Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
In 1780, John Adams succinctly defined the principle of the Rule of Law in the Massachusetts Constitution by seeking to establish “a government of laws and not of men”. This reflects the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution’s preamble: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The very foundation of our legal system says that the law should work for us all, not just a select few.
This raises the question of what is a good law that serves the majority of society and what is a bad law that doesn’t serve the majority of society?
This idea is further bolstered by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The latter addition of the 14th Amendment as well as the Preamble of the Constitution both reflect the spirit in which this country was founded as set forth in the Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Clearly, the pursuit of the Rule of Law under the Constitution as informed by the Declaration is a pursuit of the Utilitarian concept of the right course of action is the one that maximizes the overall good consequences of an action; what is in the best interest of greatest numbers of We the People is in the best interests of the country.
Utilitarianism is a quantitative and reductionist philosophical form. Utilitarianism, however, is not a unified philosophical view. It comes in different flavors with the two primary flavors being Rule Utilitarianism and Act Utilitarianism. Strong Rule Utilitarianism is an absolutist philosophical view and rules may never be broken. Like any absolutist view does not take into account that reality occasionally presents situations where breaking a rule results in the greater good. For example, the strong reductionist rule that murder is bad is countered by the exceptional example of murder is not bad if performed in self-defense or the defense of others. This result of practical application is reflected in what John Stuart Mill called Weak Rule Utilitarianism. It becomes apparent that since not all rules are absolutely enforceable when seeking the common good and exceptional circumstances require flexibility in the law, that the Utilitarian pursuit of the Rule of Law must be in Mill’s Weak Rule formulation of Utilitarianism. But is considering the greater good and circumstantial reasons for breaking or modifying rules the best way to judge whether a law is good or bad?
If one considers Kant’s Categorical Imperative – “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” – then any law not universally applicable should not be a maxim worthy of being recognized as universal. This is contrary to Utilitarianism in general as well as Weak Rule Utilitarianism specifically, but while Kant’s view takes subjectivity into account when dealing with circumstances it does not take into account that there can be objective differences in circumstances as well. It is part of the judiciaries role as a trier of fact to consider not only subjective differences but objective differences in circumstances in formulating the most equitable and just solution to a case at bar. In seeking to be universally applicable in defining maxims, Kant is an absolutist as surely as Strong Rule Utilitarians are absolutists. As a consequence of reality not being neatly binary in nature and thus not often compatible to absolutists approaches to formulating laws for practical application, what can be done to keep Weak Rule Utilitarianism from degenerating into Act Utilitarianism where actors will seek the greatest personal pleasure when presented with a choice rather than the greater good? Utilitarianism conflicting with the Categorical Imperative? Is there a unitary philosophical approach to evaluating whether a law is good or bad?
The answer seems to be no. If there is no single view, absolutist or otherwise, that leads to a practical system for evaluating whether a law is good or bad, then there is only one option for building a framework for evaluation. That option is synthesis.
Consider that absolutist systems as they are not applicable in reality should be confined to being considered theoretical boundaries rather than practical boundaries. This does not negate the value of considering systems like Strong Rule Utilitarianism or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, but rather puts them in the place of aspirational goals rather than practically attainable goals in every circumstance. Given that Mill’s Weak Rule Utilitarianism can degrade into Act Utilitarianism and that degeneration can be compounded by the number of exceptions there are to a rule, are there ways to minimize the defects of using only Weak Rule Utilitarianism to determine the societal value of a law? What supplements can be made to that framework?
I submit that one such supplement is found in the form of Negative Utilitarianism. Negative Utilitarianism is exactly what it sounds like; the inverse function of Utilitarianism. Whereas Utilitarianism is the basic proposition that the right course of action is the one that maximizes the overall good consequences of an action, Negative Utilitarianism is the basic proposition that requires us to promote the least amount of evil or harm, or to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. If one takes both into account in evaluation of the social value of a law (a synthetic approach), the test becomes a balancing act. On one side of the scale is the societal value of overall good consequences, on the other side is the societal value of preventing overall harm. This proposition suggests the following framework for evaluation of whether a law is good or bad.
