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...
Gene, me mate, you may be interested in attending Simon's Brooklyn gig: http://secretscienceclub.blogspot.ca/2015/11/wednesday-december-2-8pm-secret-science.html
ReplyDeleteOh, but that was two days ago!
DeleteI'm a little behind, but that video reminded me of this old post:
ReplyDeletehttps://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/on-the-empire-of-the-ants/
"Theory: ants are smart, and they talk with their antennae. How smart are they, and how much information can they transfer with their antennae language?
Experiment: to figure out how much information they can transfer, starve some ants (hey, it’s for science), stick some food at random places in a binary tree, and see how fast they can tell the other ants about it... Each fork in the path of a physical binary tree represents 1 bit of information, just as it does on your computer. Paint the ants so you know which is which. When a scout ant finds the food, you remove the maze, and put in place an identical one to avoid their sniffing the ant trails or the food in it. This way, the only way for the other ants to find the fork the food was in is via actual ant communication. Time the ant communication between the scout ant and other foragers (takes longer than 30 seconds, apparently). Result: F. sanguinea can transmit around 0.74 bits a minute. F. polyctena can do 1.1 bits a minute.