(If you're just talking about reducing it that's fine, but we already do that massively with the tax and transfer system, and I think you guys have estate taxes too.)
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/high-income-earners-tax-ra...
Taxes are so nominal, that the haircut is almost non-existent. Beyond theory, I’m very well aware as my close friend inherited a property portfolio, and is now set for life.
Unfortunately, most are not as lucky, and therefore we should not rely on the inheritance lottery to act as our social security.
We should not be entitled to steal the effort of others. Every person can do what they deem right with their things.
It is not a matter of how much. By that reasoning I could make legal hitting people, even if it is bad, as long as I do not kill anyone. Would that make hitting people better? I do not think so. The action is still hitting.
The same way, the action is still stealing wealth for whatever reasons. Not a right choice.
Also, by having more offer available, prices are dropped. That benefits everyone, making them automatically wealthier, since now services are at the reach of more people at a lower price.
I do not see the problem. At least, not so far.
Indiscriminate redistribution by force has a long history of failure and it makes places poorer, not wealthier.
Resources are indeed finite, but value is not. The wealth of new ideas, figurative and literal, is practically infinite. Your statement sounds very much like the zero sum fallacy.
Só, the choice is simple: you can pay more taxes now, or just hope that the masses won’t do a revolution and send you to the guillotine all the while you scream about your god given constitutional rights to property.
Or people who provide services go to the strike and stop producing. What would happen?
A civilized person would try to contribute to the society without promoting violence to steal other people efforts.
So the notion that massive intergenerational wealth is innate to humans and natural is absurd. Or if it is innate and natural, then the lack of that is innate and natural as well. Most of behavioral modernity had none of this at all, it is a relatively new phenomenon, not "innately human".
It seems quite likely to me that as soon as we started crafting and carrying things around, we developed complex behaviors around who gets which things.
I saw it from my nephews recently. One was building a castle, like five floors high with some stuff. The younger kid comes and destroys it. His brother gets deeply annoyed and started to cry. Why? Because he spent time building it.
They are three and one years old. Do you think anyone taught them to get annoyed when the castle is destroyed? No, it is innate: what takes effort has a value for humans.
We did not have the level of wealth of today before, but every single human that puts time somewhere wants to be the ruler of that effort. That is innate I think. I saw it clearly with my nephew's reaction. Noone taught him that.
Looks like a good experiment to me.
Does your nephew now own the sand he used to build that castle? I would hope not, as I think we’d agree, many kids would suffer!
And likewise, many people believe so strongly in their ownership of money, that they don’t mind if others suffer.
Taxes are robbery. If you did the same to your neighbor under threat, you would end up in jail. If a mafia does that, they go to jail.
If the government does it, they do not. And they did not ask you to adhere to a contract. It works with reversed logic from what we do in real life with others.
There is no single logical justification to say it is not robbery. That is independent of whether what they do with that money is good or bad. A different discussion.
> And likewise, many people believe so strongly in their ownership of money.
Which represents just that you offered something worth that money to others, in the absense of threat or violence. So yes, now it belongs to them because of an exchange.
> that they don’t mind if others suffer.
Or even worse, some people subtract that money from us by providing no value, unlike the average of humans who at least sells something or provides a service and pretends that the people providing services or products are worse than the person subtracting in exchange of nothing under the threat of prison.
Also, it seems that to you the person being subtracted the money they earned and spent time to get it(could be money or anything else, I am talking about effort) do not suffer. I guess they do not have a soul or feelings or do not deserve the same respect as the others.
It is the cost to you living in society; a society which provides infrastructure such as roads, education, sanitation, and food. A society which provides customers and a marketplace to trade in.
The roller coaster of watching you add and edit this comment was truly an experience. Have a great day.
Of course that is robbery. Imagine they force you to eat in a certain restarant and you must eat there, because they decided so without asking. Now let us say the food should be 15 dollars and they charge you 45, without asking. This is what they do. It is totally, totally unfair.
Later they will come and tell you: hey, you can eat thanks to me! You owe me respect. When in fact, I could have gone find my own way and eat for 15. It is absurd. And robbery, of course. Noone asked me. That is illegal if you do it to someone.
It is as if a telco came and charge you a bill of 50 usd and you get mad and go and say: hey, I did not hire your services. And they reply: the contract is implicit. They would be in trouble.
