Arthur Chandler <arthurc@crl.com> said:

Does the government have the right to know how much money I make, and from what sources? The IRS says yes, absolutely. [...] Right now, there seems to be a kind of social contract between us and the government: it protects us, provides free schools, etc etc, in exchange for which we have to pony up a fair share of our earnings. It follows, doesn't it, that the government has a right to enforce its laws saying that everyone must pay that fair share of taxes? [...] What do you think?

I'm a non-standard brand hybrid Libertarian plus other noncategorizable views, and I agree with the notion of the social contract, but I have critiques that fall outside anything you said, which cause me to view with pleasure the possibility of short-circuiting the previous government taxation schemes. I think that government supported infrastructure can be a good thing; I approve of having fire services which are not profit centers, for instance. On the other hand, I'm in favor of minimizing such things, whereas governments tend to maximize the number of "services" and therefore also taxes to support them. Governments and their bureaucracies and services and laws etc. appear to inescapably grow ever-larger over time, regardless of the impact of that bloating. I see online crypto-banking and related technologies/services as a trend that will force governments to downsize back to their appropriate role of providing only the most necessary of infrastructure. The precise nature of "most necessary" is highly controversial. But if they can only collect as much taxes as people are willing to pay in order to maintain minimum infrastructure, then it becomes a system that continues to stay in equilibrium rather than growing out of control. In other words, avoid the tyranny of the majority and of self-serving representative democracy, and create a world in which we get only that which we are willing to pay for. People will pay a lot for that which is truly valuable. At the moment we are a long way from getting what we pay for. Doug -- Doug Merritt doug@netcom.com Professional Wild-eyed Visionary Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow Unicode Novis Cypherpunks Gutenberg Wavelets Conlang Logli Alife HC_III Computational linguistics Fundamental physics Cogsci SF GA VR CASE TLAs