tldr; CEO: "Coinbase and the IRS have (I believe) a shared goal to ensure all U.S. customers pay their taxes. I believe a good option would be to use the same third party reporting mechanism that brokerage firms like Fidelity and Charles Schwab use today: the 1099-B form. We’d ideally like to see that structure applied evenly to all companies in the industry, but even if we’re required to go first, we’re ready to implement 1099-B reporting.
With this potential solution, Coinbase (and other virtual currency exchanges) would issue a 1099-B at the end of the year to all U.S. customers, and send a copy to the IRS. This would make it easy for users of virtual currency to pay their taxes without violating their privacy."
These IRS witch hunts do little but inspire FUD about bitcoin, thus hampering widespread acceptance, and keeping the US financial system in a bygone era.
Also, is there any idea about how much money the IRS could possibly recover through bitcoin? Is bitcoin even a significant source of loss for the IRS as compared to say, cash?
Agreed. But from what I recall having worked in restaurants, etc, the IRS does take steps to encourage reporting of any cash wages by pressuring employers to notify their employees of that obligation.
So it must be considered a signifcant source of taxable income to them.
But of course thats just one example of possible cash income...
TIL. They are tax excempt where I live. However it looks like in that case it's even less of an issue because seems like the employer is required to report this for calculating medicare contributions anyways if I understand this correctly.
If you live in the USA, then they are not tax exempt. They may be exempt from state income tax, but not Federal. All income, whether reported or not, whether cash or not, even barter or in-kind income, is taxable.
That said, you have to make a personal decision on what level is worth tracking, and the IRS has to decide how aggressively it wants to audit.
The IRS regularly busted people for this when I waited tables back in the 90s, so I can't imagine that it got harder for them to do so now with more advanced technology.
I'd say one advantage of bitcoin is the lack of reporting requirements if you wanted to move money without letting the IRS know. So I could see how bitcoin could be a loss for the IRS.
Right, but the IRS has already classified bitcoin and provided guidance as to reporting requirements [1]. This situation isn't much different to cash wages. You can in theory not report any of it, but then you're breaking essentially the same law.
My question is: don't losses from unreported cash wages vastly outnumber losses from unreported virtual currencies and isn't that likely to remain the case for the forseeable future?
With this sort of action, is the IRS signaling a belief that virtual currencies will replace cash for average citizens in the near future?
I'm not sure there is the massive "losses from unreported cash wages" you seem to imply there is.
There's two main forms of "cash wages" in the US. One being wait staff, the other being "under the counter pay" to workers, generally labor intensive. Wait staff who regularly under report their tips are easily identified by the IRS. In the second case, these generally aren't well paid jobs (thus wouldn't generate much, if any, tax revenue).
There's underreporting and tax evasion in almost any business which can be conducted on a cash basis. I know of a heating air-conditioning contractor (now deceased I believe) who regularly got customers to write checks directly out to him and take those to a check cashing business. He was very clear he was doing this to evade taxes.
They aren't implying there are massive losses. They implied that the losses from cash, whatever they are, would massively outnumber the losses from cryptocurrencies. (And thus that cryptocurrency-focused reforms are missing the point.)
In tin hat mode, its possible that the subpoena is actually being driven by the justice department not the IRS. As you point out there are a number of less invasive ways of insuring tax compliance but there are not better ways for unwrapping large number of bitcoin transactions involved in ransomware or other extortion or criminal activity. We saw from the MtGox fiasco that when their entire transaction record for all clients was analyzed it identified not only internal corruption but a variety of schemes being used to manipulate or defraud.
Let's assume that Justice has the full transaction records for one or more of the non-US exchanges, by adding all of your records to the mix it would give them the visibility they need to unwind a lot of stuff.
As I understand it, when you make the motion to quash you can compel them to tell you exactly how they were going to use the data. Don't let them be evasive on that point.
They talk about having "invested" in the tremendous waste of time and effort that is "compliance", simply to enforce ridiculous jurisdictional fiefdoms' opinions about who you can or can't send your money to.
Imagine a world where this terrible waste weren't mandated by the men with guns. Imagine a world where cryptocurrency executives didn't try to spin this huge coerced waste as a positive.
This is the reason cryptocurrency was invented. Shapeshift is the right direction. Coinbase is the wrong one.
And when I start getting paid in Dogecoin, I'm sure Shapeshift will be very useful. Right now, I'm paid in government controlled currency, and I don't see why efforts to get people to trade it for cryptocurrency shouldn't be applauded by cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
I offer a counterpoint: Taxation is theft, and cooperation with government tax collection authorities is unjust and immoral, even if a vast majority of those taxes collected weren't being spent on tools and research for more effective mass murder. Of course we know in the US that they are, so that's a double whammy of sorts.
How can that be "the good fight", if each nonviolent person recognizes their own personal obligation to hinder improving the effectiveness or efficiency of collection of taxes for the war machine in every possible manner?
See, I added, "in general", because I knew somebody was going to come behind me and give one anecdotal reference to a good public school. Yes, there are some good public colleges, and a whole lot of crappy public colleges. Yes, there are a few good public secondary schools and a whole lot of really awful ones.
same on what jeremy said. he specifically meant in general. not only did you pick a top ranked school as an example, but chose the #1 ranked public school as a representation of public schools in general.
i went to 8 schools before graduating high school. ranging qualities really depends on neighborhoods' wealth, unless there's a magnet/charter type school.
* You continue to be taxed even if you're not in the US. Additionally, the US uses its diplomatic advantages to strongarm foreign banks that serve US customers, even if those US customers are never present in the US.
* You have to pay a expatriation tax, and a $2,350 fee to renounce citizenship to avoid the above.
* Central banking gives the government much more control over the monetary system than is needed to pay for simple services. Look at China to see how bad this can be; the article is about Bitcoin, which is currently mostly used to evade oppressive currency controls in China. I consider our central banking system to be an indirect form of taxation.
If these 3 issues were changed, I'd put taxation closer to the 'not theft' than the 'theft' category. Until then, you have to pay the tax even if you don't want access to the US' society.
- You're not paying US taxes in most situations like that because foreign taxes paid get deducted.
- You're still profiting from your citizenship by, for example, being rather privileged when it comes to visas, by enjoying the full protection of the US foreign service (an insane machine when in the rare cases where it actually kicks into gear), or simply by having the right to return any time.
And regarding your pedestrian pseudo-Randian central-bank conspiracy-babble: Nobody gives a shit what you think. Go play with your bitcoin.
Can you explain to me how it's not theft? It's money taken from you whether you consent or not under threat of force. I suppose more technically that's extortion, but there mere fact you get some services in return doesn't change the fact it's not voluntary and done under threat of force.
I've wondered about this, and the other topic of "Why should a human recognise and heed borders?".
My conclusions:
a. Humans have evolved into socially needing to exist with each other.
b. In general, the various societies across the world have different styles - democracy, dictatorship, kingdoms, capitalism, socialism,etc.
c. In general, most of us have the choice of leaving a particular social group and then moving away to another social group. Somewhat easy to do within a country if you are a citizen or are authorised to do so. Somewhat difficult in some cases (e.g., you are not permitted to leave the country).
d. If an individual doesn't agree with social norms and "laws", they may most likely still have the option to leave. They will need to relocate to some other place where they are permitted to do (or can get away with doing) what they want to do.
If I live in a country, then my predecessors decided together to create a tax system whereby all residents contribute tax, and in exchange receive certain benefits. To prevent free-loading, tax is made mandatory. To ensure some form of proportionate taxation, there are tax slabs.
If they are not receiving these benefits, then they need correct the situation. If they feel they are being over-taxed, then they need to present the reasons, and hopefully have sufficient auditing and electoral process in place to correct the over-taxation.
If they don't like this and are not effective enough, they (mostly) have the options of reconciling to the situation, or of leaving.
So because predecessors decided something, the current state has the right to steal from me just because I was born here and haven't moved to another location where there is another state that does the same thing?
Just to be clear - this is an argument of tax being beneficial, but is not in fact an argument of tax not being theft/extortion. Am I reading you right here?
It's in the eight admendment, and you decided to be a citizen. (You can give up your citizenship?)
Now--the sixteenth admendment is violated all the time. (Excessive fines, blah, blah, no one seems to care? This is the real theft in our society, or in my world?)
See my comment above.
It's not theft because it is part of the constitution.
The constitution was enacted by the people, not by a random force-bearing entity that is beating you up.
Yes, it happened in the past.
But the consent doesn't expire until people change the constitution (anything else is insane, as you could never form a government of any sort).
Until then, those are the rules of the country, and living here means abiding by them.
The argument that "i didn't vote on this personally and therefore i did not consent" is not sane. It may be a sane argument before say, age of majority. Even then you could be emancipated and leave. But once you hit age of majority, you are consenting by staying.
Note that in basically every legal system that has ever existed, you are also consenting by exercising any other rights.
Like any contract, you don't get to pick and choose what parts you consent too, you can either ratify the document as a whole and adopt the contract or not.
But note: If you don't, this is the same document that enables folks to have the power to make it illegal for people to murder you, and enforce that, so ...
You can't just claim my consent. I don't consent by inaction, I don't consent because I was born here. I don't consent because my parents consented for me.
Now you are just asserting things randomly that are false becuase you can't come up with a good argument
Sorry!
This is just "i don't agree with the collective's decision making process, and don't want to have to abide by it, or have to remove myself from it".
Again, the document you refuse to consent to is literally the only thing granting you the benefit of being here.
No. The document doesn't grant me the right to life. It doesn't grant me the right to own property. Everyone has natural rights. These are described in the declaration of independence and other documents.
You don't have the right to take anything from me just because there's another person in the room. The state doesn't get special moral or justice exemptions just because it's a special type of group.
Why do you have the right to ownership of things? I personally don't see the difference between the right of taxation, and the right of ownership. Both are constructs created by our laws, I believe.
There are societies with neither taxation, or the idea of individual ownership of belongings.
Nothing does. You don't have an objective right to life.
>Everyone has natural rights.
There is no such thing as a natural right.
Natural right implies that it is a objective right, something that can be reasoned to be always true no matter the mindset of those who reason.
Human rights or just about all rights we have are subjective, we made them up.
And yes, that includes all basic human rights. Your right not to be violently murdered is at it's essence a subjective notion that you don't want to be murdered above all.
It's true that some documents have documented these rights, notably the declaration of independence and some other similar. But that doesn't change the subjectivity of these documents either.
>You don't have the right to take anything from me just because there's another person in the room.
Again, this is entirely subjective. The other two people in the room might massively disagree and argue that since their are in the majority, they have every right to do what they want with you and your property.
It entirely depends on the moral and ethical framework used by those in the room.
For some, it might be fully ethical to murder you and practice their cannibalism a bit.
>The state doesn't get special moral or justice exemptions just because it's a special type of group.
Which is just as subjective.
Most people in the US seem to agree that the moral framework they have constructed is beneficial to them and that a majority rule is sufficiently moral and ethical to ignore the complaints of the few.
You can whine about it all day but it doesn't change that the majority believes that a majority can rule (which is an entirely subjective notion).
Your right to own property is a textbook example of the social contract at play, because without that contract your "right" extends exactly as far as your personal ability to prevent me from taking it.
You're lucky that the Declaration of Independence is not part of the Constitution, otherwise you'd have to consent to the idea that those rights are endowed by the Creator :)
The history of the world, from feudalism to chattel slavery to honor societies to colonialism.
Whether or not you personally agree to the social contract, so long as you own property or have personal integrity protected in any way by the functions of a state, you are a beneficiary of the social contract. In its absence, you have rights solely to the extent that the strength of your own limbs can ensure them.
As I said, I am dependent on others. But the others != citizens of a nation. Its a very small subset. And for the service I am happy to pay as humans have been paying since invention of society.
We disagree on size of state. The flexibility/unhappiness of the social contract increases with size of state. The consent/absense-of-it is easier to indicate as size decreases.
Your parents consented for you. They were your legal guardians until your age of majority (or emancipation) and had the right to consent on your behalf. You don't need to like that fact for it to be true.
You are free, now, presumably as an adult, to revoke your consent and citizenship. We won't stop you.
I think this is a particularly terrifying view. Following this logic all number of terrible things that we would normally consider crimes could be written into a constitution - and your line of thinking is we should then stop considering them crimes.
