What is the ideal method of Taxation for libertarians?

[Mini-Me]

Taxes that don't interfere with private property are fine with me. That basically eliminates 90% of all taxes in one swoop.

All taxes interfere with private property to some degree. Property taxes, inheritance taxes, and income taxes are more obvious here, but capital gains, sales taxes, VAT's, tariffs, and excise taxes still interfere with private property because the government forces people selling items to give them a cut of the proceeds that rightfully belong to the sellers (or buyers, depending on your perspective).

 

[nickcoons]

It should also serve to repay the person's debt to society.

Criminals don't owe debts to society; they owe debts to their victims.

 

[nickcoons]

I have to disagree with your claim that this incentivizes police to find the right person: Rather, because their source of payment relies directly on a conviction (any conviction), it seems logical that police would be incentivized to pin the crime on whoever they can and even plant evidence. This would be especially common in cases when there's no "real" suspect in sight but when there's someone who some circumstantial evidence points to.

Why would police and prosecutors go through the effort of fabricating criminals by going through the elaborate scheme of planting evidence, training "witnesses", etc, when they can instead focus their efforts on actual criminals that wouldn't require nearly the effort? "Oh what a tangled web we weave...", and all that.

I see another potential problem with this as well, though I also see a potential solution. Most ordinary criminals are poor, meaning they won't necessarily have the immediate means to pay the police, the courts, the prosecutor, their defense attorney (assuming they have one...), and the prison. In the meantime, where does the money come from to pay for all of this?

You mentioned a loan as a possible solution, and that could certainly work.

Let's assume for a moment that the police, prosecutors, courts, and prisons are all non-governmental; which would probably make them businesses. Most businesses start up incurring large costs, such as decking out a retail store full of inventory, building out offices, hiring staff that they must pay before sufficient revenue starts rolling in, etc. Some businesses go many years before they make it out of the red but they ultimately do. Where do they get the money to do this? From wherever they can; whether it be from loans, gifts, investments, or the personal savings of those starting the company.

Lawyers and court systems might get away with subsisting on their current funds, but police officers (or rather peace officers, as they would hopefully be called again) need to pay the bills and feed their families, and they can't just wait months or years for a criminal to start paying off his debt. Who would front the money in this situation?

Police officers would probably be employees with regular salaries of a company that was paid by the criminal's efforts, not independent contractors that would all have to wait until the criminal became productive before they saw any return.

...then again, a problem I see with this solution is that if the defendant is acquitted, the court is left holding the bag.

I see this as another protective measure against police and prosecutors trying to fabricate criminals. In a society of non-aggression, one cannot force a court to hear a case, and courts probably wouldn't use resources hearing cases that they didn't feel had a decent chance of conviction.

This does help to address my question about the lonely person being murdered, but it doesn't go all the way. When the victim is still alive or has surviving family members, would they ordinarily front money for the initial investigation and/or front money to the prosecutor?

This would be up to the prosecution and the courts.

In the free market, there are all sorts of business marketing tools in order to gain customers. Appliance stores offer "90 days same as cash", auto dealers offer "0% financing for 72 months", etc. Those wishing to drum up additional business may offer up deals to attract a market like those that can't front the costs by offering to finance it for them, and of course ultimately take it out of the criminal if a conviction is acquired. They may provide a guarantee that goes something like this, "if we don't win, we don't get paid." This motivates them to provide a thorough investigation. Even in the unfree market that we have today, similar offers by law firms are quite common.

I think I like TheEvilDetector's idea of anonymous prepaid tokens a bit better. Still, point taken.

So do I.

I still struggle with the idea of whether force should be used via taxation to otherwise protect the rights of individuals...after all, I'd hate to see an innocent person convicted of a crime and forced to serve a sentence (a violation of their rights and therefore aggression, because they're innocent) simply because they didn't have money for representation and the prosecutor was "just that good." It can happen in any legal system of course, but if you don't have representation, you're pretty much screwed unless you're really damn smart yourself.

It's important to look at the whole picture here. Today, a legal representative in court is someone who went to college for eight years, graduated from law school, passed the state bar, and charges in excess of $200/hour. In a free society, a legal representative is anyone you damn well please, and the increased supply would cause the cost to slide significantly . Given that increased supply and decreased pricing would cause an increase inaccessibility, the very small remaining number of people that could still not afford legal representation would probably be helped by people like you that "hate to see an innocent person convicted of a crime and forced to serve a sentence simply because they didn't have money for representation".

In any case, taxation for the purpose of protecting rights is a very different argument from protectionist and socialist arguments, because they argue that taxation should be used for [insert arbitrary "noble cause"], which has nothing to do with the primary (and sole) purpose of government, protecting the rights of individuals.

But then you have to make the claim that the rights of one person are more important than the rights of another; that person A can be sacrificed for the benefit of person B because the guaranteed infringement on person A's rights is less than the potential infringement on person B's rights. "I'm going to steal from you to protect you from others stealing from you."

Unless there's a way of a loan fronting money or something similar (which brings its own problems), this system actually could be blamed for inability to protect an innocent [but poor] defendant from a slick prosecutor and a team of police with planted evidence.

Incentives for this exist now; they're usually political instead of financial. "Look everyone, no need to worry, we caught the guy, thanks to the leadership of Mayor X."

If we do not allow the use of any coercive force whatsoever, we must also openly permit private individuals to possess weapons of immense destructive power, such as nuclear weapons. The problem here is obvious: If some old crackpot is going out of his way to obtain a nuclear weapon and spend his life savings on it (to say the least), the odds are high that he's crazy enough to use it.

One of the arguments used against gun control is that it doesn't work; licensing, registration, and outright prohibition don't keep guns out of the hands of criminals. We see that the same was true of alcohol during prohibition, and is true of drugs today. Prohibiting an item has little if any affect on keeping it out of circulation. I see no reason why the same doesn't apply to nuclear weapons. Sure, the average person doesn't own nuclear weapons, and there are currently laws against it. Likewise, I have a magic rock sitting on my desk that is said to repel tigers, and there has never been a tiger in my house as long as that rock has been there. Obviously, we know that correlation does not equal causation. But all of this to say that I don't think we don't see people with nuclear weapons in their basements simply because there's a law saying they can't.

If you were to say that this amount of force is justifiable, that the ends justify the means, what exactly are the means? How do you insure that no one is secretly harboring a nuclear weapon that they plan to detonate and take out themselves and a million others? Just having a law against it won't prevent your hypothetical old crank from doing it. To make absolutely certain that you're protecting people from the abuses of this potential, you'd have to have cameras on every street corner monitoring activities to make sure someone isn't smuggling any items used to build such a weapon, and you'd have to question any suspicious behavior. You'd probably also have to search people's homes regularly if anything looked out of the ordinary. In the end, how much would government need to infringe on the rights of individuals in order to prevent a potential, and could it be argued that this infringement was worth it?

