No, the subset of my tax dollars used for legitimate purposes are the price of my citizenship in society. The rest is stolen property, taken at gunpoint.
Please define ‘legitimate purposes’ in a way that doesn’t mean ‘only things that I approve of’.
An easy way to start would be “things that would not leave the world better off if the money was just burned instead of being spent on super-bad thing X” (my guess would be that a lot of super-long prison sentences for victimless crimes fail here).
If one wants to be more ambitious, “things that wouldn’t leave the world better off if the money was not collected in the first place” (this is the point where more ordinary ridiculous things such as spending all the money collected from corporate taxes on corporate welfare (Finland says hi!) become unjustifiable).
For a quite stringent category of legitimacy, try “things that wouldn’t leave the world better off if the money was just distributed evenly to the citizens as a UBI”, which leaves the properly beneficial stuff that doesn’t destroy value, such as effective, targeted programs for people that can be actually significantly helped by them (a very small subset of existing programs), and gives a reasonably good theory of justifiable governance when combined with the previous criterion.
(via metagorgon)
2 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #vulgar libertarianism · 168 notes · source: fierceawakening · .permalink
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