How to Discombobulate Your Libertarian Friends

And in libertopia, suddenly that's okay? Or should we expect even more massive tax evasion? How will we fund the things libertarians deem necessary?

You are trying to derail the argument by bringing up unrelated points. Either government revenue collection is valid or it isn't. You can't claim it is valid for only certain things.

I never said I was against federal taxes. I disagree with the method. Nice try though.

Institute a national sales tax of some sort, and get the government out of our bank accounts. Not to mention promote personal savings and investment.

A sales tax requires government perusal of mom and pop shop's books. I'm not seeing a huge difference. Point is, the cry about personal finances is a red herring. We aren't debating how taxes are collected, but whether their collection constitutes theft. I say it doesn't, some say it does. Theft is the word for folks who sneak out of paying.

National Sales Tax.

Uh, I have Storm on ignore and didn't see the context, and just assumed that Archangel was being a slightly crazier version of his normal self. Mea culpa. I'm sure Archangel will eventually come up with a post somewhere I can posrep to balance things out.

So you like a military to protect your ass if you're invaded?

How about roads to drive on?

Police?

Civil servants?

If you think you shouldn't pay taxes...do tell who is going to foot the bill for these and a hundred other basic things you take for granted.

They'll say private companies.

No, they would argue that the government should provide those services and that the means for paying for them would be a combination of sales taxes and user fees. The difference is no one would be required to declare their individual wealth to the government.

There is one thing I don't get, though:

What's the difference between Storm (hypothetically) illegally manipulating his finances so the government doesn't tax him to the extent it ordinarily would, and someone in Libertopia deciding to skirt the national sales tax in order to generate more business?

Archangel - IIRC they want those to be funded by voluntary donations. Or at least some of them do.

I'd say the main difference is that storm will behave when he gets what he wants, just like any other spoiled brat will behave for a time when given the toy he threw a tantrum to get.

Long term? Probably things will be business as usual, except that it won't just be the lunatic fringe who refuse to pay, it will be everybody, since most of us will recognize that our government no longer serves us.

Not to the degree that the IRS currently individual's lives.

When did I say I was sneaking? I deducted my last major vacation. On the advice of my accountant.

This is a hilarious thread. Like I said earlier, I thought diehard liberals were disconnected from reality....but reading this shit....Wow.....wow.

Legally minimizing your taxes is different from what Storm said earlier. If you don't try to minimize your tax burden, your dumb.

Look, if taxes were reduced to the bare minimum they needed to be to support the core functions of government, I think a lot more people would be willing to donate to various charities.

There's certainly the possibility that people would not adequately fund the things that we currently do, which would in a sense be unfortunate. But on the other hand, if that's the way the people feel, why should they?

Don't feel like looking it up, but this has been proven in times of low taxation.

Funding without the political lobby?

Not if you care about...

So, what's a core function?

I work at a naval shipyard. Is that a core function? You either have a government run shipyard that taxes must fund...of if you say "Private Shipyard" then the government will have to pay them through taxes. If you fund neither you have no Navy.


Seriously, it sounds like some haven't put any thought into this at all besides...

"GIMME IT, IT'S MINE!!!!" -George Carlin

Flow,

There is a clear difference between legally minimizing your taxes and tax evasion. The first is based upon official policy, and is considered when Congress figures out how to pay for the war, whereas the second is an overt effort to thumb your nose at official policy.

Putting words in people's mouths now?

garamet has taught you well...

Nope, I pay my share. I just make sure everything is right, and my investments are proper...tax deffered.

So there is no hypocrisy you are trying to imply in my statement.

So how about answering the question in the post you quoted?

And the system provides handy methods for legally doing just that.

Show me where I said that the government should not be funded.

Hell, I've even come up with solutions and new ideas.

You've done nothing but make assumptions rampant with hyperbole.

garamet will be so proud.

You haven't done anything but throw out fantasy.


BTW...you aren't going to spin me up by comparing me to Garamet.

That's actually a good question. Taxation and funding is always the aspect of libertarianism on which I've been less than convinced.

