Comment by OliverJones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OliverJones | Hacker News Reader

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Yeh, I'm one of those boomers. It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope. That has made a terrible mess.

We were born before the invention (1959-1960) of pharma birth control, and were teenagers when it took hold in society. It was the biggest change in human history (I'm not exaggerating). We, generalizing, did an awful job of starting to sort out the moral / ethical / social changes birth control brought.

We lived through the Summer of Love (see the previous paragraph) and some of us didn't get it. To misquote Spiderman, "with great freedom comes great responsibility." Some of us missed that. Hence DJT 45, hence the abuses of celibate clergy, among other notorious members of my generation.

And, fossil carbon release.

We did make the US stop the Vietnam war. That was good.

We made the US get rid of the military draft. That, in hindsight, was bad. Politicians think twice if they have to raise taxes and conscript young women and men before they go to war.

What's going for us? What do we have to offer?

We think in decades, not years.

We made it to the moon.

We invented the internet.

We helped cure the world of sanctimonious horsest like the poem Lewis Carroll parodied: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_...

Maybe it's self-delusion, but I hope we're not finished doing some good.

> We made it to the moon.

"Late Leading-Edge Boomer" here, with a nit: We weren't the ones who got humankind to the moon in 1969-72. The Baby Boom is considered to have started in 1946. All three astronauts who flew the first lunar-landing mission (Apollo 11, in July 1969) were born in 1930. Flight director Gene Kranz: 1924. Guidance officer Steve Bales, who could have aborted the landing after a computer alarm: 1942. Junior computer specialist Jack Garman, who urged disregarding the alarm and continuing the landing: 1944.

(Source: Wikipedia articles.)

> It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope.

I'm sorry but considering the US hasn't existed for very long, and income taxes in the US haven't existed for very long, I don't see what your point is other than to knock down something you dislike.

The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism.

I'm not going to blame Boomers for the current situation because there are so many assumptions I have to make about the current situation for such blame to be effective. I think one has already been thrown around in this thread, something about education costs, where such complaints make big assumptions about the value of education in the status quo or what the entire point of an education is (e.g. being a productive part of the workforce vs. having critical thinking skills vs. knowing the value of learning about being able to discipline yourself into doing it when you want).

The worst thing is, blaming Boomers for our problems makes the assumption that there is something uniquely special about that generation that allowed them to set society on the wrong path, as if every generation before and after has also been uniquely special in not having that ability.

So I find your comment particularly underhanded in taking this hatred for Boomers and lobbing some pet-dislike you have for a certain ideology. "Oh yeah, us Boomers suck, we ruined everything especially because we don't like taxes," as if Boomers have a monolithic opinion about taxation or anything for that matter.

PS: You may have stopped the Vietnam war, but what do you think paid for it? (Answer: Taxes.)

>The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism.

While true, there seems to me to be some merit to the argument that there was a subtle change in the nature of such discourse during this period and (mainly) among a large section of the members of this generation (that many members of subsequent generations have accepted as de facto and default) and that is integration of taxation/government with market-based thinking, that is, that paying taxes is something the individual does to get an individual return, in the same way a person walks in McDonalds and expects to put money on the counter and get their happy meal and not, instead, that the homeless guy in the corner gets a happy meal.

Evidence for this (as a generational phenomenon) could include the reduction in the top income tax rate as boomers came of age. So in that sense I agree that they, generationally, may have disliked taxes in comparison to what immediately preceded them.

As far as I know, the Federal income tax (in the US) started out as a way to finance war. So it would be more like going into McDonald's and paying to have someone stand there with a gun and threaten/kill anyone who tried to take your (or anyone else's) Big Mac. There was no homeless, hungry guy in the corner suffering if not for the forced generosity of a third party. My only point here is to say that, in an abstract way, the current income tax was formed on an idea of protection as a transaction, not on being generous towards down-on-their-luck people. I believe that context is important when we talk about generations later rejecting taxation because they don't see what's in it for them.

(But I'll also admit / point out that, in the context of when the current Federal income tax started, young men were being drafted to fight in WWI, which I think is way worse than any tax in terms of the individual vs. collective. As in, there's no clearer way to say that the state owns you than it being able to send you to war potentially against your will.)

'Whenever we start playing the "who is right" game everyone loses'

We also lowered the voting age to 18.

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