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Do you support tax cutting or increasing?

Your stance on raising taxes for the rich?

I'm for tax cutting, as well as for the rich. I believe that the company, regardless on the taxes put on them, well make just as much money. So to compensate the money lost through higher taxes, they'll probably lay off a ton of their workers.

The money the government gets from the rich is pored into programs that help the poor, yet the poor are only in poverty because the company laid them off.

And the programs funded by this money have been known to....not work.

They're not poor because they've been laid off... that's not even true for half the working poor. If you're born into a poor home, you're most likely going to stay poor for the rest of your life... same goes for being rich and the middle class. Poor people don't have as many opportunities as you or me... and when I say "poor", I mean, below the poverty line, because I know many middle class families that are living from paycheck to paycheck.

Programs such as welfare and food stamps do work... In Los Angeles, you see many people in lines at the store using their food stamps to feed their families.

RedDragon, you bespeak a very Libertarian point of view on taxes and the role of government. I applaud your sensibilities.

Taxes are a cuss word, and government-- at all levels-- needs a major diet plan.

If they earned or received the money in a voluntary transaction then yes, but they don't not have the right to enslave the porn and vodka seeking individual, nor do they have the right to have another individual or group enslave the porn and vodka seeking man, in their name.

That was a horrible failure to explain property is theft, you do not have the right to stab me with the knife because I own myself and as such my body is my property those your stabbing me would be destruction of my property. If an individual earns or receives something it can use what it earned of received in whatever manner it pleases as long as the way it uses said item is voluntary. All interactions should be based on concepts of self-ownership and the Non-Aggression principle.


So you want more altruistic theft very nice, taxation is a form of extortion, where a threat is offered, and unless the victim pays up, the threat will be followed through. It is nothing short of criminal.

Or you know maybe get an actual free market not it is a hodgepodge of freedoms and regulations that is the state market otherwise known as the mixed market. Or individuals could go with some other form of a voluntary economic system, though forgive me for assuming that what you espouse might not be 100% voluntary, after seeing your call for theft.

My property is sovereign from your property and cannot be mixed unless both of us agree to do so, and since there was no agreement you violated my property while I made no action on your property and thus the blood is on your hands. And if you are not engaging in said stabbing then I cannot destroy or damage your knife unless we both agree to do so for whatever reason. Only in a case in which one of us initiates force against another may we use retaliatory force to harm one another. Because if I use force against you then I'm essentially saying I don't uphold your right to exist as an independent individual. And thus you have the right to defend yourself as this is the choice that I have made and I must live with it.

So I'm guessing here that you hold the welfare of others as the standard of "good", and self-sacrifice as the only moral action, or at least the most moral action. The problem with this though is that leaves one with the false choice between maliciously exploiting the other person (forcing them to be sacrificed) or being "moral" and offering oneself up as the sacrificial victim. So if I may ask why is the second good? Because from my point of view the dichotomy of sacrifice or exploit is false. Between rational people, there should never be any sacrifice involved or conflict of interest. The true moral interaction between two individuals should be an interaction as traders - trading value for value in a mutually agreed on and beneficial manner.

This is not to say that benevolence and good will are immoral. It is only sacrifice that is immoral, and being generally benevolent is not a sacrifice but a benefit and a virtue. The difference is that to be "good" according your ethical system an individual must hand out blank checks to all who claim a need (mind you I'm greatly exaggerating here), while I hold an individuals own life is ultimate ethical standard of value against which all acts must be analyzed. Your life as your standard does not mean trampling on other people to get what you want. This is not in your rational self-interest. It is in your interest to be benevolent.

Nor does your life as your standard mean cheating people to get ahead, even if they don't realize it and you never get caught. Fraud is not in your rational self-interest because you lose your independence and you sacrifice honesty to an unreality that you have to maintain to perpetrate your fraud. This is self-destructive in the long run.

Now you say that I must feed this person of I am essentially killing them but I do not have duty to feed this individual as a duty is but an obligation without reason. It is the same as saying that an individual can force me to give my heart away to someone who needs a transplant. According to you if my heart is not given to the individual who needs it then I'm killing them, so you have two choices force me to give my heart and kill me in doing so or let the person die, thus killing them. But maybe you object to this because it would result in my death, well what about one of my kidneys? Or a new situation you have gotten lost in desert and have had nothing to eat or drink for three days. Now I too am lost in the same dessert and I come upon, now while I also have no food or water I have only gone a few hours without such things, now since your need is greater you would the right to feast upon me? Now I don't mean slice open my thoracic cavity and start feasting upon lungs. No I mean more so as decapitating my leg and eating it, or perhaps my left hand, or maybe just a few of my fingers and one toe. Do you have the right to cripple me to attain a need?