- How many people benefit from the good consequences of a law?
- How many people benefit from the reduction of harm as consequences of a law?
- Does the benefits from promoting good consequences outweigh the costs of reduction of harm?
- Does the benefits from reducing harm outweigh the costs to the greater good in taking no action?
- Are the net consequences of a law perfectly knowable from either perspective or does the possibility of unforeseeable consequences exist? Can the unforeseeable risks be minimized either by construction of the law(s) to allow for contingencies or by regulating other risks or contributing factors?
- Do solutions from either perspective negatively impact human and/or civil rights? Do those negative impacts outweigh the positive effects to the greater human and/or civil rights of all?
This is but one way to evaluate whether a law is good or bad for society. What are other methods? Are there ways to improve this method? What do you think?
@Roco: Government misallocates money.
No more so than businesses do; I have seen businesses waste millions on complete bullshit.
A good many of those things you mentioned could be done by private enterprise for profit,
Whether they could or not is besides the point; most of us do not WANT our lives in the hands of somebody that has a profit motive, which is a motive to cut corners, or save their job, or increase their personal wealth. A profit motive is a direct conflict of interest in a protective role; we do not want law enforcement to HAVE a profit motive. it is fine if the individuals in law enforcement are doing the job for a paycheck, but if their paycheck is increased by how they use their job discretion to do their job, that becomes inherently unfair to the poor in favor of the rich.
most likely with more efficiency and create wealth in the process.
Who gives a crap about creating wealth? I don’t want some police captain using his position and authority to amass wealth of any kind. That is the definition of corruption.
Government does not create wealth in any way.
That is a lie; if you start lying too, I will stop reading your posts too. Government created the Internet, all by itself. Millions of business are getting rich off of that phenomenon. Government created plastic, government created the Interstate highway systems and states realized the economic benefits of road systems and built their own, and millions of businesses for fifty years have been using those free road systems to get rich. FedEx wouldn’t exist without government roads to ride on, and no way in hell was any individual investor or company going to create the Interstate Highway System. Or the bridges, dams, and water works built by the government that ALSO increased the economy immeasurably. Government funded research has led to literally millions of products that others use. Government created computers for goodness sake; the first computers were for the census, and research on the transistor style computer was funded by the government to help compute missile trajectories.
Government creates wealth for citizens, not for itself.
@Roco: A good example of government failure is the recent salmonella outbreak concerning ground turkey products.
No it isn’t. You seem obsessed with all-or-nothing constructs. The point of government inspecting food is to REDUCE the incidence of poisoning and disease causing agents, and they have done that and continue to do that in spades. REDUCE. No protocol is going to catch 100% of every single thing and end outbreaks FOREVER. Salmonella is a case in point; it is a bacteria, a living organism that reproduces. Even a test of a particular food item for salmonella can come up negative with a few of the bacteria in place. The testing done depends upon the presence of a significant colony; which requires the infection to have taken place several hours ago. It also depends upon some kind of systemic problem existing, because we test samples, not every single piece of food, because that would be cost prohibitive.
I don’t have more reliable stats but according to Wikipedia, we have about 80 deaths a year from Salmonella. That is a very good track record. A Salmonella outbreak does not mean the government is a failure or cannot do its job, any more than a bar fight or a mugging indicates the police department is a failure or cannot do its job.
Law enforcement (and inspecting food is a form of it) is not an all-or-nothing proposition; they take the budget they have and use it to prevent as much law-breaking as they can. Salmonella, in particular, should be a low-priority target; it has a 99.8% survival rate without any long term effects.
@Roco: the point is that government consumes wealth without concern for profit or loss or any other factors which private individuals must take into account.
I do not believe that is true. I have been a paid consultant for two government run agencies, in my career. In both cases I answered to the person responsible for administering the budget provided for their department by their respective governments. In both cases that person in charge had independently developed the straightforward philosophy, with a limited budget, of trying to do the most good they could with the resources they were given.
