Charles Anthony

From now on, I will write "stealing" when I am discussing in the "Arbitrary & Legislative Issues" category but in the "Moral & Religious Issues" category stealing is taking somebody's property without consent. It put in the same category as the "Golden Rule" thing. An anarchist might wish to do so, but the anarchist would have to wield an 'overwhelming force'...which would likely mean you would need a large force of people marching to the same tune...No. Enough open-minded non-reflexive-thieves may gradually become convinced and model their behavior to continue respecting their fellow man and property. I agree. Your statement makes no sense to me as it does not for you. Furthermore, nobody does anything for "the greater good" of anything -- show me how they do. Why would you (or anybody for that matter) be so deluded as to use "the greater good" as a standard? I do not believe it is dellusion. I believe it is evasion of responsibility. Uh.... show me that "social contract" because I want to read up on it. Do you have a citation?? I am curious to learn about its "Moral & Religious Issues" implications. The burglar would give you the choice: "Your money or your life!" in a similar moral exchange. That is why I make the reference to the protection racket.

Does that mean all people are corrupt? Because it is people who elect other people to office.Excellent! We agree. There are different ways of answering that question.

There are different ways of answering that question. First, there is no purpose of "government" per se, other than to give us the illusion of leadership and happiness and peace and whatever else with which we choose to fool ourselves. It is like asking "What is the purpose of the Canadian military?" it all depends on what YOU want. There is no objective absolute. Second, more appropriately, the purpose of government officials, in my opinion is a more concrete issue to examine. I believe that the purpose of government officials is simple: to make money and keep their jobs. Part of their purpose involves their "friends" who need to be re-paid with patronage and no-bids contracts and AdScam. I also believe that government officials enjoy their jobs. Specifically, they enjoy the prestige and the bossy (everybody-listening-to-me) elements. That explains why some of them seem blind to their hopeless and dismal election prospects and never learn to quit while they are ahead. They live for the spotlight. Third, if Istop being cynical for a moment, I would say that the purpose of government is to do what people do not want to do or can not figure how to do on their own but still want. Now we come to a very important question: I believe we can have government (albeit, it will be drastically different) without taxation. Think of your soccer club: you are a freely participating member you follow the rules you can quit if you want and join a different club you pay the membership fee The soccer club is a form of "government" but it does not force you to participate and pay taxes. Your school board councillors (often volunteers) form a government. It is more responsible to look at ways to reduce government size. We will never eliminate government, but by understanding how real social networks function effectively WITHOUT forced government, it helps to model policies and government reform to be more efficient. What about people who disagree with you? what should they think of the use of their money? I do not think it is fair to ignore them when considering the "fairness" of a policy. It is stealing from the people who do not agree. You may agree to it (and therefore, no theft from you) but as a policy, you are IMPOSING it also on all of your fellow citizens whether they agree with you or not. Your fellow citizen who does not agree does not have a choice. That is what makes it wrong. I would say NO when it comes to enforced policy. We may not have a 100% agreement on how much caffeine should be in our favorite soda but we are not forced to buy or drink it. However, if we are dealing with taxation and public policy (actions which physically force participation) your chances of any of it being fair is slim. Given your example of thughprotectors roughing up their own customers, I would again guess that the vast majority of people would choose to have a police force protecting them then these thugprotectors. So, I think my comments above would still hold true.No. The police force is the same as the protection racket. If you do not pay your taxes, the police will send you to jail and confiscate your property. There are people in jails and people who lost their homes throughout Canada TODAY because they could not afford to pay their taxes. You do not have the opportunity to fight taxes.