Until then, those are the rules of the country, and living here means abiding by them.
Again this isn't a compelling argument, or even a point. You might say that about any state - totalitarian or not. I'm struggling not to invoke Godwins law here.
The argument that "i didn't vote on this personally and therefore i did not consent" is not sane. It may be a sane argument before say, age of majority. Even then you could be emancipated and leave. But once you hit age of majority, you are consenting by staying. Note that in basically every legal system that has ever existed, you are also consenting by exercising any other rights. Like any contract, you don't get to pick and choose what parts you consent too, you can either ratify the document as a whole and adopt the contract or not.
Again, this logic leads to some terrifying conclusions. Your argument is that by living in an area under jurisdiction by a given state, you consent to everything the state does to you because you haven't fled. Again - think of all the things states potentially have the power to do, still do to this day, and have done in the past. It follows that everyone on the globe consents to these things unless they bcome refugees.
I've yet to see anyone make a coherent argument for "taxation isn't extortion" which doesn't immediately lead to the authoritarian conclusion that nothing a state does is a crime, and that anyone living in an area controlled by a state consents to whatever the state chooses to do. An argument I can at least respect "taxation is essentially extortion, but I believe the end justifies the means".
It's not theft because it is a legally established process for funding the government.
You have a say in how taxation works, through the political process. You're part of this system and are fully free to work to end all taxation.
And, you don't need to think that taxation is just, or fair, but it is in fact legal and applies to you until you either work to end it or move somewhere where it doesn't apply.
Theft is the unlawful, extrajudicial taking of something without permission.
Put simply: we all agreed to be taxed (for most of us, our parents agreed on our behalf when we were born), but theft happens without our agreeing to anything.
Again, the terrifying conclusion that being born in a huge geographic area means you consent to anything the state in charges of it does. Consider the implications of this...
If I stole your wallet and gave you a car, it would still be stealing.
The social contract is not a contract, it's an invalid excuse. If I made a contract which (1) I could change at any time without your consent, (2) I was in charge of enforcing, (3) I forced on you just because you were in a certain area which I deemed under my control, and (4) never let you opt out, no court in the world would support me.
Taxation is theft. The question is whether the moral violation is worth it.
Of course it doesn't refer to a literal contract. But a non-literal contract has no binding, so under what crazy-land definition of justice can the state use it to deem its actions of taxation, conscription, etc as just?
It really sounds like you have a mental model of the 'social contract' concept that isn't aligned with what it means for everyone else. To be clear, it says that we (possibly tacitly/implicitly) agree to give up some freedoms to the government in exchange for their governance/defense/etc. It has nothing to do with the enforceable contracts and things you sign. It just frames the relationship between government and constituents in terms of an agreement.
So if we give up certain freedoms in this agreement (such as the 'right to not be taxed'), then it's not unjust - we have (tacitly, implicitly) consented to this. It's true that you the individual might not have consented, and might not have the means to leave if you don't like it. But the collective is consenting, and can change the constitution if they change their mind.
So taxation is not inherently unjust if the state's constitution says it can tax you by definition. You might think the social contract that we're using is bad, or that the constitution is bad, and that's fine, and you can change it democratically if enough people agree with you. But 'unjust' doesn't really work.
Just as an exercise, do you think you can write down my counterargument? It's not hard to see what I'll probably say.
edit: here, I'll help you. For part (a) of this question, list four different meanings of the word 'law', and give an example of each.
For part (b), describe what the word 'just' means when applied to each definition from part (a). (Hint: they are all different.)
If you knew anything about our government and how it works and why it was designed the way it was, it would be trivial. If you don't, why do you think you know better without doing your research?
It's not a contract at all - in much the same way that the Democratic Republic of Korea is not a Democratic Republic. It's a weasel word used to give the appearance of consent when in-fact no consent has taken place.
Taxation is not theft because taxation is a legally established process for funding a society, and theft is the unlawful taking of something without permission.
You do not need to personally consent to or agree with all laws for them to apply to you.
You are also free to make taxation a point of civil disobedience, if you feel that strongly that it is immoral.
You are free to start a movement to eliminate all taxation, and if you succeed in having it become the law of the land, then taxation will no longer exist, of course, but it would still not be theft under any circumstances.
Taxation.. isn't.. theft, basically by definition, so that argument is a non-starter.
It's (in the US) constitutionally allowed, which is analogous to "we agree to be taxed to support our government". It's true that you may not have personally agreed to it, but that doesn't really scale anyway. The constitution 'stands for' our mutual agreement - which is why we're allowed to change it.
Even if you don't like that argument, you have to appreciate that it works for many people and so you won't get much of anywhere declaring "taxation is theft" like that's obvious and unquestionable; you just lose 98% of everyone right there. (okay, maybe 95 or 90. I don't know anymore.)
A different argument:
In an anarchy, taxation would be theft. In our system of government (being US-centric again), it is not. You can argue that you'd rather live in an anarchy/minarchy/whatever, and that's fine, but it's silly to declare that taxation is theft universally because in the current system that's not really true.
Well.. sort of.. but, like, (in my view) the word 'theft' has this implicit baggage to it that you're pretending doesn't exist.
Theft as a moral/philosophical concept doesn't mean "deprival of another's property against their will", it means "extrajudicial deprival of another's property against their will". The so-called governmental 'monopoly on violence' (probably better put as 'monopoly on compulsion'..) is encoded into the concept. So it's extremely relevant what governmental framework you're thinking in terms of.
I'm not saying "hey, if you look up theft in the right place, you'll find that it has this extra clause". Definitions in dictionaries aren't concerned with properly inflecting to handle philosophical debates, anyway. I'm saying "the meaning of the word 'theft' that everyone uses in real life seems to have this definition, actually, under inspection -- but you're operating on a different, more simplistic definition, and that's why you're reaching these nonsensical conclusions".
So you could stick with your (imo incorrect) definition of theft and continue declaring that taxation is theft, but I think you're just weakening your position by using an inaccurate model of the world. If you used the definition I'm using everything makes sense. You can still argue against taxation, especially the level we experience, without your argument being "taxation is theft!!" and alienating almost-everyone.
Define it or call it whatever you want. But when it comes down to it, you are forcing someone to surrender their property under the threat of violent force. That is never deemed just when it occurs between normal people.
Fortunately we're not talking about normal people, and the rules are different. If you keep using your simplistic, incorrect model of theft, you'll keep coming to incorrect conclusions about the world.
So the government is not made of normal people? Is the USA run by lizards or something?
Seriously, this is some of the craziest doublethink imaginable. Something is not made just just because the majority say so, or just because the state says so. There are unjust laws.
There's a delight in arguing with someone who understands the commonly accepted positions and can speak to the subtleties and errors in them.
This is the opposite: you seem utterly incapable of understanding basic, well-known positions, and you imagine I am delusional (lizards? really?) when your comprehension fails you.
The state as a concept is not the same as a normal person, obviously. It is subject to different rules.
Something is made just because the governing system that the people have agreed to says it is just. That's the theory that our system of government operates under. You don't have to like that, but you're ignorant if you just say it's false without going and doing some learning.
I am also wondering if you know what a 'law' is and how it differs from 'the text of the constitution'.
A person acting under the auspices of a state has no right to violate human rights. A state is merely a human construct. No human construct grants a person a right to violate human rights.
> No human construct grants a person a right to violate human rights
Human rights are a human construct. Moreover, they only make sense within the context of social contract which only becomes practical when enforced by a government.
They're not a conditional construct. They are by definition universal. When something is a human right, we consider it to be an inalienable right that no party has a right to violate.
And 'social contract' is double speak. It's an attempt to misappropriate the concept of a contract to confer moral legitimacy to majority dictates.
Something is made just because the governing system that the people have agreed to says it is just.
That's not an accepted definition in most of the world, including the US, which accepts stuff like the UDHR. We in the West consider many States unjust if we consider that they violate human rights, even if their population supports that.
That's fine, but when you get the concepts of 'government' and 'social contract' involved, you have be willing to revise that assessment.
You don't get to both 'give away a freedom to the government via the social contract in exchange for protection of your other freedoms' and then also say "hey, it's immoral to not have this freedom; Give it back!". It's one or the other.
A social contract is not a real contract. In fact, it is in some aspects exactly the opposite of a contract. The term is extremely misleading, and basically invented for propaganda purposes.
A group of people calling themselves the government and creating ideological constructs like "social contract" are still committing a human rights violation when they throw someone in prison for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade.
It's funny how people say that the social contract is the price we pay for an ordered society... But no one says, you know, it's okay to choke an unarmed man to death for selling loose cigarettes because that's part of the social contract and necessary for 'keeping order'.
You don't get to both 'give away a freedom to the government via the social contract in exchange for protection of your other freedoms' and then also say "hey, it's immoral to not have this freedom; Give it back!". It's one or the other.
Hum, the whole point of anarchism is that they don't even recognize the first as valid, let alone wanting both.
> That is never deemed just when it occurs between normal people
Yes it is. If I lend you $10 and you refuse to pay it back, it is generally deemed "morally okay" for me to be mean about it. Courts, and by extension, police enforcement of court rulings are that principle writ large.
The whole concept of ownership is based on social contract. What is "mine" versus "yours" arises from that contract. Theft, because it is rooted in ownership, is thus a relative construct.
> The whole concept of ownership is based on social contract
Except a social contract is not a contract at all. There's no offer, no acceptance, no consideration, no capacity to contract, etc.
> Theft, because it is rooted in ownership, is thus a relative construct
I don't disagree here. But I'd like to see the social contract be an actual contract that you opt-into. Specifically, one that can be arbitrated on and dissolved upon violating terms of the agreement.
Of course there's a million reasons why people would disagree with that statement. Which is fine, but let's not pretend the government and governed have a voluntary relationship established in some sort of contract.
> Except a social contract is not a contract at all
Fine, don't call it a social contract. Call it a foo. People, collectively wielding more power than any individual, agreed on a set of rules that make collective life better (in the view of those people). These rules are the foo. If you are in the geography where these people, your fellow citizens, have power then you must follow the foo or face consequences. If you don't like the foo, you can leave.
> I'd like to see the social contract be an actual contract that you opt-into
How would you propose enforcing laws? The U.S. Constitution and its ensuing legal corpus is the law of the land. If you don't like it, you can "opt out" by leaving.
Are you saying that because you agree? Because that was the only point I was making..
We can all agree that gangs, mafias and cartels have collective power and use the threat of force to govern territories. The distinction we're making is whether these cartels constitute a "legitimate" government - whatever that means.
I think legitimacy should be measured by consent (crazy idea I know), and that not leaving a territory doesn't constitute consent. Mexican families living in cartel-land do not give consent because they're too poor to leave. Because a said cartel provides "protection" from other cartels does not mean a service was provided.
I'm just asking people reason about government in principle, rather than in terms of what they think a government should be.
No. I just find discussing ideas more meaningful than arguing definitions.
> "legitimate" government - whatever that means
Don't handwaive this away. The boot-up process, which builds founding myths and their related constructs, is integral as much as with any other venture.
Ignore it and you will be advocating for the unrealistic (e.g. "everyone signs a contract at 18 or gets banished") or the abominable (e.g. "we will have an efficient, culturally homogenous society once we kill the Jews").
If the law is just. Otherwise it's literally a Crime Against Humanity to force that choice on someone.
We recognize that a person cannot be deprived of statehood. (Or, put in a situation where they must deprive themselves of their own statehood to escape, such as threatening them for their religion, sexual orientation, etc.)
Theft as a moral/philosophical concept doesn't mean "deprival of another's property against their will", it means "extrajudicial deprival of another's property against their will".
Doesn't this line of thought lead to the rather
unpleasant consequence that the state is incapable of murder? I mean by definition, a legally sanctioned state killing of a person or group of people cannot be extrajudicial.
It's totally true that a constitution could declare the state is not capable of murder, and if the governed agree to that then it's not really unjust for the government to murder people. Yes. The idea is that people would not agree to that.
(That's in the political philosophy sense. You can argue that there's a universal moral sense above that and that's fine, but that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about the just-ness of government actions. It's totally possible to have a morally-wrong constitution, and it's on the governed to change it.)
The US government has this relationship with the murder of enemy combatants right now.
