Roads is usually the go to argument when it comes to taxes, but there is a better more community focused one that benefits an entire community more: Sanitation.
If Sanitation isn’t maintained properly, it can leak into the communities drinking water and kill people. All it takes is one tank, on one private property, not being changed in a timely manner for whatever reason.
Sewage maintenance is also extremely important on these situations and having a company to monitor these is a must.
Public services like fire, police and ambulances also should also be paid by the community. It’d really suck if a fire truck doesn’t come to your house until you pay the service charge of putting out the fire that is destroying your lively.
And as a lot of people like to think cops are corrupt, they will protect your belongings from those looking to take them from you and your neighbours.
Gated communities do not work in large urban areas and can cause elitism, and caste systems to develop.
And then expect to be charged out the bum for the "privelege" of using roads. Hope anyone isn't poor.
Hope you don't need a road to your house either. Why would a private company do anything other than rip people off and try to make money off of them.
The roads near your house should be an propriety of those who live in your neighborhood
So people should pool their money, like as a tax, in order to build the roads to their neighborhood - this is what happens already.
Someone already figured this out literally hundreds of years ago.
It's when the government starts poking it's nose into 'everything' that things start going awry. That and holding all of the true power at the highest level (**cough** Monarch/Emperor/Grand Poobah **cough**)....
And then expect to be charged out the bum for the "privelege" of using roads. Hope anyone isn't poor.
Hope you don't need a road to your house either. Why would a private company do anything other than rip people off and try to make money off of them.
The roads near your house should be an propriety of those who live in your neighborhood
So people should pool their money, like as a tax, in order to build the roads to their neighborhood - this is what happens already.
Someone already figured this out literally hundreds of years ago.
It's when the government starts poking it's nose into 'everything' that things start going awry. That and holding all of the true power at the highest level (**cough** Monarch/Emperor/Grand Poobah **cough**)....
Except that monarchs had much less power than politicians on modern state. First that during the feudalism, in order to make an war, an king needs that most nobles agrees with him, since the power is more distributed. With the modern state, an president can spend tax money or debt money into bombing civilians in another side of the world after preaching against interventionism for decades and nobody can make him account.
Except that monarchs had much less power than politicians on modern state. First that during the feudalism, in order to make an war, an king needs that most nobles agrees with him, since the power is more distributed. With the modern state, an president can spend tax money or debt money into bombing civilians in another side of the world after preaching against interventionism for decades and nobody can make him account.
That depends on the monarchy. In a feudal monarchy, the nobility leveraged a lot of power - of course, they also taxed their lands and compelled them to fight in wars on behalf of their liege as well as on behalf of their own ambitions.
In an absolutist monarchy, the King wields absolute authority... and can still tax his population as he sees fit.
Frankly - from the point of view of a citizen, government is government. Democracy just allows you to participate, most others don't.
And then expect to be charged out the bum for the "privelege" of using roads. Hope anyone isn't poor.
Hope you don't need a road to your house either. Why would a private company do anything other than rip people off and try to make money off of them.
The roads near your house should be an propriety of those who live in your neighborhood
So people should pool their money, like as a tax, in order to build the roads to their neighborhood - this is what happens already.
Someone already figured this out literally hundreds of years ago.
It's when the government starts poking it's nose into 'everything' that things start going awry. That and holding all of the true power at the highest level (**cough** Monarch/Emperor/Grand Poobah **cough**)....
Except that monarchs had much less power than politicians on modern state. First that during the feudalism, in order to make an war, an king needs that most nobles agrees with him, since the power is more distributed. With the modern state, an president can spend tax money or debt money into bombing civilians in another side of the world after preaching against interventionism for decades and nobody can make him account.
Who holds private police accountable? You are arming a set of individuals, giving them access to personal information. What stops them from going corrupt and start bribes and racketeering?
semiticgod, using your definition of government, private associations, an company, an church, an tribe and almost every type of authority are governments... And i agree that people are selfish, so people in charge of the government.