To maximize the good, they had to prioritize emergency care, reduce salaries and overtime, scrape by on limited computers and other resources, and try to maintain employee morale (and minimize employee turnover, and thereby training costs) in the face of a mind-numbing parade of people whose lives were essentially in tatters. I was glad to help them (and I cut my normal rate in half when they asked for help) but I admit I would not have lasted long at all behind one of their desks.
I have also consulted for public companies, private companies, the department of defense, the NSA, banks, insurance companies and others. I see little difference in any of them. The local branch manager of a national bank faces the same dilemma: A budget handed down from on-high, often well short of the amount requested, but still expected to perform as if he had 25% more than he actually does. The one I worked for didn’t get a bonus, and had no personal profit motive to work more or less, he got a salary and if he didn’t meet his goals he got an ass-chewing and might have lost his job. In the real world there is seldom anything really motivating for employees, profit-sharing plans are crap, bonuses are crap or non-existent. Only an idiot is going to bust their ass for an extra 20 hours a week to earn a lousy $500 bonus, and people in the middle of the managerial salary pack (around $70K) don’t GET big bonuses if they get any at all.
This is a myth you have bought, that the profit motive makes people work harder. It isn’t true; the vast majority of people earn a fixed salary whether their company earns a 10% margin or a 50% margin. In sociology studies, the average worker can be TWICE as productive as they are.
So in the public sector, their concern is to do what they can with what they’ve got. You are right, profit doesn’t enter into it, but it doesn’t enter into it in the private sector either! They both do the best they can with the budget they’ve got, and no amount of pressure will change the equation. In both cases their upper management, if it is aware at all, is aware that firing one guy and hiring another will produce the same effect along with transition costs, so they leave him in place, a cog that keeps the store running and dealing with the problems as they arise.
There is no significant difference.
I will look at the rest of your post later.
Tony C:
the point is that government consumes wealth without concern for profit or loss or any other factors which private individuals must take into account. Government has a monopoly on all of those services you mentioned. Although I think police and military should be under some sort of government control assuming a free society.
A good example of government failure is the recent salmonella outbreak concerning ground turkey products.
Government misallocates money. Plus they have no business doing most of what they do.
A good many of those things you mentioned could be done by private enterprise for profit, most likely with more efficiency and create wealth in the process. Government does not create wealth in any way. It takes money from me and you and gives it to Ross Perot. It makes Perot and others like him wealthy at our expense.
@Grossman: Sacrifice is immoral.
That is your opinion, the vast majority of people all over the world think the opposite. They admire sacrifice, even revere it. There is no logical justification for believing what you do; you have been led astray (as is your right) by a failure to read critically and look for logical errors in the argument for objectivism.
I don’t know what YOU mean by “objective conditions of survival,” but I assure you, you are misusing the word “survival.” If I lock you in a cell and feed you 1500 calories a day along with a gallon of water and a multivitamin, you will survive unto old age, unless you choose not to do so. If I turn on a TV, you won’t even go crazy.
I suspect you are conflating “survival” with other things that you just want.
Tony C
> I would be forced to either convince half the population to reconsider, or exercise my freedom to live elsewhere.
Sacrifice is immoral. And rights are the objective conditions of survival in society. Rights are not social.
@Mike S: I forgot to write, thanks for the compliment earlier.
@Grossman: I expect no thanks from anybody the government helps to survive or to reach their potential. I think that is our civic responsibility, to help others survive and to remove the obstacles that prevent them from reaching their potential.
I will offer thanks, however, for those that step up to the plate and become cops and soldiers and firemen and shoulder more than their fair share of danger to keep the rest of us safe, and I will offer thanks to the teachers, doctors, lawyers, judges, counselors, psychologists and others that earn less than they could have earned in order to provide us public and military service. They have a choice, and most have chosen to put aside greed in order to live a life with meaning, helping others.
“You communist sewer filth steal money, give some of it back and expect thanks from your victims.”
