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RE: "Government": Always a Bad Deal
This is awesome. I have friends in the econ dept who love arguing with me about "public goods" being necessarily funded by confiscation and violence (they say "taxation"); always supported with some anecdote or one-sided theoretical argument.
the costs of the violent confiscation, inefficiencies, lost opportunities, agency issues, and just bad morality it bestows on our society to enable things like industrial scale slaughter are never part of those calculations...no one ever says "murdering 3 million Vietnamese, or the Holocaust, were just fine because i love me roads, free surgery after a lifetime of letting my body go, and assaulting people who smoke weeds" but it's that type of extreme chaos that is made possible with blanket taxation.
Yeah but you cannot consider taxation to be violent confiscation if the people have consented to it. Obama didn't lie about the Affordable Care Act, for example, and even if you strongly disagree with it he was clear in his election promise and won. Similarly, when Trump cuts taxes, left-leaners may complain that it is the wrong thing to do but they cannot claim it to be against their will since he won the election. Certainly, people aren't always aware of reality and that may be a bigger issue, but the people consented to be taxed therefore it's a trade not confiscation. Unfair, perhaps, but a trade nonetheless.
eh, few alive today consented to anything. Just living in the U.S. doesn't mean you consent to everything the government does or demands; it just means you tolerate the bundle more than uprooting your home, leaving everything behind, and going to some other country with a different set of bundled rules that generally tend to be more inhibiting.
Real consent would be something along the lines of providing a choice of service offerings and allowing people to make their own value judgements of what they want to purchase. Bundling things and saying we have the choice between one of two bundles is not actual choice, nor is the decision to remain in our homes and not flee the country indication of consent.
I hereby declare that by living on Earth, you are "consenting" to give me half of your money. <-- That is no more ridiculous than the "social contract" BS that people use to try to make having a violent, parasitic ruling class seem legitimate. (And no, letting people choose between two nearly identical slavemasters is not the same as people being free.)