I don't see any similarities at all. Neither private organizations, companies, churches, or tribes have the ability to use physical force to take people's money against their will, nor do they have the power to directly punish people with imprisonment, and precious few of them either elect their leaders (democracy), have dynastic lines (monarchy), or have leaders take power through force (dictatorship). The leadership of non-government organizations is usually selected through much more informal means.
Those are the distinguishing characteristics of a government, and no other entities possess any of them.
Who holds private police accountable? You are arming a set of individuals, giving them access to personal information. What stops them from going corrupt and start bribes and racketeering?
Or from fighting each other over your business. In Philadelphia, rival fire departments used to try to prevent their competitors from getting to their clients houses during fires. Some things just cannot be done on a for profit basis.
I don't see any similarities at all. Neither private organizations, companies, churches, or tribes have the ability to use physical force to take people's money against their will, nor do they have the power to directly punish people with imprisonment,<...>
If you live on northern europe during the ice age and your tribe "banned" you, is a death sentence. But yes, my examples are very different than an state. Mafia is an much better analogy. Except that Mafia is much less evil.
Frankly - from the point of view of a citizen, government is government. Democracy just allows you to participate, most others don't.
That is not true. Democracy only allows the guy who can manipulate better the population to get elected. I can't find an single case of monarchy failing and it becoming better for the population.
Anyone believes that Stalin was better than the worst Czar?
Anyone believes that the failed Weimar republic is better than the Second Reich?
Anyone believes that the Bribecracy that exists on Brazil is better than the empire of Brazil?
Who holds private police accountable? You are arming a set of individuals, giving them access to personal information. What stops them from going corrupt and start bribes and racketeering?
Or from fighting each other over your business. In Philadelphia, rival fire departments used to try to prevent their competitors from getting to their clients houses during fires. Some things just cannot be done on a for profit basis.
[/quote]
And the backlash that they suffered? Anyway, some things should't be made with political interests in mind. Why treat diseases that would cost a lot but are very rare in a public heath care. An private health secure would manage this situation far easier. If they are preventing other companies from helping then, it should be an crime...
Roads is usually the go to argument when it comes to taxes, but there is a better more community focused one that benefits an entire community more: Sanitation.
If Sanitation isn’t maintained properly, it can leak into the communities drinking water and kill people. All it takes is one tank, on one private property, not being changed in a timely manner for whatever reason.
Sewage maintenance is also extremely important on these situations and having a company to monitor these is a must.
Public services like fire, police and ambulances also should also be paid by the community. It’d really suck if a fire truck doesn’t come to your house until you pay the service charge of putting out the fire that is destroying your lively.
And as a lot of people like to think cops are corrupt, they will protect your belongings from those looking to take them from you and your neighbours.
Gated communities do not work in large urban areas and can cause elitism, and caste systems to develop.
My personal favorite in this vein is copyright, patents, intellectual property. Who protects these things in a government-less society?
It's especially germane because libertarians love to crow their quasi-social darwinist claptrap about "producers". But without anybody to protect the fruits of intellectual labor, there will be zero motivation to actually create all the things that make our society worth living in. A core pillar of the free market -- the thing that allows for inventions, books, movies, music, video games -- it doesn't exist without government protection.
So yeah, infrastructure is key obviously. But the very ability to create things intellectually, inventions that have made our infrastructure far beyond what existed in the middle ages, is impossible without this. I'll never understand how doctrinaire libertarians miss this.
Except that monarchs had much less power than politicians on modern state. First that during the feudalism, in order to make an war, an king needs that most nobles agrees with him, since the power is more distributed. With the modern state, an president can spend tax money or debt money into bombing civilians in another side of the world after preaching against interventionism for decades and nobody can make him account.
This is just historically inaccurate. Not all "monarchs" existed under the very specific European feudal system you're referring to. But even in the case of Europe, monarchy survived beyond feudalism, until even the early 20th century, with a variety of far reaching colonial empires with a strong centralized government.
