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...

The other side of the story, from store manager Jed Hershon:
ReplyDelete"For the record, I have many customers who like me fine, it's usually the really demanding, childish, touchy people with an enormously warped sense of their own importance who get upset when not treated as royalty...the complaints are few, except for blogs where people can anonymously whine and 'get even' in their tiny minds."
Source: http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/34/19/dtg_bookstoreclosed_2011_5_13_bk.html (comments section)
Sounds like they've got your number, bra. ahahahahaha
Bra?
ReplyDeleteIn any case, Jed worked every day in a cloud of marijuana smoke and alcohol fumes. As people in the article comments section said:
"Jed is getting what he deserves. Always has been a bitter person to deal with."
"Jed, almost everyone I know who went to your bookstore mentioned the same thing - that you were more concerned with having another cigarette than any kind of actual customer service. I always got the sense that you didn't really care."
"ALMOST EVERYONE" said this. Isn't it funny that so many other customers had the same problems as me, PEOPLE STOPPED COMING IN THE STORE, as Jed admits, the store had to go out of business... but the problem was with ME!
I think the problem is that Jed thought ANY requests for service were demanding and childish!
Think about it, FPS Doug: When they opened, they were doing great. But gradually, one after another, all of their customers disappeared. Finally, they lost so many customers they had to shut down.
ReplyDeleteHmmm... what could that mean?