It's certainly a difficult question, and in order to provide you with a better answer I wish I had done more research on it up to this point. Here's what Dr. Ruwart has to say about it, though I'm not sure I find her answer entirely satisfying either (and this would be a first):

http://www.theadvocates.org/ruwart/questions_maint.php?Category=9&id=193

 

[Mini-Me]

Why would police and prosecutors go through the effort of fabricating criminals by going through the elaborate scheme of planting evidence, training "witnesses", etc, when they can instead focus their efforts on actual criminals that wouldn't require nearly the effort? "Oh what a tangled web we weave...", and all that.

Well, that depends on the rules we're playing by:

• If police, investigators, and prosecutors have the option to just ignore complex cases or put little effort into an investigation and close them quickly, they have every incentive to do so. If only the easy cases are ever prosecuted with vigor, that's hardly fair to victims of more complex crimes.
• If police, investigators, and prosecutors do not have the option to just ignore complex cases: Consider the fact that corruption of justice, fraudulent investigations, witness training, and planting of evidence already happens in our current system, where the police have little financial incentive for ensuring a conviction. It's not some fantastical or implausible idea even in today's world. If we make their pay dependent upon a conviction, and greater pay dependent on more convictions and quicker convictions, it naturally follows that they'd have a huge financial incentive to ensure convictions in any way possible. If their pay is dependent on convictions and they don't have the option to ignore complex cases, they're much more liable to just find an easy fall guy and move onto their next easy case rather than "waste" precious time and pay on a proper investigation.

Under a free society, all crimes are real crimes with real victims. Because of that, I cannot support a system in which the victims of crimes can go entirely ignored by the legal system. At the same time, especially if complex crimes are not permitted to be merely ignored, I cannot support a system in which the pay of police and investigators is dependent on a conviction, because it's just begging for corruption and the violation of innocent people's freedom. The way I see it, a legal system that either ignores victims or favors false convictions would ultimately result in much greater and more unacceptable rights violations than a system in which we legitimize the government robbing people for a very slight amount of money to fund fair trials for all crimes (and I'm obviously not speaking of something like a property tax, but rather, something like a tariff at the federal level or a low sales tax or something to that effect at the state/local level).

Still, I do think there are some better ways this could be done in a user fees-oriented setting. For instance, since victims are the ones that want crimes to be investigated, they could simply front the costs to ensure investigation, and convicted criminals would then just have to pay them back if there's a conviction. This would ensure the police and investigators get paid no matter the verdict. However, there are still two problems, one of which is solvable:

• If the victim fronts the money but no conviction is made, the victim of a crime has now also lost money trying to pursue justice and restitution. This problem can be alleviated through people buying "victim's insurance," however.
• If the victim has no insurance or money to front an investigation, we run once again into the problem of certain cases being entirely ignored, no matter how horrendous the crime against the victim was. After all, since the norm would be "victims front the money," it's less likely that anyone would take up their case if they know their only chance for payment was a conviction.

As far as I can tell, the second problem cannot really be guaranteed to be solvable without taxation (however minimal). In practice, it's probably solvable through private charities...but without guarantees, that's a pretty tough sell.

You mentioned a loan as a possible solution, and that could certainly work.

Let's assume for a moment that the police, prosecutors, courts, and prisons are all non-governmental; which would probably make them businesses. Most businesses start up incurring large costs, such as decking out a retail store full of inventory, building out offices, hiring staff that they must pay before sufficient revenue starts rolling in, etc. Some businesses go many years before they make it out of the red but they ultimately do. Where do they get the money to do this? From wherever they can; whether it be from loans, gifts, investments, or the personal savings of those starting the company.

I mostly understand the rationale behind making courts private, at least for civil matters. The loser (whoever it is) would always pay for court costs.

In many ways, private courts work for criminal matters as well. The trial occurs in the victim's court, an appeal may be heard in the defendant's court, and a binding "best of three" tiebreaker would occur in some other mutually agreed-upon court. However, there are still two hitches for criminal trials:

• Because they're private, the courts will have the right to ignore important cases that are potentially less likely to find convictions in favor of cash cows. That said, I suppose that if there are no other cases in the system, they'd take the less "favorable" ones for lack of anything better to do. However, that opens up the next can of worms:
• A convicted criminal would pay court costs...but who pays in case the defendant is acquitted? If the money must come out of the court company's pocket when the defendant is acquitted, the courts will be biased toward convictions all across the board. Competition wouldn't really fix this, because every single court would be prone to the same bias. It helps that juries have the final decision, but biased judges can certainly have an impact.

To allow for fair trials, there must be a way to pay the court when a defendant is acquitted in a criminal trial. Fair courts will generally require a payment in either case, since they'll otherwise be biased toward conviction. In a free market, private courts could operate however they want, though (meaning unfair and biased courts will exist). The victim would most likely choose the most unfair and biased court possible for obvious reasons and because it avoids up-front payments. If a conviction is heard, the convicted defendant can appeal to another court which requires an up-front payment...but as it's a free market, the defendant must be the one to front the costs. If the defendant has the money, that's no problem. Otherwise, we'll have a system in which the first trial often occurs in a biased court, appeals are frequent, and poor defendants get screwed because their case is first heard in a biased court and they don't have money for an appeal. Again, there may be private charities set up to pay for poor defendants' court costs...but there are no guarantees.

If we step away from free market courts for a moment, the system becomes a bit more manageable but still not perfect:
Under a non-free-market court system based on user fees, the only courts permitted (government courts) could require up-front payments. This would work very well and prevent bias, although it also runs into the problem of either poor victims relying on charities or poor defendants relying on charities, depending on who is made to front the money.

Police officers would probably be employees with regular salaries of a company that was paid by the criminal's efforts, not independent contractors that would all have to wait until the criminal became productive before they saw any return.

In the case of private police agencies, this is a valid point. However, if payment of the company depends on conviction, employees (police and investigators) would still be on a lot of pressure from on high to guarantee convictions.

I see this as another protective measure against police and prosecutors trying to fabricate criminals. In a society of non-aggression, one cannot force a court to hear a case, and courts probably wouldn't use resources hearing cases that they didn't feel had a decent chance of conviction.