My personal favorite in this vein is copyright, patents, intellectual property. Who protects these things in a government-less society?<...>A core pillar of the free market -- the thing that allows for inventions, books, movies, music, video games -- it doesn't exist without government protection.
Do you know something called contract? If to watch an movie, you signed an contract to not "share" the movie, share the movie would be an "contract violation", but not an "propriety infringement" because lets be honest, propriety rights exist from limited resources....
About the development of technology, a lot of technology got developed before the copyright laws. Keep in mind that a lot of intellectual work like discoveries are not covered on IP laws. and that a lot of companies profit from softwares under GPL.
An junk music made in few minutes is covered by the copyright law, but an formula that took decades is not. Using your logic, nobody would try discover new formulas. Keep in mind that "You cannot patent a formula. However, you can patent an application of that formula" so if an guy from South Pole applies the gravity formula in a process, he can prevent everyone in the world, from US to Japan from using the same process. That is ludicrous. ( https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-cant-be-patented.html )
So sign contracts to watch movies. Who enforces these contracts? Private police?
This. But it's just the tip of the iceberg of his argument's shortcomings.
The idea that you cannot pirate a movie without first buying a theater ticket or DVD/streaming is just untrue. Secondly, once a movie gets leaked online, how does a theater ticket contract prevent people from downloading the movie from some publicly available pirate site? These ideas haven't been given a moment of self-scrutiny.
I mean, the music industry as it had been constructed for half a century DIED because of Napster. There wasn't really any way to convince people not to just hop online and have access to literally any piece of music they could ever want in file sizes that wouldn't fill a hard drive overnight. It would take them 10-15 years before they KINDA figured it out with streaming services (which is also where TV is headed, but are still holding down the fort because the telcom companies also sell the internet service). When I think of the thousands of dollars I wasted on CDs (which would one day end up getting stolen almost completely, thankfully I'd made digital backups of the entire collection), I still cringe.
However, the point is, it used to be a big event to go buy an anticipated album in the late '90s. It was commonplace for big releases to sell 5 or even 10 million copies, sometimes a million in one week. Then I graduated high school, went to college, and my roommate (who I hated but that is besides the point) had literally thousands of songs just sitting on his desktop all acquired by a new program called "Napster". Within 6 months, everyone was no longer coming to parties with their 48-slot CD cases, but with nearly blank discs with nothing written on them but "Party Mix February 2001". The industry never recovered.
Incidentally, my most vivid memory from the era of the largest and most pervasive case of mass copyright infringement and theft in recent history (as in almost every college student participated in it) was that a jam-band cover version of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" was UNIVERSALLY mislabeled by everyone on every file-sharing service as being by Phish, when in fact it was a band called The Gourds, who to this day have gotten no credit for a song everyone who is around 35-40 years old listened to for their entire college experience.
@Balrog99: Why would it be less reliable instead of more? It's easier to collect large amounts of data these days, statistics has advanced over time, and, unlike previous decades, there's a smaller portion of the population that can't be reached by phone or online, reducing the selection bias of older polls.
I have a theory: I myself don't ever answer phone calls or e-mails from unknown sources and almost everybody I know tells me they do the same thing. This leads me to believe that it's hard to conduct a scientific survey anymore. Only a certain sub-set of people are going to trust a polling company (or any random contact) with all the scams and data-mining out there.
You have a Hypothesis, not a theory. You should do some studies to verify it. Then maybe it will be supported enough to be a theory.
There would be a rule against that, and the response to breaking the rule would be doing something to punish Howard, Trish, and Bob. That would either involve forcibly taking the funds or inflicting some unrelated punishment until they contributed to the neighborhood. In order to do that, Mike, Michelle, and Bill need to be physically stronger than Howard, Trish, and Bob, but then, what if the physically stronger side refuses to pay? In that case, you would need a neutral body that was strong enough to enforce the rules.
In other words, a government. And the best way to pick who gets to control that neutral body is to have all six neighbors vote for a separate leader, to make sure that no one of them can dominate the others uncontested.
