units could or did turn into at the point of measure within the framework of the society in which they exist.)

Eh. Obviously we need governments for game theoretic reasons. We need soldiers because other people have soldiers, we need governments because other people have governments. But in practice the government is often a huge bully. The fact that we can't spend money we make within these systems without getting snooped on for every transactions stinks. And, guess what, rich people and billionaires are not subject to the same limitations. So yes, while we need a government, there is a tension between individual autonomy and the government, and methods of exercising autonomy outside of the government's ability to count beans and snoop on you are just fine in my book.

> forced labor

Yes, that’s exactly why people who actually lived there now regret its collapse. The younger the person, the more they were oppressed by the KGB.

Keep telling yourself that. My grandparents just died. They hated the USSR for stealing their best years from them. They didn't even get to travel until they were in their 50s.

It’s not a question of anecdata, but statistics. I’m sorry for your loss, but you can’t argue there’re many-many people who regret USSR is no more. Just look at the polls.

Here's the thing. I don't care about their opinion. The USSR was evil. Collaborators get no sympathy from me. They could be the majority and I'd still want to overthrow that system of government. It's anti freedom.

That’s very thought-through and rational. /s

You are too emotional to properly debate anything on cryptocurrencies, I'm sorry to say but it feels like you need to grow up, at least emotionally.

She got an exit visa to the USA, yet had to smuggle rubbles? Something doesn’t add up.

At the time all cash found on you would be taken from you at the airport. What is there to add up?

It was their way of sticking it to people for "abandoning" the country.

It's extremely funny that the US kind of does the same thing in a roundabout way - if you're a US citizen, you have to pay taxes to the US government, wherever you live. If you want to abandon your US citizenship, you have to pay an exit tax and pay all the other taxes you owe.

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