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Morality of tax fraud and welfare fraud

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mordecai

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Another matter of Taxes that I despise are property taxes. What right does the government have to tax you on something you have bought and paid for and is legally yours.

To quote an often overused expression, "AMEN, BROTHER!!"

The property tax is one of the most insidious of the regressive taxes. It punishes those who own land. It punishes inheritance. It ultimately is a redistribution of wealth, from the poor to the rich. (Example, the low-income family has lived in a house for generations, dating back to before taxes, or at least to when taxes were a token amount. Wealthy Socialists migrate to the region and start demanding bigger government. Taxes rise. The poor families lose their homes in tax auctions. The wealtier families buy up the homes of the poor, which have 'appreciated in value' due to the distortions and inflations of the market brought on by investing in homes as a commodity instead of as a place to live.)

I am fighting this very battle, at this very time. I think taxes force upon us a lifestyle we do not want. What if I don't wish to commute to the city four hours a day in heavy traffic and pollution, just to earn the kind of salary that a local job cannot provide say, at the local gas station? I might want to stay on my land and raise vegetables in my garden, barter with the neighbors for other things and use solar and wind power and avoid the electric grid altogether. But the tax on my land, regardless of my income, is still levied. So even worse than an income tax, which at least has some regard for one's ability to pay, the property tax is outright armed robbery.

I am not a violent man, but the property tax is one area that makes my blood boil over. I can do nothing about it, other than continue writing my letters to the editor of our local paper and keep pounding rational ideas into the local people. I have a wife and 11 month old daughter, so I have a responsibility to handle this situation in a non-violent manner. But if ever there was even half a reason to understand the nature of terrorism, this has made me grasp the mindset of it. It results when all peaceful means to get an oppressor off your back is exhausted and you throw up your hands (and your intellect) in disgust and do as much damage as possible to the oppressor. I don't condone it, but being cornered by the tax man has caused me to execute a process of thought that gave me insite into terrorism and its motives.

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No one has the right to violate the rights of another correct. The only way to violate the rights of another is through the use of force. Since we give up the right to use force to the government in order to protect our rights from those who would use physcial force. Then the government must have a means to support itself in conducting its business of using physcial force against those who initiates its use against individual rights, the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Taxation is the means upon which the government supports itself in protecting individuals from those who would decide to violoate the rights of the individual. I have no problem with the government taxing me for these purposes, it is all the other programs I disagree with and the government has no right to tax me for its altruistic programs that it has no business in dealing with anyway. IF the government had been focused on its only purpose then maybe September 11th would never have happened.

I fundamentally disagree, on the basis that once government has the power to collect taxes (assuming that it also has the power to initiate force against those who refuse to pay, which would contradict the Objectivist view of the purpose of government), it becomes empowered to expand its powers of collection. This shifts the power and control of government from the People, where it rightly belongs, to the government, and from there, there is no way to control the expansion of government. Our current government is the result of this principle, combined with the lobby system, whereby the legislature is skewed toward serving special interests at the detriment of the public in general.

The only way to fix this would be to write a new Constitution, which would explicitly limit the tax rate, and through a clever set of rules, encompass the many twists of meaning in language that would come in the following centuries that could alter the interpretation of the Constitution. This is one reason that language and grammar as so important. Once the education system changes the meaning of words, they can effectively create a generation of offspring who have a very different interpretation of, say, the Bill of Rights.

If government is solely existing for the protection of individual rights, it cannot contradict that purpose by initiating force against those who, for whatever reason, can not or will not pay the tax.

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I have to say that it was pointed out to me about chapter fifteen in VOS which I intend to go back and reread, I don't think I have read VOS in a couple of years now actually, so as such you do tend to forget somethings. Also this discussion about the government and taxes has gone ahead and got my motor working. So as such with most of that post, you can disregard what I said about the taxes being a right of the government, which is the only error in my thinking for that post.

Edited by Richard Roark
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Understood. I too am a bit 'rusty' on my Objectivism. The last real reading I did was Dr. Peikoff's book "The Ominous Parallels" which was in the 90s. Prior to that, I had read the totality of Ayn Rand's books by 1976. I do need to go back and read each of them again, to refresh my understanding and sharpen my intellect.

I am relieved to find that this group does not condemn individuals who make errors in their epistomology, so long as there is a two-way discourse by which individuals asist eachother toward discovering the truth. That makes this group more effective.

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I am happy I have somebody who reacts similiarly to the whole Property Tax matter. It would be interesting to do a Roark if somebody came to collect on your house, blow the thing up. Oh and even though tempers sometimes might get up a bit, for the most part everybody is rational around here and will work matters out on their own.

Edited by Richard Roark
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I am happy I have somebody who reacts similiarly to the whole Property Tax matter. It would be interesting to do a Roark if somebody came to  collect on your house, blow the thing up. Oh and even though tempers sometimes might get up a bit, for the most part everybody is rational around here and will work matters out on their own.

It's funny you should mention blowing up one's house. I was ponding the moral implications of a "mutially-assured destruction" scenario like that, and whether it would be immoral to cause collateral damage (the neighbors may be affected if the explosion were large enough).

At first, I thought this would be utterly immoral, because blowing up one's home would not be done exclusively at one's own expense, as it would destroy property belonging to others.

But I thought about it more extensively, and asked the question "are the neighbors in complicity with the government, and thereby partly responsible for the violence initiated against the homeowner who didn't pay the tax?

I asked myself this question because I had thought about it in the perspective of a war, rather than a civil matter. We know that when one nation attacks another, and the other retaliates, such retaliation is going to kill a portion of 'innocent' civilian population. This is known in the military as 'collateral damage.' Morally, we cannot sacrifice our soldiers to protect these civilians while destroying the enemy (as we are foolishly attempting in Iraq) and effectively fight a war and stop the enemy.

A corollary to the above is that the so-called innocent population, by its lack of resistance to their government is effectively condoning its policies, and therefore, complicit in the evil commited by its government.

Taking that logic of war to the small scale "war" we have in our example of the homeowner blowing up his house (assuming this occurs at the time of an initiation of force by the tax collecting authorities), we can observe similar parallelisms to the war situation. The neighbors, by their silence, or willingness to pay the tax without protest, become complicit in the force used against the homeowner who did not pay the tax. Their tax money paid to the government, a portion thereof, was certainly funding the initiation of force against the homeowner who did not pay. So are they complicit and guilty of the same evil that their town government is guilty of? And in light of that, does that remove the moral obligation not to harm the adjacent properties when one commits such an act of terror against the attacking parties? (We'll assume for the sake of simplicity that the owner has not family and lives alone.)

I thought it to be a touchy issue until I focused on the value judgements of all parties involved and then it became quite clear to me. Someone give me a reality check, if I'm not making sense here. :)

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Here in Pittsburgh the tallest building in the city is on the auction block for not paying property tax. It is going for 2.5 billion i think or is it million. Well regardless, it is still a shame that people lose their homes because of inability to pay a property tax, that normally supports public schools.

Edited by Richard Roark
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