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113 points jimhi | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.656s | source
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SoftTalker ◴[] No.44474976[source]
What on earth is wrong with not paying taxes legally? What taxes does anyone pay other than those that they must pay?

If the government wants a tax to be paid they need to make it simple and unconditional. If there are loopholes or ways to legally avoid it, they will be discovered and people will take advantage of them.

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capitol_ ◴[] No.44475113[source]
What is legal and what is moral are two circles in a venn diagram.

In a good and just society there is a large overlap between them, and in others there is less overlap.

But it's impossible to build a legal system where there is a 100% overlap, and it would most likely be a broken society in other ways.

I totally agree with your second paragraph, that the government needs to remove loopholes and other ways for people to weasel out of contributing to society. But there will always be some corruption and a lot of money to be earned by only taking from our shared resources and never contributing back.

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ada1981 ◴[] No.44475758[source]
Paying any tax supports genocide and other US colonization projects, so not paying is the moral path.
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1. danaris ◴[] No.44476764[source]
Paying any tax supports programs that provide life-saving food to poor women and children, health care to sick, injured, and disabled people who have no other way of getting it, and enforcement of justice for everyone in the country.

If you're only going to pick one thing that a government does, yeah, it's easy to cherrypick something awful. But the alternative is literal anarchy, which is a) much, much worse for the vast majority of people, and b) 100% guaranteed not to last, as the people either organically organize a government from the bottom up, or some violent strongman (gender-neutral) (but let's face it, probably a man in practice) emerges and enforces an authoritarian government from the top down. And in either of those cases, they'll levy taxes very soon, whether it's to make sure that the things that a representative government needs can happen, or just to take as much as they can from everyone else.

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2. ada1981 ◴[] No.44485475[source]
Sometimes mob bosses pull up with trucks of stolen goods and hand them out to people too. Doesn’t mean you support the mob.