Marxist Exploiters

[DeistPaladin]

Are you for real? You want to turn this joke of a thread into a serious discussion? Fine.

I've been in the habit all my life of over-thinking things. Why stop now?

Suppose tomorrow George Bush perpetrates a coup against the current government with the military and achieves his life-long dream of suspending all civil liberties and making your country a "Christian Nation". Suspend you disbelief for the moment and assume this happens and - as a result - a lot of advantages of living in a civilized society get taken away. Do you think you can make a legal argument that your taxes should be reduced accordingly?

A good point. In such a scenario, more of my tax money would be spent on funding the Christian agenda and meanwhile much of my liberty, which civilization is supposed to protect, would be taken away. This is why a representative system is so important. A government, to be legitimate, must balance following the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority (the latter usually done in the courts, prompting conservatives to whine about "judicial activism" but that's another topic). A government that doesn't do so loses some of it's legitimacy. Lately, simple-minded conservatives have been putting on tri-corner hats and pretending they are the successors to the "Tea Party", forgetting that it's not taxes that we rebelled against but taxation without representation.

[example of someone living in the wild] - do you think he'd be exempt from paying taxes?

He probably wouldn't end up paying taxes just from being "under the radar". He wouldn't have an income nor would he, living off the land in the wild, have any recorded property. Unfortunately for him, he'd have no recourse if a developer came along to the land he was living on and purchased it.

...beyond the necessary provision of those advantages, the money can be spent on anything else such as large scale social development.

I'm not against having a discussion on what we should or shouldn't be doing with our tax money and, sooner or later, our government's financial problems may force that discussion to happen. America maintains a costly empire that I think we could do without and the rest of the world might be happy to see recede. We're still running in the "arms race" as if the Cold War were still going on because corruption in DC and the military-industrial complex won't allow it to end. Corruption is so much a part of American politics that it's done out in the open (it's called "lobbying") with rules in place for what constitutes good corruption from bad corruption. I didn't mean to suggest a rose-colored view of our current arrangement. Far from it. But what Koolaid would replace it with would only create a power-vacuum that already overpowered corporations would fill.

Secondly, your view of Libertarianism seems limited to the American understanding of it.

I'll buy that. Our political discourse in my country, particularly from our right wing, has gotten so shrill that we're redefining a lot of labels. "Socialism" to some here means any government regulation or safety net at all. "Libertarian" may also be an abused term for those here who are in fact promoting the corporate agenda. The Koch brothers describe themselves as "libertarian" if that tells you anything.