You may see this is an upside since it somewhat mitigates the gigantic threat of fabrication in a system where only convictions pay...but I see it as a downside to having private courts in the first place: If a court cannot be forced to hear a case and their pay is dependent on conviction, then many important cases will be ignored in favor of the cash cows. If they take "unfavorable" cases for lack of anything better to do, they'll then be biased toward conviction. If they're paid up front, both of these problems are kind of solved. Victims will choose courts with no up-front fees (which will be biased toward convictions), and on their appeal, defendants will choose courts with up-front fees. As mentioned above, this means poor defendants are at the mercy of charities to receive their second trial (and possibly their only fair one). With no guarantees, it's a tough sell.

This would be up to the prosecution and the courts.

In the free market, there are all sorts of business marketing tools in order to gain customers. Appliance stores offer "90 days same as cash", auto dealers offer "0% financing for 72 months", etc. Those wishing to drum up additional business may offer up deals to attract a market like those that can't front the costs by offering to finance it for them, and of course ultimately take it out of the criminal if a conviction is acquired. They may provide a guarantee that goes something like this, "if we don't win, we don't get paid." This motivates them to provide a thorough investigation. Even in the unfree market that we have today, similar offers by law firms are quite common.

It motivates them to provide a thorough investigation...or just to ensure convictions through any means possible, moral or immoral, honest or dishonest. I think you're misinterpreting the incentives involved here.

It's important to look at the whole picture here. Today, a legal representative in court is someone who went to college for eight years, graduated from law school, passed the state bar, and charges in excess of $200/hour. In a free society, a legal representative is anyone you damn well please, and the increased supply would cause the cost to slide significantly . Given that increased supply and decreased pricing would cause an increase inaccessibility, the very small remaining number of people that could still not afford legal representation would probably be helped by people like you that "hate to see an innocent person convicted of a crime and forced to serve a sentence simply because they didn't have money for representation".

In terms of legal representation, you do make one damn good point on how much cheaper it would be. I can't argue here, and I concede the point about legal representation entirely...the fact that only those with a title of "nobility" or "honor" may serve as legal representation in our system is completely disgusting.

But then you have to make the claim that the rights of one person are more important than the rights of another; that person A can be sacrificed for the benefit of person B because the guaranteed infringement on person A's rights is less than the potential infringement on person B's rights. "I'm going to steal from you to protect you from others stealing from you."

This is still very different from socialism because of two principles:
First, as mentioned in my other post, taxation for socialistic purposes violates the property rights of people for reasons entirely unrelated to protecting other people's rights.
Secondly, taxation for socialistic purposes does indeed involve the problem you mention above about deciding who should be sacrificed for the good of the collective. That's because protectionism, socialism, and Communism decide a priori that different "groups" of people will have their rights violated to varying degrees to provide unequal benefits to other "groups."

Granted, your analysis above is roughly correct, but it's lacking a measure of scale, and it's also leaving out the fact that person A and person B are not determined a priori. I'm vaguely recalling a passage from Frederic Bastiat's "The Law" here, where he points out a similar difference between legalized plunder and the "legitimate" functions of government requiring taxation...but anyway, so long as the tax burden is spread over everyone equally (and the particular tax does not enslave people to the state like income/property taxes) - for the sole purpose of protecting everyone's rights equally - it does not involve any a priori decision about wealth transfer or whose rights are "more important." The only decision made is that it's more important to reasonably ensure life, liberty, and 99% of property for everyone equally than it is to keep all property violations illegitimate, when such a decision would permit the rights of some to be trampled entirely and even result in the user-fees-funded-government unknowingly committing much worse aggression against a few, stripping them altogether of both liberty and property.

An important point here is that if you completely denounce all taxation, you're essentially legitimizing a system that is much more likely to strip more innocent people of all liberty entirely.
Therefore, "I'm going to steal from you to protect you from others stealing from you," just doesn't tell the whole story.
Rather, it's, "I'm going to steal a tiny bit from you to help ensure I won't unwittingly steal everything from you including your freedom when you're wrongly convicted. Also, it'll help protect you from others violating your rights in a similarly large way, and if that does happen, you're guaranteed a recourse."

Once again, this just comes down to my preference for maximizing the overall degree to which each person's natural rights are respected, rather than condemning any and all violations of rights but ironically allowing them to occur to a much greater degree as a consequence.

Incentives for this exist now; they're usually political instead of financial. "Look everyone, no need to worry, we caught the guy, thanks to the leadership of Mayor X."

Since I was talking about defendants being falsely convicted, I think you might have misread my comment there. Anyway, it doesn't matter, since I've already said anything I might want to...

One of the arguments used against gun control is that it doesn't work; licensing, registration, and outright prohibition don't keep guns out of the hands of criminals. We see that the same was true of alcohol during prohibition, and is true of drugs today. Prohibiting an item has little if any affect on keeping it out of circulation. I see no reason why the same doesn't apply to nuclear weapons. Sure, the average person doesn't own nuclear weapons, and there are currently laws against it. Likewise, I have a magic rock sitting on my desk that is said to repel tigers, and there has never been a tiger in my house as long as that rock has been there. Obviously, we know that correlation does not equal causation. But all of this to say that I don't think we don't see people with nuclear weapons in their basements simply because there's a law saying they can't.

You're completely misunderstanding the direction of my argument here. I'm not saying banning nukes would keep crazies from trying to obtain them. By definition, crazies who want to blow up everyone aren't going to follow the law anyway. What I AM saying is that if you happen to know your neighbor is setting up a nuke to blow up a whole city, you should be able to call in "the law," and they should be allowed to take proactive action other than just sit there and pray he doesn't decide to set it off.

After all, if someone's attempting to acquire a nuke, I imagine it wouldn't be all that easy to hide. Someone is liable to know about it. Considering some nutcase who has acquired a nuke is extremely likely to use it, is the government justified in breaking into his house and removing it from his possession before he blows up the city, or must we take an absolutely uncompromising stand on property rights in any and all circumstances and seriously wait until he activates it and it's too late?

If you were to say that this amount of force is justifiable, that the ends justify the means, what exactly are the means? How do you insure that no one is secretly harboring a nuclear weapon that they plan to detonate and take out themselves and a million others? Just having a law against it won't prevent your hypothetical old crank from doing it. To make absolutely certain that you're protecting people from the abuses of this potential, you'd have to have cameras on every street corner monitoring activities to make sure someone isn't smuggling any items used to build such a weapon, and you'd have to question any suspicious behavior. You'd probably also have to search people's homes regularly if anything looked out of the ordinary. In the end, how much would government need to infringe on the rights of individuals in order to prevent a potential, and could it be argued that this infringement was worth it?