So.... stealing is "right" or "fair" if the "majority" of people agree to it? Sorry. Not for me. Imagine if it was not a minority. Where would YOU draw the line? My example of protection rackets is an allusion to rough parts of town and places where the police do not go. In general, a thugProtector goes to each shop or resident (I will call him TaxPayer) and makes an agressive offer: "Pay me X amount every so often and I will protect you from criminals." If the person refuses to pay, the thugProtector sends his thugEnforcers to rough up the TaxPayer on the next day. On the third day, the thugProtector returns with the same offer and says: "See, I told you so! You need my protection." The TaxPayer pays to stay safe (whether he is smart enough to figure out what is going on is irrelevant). In a nut-shell, that is how a protection racket operates in simple terms. When the TaxPayer becomes trully threatened by a real criminal, the thugProtector steps in to eliminate the competition. The thugProtector wants to continue making money. This is what drug-dealers and pimps do today. They eliminate the competition. For the TaxPayer, the protection racket actually acts as a defacto police and security force. If YOU were a thugProtector, you would make sure that your TaxPayers were safe. You do not want them to move off of your turf. Just like a property manager wants retail tenants to stay prosperous so that they can continue to pay rent, the thugProtector wants the TaxPayers to be prosperous. I know it sounds ruthless and anarchist. It is. I am not saying that protection rackets are good. I believe that they are real and natural and they exist today. You do not have to go very far to find them. The victims of protection rackets have the same tax liabilities as everybody else, but the "police" do not serve them. Furthermore, the victims of protection rackets have a fighting chance to escape the racket and even to conquer it. This is what Don Corleone did to become "The Godfather" in the Mario Puzo novels - he bumped off a thugProtector. As a taxpayer, you are treated the same as a victim of a protection racket but you will never have the opportunity to escape taxes and in fact, you will be treated more harshly even at the expense of your livelihood. Nobody cares about protecting your prosperity. At the moment, not all the tax goes to infrastructure. It goes to general revenue. I have no problem with the precentage if it is going to improve infrastructure. So the basic change would be to allocate it where it is supposed to go.So.... why do you accept the government waste of the gasoline tax revenue? Not every person is rich enough to be able to dismiss wasted money, why do you accept (or impose) that waste for your fellow citizens as well? If you are right about the gasoline tax, what is wrong with the government? why do they not agree with you? I would say that it is a result of big government and systemic waste. I would also say that bureacrats skim off the top AT YOUR EXPENSE and you accept it. I could ask why infrastructure? environmentalists would say that gasoline creates pollution and so the gas taxes revenue should go to cleaning up the environment and yadda yadda yadda. Once you impose a tax on everybody, there is no way to have everybody agree with the amount or the spending. Any way you cut it, the result of taxation will invariably lead to waste and or mismanagement. Since not everybody agrees with it, you will also invariable be taking money without consent. The only fair tax is "zero tax" and let people spend money on infrastructure if they want it.

Fun question! [CAVEAT: I do not believe any government spending can be justified, but I try to bend my morals and stay within your topic.] Any no-bids government contract is abuse of the public purse and severe disdain of the tax-payer. The more money involved in the contract, the more disdain. I understand that it can not always be practical for a "government" to have open competition for every single thing it does. However, I would look at closed-bid-expenditures as highly suspicious before I considered them to be practical. My thoughts on it are not very new nor are they original. I would refer to an excellent summary made earlier by a previous poster: So, I throw your question back to you: does this contract pass the smell test? I will take your question a step further: what is your smell test? What is YOUR criteria for misuse of public funds?

What is YOUR idea of how the gasoline tax should be improved? Is it where the money is going? or the percentage collected? or both? What is your recommendation for improving the gasoline tax and why? what is wrong with it going into general revenue? Assume that I know nothing about the tax.

Do you think your taxes are paying for it? or does the money fall from the sky?

Give me one example of a tax that you think should NOT be abolished but could concretely be improved.

No but rather: "- to obey the rules set by the people with power." The majority of people do nothing and say nothing and have no control. When was the last time you were consulted for determining public policy? Probably not as often as you were forced to pay up. I am calling it like it is. What euphemism would you call submitizenship? If what I am saying is philosophical grandstanding to you, saying the system "works" and is "proven" sounds helplessly naive and foolish to me. In Canada, many people pay more than half of their income in taxes (that is an immense proportion) and many people rightfully complain about decreasing services. There are working poor in Canada. I trust that your comments do not mean to be elitist, but it is not fair to dismiss the practical outcomes and realities that the true Canadian taxpayers face. What you call "working" and "proven" is not the entire picture. Many people fight blindly tooth and nail against the principle of privatization of various public services. For them, taxation and poor quality and no choice in service is their goal (usually just to cover their true intensions of protecting union or public service jobs). What is working? and for whose benefit? Yes! Zero taxation. My whole point is that an understanding of how to operate WITHOUT taxation can act as a very effective baseline for judging and evaluating how to fairly REDUCE tax burdens so that shift away from the Canadian steal-from-your-neighbor-entitlements culture. Whatever they are?? I do not believe you are serious. Forgive me but I can not help but laugh. Just staying with the comedy: what do you think were her plans? Once again, I doubt you are serious. Nevertheless.... People defend their property all of the time. Farmers hunt ground-hogs and coyotes and nefarious sheep robbers. Urbanites hire security companies to provide custom services that no police force could provide. Free enterprise to the rescue!!! Rich people hire body-guards. What if YOU had the courage and strength and money to protect it yourself? and the only invader was a stupid foolish weakling? What excuse would you have for taxation? I have simple questions for all of you happy-tax-payer-collectors out there: Can you honestly say you are getting your money's worth? Can you honestly say that you can not think of one single example of how your taxes are too high? and that public spending is wasteful?

