Safecoin and taxes

Don’t feed the troll.

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You may want to read the post @happybeing posted just today if you missed it:

Conduct and language on this forum: family friendly please!

being the relevant part… :smiley:

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Actually I wrote that post pretty much 2 months ago or so and just never got around to posting it. So someone likes or posts on this thread and I end up just finishing the post and posting it.

Um no. Vault creationg, storing data, earning safecoin, all of those interactions are voluntary interactions. In fact the only part of the SAFE network I have any issue with is the portion of safecoin that’s automatically deducted for the foundation. Granted I agree the devs should be funded and all that so it’s going to a good cause but I don’t agree with what amounts to taxation and think it should be optional and therefore voluntary. But that’s about the only con there is.

Perhaps you should educate yourself as to why free software is free. Yes one can opt for any piece of software they choose but that just highlights the fact that a closed source draconian piece of software restricts the freedoms of the user whereas an free open source software liberates them. You keep going on and on about having consent just by being able to choose different countries/software then why is it that people feel the need to code free software in the first place? If you need to code a new piece of software or move to a new country obviously you are being opressed in your current location or under your current code. The arguement of consent of the governed is much like consent of the abused. An abused partner can’t find a way out of an abusive relationship or home and therefore stays and therefore is accused of “consenting” to the abuse. My ex girlfriend was in such a situation. Her ex pretty much was emotionally abusing her and she wanted to leave but he told her that if she did he’d charge her with abandoning their daughter and if she took their daughter he’d charge her with kidnapping. So she stayed and endured the abuse. Now is that the kind of CONSENT you’re talking about? To be taxed (abused) or threatened with violence or to lose everything. Interesting.

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Lol…I love the way you keep telling me to educate myself… :smile:
Let’s simplify things as far as the force is concerned with Maidsafe:
:

There’s your choice - where’s the force?.
As far as the tax system is concerned, I found an earlier answer I gave in a different thread:

“This argument boils down to rights on property I think. You have a choice of whether you want to live in the society/country you were born in and accept the agreed laws that have consensus via Democratic processes or you do not and you are free to try your luck elsewhere. Just because the choice is not a nice one to make, does not mean it isn’t a choice.
Your argument would be based on some idea of an inherent right to live where you want and not contribute to society. If this were the case, we’d be back to fighting for mini-fiefdoms, then Kings…we have moved on and collectively decided that the best way to get along is to establish a system of govermnent and a taxation scheme. Ownership of land is not a birth right, it is established by the users of that land, we have collectively come together to protect our land/society - you have no natural claim on it over and above anyone else. You have as much choice as you are going to get.
Actually thinking about it, the Govt has no natural claim on the land either, the individual members do equally and their wishes should be enacted via govt. Whatever, it is an ant colony thing.”

Let’s break this down here. The state came about because religious sites were constructed. (no seriously there’s archeological evidence to support this). Early peoples created spiritual sites, we developed centralized leaderships, then started growing more food around these sites to support the population, laws to distribute food and manage people, and therefore enforcement of the laws, beurocracy, specialized occupations, more dependency and there you go the state is born all from temple building. Same thing happens today but we call our temples banks, or Google, or Football/Hockey or whatever else. Any centralized structure or organized structure can start the process all over again. My point here is how @Al_Kafir keeps saying we’d fall back into fiefdoms and kingdoms if we let people make their own decisions. But the state isn’t based on letting people make decisions. The state is a product of centralization and temple building. Kingdoms and fiefdoms are also a product of temple building, specifically they were an offshoot of agrarian culture. However what if we grew food horticulturally instead of agriculturally? What if we grew food using small to medium sized organic permaculture gardens that had a large selection of plants and that could be integrated into one’s local habitat be it out in a rural area or on a city lawn as opposed to large monoculture agrarian fields? What if we decentralized our tech (as we are doing) so that we can have smaller groups of like minded people which are connected and communicate with one another at will rather than sprawling legal code that regulates how people MUST behave in order to get along. Why would we be fighting over fiefdoms? This implies a lack of abundance. Why are we fighting over land?

