Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)

Adam Thornton · 19 May 2009, 19:39 · from 2009-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 14:39:04 -0500
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)
In-Reply-To: <13409.67.142.130.18.1242761222.squirrel at brunians.org>
References: <mailman.68838.1242757770.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<4A1304A1.1000901 at verizon.net>
	<13409.67.142.130.18.1242761222.squirrel at brunians.org>
Message-ID: <2BCC6FAA-905B-4A04-BFAE-817E0EDE9BD8 at io.com>

On May 19, 2009, at 2:27 PM, brunians at brunians.org wrote:
> Please do explain how consensual taxation works: I am all ears.

This one's easy.

The government provides services I find beneficial, such as police and  
fire protection, maintained roads, public education, and so forth.

On balance, the amount I'm paying for those services seems broadly  
fair.  Sure, there are inefficiences--waste, corruption, places money  
is spent where I think it shouldn't be and things that don't get  
funded that I think should be--but I am much more in favor of it than  
I would be of a zero-taxation Hobbesian war of all against all.  I  
lack the ruthlessness (not to mention physical conditioning) necessary  
to survive for long in *that* world.

Therefore, taxation is, at least for me, consensual.  Sure, that  
doesn't mean I don't think it can improve--that's why I vote on local  
taxation-related ballot initiatives, for instance--but it represents  
something much closer to my ideal state than its absence would.

Adam

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net