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Challenging taxation!!
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Just wondering if any of you have ever challenged the tax man/courts and won and how you did it.
I also am especially curious to see if anyone has ever challenged the court system on the following basis -
Courts must operate on facts.
You have to be in the country at the time to be guilty/liable for taxation.
Countries aren't facts. They are fictional entities, like companies.
As hard as it is for many people to accept, England, Wales etc have never existed, they are imaginary lines on a map, made real by belief. The process goes - convince population that said border exists, they behave as though it does - it gains a semblance of reality. :thumb:
Thoughts, anyone? :wave:
I also am especially curious to see if anyone has ever challenged the court system on the following basis -
Courts must operate on facts.
You have to be in the country at the time to be guilty/liable for taxation.
Countries aren't facts. They are fictional entities, like companies.
As hard as it is for many people to accept, England, Wales etc have never existed, they are imaginary lines on a map, made real by belief. The process goes - convince population that said border exists, they behave as though it does - it gains a semblance of reality. :thumb:
Thoughts, anyone? :wave:
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Comments
I think you should try that argument in court. See how far you get.
I suspect that in practice states exist and so do their laws and telling a judge that they don't is unlikely to endear you to him.
I'm sure there are many many sicker things in the world than paying tax.
NQA What, other than imagining consequences, stops you from doing whatever you want?
Tax IS immoral and wrong, and thinking about it, most of the things that are worse are paid for by it.
Have you ever considered that people may actually want to pay tax, or would develop a similar system themselves anyway...?
In the opinion of most people, the principle of taxes is good and moral. Even if some disagree with the amount being paid.
The only immoral thing here is ultra rich, greedy people happy to see others suffer and live a sad existence if it saves them a few quid.
Well the proof would be that you are in court in the first place - that would seem to me as a member of the jury seem to say that the court is under some national authority and therefore that the country exists.
Well being a fan of Hobbes I tend to say that life would be nasty, brutish and short if we could all do what we want. In places where the state is weak law tends to be decided by the rule of the sword (look at Anglo-Saxon England where feuds went on generations), with the stronger taking from the wealer. All very well, if you're the strongest, but sooner or later someone comes along who is stronger than you.
Now you can say is currently too tax is too high and I wouldn't disagree. But its not wrong - its the price we pay for living in a civilised country. There's a limitation to what private health and education can provide. Also policing and defence can hardly be funded on a user pays basis. How do you work out who uses street lamps?
I'm not sure most people want to pay tax - I suspect most think of it as neccessary evil. If all the things that should be funded could be paid for without taxing us I suspect the majority of people would be happy not to pay... :chin:
But you're right - even before the rise of the nation state and income tax, social groups had some sort of taxation - whether it was tithes to the church which made pay-outs to the destitute or in terms of time/resources (ie the practice of giving out food to the destitute in a village in Anglo-Saxon times)
Is it acceptable to force a service on anyone under the threat of force?
Would you accept it if McDonalds made you eat their burgers by employing men to imprison you if you didn't?
Would you accept it if McDonalds made you PAY for burgers that you didn't eat by employing men to imprison you?
Is the state merely the biggest bully then?
What physically prevents you from doing what you want in the present moment?
How do you know you are in a country? What evidence do you have?
How do you know that money is valuable? Where did you get that belief? :wave:
Yes of course I have used "public services". Do you want to address any of the other points I raised or are you just going to pick the one you feel you have the strongest ground on?
Or do you mean that threats are the only way to get the resources needed for things that we all benefit from?
My point is kind of that anything done under the guise of consent can be done by consent.
No, I picked the one which highlights the hypocritical stance you take.
I have no problem with your viewpoint, indeed I can understand an element of it. However, when you use public services you buy into the very system you condemn. I pay my taxes so that I can feel confident that there will be a health service, a police force, a standing army, refuse collection, education for my kids, a pension for the pensioners etc.
I don't do it because I have to. If I wanted to avoid it, I could.
...and my point is that by conforming I give my consent.
If the answer, as it must be, is "no" then you cannot give your consent, because that implies that you could withdraw that consent. If you can't say "no" then your "yes" is meaningless.
I don't really have a viewpoint. Apart from stating that I find taxation immoral due to it's co-ercive nature, I merely stated facts and asked questions. I advanced one opinion and asked a boatload of questions and pointed out some cold hard facts.