You must be ironically joking with us. Really…..you really believe this. The young man, living off of his parents, who says he owes them nothing but gratitude. You don’t have any money to steal yet, unless you’ve got a trust fund set up. This is all theoretical to you, as is I fear your humanity. You are every bit as religiously snake bit as any Fundamentalist. What amuses me so much is that the Communists used to call me: “A running dog of capitalism” in my many debates with them. How funny they would find it for you to lump me in with them, so very droll.
@Grossman: Lacking objective context, this is merely one thief complaining that another thief stole his loot.
I will overlook the insult; and point out there is only “thievery” in your objective context which I reject, so this is just your religious opinion. You accept objectivism as inerrently true, and I think it is an idiotic game invented by a teenaged mentality.
And Progressivism is based on subjectivism.
No it isn’t, it is based on logic and the reality of human psychology as revealed by science, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology. It is not subjective, like all scientific products it can be flawed, but is better than relying on the superstition and lies of philosophies that pretend to be logical like Objectivism or religion.
@Grossman: I feel that your opposition to Rand is predation and subjugation of me so I, acc/to your morality and politics, should use govt to censor you.
Yes, you should, and if you wish to play by my rules then if you can get a super-majority of people, say 75% of them, to agree with you that nobody (including them) should have the freedom of speech to express any opposition to Rand, then you can indeed take over the government, repeal the first Amendment, and replace it with another Amendment that more closely matches the beliefs common to the majority that are, I hasten to add, by my morality (which you stipulated) required to themselves abide by any laws they pass.
I think you are facing long odds, but I accept the reality that super-majority rule is the closest approximation to fair governance achievable, and if that Constitutional dogmatic restriction were ever passed and enforced and bothered me enough, I would be forced to either convince half the population to reconsider, or exercise my freedom to live elsewhere.
Mike Spindell
>>“Would you accept a million dollars to have a frontal lobotomy? Ie, you drop the context of benefit, man’s mind, his basic cause of survival.”
>Possibly the worst analogy I’ve seen in months.
Its a valid analogy in the context you copy above, ie, mind, and then evade. You also evade identifying a context in which its an invalid analogy.
You communist sewer filth steal money, give some of it back and expect thanks from your victims. Your Pragmatist epistemology is merely a habit and rationalization of dropping the context of your claims, of evading connections among facts, like an addict pleased with getting heroin because he drops the context of his destructive life. Youre a fool in the classical Greek meaning, ie, ignorance of causes. Youre a chicken, after its head has been chopped off, running chaotically about the barnyard until the energy in its muscles is all used up. Its not a pretty sight…
Youve chopped off man’s mind, ie, split it from morality, and now youre watching what man does w/o mind and blaming it on capitalism, the social system explicitly condemned by Progressives because it is the social system of the mind. It is mind, not a consensus of socially correct robots, which builds factories, cars, skyscrapers and computers. Man’s mind is the enemy of altruism, as you well know. That is the sub-theme theme of _Atlas Shrugged_. Altruism is a moral bubble in the process of being popped, after which we will return to return to religion.
@Grossman: Would you accept a million dollars to have a frontal lobotomy?
Under the right circumstances, of course. For me, an atheist, the right circumstances might be inevitable death in the immediate future anyway (perhaps due to inoperable cancer or incurable disease) and the prospect of doing more good with the million before I die than just waiting a few weeks to expire.
his literal survival need to guide his action with his own mind.
There is no such “literal” survival need. Infants and children and disabled people, including the severely mentally disabled, survive without guiding their actions with their own mind. Slaves (both modern and historical) survive for long lives without the freedom to choose their actions, so do prisoners, both criminal and political.
What you want is not automatically necessary to survive.
The rest of your argument therefore does not follow, and is in fact refuted because you based it on an absolute that is simply false.
Tony C
>Hopefully, the laws prevent predation, and subjugation
Lacking objective context, this is merely one thief complaining that another thief stole his loot. And Progressivism is based on subjectivism. I feel that your opposition to Rand is predation and subjugation of me so I, acc/to your morality and politics, should use govt to censor you.
“Would you accept a million dollars to have a frontal lobotomy? Ie, you drop the context of benefit, man’s mind, his basic cause of survival.”
