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...
I misread that as "Horse Hunting with Bob Dylan", which might indeed make an entertaining watch, at least for those who are not squeamish about violence toward companionate animals. Upon opening the link and finding that it was about the New Jersey story, I began to wonder if you were instead implicating that Dylan might have been out trying to score heroin.
ReplyDeleteI picture a show where we follow Dylan around as he wanders through suburban neighborhoods on dark, stormy nights, creeping through people's yards, checking out their houses, getting picked up by the police, shot at...
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