I'm fine with you not paying taxes, as long as you leave my country and renounce your citizenship. After that, make whatever you want on a boat in the ocean or in Somalia. But no one who thinks taxes are theft ever does that, because they want all the benefits of society my taxes pay for.
There are a lot of government policies I think should be criminal, but nobody suggests that my only options are accept the policy or completely denounce society.
I think that the large telecoms are built on theft from society and that copyright laws are too extensive. Should I leave society to go live on Sealand?
To use an analogy, you're saying "look, not every restaurant serves your favorite food, why do you call people hypocrites who go out to eat at those places" and I'm saying "the people I call hypocrites are the ones who claim it's a moral imperative to refuse to tip or even pay the check who insist on going out to eat"
I don't follow your restaurant analogy. Someone can recognize that tipping is harmful to the wait staff, but continue to tip knowing that to do otherwise would only hurt the wait staff and not the restaurant.
With a government imposition you must pay, noone asks you, and, on top of that, you do not use those services most of the time. But if you use them, why they do not ask you if you want? That is exactly how real life works... except for government impositions.
I'm fine with you having to renounce your citizenship if your point is "taxes are theft" and you want to avoid them. If you wanna go your own way, fine. But then go your own way.
Or do you think you personally should be given a line-item veto to a $5 trillion federal budget? Cause that's unworkable both practically and morally.
Morally the right thing to do is to ask EACH person what budget they want to spend on what and have a BINDING contract on that.
When you buya house or sign a contract witha telco company you pay for what you were offered and you can claim any deviation for that. I do not accept it has to be different with a government.
Of course, I would not ask for using a road or health care. I buy an insurance, pay a toll for roads or whatever. And we would save money, at least in Spain, where taxes are abusive by all measures.
I am not claiming I should have roads and health care and all and that taxes are theft at the same time. I am saying that taxes are theft on the basis that noone asked me what to pay or not.
The proof that things are terribly managed, at least in my country (Spain), is that we have a 120% GDP debt.
We are making new-born be born with a debt. Is that the right thing to do? For me that is immoral, unless you are that kind of person that thinks that we do a default and done, which would mean you are not a person that has a word to be believed. So what are the alternatives?
I will give you some clues: Taiwan, Singapore, Cyprus (Greek part, of course), Estonia, Georgia, South Korea, Switzerland: and probably also many of the places you call a tax haven.
You can go to Somalia if you feel like.
In Spain if you earn 60,000 euros, which is not so much, in my area they tax you 47% from your salary + what your employer already paid to the social security. At the same rime they are raising the retirement age and do all kind of sh*t bc we have a Poncy system for retirement. Of course, politicians get max retirement after 8 years (for normal people it is 30 I recall). Some of them, like ex-presidents, have an income for the rest of their lives.
But hey, the money is to build roads and pay retirements and health care. Please someone explain to me this is not theft because I really do not get it.
The difference with a country like Singapore, with all its bad things (I lived there before, among other places) is that the level of corruption is lower, the taxing lower and the budget is managed seriously. Here... this is not even funny.
And it’s not robbery if you’re getting something from it everyday, which you clearly are because you’re posting on the Internet and drinking clean water.
My point is to have control on what to pay or not. When not paying, of course, I have to pay it by myself. But noone is entitled to tell me how much and in which conditions unilaterally.
Governments and stated should NOT be an exception.
Good luck.
The duty of the governments is to kidnap and monopolize services on the basis that you owe them something because they provided you that, when, in fact, there are alternatives.
But even if they were useful on their own right, you could optionally pay or not in the taxes (that would not be taxes actually) and acquire or lose the right to use certain services.
Why they do not do that, and later accuse you of bad citizen wanting people to die, to not have education or that you cannot use roads? Because they are desperate to justify their own existence and by kidnapping these services they have their justification to exist.
I don't mean to be snarky, but putting it in more business terms. For some services the service provider offers several alternative plans, some have only a single one-size-fits-all plan
You're anti fire department?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/steal
"to take something without the permission or knowledge of the owner and keep it"
As far as I know, they do not have my permission to get my wealth.
From RAE, in Spanish, robar:
"Quitar o tomar para sí con violencia o con fuerza lo ajeno." -> To extract or remove for oneself with violence or force other people's property (ajeno in this context refers to property in spanish)
So yes, it is an objective definition of what stealing is, because you pay under the threat of jail, not by mutual agreement, as you do when you purchase something.
"