Bravo! Possibly the worst analogy I’ve seen in months. It’s worthy of the Ayn
Rand Award for Stupid Logic. She would have loved it. It’s so, soooo deep!
Tony C
>you DO gain a benefit from the expense of tax dollars which are collected involuntarily, because involuntary taxation is the ONLY method by which taxation works and can deliver benefit.
Would you accept a million dollars to have a frontal lobotomy? Ie, you drop the context of benefit, man’s mind, his basic cause of survival. You take his money by initiating force, thus contradicting his literal survival need to guide his action with his own mind. After that, in that context, there are no benefits, no values, only the slow (or fast) death of a living organism deprived of its means of survival. This is the necessary result of the subjectivist/modernist/nihilist assault on the mind.
If you knew Rand’s philosophy beyond a pop culture concern with word usage (rather than objective meaning), you would already know this. You might reject it and advocate an alternative, but you would know that Rand identifies reality in a hierarchical form. You would know that involuntary taxation has the initiation of force as a context, that the context of that is the inability of mind to guide action, and that the context of _that_ is man’s need to guide his action with his mind. Subjectivists are zombies, bodies w/o minds. See Munch’s modernist/nihilist, “The Scream” or Pollack’s pretentious, “Autumn.”
Mind is the source of values for man. Conservatives pretend to have a mind. Progressives gleefully reject their mind. Recall Pelosi’s, We’ll know what’s in the bill after we pass it.” Nazism is the consistent rejection of the mind, the goal which Progressives strive to evade. The alternative is New York City.
@Roco: people pay to be entertained. The product of Hollywood is entertainment. It produces wealth and therefore has value.
Just let me revisit this. You said here that government workers don’t produce anything of value.
Yet now you say that if people pay for it, it does have value! Well people pay for protection, so the police and military have value. People pay private bill collectors, so collecting from deadbeats does have value. In your “free market” scheme of society, you think people (or companies) would pay for food inspection and product inspection and insurances, so those have value.
And certainly people already pay for medicines and health care, so those have value, and when they do that, part of their payment goes to the private industry staffers that are not doctors or nurses themselves but handle the finances, scheduling, billing, machine and building maintenance, bookkeeping and safety protocols. So those jobs are producing value; or hospitals would not pay them.
Virtually every job in the government has a corresponding job in the civilian sector where somebody is getting paid. Perhaps some spies or Seal Team Six type guys have no real counterpart, but they are a tiny percentage of the total number of government workers.
By your logic, if private people freely pay for a job then it is producing something of value, so in the civilian world, private people DO freely pay for the same jobs to be done as are done in government, so those jobs produce something of value, and the government workers ARE producing something of value.
If you claim the difference is that they are in government then you are saying that it makes no difference whether they produce value or not, that was just a red herring you were throwing out there, and we return to your axiomatic claim that government is inherently bad no matter what it does.
Unlike you, I believe the government does produce wealth, it just isn’t wealth for itself. Free government roads make transportation very inexpensive, and multiply the sizes of markets. Some famous New York Delis ship their cheesecakes and desserts all over the world; that would be impossible without the roads and the government funded research (mostly by the military) that led to efficient air cargo. FedEx and UPS may be private, but their entire business model depends upon free access to trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of government built public roads and highways and airports.
Government funded research led to the Internet (again, through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the discovery of the genome, and public funding of research has advanced medicine, scanners, materials science, chemistry and more a hundred-fold in the last 30 years. That knowledge, like the knowledge I develop as a researcher, becomes public. It is generally not patented and no rights are retained; and anybody can use it for anything.
Many people use it to create wealth. Amazon wouldn’t exist if it were not taking advantage, for free, of a few billion dollars worth (literally) of publicly funded research by DARPA, to create ARPANET, which ultimately became the Internet. Neither would any of the other trillion dollars worth of Internet based businesses, like eBay, dating sites, Facebook and so on.
Government produces value by the train load. But when government is kept in its role as a servant, than like an employee the value it produces beyond its cost belongs to the employer, which is the public. Which is why government funded research should be free to the public, to do with as it will.
