So you do think that a person who is starving is more free than a person who is not? Is the starving person not already in practice a slave to starvation? Imagine there's one company who exploit workers at the lowest possible wage. Even if we accept the idea that taxes are taken by threat of death, isn't a person who would starve without that job just as much under death threat as a taxpayer (if not more, since starvation doesn't even try to take prisoners)?
In principle, we need to agree on what words mean in order to talk about them. We do that through definitions, which are defined by usage. The definition of theft is the illegal taking of property. That is what the word means. If you think taxes are morally equivalent to the lawful taking of taxes, you may make that argument, but it does not allow you to change the meaning of the word from what everybody else uses (or at least, it doesn't guarantee you will be understood). That's not a moral-philosophy point, that's a linguistics point.
Let's say you have true anarchy and that that leads to chaos (I know many libertarians say that wouldn't happen, and I might agree with them, but imagine the hypothetical). If there is such a chaos, then I would be unable to walk down the street for fear of being mugged, for instance. I wouldn't call that freedom, it seems to me I have been in practice restricted. Now, I'm not picking a fight here, I think I agree with your conclusion that such freedom would have to be regulated. I am however interested in what you mean by the word freedom, so it seems we disagree there. We still come to the same conclusions, but we use different phrasings of freedom to get there.
I agree we both appear to come to the same conclusion, if you asked me what people mean by freedom, in its basic term I think many believe it is "the ability to do whatever you want and **** everybody else". I realise that is a crude way of putting it but I really think that is what they mean. Of course that is not what I think, although that could exist in a society with huge amounts of untapped and un-owned resources such as the US at the time the constitution was written. (ignoring any minor inconvenience like a native american population!)
You haven't provided enough detail to make this a reliable conclusion. If, e.g., the person in danger of starvation is a soldier fighting a just war, the tax serves to protect the freedom of both. OTOH, if the starving person is a parasite having no inclination to be otherwise, he'll never be free though he eats like a king at every meal.
I assume there is no other particularly relevant facts. Imagine just some person who has fallen on bad luck. Other than that, I think the conclusions are clear. You might say a parasite does not deserve freedom, but I don't think it can be denied that he would have more freedom if we were fed than if he were dead. (edit: at least positive freedom)
Multiverse Theory indicates that we have a panorama of choices ahead of us and that those various choices produce quite different potential futures.......... http://www.near-death.com/science/research/future.html A factor that can seem to produce certain positive similarities is apparently an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all flesh...... that will alter human nature...... and even the nature of animals by certain time periods......... Apparently we are less than two centuries away from a utopian world..... but the next hundred years can be seriously rough.......
Whether you admit or not, we have unconstitutional taxation. No different than we have unconstitutional guns laws. Just because government ordains it does not make it legal. There's legitimate taxation and government theft.
I'm not sure what you mean by unconstitutional here. The only constitution people tend to pay attention to is the US constitution, and my arguments are not limited to the US. I don't know the details, maybe the US constitution is regarded as law and maybe taxation is against it, making taxation unlawful taking of property which in turn makes it theft, I couldn't say. That would still not mean that taxes as such are theft. It would seem to me in some ways, government includes the legislative branch, which indeed does have power over what is legal. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your argument.
It was a subjective thought. IOW its a description of a personal feeling. If you try to judge it by figuring out what a person different from yourself would think you will completely miss the point. So, no one but yourself might be more perfectly literal. The last part about being in a foreign country is something that might not translate because of course other countries do have rules. But if you participate in things like the running of the bulls in Spain, or if you visit Amsterdam. Or if you go to places in the poorer parts of the third world where police are rare occurrences. Its not that there are no rules in any of these places, but those rules can be so drastically different from what we normally encounter that subjectively we will feel a sense of being loosed from our fetters. Freedom IOW.
That's because you haven't got a clue as to what freedom is. OK, I've imagined it. Now what? And clearly preposterous. Yes, that is a theoretical possibility, though the point of adducing it here is obscure. More to the point, it's not within lightyears of what I did say. It most certainly can and should be denied, because a parasite becomes more of a slave every time he gets what he wants.