That's in the political philosophy sense. You can argue that there's a universal moral sense above that and that's fine, but that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about the just-ness of government actions.
I am pretty sure people are talking in the philosophical sense when they say "taxation is theft". I don't know what it accomplishes to simply state "a democratic state has instituted it, therefore it's not a crime" - you could see how this would fall apart for other things we would consider crimes like murder.
Yes, again, it's with the consent of the people as a collective, which is a pretty good system that we have not seen fit to radically change.
The phrase "taxation is done with consent" uses consent to mean "the collective's continuous consent", due to the understanding that the collective is capable of changing the system if they deem it important enough. But I think you knew that already and are playing dumb as some kind of rhetorical strategy.
Other people can't consent for me. That's not real consent. You can call it consent, but it's really just an excuse. There's no court that would uphold that in any other context. The state doesn't get a special exemption from definitions just because.
> which is a pretty good system that we have not seen fit to radically change
Slavery was "a pretty good system". Any action the state takes can be justified using this line of reasoning.
You sound like a college kid who read some libertarian propaganda but has never learned anything about political philosophy and thinks (s)he knows everything anyway. You really need to go back and at least get to the point where you could argue (ideally, steelman[0]) for the other side, and then show where they're mistaken. Right now it just sounds like you've never learned anything about any Enlightenment-era principle of government, much less anything past that, and, well, I don't really feel like explaining any more basic concepts to you.
Easy retorts:
* Slavery was morally wrong (per almost all moral frameworks), but it was just per the government at the time. You should be opposed to immoral things regardless of how just they are under a government.
* You're still using the wrong definition of consent. Imagine there are two words - ConsentI and ConsentP. You're arguing against the phrase "taxation is done with ConsentP" by saying "well I didn't ConsentI!!!". No shit, we're talking about ConsentP. Get with the program or you just sound ignorant.
* The state does get a special exemption from definitions. That's the point of having the definition of 'just' come from the state. This is basic stuff.
(Specifically, defined in the constitution of the state. The behavior of the agents of the state are not exempt from the definitions.)
[0] steelmanning is the opposite of strawmanning: instead of fighting a fake, weak version of your opponent's argument, you go out of your way to fight the strongest possible version of it - which should be easy if your position is the correct one.
Ironically, I viewed libertarians exactly the way you do many years ago. I would have long grueling debates on the internet with American libertarians. They may as well have been speaking to a wall, because I discounted them and their views the same way you're doing now.
>The state does get a special exemption from definitions. That's the point of having the definition of 'just' come from the state. This is basic stuff.
No it gets no exemption. The state does not define justice. We categorize many state actions as unjust.
As long as you're speaking in absolutes, not relative to a framework of thought, talking to you will continue to be like speaking to a wall.
"The state does not define justice." It does for me. It does in America. So you're talking about "in your fantasy system, it doesn't". Who cares? You need to use the same definitions of words that everyone else is using. If you can't, won't, or are incapable of it, then talking to you is, indeed, like talking to a wall.
'Justice' is not conventionally understood as being synonymous with law. You're employing a highly unconventional definition of 'justice' which would make your statements misleading to most.
>You need to use the same definitions of words that everyone else is using.
Everyone else does not use the same definition of justice as you.
This is how justice is usually defined (first definition found through a Google search):
>Justice definition, the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness: to uphold the justice of a cause.
just:
>just
jəst/
adjective
1.
based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair.
When used in the context of laws, justice refers to a legal remedy that is morally right, equitable, etc. Legal rulings are not automatically considered justice on account of being from the state. State actions everywhere, including in the US, are widely characterized as unjust, a miscarriage of justice, etc., when they are considered immoral.
I suggest you stop being stubborn, because you're wrong.
No, I really don't think so even in your case. You must have a limit where if a law was passed saying it was okay to .... something, that you'd object. Even if only such that you'd recognize it in a movie and say "Not in my America."
It really is the people who define justice. The state codifies and enforces that.
We try people (Nazis, Saddam Hussein, etc) for crimes that were legal by the laws of their state. The Italians try American CIA agents with kidnapping for extraordinary rendition. This is a widely held, almost universal view, that justice transcends law.
> It does in America.
We (my government and likely yours) recognize North Korea as a country, but we don't recognize it's actions as legitimate.
So pure minimalistic statehood - the ability to have and hold land - isn't enough for legitimacy.
What, beyond statehood, does America have that makes it legitimate. Can you put your finger on what parts matter to you?
> You need to use the same definitions of words that everyone else is using
You're the steelman. I don't think that's compatible with definitional nitpicking.
> > So the government is not made of normal people? Is the USA run by lizards or something?
> you seem utterly incapable of understanding basic, well-known positions, and you imagine I am delusional when your comprehension fails you.
The Lizard comment was valid sarcasm. You're not only not steelmanning, you're playing the victim.
You're rightly being called on your use of the word 'normal' because you're hand-waving so much away with it, and being so dismissive with the article.
Hmm, I believe consentp is only valid if rights we're specifically transferred from consenti. Otherwise, couldn't I just come up with consentx where you consent to everything that I say? If need be, I could have a few people sign this so we're really a majority in your town...
Where is the reason that consentp is not just "other people taking away the rights of someone"?
ConsentP is sort of a proxy for collective ConsentI, because it's not feasible to build a society where we check everyone's ConsentI. As it happens, the system we implement says "ConsentP is officially derived when the constitution says it is, and the majority is allowed to change that if their ConsentI changes / they think it's a good idea."
Fortunately, the majority also has a vested interest in the system being functional, so they don't necessarily change the constitution every time it rubs them the wrong way (and it's hard to change it, also, so it takes a lot of momentum and time for it to actually happen, giving everyone plenty of time to reconsider). In this case, it would be not in most peoples' interest to abolish taxation, because the country would immediately collapse.
I was only talking about the two terms to make it clear that the argument against that specific phrase was missing the point of the phrase entirely - inventing new words to clear up overloaded ones can be quite useful.
Every person can not give explicit consent to every law and still form a society. That much should be self evident.
How do we reconcile this with the unjust regimes practicing things such as slavery or capital punishment? It's not an obvious question, but one must be able to reason about it without resorting to trivialities such as universal unanimous consent.
That's a pretty loose definition of consent. If the group say votes that we can have sex with someone against their will, can we argue "collective consent"?
I would say yes assuming the group (of which the entire collective is made) also has the ability to change its mind later and vote that non consensual sex is in fact not ok.
If the majority of a group decide something then that implies collective consent unless and until the minority are so outraged that they either successfully agitate for change or the group splinters and starts fighting e.g. as happened with the abolition of slavery in the US.
Basically, collective consent is an implicit concept rather than an explicit one and doesn't require (nor imply) universal acceptance of something.
The basic moral foundation of most anarchist philosophy is universal. States do nasty things such as wars, theft, murder, violence, torture, jailing, spying, destruction, etc. If you apply a universal moral standard these things are still considered wrong, even if an organization called a 'state' is doing it. Even if many people believe it's ok for this organization to do it. It doesn't matter when a moral standard is universal.
A good way to think of anarchists are pacifists. Pacifists think all violence is universally wrong. Most people are not pacifists although and feel like violence is OK in some instances. Many of these non-pacifists would also agree in an ideal world that pacifism is what humanity should follow. But they recognize they don't live in an ideal world and thus are not pacifists.
Anarchists are really the political equivalent of pacifists. No force or coercion is ever acceptable in any circumstance is the basic foundation of anarchism, everything must be voluntary.
So according to that political philosophy taxation is still theft or extortion, just like self defense is still violence and soldiers killing in war is still murder to a pacifist.
Well, that's fine, and it's totally cool if we have different moral frameworks that we make our moral judgments based on.
But if you walk into a room and make a statement about the just-ness of something, it's implied and assumed that you're talking about "in our state", not "according to the government system I wish we were using".
It really irks me when people have the opinion "I think a better government system would be X" but conceal it with playing-dumb arguments like "y is wrong!", where y is a thing allowed in our current government Y but not in X. Like, if you want anarchism, don't say "taxation is theft", say "anarchism is good because taxation is theft in anarchism". Taxation isn't theft right here, right now.
And if taxation is theft in your moral framework, fine, whatever, we can't really unify our positions unless you convince me that your moral framework is better than mine. But even still! start with "my moral framework is good", not "this thing we disagree on, I'm going to make blanket un-qualified statements about it and pretend they're obvious and universally agreed upon".
> Anarchists are really the political equivalent of pacifists. No force or coercion is ever acceptable in any circumstance is the basic foundation of anarchism, everything must be voluntary.
Most of the anarchist groups I used to know a couple of years back where full of force, coercion and exploitation. They just used psychological tricks and peer-pressure instead of physical force.
These things can happen. The victims within the anarchist groups just had the problem, that whenever they were trying to defend themselves, the (inofficial) leaders were able to use political rhetorics to declare them wrong and keep them in line.
It was always the power-hungry egoists shaping these groups. Some were ok, but some weren't better than sects. All-in-all I haven't seen less free people in my life.
I have no idea how anarchist groups work like, I have never encountered one. I'm not an anarchist myself, just like I'm not a pacifist. But I understand where they & their derivatives are coming from.
Many human organizations have similar problems, I'm not really surprised it happens in an anarchist group as well.
> The basic moral foundation of most anarchist philosophy is universal.
They claim their moral foundations are universal. I have yet to see a comprehensive proof that they are in fact universal and overcome the is-ought problem outlined by David Hume.
Actually, it is.
You choose to live in a country that has a constitution. You abide by that constitution.
Like any sane government, you can change that constitution. That's "consent of the governed".
But saying "things that people have consented to in the past, that i have not, are not binding upon me, and therefore taxation is theft" makes no sense. The world existed before you were born. You can leave the country at any time.
I didn't choose to be born in this country. I never gave my consent.
> You can leave the country at any time.
You seem pretty confident. But you're wrong. There are countless barriers to exit, especially if you are poor. Even if I could leave, there is no viable stateless territory on which I can live.
"I didn't choose to be born in this country. I never gave my consent.
"
Talk to your parents, and their parents, and their parents, who did.
Like i said, this is pretty much only a valid argument until age of majority.
But note: even before then, you are taking advantage of the contract, which is the essence of implied consent in every legal system.
". There are countless barriers to exit, especially if you are poor."
There literally are not.
You may walk, all the way to a border, and exit, as many people have.
You may not be accepted elsewhere, nor may you have a good time, but that is different, and changes nothing about consent.
(remember that document you didn't consent to, that's the thing that tries to make it so you might have a good time here)
"Even if I could leave, there is no viable stateless territory on which I can live.
"
Nor does this change anything about consent either.
The fact that you want something does not mean that your inability to get it easily changes anything.
Nothing has ever been easy.
You want a viable stateless territory, go make one, by force if necessary. Heck, you are complaining about lack of consent, go get people to consent to one.
Suck it up.
Nothing in the above is a valid argument about you consenting or not, just an argument that "if i don't consent, life is tough."
To which the answer is: Yes, yes it is.
That's why we created governments in the first place.
No human society in the history of human society has claimed this, because it's ridiculously stupid.
If you want to claim this, okay.
Great, parents can't consent for their children.
Since the document you don't consent to is the only thing that makes it illegal for me to murder you, ..., it's now okay to go out and murder every child, because they haven't explicitly consented.
Instead, of course, we discover that parents in fact, sanely consent for children until those children are capable of consenting or not consenting for themselves.
We also discover the concept of implied consent, whereby people using the benefits of a contract have also consented to the burdens.
No. It's not okay, because the children did not consent to be murdered.
Can a parent consent for the child to have sex? Of course not. A parent can't sign their child's life into debt.
Parents can not consent for their children, especially when that consent entails being conscripted into military service, taxed, and being put in prison for possessing a plant.
> A parent can't sign their child's life into debt.
Student loans aren't actually very far away from that. (Not everyone taking out a student loan is over 18 or the local age of majority, which I realize that you haven't personally consented to what that age of majority should be.)
You should re-read Hobbes. Outside the social contract we live in the natural state of man, where our rights are to do whatever we think necessary to ensure our well-being, no matter the consequences to anyone else. Without a state, from where do you derive the right not to be murdered? The strength of your own limbs, and little else.