Yes we should be able to live where we want and contribute or not as we choose. Why do you believe this would lead to fiefdoms or Kings? Fiefdom and Kings is a result of temple building and centralization not that of choice.

You forgot the third option: Fork. I would accept the terms until such time as maidsafe was forked to be completely voluntary. However hardcoding something is STILL a use of compulsion. That’s why there is such a debate concerning free software. Consider the difference between Windows and Linux, on Windows you are compelled to give up a slew of freedoms in order to use the software, on Linux you are not and are in fact granted tons of freedoms. And you keep forgetting that moving to a different country is not a practical choice. There is no way I’d have the money to move to the next province let alone the next country. It is not feasible. It is not a choice. It is not reasonable or realistic to say that I am living in a given country by choice. Nor are most people below a certain financial poverty line. Basically if you don’t have the money the “Decline” button gets greyed out. Is that clear enough for you?

Okay let me get this straight. You’re saying that all members of the community have equal rights to the land. Could that not be interpreted to say no one has land ownership rights? I mean how can we all vote on who owns what if none of us have the right to lay title, or if we all have equal right to lay title? If 3 people get to a spit of land it’s either whoever got there first or split it 3 ways.

Okay so wait what now? You’re saying no one owns land by birthright. Yet somehow we all came together to protect something and lay claim to something none of us own or have a right to? How does one gain the right to own land in this society of yours? If all members are equal and all members equally have the right to own (or not own) land and none of them have this right as a birthright then how did they purcure the right to own land? If you start at 0 rights to own land by birth how to get to 1 if no one in your society has the right to grant that access? How are you voting on the right to own land if no one has the right to own land by birth?

You might want to watch this if you want to understand what I was talking about concering permaculture and the state deriving from temple building and centralization.

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I was going to ask what your point was actually -as usual it appears completely irrelevant to the OP. I also do not keep saying any such thing, so please stop with the misrepresentation of what I actually do say.

I’m not sure why you insist on just repeating the same questions over and over again in different threads, even though you have clearly already been answered. We went through the whole “shared house” analogy for starters in this thread
-remember?

You also stated that Safe Network used force and I asked how so -as usual you evade the question and shift the goalposts by answering:

Which yet again assumes I’m forgetting something (completely irrelevant) and in no way answers anything. Anybody interested in actually conversing or arguing honestly would just concede the point, that it does not use force, but instead you do your usual trick.

I don’t “keep forgetting” sod all and have addressed this very question as with all your others countless times - I’m not forgetting things, nor do I need to educate myself about completely irrelevant nonsense, which you also keep repeating.
This is becoming massively boring now.

I’m sorry, Mark. I have to call you on this because you’ve stated a generality that is not true in the sense you state it. Wealth inequality, in itself, is not and cannot be considered coercion. Wealth gained through coercion is coercion. Wealth gained without coercion is not.

If I happen to be very smart, work really hard, make good decisions and have some luck, and thus become much more wealthy than others there is nothing coercive in it unless I use coercive means. Granted that most great wealth today has been gained by coercion. That coercion is most often executed by influencing political decisions and the enforcement thereof, backed by the guns of government. That power of government and the guns are financed, in turn, by taxes which are taken by coercion, by definition (taxes paid voluntarily are called donations or voluntary exchanges of value).

Bad guys with a lot of money can do more coercion, true. But nothing near the amount of coercion they can do by influencing the political process, and indirectly getting the guns of government to do their overt coercion for them.

The problem in parsing this is the fact that the basic system of coercion is rooted so deeply in our social system that it is really hard to sort out cause and effect in a lot of particular instances. That difficulty doesn’t invalidate the basic principle, though. If you initiate extraction of value from people through the threat of force, that’s coercion. The gray areas are vast, but the principle is still valid.

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There’s an inevitable coercive effect between a very wealthy person and those much less wealthy than they.

It is hard to draw a line and say what is coercive or not, but if I’m very rich (BTW it is irrelevant to my point how I became very rich), and you are very poor, then almost inevitably (unless I don’t use my wealth) that exerts my power (more choice, ability to pay you to do work you would not otherwise want to do if you were rich etc.)

I agree it is tricky to call this coercion and I expect you won’t, but to me the effect is the same so the moral meaning is moot, a matter of choice in how we see it.