In other words, a democracy.
Government is simply a means of solving problems that aren't solving themselves. People are selfish and the vast majority of folks will not lift a finger or spend a dollar to help the community unless everyone is required to do the same.
I agree with much of the above, but I think there's good evidence that the vast majority of people will actually lift a finger to help a closed community. The social pressures to do so are extremely strong (think Amish), quite apart from any altruistic motives.
Historically, most communities were far more closed than they are today. That's why early roads for instance were often privately funded and maintained (think of the Turnpike movement). If nearly all users of the roads are locals there's a clear advantage to the community of maintaining them.
However, once communities become more open the problem of 'free riders' from outside the community becomes evident and people are no longer willing to maintain assets. There's also the reverse problem with liabilities - communities are usually happy to pollute a river causing problems for those downstream, but are very unhappy with other communities upstream of them doing the same thing ...
There are attempts to form closed (gated) communities today and recreate local islands that help themselves, but not surrounding areas. There are huge problems with those though. They can work well within the community, but the interaction around the edges always causes friction - a significant reason for having governments is to manage that friction.
So sign contracts to watch movies. Who enforces these contracts? Private police?
This. But it's just the tip of the iceberg of his argument's shortcomings.
The idea that you cannot pirate a movie without first buying a theater ticket or DVD/streaming is just untrue. Secondly, once a movie gets leaked online, how does a theater ticket contract prevent people from downloading the movie from some publicly available pirate site? These ideas haven't been given a moment of self-scrutiny.
What prevents it now? I can't post piracy "propaganda" here, so i will only say that this is not restricted to movies... Most "dead" mmos have private servers operating right now. Imagine that the Owner is living in Eastern Europe with an server operating on Caiman Islands, like an server from an famous mmo that i will not name. How the ""owner"" of the game could prevent people from accessing the private server in a small British territory or sue the owner? Or are you advocating for an world government? Should the British government forces his overseas territory into an "new colony status" where they decide the territory rules?
This not mentioning that IP laws make the gap between rich and poor countries, big and small business owners, much bigger. Is thanks to copyright laws that there are draconian laws like article 13. Copyright is a euphemism for state enforced monopoly.
@Balrog99: Why would it be less reliable instead of more? It's easier to collect large amounts of data these days, statistics has advanced over time, and, unlike previous decades, there's a smaller portion of the population that can't be reached by phone or online, reducing the selection bias of older polls.
I have a theory: I myself don't ever answer phone calls or e-mails from unknown sources and almost everybody I know tells me they do the same thing. This leads me to believe that it's hard to conduct a scientific survey anymore. Only a certain sub-set of people are going to trust a polling company (or any random contact) with all the scams and data-mining out there.
You have a Hypothesis, not a theory. You should do some studies to verify it. Then maybe it will be supported enough to be a theory.
Well, I don't have much time to do a study but you're right, hypothesis it is. Maybe when I retire and don't need my full-time RL job I can focus on anthropology or political science but that won't be for a long while. In the mean-time, maybe you could cut me a little slack on the verbiage. You know what I meant...
Edit: Hmmm, in thinking about it, this would be a very challenging study. I wouldn't be able to use phones or computers at all to gather the data. I'd have to hoof it and ask people personally while trying to keep the demographics scientific. This would be a monumental task requiring multiple pollsters in multiple varied locations. Yikes!
@Balrog99 You seem to like telling people here that you're a scientist quite often (I would too!), so I'm gonna hold you to a standard appropriate for that. Nothing personal, just pride for the occupation.
I want to agree reflexively but is there any evidence of this? The source of the lack of freedom in any society isn't taxation.
When you think about societies that aren't free, tax is not the problem it's an authoritarian government restricting what you can say and do with your body.
I want to agree reflexively but is there any evidence of this? The source of the lack of freedom in any society isn't taxation.
When you think about societies that aren't free, tax is not the problem it's an authoritarian government restricting what you can say and do with your body.