It's certainly a difficult question, and in order to provide you with a better answer I wish I had done more research on it up to this point. Here's what Dr. Ruwart has to say about it, though I'm not sure I find her answer entirely satisfying either (and this would be a first):

http://www.theadvocates.org/ruwart/questions_maint.php?Category=9&id=193

There are no guarantees, and I never once said anything about going to extreme measures to make absolutely sure bad things can never happen. Big Brother policies completely trample ALL privacy rights and personal liberty for an almost negligible increase in the protection of life. I'm not talking about legitimizing any of this.

Instead, I'm just talking about a much more straightforward scenario: You already know your neighbor has a nuke (or is building it and almost done, or is receiving it tomorrow via UPS, etc.): Would you frown upon anyone for violating his property rights by "relieving" him of his nuke and safely disposing of it?

Similarly, in the unlikely case that nukes became cheap: Would you say that it should be perfectly legal for anyone and their mother to set up nuclear missile launchers on their rooftops?

My underlying point here is basically this: If we are to maximize the overall degree to which everyone's rights are respected, we must make some very small concessions of principle. These concessions are never justified for any arbitrary purpose other than maximizing the degree to which people's rights are respected (such as various socialist "good causes"), and these concessions should never be large enough to really noticeably impact any person's life. I would never suggest, for example, that one innocent person's life should be sacrificed against their will, no matter how many other people it would save, since the right to life is just too absolute to legitimize violating. It's too high of a price for any one person to be made to pay. Compromising on principle is always a slippery slope...but so long as property rights violations are small enough to be essentially negligible in practice, I would say they can be justified if they will protect against more serious rights violations that would drastically trample all over some people's rights.

You don't have to agree, of course. The main reason I made these posts was just to shed some light on how/why a self-described libertarian could ever possibly support any taxation whatsoever. I suppose the real answer is that I'm not in fact 100% libertarian, but I'm still pretty close...probably about 90% libertarian and 10% classical liberal. The truth is, most of the population considers Ron Paul an extreme libertarian. Compared to Ron Paul, I myself am pretty extreme in my libertarianism. If you believe the only libertarians in existence are those who are unflinchingly pure in their ideology, I suppose that's fine...but then what better term can you offer for how I should categorize my views?

 

[RCA]

All taxes interfere with private property to some degree. Property taxes, inheritance taxes, and income taxes are more obvious here, but capital gains, sales taxes, VAT's, tariffs, and excise taxes still interfere with private property because the government forces people selling items to give them a cut of the proceeds that rightfully belong to the sellers (or buyers, depending on your perspective).

That's why I said 90%. I don't have a comprehensive list of all types taxes on hand to determine if I disagree with 100% of them.

 

[nickcoons]

To allow for fair trials, there must be a way to pay the court when a defendant is acquitted in a criminal trial.

With the work-prison system, the plan was basically this: That a prisoner would be assigned a debt which would cover his restitution, court and police costs, as well as his own incarceration. In other words, let's say that his debt was $5,000, and his incarceration costs (food, clothing, shelter) were $20/day. And let's say that while incarcerated he was able to produce $100/day. This would mean that $20/day would go towards his incarceration expenses and $80/day towards his debt, such that he'd be released in approximately 63 days.

You say that for trials to be fair, courts and prosecution must be paid whether or not a conviction is reached in order to not bias these institutions towards convictions (though I'm not sure if I agree since this decision rests with juries). But let's say that you're right, and guaranteed payment of courts is required. Instead of incarcerated individuals incurring daily costs of $20, perhaps they incur daily costs of $30, some of which is paid to fund the guaranteed court payments.

The numbers are all bogus in the example; they're just to illustrate the point. They can be anything you'd like. Either way, this now provides courts with guaranteed payments separate from convictions.

This is still very different from socialism because of two principles:
First, as mentioned in my other post, taxation for socialistic purposes violates the property rights of people for reasons entirely unrelated to protecting other people's rights.

I get that, but this is simply a question of changing the ends and justifying the same means.

Granted, your analysis above is roughly correct, but it's lacking a measure of scale, and it's also leaving out the fact that person A and person B are not determined a priori. I'm vaguely recalling a passage from Frederic Bastiat's "The Law" here, where he points out a similar difference between legalized plunder and the "legitimate" functions of government requiring taxation...but anyway, so long as the tax burden is spread over everyone equally (and the particular tax does not enslave people to the state like income/property taxes) - for the sole purpose of protecting everyone's rights equally - it does not involve any a priori decision about wealth transfer or whose rights are "more important."

Would you then say that Social Security was a valid program if it were funded by a tax other than an income or property tax? It meets your other criteria, which is that it does not claim to put the rights of any person above anyone else. Theoretically, everyone pays in, and everyone gets to collect, no?

I like your "victim's insurance" idea. Since being a victim is a rare occurrence, premiums for such a service would be extremely low. If someone did not carry this type of insurance, it would most certainly be out of choice and not inability to pay. To say that an option for protection exists with such great ease, and that someone has opted to neglect protection, and so we therefore must incur a tax on everyone to cover these people; I think that would be a tough sell.

An important point here is that if you completely denounce all taxation, you're essentially legitimizing a system that is much more likely to strip more innocent people of all liberty entirely.

I think we might ultimately end up having to agree to disagree on that point.

Once again, this just comes down to my preference for maximizing the overall degree to which each person's natural rights are respected, rather than condemning any and all violations of rights but ironically allowing them to occur to a much greater degree as a consequence.

I too wish to maximize liberty. The notion that we can't, on a message board, hypothesize an entirely free society from start to finish that promotes liberty to a greater degree than the existence of a state would therefore conclude that it can't be done.. that seems a little arrogant. Wouldn't you agree?

What I AM saying is that if you happen to know your neighbor is setting up a nuke to blow up a whole city, you should be able to call in "the law," and they should be allowed to take proactive action other than just sit there and pray he doesn't decide to set it off.

Ahh.. well then, if I happen to know that my neighbor is pointing a gun at me with the intent to pull the trigger, do I have to wait for him to actually pull the trigger before I can retaliate? No, I don't think so.

Let's make this more similar to your example. If my neighbor is sitting in his living room pointing a gun at me through the window with the intent to pull the trigger, and the only way I can stop him and save my life is by going over there, entering his house, and taking away his gun, would I be justified in doing that? Yes, I think so. I think that the threat of force justifies a retaliation of force, and this would not be an infringement on his property rights.

If you believe the only libertarians in existence are those who are unflinchingly pure in their ideology, I suppose that's fine...but then what better term can you offer for how I should categorize my views?

