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by fires10 976 days ago
I don't understand this comment. Can someone explain it like I'm five?
2 comments

You can't give somebody something unrequested and then demand payment. Otherwise people could send you parcels you haven't ordered and then charge you.

So he is saying he hasn't asked for the government services but is been forced to pay for them. The obvious answer is that by being a member of society you have implicitly agreed to it's rules - you can't pick and choose.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/officious_intermeddler

The obvious answer is that by being a member of society you have implicitly agreed to it's rules

That's such nonsense though, since as an individual you have virtually no impact on anything unless you were born into extreme wealth. No government that I'm aware of operates hypothecation (where you can specify what your taxes get used for), and voting for representatives based on policy commitments is crude, unreliable, and too slow to be adequately responsive. Nobody in the private sector has a job where they are only subject to performance review every 2/4/6 years.

In the US, few people truly support the roughly $1 trillion annual cost of 'defense' and nobody thinks it's efficiently allocated, but any proposals to significantly cut that sum are political suicide so it's never going to happen. Much of our current political angst stems from people's intuitive awareness that their taxes are a real fact of life whereas their influence on the political process is largely notional.

> In the US....

I'd argue that the democratic ties between the people and the actions of the government in the US are extremely fragile - money is more important than people now in the US electoral system.

Another American disease is to then extrapolate that malaise and assume the rest of the world is in a similar position.

The solution isn't to dissolve society - that removes the only mechanism ( government ) that the majority have to control the powerful, further entrenching the power of the rich.

The solution is to take money out of US politics and get it working again for the majority,

I don't agree with them. but to simplify it:

Imagine without asking you someone cleaned your car ,while you were shopping, and then demanded payment.

They're comparing the services provided by taxes to this.

It is silly. None of us consented to our parents / guardians raising us.. but for better or worse they did.

Thank you.