this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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I pay taxes to avoid going to jail.
if you're saying you're a libertarian whose only incentive to pay taxes is avoiding jail then cool I also like to play make believe
but in real life I am happy to pay taxes not to avoid punishment but because it makes society better
Taxes can be used to make society better. Usually they're not used for that though. So I donate to charity, or give to people I care about.
Taxes demonstably don't make society better because society is set up to only benefit the ruling class at the expense of everyone else.
come on, that's such a sophomoric view of society. you're ignoring the force of the majority that keeps the ruling class in check. they have to provide SOME level of comfort to their citizens in order to keep us complacent, so that they can in turn abuse us and extract even more wealth. image the difference between your world and a despotic dictatorship where people are oppressed with overt violence. the fact that the ruling class needs to use systemic forces to keep us down instead of dudes cruising our neighborhoods with assault rifles is evidence enough. it's why police violence is one of the most egregious violations of human rights in the US: because it's so beyond the norm.
we're not talking about a post-capital society or a world without markets or currency. we're talking about this world. if you remove taxes, you're removing public welfare, infrastructure, safety measures, social security, health care, etc. I want to live in a society where the greater good is prioritized, but that doesn't mean the current society does absolutely nothing for me.
Literally anyone who is not a white male here IS living in a despotic dictatorship where they are oppressed with overt violence. And your tax dollars pay for that.
The systemic violence isn't actually possible without tax dollars, especially at the state and local level.
🤔 Maybe that's the answer to our problems. Just to not pay taxes and starve the beast.
There are two actual issues you're just glossing over here.
Tax burden lies mostly on the middle class due to a failure by society (in the US at least) to tax the richest among us. It doesn't help that we tax things they can hide and avoid, meanwhile their wealth appears elsewhere.
Tax allocation doesn't go to the correct places. This one is largely true but it also depends on the person's individual ideas about what public money should support.
Taxation isn't just the best possible means to make society better overall, it's the best way to represent collective ownership via capitalism. Look up the "Land Value Tax" if you're curious how that would actually work.
You misunderstand what I mean. The reason taxes don't work is because governments are inherently corruptible and thus can't be trusted with our tax money. We need a decentralized, incorruptible system that can't be wrecked or stolen from before we can talk about putting our money into anything substantial.