A few points:

1) Charitable donations would increase some, but not as much as libertopians would like to believe, and would be partly offset by reduced donations due to the presumed loss of a tax deduction.

2) Charity is a horribly inefficient way to provide needed services for several (nonexhaustive) reasons.

a) Charities tend to have very high overheads compared to government services--taxation is a lot cheaper than cold call solicitation.

b) Although government's far from perfect, charities tend to be more corrupt than government services, and in a governmentally minimalist libertopia they'll be even more so.

c) The distribution of charitable donations is already disastrous, making them even harder to rely on to provide regularly needed services. For example, immediately after 9/11 the Red Cross got literally more donations than it knew what to do with, but those donations displaced other charitable giving in both time and donee, so that non 9/11 related charties were knocked out cold and the Red Cross saw a very weak year after the initial burst of donations.

3) All of which adds up to a drastic reduction in services and a big negative hit to the economy from inefficiency for relying on charity to do a lot of what government does now.

4) No one agrees on what "core functions of government" are anyway, so there's no way to simply cut services to core services and be done with it. A lot of people would rightly say that given the way health insurance markets work, or more accurately don't work, single payer national insurance should be a core government function. Other functions have weaker arguments, but you'd still be having them, and they'd still be the same arguments we have today, just semantically reframed.

Garamet, Liet, and me more or less on the same side...

/checks Bible

Yeah, that's one of the horsemen of the apocolypse.

Here's something I've looked into that evenflow should as well.

IRS Form 8283.

I'm looking at donating a conservation easement of my own design to a local land trust. Keep in mind I never have once entertained the idea of developing my ranch for any purpose. But because I may donate this easement -- which will cost me nothing -- and I'll have it appraised at a rapacious price (helps to be poker buddies with a certified appraiser) -- the benefit will be as follows:

For the next 15 years I'll be looking at a 50 percent deduction on my adjusted gross income.

All for the price of promising not to develop land that I wouldn't develop anyway.



That's what I mean when I say using your own laws against you to evade your stupid income taxes.

We're just spitballing here, so no one can say with any authority whether charitable donations would exactly meet the level of funding government gets for the corresponding functions, would surpass it or be under it.

What seems indisputable is that the charitable donations would go more closely toward whatever the donors wanted them to go.

Right now, people are partially paying for schools that they do not use, and faith-based services that they might find offensive and things they may think have no purpose at all. At the same time, they are denied the opportunity to fund things that they care about to the extent they would want to.

I don't think so because:

Charities, typically, aren't union shops, so wages, benefits and other costs are much higher for government.

Charities are much better at recruiting volunteers than government.

That is certainly a legitimate concern.

However, there's more of a disincentive for charity to police itself than government. A single case of incompetence or corruption can sink a charity completely. And competition among charities would hypothetically make it foolish for a charity to allow corruption to continue to breed.

By contrast, no matter how incompetent or corrupt government is, it keeps rolling along. It has monopoly power.

I'd say that a charity getting too much funding to immediately know how to distribute it is not a problem I'll lose sleep over.

The notion that some charities would suffer drought years is more troubling. Of course, 9/11 is a once-in-a-generation (keeping fingers crossed) event.

Outside of that, I don't see how the distribution of donations is "disastrous." It may not be to your liking or Dayton's or mine or whoever's. But if it's what people want to do, isn't it fine the way it is?

Even accepting that for argument's sake, the increased efficiency of the private sector and the change in mindset from people being dependent on government to people being independent very well would make it a net positive.

That there isn't perfect agreement doesn't mean that there's no agreement.

I'm pretty sure we would all agree that the following are areas that should be taken care of by government:

National defense
Police/Fire/Emergency services
Courts/records management
Roads
Political representatives

Of course, how government should take care of those services would spur disagreement. Archangel's shipyard, it seems to me, would fall under part of the core services. But maybe Storm or someone else would argue that it would be better if the government simply hired a private company to run it.

And while I might think national health insurance would be a worthwhile function of government, obviously many would oppose it.

We're talking libertopia, so this isn't going to happen.

But we could decide either by popular vote or by what's in the Constitution as to what the core government functions are.