A lot of our discussions on the forum centre on this kind of issue. For example: you are free to go live somewhere else, therefore democracy is not coercive. Well I see both sides of this. If you are wildly rich, no, democracy is not coercive because you can go live anywhere you like, buy your own island and run it with complete choice. But if you are poor, you are stuck, have very much more limited options, and can argue democracy is coercive.

I’m not going to argue with anyone where we draw the line. My use of the word coercive for wealth disparity is contentious, but really not an issue for me because I am not attaching value to the categorisation, but the effect. So by all means disagree on whether there is coercion here or not, I shan’t argue the point. I will though argue that the effects are real.

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Could I just try to simplify the tax/coercion argument here, which is basically the difference between a Liberal position - which would be my own (and @happybeing’s I think - correct me if I’m wrong) and a Libertarian position, by way of this short extract I found:

" Taxation, presumably, is coercive because the government simply orders you to hand over some portion of the goods you possess, on pain of imprisonment. You haven’t signed a contract regarding this transaction, and it’s not punishment for your violation of someone else’s rights; it’s simply forced upon you, regardless of whether or not you agree with it. Imprisoning someone who nicks your lawn gnome, on the other hand, is retribution for their violation of your property rights. It’s not coercive; the person imprisoned has broken a rule with which they can be presumed to agree, the rule that people’s possessions belong to them, and punishing them is simply just.

Liberals are likely to disagree with this formulation for two reasons. First, liberals think of taxation as paying one’s fair share for the collective goods that make society feasible. Every society needs collective goods to function, including transportation and infrastructure, education, the justice system itself, and so on; the more wealthy a society wants to be, the more collective infrastructure it needs. Payment for those goods cannot be left voluntary, as ultimately everyone would welch. So paying your taxes is a basic obligation of citizenship, and collectively deciding on the level of taxation through democratic government is the closest we can come to making this transaction consensual. Not paying taxes means violating your obligations as a citizen; when the state punishes someone for not paying taxes, it is acting in a fashion no more or less coercive than when it punishes someone for stealing someone else’s property.

The second reason liberals would disagree, or why I would disagree, anyway, has to do with those episodes of “Buren” about property disputes. Basically, in none of these episodes can it be simply stated that one person nicked another’s lawn gnome. How do we know who nicked whose lawn gnome? It’s always subject to dispute. When that first guy said he’d cut the other guy’s throat, was that a legally culpable threat, or just a figure of speech? If one guy’s kid tossed a cherry bomb and the other guy’s kid dumped the poop, who pays restitution to whom? Can someone get an injunction to stop their neighbour from cooking where they can smell it? In any case of stolen lawn gnomes, dumped poop, stinky cooking, fences that may or may not be built on someone else’s land, and so forth, there is likely to be a factual dispute, a dispute at law, or both at the heart of things. If the case comes to trial, it is the state that will adjudicate the rival claims and impose a decision on the parties. That exercise of state authority feels just as coercive to people who think they have been unjustly ruled against in court, as it does to people who don’t want to pay the level of taxation that a democratic society has decided is fair.

"It’s one thing to argue that taxes are too high, or are too high for some group of earners or for some type of economic activity. But I feel that a broad libertarian claim that “taxation is coercive” is an attempt to legitimise refusal to play by the rules, and to delegitimise the exercise of state authority. The existence of the state involves a certain level of coercion to enforce the law. But the existence of the state is a good thing, both because it provides the infrastructure of a prosperous, safe and fair society, and because it enforces property claims such as deciding who has stolen whose lawn gnome. It makes me happy to see the state providing a decent education to kids whose parents can’t afford to buy them one. It makes me happy to see the state administer justice in a fair and procedurally sound fashion. It makes me happy to see the state build zoos. And yeah, we all have to pay our taxes for these things to happen. But when I read libertarians focusing on the intrinsically coercive nature of taxation, I’m reminded of the way Marxists used to focus on the intrinsically alienating character of wage labour. It just doesn’t really get you anywhere."

Emphasis mine… :smiley:

Nice elucidation @Al_kafir. Frankly I’m not going to give myself any label, but I won’t argue with us having similar perspective on this.