You also say that allowing a person to die is akin to murder and thus I am a criminal of sorts. Yet to do this I must act I must initiated force to be a forceful person, and since I have not initiated force I'm not a criminal. Right and ethics are built upon interaction between individuals, specifically rational interactions.

If a person saved because they were forced to or because they did not want but did so any because of some misguided ethical system, well eight out of ten times I would jump off that cliff.

Also may I ask where do you get the idea that I hold theft to be of a greater crime then murder, this is false. I hold murder and theft on the same level as murder is but the mutilation of one's body (one's property) and the theft of ones life. These things are but the different heads of the same beast.

Now you say that the free market is not voluntary because of necessity, this is the same as saying that breathing is not voluntary because humans need to do it for survival. If one starves it is only do to the natural consequence of human freedom. You hold the property of one individual is not the property of that individual but also of all other individuals whether said individual agrees to this or not. Because of this individuals could not be independent. They cannot live on their own efforts, because their goods will be stolen. This means that to live, they must act in accordance with the wishes of society. They are enslaved. Now if people voluntarily joined their wealth together for some whatever reason I would have no problem with it, I would not join in this agreement but I would not try and stop such a thing. And to clarify I hold that all actions between individuals must be based on voluntary cooperation. Which is why I threw out my nations flag a long time ago.

And I think that fact that you hold theft not to be a crime shows how hollow your ethical system is, but I doubt we'll ever get past this ideological difference. Because I hold that if a person cannot acquire food through their own means or though voluntary negotiations of others then they will starve it is neither good nor bad it just is. I do not hold that there is a right to food only a right through voluntary and non-aggressive means. But this goes completely against your ethical system so I doubt even if we were to sit here and argue until the sun extinguishes, and we still wouldn’t have convinced each other of anything.

So I must ask how is an individuals value determined? What is the objective system used to determine one's worth to others. Because I consider Values to be that of which one seeks to achieve or maintain according to their own life as the standard of evaluation. Values are the motive power behind purposeful action. They are the ends to which one act. Without them, life would be impossible. Life requires self-generated (self being the key word here) action to sustain itself.

Breathing is voluntary I can decide whether or whether not to breath I will die of course, or pass out but this a natural consequence of lack of oxygen not of another individual using force against me. Since I have freely chosen to die it is voluntary. No one else has forced me to anything against my will, I have chosen my actions thus breathing is voluntary.

I disagree natural as I use the word refers to all directly observable phenomena of the "physical" or material universe, and it is contrasted only with any other sort of existence, such as spiritual or supernatural existence. And the effects of economic organization can be observed, thus it is part of the observable the world and thus is natural.

Yes but luckily for me I regard the will as superior to the universe, not in sense of power but just in choosing how one should act.

Well because I'm not coerced to choose whether to stop breathing for not I'm not being threatened to do anything. I should be free to choose whatever I want to do as long as I do not harm anyone else, but I would have only two choices if you were threatening me, die or bow to one who uses means that are to contrary to the nature of the intellect. These choices would be determined by you and would violate my individual liberty, as I have right to do what I want without any trying to stop as long as I am not harming anyone. But in this case I wouldn't have the choice to say, yell, "sit down and shut up you coercive brute", without being responded with violence thus initiating an act of aggression upon me. That and to violate my individual self the cosmos would have to have will and some intelligence. It is neutral in that it has no motivations but Individually a human has an individual will which can either be positive or negative depending on its actions.

No when I say voluntary I mean "without coercive pressure from other people". Also society is but a collective abstraction used by the state to justify its existence and to keep its ill-gotten gains. But to answer your question no, people should be able to act in any way they dam please as long as they do not force others to act in a way they did not want to. It is a fact that the only person who can think with your brain is you. Neither can a person be compelled to do anything against his or her will, for each person is ultimately responsible for his or her own actions. Governments try to terrorize individuals into submitting to tyranny by grabbing their bodies as hostages and trying to destroy their spirits. This strategy is not successful against the person who harbors the Stoic attitude toward life, and who refuses to allow pain to disturb the equanimity of his or her mind, and the exercise of reason.

I assert that all persons are the absolute owners of their lives, and should be free to do whatever they wish with their own bodies or property, provided they do not infringe on the rights of another to engage in that same freedom. I maintain that the initiation of force, defined by physical violence against another or non-physical acts such as fraud or threat, is a violation of that central principle; however, I hold that protective violence, such as self defense, does not constitute an initiation of force, since they hold that such actions necessarily reflect an individual's reaction to a danger initially started by another individual.