Sorry I missed your last question in that post. When we think that freedom is good? I think freedom is a dangerous thing. Every year people die deep in the woods and out at sea and in foreign countries adventuring. Maybe freedom isn't "good" for a lot of people. Because freedom and safety are different things and both have their good and bad qualities. But just because I see a need for safety in some things doesn't mean I think freedom is bad.
Are you sure? http://sites.psu.edu/katherinewarringtonrcl/wp-content/uploads/sites/5539/2014/01/1107_poverty.jpg
Gosh! You're a "misfit". You don't fit in society. You're the kind of guy who goes to Alaska to live 5 or more miles from anyone so there is no interdependence.
Misfit is not someone who opposes interdependence. You on the other hand believe it is justified to FORCE interdependence on others
Now what? Well, what else do you need to know to resolve the issue I presented? They don't seem clear to me, would you care to elaborate please? That's fine, I just wanted to resolve it in case that was the argument. If it's not, then no worries. So you would say a person who is alive and fed (and not a slave in the literal sense) can have less freedoms than a person whose only choice is being and staying dead?
You're not making a lick of sense. I doubt that would help. This is the problem: you ask all the wrong questions. There is no sense talking about particular actions one may take or not take, or particular sets of circumstances one may enjoy or avoid, without some recognition of freedom as a principle, an essence, a spirit, which is inseparable from justice, so that no one who is unjust is free.
I don't like being dependent on infrastructures, but I have no desire to live 5 or more miles from the nearest human. Even still, why does a preference for peace/quiet and nature, equate to being a misfit? I would call the person who needs to live in the centre of a teeming city just as liable to be a 'misfit'. ie, not necessarily at all ... it's merely personal preference. Meantime, I can almost understand Americans who complain about taxes. After all, they don't even get healthcare in return.
As man started living in communities, to contain flagrant behavior of the members, communities started making rules. The rules were enforced using the fear of punishment. The wiser and stronger persons surfaced as the leaders to defend the community from without and to maintain order within. In a nutshell this is a government. Thus it is the society that creates a government, and not the other way around. In addition to regulate the behavior of the members, the rules aim to prescribe the modes of division of labor, and the distribution of wealth. This frame work of rules is called socialism. We all possess a different balance of kindness and the need for gratification. A parent has a high level of power over the children. Fortunately, nature has given us intense parental instincts to bring out kindness to forefront when nurturing our children. But our sense of dedication decreases as the circle of our affection enlarges. Highly dedicated social leader is a rare phenomenon. That is why we need a few leaders making decisions together, in order to bring out their dedication, and shame the selfish interests. We do not want a father figure rule us, except our natural father in our childhood. According to the availability of information channels we need to choose the appropriate number of our decision makers to keep the decision-making process effective. A happy medium has to found. This is democracy. Due to the recent enhancement of the information channels, in a generation or two, as we figure out the proper ways to use the channels, we will see the decision-making process being influenced by much larger participation. Since autocracy can act more decisively and swiftly due to highly concentrated decision-making process, the rest of the world used to think that democracy has no chance of survival against it. What it forgot to consider is that the governance of democracy is more in tune with the well being of all its citizens, and so it receives highly motivated support of its population, and can sustain itself against all kinds of foreign tyrannies. The results of the conflicts over the last hundred year period prove this: monarchy and dictatorship are all but dead, and communism is dying, but democracy is alive and spreading. Will of people prevails over huge adversities. The super powers went home empty handed from Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan, because of native peoples’ will. India won freedom without firing a shot. Comparatively insignificant American colonies of merely three million people won against the then mighty British Empire, because of self respecting and fiercely independent minded citizens. Top leaders like Washington were supported by hundreds of courageous and dedicated second and third category leaders. Since the well being of all the citizens is the most basic concern, Democracy is the best deal we have so far. Democracy is founded on the basis of diffusion of state’s power, curtailing the power’s potential for injustice. The dazzling success of the system has made the concepts of democracy and capitalism popular around the world. The existing form of capitalism worked very well for a while, because then, wealth making