Dennis Hackethal’s Comments

Following a suggestion, I have changed the following passage

Then there’s the issue that nobody has ever given a moral explanation for why it would be okay to employ coercion against peaceful people.

to say "non-refuted moral explanation" instead. As suggested, "there has been plenty of moral philosophy dealing with that, starting with Hobbes and Rousseau. Whether the theories are satisfying or not, they do exist."

Likewise, the following sentence that used to say

Arguments usually concentrate on certain outcomes that may seem desirable, but it is never explained why coercing yourself there is okay.

has been changed to

Coercion does not solve problems—it just steamrolls over one side of the argument.

I just realized that Weinstein published his paper on April 1st, so... I hope it's not just an April Fools' joke 😂

The simplification of "to reassess the neurobiological substrates of conscious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals" to the clearer "to think about consciousness in all animals" reminds me of the following passage from Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!:

There was this sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on the list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

So I stopped—at random—and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

Then I went over the next sentence, and realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

Same for the Cambridge Declaration above. There is nothing to it. Maybe a good term for this phenomenon is "academic obscurantism."

How is it evil to ask a person to contribute 50 million back to society if they have billions?

First of all, it's not about asking them. That implies that they'd get a chance to respond with "no, I'm not going to do that." In reality, if wealth tax is instated, they won't get that chance—it's an initiation of force.

Second, "contribute [...] back to society" (emphasis mine) implies that they haven't contributed anything yet, when in reality they've contributed lots in wages and taxes. They didn't take anything to get rich—society is not a zero-sum game.

Third, regarding "if they have billions": it doesn't matter how much money they have. Extracting money from someone against their will is theft, be they a poor person or a billionaire. And theft, as all aggressive coercion, is evil.

One only becomes a billionaire by “stealing” in the first place.

Is that really what you think? Can you think of other ways people make lots of money?

Following a suggestion, I want to point out that some situations do not require explicit consent. Instead, consent can sometimes be implied. For example, enthusiastic participation in an activity such as sex can reasonably be understood as consent. In other words, explicit asking and granting of consent is not always necessary for something to be consent.

What is necessary is:

1. An ability to say "no" beforehand
2. An ability to change one's mind and say "no" as it's happening

One has neither option when it comes to taxation. And my point that a lack of resistance to force does not imply consent stands.

Isn't it a bit ironic that the Mises Institute has a copyright notice on page 3?

Copyright © 2008 Ludwig von Mises Institute

Looking at this again, I noticed that I mix having and skipping parentheses in Ruby for method invocations. It would probably be better to settle on one approach (maybe parentheses because those are never ambiguous) and then use it consistently.

If I understand your argument correctly, you are saying that it is literally impossible for me to consent to taxes in any sense. Even though I feel like I do and I'm convinced that I do. Is that correct?

Yes. Because you can't consent to something for which nobody is asking your consent. What you're doing is not resisting and then labeling that consent.

I never said paying for internet was involuntary.

Neither did I.

We are forced to weigh the pros and cons of each choice. Since I can't feed my family without the internet, and feeding my family is a very high priority for me, I really have no choice but to pay for the internet.

That's an equivocation of the word "force." What you're talking about is necessity. Force is something else. Logan and I wrote a bit about that here.

Dennis seems to have missed the fact that I was actually agreeing with him that [the internet example] is well within the concept of voluntary/consensual transactions [...]

I don't know why you think I missed that when I wrote:

[Y]ou did agree to pay your internet provider when you signed up with them. You consented.

Back to your comment:

[...] and attacked it as if I had claimed that it wasn't.

"Attack" is a strong word, don't you think? I'm merely criticizing.

So hopefully this helps Dennis realize that I actually agree with them here.

A bit condescending. And again, we agree that you purchasing internet is voluntary.

I think we disagree about what consent is and whether you have consented to the government taxing you.

I suspect the point Dennis actually should have made to me was that governments are less voluntary/consensual than paying for the internet.

I did make that point by saying governments are coercive. If something is coercive, it's less voluntary than paying for internet, because that's not coercive at all.

