You Can't Keep Your Money Because It Belongs To The Government | Hacker News Reader

You Can't Keep Your Money Because It Belongs To The Government

professorhollybell.com

8 pointselfinlike14 comments

I think the author has a funny perception of what a government is. The government is not a truly separate entity. We the people are the government.

Then we have decided to create money to help bartering.

Same problem though. Other people deciding how much money an individual gets to keep.

It's only a problem if you have this absurd, artificial, ahistoric notion of private property that seems to be popular lately.

You're right, when private property included people, nobody questioned the right of the owner to take 90+ percent of what his serfs produced.

I'm being sarcastic of course, I know what you meant. But after you've crossed over the 50% threshold, it feels more like your arrangement with the government is to be milked for tax rather than consensual mutual agreement to protect my rights. I'm working for the government instead of it working for me.

50% of what though? 50% of your take home pay or 50% of the value you receive from living in a functioning modern society?

Human Ownership is still legal.

Here's the Act showing how to do it in Canada: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-20/FullText.html

Here's the act showing how to use the form: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/SOR-85-846/FullTex...

What the fuck?

Pretty much nobody has an effective tax rate of 50%.

Not true. Many people in California are already paying 50% or more between state and federal income tax.

Here's an article that shows that in several states the total income tax rate will meet or exceed 50% http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevinglass/2012/12/06/study_50_...

That's not income tax. That's income tax added to payroll taxes added to capital gains taxes added to dividend taxes.

If you're making enough money from dividends and capital gains that you have to pay taxes on them, great! Pay your fucking taxes and don't complain, because most of us don't have investments at all outside our retirement accounts. Ha, that's if we're even fortunate enough to have proper retirement accounts!

And payroll taxes are more or less flat, or even regressive, yeah.

I say all this as someone who already looked at his paychecks once and found that after all the income and payroll taxes came out I was only getting 2/3 my nominal salary in take-home pay. You know what that taught me? Negotiate for net salaries.

You know what it didn't teach me? To complain about how a fortunate person like me has to pay into society to get the public sector out of debt and enable it to afford to help society again.

I found it frightening that you would approach such a topic as property from a historical perspective rather than a philosophical one. Simply because something has been the case throughout most of history doesn't mean it should be.

My first point was the philosophical one that the notion was absurd; that it is artificial and ahistoric were pre-emptive counters to claims that it's natural or traditional (it is neither).

This is such a piece of trivial dreck that I would downvote it if I could. There's barely even enough of a real idea for the few paragraphs actually written.

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