Freedom to do anything that doesn't violate third part rights should be allowed. And the problem with autoritarian government is not only restrict what you can say and do with your body, is that they spend a lot of resources that could be used against real criminals to punish people from crime without victims.
Understand that despite how the term has been used as a negative, there IS class warfare going on in this country, and it is being waged almost exclusively by the rich:
I want to agree reflexively but is there any evidence of this? The source of the lack of freedom in any society isn't taxation.
When you think about societies that aren't free, tax is not the problem it's an authoritarian government restricting what you can say and do with your body.
High taxes restrict your individual freedom to move, buy and sell freely, own property or invest in your own and your family's future. They can also stifle research and long-term investing on a corporate scale (not that many companies choose to so this rather than pay higher dividends or buy back stocks - but hey, if I had more money in my pocket I might be able to take advantage of stocks and/or dividends myself). High taxes are also most frequently paid by the lower (think sin-taxes and energy-taxes) and middle-classes, not the higher-class folks who have many tried-and-true methods of avoiding them (as well as there not being enough of them to pay for everything anyway).
I want to agree reflexively but is there any evidence of this? The source of the lack of freedom in any society isn't taxation.
When you think about societies that aren't free, tax is not the problem it's an authoritarian government restricting what you can say and do with your body.
High taxes restrict your individual freedom to move, buy and sell freely, own property or invest in your own and your family's future. They can also stifle research and long-term investing on a corporate scale (not that many companies choose to so this rather than pay higher dividends or buy back stocks - but hey, if I had more money in my pocket I might be able to take advantage of stocks and/or dividends myself). High taxes are also most frequently paid by the lower (think sin-taxes and energy-taxes) and middle-classes, not the higher-class folks who have many tried-and-true methods of avoiding them (as well as there not being enough of them to pay for everything anyway).
That's talking points and theory, I'm asking about data to back this up. Use the scientific method -look at data and don't just assume what you've been told is how it is.
Like, let's find a chart of tax rate and freedoms.
I suspect it won't match up the way that those commonly accepted talking points have been told to us.
For example, Nordic and European countries have higher taxes and more freedom than many countries with low tax.
Comments
If Sanitation isn’t maintained properly, it can leak into the communities drinking water and kill people. All it takes is one tank, on one private property, not being changed in a timely manner for whatever reason.
Sewage maintenance is also extremely important on these situations and having a company to monitor these is a must.
Public services like fire, police and ambulances also should also be paid by the community. It’d really suck if a fire truck doesn’t come to your house until you pay the service charge of putting out the fire that is destroying your lively.
And as a lot of people like to think cops are corrupt, they will protect your belongings from those looking to take them from you and your neighbours.
Gated communities do not work in large urban areas and can cause elitism, and caste systems to develop.
It's when the government starts poking it's nose into 'everything' that things start going awry. That and holding all of the true power at the highest level (**cough** Monarch/Emperor/Grand Poobah **cough**)....
https://sealsecurity.com/
And lets be honest, there are projects about private cities and there was private companies dealing with sewers and water.
Except that monarchs had much less power than politicians on modern state. First that during the feudalism, in order to make an war, an king needs that most nobles agrees with him, since the power is more distributed. With the modern state, an president can spend tax money or debt money into bombing civilians in another side of the world after preaching against interventionism for decades and nobody can make him account.
That depends on the monarchy. In a feudal monarchy, the nobility leveraged a lot of power - of course, they also taxed their lands and compelled them to fight in wars on behalf of their liege as well as on behalf of their own ambitions.
In an absolutist monarchy, the King wields absolute authority... and can still tax his population as he sees fit.
Frankly - from the point of view of a citizen, government is government. Democracy just allows you to participate, most others don't.
Who holds private police accountable? You are arming a set of individuals, giving them access to personal information. What stops them from going corrupt and start bribes and racketeering?
Those are the distinguishing characteristics of a government, and no other entities possess any of them.
