Taxes on hard drives

[Ray Dillinger]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:

>At 6:27 PM -0800 2/14/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>>
>>BTW; I don't generally download music: I tried it and the sound
>>quality of MP3 is crap.  I don't use windows; the engineering
>>quality of the product is crap.  But I'd still rather pay taxes
>>on hard drives than have snooping software installed in Windows.
>>See, given the choice, I'd rather have taxes rather than snooping
>>software accepted as "normal". -- At least for now.
>
>A tax on a hard drive is a theft, a shake down. Rent-seeking.

No argument here.  That's absolutely true.  All I'm saying is 
that I'd rather be subject to theft (at predictable times and 
in predictable amounts) rather than invasion and monitoring.  
It's not that one is good; it's just slightly less annoying, 
inconvenient, and evil.

The real solution, of course, is open-content music.

>Why should someone who is not downloading music or images (or 
>whatever it is the tax is allegedly meant to support) be taxed thusly?

They shouldn't be.  Now, do you *really* want the infrastructure 
in place that would permit tax collectors to distinguish between 
those who are and those who aren't?  Didn't think so.

>Should paper be taxed so as to support writers?

Interesting analogy.  I hope someone uses it in court. 

>As to your preference for a tax on hard drives over snooping software 
>in Windows, the solution is to to not use products with such snooping 
>features. Or to find ways to cripple the functionality (as was done 
>with the barcode scanner giveaway of several months back).

Get real.  If they put snooping software in windows, it will be 
accepted as "normal" within a few years, and the leap is short 
from there to "legal requirement".   I don't want the "legal 
requirement", and I'm willing to pay money (extortion money if 
you think about it, but what the hell, that's nothing new where 
governments are involved) to avoid it. 

>The "tax" approach is attractive to the thugs for the obvious 
>reasons: more opportunities to shake down the proles and collect a 
>percentage for themselves.

Yep.  No argument there; all that means is that in the fight to 
keep snooping software out of operating systems, political greed 
is one of the weapons that's on our side.  What's your point?


				Bear