I didn't mean to imply that. There are far more libertarians that prefer "low taxes" instead of "no taxes". As I understand it, a libertarian is one who bases their stands on principles. If one takes those principles to their logical conclusion, then taxes can't be accepted. If taxes are accepted, even to a very small degree, then principles have been compromised.

Most libertarians that I know are new; they didn't start out that way and haven't been for very long. They mostly start out promoting the same ideas that someone like Bob Barr would promote. As they think about the principles and what they mean, they start to realize the contradictions one by one until they either justify them away ("we must tax at least some in order to handle X") or discard them and stand on the principle.

I don't claim to have all the answers, as you can infer from our discussion. What I do claim is that the free market is always better than government at providing solutions, even if I haven't yet personally formulated what those solutions are. Solutions in the free market normally take the form of business models. Imagine the burden you are placing on someone in asking them to invent a business model to provide every solution that people need in the absence of government force, and then claiming that it can't be done because this person wasn't able to demonstrate such a business model.

As a business person myself, I feel that I'm more adept than most at taking on this task. But there are no doubt hundreds of thousands if not millions of others that are more capable than I am to come up with ways to contemplate ways that the free market can provide solutions to each of these problems. As they've been tackling this more successfully than government for centuries, I trust that they would continue to fill the market's needs when they arose, even if I can't answer "how" at the moment.

 

[werdd]

Id like to see a voluntary tax system. You get your tax return, mandatory is funding the military and the USPS.

Then you can check off any of the voluntary bullshit you feel like paying for.

The two roles of goverment are to protect your personal liberties, and deliver the mail.

And that is all.

 

[nickcoons]

The two roles of goverment are to protect your personal liberties, and deliver the mail.

And that is all.

Why is it their job to deliver the mail?

 

[nate895]

Why is it their job to deliver the mail?

The economics of first-class mail make it impossible for it to be affordable. If we had private first-class mail, we'd have postage at around $2.

 

[werdd]

Why is it their job to deliver the mail?

I don't believe it is a necessity, but the constitution allows for a national postal service to be regulated and maintained on a central level.

So constitutionally speaking,

the goverment has the right to

Defend your personal liberties, which includes a strong national defense, justifiably taxable IMO.

Deliver your mail, as an option.

 

[Mini-Me]

With the work-prison system, the plan was basically this: That a prisoner would be assigned a debt which would cover his restitution, court and police costs, as well as his own incarceration. In other words, let's say that his debt was $5,000, and his incarceration costs (food, clothing, shelter) were $20/day. And let's say that while incarcerated he was able to produce $100/day. This would mean that $20/day would go towards his incarceration expenses and $80/day towards his debt, such that he'd be released in approximately 63 days.

You say that for trials to be fair, courts and prosecution must be paid whether or not a conviction is reached in order to not bias these institutions towards convictions (though I'm not sure if I agree since this decision rests with juries). But let's say that you're right, and guaranteed payment of courts is required. Instead of incarcerated individuals incurring daily costs of $20, perhaps they incur daily costs of $30, some of which is paid to fund the guaranteed court payments.

The numbers are all bogus in the example; they're just to illustrate the point. They can be anything you'd like. Either way, this now provides courts with guaranteed payments separate from convictions.

While this is kind of taking advantage of prisoners by increasing their penalty beyond that strictly warranted by their crime...I suppose it works out, since it's better than taxation of the innocent. Point taken.

I get that, but this is simply a question of changing the ends and justifying the same means.

This is true...although I'd say that the purpose is choosing ends (protecting lots of rights) that compensate for the means (violating rights minimally). For instance, let's pretend - although I DO know that this isn't necessarily true - that under Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, there would be mayhem, and everybody would be killing each other, eating their babies, and stealing their cars to run over children with. This is a ridiculous scenario, but hypothetically speaking, let's run with it. If legitimizing minimal taxation could be proven to alleviate these problems and result in much fewer violent rights violations, would you grudgingly consent to such taxation? I'm obviously talking about preventing rights violations on a much smaller scale, and eventually there's certainly a point where the evil of the means overshadows the good of the ends. Personally, I agree with you that such a point comes very quickly - but I don't necessarily have a strict zero tolerance policy, so long as the limits are clear.

I'm not a person that says the ends always justify the means. It always depends on what the ends are and what the means are. Sometimes the ends do justify the means - for instance, eating a cookie from my pantry can very easily justify the means of walking down there to get it, so long as it tastes good and the walk isn't too unbearable. This is a very simple scenario of course which violates nobody's rights, but my point is that by itself, the phrase "the ends justify the means" is only Machiavellian under contexts in which someone believes an end justifies practically any means, no matter how destructive.

Would you then say that Social Security was a valid program if it were funded by a tax other than an income or property tax? It meets your other criteria, which is that it does not claim to put the rights of any person above anyone else. Theoretically, everyone pays in, and everyone gets to collect, no?

Social Security may follow my second rule, but it doesn't meet my first rule (which I admit wasn't worded in a way I could call a rule, but I digress), because it violates the property rights of people for reasons entirely unrelated to protecting people's rights.

I like your "victim's insurance" idea. Since being a victim is a rare occurrence, premiums for such a service would be extremely low. If someone did not carry this type of insurance, it would most certainly be out of choice and not inability to pay. To say that an option for protection exists with such great ease, and that someone has opted to neglect protection, and so we therefore must incur a tax on everyone to cover these people; I think that would be a tough sell.

It may be a tough sell here - but I imagine people in the general population would lynch us immediately if they heard we were even having a discussion about whether taxation for this purpose is necessary. My main concern is that, while people are only legitimately obligated to respect each other's rights, not to protect them, extending this concept to law would open up a "hole of apathy" (whether small or large) in which nobody really cares when someone else's rights are being violated. If that were to happen, the concept of rights would become more academic than functional.

Ultimately though, I do kind of "secretly" agree with you on a lot of this...but this should certainly be one of the last bits of tax-funded spending that anyone moves to abolish. The way I see it, the first step is to get a stable minarchist government in place with much lower taxation than today (and collected in less enslaving manners), and then after things start moving much more smoothly and everyone's lives improve, that would be the time to start talking about dismantling the final percent of taxes or so, along with the spending they finance.

I think a lot of my objections are due to the fact that we're still living under a very large leviathan government. Considering just how much better a small government with minimal taxation would be, I guess I think to myself, "Life would be so good that almost nobody would even bother complaining about the remaining 1% tariff and 1% local sales tax. Would it really be the best idea to experiment with eliminating them entirely? After all, the potential advantages might be outweighed by foreseen and unforeseen disadvantages, and if the disadvantages win out, that could spark a reactionary movement back to full-fledged tyranny."

