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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

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The parasites are trying to raise the national debt by 4 trillion USD, to pass on as tax cuts to only the richest people in the country. DOGE is playing whack-a-mole against figures that are 5 orders of magnitude smaller, while ignoring the waste that pads their own pockets.

The ideal world is zero tax. Failing that the minimal possible tax. Paying taxes is not in itself virtuous, nor is spending tax money a good thing.

We cut spending, then we cut taxes

Let's not cut taxes until after the deficit is zeroed out.

Preferably until after the debt is going down, so that the next generation doesn't have to pay interest on our poor decisions.

> The ideal world is zero tax

This is true but useless. It is like saying the ideal sorting algorithm is one that does nothing because your data is already sorted.

How do we fund road repairs and constructions with zero tax? Medical care for the poor who can't afford medical care or insurance? Public education in general?

And critically, are these things more cheaply centrally provided by a government?

Not providing a medical safety net or social security net seems like it's saving money... until one has to account for the downstream costs those decisions have.

Road repairs would be done by their owners, who will sell road access to anyone wealthy enough to deserve to be able to use a road. /s

If we decide to do these things with tax dollars, then as a society our goal should be the best outcome for the lowest cost. Many seem to have forgotten this

How could they even be done at all without tax dollars? That was the question.

Sure, but "best outcome for the lowest cost" isn't a specific point, that describes the entire Pareto front. There's no one optimal money/quality point.

> How do we fund road repairs and constructions with zero tax?

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/this-is-who-will-b...

> Medical care for the poor who can't afford medical care or insurance?

Private charities

> Public education in general?

Homeschooling / Private schools / Private charities

> > How do we fund road repairs and constructions with zero tax?

> https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/this-is-who-will-b...

To anyone who didn't click the link, the answer is "private companies will build roads. And they won't charge tolls! They will pay for the roads by building roads in front of businesses, and then extorting the business for money or else they wall off business access from the road".

I guess if the business doesn't like that they can just build their own road on top of the first one, wall off the sides, and charge the first road owner if they want to have a road near their business.

Whether this scenario is better for literally anybody compared to what currently exists, is an exercise left to the reader.

All civilizations have funded public works with taxes, whether through income taxes, taxes on production (crop yields, mineral extraction), customs (tariffs), or by labor obligations (corvée).

Even libertarian enclaves end up recreating taxes by another name (use fees, tolls).

Voters should (and do) prioritize public spending versus taxation. Sometimes they are inefficient (Greece, Argentina pre-2025), but many states get it right (Estonia, Sweden).

Use fees and tools are voluntarily paid if you want to access a service.

Not extracted from you under the threat of violence and incarceration.

> Not extracted from you under the threat of violence and incarceration.

No one is forcing anyone to pay taxes unless they wish to continue to be a part of the society collecting the taxes. If you don't like that deal, leave and find somewhere better; you may be interested in Seasteading [0]

If you are referring to being a US citizen and paying US taxes, you are free to renounce your citizenship, hand in your passport if you have one and never to have to deal with this "threat of violence and incarceration" from a state you seem to feel threatened by.

Why stay if participating in it poses such a hazard to your health? One great thing about the freedoms in the US, is the freedom for you to leave. Notice how we don't have passport control on exits? No one in the US is forcing you to be here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading

Now do property.

> The ideal world is zero tax. Failing that the minimal possible tax.

And who decides what that minimal possible tax is for in a society of 340+ million people?

We would probably have to consolidate the amount of decision makers by creating blocs of the population who choose them to be their representative present when all of the representatives come together to decide where to spend the peoples minimal possible tax dollars for the best outcome of the people they represent; because there are so many people and their needs to account for they will not all get exactly what they want and will probably have to compromise like adults.

Taxation is a public good.

If we're done having fun with words, would you like to take this opportunity to provide some reason to think this true? Specifically, how DOGE is combatting inefficiency.

How would cutting spending be a parasite? The goal is to cut spending.

The parasitic act is cutting spending while leveraging the position to increase their own revenue. The guy "cutting spending" is getting contracts and tax cuts out of the deal, and killing watchdog agencies and anything else that might try to stop him. It's almost poetically parasitic. He's inside the host, sucking it dry, while killing anything that can get in his way.

While I agree with you, the "parasitic" act I was referring to was specifically taking over the USDS. The image I had in mind was the fungus that mind-controls insects.

Trump doesn't have the authority to create new federal agencies, so he claims to have repurposed the authority of an existing one, retaining only the shell for appearances. I don't think that can possibly be constitutional - it entirely defeats the point of Congress having that authority, and is effectively a line-item veto if the law can say "this agency will exist for X purpose" and the president can simply ignore the "for X purpose" - but it doesn't matter if neither Congress nor the courts are willing to do anything about it.

The USDS is irrelevant, it was taken over to provide a fig leaf of legality and legitimacy to Elon’s depredation.

Yes... that's what I said

That does seem to be the goal. But the facade is that it is wasteful spending being cut.

The question is if one is dumb enough to buy Tweets from the DoGE Twitter account as anything resembling reality. There's plenty of "evidence" there for morons to buy.

Of course, but to start the uphill battle of calling out the bullshit, we have to at least know which bullshit to counter.

For me, the only charitable interpretation of DOGE is that they have accidentally figured out how to spread incompetence (not wholly unfamiliar to much of the government) to the small islands that fended it off (gutting 18F/USDS). The cherry was accidentally firing a chunk of the nation's nuclear experts to save a dime, and then clawing them back.

I think any claim of DOGE doing good work has to address those things in a convincing manner (in addition to why the existing processes are lacking; GAO). I haven't seen that attempted by anyone.

I would prefer some medicine without vice signalling with particular gestures from 1930s, thank you.

This is the first time I've seen the term "vice signalling" and it seems to fit. I suspect this is not the last we'll hear of that term.

That’s its stated purpose, yes, but given whose mouth those statements have come out of, I’m pretty skeptical that that’s going to be the actual outcome.

Totally willing to be proven wrong, we’ll see.

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