Yes. That is why I said that I would rather read the original email and not MacKenzie's interpretation. I understand that the general public can not be privy to all of the information. MacKenzie's statement are still an interpretation. Maintaining an arms embargo when there is a desparity in arms makes you complicit with the crimes and the results of the war. Not letting people freely defend themselves is evil. While maintaining an arms embargo, the UN was part of the problem in a grave manner. No. Because he went RIGHT AFTER his duty and said he DID NOT know who was paying him. Hmmm..... I do not trust people who SAY they do not know who is paying them particularly when other people can easily find out. I understand that the UN could not do everything. At the same time, I do not trust the UN was neutral. Why not lift the arms embargo and let people defend themselves? We would not do the same if it was in our country, would we? When he was in the UN, my taxes funded him. If he comments on his actions in the UN, it is fair game. Canada was not at war with any Balkan nation. Canadian soldiers fighting in a foreign land (that did not declare war against Canada) are foreign mercenaries paid by Canadian tax-payers for somebody else's interests.

Yes. That is why I said that I would rather read the original email and not MacKenzie's interpretation. I understand that the general public can not be privy to all of the information and thus it is easier for the public to be duped. The arms embargo is the clincher.

In that case, it is wrong! Does nationhood require taxation? What are your responsibilities? What are those rules? Who makes them? Who is society? When was the last time that YOU personally: built where you wanted to? walked around naked? took whatever food you can find? did not recognize someone else's property? If you felt compelled to do any of the above, what stopped you??? You give yourself less credit than you deserve. Most people respect their neighbors out of true respect -- not because they will be hauled away by police. Most people act dignified out of a sense of modesty -- not because they will be hauled away by police. If you felt compelled to violate somebody else's property, are you such a fool to forget that your victim has the right to self-defense? and would fight back? You do not need police to be a good person. Today, the thieves and burglars do not seem to stop even though we have police. Unless you are doing harm to somebody or violating their property, you are not doing wrong. Whether it is practical or not is irrelevant to whether it is right or wrong. On the issue of the practicality of police administration -- to use your example -- it would still be possible. How do you think protection rackets work? People protect their own turf. Yes, they do so ruthlessly but they do it. Yeah and the Guardian Angels are disproving that one! They do it for free! Despite the nitty-gritty details of these specific examples, would it be right for me to steal from you if I was going to donate the proceeds to charity????????? Is it wrong to NOT give to charity?

from the Skeptics Dictionary:

Sure. Taxation is wrong because it is collected by force. The fact that nobody can freely opt out of taxes and opt out of the supposed "benefits" funded by taxation, makes it theft or burglary. If it was right, it would not have be expropriated with force. If everybody agreed with it, they would give it up willingly. Try this experiment: Send everybody a tax assessment that says: "Your fair share = X. Please remit X out of the goodness of your heart and socialist solidarity to your neighbor IF YOU WANT. If you do not remit X, you will forego all of the glorious benefits of imposed socialism." Any difference between the forced tax collection and the experimental collection proves that taxation does not represent the wishes of the tax-payer. The burden of proof (taxation is not theft) is on the taxman because he has been caught red-handed.

Sure. Here goes: taxation is wrong because...

No. The only "fair" tax is no tax. However, that is best left to a different thread. Such a different thread could analyze the innuendo of and justifications for euphemizing stealing-from-Peter-to-give-to-Paul.

Yes, it creates two brackets but you are not back where you started. Instead, you are then only at a consumption tax. The consumption tax will still work. You proposal seems like a workable compromise given that a minority of people are "poor" in Canada. It is only active for "poor" people and not all consumers. CAVEAT: I believe all taxes are wrong. I am only comparing two competing forms of taxation.