That said, without yet reading Mary Ruwart's argument, I still worry about the country being able to defend itself against high-tech weaponry without tax-or-tariff-funded military technology...and obviously, the user fees framework doesn't exactly work the best there.

I think we might ultimately end up having to agree to disagree on that point.

Perhaps...

I too wish to maximize liberty. The notion that we can't, on a message board, hypothesize an entirely free society from start to finish that promotes liberty to a greater degree than the existence of a state would therefore conclude that it can't be done.. that seems a little arrogant. Wouldn't you agree?

I'm not saying that we can't daydream. I'm just saying that there are valid hypothetical arguments on both sides, and at least for now, I generally tend to prefer the "devil I know."

Ahh.. well then, if I happen to know that my neighbor is pointing a gun at me with the intent to pull the trigger, do I have to wait for him to actually pull the trigger before I can retaliate? No, I don't think so.

Let's make this more similar to your example. If my neighbor is sitting in his living room pointing a gun at me through the window with the intent to pull the trigger, and the only way I can stop him and save my life is by going over there, entering his house, and taking away his gun, would I be justified in doing that? Yes, I think so. I think that the threat of force justifies a retaliation of force, and this would not be an infringement on his property rights.

Now that you've restated things under more coherent terms, I think my main point was that people have so many legitimate reasons to have ordinary firearms that it would be absurd to consider the mere ownership of them to be the threat of force...but if your neighbor has a nuke, his possession or attempted possession of such a weapon would constitute a threat all by itself (since seriously, what else is he going to use it for? ). The main problem, of course, is identifying when a threat is being made and intervening is not a violation of property rights...which seems to be an inherently subjective decision. Unfortunately, the only rules we can make are arbitrary and along the lines of "I'll know it when I see it." I think by bringing up this scenario, I was asking whether you felt it's valid to even try making these calls. Since you do, well...I don't think we disagree here.

I didn't mean to imply that. There are far more libertarians that prefer "low taxes" instead of "no taxes". As I understand it, a libertarian is one who bases their stands on principles. If one takes those principles to their logical conclusion, then taxes can't be accepted. If taxes are accepted, even to a very small degree, then principles have been compromised.

Most libertarians that I know are new; they didn't start out that way and haven't been for very long. They mostly start out promoting the same ideas that someone like Bob Barr would promote. As they think about the principles and what they mean, they start to realize the contradictions one by one until they either justify them away ("we must tax at least some in order to handle X") or discard them and stand on the principle.

You're right on this. I'm relatively new, and I'm still weighing in on a few questions at the more extreme end of ideological purity. I'll take libertarian principles to their logical conclusion, but at the more anarchic end of things, my mind goes into such unknown territory that I tend to backtrack a bit and justify some small concessions in order to avoid opening Pandora's Box. I approach all systems with a "Murphy's Law" kind of approach. For instance, I perused through For a New Liberty by Rothbard a few months back and read some of his arguments for anarcho-capitalism, and I had many objections based on corner cases he didn't address in the passages I read. Most of these notes revolve around the difficulties private agencies would have fairly keeping order without becoming thuggish themselves against the unprotected and without becoming another state unto themselves (especially considering "not all states are created equal," and a Constitutional republic is a much better compromise than anarchy turned into totalitarianism). Browsing through some of the notes I wrote, I still agree with most of them. They're wayyyyy too long and detailed to copy/paste here, though. Besides, I'm not sure if you're an anarcho-capitalist anyway or just a libertarian who believes all government should be funded through user fees.

I don't claim to have all the answers, as you can infer from our discussion. What I do claim is that the free market is always better than government at providing solutions, even if I haven't yet personally formulated what those solutions are. Solutions in the free market normally take the form of business models. Imagine the burden you are placing on someone in asking them to invent a business model to provide every solution that people need in the absence of government force, and then claiming that it can't be done because this person wasn't able to demonstrate such a business model.

As a business person myself, I feel that I'm more adept than most at taking on this task. But there are no doubt hundreds of thousands if not millions of others that are more capable than I am to come up with ways to contemplate ways that the free market can provide solutions to each of these problems. As they've been tackling this more successfully than government for centuries, I trust that they would continue to fill the market's needs when they arose, even if I can't answer "how" at the moment.

I wouldn't claim that "it can't be done" just because one person can't come up with a business model on command. However, I'm certainly willing to raise the issues that such a system must adequately address, and I would also say it shouldn't be done until someone comes up with a business model that seems workable. This is the inherent problem with advocating "new and scary" ideas that are entirely different from what everyone is used to: As their advocate, you have the burden of proof, no matter how great that burden is.

 

[Mini-Me]

I don't believe it is a necessity, but the constitution allows for a national postal service to be regulated and maintained on a central level.

So constitutionally speaking,

the goverment has the right to

Defend your personal liberties, which includes a strong national defense, justifiably taxable IMO.

Deliver your mail, as an option.

I'd amend this by saying that Constitutionally speaking, the government has the authority or the power to, but...government doesn't have rights. It's a matter of semantics, though.

Personally, I've heard tons of people in real life - non-libertarians, that is - complaining about the USPS and wishing for private competition in first class mail for a long time. It certainly couldn't hurt to at least ALLOW it for now, and if it works out (which it might even in competition with the subsidized USPS), then go ahead and abolish the USPS. I highly doubt letters would actually cost $2 apiece to mail (except to rural areas maybe), and if they did, well...so be it. If that's the real cost of mail delivery, you're already paying that and more through taxes anyway (because government is inefficient and their lack of profit motive gives them a tendency to create unnecessary and overpaid jobs). On top of that, mail delivery is neither a right nor a matter of life and death. I see no reason why I should be paying for Bubba and Jimbob to be sending each other secret love letters. Instead, mail should be paid for in the same way as any other service in the economy.

 

[Mini-Me]

Criminals don't owe debts to society; they owe debts to their victims.

I just noticed this, and it's a succinct point that deserves to be repeated.

 

[Kludge]

I just noticed this, and it's a succinct point that deserves to be repeated.

Who pays for the court system? The prison system? Violating a just law of society is to forfeit all rights granted by society. If nothing else, the prisoner should be grateful to be given an opportunity to be saved from an emotional and potentially homicidal victim -- though that is only if the victim is still alive. Is the prisoner debt-free when he kills a man because he has no one to repay? -- is he to be kept free and judged by God, the only entity (if you so believe) who would be able to judge him on such a matter?

