shirgall

When did I say any of this?

Do you consider baptism and confirmation to be the starting point of religious indoctrination?

I was born an atheist like everyone else, and stayed that way. Saved me a lot of grief. What is the age of consent for life-changing events like sex and marriage? Why is the age of consent for religion lower?

Show how it is a tautology. I'm referring to private property, of course, derived from ownership of one's own body and what one produce's with it. Your example required slavery to a tyrant, which is not akin.

1. You said "owe", not me. As for "honest debate", see #2. Taking someone's property without their consent is theft. 2. It's not important just because you feel it is. We can't even start arguing because we can't even agree on a definition. Common terminology and understanding is necessary before we go anywhere. Taking someone's property without their consent is theft. 3. See #2. Taking someone's property without their consent is theft. 4. "Wishing" things to change sounds a lot like prayer. And it's just as effective, too. Also, taking someone's property without their consent is theft. PS,

Explicit permission for something to happen to something under your control, freely given.

I don't owe you anything. I choose to participate of my own free will. Are you trying to force me into your irrelevant side missions? "Another settlement needs our help", indeed. I have no idea when the first tax was imposed. The Duke of Luxumbourg takes things without consent. The Pope pushes religion (Catholicism *and* socialism), on children.

A fraudster who seeks to convince others to give him property based on falsehoods. Not a thief, but certainly not a role model.

It's not about preferences, it's about private property. If my body or something I've made with it can be taken without consent (that is, taken by using threat, force, or fraud), the concept of private property has no meaning. I don't know why you are erecting this construction of preferences based on consent. Is it universally-preferable to steal? If everyone stole all the time the very idea of stealing has no meaning because private property has no meaning. Anyone could take anything they wanted. Therefore it cannot be universally-preferable to steal. I'm not sure what relevance your further extrapolations have on the matter. I didn't bring up determinism at all.

I got 100% European, primarily British and Irish (almost 40%), and the rest was Scandinavian (especially Finnish), with smaller amounts of French and German.

Indeed, I don't know what's wrong with the definition of theft as "taking property from someone without their consent", but apparently that's not manipulable.

Your moral definition doesn't actually say what the behavior and conditions are, so I'm going to reject it.

No, we can't, because it's a poor metaphor. A "corporation" is a creation of a state. If you prefer to organize a group of toughs to own a piece of land, protect its borders, and impose its will upon everyone in that piece of land then you have just created another state, so why bother using a different name to describe it?

All self-defense is taken with an eye to survival, not principle. There is no duty to kill. There is a duty to live, if not for yourself, then for all that depend on you. Also, the circumstance that justifies lethal force is the immediate, otherwise unavoidable, danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent. Since I've seen people evade taxes and get imprisoned, I will stick to avoiding taxes and lay low. My family doesn't eat very well when I'm in prison. I'm under no illusions that I've consented to taxation, though. Compliance is not acceptance. It may be the price we pay for living the way we do, but that doesn't make it right. If you think the ends justify the means, you are not dealing in morality. You are dealing in a particularly nihilist form of pragmatism. Some might call it Russian fatalism. Where do you think *they* got it?

He digs deeply into his experience with atheism in The Art of the Argument. Since he overcame indoctrination to reach atheism through logic, it's different than others who came to atheism by being born into it and never indoctrinated, or those that came to it via rebellion against their parents. To some, like me, atheism is a lack of belief in any gods, and is no more special than a lack of belief in dragons, unicorns, or square circles. To others it is a rejection of all cultural values to the point of becoming a necessary element of post-modernism. To spot the difference, note the difference between the people that feel the needs to join an organization of atheists that form a community versus those that are just tired of religion being crammed in their face all the time and just want to be left alone.

We aren't talking about justice, we are talking about taxation being theft because it involves taking things from people without their consent.

Every *resident* of Luxumbourg has to pay tax on global income and has a parliamentary representative democracy. Doesn't look like unanimous consent to me. By the way, I do support corporate income taxes if corporations are voluntary to create, cannot hold exclusive access to any particular market, and if transactions among individuals are not taxes. I'd also like to see all restrictions on government (namely, rights) applied to corporations as they are wholly creations of the state to begin with. Why are you introducing the term "just"? The dividing line we have been talking about is consent.