What are you talking about? I consent to things for my children all the time. My son had elective surgery at ~18 months imposed on him without his consent, that would have been potentially criminal to do to an adult.
I genuinely don't understand what you mean by this point.
You can complain of course, for anything you think is a violation of whatever.
You can vote to change it.
As long as the consensus decision making process exists, is being followed, and you are still taking advantage of the benefits of the contract, you don't have a complaint that you didn't consent to the contract.
You even have a way out.
You seem to have a very very very strange view of what collective consent is.
You seem to think it is "individual consent of literally every member of the collective", instead it is "output of collective decision making process".
You may want that decision making process to be "every member of collective says yes", but that's just one form of collective consent, and at least here, not the one agreed to.
and again, you have your chance to ratify or not ratify the agreements your forebearers have made. If you choose to ratify and adopt, you've consented. If you choose to leave, great, you haven't. You can't have it both ways. You can't claim "i don't subscribe to the agreed collective decision making process but i want the benefits the collective have agreed to".
> You seem to have a very very very strange view of what collective consent is
Collective consent is not a form of true consent. 51% of people in a room cannot decide what the other 49% have to do. That is tyranny, and it's ridiculous to think that the government even has the consent of the majority for half of the shit they do.
>you don't have a complaint that you didn't consent to the contract.
But you didn't consent to the contract. Choosing to stay in a country is not contenting to following any human-rights violating law the majority happens to pass. By your logic, any law implemented through the democratic process cannot be a human rights violation, as long as the citizens had an option to leave the country, since all citizens "consented to the contract" by choosing to stay in the country.
>You seem to have a very very very strange view of what collective consent is.
Terms like "collective consent" are double-speak, and mean exactly the opposite of what they imply. Other terms that fall in this category include "social justice", which blatantly violates justice, and "social contract", which is in no way a contract.
It's okay. Statists are used to double speak, apparently. It;s incredible the amount of dissonance a statist has to endure in order to justify the morality of their beliefs. And then you have the HNers using downvote buttons as a symbol of disagreement. This is just a terrible forum for political discourse.
Ironically, I am a statist too. I believe a state has a rightful place in society, in managing the commons, and expending its revenue on public goods. What I don't believe a state has a right to do is violate human rights, in imprisoning people for engaging in some voluntary action or interaction by and between consenting adults, or for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade.
Many people are actually working towards the goal of a non-taxation (or "private") government to reach an "Anarcho-Capitalist" society. Many of the original proponents of bitcoin are following a path called "Agorism", which is a method to reach this goal by engaging in "grey" market activities such as buying and selling goods through a non-state-managed currency without paying taxes, to achieve a peaceful revolution, without having to physically move.
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
You could say that in response to literally anything a government does. You're welcome to move to a non spying government, you're welcome to move to a non prohibitionist government, you're welcome to move to a non police brutality government, etc etc.
Are you are arguing that staying in a geographical area constitutes consent for whatever the state in control of it does?
Using raverbashing's logic, it sounds like he is saying every American resident "consents" to everything that Bush/Obama has done and everything that Trump will do...
Yes I am. Police/Courts works because people are non-aggressive. And when you do get in trouble, Police/Courts should be last in your list of things that will help.
I don't understand. Human beings are capable of performing many tasks without the state. Including building roads and infrastructure. The government is just an entity made up of people. This idea that because the government does something now, it can't possibly be done any other way shows a limited line of thinking. People historically used this argument to justify many other forms of coercion once considered acceptable. It doesn't make sense then, and it doesn't make sense now.
> You're welcome to move to a non taxation government, or just to one where it is barely enforced
Even if you do that, the US will still tax you unless you also renounce your US citizenship. Which, incidentally, is not easy to do, and also requires paying a hefty fee (ie, "the tax you have to pay to get out of paying your tax").
I think if this is your philosophy, Coinbase isn't your exchange, and they've been very forthright about their mission to popularize Bitcoin by complying with regulations rather than trying to skirt them basically since day one. And this strategy has made them effectively the first mover on Bitcoin in every sense that matters even though they were pretty far from first to market.
I think this note from Coinbase is exactly what I would hope they would do in such a situation: reject an overly-broad request while restating their willingness to comply with all regulations and legal requests, just like a traditional financial institution.
Many of us are not interested in turning every situation into a political or philosophical battle. I'm glad that there are options out there both for people who do and people who do not.
Taxation is only "theft"[1] in precisely the same way that any part of the constitution is enforced.
So I guess i'm not sure what the point is. In the US, the government derives its rights from the consent of the governed (see the declaration of independence, which, while not an binding source of law, explains this quite well:P).
Here, the governed chose to enact a constitution that allowed the government to take taxes.
The government does so.
If the governed wish to not be taxed, they have a way to do that too!
Pass a constitutional amendment.
Says who?
There are many forms of collective consent and decision making.
Your parents parents parents parents parents (or whatever) consented either by exercising rights in the document (adoption/ratification), voting for it, or heck, choosing to remain knowing what the rules would be.
You get your chance to not consent by choosing to not remain if you like.
Parents can't consent for their children. And claiming that you can leave is not a valid argument because it's not always true, and there's nowhere to go.
In practical terms and matters, parents make binding choices for their minor children every day. Where are my kids going to sleep tonight? Where I [and my wife] decide. What are my kids going to eat tonight? ...
You're right that it's not consent exactly, but I made a binding choice to have children and to raise them in America (and Massachusetts and Cambridge and in this house). I made that choice recognizing that that would subject them to the good and ill of those choices, including taxation, the federal and state laws, local ordinances, and whatever drafts, roof leaks, and other dangers this house might have.
That they were not personally consulted and did not personally consent that we drive on the right side of the road, that we use the USD as our currency, that we use center-tapped 240VAC, 60 Hz single-phase as the residential electrical standard is irrelevant in practical terms.
Consent doesn't 51% of people get to decide for 100% of people what to do. Majority-rule does not make state action consensual. Your politics is shallow and inhuman.
That's a sub form of democracy called Majoritarianism.
lots of decision making needs higher standards, often watered down later
Conviction for Murder 12 unanimous peers - watered down to 11 of 12 in some places
Constitutional changes - 2/3 majority required in many jurisdictions
As a side note this is why the Brexit result was so devastating, the brexit side won by only a little however the support for being governed by the EU was only 48% .... this needed to be 66% or more for EU rule to be truly accepted
Consent doesn't happen at anything but unanimous consent in a group. If you decide to vote, the decision to vote must be unanimous. There needs to be a consent on every individual level in order for consent to occur in the collective level. Otherwise a room of wolves can eat the sheep.
Play that out a little bit and tell us how you get a functioning government [or collective society over 100K people] as a result.
"I didn't agree to that parking fine; I park where I damn well please."
"I didn't agree to not put rat poison on the food I sold."
"I didn't agree that John and Jane Doe owned that house."
"I didn't agree that we have a medical licensing board to determine qualifications for doctors/surgeons."
"I initially agreed to pay for that, but I now revoke my consent and don't wish to be bound by that earlier consent. I did not agree to recognize your courts as valid and able to enforce that civil agreement."
That's not a rebuttal against the argument. If you have a chicken and call it a bull, and I say "that's not a bull, those have horns, tails, etc", saying "well, try getting eggs from that" doesn't prove that chickens are actually bulls.
I'm claiming that a unanimous consent ideal is utterly unworkable at the scale that even a city government needs to work at, let alone state or federal government.
If the argument against a mostly functional existing government is that "not everyone consented unanimously and willingly", I think the claim that to require such makes things less functional is an in-bounds claim. You can argue that I'm wrong, but you will have a hard time convincing me that my claim was non-responsive.
Not all things need consent. You don't need the consent of someone violating other people's rights to punish them. You don't need the consent of 100% of the citizenry to make a decision on how to expend public funds. You do need someone's consent to take private income from them. Income taxation is wrong for that reason.
Everything you said applies to gang rape. Consent is personal and is a moral gold standard. If there were any legitimacy to such decisions, social contract theorists wouldn't try to bend backwards to make them sound like they are consensuals.
>Consent is personal and is a moral gold standard.
A subjective and indefensible view point, as far as I'm concerned.
>If there were any legitimacy to such decisions, social contract theorists wouldn't try to bend backwards to make them sound like they are consensuals.
As far as "social contract theorists" are concerned their system is right/just within it's own bounds, just as yours is only right/just within it's own bounds.
There is no moral gold standard just as there is no universally just government.
The Social Contract works because it defines that a majority of people can give consent for others to participate in it. This is purely subjective and is only an operating principle if the Social Contract exists.
Once you step out of the Social Contract, it no longer applies and nobody can give consent you into participating.
Now let's step back for a minute.
What you're attempting here is saying that under the moral framework A, the actions taken with justification moral framework B are unjust.
This is not correct. It's similar to taking a mathematical system that lacks addition and then complain that another system with addition does not work correctly because it has addition. (Reverse lack/has if you want, it's irrelevant)
The "social contract theorists" justify their actions under the social contract which allows them to give consent via majority instead of unanimity, while you want a system that defines the consent to said contract via unanimity.
Both options are fine but you cannot simply say the other side is wrong.
edit:
I might also add that even you continue to utilize a social contract; the contract of consent via unanimity.
Which means that everyone agrees to respect the consent of everyone else. This is not a objective right that you somehow magically have, it's something you say you have.
That only works as long as everyone agrees but if one person says "I don't want everyone to respect my consent" your social contract violates itself.
> "Here, the governed chose to enact a constitution that allowed the government to take taxes"
No. A bunch of politicians composed of lawyers and privileged elites from the various states chose to enact a constitution did.
> "If the governed wish to not be taxed, they have a way to do that too! Pass a constitutional amendment."
If someone rejects the government's claim on their self and rejects the government's legitimacy, then no, they have no obligation to utilize the government's system of law making.
The thing is, if taxation isn't theft then why shouldn't the government do as much of it as it wants? Why not just tax the people at 100%?
I think we actually get to a proper statist view by seeing taxation as theft, thus an inherent badness, which is only justified when the people are represented properly and the government respects their needs.
So I hear this language as a perfectly reasonable call to examine the balance and see if we're being heard and getting our needs met in exchange for the sacrifices in question.
Totally agree with you. So happy to find people like you here. I think of course taxation is indeed theft and indeed most of it is used to commit mass murder overseas to people that are absolutely no thread, in fact they become a thread of they get bombs on their heads, weddings bombed. They become radicalized, I would to if I would live there.
Its not only war, its all kinds of stuff where taxes are wasted on. Sadly the brainwashed people come up with their excuses with BS like "access to society" like society is some kind of concept you have to pay a HUGE entrance fee for to then let corrupt people decide over your life and use it to fight against you (NSA, CIA, FBI).
I am disappointed that true annonymous currencies like DASH, Shadow ... are not taking over bitcoin. I think cryptos should in fact be used to avoid taxes. But of cousrse a big millionaire CEO of a exchange is "Fighting the good fight". Babbeling about he wants the same thing as the IRS that people pay and of course he is all about complacence, what a surprise.
Also I like to quote someone from Reddit about this: "and at a stroke proves the "EU-US Privacy Shield" is worth less than the paper it was written on."
While it's easy to dismiss such a statement ("Taxation is theft") as rather vacuous reframing of an act in moralizing language, I actually do appreciate the point of view and believe it is an important one.
The question of how, that is by what process, can an act be considered intuitively vile when performed by an individual and yet good and indeed natural when performed by that particular corporation we call the government, nags incessantly at my mind.
Is it a function of group size? Where does the phase transition occur? Or is it a discontinuous process and possible only when we've sublimated from mere mortals into the holy categories of "sovereignty" and "legitimacy?" Oh sure, the replies to your comment are full of the old "argumentum ad pragmaticum" (excuse the poor latin), but their emotional volatility reveals it is anything but pragmatism driving their convictions. There's some deep, primal, psycho-spiritual shit going on here!
So yes, while I would not count myself amongst their ranks, I really do sympathize with the anarchists, but I've got to ask you: What did you hope to achieve with this comment? Do you really think you are going to change anyone's mind here?
P.S.
More questions for you!
Given the putative measures the government would levy against coinbase should they refuse to cooperate, do you _really_ think that they are acting immorally? Why should _they_ have the moral obligation to put themselves and their business at risk because of something being done to them against their wishes?
