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Originally Posted by JJRousseau
1) But Yakk, I accept taxes! Just not that fact that I should pay more to drive on the same road use the same water, electricity as you.
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The road/electricty are extremely valueable resources, but thier benefit is not from being able to drive on them and turn on a light. Their main benefit is that they enable the engine of the economy to burn brighter.
You pay for the roads using collective (government) methods not because you want to drive on them, but because the existance of well maintained roads make the entire society richer beyond their costs.
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2) OK, I'll even accept higher taxes based on my assets but as assets are only a small part of the life we are afforded here I will only pay a tiny bit more. We both benefit from freedom, liberty, clean air, clean water, roads, etc, etc so we can both pay equally for that. The services that the govt transfers to me specifically because of my enormous asset base (smirk), I am prepared to pay proportionally more for. How about $20?
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You should pay for your liberty with a tax on your liberty.
As an aside, there are numerous studies that demonstrate that the wealthy care more about clean air than the poor.
As a thought experiment: Bob earns 10,000$ per year, Charlie earns 1 million dollars per year.
Which of these two is more likely to accept "you will earn 1000$ more per year, and in exchange smog levels will double".
If the assets and income that society provides to you mean so little, why are you complaining about losing less than half of it in exchange for liberty, clean air, clean water, etc? If they mean a huge amount to you, then taxing that massive benefit provided to you by a functioning society seems fair.
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3) Well since I don't think either of us wants to live in a dictatorship or an anarchy, there is no point considering those social structures.
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If you don't want to fund a functioning state, then you will be living in a dictatorship or anarchy pretty damn quick. Practically, making a state that is powerful enough to resist being turned into an anarchy or dictatorship is expensive. The people that can afford to prevent it are those which the current state setup allocates control of resources to -- hence, the "tax the people with the money to keep the current state of affairs stable" tactic.
If the government shrunk to less than 1% of the nation's economic output, how long would the nature of the government matter? The government might not be a dictatorship, but it would lack the power to prevent one from forming, or prevent organizations with enough power from just ignoring it.
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4) How do you figure my neighbour's house gains more? Same street light, fire dept, bus stops, water, sewer, garbage. BUT BUT he can afford to send his kids to private school so in fact the rich guy is getting less for his municipal tax dollars than me.
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The property value of his home. When a city becomes a better place to live, home values don't go up by a fixed amount -- they tend to go up by a percentage of the home's value. Or at least I think...
... ya, that will happen. If that wasn't the case, investors/speculators would buy up the undervalued land (because if low-value land has a higher expected value increase, it is undervalued) and correct the market imbalance.
So to the limits of the market's knowledge, when a city becomes a better place, the land serviced by it should increase in value in approximate purportion to it's current price.
Now, given that the job of the city is to make the city a better place to live in, and that the quality of the cities life determines the market value of homes, allocating the cost to pay to make the city a better place to live based off home market price seems reasonable.
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Funny thing is, Yakk, the biggest problem I have with some Libertarians is that they don't accept the notion of ownership. That seems to be the only place you do agree with them.
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I accept ownership. I think it is a very useful legal fiction. For related reasons, I think free markets are a good idea -- they solve a problem.
It doesn't mean that I am about to build a moral philosophy built around ownership. Private ownership is a means to an end.