Uh, no. I agreed that I was the person the card identified. I got the first card because it was required to operate a motor vehicle on public streets. My social security card I signed because it was required to open a bank account and it said right on it that it was not to be used for identification (tells you how old I am). My concealed carry permits were required to carry a concealed weapon in public places, but that scope was limited to. Even my passport signature only said that the passport properly identified me so I could get back into the country when I traveled. My voter registration card also only was attestation of identity. The only time I was ever required to present my voter registration card was at a Libertarian Party business convention to prove I was a legal voter because the party did not want their convention's votes thrown out. Did I consent to these purposes? Perhaps. But you cannot use these to prove that I consented to having a third of my income taken from me on a regular basis or to pay rent to the government for my house.

Good contracts lay out what will happen if the participants are no longer willing, or no longer able, to perform their activities. When you agree in advance what happens when you want out of a deal, it makes things go more smoothly. I think part of the difficulty is the difference between latitude (the scope or breadth of actions from which one is allowed to choose) and freedom (the capacity to choose actions without the threat of force). I can choose to avoid taxes. I am not free to evade taxes.

What you are not getting is that consequentialist justification does not imply consent. Consent is giving permission to incur an obligation of one's free will. Permission given under duress is not acceptance, it is compliance borne of fear of reprisal. Your lifeboat scenario has no applicability to real life, especially since you are asking if governments are morally justified. Their justification has nothing to do with morality, it has to do with pragmatism.

I'm not going to write you a detailed report about the sucking. The best option was to stay put and lay low. There is no place in the world I could find where you can go without fear that some government will hunt you down and extract value from you and yet provide for myself and my family. Antarctica is specifically forbidden from settlement by treaty. The unclaimed territory you spoke of was recently the site of refugee overrun and less recently civil war. You are being specious. You have no solution. None of the options you offered allows me to move there tax-free, because there's even a tax for renouncing your citizenship. I don't want your help. I want you to recognize that socialists don't understand consent and have to be restricted in their influence as much as possible as a result.

I didn't disregard it. It was specious. The Gobi Desert is part of a country that has massive taxes, so your emotional reaction is unwarranted. http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/mongolia/paying-taxes Where was this place that had no theft in it that I could go to again? Especially a place where moving there would not cost me most of my assets? I've looked into it, and every option sucked. So, instead, I made do.

That's a straw man. I'm just pointing out it's not so simple to "love or it or leave it". Your analysis about how much I really care is even more shallow than your assessment of how much I really care. I ran for office. I helped others run for office. I taught people how to defend themselves. I have engaged in debate for decades. I have supported the development of methodologies that leverage reason, logic, and real-world data. I have raised a family. None of what you said changes my conclusion that consent is a mystery to socialists.

The cost of moving is huge and also under duress. And, there's no place to move to where your consent is respected. Thus, you make the best of a bad situation, but that does not mean you consent.

Taking things from you without your consent is theft. Giving you things without your consent is, what, exactly? Gifts (rewards, memento) and presents (donations) are given without anything expected in return. That's not the case with government services. They want obedience, allegiance, and respect, at a minimum. It's a transaction, but you are given no choice by to give what is asked and receive what is thrust upon us, thus, an imposition. "Easier" doesn't make something right. Slavery was easier for some. It was wrong. Modern taxation is a new form of slavery, a more insidious form based on the complacency and acceptance of the populace. Socialists don't understand consent. Most have have it taught out of them for decades. Paid for with money stolen from their ancestors. People who accept it outweighing people that don't completely misunderstands the importance of consent. Is it right if all the frat brothers vote which gal that passed out at the bar to rape just because they outnumber her? Taking things from people without their consent is wrong. What we do with that information is what matters. The United States was a better country when they knew things were wrong. "A standing Army is wrong, but we have a hostile nation at our doorstep." When everyone involved knows that something is wrong, but a crisis has to be handled, that's fine. When they forget it is wrong, or invent crises that live in perpetuity, they become tyrants.