 

[Mini-Me]

Who pays for the court system? The prison system? Violating a just law of society is to forfeit all rights granted by society. If nothing else, the prisoner should be grateful to be given an opportunity to be saved from an emotional and potentially homicidal victim -- though that is only if the victim is still alive. Is the prisoner debt-free when he kills a man because he has no one to repay? -- is he to be kept free and judged by God, the only entity (if you so believe) who would be able to judge him on such a matter?

First of all, I disagree that rights are "granted" by society. Instead, I consider rights to be inherent to our human dignity. They can either be acknowledged by society or not, but that doesn't affect the truth of their existence (in other words, I believe that universal truth exists, but its exact parameters are not necessarily known for sure). Still, I agree that you forfeit them when you trespass against another...though not entirely. You forfeit them with respect to your victim and in exact proportion to your crime itself. Today's court system is indeed designed around the idea that criminals owe a debt to "society" rather than to their victim, but that's one of the reasons why our criminal justice system is so screwed up in the first place. The court system meant to determine actual guilt (so that victims do not just go violate some other innocent person's rights), but after the proportion of the sentence is determined by the court, the criminal truly owes that sentence to his/her victim, not to "society." A murderer in particular owes the greatest debt of all to their victim...one which I imagine is rightfully transferred to the victim's closest loved one for the purposes of exacting justice, since nothing can be done to bring a murder victim back. Funding aside, I'd consider a proper justice system to be one in which a jury determines guilt, a jury and/or judge determines a sentence, and it's finally up to the victim (or next of kin, assuming they're not the murderer) to determine whether to:

• Forgive the criminal's debt to them
• Make them serve their sentence
• Bargain with them for some kind of restitution in exchange for a reduced or eliminated prison sentence. You know, like, "Your debt to me for assault and battery is three years in prison. I have some physical and emotional scars. Just how much is it worth to you to not stew in prison?" Obviously no murder can be entirely made up for with money or anything else, but many other crimes work very well with this model.

However, you are correct about this: If taxpayers do continue to pay for the court system and prison system (a subject of my debate with NickCoons, in fact), you're right...criminals would also owe us as well.

 

[TheEvilDetector]

This is workable.



Similarly workable.



There are still some potential problems, though. I won't reiterate here, but I listed my concerns in my reply above to NickCoons.

I notice there is a lot of discussion about the intricacies of an alternative funding model for the justice system as far as courts and prisons go.

(Note: I think police funding is clear, opt to pay annual flat fee or pay surcharge when called upon. Surcharge is high,enough to raise an equivalent amount based
on statistical distribution of annuals versus per incident payers. For example $120/year (per head in household including kids) or $2500 per incident where an actual
crime took place (cost attributed to the victim who does not pay annual fee and payment could be structured like a debt, with a low repayment over a sufficiently
long period of time to make it easier). In a city of 100,000 where every citizen pays an annual fee (hypothetically), that amounts to $12,000,000 which is enough to keep 240 police at $50,000/year (which I think is a good salary) at the citizen to cop ratio of 416 to 1 (equivalent to LA). Of course in real life, you would also have equipment and other costs, so the annual fee would probably be closer to $200/year per person, but that is still quite a small sum I believe for a core governmental function ie. family of 4 would have to pay $800/year (of course they could choose to pay this in instalments eg. $30.77 fortnightly).)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Police_Department at the staffing section "Further points of comparison include Chicago, which has a ratio of one officer per 216 citizens and Philadelphia, whose officer per citizen ratio is 1 to 219.[54] By contrast, the Los Angeles Police Department protects its city with only one officer for every 426 residents.")

Check out my proposal:

When a court case commences:

Both the prosecution and the defence either:

1. Deposit 100% of the estimated court fees (with any difference adjusted after verdict)
OR
2. Have a debt obligation imposed for the same amount and payable out like a loan repayment over a term comfortable to the party entering into such an agreement.

Court Fees of course relate to:

a. Court Staff
b. Prosecution
c. Public Defenders

Whoever wins, gets their money back or debt obligation reversed as the case may be.

The court gets reimbursed either way, there is no pressure then to convict or not to convict.

No one other than a designated court officer who does not participate during the actual trial, knows the mechanism elected by each side.

This also makes sure, that police who are trying to help the victims do not bring in suspects who have little chance of being convicted, since a failure to convict will bring a financial burden on the victim. Thus costs and frivolous litigation are kept in check through this mechanism.

So let's take a practical example:

Hit and Run case.

Based on past court cases, court fees estimated to be approximately $40,000.

(Note:Of course, the prosecution and defence could shop around different courts for a good deal (based on cost and track record etc).
All courts have jurisdiction, which one is used is a matter for prosecution and defence to decide (defence must make a choice, it cannot simply
stall the process). If dead locked, designated state official makes a choice on their behalf. The official gets paid regardless of court or verdict, thus there is no bias in that regard.)

Prosecution (on behalf of victims) submits a debt arrangement over 10 years.

Defence (rich guy) deposits $40,000.

Court case proceeds, rich guy convicted. Court is paid with the deposited money, the prosecution gets the debt arrangement cancelled.

Rich guy sits in jail.

In Jail during his term, he is advised his debt to prison will be $20,000 over 2 years. He can work it off or he can assume a debt. He takes a debt. He doesn't work during prison, when he gets out he makes repayments. If he chose to work it off, he would just have a certain amount of debt repaid. But it is his choice at all times, just like in the court.

If the Rich guy was proclaimed innocent, then the victim's family would pay out the court fees.

If the victim is deceased and had noone to pay for his costs then money would come out of
victim's estate.

After all, assuming the jury gets it right most of the time, it is a fair arrangement, why should an innocent man pay for the court fees?
Why should the whole community pay either?

PS. Failure to pay according to court debt arrangements, results in a request for the full sum immediately. If that doesn't happen then imprisonment,
where release occurs when the debt is paid off, meaning that the prisoner must work or be able to obtain funds to pay the debt.

Lawful excuse not to pay would be serious disability, illness or death. In such cases, debt is recoverable through the assets of the person.

If the person left the country for the purpose of avoiding paying court debt would result in an arrest warrant being issued in case the person returns.

