From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 21:38:04 MDT
At 11:13 PM 8/29/02 -0400, Dan sez:
>I'm not sure about other countries, most qualified adults in the US
>don't vote, so anything the majority of actually voting people agree on
>would only apply to them, no?
Look, if most USians believe the IRS is stealing them blind but can't even
be bothered voting for the Technotranscendence Party (say) that vows to
abolish this wicked impost, fuck 'em. Ahem. Sorry, that was irrelevant to
the point at hand. Still.
I was under the impression, BTW, that many of those who don't vote are the
disillusioned and deracinated poor who'd be likely to vote eagerly for more
taxes on the wealthy, no?
>> First, resist it by refusing to pay.
>
>Since tax avoidance and resistence is quite high, I assume that many
>people do just this.
MOST people? I assume this is a hyperbolic way of saying that almost
everyone tries to minimize their tax levy; this to me resembles haggling
for the best price you can get in the blessed marketplace, rather than
running away from an armed thief.
>most people who vote don't vote on one issue, but
>either on a constellation of issues or personal appeal.
Sure. Yet you're saying that some unconscionable proportion of every
taxpayer's earnings is being filched each and every year against their
will. Surely if tax were widely seen in this light, it would breed more
explicit and successful resistance.
I was raised in a Catholic school system in Oz that educated (after a
fashion) something like a quarter of the population, maybe more, and did it
without a penny from the government. Meanwhile, though, Catholic parents
paid a large chunk of their taxes into the free public system, which was
thus massively subsidized by people who were forbidden by their prelates
from using it. This still seems to me an outrageous injustice, even though
I'd be happy to see religious and other egregiously indoctrinatory schools
wiped from the face of the planet. Eventually, through political
organization, the self-interest of that huge number of Australians forced
changes in the policies of all the parties. Instead of Catholics having
their property in effect stolen and redistributed to other moieties, they
got to share in the common pool. This seems to me a sensible way to
approach problems of that kind.
Damien Broderick
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