You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence - but Sometimes They Actually Exist
It is theft, but the statement gets boring at or around the 7,000th time you hear it.
It is theft, but the statement gets boring at or around the 7,000th time you hear it.
The 'taxation is theft' claim probably has never convinced anyone that didn't believe it in the first palce. I find it a lot more productive lately to say 'well it makes kind of sense to have taxes for this and for that, but hey there are also downsides' and then talk about those and then after some discussions one can come back to question those other areas.
Yeah, that's very well said. That's my point exactly. It's a statement that will never convince anyone. It's just a form of circle jerking. It's said to get a pat on the back from people who already agree with you.
It's boring.
And the truth of it depends on one's definitions of "taxation" and "theft" only, so any discussion will be about said definitions and miss all depth.
It's also a useless statement, because any group of cooperating people will want to do some things collectively and together, because it is necessary or practical. The question then is what ways there are to do that, and which work and which don't.
Taxation being theft or not is completely uninteresting when you step back from doctrine and organise things for a group in the real world that needs to get some things done together.
I do think it is a great slogan for some belief system or other, though.
Cooperation is such an Orwellian word if you ask me.
It is said that if someone did what a rapist, robber, murderer "asked"
them to do under thread of or use of violence, that the victim cooperated.
But can you speak, in such a situation, of a cooperation between the people (in that group)?
I speak of cooperation more as people working together for mutual benefit....without forcing, or threads or violence on each other. But that is of course my opinion which would lead into the territory of definitions so I won't go any further.
Thank you for making my point.
You're welcome. You truly don't like having discussions with people who are not religiously believing in your faith, and you don't want those dogmas challenged. I get that, and respect that.