>> Please stop coercing him using appeals to emotion and false authority. It's paternalistic and condescending.
Tell me, do you think that when say, 330 million people are systematically punished for attempting to keep their property, something just might, in fact, be wrong?
The part where you have to do semantic contortions in order to make it a true statement. If anyone's guilty of butchering everyday language in order to make an obscure academic edge case, it's your redefinition of extortion to include taxation. Common sense does not make people think "extortion" when they hear "taxation".
>> The part where you have to do semantic contortions in order to make it a true statement. If anyone's guilty of butchering everyday language in order to make an obscure academic edge case, it's your redefinition of extortion to include taxation
to wrest or wring (money, information, etc.) from a person by violence, intimidation, or abuse of authority; obtain by force, torture, threat, or the like.
When a mafia threatens people with violence to make them pay "protection money", it's clearly extortion and clearly immoral.. but when governments threaten people with violence to make them pay taxes, that's.. perfectly fine?
>> Common sense does not make people think "extortion" when they hear "taxation".
Actually, it's brainwashing that prevents people from connecting these dots.
Please stop coercing him using appeals to emotion and false authority. It's paternalistic and condescending.