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Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

That's why I'm leaning more and more towards the idea that paying taxes is immoral and wrong in our current system.

And that is because a good chunk of the taxes we pay go towards arming young people and sending them to kill other young people - military/war/defence.

Another chunk goes towards arming your own people against your own people, thus making dissent and protest hard and dangerous.

And another chunk goes towards maintaining big and powerful institutions, like the IRS, threatening us with violence if we don't pay up.

Centralised taxation systems should be replaced with citizen crowdfunding, in which everyone can choose where his tax money goes.

I'm curious if we'd still be spending as much on police and military if we could choose how we spend our taxes.

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There are many parts of government that I disagree with, including many that I consider immoral. That's why it's important to participate in the political process. Government and law can be changed; it's a slow process and it requires a lot of work, but it's possible.

Picking and choosing where your taxes go a terrible idea, because government isn't à la carte[1]. Everybody has their own opinion on what they don't want to pay for, such as the religious fanatics that don't want to cover certain medical items (e.g. some types of birth control). The "market" is not a law of nature that fixes everything, so you're really advocating for a failed government where nothing is properly funded.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSQCH1qyIDo#t=170

> Government and law can be changed; it's a slow process and it requires a lot of work, but it's possible.

We embrace diversity in culture, why not diversity in governance?

People are exploring ideas like 'stop paying taxes' because there are no other options available to them except civil disobedience. We can't just move to another city or another state and get a governance we can endorse in good conscience.

> We embrace diversity in culture, why not diversity in governance?

When was the last time you participated in your local city council? We do embrace diversity in government. Local government is much easier to change.

> People are exploring ideas like 'stop paying taxes'

Well, have fun when they throw you in jail for failure to pay. That isn't a new idea (it's been tried longer than the USA has existed), and it always ends badly. It's equivalent to advocating for the government to fail. If that is what you want, you should say it directly.

> no other options available

> We can't just move to another city

First, sometimes you can. It's a solution used by many people in the past.

Second, why do you think this is the only option? Did you spend time trying to change local government? Did you run for office?

> endorse in good conscience

So you support every type of religious fanatic that hates some aspect of government? And the people that want to disband the armed forces? And the anarchists that want to unfund the entire government?

> People are exploring ideas like 'stop paying taxes' because there are no other options available to them except civil disobedience.

Stopping paying taxes is a form of civil disobedience. eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Thoreau_Spent_in_Jai...

> Picking and choosing where your taxes go a terrible idea, because government isn't à la carte

And why not ? Our current system stems from a different age, when there were no technological means of communication and collaboration similar to what we have today. Democracy (majority wins, regardless of competence) was the best tech people could come up with in those circumstances.

But this is no longer the case.

If we could start over, how would we build SocietyOS today ?

Laws ? Why not write them in a special programming language, which can then be executed against facts from reality (coming from sensors and human input) - no judges, lawyers and lawmakers - input facts, click and get the judgement.

Use collaboration and communication tools like Github to write the laws. Let citizens submit pull requests.

Let citizens have the "Society" app on their phones and let them up/down vote serious things too, not just pictures of cats.

Log the public opinion and gather feedback in real time.

Use advanced reputation systems, in which people's opinions have different weights in various domains. And so on.

Many many ways in which we can use today's technology to create a 'better', 'fairer' society - we just have to let go of the old system.

I think this will inevitably happen 'naturally' some time in the future, but the weight of the 'old' makes it very difficult to move forward now..

> And why not ?

Because you are advocating for the government to fail due to under funding. Do you not realize that every piece of government has some group that wishes it didn't exist? You are advocating for the de-funding of everything.

Living with other people requires compromise. We cannot all have the government we want, because most of those governments are contradictory. Instead, the goal should be to guarantee the ability to change government.

> regardless of competence

That's a feature, not a bug, because there isn't (and never will be) agreement on the definition of "competence". In the past, for example, tests of "competence" were used to disenfranchise people.

> best tech

You cannot define this either.

> Why not write them in a special programming language

I would love to have laws written in a strict, machine-checkable grammar. "Legalease" already approaches this idea, with many defined terms and standard formats for some things. There is a lot of room for improvement, of course.

> executed against facts from reality ... no judges, lawyers and lawmakers

You should really hang out with lawyers more, because this sentence is wildly detached from reality. You're pretending that "facts" and the interpretation of how the law applies to them are (or ever could be) some sort of automatic process. A large part of trials is deciding what the facts are, as there is often disagreement about that.

