Ugh, not a cryptocurrency trader, but I recently learned that by having U.S. citizenship from birth, and though I never lived there, I'm responsible for FBARs and tax-filing in the states. $4000 or so later and I'm compliant now. What a stressful pain that was.
No surprise that in both Great Britain and the US, the income tax was first instituted during a time of war.
Only during a war, with the demands it places on the public conscience to make sacrifices, would the population acquiesce to an institution so contrary to natural rights and so pernicious to liberty.
Most new taxes come about at times when the locality creating them is under financial stress. Wars are financially stressful. Thus you'd expect that any given new modality of taxation would be created, with some relatively high probability, in proximity to a war.
Financial stress is not exactly the condition correlating with the creation of new taxes.
A tax does not relieve financial stress in any general way. If it did, we would constantly raise taxes.
What a tax does is enforce a collective use of financial resources. The demand for such enforced collectivism increases when a threat emerges that can only be adequately dealt with using such collective action.
A foreign nation, engaged in organized violence, aka war, against a nation, is the most extreme example of a situation where enforcing collective action provides a benefit to the majority, and thus that's when people are most likely to sacrifice their liberty and accept a new tax.
I think every major economy has an income tax. There's quite a bit of syncronization between political systems, because political and cultural trends tend to transcend borders.
There are quite a few countries which do not have global income reporting requirements. Singapore is probably the most notable example.
Some European countries absolve non-domicile residents of the requirement to report global income in exchange for a flat annual fee, like 100,000 EUR.
So it is possible to live a life without being forced to surrender your natural rights like your wealth and your privacy, but it's expensive.
There's got to be a better term than "reverse virtue signaling" to describe how the use of specific terminology (outside of a legal setting) like "pernicious", "females", or "virtue signaling" instantly means that someone can be safely dismissed.
Considering that your comment at issue didn't actually contain a gratuitous use of "female", you perhaps shouldn't focus too much of your argument on that bit and instead defend yourself only in regards to what you're actually being accused of.
You've repeatedly used the term "natural right" without defining what you mean by that, and without explaining why income taxes are a particularly egregious infringement on those rights. All you've done vaguely state that income taxes infringe on a category of rights that by their very name can only be infringed unjustly.
"Pernicious" is not a word that anyone uses conversationally today. It's archaic. (According to Google Ngram, usage of "pernicious" peaked around the time of the American Revolution.) A phrase like "pernicious to liberty" is the kind of thing you write when you want to give the impression that you're quoting a famous scholar from a few centuries ago. It does nothing to explain how income taxes are exceptionally harmful to liberty compared to other means of funding a government. This is not to say that you cannot use the word "pernicious", but your use of it is remarkable. In reality, you're borrowing language from what seems to be a contemporary anti-tax crackpot.
All you did was use uncommon language to repeatedly assert that income taxes are bad. You said nothing to actually support that assertion or provide any more detail. There was nothing superficial or peripheral about your word choice; it was clearly the most carefully thought out aspect of your comment. There's no content in your comment to have a meaningful discussion about except the rhetorical tactics and allusions.
And to cap it off, your first response to criticism was an incorrect usage of the term ad hominem.
>>You've repeatedly used the term "natural right" without defining what you mean by that, and without explaining why income taxes are a particularly egregious infringement on those rights.
I would be happy to debate my use of the term natural rights, but you're moving the goalposts.
Let's reach a resolution on the previously discussed point before moving to another.
The previous point was that dismissing a person, and their argument, merely for their comment containing one of a set of blacklisted words, like "pernicious" or "female", is absurd.
It's obviously anti-intellectual and trying to defend this kind of conduct shows bad faith.
>>This is not to say that you cannot use the word "pernicious", but your use of it is remarkable.
Again, moving the goalposts. Your argument is not the same thing as the one you defended earlier.
I'm only moving the goalposts in that I will not necessarily dismiss you and your comment at the first offense. But when your comment has multiple red flags and little substance, the scales don't tip in your favor. There is absolutely no goalpost-moving involved in expecting your comment to have sufficient substance to balance out the rhetoric.
In a discussion about details of tax policy, I consider it a red flag when someone starts ranting about "natural rights"; they're clearly trying to drag things off-topic, and probably not in a particularly enlightening direction. When the comment goes downhill from there, I'm quite justified in rendering a judgement. There's nothing anti-intellectual about this. It's just a logical reaction to your inability to stay on-topic and level-headed for two whole sentences.
It would be anti-intellectual or at least inadvisably closed-minded to filter out your comments with a blind grep-like process for merely mentioning certain words. But the Bayesian process of reading until I understand what you're trying to say is the only sane way to interact with an Internet that contains an effectively limitless supply of crackpot ideas.
>>I'm only moving the goalposts in that I will not necessarily dismiss you and your comment at the first offense.
Discussions of a social and economic nature are already hard enough to navigate constructively as it is.
I don't feel like dealing with shifts of goalposts on top of it. It just gets far too tedious.
So with all due respect, given your admission that you are changing the subject, I'm going to end our discussion. Not even because what you're doing is necessarily unreasonable. It's just too time-consuming for me to deal with.
It’s just experience in dealing with people online. I apply the same filter to “cuck,” “Overton window” and “Hegelian dialectic” for example. Offline it’s much easier to ascertain intentions and attitudes, and there aren’t millions of people all screaming at once. Online you have to filter, and alt-right buzzwords are excellent components of a healthy filter.
Since when is "overton window" exclusively a right-wing concept? It's been commonly discussed for a very long time. It seems like a bad idea to shut out any conversation that mentions that.
It's a very anti-intellectual approach to dialog. It explicitly ignores the logic of the argument being made. It disqualifies any language containing words that are allegedly associated with some ideological perspective from even being considered.
It creates an ideological echo chamber, as it is completely intolerant to any view that even hints at falling outside of it.
If you do utilize such heuristics, at least don't brag about it, as if it's something reasonable.
I encourage you to spend time in actual academic fora, where language choice absolutely will get you disqualified from a conversation. Nobody is obligated to listen to anybody.
Those in the academic fora do not discount an argument for containing the word "pernicious" or "female". The kind of behaviour that does that is ideologically intolerant to the point of being anti-social.
You can ignore people all you like. But to post a comment telling people you're ignoring the comment because it contained blacklisted words like "female" or "pernicious" is absolutely toxic to a constructive environment for dialog.
You're not simply ignoring a party at that point. You're promoting a pretty extreme form of ideological intolerance, where merely using a particular word is enough to make a snap judgement about a person's entire argument.
>>Fortunately though, as your argument(s) seems to be largely logic-free, it turns out to be very helpful.
Trying to insult me like this is not mature at all.
