-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Fri, 26 Apr 1996, Michael Loomis wrote:
I have been reading this list to get an idea where Declan gets some of his lunatic ideas and what Rich Graves says when he is not up to Holocaust fetishism. Despite Timothy's claim to the contrary, it seems that the basic point of this list is some libertarian notion that tax evasion is a good thing.
That might be one view, but not mine. I think people who evade income taxes are bad -- they're stealing from the rest of society. But I believe that the growth of cryptoanarchy means that people who make far more money than we do can evade taxes with ever greater ease. The current system puts honest people at a disadvantage, which is never a good thing. The technical and economic analyses presented here are neither good or bad -- they're true or false. I tend to believe that they are more true than false. My semi-conclusion is that in a knowledge and services society like ours, a fair share of income tax cannot be collected from the very rich without imposing totalitarian controls; therefore, government needs to be more entrepreneurial, cut costs, divide labor, and raise revenue through somewhate harder-to-evade sales, real estate, and inheritance taxes. Such a system would probably be more regressive in theory, but not too different in practice -- and it would be honest. Globalization and network-based freedom further weaken the sovereign, geographically defined, vertically integrated nation-state. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. I agree with the crypto-anarchist analysis that the status quo is untenable, but I haven't made up my mind where we should go. My academic background is in Latin America. I've known a lot of governments that really suck, and a lot of revolutions that are even worse.
While I am not clear how serious of threat, if one at all, to a system of fair taxiation, since much of the talk could be simply bluff, I have been made glad for the first time for the War on Drugs. This silly war--tragic in terms of its economic cost and its assault on liberty--at least has forces some government agencies to take you seriously enough to figure out how to derail your plans of tax evasion.
In what way has the War on Drugs derailed tax evasion? Please elaborate. On the contrary, I think it has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of attempts to control tax evasion and smuggling. Thank you for providing this rare insight into how you think. I haven't heard from you in three months; I was starting to wonder. Please drop by and have a beer some time. - -rich FUCKING STATIST and HOLOCAUST FETISHIST http://www.c2.org/~rich/Not_By_Me_Not_My_Views/rebuttal.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMYCTRI3DXUbM57SdAQHLDQQAjg/jsvqt+xAfmXAysAQ/E8519SC57/Tk x46GoHv3ExVQcJNFu2MrePa8OygMzQZ5Iw0OFUhv9XRLJ05ClVUbyff6X5Y2oVyl ZlLb84NrGgl23Ksfi8QkRdlvGgEEEwfB0VFei9mte82HBQvULELM6KmNiBQIgW/R XG7xbWrneKI= =teBf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----