Bitcoin, The Economic Singularity: From Holland with Love

I don't see this 'larger implication'. Where is this objective moral scale I can look at? The one that'll tell me that I'm more moral than you, or you're more moral than me? I don't claim I'm more moral than you, I do claim we have differing morality. My morals tell me that it is okay to 'initiate force' in certain circumstances, the fact that your morals tell you the opposite has no bearings on me nor on any objective scale of morals you could point to. You've taken a principle and put it on some sort of pedestal which allows you to point to it and say: if you violate that, you're immoral. I can do the same with any given principle and neither of us comes out on top morally, nor will we ever. The unfortunate thing about your principle is that it is weak from a force perspective: in order for you to stay true to your morals, you cannot initiate force, in order for me to stay true to my morals, I can do so and I can enable the government to do so as well.

On a legal conception (my field), people don't pay taxes because they are forced to do so by force, people pay taxes for a wide variety of reasons: fear of consequences, habit, actual willingness to pay taxes, social cohesion, internalization of process. Paying taxes makes sense for businesses, and various other organisations on an economic level. Paying taxes in Australia (where I am), for example, gets you a wide variety of benefits that most people appreciate, and most of them don't feel forced to do so. Maybe at some baseline level they are 'forced' to do so, but it is done voluntarily. Just as you would say that a person taking a job because otherwise they will starve is a voluntary act, so can paying taxes be voluntary despite the background threat of prison.

Same with religion, maybe those initial people will not be Christians, but maybe their grandchildren will be if the occupation continues. The Ottomans, for example, converted people to Islam through tax incentives and education.

A test case for you:

In Canada (and Australia), for example, 89% of the land is in direct ownership by the Crown, the other 11% is rented by the Crown to individuals in the form of land tenure. Legally, the Queen is not allowed to permanently sell any land, as they are subject to the old rules of English family law, where descendants are to be entitled to inherit the land. The Queen, through the Government of Canada which represents her, is the owner of the entire country. Does she not have the right to charge whatever rent rates (taxes) she would like? And are not people paying these taxes voluntarily as long as they live on this rented land?

Is that the correct test, though? Ask the guy if he would take the job if he wasn't starving: He'll say 'No'. So in a system where he has no recourse to some safety net, he's not acting voluntarily in any case where the alternative is a type of negative consequence which he'd like to mitigate. I'd rather not be doing law, for example, I'd rather be reading on the beach, but the alternative could be living on social assistance (which is a definitely a thing to fear for me), still I wouldn't say that I'm involuntarily doing my job.

Maybe you should ask, instead: "Why do you pay taxes?" And allow the respondents to give you a wider set of reasons. Maybe some will say it is out of fear of the IRS, but some people might not say that, or say something different. It's still a 'test' of the matter, but it's a less leading test and it's the sort of test that follows from what I've said.

Sorry, the Queen test case was just for fun. Wanted to see what you'd say. Yeah, the Queen cannot legitimately own anything by that conception, since it is all ultimately tainted by a long historical process of beating out competitors on the British Isles.

Yeah, asking why you do something is as much a question about an action as asking whether you'd do it. You're not asking "Would you pay it?" you're asking: "Would you pay it if condition x were false?" You're taking it out of reality, where condition x is true. I agree, you could ask: "Would you pay it?" but the response from the person to that question would be useless without the necessary conditional you've put in it. However, as soon as you put in the conditional about a state of affairs, the person is not analysing their action as it is, but is instead analsying their action according to a state of affairs that may exist. It's as much a mental trick as it is in a case where people convince themselves it's a good idea if it's inevitable.

That goes back to what I said before, which you ignored, if you were to ask me: "Would you still work if you were a millionaire?" I might say: "No." That's true, but it's not true for any useful purpose, because I'm not a millionaire. If you ask me: "Why do you work?" I might say: "Because I like making money." In fact, the latter case is a more truthful statement than the previous case, because I don't actually know what Millionaire-Me might do whereas I do know what Non-millionaire Me would do (work). In any event, the previous question doesn't tell you whether or not I consider the fact I work voluntary, in fact, it doesn't tell you very much anything at all. I personally do consider the fact I work voluntary, but you'd have to ask the latter question to find that fact out. If you just had the previous question and left it, you might as well assume I believe that I work involuntarily.

In the end, you ARE asking for an opinion, the way you propose is a less honest way to do so considering what the inquiry at hand is. Remember, I said that people might have multiple reasons why they pay taxes. This is a sociological fact. Even one person might have multiple reasons why they pay taxes.

If you asked me your question:

"Would you pay taxes if you weren't forced to?" I'd say: "Yes." That's all you get.

My question:

"Why do you pay taxes?" "Fear of jail if I don't, because they pay for roads, social services, because I believe they are a legitimate exercise of function of government."

I'm not lying, no reason to, I pay taxes for multiple reasons and so do most people, and these preferences themselves may be ordered, maybe on my scale of preferences the fear of jail is in-fact less than the fear of potentially unmaintained roads if I have a nice car, for example.

Actually, an idea: Presumably we can synthesise the inquiry, ask "Why" and then ask "Would you still do it", or do it in reverse order. Then, ask people what their preference scales are, etc, etc. You'll find out more information about the reasons people pay taxes, you'll also find that what I said before is true: people pay taxes for multiple reasons.

> And why do you suppose people decide to stand in line without anyone actually forcing them to do so? It must be...

This doesn't follow intrinsically. The threat of violence is absolutely present in line-standing scenarios (imagine starving people in a bread-line; the biggest reason not to cheat is that fellow line-standers would kick your ass).

> But people are forced to use USD.

Sort of, in the same sense that one is "forced" to engage in voluntary labor in order to survive. If one were to go live in the woods, they could hunt and forage without ever touching a greenback. However, to nearly everybody, the benefits of USD (and labor) outweigh the costs, or at least they act that way.

Obviously, many of our existing social structures are backed by centralized violence, both at the nation-state and community levels. But my point is that this is just as true of gold or BitCoin as it is of USD and taxes. While common decency will prevent most people from taking your stuff, at the end of the day, the threat of violence is what keeps someone from stealing your gold, or beating you with a wrench until you give up your BTC encryption key. There is no reality in which there is not an incentive to use violence, even if only to stop other violence.

Clearly, "social contract" is a broken metaphor: none of us signed a goddamn thing simply from being born. It bothers me as well that I effectively have no say in the matter, and that I am tacitly complicit in the various injustices of the state. I would vastly prefer opt-in distributed nation-tribes, such as Neal Stephenson's "phyles".

But at the same time, there is a strong possibility that if governments were to evaporate tomorrow, we would revert first to "nature red in tooth and claw", eventually giving way to networks of feudalistic allegiances, in both cases, backed by extreme violence. Should we invent new post-national social structures (perhaps with actual social contracts that people choose voluntarily)? Of course, the sooner the better! But in the meantime, we all get 30% (or whatever) stolen in order to not have to worry about 100% getting stolen. It sucks, but it could be a lot, lot worse.

Civilization is a non-trivial problem.