There was a recent post on lesswrong, which also got highlighted on AC10, that struck my interest. It claimed that he had been avoiding taxes for 20 years through "one simple trick:" filing, but not actually paying them. The idea is that the IRS is so small and incompetent that they basically won't do anything against this sort of passive resistance.
Is this too good to be true? I'm not any sort of "effective altruist," I just don't want to pay taxes. And as it happens, I have a lot of capital gains income this year. According to the rules, I'm supposed to write the IRS a big check by Jan 15 for "estimated taxes." I can afford it, but it would make my life better to keep that money for myself. Can I just... not...? This feels like a real Matrix, red pill moment-
"You're telling me that I can dodge taxes?" "No. I'm telling you that when the time comes- you won't have to."
Then again... I really, really don't want to go to prison. even just getting my passport suspended would be a major hassle. And the guy who wrote that post seems like a real hippy... no bank account and no salary income??? how does he live?
Perhaps it would be better to set up a shady small business and claim all sorts of vague tax deductions. Thoughts on this?
btw: long time lurker, first time poster. I'm asking here because you seem like people who are smart, outside-the-box, and not simps for the government.
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I've basically never seen a police officer in a drug store. What I do always see, though, is drug store shelves laden with row after row of expensive products, instead of the post-apocalyptic scene you get when police aren't keeping the products I'd like to buy safe. That's not because my city doesn't also have countless people who would be happy to steal shelves bare, it's just because there's a huge amount of hysteresis in these systems, so in my areas the police usually don't have to be seen because they've been effective enough to be a deterrent.
Maybe. But I notice that that drug store's existing private security is reportedly "to protect customers and employees rather than chase after shoplifters", not to actually solve their huge security problem. Although as a customer I would indeed find myself in zero direct danger from a store that I have no remaining reason to enter, half of my family ended up relying on one life-saving drug or another in their old age, so I would at least consider a collapsing market for drug stores to be an indirect danger at some point. Perhaps private security would be forced to step up their game, if public police were completely nonexistent? Or perhaps the important factor is that the problem of liability concerns for unrestricted private policing would mostly go away at that point ... which strikes me as a bit of a double-edged sword, though I must admit that I'm not thrilled with all the side effects of public policing either.
Yup! Ironically, the "it's just stealing" premise (I like the phrasing "taxation is theft", personally) makes income tax more acceptable to me rather than less. Until we figure out how to keep a country working without a lot of stealing, we might as well give up on trying to make each individual theft precisely justifiable, and just focus on trying to mitigate the damage by spreading it around in amounts scaled to the victims' ability to afford the loss.
I suppose the real problem is the converse? If you're not trying to justify each particular form of taxation with reference to what that specific revenue is to be spent on, then you're also not trying to justify each particular form of spending with reference to how the specifically taxed people are going to benefit from it, and that means the options for spending blow wide open? But I'm not sure that would be a real obstacle to any politician who wasn't also a philosopher, and I suspect in the USA any remaining philosopher-politicians quit in disgust after the non-philosopher-politicians discovered the "reinterpret the Commerce Clause to let us make any law about anything" loophole.
No? I'd always thought of "privatize all police" as the major dividing line separating anarcho-libertarianism from the varieties including my own much more tentative/boring libertarian leanings. At the very least, when I think about "how could we make police privatization work", I'm hard pressed to find someone other than David Friedman who's given great thought to the issue, and e.g. his subtitle to "Law as a Private Good" is "A Response to Tyler Cowen on the Economics of Anarchy".
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