Or from fighting each other over your business. In Philadelphia, rival fire departments used to try to prevent their competitors from getting to their clients houses during fires. Some things just cannot be done on a for profit basis.
If you live on northern europe during the ice age and your tribe "banned" you, is a death sentence. But yes, my examples are very different than an state. Mafia is an much better analogy. Except that Mafia is much less evil.
That is not true. Democracy only allows the guy who can manipulate better the population to get elected. I can't find an single case of monarchy failing and it becoming better for the population.
Anyone believes that Stalin was better than the worst Czar?
Anyone believes that the failed Weimar republic is better than the Second Reich?
Anyone believes that the Bribecracy that exists on Brazil is better than the empire of Brazil?
[/quote]
And the backlash that they suffered? Anyway, some things should't be made with political interests in mind. Why treat diseases that would cost a lot but are very rare in a public heath care. An private health secure would manage this situation far easier. If they are preventing other companies from helping then, it should be an crime...
My personal favorite in this vein is copyright, patents, intellectual property. Who protects these things in a government-less society?
It's especially germane because libertarians love to crow their quasi-social darwinist claptrap about "producers". But without anybody to protect the fruits of intellectual labor, there will be zero motivation to actually create all the things that make our society worth living in. A core pillar of the free market -- the thing that allows for inventions, books, movies, music, video games -- it doesn't exist without government protection.
So yeah, infrastructure is key obviously. But the very ability to create things intellectually, inventions that have made our infrastructure far beyond what existed in the middle ages, is impossible without this. I'll never understand how doctrinaire libertarians miss this.
This is just historically inaccurate. Not all "monarchs" existed under the very specific European feudal system you're referring to. But even in the case of Europe, monarchy survived beyond feudalism, until even the early 20th century, with a variety of far reaching colonial empires with a strong centralized government.
Do you know something called contract? If to watch an movie, you signed an contract to not "share" the movie, share the movie would be an "contract violation", but not an "propriety infringement" because lets be honest, propriety rights exist from limited resources....
About the development of technology, a lot of technology got developed before the copyright laws. Keep in mind that a lot of intellectual work like discoveries are not covered on IP laws. and that a lot of companies profit from softwares under GPL.
An junk music made in few minutes is covered by the copyright law, but an formula that took decades is not. Using your logic, nobody would try discover new formulas. Keep in mind that "You cannot patent a formula. However, you can patent an application of that formula" so if an guy from South Pole applies the gravity formula in a process, he can prevent everyone in the world, from US to Japan from using the same process. That is ludicrous. ( https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-cant-be-patented.html )
I suggest the book Against Intellectual propriety ( https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Property-Stephan-Kinsella/dp/1933550325 )
This. But it's just the tip of the iceberg of his argument's shortcomings.
The idea that you cannot pirate a movie without first buying a theater ticket or DVD/streaming is just untrue. Secondly, once a movie gets leaked online, how does a theater ticket contract prevent people from downloading the movie from some publicly available pirate site? These ideas haven't been given a moment of self-scrutiny.
However, the point is, it used to be a big event to go buy an anticipated album in the late '90s. It was commonplace for big releases to sell 5 or even 10 million copies, sometimes a million in one week. Then I graduated high school, went to college, and my roommate (who I hated but that is besides the point) had literally thousands of songs just sitting on his desktop all acquired by a new program called "Napster". Within 6 months, everyone was no longer coming to parties with their 48-slot CD cases, but with nearly blank discs with nothing written on them but "Party Mix February 2001". The industry never recovered.
Incidentally, my most vivid memory from the era of the largest and most pervasive case of mass copyright infringement and theft in recent history (as in almost every college student participated in it) was that a jam-band cover version of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" was UNIVERSALLY mislabeled by everyone on every file-sharing service as being by Phish, when in fact it was a band called The Gourds, who to this day have gotten no credit for a song everyone who is around 35-40 years old listened to for their entire college experience.
Too much taxes, no freedom.
You have a Hypothesis, not a theory. You should do some studies to verify it. Then maybe it will be supported enough to be a theory.
