All of this!!! I share similar sentiments in my recent post "Don't Ask Me Who I'm Voting For," so, hi, fellow outlier 🙋🏾♀️ I pray the nation recognizes how barbaric it is to try to impose their own will over the entire nation, in lieu of governing only themselves in accordance with God's will.
> I pray the nation recognizes how barbaric it is to try to impose their own will over the entire nation, in lieu of governing only themselves in accordance with God's will.
Outsourcing ethics and engaging in imitative behavior is easy. Developing a conscience that would recognize what you note about government, takes much more effort. Much good work to be done . . .
I feel discouraged. Trump wasn’t the problem. He’s a puppet. The puppeteers behind his campaign who masterminded a platform founded on blameshifting, hatred, lies, and empty promises of a prosperity gospel— they are the real evil. Harris was my only viable alternative. However, I think her campaign got complacent, riding on the evil of the other side, and simply running as a better alternative. It’s not enough to be better than absolute evil.
Either way, we still need to remember that we cannot sit back passively and expect politicians to live the baptismal call for us. No matter who got elected, there is still work for us to do. With Harris, I could still fight the abortion issue by being a witness to other pregnant people in crises. With Trump, I will have to challenge the people around me who jump on the othering bandwagon that his regime has so readily normalized.
I won't quibble with your concerns about Trump, only with the notion that Harris was an alternative to the puppetry and the absolute evil. Harris spent her vice presidency and puppet-orchestrated coup of a presidential campaign LARPing as a retarded person, trying to disguise the absolute evil of her positions behind insane cackling and kindergarten levels of logic and articulation.
Government is absolute evil; it's an archetype of evil. Government is the scaling up and systemizing of evil, with a pre-justification of future evil. There's nothing beyond that; it's a limit, an archetype.
> Either way, we still need to remember that we cannot sit back passively and expect politicians to live the baptismal call for us. No matter who got elected, there is still work for us to do.
Yes, always! I always wonder what the tipping point is for different people arriving at this realization. If Trump's election did it for you and some other folks, then welcome aboard! 😇
Thanks! This was a rough one. My first urge was to merely mock the whole process and crap all over everything. Took some effort to move away from that and make it substantive and constructive.
Distributing resources from the productive economy is completely normal. There are better ways to distribute, but this is where it's at for now. All taxes are paid by spending and all spending is taxed back so the net result is just overhead and some distribution.
> Distributing resources from the productive economy is completely normal.
Unfortunately, yes, extracting and harming the productive activities, have been normalized.
> There are better ways to distribute,
Yes! Spontaneous order does a much better and much more ethically humane job than the imposed order of government. I'm not sure if I understand your final sentence. All government is violence, and all government spending is the stealing of purchasing power from producers, whether the theft occurs through confiscation of property (forms of taxation, etc.), inflation of currency, or a combination of the two. The net result is always economic harm, but this harm can be cleverly masked by dubious metrics (like GDP) and/or by a truly expanding economy that grows despite -- never because -- of the government intrusions.
The government does not "steal" anything, money is spent full stop. People take that money, so the exchange is voluntary. Taxation is just a system of clawing back public spends, it's completely covered by public spending so that nobody pays any tax at all. It does not mathematically exist.
Inflation is to be expected, and everybody adjusts their price accordingly. It does not "steal" from anybody, and it's the best tax strictly driven by market freedom. People set prices based on the money supply.
There is no assumed right to "save" in some kind of currency, although bank interest seems to equal inflation in the long run. We could save in gold and silver coins, real estate and other objects or property. Nothing is perfect and it's not supposed to be either.
Everything is spontaneous order welcome to life. It is pure mythology that some class of producers is exploited by another class of consumers, as we are all producing and consuming. We are all giving value to that money, and most of the value comes from overseas military deployments.
Money is a proxy for goods and services; production -- and proxies, like money -- pre-exist governments.
Governments very much steal by demanding a portion of production (and demanding it at weaponpoint, violently). This violation of property rights is what gives utility to the government's favored currencies, since there will always be an end user (the government) to take the currency.