> coming from sensors

Sensors fail. It requires interpretation and argument to decide how to handle those situations.

> input facts, click and get the judgement.

Automatic judgment of law is terrifying. Consider that from the perspective of people that don't have your level of privilege. Minority groups regularly have to fight democratically created prejudices, and human judgment - judges, juries, etc - that has the option to not apply the law is an important safety mechanism.

> Use collaboration and communication tools like Github to write the laws.

Sounds great. When are you introducing these tools to your local government? Also... "collaboration and communication" to decide how to run society is called politics. I strongly recommend participating in that process; just remember that you may have to do a lot of remedial work before everybody else is ready for tools like git.

> Log the public opinion and gather feedback in real time.

I'd love to have that. If you know of a way to do that which isn't trivially broken and doesn't allow coercion by employers or other people in positions of power, do share it. It would solve a lot of problems. Right now, we already try to do this in the voting process; adding in the internet or a phone "app" is guaranteed to create problems. For an explanation of why, see this[1] talk by Andrew Appel (CS prof at Princeton).

I suspect you're suffering from a tech-focused variation of the Just World Fallacy[2]. Reality just doesn't work that cleanly, even when you use computers. In fact, computers have a nasty tendency to amplify and automate mistakes and prejudices, just like they can amplify and automate useful work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

> Automatic judgment of law is terrifying. Consider that from the perspective of people that don't have your level of privilege. Minority groups regularly have to fight democratically created prejudices, and human judgment - judges, juries, etc - that has the option to not apply the law is an important safety mechanism.

In other words, are you saying the system might be prejudiced?

But even so, as long as it's less prejudiced than humans (notoriously bad), it'll be better.

> In other words, are you saying the system might be prejudiced?

Every system has prejudices and biases.

> But even so, as long as it's less prejudiced than humans (notoriously bad), it'll be better.

I'll take a system that has less prejudice, but first show that it actually is less prejudiced in practice.

Non-human systems "bake in" and automate the biases of the creator of the system, and it is very hard to create a system that isn't full of preconceptions, misunderstandings, and bad data.

The point I'm trying to make is that our society runs on a myriad of apps and databases, yet the operating environment in which these apps run is maintained by a bunch of people in suits, using a set of laws written in human language, elected by the majority vote, prone to corruption, emotions, insanity, etc...

We will need an operating environment which can distribute the limited resources available on the planet in a sustainable way if we are to survive as a species.

People can and want to govern themselves - most of our needs are local and can be solved locally without having to rely on a centralised entity to distribute money and decisions for us.

We can replace politicians with discussion forums and instant votes, instant decisions.

I see the role of 'government' as an institution which creates and runs campaigns for various 'global' societal issues, not as an institution which 'thinks' for everyone else.

Anyway, I know this is extreme idealism and I'm probably wrong in many ways, but as I said, eventually this system will be developed, it would help if we start thinking about it, because we're kind of running out of time ...

Thanks for the conversation.

If you really want to make your plan happen in reality, you can't target government first.

First step is build the software and get a small group of people to use it to govern themselves. Say... some conference organizers.

Second step is scale.

You don't even need to do the third step, because once teenagers are using SnapGovernance to organize bake sales and establish codes of conduct, the manual government will just look sillier and sillier, and people will look to government to solve fewer and fewer problems.

I totally agree and that's how I think it will happen anyway.

>Let citizens have the "Society" app on their phones and let them up/down vote serious things too

r/writing prompts had a scenario like that. Where a nuke is incoming and a majority of the citizenry has to approve a retaliatory strike, via an app of course.

Also, I'm hitting myself in the face right now.

Interesting. But unrealistic. The "do we all trust Todd to launch a retaliatory strike?" app would've already made the rounds long before that.

We probably wouldn't be paying so much towards the military, but god only knows what idiocy would be receiving the money instead. The whims of the people would probably deliver super-unstable funding, making it confusing as to what programs really were effective and which ones just became scapegoats. Hard to say if that system would be more or less wasteful, especially with the low bar of what's currently happening.

Honestly, there's a leadership gap right now, but I'm not convinced that that means leadership as an institution is dead. We need good leadership that people can respect, which does it's job, and is ultimately accountable without endless redirection and blame for "the other guy being the bad one"

Unfortunately, taxes are difficult to avoid. For that reason, disrupt or damage at least as much as you contribute so it balances out.

That will only lead to more tax money being funnelled into law enforcement instead of public services.

Then step up your disruption?

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