It strikes me that we all tend to think of “coercion” as bad. Agreement!! :smile:

And that we’re choosing to use a word (coercion) as a label where we think something bad is happening: whether tax, or excercising one’s wealth to make “free” choices (power to do what you want that almost inevitably restricts what others can do).

The real point then seems to be about what we choose to see as good or bad. Taxation, wealth disparity, democracy, liberty etc etc Many of the debates get lost because we’re really arguing over and above these fundamental beliefs, which are ingrained and very unlikely to change. However, we might at least acknowledge where they come from (e.g. our parents, community, education, personal history etc etc). Which means they are not givens, they are learned. Which means that your view, not matter it contradicts mine, has as much basis as mine whether we agree or not.

This is why I am starting to prefer we address the effects. Identify what we “observe” with as little pollution from our underlying beliefs, either through accidental perception (tinted lenses) or deliberate attempt to prove our beliefs right or true.

If we were to focus on observed effects, I think we might arrive at some more useful common ground in terms of what we believe happens. Not agreement, but some common ideas about the world out there. Similarly for rights and values; can we achieve some common ground on principles around rights and value? More contention will no doubt arise regarding which things are good and which are bad based on the any shared principles around rights and values. Then perhaps we can just argue over what if anything to do about them! :slight_smile:

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I totally agree with this and really struggle to find the correct terminology in many cases and lines blur in any case. I’ve mentioned quite a bit that I know what and how I think, but not always what others would “call” it - as in the philosophy thread with @Seneca.
It’s the same with lots of things really, I just grasp the basic concepts/ideas etc but would have little clue as to what things are called or who said what historically. I’m reminded of the following comment from Richard Feynman, which I fully go along with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_7j72CVlc

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Them was not thrushes! :wink:

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Thank you and this is exactly what I’ve been saying both about land and software. Technical knowledge is to software as money is to land when determining choice. If you can code you can simply write your own software, or perhaps you have a high level of technical knowledge and know about and can install a variety of alternatives (if available which often they are not). However if you are not sufficiently wealthy in technical knowledge and if you need a task performed then you must press the accept button. Similarly if you have a lot of money you can travel wherever you wish and choose to live under whatever set of legal codes you wish and therefore democracy is not coercive. However If you are poor you’re stuck and cannot travel and it is coercive. To say democracy is not coercive is a very plutocratic attitude. I mean one could use the same argument to defend the abolition of minimum wage laws or the restrictions on child labour. If they don’t like how much they’re being paid or the conditions they’re working in or even if they’re competing with older/younger workers they can quit. But a lot of people work for slave wages because they have no other option. It’s either work for a couple pennies a day or earn nothing. If offering the end user a yes or no choice counts as consent then why do we protest so hard for minimum wage? Should there not be a freedom to move between countries/political zones as well as a minimum standard of what we earn? Or conversely if consent = yes/no why have such restrictions on the free market?

I in fact quoted you. You in fact DID say that and you have said that on quite a few occasions that if we were to become a voluntary society we’d go back to having fiefdoms and fighting over land. But regardless you did not defend the point you made here.

Then it shouldn’t be too hard for you to link or quote the post in question now should it? Or are you just being evasive? Also as I believe the whole shared house analogy discussed an entirely different topic. In that case you were positing the case that the occupants of the house had the right to dictate terms to the individual whereas the individual wanted to simply be left alone and not share resources. Here we are discussing how one can democratically make a decision on the ownership of land when no one in the collective has land ownership rights by birth. Please if you believe you have answered a question already just quote the answer. Don’t be evasive and dismissive. Either defend your position or concede.

Look you keep saying that you’ve already explained it. Obviously I’m not seeing the connections you are making much as you are not seeing the connections I am making as you keep asking what my point is and asking for clarification. So can we agree to stop disrespecting one another and just offer increased clarification in our communications? If you are not understanding something I’m saying or the connections being made then ask how it’s connected and if I don’t understand you then I’ll ask you. Does that sound fair?