But at this point, I'm simply pointing out that governments like that of the US are not entirely non-consensual things and that there is a heavy element of consent involved.

For there to be consent, the government must have asked you, at some point, e.g., "would you like us to build roads?" Were you ever asked such a question? Do they ask you to please pay your taxes? Do you have an option to answer "no" to these questions?

Do you see the difference now?

To others reading Bruce's comment: yes, this blog post is an edited version of a response of mine to a post of Bruce's in a private forum. That forum has a privacy policy which requires consent (how topical!) before quoting or paraphrasing someone publicly. I reached out to Bruce before writing this post and we discussed my quoting him but that ended up in a rather complicated email exchange about the terms of quoting, so I decided I would publish my response without context to make things easier and to be in line with the privacy policy. I informed Bruce of this and sent him the link to this post after posting it so that he could comment. He had also sent me a link to his blog but I only saw that later.

Now, regarding what Bruce wrote:

[...] most citizens of the US, at least, do see their government as worth defending philosophically -- and, if threatened, maybe even physically. How is this not consent?

It's like I wrote above: because the government does not ask its subjects' consent. It taxes them and provides services for them whether they like it or not. It's consent only if the government asks first and then refrains from doing anything if the answer is "no." Consent is a kind of handshake between two parties. It requires active participation on both sides.

The very fact that libertarians spend so much time arguing with non-libertarians over things such as 'taxes are theft' proves that nearly everyone else is consenting to taxes in exchange for the services governments provide.

That's not proof because people can be mistaken about what theft, coercion, and consent are, and even about whether they are consenting. Likewise, rape victims can be tricked by the perpetrator into thinking that they consented or even "asked for it." The rape victim may genuinely believe that to be true, and yet would be mistaken about that. What really happened was rape, whether the victim knows this or not. And since it was rape, by definition that means the victim did not consent.

I personally do not at all feel like taxes are involuntary. (Or at least no more involuntary for me than paying my internet bill. I don't really want to pay for that either, but I do want access to the internet and the money seems like a fair exchange to me.)

The difference is that you requested the service your internet provider provides. Your internet provider won't start serving you internet if you don't specifically ask for it and agree to pay them. Businesses do not provide services unsolicited, much less expect or even enforce payment for such unsolicited services. But the government does just that.

You say you don't really want to pay for your internet either, but I think you mean something else. I think you mean that if you could have free internet instead of paid internet, you'd choose the free one. Yes, of course that would be nice. But you did agree to pay your internet provider when you signed up with them. You consented. You have never consented to the government building roads for you and then billing you for it. That happens whether you like it or not.

The internet provider would only be comparable to the government in this context if they installed the requisite telephone lines at your house, connected them to the internet, and then started billing you for it, even if you never agreed to that. And even if you started using the internet they provide---because now that the lines work, you "might as well"---there still wouldn't be any consent. The internet provider forfeited the right to claim consent the moment it decided to go ahead without asking you first. It's not consent if you don't get a chance to say "no." Consent requires free choice.

It would be astounding for your internet provider to do such a thing, and in fact, they would be prohibited from doing so. But the government, for some reason, is allowed to do that.

Do you see the difference? If not, what would illuminate the difference for you?

BTW genes know how to code for feathers because they contain the instructions that make the feathers. I don't know what you mean by longer feathers in particular.

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We have good explanations suggesting that peacock tails are genetically determined and good explanations saying creatively conjectured ideas are not. The neo-Darwinian theory of the mind in particular explains how ideas mutate away from their inborn origins. If anyone can refute the neo-Darwinian theory of the mind, I'll change my mind on this issue. As to why it's bonkers, consider this question: were genes encoding national socialism dominant or recessive? Were half-German babies only a little bit national socialist? How come some Germans were not national socialist at all? How come Germans dropped national socialism after the war so quickly if national socialism is coded for (or at least favored) genetically? Etc. Lots of problems with this view.

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I'd guess ideas that have successfully spread through one's mind are harder to change than inborn ideas.

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