[tn13]

Government can not be trusted. Something that the founding fathers and understood and warned centuries ago despite their own inherent flaws.

Individual liberty is something that we need to defend actively from the government and that can not happen unless we take a diametrically opposite stance and do not concede even and inch of ground.

Example: People who supported civil forfeiture essentially thought that its okay to take things away from crime lords even if the charges are not proved. Now CF is coming after everyone.

I think the right solution here is to starve the beast. Force the government to lower taxes and leave them with substantially less money for needless wars, enforcing idiotic laws and other welfare schemes.

[hx87]

Taxes aren't the problem--it's the fees, law-enforcement-as-revenue-service, and other hacks to get around the lack of tax revenue that makes government nasty. I'd much rather pay taxes and zero out all government fees, civil forfeiture and non-criminal fines.

[tn13]

I lived in India for many years. India has idiotic laws but the government simply does not have enough money to enforce any laws. As a result we can simply ignore the laws and get about our business. (That also explains corruption and inability to scale a model).

For example my house was not connected by road. When we tried to build our own private road we realized we had to take clearance from 8 departments which would have taken us 2 years and several $$$ in bribes. We paid money to a contractor who build the road without any clearance and no government person ever showed up because they had more important job to do.

The problem is if you are going to have a higher number of cops per capita, they need to catch someone to justify their existence. The only reason we have "War against drugs" because there aren't any other wars that politicians are fighting with. Almost all problems are solved (compared to say India).

If gov. shuts down war against drugs they will start war against sex. American women enjoy freedom and safety that Indian women can only dream of and yet our government is busy passing all sort of laws to "protect woman". This is because these are empty minds working as devils workshop.

[wallace_f]

>The problem is if you are going to have a higher number of cops per capita, they need to catch someone to justify their existence. The only reason we have "War against drugs" because there aren't any other wars that politicians are fighting with. Almost all problems are solved (compared to say India).

Insightful comment.

I hope for a future where we focus on using government to govern ourselves in a way in which we reward people for doing bad things, and punish people for doing good things. Right now it seems to be a tool that is mostly focused to benefit those in power, at the expense of others. One cost of this is that the definition of what is unacceptably unjust is becoming increasingly inane. Our liberties are eroding.

[wallace_f]

Correction: that is (probably obvious) supposed to say, "reward people for doing good things, and punish people for doing bad things." My comment is uneditable now, though.

[uberuser]

>India has idiotic laws but the government simply does not have enough money to enforce any laws Kinda same in Russia. There is even a national joke: "The severity of Russian laws is alleviated by the lack of obligation to obey them." But it's excuse of course, we must change the things.

[freshyill]

You had me until you decided to turn it into a tax thing.

[794CD01]

The founding fathers also "understood" that negroes were subhuman and women existed solely to bear children. There is no reason to base modern decisions on 250-year-old morals.

[thomasthomas]

I agree with you but I would challenge the assumption lower taxes means less revenue

[wvenable]

Starving the beast doesn't work -- programs and infrastructure you want funded aren't and programs you don't want supported are fully funded. This has always been the way. Furthermore, under funded governments tend to much more corrupt.

You also can't lower taxes without hurting employment and nobody wants higher unemployment.

[thaumasiotes]

> You also can't lower taxes without hurting employment and nobody wants higher unemployment.

This is counter to virtually everything I've seen asserted about economics, as well as the raw world data on hours worked compared to tax rates.

There is a "leisure effect" whereby getting more money for the same amount of work (the effect of lowering taxes) means that people choose additional leisure over additional work, because they don't need the extra money from additional work as badly. It is much less strong than the effect whereby raising the returns on work leads people to do more of it, because they're getting more out of the extra work than they used to.

What are you thinking of when you make this claim?

[wvenable]

I meant people working directly or indirectly for the government.