power could not converge easily into a few hands. Industrialization has changed that. Now a few rich have undesirably high power to manipulate wealth distribution and politics, and to influence social values. In the US the richest 1% own more than 35%, and the top 3% own more than 50% of the total wealth, while the bottom 50% share 4%. The world statistics is even more appalling, the top 1% own 50% of the total wealth, while the bottom 68% share 3%. Unrestricted capitalism favors the rich. It is easier to make money with money than by working. Extreme greed for wealth and the power of highly concentrated wealth has a degrading effect, the same as that of the power of state, on community. A community cannot function without some socialism. By definition, socialism is nothing but taking away some individual freedom for the good of whole community. Even law of land is socialism. In advanced communities the modes of labor divisions are maintained by the economy. Countries around the world try to make the distribution of wealth just by variety of means. But so far most of the experiments have tried to shift the control from money to authority. USSR was an extreme example of this. This cannot work for long, because human greed for power, wealth and fame, has a high tendency to take over the process. The axiom, ‘the rule that rules the least is the best’ applies to any power. The U.S. seems to be leading the way in such greedy degrading enterprising. Simply defined, morality is: ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you’. The existing degenerate environment of greed forces new entrepreneurs to compromise their moral convictions and adopt cunning ways, first for their businesses to survive against the unscrupulous competition, and later, after testing the fruits of corrupt methods, to prosper. The first offense of a kind against one’s own self is the most painful. Each subsequent one is easier than the preceding one. This craving for quick gratification is evident in mature and growing economies all over the world. Look at how processed food is made unhealthy with harmful preservatives and cheap ingredients, the quality of food in chain restaurants has degraded over the years, farm produce is made unhealthy by high-breeding, and the quality of dairy products by rampant use of hormones and antibiotics. This makes the nation fat and unhealthy, requiring more medical attention. On the other side, medical drugs/treatments are marketed at exorbitant prices, and once they are in circulation, our medical drug industry shows instances of suppressing and discouraging immerging cheaper/better remedies, and of suppressing discoveries of dangerous side effects. The common man is getting squeezed from every side. The subtle influence of the rich on our legislature keeps our tax code from correcting the loop holes, which favor the rich heavily. This keeps the taxes of the less affluent high, and the entitlement programs strained. Our automobile industry ignored, or bought and shelved technical innovations, to avoid prerequisite expensive modifications to production processes, loosing against foreign completion in the end, retarding the country’s progress. Even our national sports have turned excessively commercial. Our society is losing from every side. Too much wealth in the hands of a few robs democracy of its effectiveness. What we need is a way to defuse the power of money on economic decision-making, releasing the economic factors from the narrow channels of money flow that keep enriching the economically high and mighty. This needs to be effected without blocking individual’s ability to acquire wealth, which motivates economic production. It is best to achieve this economic power diffusion with least interference from other entities, like continued meddling by the government. Democratic societies can make new rules to curtail the flagrant expression of greed, just as they have rules to contain other vices we all possess. This can be achieved by limiting the number of persons any business can employ. In conjunction with this there has to be a limit to the maximum percentage interest an individual can own in all other businesses.
That sounds a bit like an arbitrary I'm-going-to-justify-anything-I-like-by-calling-it-freedom kind of solution. It seems to me to fundamentally rely more on justice than on freedom in the sense the word is mostly used. Now, I don't have a unfavourable view of justice as such, this just seems like a shifty bit of semantics. Does this mean that we have to accept your perspective of the situation or you're not going to play the game here? What makes my understanding of freedom "wrong" to the extent that it's not taken into account when we're discussing politics? In any other context when something is free, it's that it has several options on how to act or be (except free of charge or so). Unconstrained, unrestricted, unobstructed. Why is it that when we come to things like the supposedly unalienable right to liberty, we have to sneak in this other concept which somehow trumps the idea of freedom as unconstrainedness?
That's a problem on your end. I'm not here to play games. I'm here to call it like I see it; and whether that strikes you as "playing the game here" I couldn't care less. You evince no consideration of motivation, without which freedom can't be understood.
