You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: [STATISM] Is it Morally Wrong to Evade Taxes?
Great article as usual steemswede. But may I ask you something a little off topic? Why do you quote Larken Rose so much? It's not like he's the original source of these thoughts. Why not quote Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and use videos of Robert Murphy, for example? Just a thought...
lol I quote Larken Rose much? This is the very first time I post a video by him on Steemit. Please see my posts on Hazlitt, Mises and other greats.
It's not the first quote... but ok, I'm probably seeing too much.
I'd like to register the opinion that's too easy to say Germans should not have paid taxes because the money would be used for terrible end. Is it more moral to have yourself arrested and leave your family not provided for and labelled as traitors?
You see, the idea of self-regulation carries implicit that morality is an individual pursuit. It is not helpful to say 'if all Germans did not pay taxes' because that's outside the scope of self-regulation. To a German in Nazi regime, both paying and not paying taxes was immoral in principle. This could apply to any of us today.
I'd agree absolutely that in a true capitalist society, where everything is private property, taxes would be non-existent and we'd all be better off. But there's a problem with the transition from here to then, since it's at least conceivable that the total amount of suffering would increase in a revolution. (By revolution I mean the sudden collapse of government without enough time for private initiatives to provide answers to problems dealt by governments, however poorly.) If you only take your morals from principles, like NAP, then you're safe, but things get a lot more complicated when we assess the problem with a utilitarian perspective.
Technically speaking, you're referring to a consequentialist perspective, not a utilitarian one, per se. Consequentialist is opposite of "deontological" or "duty-based" perspective. A compatibilist perspective merges the two, noting that there are no differences that cannot be reconciled under normal circumstances, and that only lifeboat circumstances contain irreconcilable differences of approach. Just my .02
I stand corrected on the use of the word utilitarian.
As for the word compatibilist (which I actually use in other context), I think the label isn't all that useful. There could be many ways to reconcile the two and an umbrella term could silence them.
Thanks for your input.