> Taxation is just a system of clawing back public spends, it's completely covered by public spending so that nobody pays any tax at all. It does not mathematically exist.
That doesn't make sense. Remember that production and media of exchange pre-exist governments. All "public spends" are actually intrusions into the productive economy using a violence-backed currency, the violence being sometimes obvious (like the overseas military deployments you noted) and sometimes being clandestine (like inflating the money supply with new units unbacked by production).
> There is no assumed right to "save" in some kind of currency
Agreed! All economic value is subjective, and there's no guarantee that goods and services will retain value, nor that today's acceptable proxies will remain acceptable proxies in the future.
> Everything is spontaneous order
Some things are *imposed* order, not spontaneous order. Government is *imposed*, hierarchical social order; a monopoly-violence institution; a system of coercive civil authority. If everything were spontaneous order -- meaning, government didn't exist -- I'd have much less to rail against! 🤣
Alas, the lure of imposed order and asserting control over others is a play on primitive, pre-human evolutionary biology. That urge will always exist as long as new humans keep popping up. The message of the Gospel is to overcome that urge, both in your small-scale, intimate dealings and in the kinds of scaled-up, social organizing that you pursue and endorse.
In modern America and Western countries, taxation doesn't look anything like you described. It is neither theft nor violent, there are mythological prosecutions on behalf of tax filings and nonsense like that but it's unconstitutional for a different reason.
There's just no proper need to impose filing requirements or criminal penalties and collect something out of the economy. So it's not the tax which is theft, and it's historically just another way to measure privilege or opportunity. It has nothing to do with property rights, it's under franchise from the state in the first place.
Everything the government does, by definition, is violence. The fact that most people acquiesce when faced with the threat of harm, doesn't make it voluntary (acquiescing under threat of harm is literally coercion, a subset of violence).
> There's just no proper need to impose filing requirements or criminal penalties and collect something out of the economy.
I agree that it shouldn't happen, but it does happen.
> So it's not the tax which is theft
Technically, that *could* be correct, if the confiscated currency's purchasing power never made its way back into the economy, so all purchasing power remained with producers and those to whom producers had voluntarily transferred production-backed purchasing power.
But that's not how it actually happens. Taxes are levied with the aim of redistributing purchasing power, which intrudes upon the natural human rights, including property (which is a natural human right, pre-existing any government-granted privileges). It's why I pointed out in the article that government *spending* is a problem, no matter how it's coercively funded:
"Government spending isn’t a wealth-generating activity; it steals real resources and purchasing power from the productive economy and attempts to redistribute them. But this kind of coercive spending isn’t production, even though it’s included in the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) statistic. This is a big reason why the GDP metric is so dubious as a measure of the economy."
(the hyperlinks within that paragraph don't transfer when pasted into the Comments section, but they're in the article)
I wish the economy operated more like you described it, Tombadil. But, alas, under every monopoly-violence institution in the world, taxation is used by governments to intrude into the productive economy and violate natural human rights. Taxation is theft; taxation is violence.
I've never seen any violence associated with taxation, and you can't identify anything violent either. People get arrested for crime theories, and there's a lot of ritual shaming and religious belief about tax systems. It has nothing to do with the act of taxation itself which is completely impersonal and agnostic
Wow, really excited to have found your substack. I have been on a spiritual journey for awhile and have gotten into the teachings of Jesus in the past few years.
Also, I have been on a journey of letting go of the belief in authority and government. I was following RFK Jr. this year but realized even if an independent won, I am still forcing my views on others, which is always wrong and inconsistent with my moral compass.
I like how you combine both ideas and I see how similar they are in living a morally consistent life.
Thanks, Michael, and welcome to my little corner of the interwebbies 😎
Your journey sounds like a worthy one. I'm on a similar road and like to encourage my fellow travelers -- and grapple with my own beliefs and experience -- with my weekly articles and podcasts. Allbest to you!
All of this!!! I share similar sentiments in my recent post "Don't Ask Me Who I'm Voting For," so, hi, fellow outlier 🙋🏾♀️ I pray the nation recognizes how barbaric it is to try to impose their own will over the entire nation, in lieu of governing only themselves in accordance with God's will.
Thanks for finding my little corner of Substack!
> I pray the nation recognizes how barbaric it is to try to impose their own will over the entire nation, in lieu of governing only themselves in accordance with God's will.
Outsourcing ethics and engaging in imitative behavior is easy. Developing a conscience that would recognize what you note about government, takes much more effort. Much good work to be done . . .
Happy anniversary on Substack.
Thanks! First article published on Nov. 8, 2023, the second Wednesday of November. Next week will be the start of Year 2 of weekly articles.
I feel discouraged. Trump wasn’t the problem. He’s a puppet. The puppeteers behind his campaign who masterminded a platform founded on blameshifting, hatred, lies, and empty promises of a prosperity gospel— they are the real evil. Harris was my only viable alternative. However, I think her campaign got complacent, riding on the evil of the other side, and simply running as a better alternative. It’s not enough to be better than absolute evil.
Either way, we still need to remember that we cannot sit back passively and expect politicians to live the baptismal call for us. No matter who got elected, there is still work for us to do. With Harris, I could still fight the abortion issue by being a witness to other pregnant people in crises. With Trump, I will have to challenge the people around me who jump on the othering bandwagon that his regime has so readily normalized.
I won't quibble with your concerns about Trump, only with the notion that Harris was an alternative to the puppetry and the absolute evil. Harris spent her vice presidency and puppet-orchestrated coup of a presidential campaign LARPing as a retarded person, trying to disguise the absolute evil of her positions behind insane cackling and kindergarten levels of logic and articulation.
Government is absolute evil; it's an archetype of evil. Government is the scaling up and systemizing of evil, with a pre-justification of future evil. There's nothing beyond that; it's a limit, an archetype.
> Either way, we still need to remember that we cannot sit back passively and expect politicians to live the baptismal call for us. No matter who got elected, there is still work for us to do.
Yes, always! I always wonder what the tipping point is for different people arriving at this realization. If Trump's election did it for you and some other folks, then welcome aboard! 😇
Great write up, Dom!
Thanks! This was a rough one. My first urge was to merely mock the whole process and crap all over everything. Took some effort to move away from that and make it substantive and constructive.
Glad you didn’t “Cornette” it :-)
Distributing resources from the productive economy is completely normal. There are better ways to distribute, but this is where it's at for now. All taxes are paid by spending and all spending is taxed back so the net result is just overhead and some distribution.
> Distributing resources from the productive economy is completely normal.
Unfortunately, yes, extracting and harming the productive activities, have been normalized.
> There are better ways to distribute,
Yes! Spontaneous order does a much better and much more ethically humane job than the imposed order of government. I'm not sure if I understand your final sentence. All government is violence, and all government spending is the stealing of purchasing power from producers, whether the theft occurs through confiscation of property (forms of taxation, etc.), inflation of currency, or a combination of the two. The net result is always economic harm, but this harm can be cleverly masked by dubious metrics (like GDP) and/or by a truly expanding economy that grows despite -- never because -- of the government intrusions.
The government does not "steal" anything, money is spent full stop. People take that money, so the exchange is voluntary. Taxation is just a system of clawing back public spends, it's completely covered by public spending so that nobody pays any tax at all. It does not mathematically exist.
Inflation is to be expected, and everybody adjusts their price accordingly. It does not "steal" from anybody, and it's the best tax strictly driven by market freedom. People set prices based on the money supply.
There is no assumed right to "save" in some kind of currency, although bank interest seems to equal inflation in the long run. We could save in gold and silver coins, real estate and other objects or property. Nothing is perfect and it's not supposed to be either.
Everything is spontaneous order welcome to life. It is pure mythology that some class of producers is exploited by another class of consumers, as we are all producing and consuming. We are all giving value to that money, and most of the value comes from overseas military deployments.
Taxation is theft.
Money is a proxy for goods and services; production -- and proxies, like money -- pre-exist governments.
Governments very much steal by demanding a portion of production (and demanding it at weaponpoint, violently). This violation of property rights is what gives utility to the government's favored currencies, since there will always be an end user (the government) to take the currency.
> Taxation is just a system of clawing back public spends, it's completely covered by public spending so that nobody pays any tax at all. It does not mathematically exist.
That doesn't make sense. Remember that production and media of exchange pre-exist governments. All "public spends" are actually intrusions into the productive economy using a violence-backed currency, the violence being sometimes obvious (like the overseas military deployments you noted) and sometimes being clandestine (like inflating the money supply with new units unbacked by production).
> There is no assumed right to "save" in some kind of currency
Agreed! All economic value is subjective, and there's no guarantee that goods and services will retain value, nor that today's acceptable proxies will remain acceptable proxies in the future.
> Everything is spontaneous order
Some things are *imposed* order, not spontaneous order. Government is *imposed*, hierarchical social order; a monopoly-violence institution; a system of coercive civil authority. If everything were spontaneous order -- meaning, government didn't exist -- I'd have much less to rail against! 🤣
Alas, the lure of imposed order and asserting control over others is a play on primitive, pre-human evolutionary biology. That urge will always exist as long as new humans keep popping up. The message of the Gospel is to overcome that urge, both in your small-scale, intimate dealings and in the kinds of scaled-up, social organizing that you pursue and endorse.
In modern America and Western countries, taxation doesn't look anything like you described. It is neither theft nor violent, there are mythological prosecutions on behalf of tax filings and nonsense like that but it's unconstitutional for a different reason.
There's just no proper need to impose filing requirements or criminal penalties and collect something out of the economy. So it's not the tax which is theft, and it's historically just another way to measure privilege or opportunity. It has nothing to do with property rights, it's under franchise from the state in the first place.
Everything the government does, by definition, is violence. The fact that most people acquiesce when faced with the threat of harm, doesn't make it voluntary (acquiescing under threat of harm is literally coercion, a subset of violence).
> There's just no proper need to impose filing requirements or criminal penalties and collect something out of the economy.
I agree that it shouldn't happen, but it does happen.
> So it's not the tax which is theft
Technically, that *could* be correct, if the confiscated currency's purchasing power never made its way back into the economy, so all purchasing power remained with producers and those to whom producers had voluntarily transferred production-backed purchasing power.
But that's not how it actually happens. Taxes are levied with the aim of redistributing purchasing power, which intrudes upon the natural human rights, including property (which is a natural human right, pre-existing any government-granted privileges). It's why I pointed out in the article that government *spending* is a problem, no matter how it's coercively funded:
"Government spending isn’t a wealth-generating activity; it steals real resources and purchasing power from the productive economy and attempts to redistribute them. But this kind of coercive spending isn’t production, even though it’s included in the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) statistic. This is a big reason why the GDP metric is so dubious as a measure of the economy."
(the hyperlinks within that paragraph don't transfer when pasted into the Comments section, but they're in the article)
I wish the economy operated more like you described it, Tombadil. But, alas, under every monopoly-violence institution in the world, taxation is used by governments to intrude into the productive economy and violate natural human rights. Taxation is theft; taxation is violence.
I've never seen any violence associated with taxation, and you can't identify anything violent either. People get arrested for crime theories, and there's a lot of ritual shaming and religious belief about tax systems. It has nothing to do with the act of taxation itself which is completely impersonal and agnostic
Wow, really excited to have found your substack. I have been on a spiritual journey for awhile and have gotten into the teachings of Jesus in the past few years.
Also, I have been on a journey of letting go of the belief in authority and government. I was following RFK Jr. this year but realized even if an independent won, I am still forcing my views on others, which is always wrong and inconsistent with my moral compass.
I like how you combine both ideas and I see how similar they are in living a morally consistent life.
Look forward to following your work.
Thanks, Michael, and welcome to my little corner of the interwebbies 😎
Your journey sounds like a worthy one. I'm on a similar road and like to encourage my fellow travelers -- and grapple with my own beliefs and experience -- with my weekly articles and podcasts. Allbest to you!