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Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

Correct, it does not violate your rights that you are obligated to pay a portion of your income to the rest of us, in the form of the government.

That is part of the terms of your citizenship here, an agreement to which your parents consented on your behalf when you were too young to consent.

If you refuse to pay the tax, people with guns do not come for you. Your wages may be garnished, or money taken from your savings accounts, because that money you owe in tax is not yours. It's all of ours, to use for public goods and services, to be shared by all of us.

People who refuse to pay tax are stealing from all of us.

People who don't like the tax arrangement in this country are free to 1) try to change it or 2) leave. I welcome both options. Stealing from us, that just makes me angry.

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> If you refuse to pay the tax, people with guns do not come for you.

Seriously? People get put in jail for tax evasion all the time. Certainly lots of guns involved in that process.

> money taken from your savings accounts

Not theft?

> public goods and services, to be shared by all of us

No. Tax money is distributed to favored interests. It is not shared among all.

So what portion of your property do I have a right to? Which part of your home or possessions may I come and direct to my purposes? Or to "the rest of us" even? May I go to your fridge and distribute some fruit to your neighbors or to the homeless? How is a claim to income different than a claim to your other property?

People rarely get put in jail for tax evasion, and never for simply failing to pay.

The vast majority of people who do not pay tax--who steal from the rest of us--simply have it taken from their accounts or paychecks by the legal machinery we've established to do so.

And again, garnishing paychecks or withdrawing from accounts is not theft, because it is not your money.

Remember, by definition, your tax obligation is not yours. It never was. Keeping it from the rest of us is stealing from us.

And last....

"So what portion of your property do I have a right to? Which part of your home or possessions may I come and direct to my purposes? Or to "the rest of us" even? May I go to your fridge and distribute some fruit to your neighbors or to the homeless? How is a claim to income different than a claim to your other property?"

Great questions! That's what the democratic process is for, for us to settle those questions. Right now, we have one set of answers to those questions. We won't always, because laws are always changing to reflect the society that writes them.

Hey, if you reeeeeally hate taxes, maybe you can make some pamphlets and get enough of us on board to vote in your new tax-free system.

>Remember, by definition, your tax obligation is not yours.

What a strange debt: one that a person assumes without their consent, and which you only know about by violating their privacy.

With regard to the last point: if I trade $1 million worth of goods with another private party, you have no way of knowing I "owe" you and the rest of society anything unless you somehow get details about that private trade. If myself and the private party do not divulge any information about our private activities, you would need to violate our privacy rights and force us to divulge information about our private interactions for you to uncover the existence of this debt that we owe you.

How absurd your moral framework is..

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