St. Paul and I Agree...
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Well... ok...
ReplyDeleteBut if I looked like a Paki and wore heavy, out-of-season clothes, and the law ordered me to surrender, I'd surrender. Wait a few days before passing judgement on this one. Something about his behavior was indeed suspect, if the press can be trusted.
Sure, something about his behaviour was suspect.
ReplyDeleteAnd he was then shot five times while he lay cowering, unarmed, on the floor of a train.
Typical government waste: use five bullets when one would do the job!
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, it does appear that the only way to stop a suicide attack in progress is to destroy the brain of the attacker before he detonates the explosives on his person.
These suicide attackers are going to do everything for urban living that they did for tourism. Getting from place to place is going to be one huge pain in the a--.
I've thought about the victim's behavior in terms of what I'd do were I in possession of a controled substance, or, say, had just left my boss' house where I had been playing hide the salam with his wife. I'm facing loss of a job and/or deportation so maybe the rational response was to run? That is, it *was* a rational response before the state decided to pre-emptively kill terrorism suspects.