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...
You might be interested to know that Pinker discusses this in 'The Language Instinct'. Except, linguistically it isn't any different than that of the many words that English speakers use to describe snow.
ReplyDelete"Except, linguistically it isn't any different than that of the many words that English speakers use to describe snow."
ReplyDeleteDid you follow the link in the post?
Yes, I had. It is an extreme case, indeed.
ReplyDeleteI was talking more along the lines of "cold", "fluff", "powder", "hard-pack", etc which obviously aren't words for snow, they are merely words describing snow (but are often used in the place of snow) This (as far as I know) is where the whole "50 words for snow" thing came about originally. Basically, mistaking the words of the Eskimo language, as used above in English, as actual words for snow.
The article that you linked to has Nevin going WAYYYYY beyond that, which is plain idiocy. However, I have the feeling that he might have been doing so tongue in cheek (i.e. he was being purposely ridiculous).
No, Joseph, I mean that what I linked to contained a debunking of the "50 words for snow" idea itself.
ReplyDelete"The Eskimo Snow Vocabulary Debate: Fallacies and Confusions"
ReplyDeleteby Mark Halpern
http://www.rules-of-the-game.com/lin003-snow-words.htm
I read the article more along the lines of "the 50 words for snow thing is incorrect yet people keep bringing it back. Here is an extreme case of such".
ReplyDeleteObviously, I know that there aren't 50 words for snow in the Eskimo language. However, I wanted to also give an example of how such a confusion could have come about even if it was journalists who perpetrated the myth (not linguists).