This is what you (and your friends) are missing; you see government as a drag on your income when in fact it is a booster of your income, and the taxes it collects are far less than the costs you would have in any free market system (which would lower both your gross and your net).
I say that even for our corrupt and wasteful and overreaching government that has been captured by the monied interests. I think it is possible for our government to better approach the ideal, but even as it is it produces value.
@Roco: What we are arguing is whether or not man gives up rights to enter into society and if he “belongs” to society or is an autonomous actor within society following the laws developed by society to protect individual rights.
Okay. Man gives up no rights to enter society; he never voluntarily made a decision to enter society, he was born into one, and did not even become conscious of the fact that he was IN a society until he was eight or so (I am guessing at that age).
So man never had any extra-societal rights to begin with; as a toddler he was still prohibited from murdering or theft or driving on the sidewalk.
IMO Man does not “belong” to society. Humans are not property, not even of themselves. But man can have responsibilities and debts. If the man is lucky, he lives in a free society, but the freedom is not absolute, because absolute freedom is anarchy, and anarchy is inherently unfair, because it allows for subjugation and harm for profit. A fair society is therefore regulated. It has laws. Hopefully, the laws prevent predation, and subjugation, and fraud, and have strong discouragement to endanger the lives or health of other people for any reason, including for profit.
@Roco: people pay to be entertained. The product of Hollywood is entertainment. It produces wealth and therefore has value.
Entertainment is not a “medium of exchange,” which you demanded earlier. Are you revising that requirement?
Also, courts do not consume wealth; they protect wealth. That is the point of lawsuits, to enforce contracts so party A cannot take the money of party B and then walk away from his responsibilities; if A breaks his contract then B can get his money back.
On the other hand, if A has a legal patent and B violates it, then A can recover the profits B made from the patent violation. Or if B violates the property rights of A, A can sue B for civil damages and not just suffer a loss.
If A gets robbed or killed by B, the courts can send B to prison, and protect C, who would otherwise have been B’s next victim, from being robbed or killed while B is in prison. That is an example of how C can benefit from the interaction of A and B even if C never interacted with either one of them, and an example of how C’s tax dollars benefit C even when C does not realize it.
“Its not a favor but an obligation for parents to protect their children since children are the result of the parent’s actions. Children may owe gratitude for rational parents but nothing more. They owe nothing to the wider society.”
I’d hate to be the parent of a little Stevie, to be spending so much to put him through school. He doesn’t even love them, but certainly would force them to support him. Frankly, if that were my child’s attitude I’d cut him off and lend him fend for himself. A wise man once said “prepare for your old age”, which is wise considering some children are like Stevie and only owe you gratitude, but nothing else. Are you a virgin young man? It would be a rare and unwise person who would ever make the mistake of having a relationship with you. Perhaps though, you could find someone like Rand, who’ll use you and discard you, which you of course would be quite comfortable with from a rational perspective.
Roco,
Is that how your kids feel about you? I doubt it.
@Grossman: Notice the morality of suffering and death as the implicit context. Ie, if you benefit, its evil.
That is a lie or you are stupid, there is no such implied context, and your conclusion is wrong. How in the world can you infer that a benefit is evil?
This was a comment about payment for services rendered; you DO gain a benefit from the expense of tax dollars which are collected involuntarily, because involuntary taxation is the ONLY method by which taxation works and can deliver benefit.
Arguing for voluntary taxation is stupidly unfair, so the only possible alternative to involuntary taxation is ZERO taxation, which means nobody gets paid as a public servant, which means there is zero government, which means there is anarchy and we live in a lawless wasteland where business cannot function except as a fort (but we will call them castles), contracts mean nothing, murder and rape and assault is not punished and robbery is rampant.
It was not me that described taxation as theft, it was you. Your excuse was it was not voluntary. My explanation to you was that you benefit from the tax money collected and spent, whether you realize it or not.
I stopped reading the rest of the post at the word “spew” which I infer was characterizing something I said and was therefore an insult.