A member can simply be prevented from posting. That is all up to the administrator's discretion. Common sense and common decency generally applies. The best rule to follow is: act like you are a guest in somebody else's house.

Thank you. I understand your comment. However, I disagree and I believe you are mistaken because the credit system is only active below at a certain threshold. Once, a person's income rises above the threshold, you can design the credit system so that it only applies to "poor" (however you want to identify them) people. The consumption tax will still work.

Both of them receive the same services, therefore they should pay the same. Equity in taxation is the only form of taxation I can accept (if not-making-much-of-a-fuss-to-oppose, can be called acceptance). If not equity, what would be your standard of reasonability? Maximum-plunderability while minimizing-political-flack? No. It sounds like they target everybody equally to me. What if a "poor" person and a "rich" person wanted to each buy their own pair of shoes? Should the "rich" person be obligated to pay more? Explain.

Correct. That is how to focus change in legislation.

After reading the article again, it is more than obvious that the color "obvious allusion to Hezbollah tactics" are one-sided conclusions that are Maj.-Gen. MacKensie's view only and are not the only interpretation of the Isreali attacks. There is nothing obvious about concluding Hezbollah tactics. Lewis MacKenzie was not there at the UN outpost. The whole former Yougoslavia had an arms embargo and everybody knows that. It does not take a tactical genius to figure out that an arms embargo leaves the unarmed to be victims of the armed. Everybody knows that. What everybody does not know is that the Serbs controlled the Yougoslavian government and the military. The UN ran away when they were supposed to be protecting unarmed civilians in UN safe havens. Everybody knows that. The UN left unarmed civilians in Srebrenica when Serbs over-ran the town. Everybody knows the UN ran away and left them to be slaughtered. I did. Right after he comes back from Bosnia, he went a speaking tour by Serbs. He said he did not know who paid him. That does not make him a reliable and unbiased source to me. Sorry, I do not trust his word. I will take it a step further and quote MacKenzie himself on his interpretation of what happened in Srebrenica. The Real Story Behind SrebrenicaLet me get this straight: Morillon (a colleague of his) actually tries to do something on behalf of the UN (against "his UN masters"????) to protect the civilians and MacKenzie sees that as the source of the problem. The rest of his article goes on to explain how the UN did not have the resources. Correct. I am talking out of my ass and the asses of people who physically were in Bosnia trying to help family. They told me what they saw on the other side of the fence. Those are dramatic words. You tell me what he did to "serve his country". I think questioning a public figure (particularly one whose decisions and actions affected the lives of unarmed civilians) who talks publicly is fair game. Even more so when my taxes go to fund it. I do not wish to be named either but you should all believe everything I say!

Environmental Laws, Labour Laws, the list is nearly endless. These laws regulate business and industry which dictate the behavior of non living legal citizens. Living citizens are natural people who are regulated by criminal and civil laws. What you are saying makes no sense. Your outlook on legislation seems to apply to cars or trucks without drivers. Business and industry exist only with human beings doing something. Any legislation that you make directed at inanimate objects will require a citizen to change behavior. A "business" or an "industry" does not act without the control of humans. Likewise, changing the performance and accountability of a "business" or an "industry" requires impositions upon humans.

Let me point this out: the first account of the article (in fact, the only account to provide specific details) was from a person who was not there by her own admission! What sort of response should there be from a fourth-party perspective??? Let us interview and get commentary from more people who were not there either.Interestingly, the article does not identify the name of this "Jewish organization in this northwestern U.S. city" for anybody reading this forum to verify nor to get more details. You tell us. You tell us. You tell us what your are suggesting. I think there is a lot more bait out there than many people realize. You tell us. You tell us what your are suggesting about the media slant. I will not put words in your mouth. Remember, this is the same media outlet that ran with a story about nutbar muslim legislation against Jews in Iran.

I do not care who is happy or unhappy. I care about fair policy. If there is a fiscal imbalance, the only fair solution is to reduce federal taxes. Period. No ifs, ands or buts. The federal government should not be making cash handouts to the provinces to deal with this "imbalance" if it truly exists. If the provinces should need more money for their operations, the provinces should raise their own provincial taxes (or cut spending) and deal with the political fallout that would result. Just to be nit-picky on protocol, the CanWest linked article requires a subscription for access.