Feds, We Need Some Time Apart

Sort of. I illegally decided to refuse to pay my taxes to the federal government, and instead payed extra taxes to my state government.

http://izbicki.me/blog/why-and-how-im-refusing-to-pay-war-ta...

Of coarse, sometimes we put our own safety above ethics, and people have differing opinions on whether that is right or not. There is no easy answer there.

This is a really interesting story, and I'm going to be giving it a lot of thought. One problem for me is that I do computer science research (I'm a grad student), and I'd like to keep doing something somewhere similar after I graduate (but self-employed), but if you're working on generic low-level computer stuff that can be re-used by everybody ad infinitum, the state will use it. I'm not a Linux kernel developer, for example, but that's a good analogy. I don't see a good way to stop supporting the state without giving up on doing computer science research. I'd appreciate any thoughts.

So, you don't have to pay taxes (except for things like sales tax) to any state? As an American, I think I'd have to renounce my citizenship (they still make you pay taxes when you are overseas), which would probably have a number of negative impacts for me personally, such as possibly making travel difficult.

Overall, I'm not so sure that I agree with your conclusions, but I'm still thinking about it. Yes, I am supporting the state, but not willingly, and not quietly (though I am not vocal about my opposition to the system in my corporeal life, which wouldn't do any good anyway in my work environment, and would probably do much harm). Actually, I'm the victim. Is a Jew working in a munitions factory in Nazi Germany morally obligated to commit suicide rather than try to ride out the war? I would say "no," and I would tentatively say that about the actual situation I am in, for the same reasons.

My bigger concern about supporting the system as I do is that it is self-defeating (of myself). In the limit (i.e., in communism), there is no possibility for productive labor, because 100% of your earnings will be taken by the government and used against you. We are not in that situation. Still, US government action seems to be moving in the direction of making it impossible to start and run small businesses; this is already the case in some sectors, like telecom. When all there are, are large corporate giants under tight regulatory control (which is literally the model adopted by Hitler and Mussolini), we are all worker drones; it would be equally (un)productive for me personally to work a a cashier at Wal-Mart as it would be to be a software engineer. (Because you get paid approximately the same in both cases and true innovation is illegal or impossiblein both cases.) I fear that we are not all that far from that situation.

Ding ding ding. Please keep this in mind at all times.

They not only can be, but unfortunately both often are.

Sure, but the ability to build a minimum winning coalition on eliminating social security is pretty much irrelevant to finding a minimum winning coalition on eliminating income tax.

> If it were possible for the general population to somehow wake up and realize that Social Security is a ponzi scheme and that it's not sustainable long term

Its not possible for them to "wake up and realize" that because its not true, but its certainly possible for them to be convinced of that; indeed, that's a fairly common idea (at least, if you take out the "ponzi scheme" part) now. What is less common is the idea that the best way of dealing with that is to eliminate the program entirely rather than addressing features that make it nonsustainable. [1]

> then it's ENTIRELY conceivable that said people might listen to the "income tax isn't constitutional" argument as well.

Sure, its entirely conceivable that people might listen to that argument. That's a bit different saying that it is likely that he would also be able to eliminate the income tax (there is a big gap between "conceivable" and "likely" and another big gap between "listen to" and "agree with".)

> The political landscape would have to be so incredibly different for social security to go away I can't even really comprehend it.

I have no problem with that description, but that's an argument against any assertion you might make about what would be likely in that case, not an argument for it.

> You can speculate that people wouldn't both abolish social security AND the income tax.

I could, but I haven't. A statement that your claim that a particular outcome is likely is not supported by the argument you have presented for it is not a claim that the outcome is impossible.

> I speculate that such a thing could reasonably happen.

There's a difference between speculating that a thing "could reasonably happen" and asserting, as you did previously, that it is likely.

[1] E.g., http://www.gallup.com/poll/1693/social-security.aspx