I didn’t throw anything back in your face.
Oh, boy, here come the legal positivists. We can only conclude from your position that no government has ever committed murder
There is no reason to obfuscate the mechanincs and pictures of reality by trying to turn aesthetical and / or subjective statements into anything more than what they are. The whole thing we are discussing is the kalediascopic (and not mechanistic) world of intersubjective values. Furthermore, jurisprudence is not a science, and it is diverse from place to place from time to time. The words outside of the context of a specific court that is actually tied to material reality will serve little more universal function than as to how I defined it. It is just the nature of the word in relation to the actual practices of such a thing (and the practice is what actually matters, not the word). Ex: For our pourposes, it doesn’t matter if I say “half full” or “half empty” all I want is the picture in your head of a glass with water filled up to the correct point. Focusing on the rest is in the field of personal psychology, therapy, aesthetics, or a very specific context to something that is out of my realm.
Thinking otherwise will have a higher chance to send people off in the wrong direction if they are trying to get an acurate picture as to what is going on. I can not see how this is a desirable thing among any academic or practicle thought when looking at broad intersubjective things as a whole.
Besides all that, I think in the end, if you looked at it from my point, the government statement you made would seem more like “random dudes killing people because they have the power to do so” rather than something like “government with justification to do so via its inherently good structure within the fabric of reality”
Also known as the 11th Commandment… Thou shalt not get caught.
Also known as the 11th Commandment… Thou shalt not get caught.
one customs theft is another’s homestead. The one with the most market oriented outlook will have te richest society though
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/steal
Only problem is that one could make the argument that taxation is not theft because taxation isn´t against the law. That, at least, would be the positivist argument.
The other issue arises is you believe that it is correct for the government to habitually take money from others.
Morning…
Thank you reviewing the link now.
“Liberty student’s reference to a “red pill” was not intended to be sarcastic or trite, he was making an obscure movie reference because of the difficulty most people have wrapping their mind around the idea of complete absence of any government whatsoever.”
Sorry, I am slow…
Thank you for the pill.
Welcome to the Mises Forums, Pushback. My responses to you will probably be a lot like Clayton’s, but hopefully there will be enough of a different angle to help you out.
It depends on what you think they’re “necessary” for. Also, do you distinguish between “illegal” and “immoral”?
Why must there be “elected officials”? Why must there be “representation”? Why should things like settling disputes, protecting property, building/maintaining roads, and/or putting out fires be entrusted to a monopoly group of such people?
I see, so your question about whether taxation is “100% necessary” was only rhetorical?
Regardless, if you’re going to presume the legitimacy of governments, then it follows that taxation (stealing by governments) is legitimate. You can even go one step further and conclude that anything governments do is legitimate by definition. This is the premise behind legal positivism.
Finally, can you tell me just what a “successful nation” is in your mind?
Of course that again raises the question - why must we have a government or a group of individuals to “represent” us?
What do you mean by “power”?
What do you mean by “prosecute”?
What do you mean by “theft”?
Why should anyone care what a physicist said about economics?
Hold on, let me go ask an award-winning Java developer I work with what she thinks about the hypostatic union.
What do you mean by “power”?
What do you mean by “prosecute”?
What do you mean by “theft”?
There are 20 definitions for “power”, 4 for “prosecute”, and 3 for “theft” on that site. Can you please be more specific?
No harm, no foul. Welcome to the Mises Community.
the premise of “government owns all the land in its territory” is axiomatically true. If it were otherwise, they wouldnt be the monopoly of violence in the first place, as ownership and violence are sides of the same thing(just as action and preference). hence, the claim of government being a robber/thief is absurd, as one cannot steal what he owns.
The government does not, in fact, hold a monopoly over violence. Crimes against people and property occur all too often in spite of the existence of government.
Regardless, if the government does indeed own all the land in its territory, then why does it go through such trouble to make it seem otherwise to its subjects? Also, even if some people assume that government owns all the land in its territory, why must anyone else agree?
why does it[the state] go through such trouble to make it seem otherwise to its subjects?For more revenue, of course. Even the arch-anarchist moluneux agrees: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A
And anyone else must agree, because he is not in a position to negotiate.
I don’t view Einstein to hold any particularly striking ethos in the field of informal logic. However, in addressing the example that is his claim…
“Over-simplifying. As Einstein said, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Political slogans such as ‘Taxation is theft’ fall in this category.” Breaking this down, the Reductive Fallacy is paradoxically guilty of its own definition. I say paradoxically because it is, in itself, invalid, most probably through its own definition.
For instance, is 1+1=2 guilty of the reductive fallacy? It seems to mean that generalizations can be inaccurate, but the fallacy implies that anything too simple is wrong, which, in itself it wrong since it is not necessarily true.
I won’t even look, and I’m going to tell you to use the 1st one. Are you being coy, or are you honestly a word skeptic? Instead of asking me, perhaps arbitrarily, what every other word means take a guess and assume they mean what you think they mean.
Perhaps rephrase a question like this “by power do you mean (insert definition here)” if you are honestly confused.
I think you misunderstood my question, because your answer invites one to ask why the state gets more revenue only when it goes through such trouble to make its subjects think that it doesn’t own all land in its territory. After all, if the state is indeed the owner of all land in its territory, it should then be able to take whatever it wants, right?
Agreement is mental. One can comply without agreeing. Otherwise, you’re arguing that robbery victims who complied with their robbers’ demands must have been just fine with those demands. Then again, one always has the choice to not comply, even if doing so leads to his death.
I take it you agree with the rest of what I wrote?
It might not be as simple as taxation = theft as if you start to explain it can get more complicated. But that would be like saying, “I fixed the PC”. But in reality you did a lot more, you changed the motherboard and replace the ram and you reinstalled the operating system. But an over simplication, although still correct, “I fixed the PC”. So taxation = theft is still correct although there is more to it than that.