Spoken like somebody who has never had a taxpayer-funded clusterbomb dropped on their children.
Spoken like someone who likes to speak for someone else using a curious line of reasoning. You don't want to pay taxes because taxes pay for bombs. But they also pay for poor people to get health care (yes, even in the U.S., at least up until now), older people to get health care, and much more.
That is an excuse, not a line of reasoning. The fact that taxes are used for some good things is a really shitty excuse for the misery and slavery that empire casts upon the world.
Furthermore, I have every confidence in people to care for each other as brothers and sisters in the absence of the state. The internet will not tolerate the bombs and the fake money, but it will facilitate health care and, as you say, "much more."
Your taxes also help pay for the education of millions of children, among other things, so there’s that.
More to the point, your objection has some merit- but if you (or anyone else reading this) feels that way, are you protesting or otherwise politically agitating against war, or are you just sitting around feeling abstractly ashamed?
For me, prisons are a more front-and-center topic of activism. I've been involved with SSDP for over a decade. My only real anti-war activism (since the protests around the 2003 war) has been donating to Doctors Without Borders.
But that wasn't quite the point I was making. All I'm saying is that there's no reason to be proud per se of paying taxes.
And while I wish that education were better funded (and National Parks, and NPR), I don't think that it's reasonable to suppose that, so long as we make the mistake of delegating those things to the state, that it won't use our money mostly for misery and death.
I don't really understand this comment. I didn't make an analogy.
The state takes tax money and uses it to literally put people in cages and literally drop explosives and chemicals on children. I didn't mean this as an analogy - it's a literal statement.
Isn't that what we are doing? Not exactly shutting it down, but massive amounts of privacy destroying laws and related technologies are in place for this reason, but which are used more to enforce laws with far less agreement. We didn't shut the internet down, but we destroyed a part of it.
But I don't think it's fair to consider one nation in isolation; the entire world system has afforded hegemonic states for over a century now. Time to bring it to a close.
I agree, I picked a single one, though I could also have pointed at the UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and so on. Curious what you mean by bringing it to a close, though.
Interesting, I think your point about equalization and homogeneity is a likely outcome. I think state sovereignty is interesting when viewed as hundreds of simultaneous experiments in different ways of self-organization. Since it seems nobody has quite perfected it yet (?) I think we're not quite ready yet, though the vision is an enticing one.
I'm actually British, Canadian and Polish, and I live in the US. I've lived in Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia and Saipan. I've had the opportunity to live under many different systems. Of course, Canada has done shameful things in the past, as has virtually every other nation. I mean, Quebec was a world leader in the export of chrysotile asbestos until 2012. I hardly think you can point to past systems as a reason the current is deficient.
There are plenty of things Canada can do better, too: universal drug benefit, universal dental and vision, childcare, not exporting asbestos so much, etc. I can honestly say though, its a much better way to live up there than down here. You can point to what your taxes do, like allow you to live without the fear of crushing medical debt at any moment. So you pay them without the same amount of tooth gnashing.
No, I am trying to say that the, "You have to pay tax or be tortured" is ridiculous. You're not going to be tortured at all. You're going to be penalized just like you would if you failed to follow any other law on the books.