Generic ideological discussions (and "taxation is theft" is a poster child of those) are what we don't want on HN. Please don't post them here. They're predictable, which makes them boring, and they rile people up into a froth, which creates flamewars. Just look at the trainwreck we ended up with below.
Generic ideological tangents (and "taxation is theft" is a poster child of those) are what we don't want on HN.
Should I flag any of those I see? Because I see it all the time here, but they are "generic ideological tangents" that are more popular and universally accepted, so they seem to create no controversy.
I used bitcoin quite heavily in 2016 through the 'shift' card that coinbase offers, and I think I'm going to hold off on further use in general until tax stuff is more clear / straightforward - I've made an effort to pay the bitcoin taxes correctly in previous years, but not personally being an accountant, had to hire one to check all the stuff (I'm not super rich, so this is a little bit annoying). The point of this comment is that I think it is a good thing coinbase is trying to standardize some reporting method - I also agree with the '1099 for each cup of coffee bought with bitcoin' seems a little bit much...
> For tax purposes, gains on property do not have a de minimis exemption like currency. This would mean that even the sale of a small amount of digital currency (say to purchase a cup of coffee) would generate a 1099 form.
Does that mean you could write a program that created virtual currencies and transactions between them (along with their required 1099 forms) in order to troll the IRS by submitting TBs of data?
This is a good move for Coinbase, i'm glad they are defending their users. They are right that it is overly broad. I don't see how IP addresses and customer support transcripts are a matter for the IRS.
IP addresses could help them identify people trying to get away with smurfing by setting up multiple accounts [see: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/smurf.asp], and customer support for banking is typically about reconciliation -- if coinbase has any mutable records in their databases (likely) that'd be the only place to find the original information -- if they don't get it in the first court order they won't have a super good reason to ask for it later (a judge will ask them why they think the new order is needed, and if they suspect the information supplied to be false -- if they ask for it immediately it can be used to create a more detailed picture of how certain accounts developed).
Not saying the order is justified, merely that the people asking for it want it for actual reasons.
Offtopic, but why would a CEO make an important (for his company and customers) post like this on medium.com? Why isn't this hosted on blog.coinbase.com or something? I know that Medium is a popular platform these days, but I think it weakens the branding of any company or individual to be posting there.
Of course mishandling the IRS would be worse, but I wasn't comparing the brand damage of the two actions (though you
seem to contradict yourself by saying "doesn't weaken" and then "a lot more fatal"). I was making a general claim that hosting important information or communication about your company off-domain weakens the brand of the company. I could imagine a worst-case scenario where putting great content on Medium actually harms your SEO, and you end up with Medium outranking your business in search results that you would really want going to your domain.
Seriously? As a user of their service I'm glad to see them offload an extraneous expense to someplace that's better equipped for the service provided.
After evaluating this situation further, I felt further comfort in knowing there's an added level of authenticity to the post. They could have signed it with a GPG key which would've been nice, but not only would their core site have needed to have been comprised but also their medium account in order to deliver this news. Should this have been a security incident I would have been comforted by these additional ID confirmations.
Most companies don't regard brand-building and SEO as an extraneous expense. I'm sure Coinbase has spent their share of money on promotion. I'm also sure they could host a blog, or have someone else do it for them (does Medium have a self-hosted or custom domain option?)
Even a custom domain on Medium would bring it clearly under their brand (e.g. if this submission didn't have many comments I wouldn't have clicked it, since the title and medium.com signals "low-effort article by someone trying to make some political point", not "company blog"), while from a technical perspective also giving them the option to move later to a different platform without breaking their URLs.
I was actually interviewed for a radio program the other week that is targeted toward federal employees in the DC area. I was being asked questions about a post I wrote on Medium.
The first question was, what is Medium?
I had to explain that it was just this open-to-anybody blogging platform, and not a personal site of mine. Outside of the tech sphere, it's not so recognizable.
Bitcoin is a technology defined by its community. That's why they made a public comment about a pending legal issue - to defend their reputation within that community. A community that, for instance, leads a HN discussion to be >50% arguments about whether government of any type is a bad idea. They'd get even more customers of they refused to comply with any subpoena, but then they'd be unable to interface with modern banking.
Good point. Coinbase by nature has to walk a line between two communities very much at odds with each other.
There is an onus on the bitcoin community to get more people to accept bitcoin directly as payment. Companies like coinbase could help that process along in theory, but they'll have to keep walking this line while they grow.
> They'd get even more customers of they refused to comply with any subpoena.
Dubious. They might capture more of an existing niche market. Coinbase is aiming to expand the market significantly to people don't see Bitcoin's murkiness as a feature. That is, the rest of us.
At the end of the day unless you exclusively use Coinbase to handle your Bitcoin business they can't possibly know the correct cost basis for all your transactions. Kind of like if you transferred stocks from one brokerage to another. You are always going to have to do some amount of work.
The income tax depends on throwing those who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison, where they are kept in a small enclosure, and where they often develop mental illness and suffer from physical and sexual assault. It not only blatantly violates one's right to their own property, it necessitates the violation of privacy rights in order to enforce. It is a grotesque violation of human rights and should be abolished.
It looks like, despite the shiny front and claims, they are still not a solid, trustworthy company, even though they play with a lot of others' money. In particular, the mechanics of their transactions are not obvious (e.g. long wait times), and their customer service is subpar, making some customers feel scammed, with no recourse.
People like to hate on Coinbase because they took a stance on the block size debate in the past that was at odds with powerful people in the Bitcoin world who also happened to control the main forums for discussing Bitcoin. I think most of the "problems" people have are just a thinly veiled attempt at a smear campaign. At this point they are the the standard in Bitcoin for what a trustworthy and ethical company should be. They have got to hold the record for longest period in Business w/o losing massive amounts of customer funds to fraud or theft.
There is a pro-blockstream agenda on reddit, and bitcointalk (theymos owns both). coin dance shows what % of users are running whatever fork, shows volume , transactions, node counts, etc. etc.
Why does that matter? You can see the truth (data) for yourself rather than what people are saying/censoring.
Given that Bitcoin isn’t the future of money — it’s either a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco... it's somewhat hard to be "trustworthy" and "ethical". Are you rating the competing mob families on the trustworthy and ethical scale too?
I'll never understand the people who are rabidly anti-Bitcoin. Can anyone enlighten me? Are they threatened by an alternative to traditional fiat currency, or have they just read so much propaganda (like that WaPo article) that they're completely committed to it now?
My theory: many of those people have heard about Bitcoin early enough that they would've made some money on it by now. Psychological self defense finds a rationalization not to feel guilty about it.
Of course there's completely no reason to feel bad, it's a risky bet and one could just as well think about what fantastic sports bets he could have done in the past years.
Plus, without thorough technical understanding, quite a lot of trust is involved in believing that it can actually work.
Its their desire to impede the eventual massive reduction in tax revenue due to "evasion". Without enough tax revenue, they wont have free money anymore.
Harsh yes but sometime you just have to call it the way you see it.
I am mad at the hype leveled at Bitcoin because ordinary people lose so much money with it. Not just because of the inherently fraudulent nature of Bitcoin but because you put something that can be very easily exchanged into money on insecure computers. Every computer is insecure, mind you but people don't really know (or care!) what they are in for until they are hit.
No offense but you seem to only have a surface understanding of Bitcoin.
I'm not sure what you mean by ordinary people lose a lot of money with it but ordinary people have surly lost more money in the stock market than they have in Bitcoin. Saying Bitcoin is inherently fraudulent is simply false.
On the topic of computer security. If you are serious about your Bitcoin's security there have been secure hardware wallets available for several years now that are easy to use and eliminate the chance of theft from hacking. They have come down in price to the point where they are very affordable.
The Ledger Nano S for example is $50. It's also super easy to use and never exposes your private key to your computer so it can't be stolen even if your computer is infested with Bitcoin stealing malware. Trezor and Keepkey are similar devices.
1) The Bitcoin community day-trades a volatile security while singing its praises in public. It's not clear why Bitcoin advocates should be seen as any more credible than their counterparts on Wall Street, whose characteristic activity is exactly the same.
2) "It won't be possible for the government to enforce taxes or seize assets" is not a selling point outside the criminal, libertarian, and anarchist communities. Most people seem to feel that the rule of law is too weak in the financial realm, not too strong. HSBC's money laundering for the cartels, for example, is generally considered a bad thing. Billionaires minimizing their taxes through tricky schemes are seen as villainous, not smart, by a simple (though not electoral) majority in the US.
3) Inflation is not a problem Americans have or have had since, like, the Carter administration. Given how leveraged most households are, we'd probably like some more of it. "Inherently deflationary" and "no central bank" are not compelling arguments, and just further the anarchist/libertarian branding.
That article does a good job of explaining the problem with an inherently deflationary currency. It does not explain why the author claims that Bitcoin is not a curreny. Neither does it explain why the author claims that Bitcoin is a Ponzi - or pyramid - scheme. The fact that the author feels that the two are interchangeable demonstrates a lack of understanding of what those schemes actually are.
A pyramid scheme involves selling a product - something like knives or energy drink. But the actual thing which is sold are licenses to sell the product. Each licensee passes some of their profits up to their licensor who is the licensee of someone else and passes along part of that and so on. Eventually the last round of licensees are stuck with product that they can't sell and the upstream licensors are getting rich from the "pyramid" of downstream licensor/licensees recruited into the scheme.
Well, there are no Bitcoin licenses - anyone can mine it, hoarde it, spend it, etc. So it is not a pyramid scheme (or multi-level marketing scheme). The value of Bitcoin will not collapse if everyone in the world is using it.
A ponzi scheme is quite different. You pretend to invest an initial investor's money. The returns to that investor are paid out of money coming in from later investors. There is no opaque "fund" making "investments" when it comes to Bitcoin.
So what makes something a currency? It is:
* Medium of exchange - 100s of 1000s of merchants accept Bitcoin for payment
* A store of value - Bitcoin has had a nonzero value for 5-10 years now so it can be reliably used for savings
* Unit of account - This is where things get fuzzy. Things tend to be denominated in US dollars or Euros with Bitcoin converted at the spot price when a transaction occurs. There is no reason why Bitcoin can't be used as a unit of account, but it still has a ways to go before it is popular enough that it is actually used that way.
The Washington Post article places a lot of emphasis on the greater fool aspect of buying/selling/hoarding Bitcoin. This applies to all investments, and especially to stocks. Are you going to claim that the stock market is also a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme?
fwiw, Coinbase wouldn't be the first financial institution to challenge a John Doe Summons. The IRS issued one to UBS in 2008 (https://www.justice.gov/archive/tax/txdv08584.htm). UBS claimed it couldn't comply with the summons without breaking Swiss bank secrecy law, and the Dept of Justice ultimately came to an agreement directly with the Swiss government (under an existing tax treaty) to get the records it was seeking. Simultaneously, the IRS set up a voluntary disclosure program for Americans to pay a penalty on back taxes and avoid criminal prosecution. The amount of back taxes owed on bitcoin capital gains is probably less than the amount being sheltered by the Swiss in 2008, but it's not nothing.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadSo it must be considered a signifcant source of taxable income to them.
But of course thats just one example of possible cash income...
That said, you have to make a personal decision on what level is worth tracking, and the IRS has to decide how aggressively it wants to audit.
My question is: don't losses from unreported cash wages vastly outnumber losses from unreported virtual currencies and isn't that likely to remain the case for the forseeable future?
With this sort of action, is the IRS signaling a belief that virtual currencies will replace cash for average citizens in the near future?
[1] https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/irs-virtual-currency-guidan...
There's two main forms of "cash wages" in the US. One being wait staff, the other being "under the counter pay" to workers, generally labor intensive. Wait staff who regularly under report their tips are easily identified by the IRS. In the second case, these generally aren't well paid jobs (thus wouldn't generate much, if any, tax revenue).
In tin hat mode, its possible that the subpoena is actually being driven by the justice department not the IRS. As you point out there are a number of less invasive ways of insuring tax compliance but there are not better ways for unwrapping large number of bitcoin transactions involved in ransomware or other extortion or criminal activity. We saw from the MtGox fiasco that when their entire transaction record for all clients was analyzed it identified not only internal corruption but a variety of schemes being used to manipulate or defraud.