This is from the original post. The original post poses a couple key questions:

The validity of taxation as a whole because it poses the the following question of taxing transactions on a global community via the SAFE network. This brings us to our debate about consent and then national soverignty. And from national soveregnty you posed the idea that people were not born with the right to own land. To which I posed the question if people are not born with the right to own land how then can they vote on such an issue or grant a representitive or democratic government the right to own land if they themselves do not have this right? How can you have land taxes if no one in the country has the right to own land? How can you divvy up what no one owns? The democratic process does not create new powers it simply delegates them. And therefore if the individual does not have an ability so to nether does the collective. If the individual does not have a right so to neither does the collective. Conversely if the individual does have a right or ability so to does the collective. And if the collective has an ability or right so to does the individual. Arguing the individual should not have any rights is the same as arguing the collective should not have those same rights. You can’t vote collectively on an issue no one in the collective has the authority to individually assert power upon on their own.

Moreover I pointed out the state is a product of centralization and went on to explain that AND posted a video to further expound on that. This should be very important to a decentralized community which is debating supposed taxation. Taxation in and of itself is a form of centralization. So what we build a decentralized internet and then slap a centralized taxation mechanic on top of it? Doesn’t that kind of undermine what the whole concept of maidsafe is about? And to which country would these taxes go to, and how would that be determined, and why would one submit to that? The state is a product of temple building, of centralizing structures of interest and authority figures and then centering civilizations around these institutions. However the more we decentralize our lives the more in turn we dismantle the state which is based upon these centralized institutions. Why should maidsafe get involved in taxation or support any country’s economy or political regime when maidsafe and the internet is a global, decentralized and anonymous entity? It swears no fiealty to any country over another any more than it would one individual over another. So long as you provide resources to the network that’s all that matters and you are rewarded with safecoin. It doesn’t matter if you are an entity of 1 or 100,000,000 your relationship with the network is the same.

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Yeah that more or less sums up my position. Though I would add one could bypass the legal system all together by adding no tresspassing signs or such things and if someone nicks your lawn gnome or tresspasses they have been clearly warned not to do so, whether they agree or not, and are therefore made themselves open to getting filled with buckshot, or whatever other ammo of choice you prefer.

See this is the first assumption I disagree with. If we structured our society to promote self sufficiency and decentralization of the individual and their homes such institutions would be unnesssary. Their functions would remain but the collective and centralized nature would not.

Again I disagree. If I support something I’m not going to welch on it because I want to see it happen.

You CANNOT make generosity an obligation else you will generate resentment towards the recipient. Notice how middle and upperclass resent those that benefit from their tax dollars? No I am not obligated to help you. At all, period. I am very generous and very may well help you but you are not entitled to my help and in fact if you say you are obligated I am more inclined to withdraw any generosity I have thusfar expressed in response to your ingratitude and sense of entitlement. I might be a humanitarian, I might even feel compelled to help those in need but that’s not because I feel an obligation to do so but rather because I feel empathy for them and want to help them.

Oy va this is why I hate urban life, people are insane. First of all if it’s poop guy vs cherry bomb or whatever or a dispute over who nicked whoever’s lawn gnome then let them just duke it out. Why should the state get involved at all? Honestly we never had this issue when I was growing up ever. It’s only when I moved here I realized how nuts people could be. I think it’s a population density thing. Anyway point is what if the state just didn’t get involved period. Parties A and B argue about their lawn gnomes. So what? So long as they keep the noise down why is that a concern of party C? Some guys dog deficates on the lawn? Well are you going to put up a fence, yell at the neighbour or shoot the dog next time you see it lifting it’s tail? So what if some guy’s figure of speech is interpreted as a real threat. Such is the nature of communication. The receiver of the communcation can learn to defend himself, or be ready to. The issuer, of retaliated against can learn to have better manners. Yes being polite is IMPORTANT. You have the freedom of expression but that doesn’t mean you are not responsible for what you express. If you really need a third party arbitor does it need to be the court or can it be a friend or just someone from the next block over who isn’t involved in your little debachle? The belief in authority and the state is a form of religion.

You’re damn right as I do not consider state authority legitimate. I’ve said this before. I’m an anarchist. I believe in self rule and voluntary interaction and collaboration. I do not believe that just because a bunch of people get together that they suddenly have authority to force a smaller group of people to comply with their “rules” and play their game.