So here then is an example government collection web page:

Household @ Unit 2, 1-3 Citizen St, Goodtown
Residing Citizen Count x 4

--

NATIONAL PROTECTION SERVICE ACCOUNTS:
Defence Forces FIXED: ANNUAL RATE:$4000 (National Set Fee $1000 per person per year) PAYMENT:STRUCTURED $100x40

NATIONAL MAIL SERVICE ACCOUNTS:
Postal Service OPTION: PER USE:$0.10xArticle Category(1-10)

LOCAL PROTECTION SERVICE ACCOUNTS:
Police Service OPTION: ANNUAL RATE:$800 (Local Set Fee $200 per person per year) PAYMENT:ONCE OFF
Fire Service OPTION: INCIDENT RATE:$1200 (Incident Fee $300 per person) PAYMENT:ON INCIDENT

LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE ACCOUNTS:
Water Infrastructure FIXED: ANNUAL RATE:$100 (Local Set Fee $25 per person per year) PAYMENT:ONCE OFF
Sewage Infrastructure FIXED: ANNUAL RATE:$100 (Local Set Fee $25 per person per year) PAYMENT:ONCE OFF

LOCAL VOLUNTARY ONGOING CHARITABLE FUNDS:

Homeless Shelter Fund OPTION: ACCEPTED AMOUNT:$20 PAYMENT:ONCE OFF THIS YEAR RAISED SO FAR: $204,000 LAST YEAR RAISED: $1,002,304 SURPLUS: $503,394
Isolated Elderly Home Care OPTION: DECLINED THIS YEAR RAISED SO FAR: $1,623,045 LAST YEAR RAISED: $5,302,304 SURPLUS: $23,400
Isolated Elderly Medical Care OPTION: DECLINED THIS YEAR RAISED SO FAR: $643,004 LAST YEAR RAISED: $3,002,304 SURPLUS: $45,320

LOCAL VOLUNTARY PROJECT FUND RAISING:

Local Park Project OPTION:ACCEPTED AMOUNT:$30 PAYMENT: ONCE OFF AMOUNT OUTSTANDING: $800,340 (Click here for specifications)
City Beautification Project: OPTION: DECLINED AMOUNT:$0 AMOUNT OUTSTANDING: $99,200 (Click here for specifications)
City Hall Fountain Project: OPTION ACCEPTED AMOUNT:$15 PAYMENT: ONCE OFF OUTSTANDING: $5,600 (Click here for specifications)

REVENUE ADMINISTRATION ACCOUNT:
Revenue Administration FIXED: ANNUAL RATE $0.04 (Set Fee $0.01 per person per year) PAYMENT:ONCE OFF
--

a. Prisons, Roads, Courts pay for themselves through user fees.
b. Hospitals (and ambulances), Schools, Garbage Collection, Gas and Electricity are private (regulated by government only to prevent fraud and monopolistic abuses)
c. Water and Sewage cannot be private for practical reasons (just imagine frantic competion for water and sewage pipes in the ground LOL).
d. Congress, President, State Congress, Local Government Council Members should NOT have salaries.
Public Service is a sacrifice for the community and should be approached as such.

Libertarianism FTW.

This is how I see an honest constitutional government funding itself.

No Taxes, No Tariffs, Never Have To Reveal Your Income or Finances.

PS. If local project funding goals not met in set time frame, the moneys are refunded or put towards another account at the discretion of the paying citizen.

 

[nickcoons]

I don't believe it is a necessity, but the constitution allows for a national postal service to be regulated and maintained on a central level.

So constitutionally speaking,

the goverment has the right to

Defend your personal liberties, which includes a strong national defense, justifiably taxable IMO.

Deliver your mail, as an option.

You identified the government as having two jobs; protect our liberties and deliver our mail. I know that the postal service is specified in the Constitution, but so are many other things that you didn't mention. I was just curious as to why you felt strongly about mail service versus the various other responsibilities the Constitution bestows on the federal government.

 

[nickcoons]

The economics of first-class mail make it impossible for it to be affordable. If we had private first-class mail, we'd have postage at around $2.

So is your claim that, because government can do it for about 40 cents and the private section must charge at least $2, government is more efficient than the private sector?

 

[nickcoons]

Ultimately though, I do kind of "secretly" agree with you on a lot of this...but this should certainly be one of the last bits of tax-funded spending that anyone moves to abolish. The way I see it, the first step is to get a stable minarchist government in place with much lower taxation than today (and collected in less enslaving manners), and then after things start moving much more smoothly and everyone's lives improve, that would be the time to start talking about dismantling the final percent of taxes or so, along with the spending they finance.

I agree with you on the incrementalist approach. The issues laid out on my campaign website will attest to that.

Now that you've restated things under more coherent terms, I think my main point was that people have so many legitimate reasons to have ordinary firearms that it would be absurd to consider the mere ownership of them to be the threat of force...but if your neighbor has a nuke, his possession or attempted possession of such a weapon would constitute a threat all by itself (since seriously, what else is he going to use it for? ).

I believe the vast majority of nuclear devices are used for power generation, not weapons. If I ever had my hands on a nuclear weapon (and felt safe handling it), I'd modify it to provide power to my house, my car, etc, and cancel my utility account.. and perhaps even sell off excess power to my neighbors for less than the local utility company. But maybe that's just me .

For instance, let's pretend - although I DO know that this isn't necessarily true - that under Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, there would be mayhem, and everybody would be killing each other, eating their babies, and stealing their cars to run over children with. This is a ridiculous scenario, but hypothetically speaking, let's run with it. If legitimizing minimal taxation could be proven to alleviate these problems and result in much fewer violent rights violations, would you grudgingly consent to such taxation?

I think this is a catch-22 though. If the psychology of people were such that this was society's existence, then I don't think the implementation of such a system would be successful. As it is today, most people are good in that they (on an individual basis) generally respect the rights of others. In spite of that, we have countless government-sponsored atrocities. Imagine that in general most people were not good in the scenario that you outline. Just as today, those that wish for power work to rise to the top and achieve it, I think it would happen much more quickly and brutally if the initiation of force was legitimized in your scenario.

 

[werdd]

You identified the government as having two jobs; protect our liberties and deliver our mail. I know that the postal service is specified in the Constitution, but so are many other things that you didn't mention. I was just curious as to why you felt strongly about mail service versus the various other responsibilities the Constitution bestows on the federal government.

I do beleive the mail system is bloated as it is right now, with all of the junk mail it is no doubt costing us an excessive amount of cash.

In the future i see the junk mail being phased out, as it will be more economically feasable to just send a digital email out. I beleive the USPS should be used only for critical business document's, payroll, and etc.

But you still need an institution to deliver first class mail at a reasonable rate. And while i am for competition, no one can compete with an institution that has the constitutional right to exist on tax payer dollars.

They could create a private institution like the fed, but i beleive that form of quasi goverment privatization is almost always worse than just nationalizing it. That's one of the main problems with the fed, its an outright goverment institution, but since it is legally privatized, there is no required oversight.

And im not advocating nationalizing the fed