Let's assume that Justice has the full transaction records for one or more of the non-US exchanges, by adding all of your records to the mix it would give them the visibility they need to unwind a lot of stuff.
As I understand it, when you make the motion to quash you can compel them to tell you exactly how they were going to use the data. Don't let them be evasive on that point.
Imagine a world where this terrible waste weren't mandated by the men with guns. Imagine a world where cryptocurrency executives didn't try to spin this huge coerced waste as a positive.
This is the reason cryptocurrency was invented. Shapeshift is the right direction. Coinbase is the wrong one.
How can that be "the good fight", if each nonviolent person recognizes their own personal obligation to hinder improving the effectiveness or efficiency of collection of taxes for the war machine in every possible manner?
i went to 8 schools before graduating high school. ranging qualities really depends on neighborhoods' wealth, unless there's a magnet/charter type school.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-32608772
If you must, think of it as how you're paying for access to this society.
* You continue to be taxed even if you're not in the US. Additionally, the US uses its diplomatic advantages to strongarm foreign banks that serve US customers, even if those US customers are never present in the US.
* You have to pay a expatriation tax, and a $2,350 fee to renounce citizenship to avoid the above.
* Central banking gives the government much more control over the monetary system than is needed to pay for simple services. Look at China to see how bad this can be; the article is about Bitcoin, which is currently mostly used to evade oppressive currency controls in China. I consider our central banking system to be an indirect form of taxation.
If these 3 issues were changed, I'd put taxation closer to the 'not theft' than the 'theft' category. Until then, you have to pay the tax even if you don't want access to the US' society.
- You're still profiting from your citizenship by, for example, being rather privileged when it comes to visas, by enjoying the full protection of the US foreign service (an insane machine when in the rare cases where it actually kicks into gear), or simply by having the right to return any time.
And regarding your pedestrian pseudo-Randian central-bank conspiracy-babble: Nobody gives a shit what you think. Go play with your bitcoin.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Can you explain to me how it's not theft? It's money taken from you whether you consent or not under threat of force. I suppose more technically that's extortion, but there mere fact you get some services in return doesn't change the fact it's not voluntary and done under threat of force.
My conclusions: a. Humans have evolved into socially needing to exist with each other.
b. In general, the various societies across the world have different styles - democracy, dictatorship, kingdoms, capitalism, socialism,etc.
c. In general, most of us have the choice of leaving a particular social group and then moving away to another social group. Somewhat easy to do within a country if you are a citizen or are authorised to do so. Somewhat difficult in some cases (e.g., you are not permitted to leave the country).
d. If an individual doesn't agree with social norms and "laws", they may most likely still have the option to leave. They will need to relocate to some other place where they are permitted to do (or can get away with doing) what they want to do.
If I live in a country, then my predecessors decided together to create a tax system whereby all residents contribute tax, and in exchange receive certain benefits. To prevent free-loading, tax is made mandatory. To ensure some form of proportionate taxation, there are tax slabs.
If they are not receiving these benefits, then they need correct the situation. If they feel they are being over-taxed, then they need to present the reasons, and hopefully have sufficient auditing and electoral process in place to correct the over-taxation.
If they don't like this and are not effective enough, they (mostly) have the options of reconciling to the situation, or of leaving.
They were your legal guardians and were permitted to do so.
Now--the sixteenth admendment is violated all the time. (Excessive fines, blah, blah, no one seems to care? This is the real theft in our society, or in my world?)
Yes, it happened in the past. But the consent doesn't expire until people change the constitution (anything else is insane, as you could never form a government of any sort).
Until then, those are the rules of the country, and living here means abiding by them.
The argument that "i didn't vote on this personally and therefore i did not consent" is not sane. It may be a sane argument before say, age of majority. Even then you could be emancipated and leave. But once you hit age of majority, you are consenting by staying. Note that in basically every legal system that has ever existed, you are also consenting by exercising any other rights. Like any contract, you don't get to pick and choose what parts you consent too, you can either ratify the document as a whole and adopt the contract or not.
But note: If you don't, this is the same document that enables folks to have the power to make it illegal for people to murder you, and enforce that, so ...
No. There is no consent.
Again, the document you refuse to consent to is literally the only thing granting you the benefit of being here.
You don't have the right to take anything from me just because there's another person in the room. The state doesn't get special moral or justice exemptions just because it's a special type of group.
There are societies with neither taxation, or the idea of individual ownership of belongings.
Nothing does. You don't have an objective right to life.
>Everyone has natural rights.
There is no such thing as a natural right.
Natural right implies that it is a objective right, something that can be reasoned to be always true no matter the mindset of those who reason.
Human rights or just about all rights we have are subjective, we made them up.
And yes, that includes all basic human rights. Your right not to be violently murdered is at it's essence a subjective notion that you don't want to be murdered above all.
It's true that some documents have documented these rights, notably the declaration of independence and some other similar. But that doesn't change the subjectivity of these documents either.
>You don't have the right to take anything from me just because there's another person in the room.
Again, this is entirely subjective. The other two people in the room might massively disagree and argue that since their are in the majority, they have every right to do what they want with you and your property.
It entirely depends on the moral and ethical framework used by those in the room.
For some, it might be fully ethical to murder you and practice their cannibalism a bit.
>The state doesn't get special moral or justice exemptions just because it's a special type of group.
Which is just as subjective.
Most people in the US seem to agree that the moral framework they have constructed is beneficial to them and that a majority rule is sufficiently moral and ethical to ignore the complaints of the few.
You can whine about it all day but it doesn't change that the majority believes that a majority can rule (which is an entirely subjective notion).
I have to use my social/economic power. And yes I am happy to "pay taxes" to them. Because I need them but not to a welfare/UBI-addict who just takes.
And whats up with assumption that everyone will steal from everyone all the time if it were not for Govt ?
Whether or not you personally agree to the social contract, so long as you own property or have personal integrity protected in any way by the functions of a state, you are a beneficiary of the social contract. In its absence, you have rights solely to the extent that the strength of your own limbs can ensure them.
You are free, now, presumably as an adult, to revoke your consent and citizenship. We won't stop you.
Until then, those are the rules of the country, and living here means abiding by them.
Again this isn't a compelling argument, or even a point. You might say that about any state - totalitarian or not. I'm struggling not to invoke Godwins law here.
The argument that "i didn't vote on this personally and therefore i did not consent" is not sane. It may be a sane argument before say, age of majority. Even then you could be emancipated and leave. But once you hit age of majority, you are consenting by staying. Note that in basically every legal system that has ever existed, you are also consenting by exercising any other rights. Like any contract, you don't get to pick and choose what parts you consent too, you can either ratify the document as a whole and adopt the contract or not.
Again, this logic leads to some terrifying conclusions. Your argument is that by living in an area under jurisdiction by a given state, you consent to everything the state does to you because you haven't fled. Again - think of all the things states potentially have the power to do, still do to this day, and have done in the past. It follows that everyone on the globe consents to these things unless they bcome refugees.
I've yet to see anyone make a coherent argument for "taxation isn't extortion" which doesn't immediately lead to the authoritarian conclusion that nothing a state does is a crime, and that anyone living in an area controlled by a state consents to whatever the state chooses to do. An argument I can at least respect "taxation is essentially extortion, but I believe the end justifies the means".
You have a say in how taxation works, through the political process. You're part of this system and are fully free to work to end all taxation.
And, you don't need to think that taxation is just, or fair, but it is in fact legal and applies to you until you either work to end it or move somewhere where it doesn't apply.
Theft is the unlawful, extrajudicial taking of something without permission.
Put simply: we all agreed to be taxed (for most of us, our parents agreed on our behalf when we were born), but theft happens without our agreeing to anything.
When you reach the age of majority, you are free to revoke your consent by leaving the area and renouncing your citizenship.
You really don't have to stay if you don't like the laws. You don't even have to move, if you can get enough people on board to changing them.
You have a lot of options, but very few of them make "taxation is theft" into a meaningful sentence.
The social contract is not a contract, it's an invalid excuse. If I made a contract which (1) I could change at any time without your consent, (2) I was in charge of enforcing, (3) I forced on you just because you were in a certain area which I deemed under my control, and (4) never let you opt out, no court in the world would support me.
Taxation is theft. The question is whether the moral violation is worth it.
So if we give up certain freedoms in this agreement (such as the 'right to not be taxed'), then it's not unjust - we have (tacitly, implicitly) consented to this. It's true that you the individual might not have consented, and might not have the means to leave if you don't like it. But the collective is consenting, and can change the constitution if they change their mind.
So taxation is not inherently unjust if the state's constitution says it can tax you by definition. You might think the social contract that we're using is bad, or that the constitution is bad, and that's fine, and you can change it democratically if enough people agree with you. But 'unjust' doesn't really work.
I wasn't aware that the state defines what is just and what is not. Does that mean that there are no unjust laws?
edit: here, I'll help you. For part (a) of this question, list four different meanings of the word 'law', and give an example of each. For part (b), describe what the word 'just' means when applied to each definition from part (a). (Hint: they are all different.)
I really expected more of HNers.
You do not need to personally consent to or agree with all laws for them to apply to you.
You are also free to make taxation a point of civil disobedience, if you feel that strongly that it is immoral.
You are free to start a movement to eliminate all taxation, and if you succeed in having it become the law of the land, then taxation will no longer exist, of course, but it would still not be theft under any circumstances.
It's (in the US) constitutionally allowed, which is analogous to "we agree to be taxed to support our government". It's true that you may not have personally agreed to it, but that doesn't really scale anyway. The constitution 'stands for' our mutual agreement - which is why we're allowed to change it.
Even if you don't like that argument, you have to appreciate that it works for many people and so you won't get much of anywhere declaring "taxation is theft" like that's obvious and unquestionable; you just lose 98% of everyone right there. (okay, maybe 95 or 90. I don't know anymore.)
A different argument: In an anarchy, taxation would be theft. In our system of government (being US-centric again), it is not. You can argue that you'd rather live in an anarchy/minarchy/whatever, and that's fine, but it's silly to declare that taxation is theft universally because in the current system that's not really true.
If a woman forces a man to penetrate her, she has raped him, regardless of what the law defines it as. Law is inconsistent.
Theft as a moral/philosophical concept doesn't mean "deprival of another's property against their will", it means "extrajudicial deprival of another's property against their will". The so-called governmental 'monopoly on violence' (probably better put as 'monopoly on compulsion'..) is encoded into the concept. So it's extremely relevant what governmental framework you're thinking in terms of.
I'm not saying "hey, if you look up theft in the right place, you'll find that it has this extra clause". Definitions in dictionaries aren't concerned with properly inflecting to handle philosophical debates, anyway. I'm saying "the meaning of the word 'theft' that everyone uses in real life seems to have this definition, actually, under inspection -- but you're operating on a different, more simplistic definition, and that's why you're reaching these nonsensical conclusions".
So you could stick with your (imo incorrect) definition of theft and continue declaring that taxation is theft, but I think you're just weakening your position by using an inaccurate model of the world. If you used the definition I'm using everything makes sense. You can still argue against taxation, especially the level we experience, without your argument being "taxation is theft!!" and alienating almost-everyone.
Seriously, this is some of the craziest doublethink imaginable. Something is not made just just because the majority say so, or just because the state says so. There are unjust laws.
This is the opposite: you seem utterly incapable of understanding basic, well-known positions, and you imagine I am delusional (lizards? really?) when your comprehension fails you.
The state as a concept is not the same as a normal person, obviously. It is subject to different rules.
Something is made just because the governing system that the people have agreed to says it is just. That's the theory that our system of government operates under. You don't have to like that, but you're ignorant if you just say it's false without going and doing some learning.
I am also wondering if you know what a 'law' is and how it differs from 'the text of the constitution'.
A person acting under the auspices of a state has no right to violate human rights. A state is merely a human construct. No human construct grants a person a right to violate human rights.
Human rights are a human construct. Moreover, they only make sense within the context of social contract which only becomes practical when enforced by a government.
And 'social contract' is double speak. It's an attempt to misappropriate the concept of a contract to confer moral legitimacy to majority dictates.
That's not an accepted definition in most of the world, including the US, which accepts stuff like the UDHR. We in the West consider many States unjust if we consider that they violate human rights, even if their population supports that.
Most people view theft as wrong because it takes someone's property from them by force, not because it's illegal.