Please explain how I am hypocritical when the option to refuse is not open to me. If I had the choice to refuse services and failed to take it, then I would be a hypocrite - but that choice is unavailable. You seem to be saying that by using services I have no option but to use, I buy into the system you say I condemn.
So by being forced into using public services, I have voluntarily made myself a part of the system. Eh? I would love an explanation of this one.
Having sorted that one out, any chance of answering any of the other questions?
What is the state, factually? (Hiya NQA)
"All societies rest ultimately on the threat of force" Now that is alarming. How many people do you threaten or see threatened on a daily basis? Is it a large part of your life?
And if you want a laugh, look at a ten or twenty pound note and read it's inscriptions. Thank you for the lively comments, btw, I am kinda enjoying this.
Without a universal health system many people couldn't afford to pay increasing the amount of contagious diseases (TB for example) one of which you could catch. Education provides a skilled workforce (try going shopping if none of the sales assistants can count above 5) and benefits stops people starving on the streets and robbing you to stop themselves starving to death.
On top of that you may never need a police officer, but you are protected by the fact they exist, same for the fire service and the military. Do you travel on roads? Walk on pavements? Do you watch the BBC? Listen to radios 1-5? What about street lighting?
Tax may be coercive - but you can no more drop out of society than you can say I didn't ask to be born.
Very few nowdays. But take a hypothetical example. You refuse to pay council tax. The court sends a baliff round to take your TV instead. You refuse to let him in and threaten him. He comes back with the police, not only do you refuse to let him in, but you shoot a policeman.
More armed policeman arrive - but your neighbours agree with you and the police are shot to shit. Eventually the Government will see this as an armed rebellion and you'll have Challengers Tanks at your front door.
Now this doesn't happen in the UK nowdays, but this is because people have accepted that the state has the right to tax them and very few people have the ability to resist the police to the point the army is needed. However see Northern Ireland for a place where the police weren't able to cope...
The problem I have in communicating here is that you assume that the country exists, that ANY country can EVER exist. Go out to where you have been brainwashed into believing your "town" begins and ends. Note the absence of forcefields, coloured lines or anything denoting any boundary.
Would the problems of Northern Ireland be anything like as acute if the general population realised they were arguing over fiction?
The geography is there, but the hills and fields don't give a rat's ass what you call them, or how you pretend to divide them up. Point a gun at my head and I will probably pretend anything, that doesn't make it so.
I am not going to pursue this too much longer, mainly because the list of assumptions you make would take ages to sift through one by one. But also because the thread is getting very OT and sidetracked.
I don't pay council tax, I don't have to refuse to pay, because I ask for the nature of the agreement I am under and evidence of my town's existence. I always accept liability, provided proof can be found for the existence of the debt. As there is no agreement, and it's just bullies taking my money that's usually where things end. I started the thread to see if anyone else was actually awake and paying attention.
I have been taken to court once and I asked for evidence of a complaining party. The judge said "there isn't one", and I got to leave.
Any of those things you mention could be paid for by other methods, voluntarily.
What is the state, factually?
The best way for you to look at it I think is to realise that at one time there were no roads, no cars, no government and no combs. Someone somewhere at sometime thought them up first, and then created them in the real world.
Priests give to the poor because they believe God wants them too. Does the fact that they then give to the poor prove the existence of God?
No the two things are unrelated.
You talk about geography as if that is what defines a country.
I talk about people.
It's that place just outside of your mind. Suggest you go there sometime.
First of all it's insulting.
Second only one of us is trying to treat things that cannot be touched, heard, smelled, felt or tasted as though they are real. And it isn't me. My whole point is that there is no first hand experience, no way to sense a country, so it must not be there.
Are you seriously suggesting that geography ISN'T what a country is?
Then what is it?
Finally, you never tackled any of the questions I raised before. If the answers to my questions disturb or offend you, please remember that you are the one that supplies the answers, not I.
Please step outside of your own mind and supply some hard empirical evidence for your position, the kind that say, a scientist would use.
These are not figments of my imagination - ergo the UK exists.
If the UK existed and was an undisputable fact, why would there be any need for documentation? Trees don't need bits of paper to be trees, do they?
If I were to try to convince you that something was there that wasn't I would give it a symbol, a song and get everyone you knew to pretend that it was already there.