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Either actually quote me saying it or stop misrepresenting my views, you said:

You were originally talking about not recognising established land rights and that basically it should be a free for all territorially - you said:

"You have no fixed territory that you defend and you have no proof of ownership. Why should I care what you SAY or believe you? It’s what you can do that matters. You say you staked a claim to the land? I say you are both a liar and I don’t care as I don’t recognize your ability to claim land anyway. What are you going to do? " (post 111 of the global democracy thread - again quote thing not working)

In reply to this, I said

Going back to fiefdoms and Kings would be the logical progression from fighting over small territories within a Country’s borders. You clearly misrepresent my position on both these issues.
If you want to paraphrase me, then the more correct quote would be:

If you can’t argue honestly, then I’d suggest you just stop arguing.

Ooookay at least I know where you’re going with this… sort of. However weren’t you the one arguing that you believe that one is not born with the right to own land?

So when I argue that one does NOT believe in another’s right to own land that results in a territorial dispute and we end up fighting over land. However are you not arguing the EXACT same thing in the above post? That everyone would be born without the right to own land. What I was asking is how can you vote on owning land if no one has the right to own land in the first place? Moreover how would you resolve the inevitable conflicts that would arise with those that disagreed with the majority and insisted that they could and did own land? How is what you are proposing different from what I was proposing save for the fact you are putting it to a vote?

Is that not what you are talking about as well? You did say that you don’t believe anyone is born with the right to own land. Therefore how do they purcure land ownership? Is not the assumption of land ownership a precursor for the regression into territorial disputes? Please clarify.

But… you just proposed the same thing…

How is that different than my “mad cap” plan to abolish land ownership? Which you just pointed out results in conflicts that in turn result in territorial disputes throwing us back to fiefdoms and kingdoms? How is your idea better? And please remember the individual cannot deligate powers to the collective via democratic voting which they do not already have. If the individual cannot own land by birth then they cannot vote on owning land because they cannot own land in the first place. You cannot deligate authority to your MP to speak on your behalf that you do not already have yourself.

Please explain.

This was a misunderstanding in communication not dishonesty. Please stop confusing the two. Also increased explicitness and clarity will help prevent these kinds of misunderstandings.

In the first place fiefs were granted to each lord by the King. Lords didn’t get to just arbitarily choose where to live. And do try to remember what the word Lord originated as: Plaford, Loaf Ward, keeper of the grain. Meaning Lords were orginally, and still were largely, responsible for having food produced, guarding it and distributing it. Again a product of agriculture and centralized food production. However if you keep things decentralized with a horticulture based society instead of an agriculture based society you’re more likely to see homesteads than kingdoms and fiefdoms.

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I have recently been thinking that governments will be able to tax profits made when safecoins are converted into currencies, goods or services outside the SAFE network. And I think that’s fair. And as long as the safecoins stay within the SAFE network, then governments are unable at the moment I think to put a tax on them.

In the future, as you wrote, if there will be a huge market within the SAFE network itself, then perhaps governments will start to tax the safecoin economy directly somehow. But in practice that will if ever be something several years into the future.

So my idea at the moment is that I can earn lots of safecoins and as long as they remain within the SAFE network I don’t have to pay tax for that income. I will check with the tax authorities in my country just to be sure.

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The goal of crypto currencies is to not allow taxation system as we all agreed that taxation is theft. The direction we’re heading is community funding systems, with co-operatives, and business mixed into it.

Safe and bitcoin technology is making the godvernment obsolete.

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How? I can understand about converting them into currencies using major banks but if you sell person to person it’s less likely, especially with decentralize exchanges. If the government can’t track and monitor sales they can’t tax them.

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By people being honest. Just because someone can get away with cheating on paying taxes doesn’t make it legal. If it’s an unfair tax, then yes people probably should rebel against that, but if it’s a fair tax then law-abiding citizens will pay the tax.

I don’t think most people are, or want to be, criminals, even if they can get away with a crime without the government noticing it. People are generally not sociopathic monsters. At least I hope not, ha ha.

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