You don't get to both 'give away a freedom to the government via the social contract in exchange for protection of your other freedoms' and then also say "hey, it's immoral to not have this freedom; Give it back!". It's one or the other.
A group of people calling themselves the government and creating ideological constructs like "social contract" are still committing a human rights violation when they throw someone in prison for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade.
Hum, the whole point of anarchism is that they don't even recognize the first as valid, let alone wanting both.
Yes it is. If I lend you $10 and you refuse to pay it back, it is generally deemed "morally okay" for me to be mean about it. Courts, and by extension, police enforcement of court rulings are that principle writ large.
The whole concept of ownership is based on social contract. What is "mine" versus "yours" arises from that contract. Theft, because it is rooted in ownership, is thus a relative construct.
Except a social contract is not a contract at all. There's no offer, no acceptance, no consideration, no capacity to contract, etc.
> Theft, because it is rooted in ownership, is thus a relative construct
I don't disagree here. But I'd like to see the social contract be an actual contract that you opt-into. Specifically, one that can be arbitrated on and dissolved upon violating terms of the agreement.
Of course there's a million reasons why people would disagree with that statement. Which is fine, but let's not pretend the government and governed have a voluntary relationship established in some sort of contract.
Fine, don't call it a social contract. Call it a foo. People, collectively wielding more power than any individual, agreed on a set of rules that make collective life better (in the view of those people). These rules are the foo. If you are in the geography where these people, your fellow citizens, have power then you must follow the foo or face consequences. If you don't like the foo, you can leave.
> I'd like to see the social contract be an actual contract that you opt-into
How would you propose enforcing laws? The U.S. Constitution and its ensuing legal corpus is the law of the land. If you don't like it, you can "opt out" by leaving.
Are you saying that because you agree? Because that was the only point I was making..
We can all agree that gangs, mafias and cartels have collective power and use the threat of force to govern territories. The distinction we're making is whether these cartels constitute a "legitimate" government - whatever that means.
I think legitimacy should be measured by consent (crazy idea I know), and that not leaving a territory doesn't constitute consent. Mexican families living in cartel-land do not give consent because they're too poor to leave. Because a said cartel provides "protection" from other cartels does not mean a service was provided.
I'm just asking people reason about government in principle, rather than in terms of what they think a government should be.
No. I just find discussing ideas more meaningful than arguing definitions.
> "legitimate" government - whatever that means
Don't handwaive this away. The boot-up process, which builds founding myths and their related constructs, is integral as much as with any other venture.
Ignore it and you will be advocating for the unrealistic (e.g. "everyone signs a contract at 18 or gets banished") or the abominable (e.g. "we will have an efficient, culturally homogenous society once we kill the Jews").
If the law is just. Otherwise it's literally a Crime Against Humanity to force that choice on someone.
We recognize that a person cannot be deprived of statehood. (Or, put in a situation where they must deprive themselves of their own statehood to escape, such as threatening them for their religion, sexual orientation, etc.)
Doesn't this line of thought lead to the rather unpleasant consequence that the state is incapable of murder? I mean by definition, a legally sanctioned state killing of a person or group of people cannot be extrajudicial.
(That's in the political philosophy sense. You can argue that there's a universal moral sense above that and that's fine, but that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about the just-ness of government actions. It's totally possible to have a morally-wrong constitution, and it's on the governed to change it.)
The US government has this relationship with the murder of enemy combatants right now.
I am pretty sure people are talking in the philosophical sense when they say "taxation is theft". I don't know what it accomplishes to simply state "a democratic state has instituted it, therefore it's not a crime" - you could see how this would fall apart for other things we would consider crimes like murder.
The phrase "taxation is done with consent" uses consent to mean "the collective's continuous consent", due to the understanding that the collective is capable of changing the system if they deem it important enough. But I think you knew that already and are playing dumb as some kind of rhetorical strategy.
> which is a pretty good system that we have not seen fit to radically change
Slavery was "a pretty good system". Any action the state takes can be justified using this line of reasoning.
Easy retorts:
* Slavery was morally wrong (per almost all moral frameworks), but it was just per the government at the time. You should be opposed to immoral things regardless of how just they are under a government.
* You're still using the wrong definition of consent. Imagine there are two words - ConsentI and ConsentP. You're arguing against the phrase "taxation is done with ConsentP" by saying "well I didn't ConsentI!!!". No shit, we're talking about ConsentP. Get with the program or you just sound ignorant.
* The state does get a special exemption from definitions. That's the point of having the definition of 'just' come from the state. This is basic stuff.
(Specifically, defined in the constitution of the state. The behavior of the agents of the state are not exempt from the definitions.)
[0] steelmanning is the opposite of strawmanning: instead of fighting a fake, weak version of your opponent's argument, you go out of your way to fight the strongest possible version of it - which should be easy if your position is the correct one.
>The state does get a special exemption from definitions. That's the point of having the definition of 'just' come from the state. This is basic stuff.
No it gets no exemption. The state does not define justice. We categorize many state actions as unjust.
"The state does not define justice." It does for me. It does in America. So you're talking about "in your fantasy system, it doesn't". Who cares? You need to use the same definitions of words that everyone else is using. If you can't, won't, or are incapable of it, then talking to you is, indeed, like talking to a wall.
>You need to use the same definitions of words that everyone else is using.
Everyone else does not use the same definition of justice as you.
This is how justice is usually defined (first definition found through a Google search):
>Justice definition, the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness: to uphold the justice of a cause.
just:
>just jəst/ adjective 1. based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair.
When used in the context of laws, justice refers to a legal remedy that is morally right, equitable, etc. Legal rulings are not automatically considered justice on account of being from the state. State actions everywhere, including in the US, are widely characterized as unjust, a miscarriage of justice, etc., when they are considered immoral.
I suggest you stop being stubborn, because you're wrong.
No, I really don't think so even in your case. You must have a limit where if a law was passed saying it was okay to .... something, that you'd object. Even if only such that you'd recognize it in a movie and say "Not in my America."
It really is the people who define justice. The state codifies and enforces that.
We try people (Nazis, Saddam Hussein, etc) for crimes that were legal by the laws of their state. The Italians try American CIA agents with kidnapping for extraordinary rendition. This is a widely held, almost universal view, that justice transcends law.
> It does in America.
We (my government and likely yours) recognize North Korea as a country, but we don't recognize it's actions as legitimate.
So pure minimalistic statehood - the ability to have and hold land - isn't enough for legitimacy.
What, beyond statehood, does America have that makes it legitimate. Can you put your finger on what parts matter to you?
> You need to use the same definitions of words that everyone else is using
You're the steelman. I don't think that's compatible with definitional nitpicking.
> > So the government is not made of normal people? Is the USA run by lizards or something?
> you seem utterly incapable of understanding basic, well-known positions, and you imagine I am delusional when your comprehension fails you.
The Lizard comment was valid sarcasm. You're not only not steelmanning, you're playing the victim.
You're rightly being called on your use of the word 'normal' because you're hand-waving so much away with it, and being so dismissive with the article.
Where is the reason that consentp is not just "other people taking away the rights of someone"?
Fortunately, the majority also has a vested interest in the system being functional, so they don't necessarily change the constitution every time it rubs them the wrong way (and it's hard to change it, also, so it takes a lot of momentum and time for it to actually happen, giving everyone plenty of time to reconsider). In this case, it would be not in most peoples' interest to abolish taxation, because the country would immediately collapse.
I was only talking about the two terms to make it clear that the argument against that specific phrase was missing the point of the phrase entirely - inventing new words to clear up overloaded ones can be quite useful.
How do we reconcile this with the unjust regimes practicing things such as slavery or capital punishment? It's not an obvious question, but one must be able to reason about it without resorting to trivialities such as universal unanimous consent.
If the majority of a group decide something then that implies collective consent unless and until the minority are so outraged that they either successfully agitate for change or the group splinters and starts fighting e.g. as happened with the abolition of slavery in the US.
Basically, collective consent is an implicit concept rather than an explicit one and doesn't require (nor imply) universal acceptance of something.
A good way to think of anarchists are pacifists. Pacifists think all violence is universally wrong. Most people are not pacifists although and feel like violence is OK in some instances. Many of these non-pacifists would also agree in an ideal world that pacifism is what humanity should follow. But they recognize they don't live in an ideal world and thus are not pacifists.
Anarchists are really the political equivalent of pacifists. No force or coercion is ever acceptable in any circumstance is the basic foundation of anarchism, everything must be voluntary.
So according to that political philosophy taxation is still theft or extortion, just like self defense is still violence and soldiers killing in war is still murder to a pacifist.
But if you walk into a room and make a statement about the just-ness of something, it's implied and assumed that you're talking about "in our state", not "according to the government system I wish we were using".
It really irks me when people have the opinion "I think a better government system would be X" but conceal it with playing-dumb arguments like "y is wrong!", where y is a thing allowed in our current government Y but not in X. Like, if you want anarchism, don't say "taxation is theft", say "anarchism is good because taxation is theft in anarchism". Taxation isn't theft right here, right now.
And if taxation is theft in your moral framework, fine, whatever, we can't really unify our positions unless you convince me that your moral framework is better than mine. But even still! start with "my moral framework is good", not "this thing we disagree on, I'm going to make blanket un-qualified statements about it and pretend they're obvious and universally agreed upon".
Most of the anarchist groups I used to know a couple of years back where full of force, coercion and exploitation. They just used psychological tricks and peer-pressure instead of physical force.
These things can happen. The victims within the anarchist groups just had the problem, that whenever they were trying to defend themselves, the (inofficial) leaders were able to use political rhetorics to declare them wrong and keep them in line.
It was always the power-hungry egoists shaping these groups. Some were ok, but some weren't better than sects. All-in-all I haven't seen less free people in my life.
Many human organizations have similar problems, I'm not really surprised it happens in an anarchist group as well.
They claim their moral foundations are universal. I have yet to see a comprehensive proof that they are in fact universal and overcome the is-ought problem outlined by David Hume.
Yeah, it's not really a valid argument, is it.
But saying "things that people have consented to in the past, that i have not, are not binding upon me, and therefore taxation is theft" makes no sense. The world existed before you were born. You can leave the country at any time.
> You can leave the country at any time.
You seem pretty confident. But you're wrong. There are countless barriers to exit, especially if you are poor. Even if I could leave, there is no viable stateless territory on which I can live.
Talk to your parents, and their parents, and their parents, who did. Like i said, this is pretty much only a valid argument until age of majority. But note: even before then, you are taking advantage of the contract, which is the essence of implied consent in every legal system.
". There are countless barriers to exit, especially if you are poor."
There literally are not. You may walk, all the way to a border, and exit, as many people have.
You may not be accepted elsewhere, nor may you have a good time, but that is different, and changes nothing about consent.
(remember that document you didn't consent to, that's the thing that tries to make it so you might have a good time here)
"Even if I could leave, there is no viable stateless territory on which I can live. " Nor does this change anything about consent either.
The fact that you want something does not mean that your inability to get it easily changes anything.
Nothing has ever been easy. You want a viable stateless territory, go make one, by force if necessary. Heck, you are complaining about lack of consent, go get people to consent to one. Suck it up.
Nothing in the above is a valid argument about you consenting or not, just an argument that "if i don't consent, life is tough."
To which the answer is: Yes, yes it is. That's why we created governments in the first place.
Instead, of course, we discover that parents in fact, sanely consent for children until those children are capable of consenting or not consenting for themselves.
We also discover the concept of implied consent, whereby people using the benefits of a contract have also consented to the burdens.
Can a parent consent for the child to have sex? Of course not. A parent can't sign their child's life into debt.
Parents can not consent for their children, especially when that consent entails being conscripted into military service, taxed, and being put in prison for possessing a plant.
Student loans aren't actually very far away from that. (Not everyone taking out a student loan is over 18 or the local age of majority, which I realize that you haven't personally consented to what that age of majority should be.)
I genuinely don't understand what you mean by this point.
You seem to have a very very very strange view of what collective consent is. You seem to think it is "individual consent of literally every member of the collective", instead it is "output of collective decision making process". You may want that decision making process to be "every member of collective says yes", but that's just one form of collective consent, and at least here, not the one agreed to.
and again, you have your chance to ratify or not ratify the agreements your forebearers have made. If you choose to ratify and adopt, you've consented. If you choose to leave, great, you haven't. You can't have it both ways. You can't claim "i don't subscribe to the agreed collective decision making process but i want the benefits the collective have agreed to".
