Arguing On The Internet Again

I found a text file I had saved from an old rambling Facebook discussion on taxes and schools with the intent to make it into a Steemit post. As is often the case with statists, instead of responding to my arguments, they attacked my character, told me to move if I didn't like it, and moved the goalpost instead of addressing what I actually wrote.

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Me: Taxation is extortion. Government monopoly services are not immune to the waste and abuse inherent in all monopolies. Stop stealing our wealth.

Statist A: Idiots like you are why public schools are in such desperate shape.

Me: Right. The model is broken, the funding method is dishonest, but dissent is the problem? If the only response you are capable of making is calling me an idiot, that is called an ad hominem, or, "against the man" argument. You avoided the actual argument itself entirely.

Taxation is extortion. "Pay what we demand, or we will hurt you." Education is a monopoly service. Waste and abuse are inevitable results when choice is forbidden. It's an example of the economic calculation problem, where neither the producer nor the consumer has any sound basis for analysis of the cost/benefit. When people who wish to choose an alternative must still fund the government monopoly first, that isn't allowing choice, that's still extortion. Government has no legitimate claim to our lives, liberty, or property. Any such claim, including taxation, is usurpation.

Statist A: If you are incapable of contributing to the needs of our functioning society go live on a desert island somewhere. Your libertarian utopia with no taxes, no rules and no responsibility doesn't exist.

Me: Statist A, again, that is a non-response, this time in the form of the ergo decedo fallacy. I do not oppose cooperation, society, free markets, or progress. You assume that the status quo warrants respect for what reasons? As Frédéric Bastiat wrote back in 1850,

...Every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."

Statist B: Work for welfare benefits mandatory. Support our schools instead of local school districts in areas of massive Federal ownership taxing landowners excessively. Fed do not pay property taxes. [This is what B wrote. Decipher it as best you can.]

Me: Even if I put on my minarchist dunce cap and assert that the government serves some legitimate functions, it is patently obvious that federal land holdings outside the strictly established Constitutional limits need to be addressed. Here in the west, the federal government "owns" much (if not most) of the land within the states.

Statist C: For you ANTI-TAXERS. Tell us how to pay for police, fire dept. streets, highways, schools, and fish & game management as just a few of the many things taxes pay for. Let's hear your ways to supply these things. Or do you propose to go back to 1860.

Me: An analogy, since you brought up 1860: "For all you SLAVERY ABOLITIONISTS. Tell us how you grow cotton, sugar, or tobacco!" Can you see how this sidesteps the question of justice in a false appeal to utility? Many fire departments are staffed by volunteers, and there is no reason they couldn't be funded by numerous means such as homeowner insurance premiums.

"But who would build the roads?" Look up the Lincoln & Dixie highway networks, the Bridge of the Gods, and other infrastructure built largely or even completely with voluntary independent funding. Billboard revenue, auto insurance, trucking fees, and yes, independent funding by petroleum companies without the middleman of government tax bureaucracies are all possibilities. In housing developments and neighborhoods, the roads are built before the property is sold, and the cost of access is incorporated into the cost of the lot. There is no shortage of solutions, just a monopoly running on the inertia of unimaginative bureaucracy and public ignorance.

Schools are an abysmal failure by every metric. The model is broken, The funding exorbitant, the bureaucracy bloated, and the results pathetic. However, an extortion-funded monopoly has little real incentive to make real improvements. No Child Left Behind? Common Core? Public choice economics explains the mechanisms that make these perpetual calls for reform just another example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The same case applies to every other issue where people assume government management results in progress, and appeal to the status quo as if it constituted an answer to any given question, while turning a blind eye to the injustice, waste, and abuse that pervades these "solutions."

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Aside from fixing a few typographical errors, anonymizing the conversation, addition of links, and the omission of some irrelevant agreement comments, this is the thread as it occurred. Can you see how apologists for the State either deflect the question at hand through fallacies, or else offer half-baked opposition to a government scheme only to promote a different government scheme? Instead of addressing my actual arguments regarding the legitimacy of taxation, they cannot comprehend dissent, and must attack their interlocutor rather than address the root issue.

Similarly, opposition to war means one isn't patriotic, or perhaps even sides with the enemy like a dirty traitor. Never mind that at the time of this post, it has been nearly eighty years since there has been a formal declaration of war from Congress, and how even the mild appeal to Constitutional statist procedure is hand-waved away in the name of expedience whenever it suits the political class should constitute an immediate loss of legitimacy even under statist standards.

The State is the god of the majority of the population. It can do no wrong, no matter how corrupt the men who act in its name. They don't care about their own double standards or false justifications if they think it is a boon to their false pride or personal wealth. And that idea is our true enemy.

And taxation is still theft. Image credit