I agree with much of the above, but I think there's good evidence that the vast majority of people will actually lift a finger to help a closed community. The social pressures to do so are extremely strong (think Amish), quite apart from any altruistic motives.
Historically, most communities were far more closed than they are today. That's why early roads for instance were often privately funded and maintained (think of the Turnpike movement). If nearly all users of the roads are locals there's a clear advantage to the community of maintaining them.
However, once communities become more open the problem of 'free riders' from outside the community becomes evident and people are no longer willing to maintain assets. There's also the reverse problem with liabilities - communities are usually happy to pollute a river causing problems for those downstream, but are very unhappy with other communities upstream of them doing the same thing ...
There are attempts to form closed (gated) communities today and recreate local islands that help themselves, but not surrounding areas. There are huge problems with those though. They can work well within the community, but the interaction around the edges always causes friction - a significant reason for having governments is to manage that friction.
Yes. Everything that the sate do, private parts can do without demagogy, short therm focus, etc.
PS : To watch netflix you sign an contract. To download games on steam too.
What prevents it now? I can't post piracy "propaganda" here, so i will only say that this is not restricted to movies... Most "dead" mmos have private servers operating right now. Imagine that the Owner is living in Eastern Europe with an server operating on Caiman Islands, like an server from an famous mmo that i will not name. How the ""owner"" of the game could prevent people from accessing the private server in a small British territory or sue the owner? Or are you advocating for an world government? Should the British government forces his overseas territory into an "new colony status" where they decide the territory rules?
This not mentioning that IP laws make the gap between rich and poor countries, big and small business owners, much bigger. Is thanks to copyright laws that there are draconian laws like article 13. Copyright is a euphemism for state enforced monopoly.
Yes, there are no tribal societies /just kidding.
And ironically, North Korea maintain itself with an gigantic state and there are no taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_North_Korea
https://www.dailynk.com/english/tax-what-tax-the-north-korean-taxa/
Well, I don't have much time to do a study but you're right, hypothesis it is. Maybe when I retire and don't need my full-time RL job I can focus on anthropology or political science but that won't be for a long while. In the mean-time, maybe you could cut me a little slack on the verbiage. You know what I meant...
Edit: Hmmm, in thinking about it, this would be a very challenging study. I wouldn't be able to use phones or computers at all to gather the data. I'd have to hoof it and ask people personally while trying to keep the demographics scientific. This would be a monumental task requiring multiple pollsters in multiple varied locations. Yikes!
I want to agree reflexively but is there any evidence of this? The source of the lack of freedom in any society isn't taxation.
When you think about societies that aren't free, tax is not the problem it's an authoritarian government restricting what you can say and do with your body.
Freedom to do anything that doesn't violate third part rights should be allowed. And the problem with autoritarian government is not only restrict what you can say and do with your body, is that they spend a lot of resources that could be used against real criminals to punish people from crime without victims.
High taxes restrict your individual freedom to move, buy and sell freely, own property or invest in your own and your family's future. They can also stifle research and long-term investing on a corporate scale (not that many companies choose to so this rather than pay higher dividends or buy back stocks - but hey, if I had more money in my pocket I might be able to take advantage of stocks and/or dividends myself). High taxes are also most frequently paid by the lower (think sin-taxes and energy-taxes) and middle-classes, not the higher-class folks who have many tried-and-true methods of avoiding them (as well as there not being enough of them to pay for everything anyway).
That's talking points and theory, I'm asking about data to back this up. Use the scientific method -look at data and don't just assume what you've been told is how it is.
Like, let's find a chart of tax rate and freedoms.
I suspect it won't match up the way that those commonly accepted talking points have been told to us.
For example, Nordic and European countries have higher taxes and more freedom than many countries with low tax.
Nope, he is yet another white supremacist neo-nazi murderer.
https://amp.insider.com/gilroy-garlic-festival-shooter-shared-neo-nazi-ideas-instagram-reports-2019-7