Collective consent is not a form of true consent. 51% of people in a room cannot decide what the other 49% have to do. That is tyranny, and it's ridiculous to think that the government even has the consent of the majority for half of the shit they do.
But you didn't consent to the contract. Choosing to stay in a country is not contenting to following any human-rights violating law the majority happens to pass. By your logic, any law implemented through the democratic process cannot be a human rights violation, as long as the citizens had an option to leave the country, since all citizens "consented to the contract" by choosing to stay in the country.
>You seem to have a very very very strange view of what collective consent is.
Terms like "collective consent" are double-speak, and mean exactly the opposite of what they imply. Other terms that fall in this category include "social justice", which blatantly violates justice, and "social contract", which is in no way a contract.
Are you are arguing that staying in a geographical area constitutes consent for whatever the state in control of it does?
No I'm saying that without the government you wouldn't be making this comment on the internet, in English, or even have had a roof over your head.
Nations are a way of making people proud of things that they did not do, and making people hate other people that they have never met.
I 100% do not rely on police or courts to protect my property - because they don't.
Even if you do that, the US will still tax you unless you also renounce your US citizenship. Which, incidentally, is not easy to do, and also requires paying a hefty fee (ie, "the tax you have to pay to get out of paying your tax").
I think this note from Coinbase is exactly what I would hope they would do in such a situation: reject an overly-broad request while restating their willingness to comply with all regulations and legal requests, just like a traditional financial institution.
Many of us are not interested in turning every situation into a political or philosophical battle. I'm glad that there are options out there both for people who do and people who do not.
So I guess i'm not sure what the point is. In the US, the government derives its rights from the consent of the governed (see the declaration of independence, which, while not an binding source of law, explains this quite well:P).
Here, the governed chose to enact a constitution that allowed the government to take taxes. The government does so.
If the governed wish to not be taxed, they have a way to do that too! Pass a constitutional amendment.
Collective consent requires unanimity. If you don't have that to begin with, then you don't have consent to consitutional amendments or what have you.
If you want to argue for government, argue on pragmatic grounds, social contract theory or "the consent of the governed" is a joke.
Says who? There are many forms of collective consent and decision making.
Your parents parents parents parents parents (or whatever) consented either by exercising rights in the document (adoption/ratification), voting for it, or heck, choosing to remain knowing what the rules would be. You get your chance to not consent by choosing to not remain if you like.
You're right that it's not consent exactly, but I made a binding choice to have children and to raise them in America (and Massachusetts and Cambridge and in this house). I made that choice recognizing that that would subject them to the good and ill of those choices, including taxation, the federal and state laws, local ordinances, and whatever drafts, roof leaks, and other dangers this house might have.
That they were not personally consulted and did not personally consent that we drive on the right side of the road, that we use the USD as our currency, that we use center-tapped 240VAC, 60 Hz single-phase as the residential electrical standard is irrelevant in practical terms.
lots of decision making needs higher standards, often watered down later
Conviction for Murder 12 unanimous peers - watered down to 11 of 12 in some places
Constitutional changes - 2/3 majority required in many jurisdictions
As a side note this is why the Brexit result was so devastating, the brexit side won by only a little however the support for being governed by the EU was only 48% .... this needed to be 66% or more for EU rule to be truly accepted
"I didn't agree to that parking fine; I park where I damn well please."
"I didn't agree to not put rat poison on the food I sold."
"I didn't agree that John and Jane Doe owned that house."
"I didn't agree that we have a medical licensing board to determine qualifications for doctors/surgeons."
"I initially agreed to pay for that, but I now revoke my consent and don't wish to be bound by that earlier consent. I did not agree to recognize your courts as valid and able to enforce that civil agreement."
If the argument against a mostly functional existing government is that "not everyone consented unanimously and willingly", I think the claim that to require such makes things less functional is an in-bounds claim. You can argue that I'm wrong, but you will have a hard time convincing me that my claim was non-responsive.
A subjective and indefensible view point, as far as I'm concerned.
>If there were any legitimacy to such decisions, social contract theorists wouldn't try to bend backwards to make them sound like they are consensuals.
As far as "social contract theorists" are concerned their system is right/just within it's own bounds, just as yours is only right/just within it's own bounds.
There is no moral gold standard just as there is no universally just government.
The Social Contract works because it defines that a majority of people can give consent for others to participate in it. This is purely subjective and is only an operating principle if the Social Contract exists.
Once you step out of the Social Contract, it no longer applies and nobody can give consent you into participating.
Now let's step back for a minute.
What you're attempting here is saying that under the moral framework A, the actions taken with justification moral framework B are unjust.
This is not correct. It's similar to taking a mathematical system that lacks addition and then complain that another system with addition does not work correctly because it has addition. (Reverse lack/has if you want, it's irrelevant)
The "social contract theorists" justify their actions under the social contract which allows them to give consent via majority instead of unanimity, while you want a system that defines the consent to said contract via unanimity.
Both options are fine but you cannot simply say the other side is wrong.
edit:
I might also add that even you continue to utilize a social contract; the contract of consent via unanimity.
Which means that everyone agrees to respect the consent of everyone else. This is not a objective right that you somehow magically have, it's something you say you have.
That only works as long as everyone agrees but if one person says "I don't want everyone to respect my consent" your social contract violates itself.
No. A bunch of politicians composed of lawyers and privileged elites from the various states chose to enact a constitution did.
> "If the governed wish to not be taxed, they have a way to do that too! Pass a constitutional amendment."
If someone rejects the government's claim on their self and rejects the government's legitimacy, then no, they have no obligation to utilize the government's system of law making.
I think we actually get to a proper statist view by seeing taxation as theft, thus an inherent badness, which is only justified when the people are represented properly and the government respects their needs.
So I hear this language as a perfectly reasonable call to examine the balance and see if we're being heard and getting our needs met in exchange for the sacrifices in question.
Its not only war, its all kinds of stuff where taxes are wasted on. Sadly the brainwashed people come up with their excuses with BS like "access to society" like society is some kind of concept you have to pay a HUGE entrance fee for to then let corrupt people decide over your life and use it to fight against you (NSA, CIA, FBI).
I am disappointed that true annonymous currencies like DASH, Shadow ... are not taking over bitcoin. I think cryptos should in fact be used to avoid taxes. But of cousrse a big millionaire CEO of a exchange is "Fighting the good fight". Babbeling about he wants the same thing as the IRS that people pay and of course he is all about complacence, what a surprise.
Also I like to quote someone from Reddit about this: "and at a stroke proves the "EU-US Privacy Shield" is worth less than the paper it was written on."
The question of how, that is by what process, can an act be considered intuitively vile when performed by an individual and yet good and indeed natural when performed by that particular corporation we call the government, nags incessantly at my mind.
Is it a function of group size? Where does the phase transition occur? Or is it a discontinuous process and possible only when we've sublimated from mere mortals into the holy categories of "sovereignty" and "legitimacy?" Oh sure, the replies to your comment are full of the old "argumentum ad pragmaticum" (excuse the poor latin), but their emotional volatility reveals it is anything but pragmatism driving their convictions. There's some deep, primal, psycho-spiritual shit going on here!
So yes, while I would not count myself amongst their ranks, I really do sympathize with the anarchists, but I've got to ask you: What did you hope to achieve with this comment? Do you really think you are going to change anyone's mind here?
P.S.
More questions for you!
Given the putative measures the government would levy against coinbase should they refuse to cooperate, do you _really_ think that they are acting immorally? Why should _they_ have the moral obligation to put themselves and their business at risk because of something being done to them against their wishes?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13402805 and marked it off-topic.
Should I flag any of those I see? Because I see it all the time here, but they are "generic ideological tangents" that are more popular and universally accepted, so they seem to create no controversy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_...
Does that mean you could write a program that created virtual currencies and transactions between them (along with their required 1099 forms) in order to troll the IRS by submitting TBs of data?
Not saying the order is justified, merely that the people asking for it want it for actual reasons.
After evaluating this situation further, I felt further comfort in knowing there's an added level of authenticity to the post. They could have signed it with a GPG key which would've been nice, but not only would their core site have needed to have been comprised but also their medium account in order to deliver this news. Should this have been a security incident I would have been comforted by these additional ID confirmations.
The first question was, what is Medium?
I had to explain that it was just this open-to-anybody blogging platform, and not a personal site of mine. Outside of the tech sphere, it's not so recognizable.
There is an onus on the bitcoin community to get more people to accept bitcoin directly as payment. Companies like coinbase could help that process along in theory, but they'll have to keep walking this line while they grow.
Dubious. They might capture more of an existing niche market. Coinbase is aiming to expand the market significantly to people don't see Bitcoin's murkiness as a feature. That is, the rest of us.
It looks like, despite the shiny front and claims, they are still not a solid, trustworthy company, even though they play with a lot of others' money. In particular, the mechanics of their transactions are not obvious (e.g. long wait times), and their customer service is subpar, making some customers feel scammed, with no recourse.
There is a pro-blockstream agenda on reddit, and bitcointalk (theymos owns both). coin dance shows what % of users are running whatever fork, shows volume , transactions, node counts, etc. etc.
Why does that matter? You can see the truth (data) for yourself rather than what people are saying/censoring.
Of course there's completely no reason to feel bad, it's a risky bet and one could just as well think about what fantastic sports bets he could have done in the past years.
Plus, without thorough technical understanding, quite a lot of trust is involved in believing that it can actually work.
Harsh yes but sometime you just have to call it the way you see it.
I'm not sure what you mean by ordinary people lose a lot of money with it but ordinary people have surly lost more money in the stock market than they have in Bitcoin. Saying Bitcoin is inherently fraudulent is simply false.
On the topic of computer security. If you are serious about your Bitcoin's security there have been secure hardware wallets available for several years now that are easy to use and eliminate the chance of theft from hacking. They have come down in price to the point where they are very affordable.
The Ledger Nano S for example is $50. It's also super easy to use and never exposes your private key to your computer so it can't be stolen even if your computer is infested with Bitcoin stealing malware. Trezor and Keepkey are similar devices.
2) "It won't be possible for the government to enforce taxes or seize assets" is not a selling point outside the criminal, libertarian, and anarchist communities. Most people seem to feel that the rule of law is too weak in the financial realm, not too strong. HSBC's money laundering for the cartels, for example, is generally considered a bad thing. Billionaires minimizing their taxes through tricky schemes are seen as villainous, not smart, by a simple (though not electoral) majority in the US.
3) Inflation is not a problem Americans have or have had since, like, the Carter administration. Given how leveraged most households are, we'd probably like some more of it. "Inherently deflationary" and "no central bank" are not compelling arguments, and just further the anarchist/libertarian branding.
A pyramid scheme involves selling a product - something like knives or energy drink. But the actual thing which is sold are licenses to sell the product. Each licensee passes some of their profits up to their licensor who is the licensee of someone else and passes along part of that and so on. Eventually the last round of licensees are stuck with product that they can't sell and the upstream licensors are getting rich from the "pyramid" of downstream licensor/licensees recruited into the scheme.
Well, there are no Bitcoin licenses - anyone can mine it, hoarde it, spend it, etc. So it is not a pyramid scheme (or multi-level marketing scheme). The value of Bitcoin will not collapse if everyone in the world is using it.
A ponzi scheme is quite different. You pretend to invest an initial investor's money. The returns to that investor are paid out of money coming in from later investors. There is no opaque "fund" making "investments" when it comes to Bitcoin.
So what makes something a currency? It is:
* Medium of exchange - 100s of 1000s of merchants accept Bitcoin for payment
* A store of value - Bitcoin has had a nonzero value for 5-10 years now so it can be reliably used for savings
* Unit of account - This is where things get fuzzy. Things tend to be denominated in US dollars or Euros with Bitcoin converted at the spot price when a transaction occurs. There is no reason why Bitcoin can't be used as a unit of account, but it still has a ways to go before it is popular enough that it is actually used that way.
The Washington Post article places a lot of emphasis on the greater fool aspect of buying/selling/hoarding Bitcoin. This applies to all investments, and especially to stocks. Are you going to claim that the stock market is also a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme?