I didn't realize that Disney buys up so many roads. I guess it makes sense. I like the story with the bridge between the US and Canada. I wonder what it is that made the governments so horrible as making the bridge profitable, even at a higher price. What was it that made it easier for the private company to monetize the venture? Aren't there some government policies that prevent cell phone companies from endlessly raising their prices? I think it's called collusion, right? Without government regulation, are there some natural tendencies that would prevent collusion?
Monopolies cannot exist without government force. It just doesn't work. I can only site one case of a natural monopoly in the United States that did not use the force of government. That is the company that manufactures those little white pieces of cardboard for priests to wear around their collars. I'm thinking the only reason it was a monopoly was that there was not much motivation to disrupt that industry and the company likely kept prices low for ideological reasons. |
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Whelp, we tried.
Anyone have any good leads on some super sweet municipal bonds I can jump on? I'm hearing that they're giving some super sweet 2% yields over 20 years.
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this could be an interesting take, its not a theft as it is used for your own welfare by the government. We use those things in daily life and then debate if it is a theft?
Wow, that's different from the 1000 other sheep in this thread. Thank you for the valuable insight. You are all paying taxes on the few scraps you get from your signature campaigns...right? Because the ends justifying the means and all. |
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ENTP
I participated in the INTP forum for a couple of days once. Pure autism  . Perhaps you were looking too hard for someone to reach a final conclusion. Not going to happen with an INTP. Actually, we INTPs are the most logical type. Unfortunately, our premise is liable to change when we gather more data. I just re-took the test and it said INTP instead of INTJ as I had previously thought. I was always bothered by the descriptions that said I was very organized and stuck to a plan. Perhaps when I took it I was thinking about money. But no, I'm never on time for anything. Either way. I like to sit alone and stay inside and enjoy the world I create inside my head. |
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Strangely enough, I just had my gf take that test last night. INTJ and ENTP...neither of us have our feet on the ground. Either we'll achieve big things or crash and burn. |
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Thanks a lot for taking the time to respond. This really is an interesting subject. You do a good job of explaining it. In terms of the roads, the way I understand it, private companies would own different parts of the roads? I guess one company could run the roads in one region and another could own the roads in the next region over. Each company would sell memberships to people. They would make contracts with each other to allow their "members" to use to other company's roads. Does that sound about right? Shouldn't we be concerned at all that the roads are private? Couldn't they jack the prices up unreasonably or discriminate again certain groups of people, for example?
There are some examples of private roads, and most people who are for privatizing would require some sort of easement to ensure that people are not locked in their homes. I imagine road systems would be local, regional and national. Where local roads are treated differently from national roads. If you have ever been to Disney World you have driven on a private road. Disney wants people to be able to get to their park easily so they purchased all of the roads going into their park and have built them and maintained them on their own so that they don't have to worry about huge traffic jams or degrading roadways for their customers. Most believe that local roadways would be paid by businesses that want people to have easy access to drive to their stores. Ever turned off of the government road onto a large shopping center parking lot with roads? Those are all private. There was a bridge between the US and Canada that was losing money for the governments of both sides even though they charged a large fee for everyone crossing. They ended up privatizing it and not only did the company that bought it lower prices but they made it profitable. Phone companies could also raise prices on those cell towers as well. Make it so expensive so that only the world's richest can use cell phones. So why don't they do that? Could it be that companies that are in business to make money actually want to make money? Private roads would be the same. More customers equals more money. Why would they want to push people out of the system by making it harder for people to use their service? I'm just one person on the Internet with an idea of how private roads could work. But if they were private there would be tens of thousands of people with entrepreneurial spirit trying to figure out a better solution to beat the current competition to offer better solutions. We would go from our current system in the same way that we used to have our home phone lines to an advancement system in roadways akin to our current smart phones in our pockets. In a way, people who want taxes to pay for roads are getting in the way of the potential that transport could achieve. If it weren't for the government monopoly. And if they raise the price on a certain group of people....  Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.  |
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I'm looking at that sparkswap app thinking...that's how easy it should be...
Meanwhile my German bank just e-mailed me saying for "security reasons" they cannot let me transfer any funds out of the country from my bank account. That I have to come in personally to un-block my account. I live in French Polynesia and have no plans whatsoever of ever returning to Germany.
Meanwhile, in Germany, they consider bitcoin a private currency. Which means that localbitcoins was asked to pay the 250k euro foreign exchange license. To which they said "fuck you" and locked all ads in Germany. So I can't simply transfer my money to some dude locally in Germany for bitcoins.
There is bitcoin.de which is an exchange. But it's p2p, I'd have to hope that I get someone selling that lives in Germany. And I registered there once before and they know I'm a US citizen so I'm blocked.
We just need all fiat to be colored coins on a separate bitcoin lightning network which can be easily swapped in a decentralized market.
When it comes to bank accounts. Don't invest more than you can afford to lose.
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If taxation is done as intended, it definitely is not theft. However, it's only human to want to use taxpayers' money for personal financial gain and, probably, very few people can resist it  What does it matter what a thief does with the money once he has stolen it? There are two separate issues here. How the money is obtained. And how the money is spent. How the money is spent does not affect how the money is obtained. That is what people do not understand. If I kill a guy, then roast him up in a fine meal that I then give to some hungry people on the street, would you be trying to justify the murder because some people got fed? Would you not even care that someone was killed? Would people even have to ask the question "is killing people to feed people murder?". Would you be criticizing those that call it murder as being heartless? Not wanting hungry people to be fed. What about those poor starving children that just want a meal? How dare you call it murder? If this has been done for millennia, nobody would consider it murder. If someone else chimed in and said "maybe we can feed people without killing people" then the majority would have no clue how it could be done. So they would say that the killing is justified. Oh, but only "if the meal is prepared correctly". Because they cannot fathom any other way. |
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Tax thieves are people who have no responsibility to pay their obligations to the state.
The state is obligated to serve the people. The people have no obligations to the state. Taxes only work if society accepts the morality that the government can use force to extract money from people. For millenia people have found this to be morally acceptable and have not questioned it. They also felt that slavery was perfectly moral because slaves were not humans. We overcame that morally accepted practice. We can overcome taxation as it is currently enforced. I like that comparison with slavery. It's true that for so many decades slavery was generally accepted. Most people didn't even think about it being something bad or unnatural. That's exactly what's happening with taxation now. It's just generally accepted that the government forcefully takes our money and spends it how it pleases. How do you think things would world if taxes were eliminated? How would the roads work? Should they all be privatized? My ideal method for raising funds has always been a "membership" type of up front payment that is voluntary. You pay up front a certain amount which allows you to buy a bronze, silver, gold, platinum, etc. package. Bronze might get you just the basic necessities that a government provides such as military protection but not a whole lot. The country may even decide to subsidize the bronze members through the fees for the more expensive packages. The more expensive package might include things like health care, education (all through college), etc. These packages could even be private offerings to lump together a large amount of private services. And there could be competing industries (or blockchains) trying to get the most customers. So people are competing to give you the best government possible. As for roads. Consider that I once mentioned ending taxes online and someone from Britain could not fathom how people would be able to pay for their dental work without taxes. I used to live in a city with private fire department and private ambulance services. Most places I have lived in the garbage company was private. These actually exist yet people cannot comprehend how they can be done without the government. If you are too mentally lazy to consider things that already exist being private then you likely cannot imagine the roads being private. What I suspect would happen would be similar to how our cell phones work. Right now there are towers owned by various companies that rent out their frequencies to cell phone companies who then sell plans to consumers. When you pick up your phone and use data, you don't care that your data is going over some third party that is a contract with another company that is paying the company of the cell tower which then transfers data to another cell tower owned by another company, and on and on, changing hands through many many different private companies. In your mind, if you had to plan it all you would just have one entity "the government" run it all and it's all simple with no need to use your brain. Personally, I look forward to smart roads that charge your electric car as you drive while your car drives you at the optimal speed with no more car crashes all paid per meter on the lightning network. But none of that is possible if governments still hold a monopoly on the roads. |
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This is the tech that will change everything. |
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I suspect that with the large amount of 2nd world citizens on this forum, most have been convinced by their governments that the state knows best.
That is also why those countries are 2nd and 3rd world countries.
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As bitcoin price tumbles to extreme low prices that pretty much prove the central bankers right, this is how I spend my evenings.  |
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Tax thieves are people who have no responsibility to pay their obligations to the state.
The state is obligated to serve the people. The people have no obligations to the state. Taxes only work if society accepts the morality that the government can use force to extract money from people. For millenia people have found this to be morally acceptable and have not questioned it. They also felt that slavery was perfectly moral because slaves were not humans. We overcame that morally accepted practice. We can overcome taxation as it is currently enforced. |
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Taxation is simply can not be directly related to theft. We cannot absolutely say that taxation is theft nor theft is taxation. The nature of taxation in the first place is to utilize and ditribute the money within the society fairly and just. It aims for the common good and tge development of the community as a whole. Without this, a cohesive advancement will not be achieved. Thus, fragmented progress will prevail. And it is not good within the country. However, despite of the taxation's beneficial intention, it also open the doors for the thieves to steal. It makes anyone who are facilitating the funds vulnerable of commiting a theft. But at the end of the day, though taxatiin may be a platform for theft, still, the good decision to make is our choice.
That's some commie bullshit right there. Your money is your money. Not something to be distributed "within the society fairly and just". If you don't own your own body or the product of your labor, then you are accepting that the government owns you. |
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Why would they be sending oil to Cuba and not getting paid for it? It doesn't make sense to me?
Same reason Russia was pouring money into Cuba. The great communist ideal must be replenished from outside in order to continue. It cannot stand on its own. The idea being if these countries can make communism successful in one place, then they prove that it works. |
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As the price drops to panic inducing low prices I will share a few stories for story time.
I finally got my account unlocked on WEX after supplying details of every transaction I ever had with them, signing statements from the addresses of the receive addresses for all of my withdrawals, screen shots of receiving those transactions and sending the IP address of every time I logged into the system.
My account was locked out but I am not able to withdraw my NMC for 2 weeks (I assume this is how long they believe they will still be around, or they need 2 weeks to pilfer the rest of my NMC). I used to have 21k NMC. I logged in to see 12k NMC and 9k NMCET. From the looks of things WEX was allowing people to withdraw NMC (likely because they could just use mine and that's all they had left). I guess their remedy for opening my account was to create a fake NMC token and distribute that as "just as good as NMC". As people quickly ended up dumping the worthless token lowering the price.
So now I have to wait 2 weeks and watch as the whole thing implodes. But at least I can watch the last of my NMC get pilfered in the meantime.
On another note, I've been trying to buy a car here in French Polynesia since February. Borrowing a friend's car while I try to sell enough BTC to get francs to buy a car. After only getting about $800 worth I was about to buy a scooter when I realized that I have 6000 euro in an old German bank account from a few years ago. That German bank account is on the European SEPA network. Many people here in French Polynesia are from France and have french bank accounts. So I found a guy from France who sold me his Twingo for 6000 euro. I sent the transfer though the online bank transfer and got the car. I got an e-mail today from the guy saying the transfer never went through. So I check the bank and sure enough, transaction was reversed "Please contact the bank for further details". The problem being...how do I call the bank in Germany from French Polynesia? I don't even have a number here, who uses phones? I opted for the data only plan. Furthermore I don't speak German so even if I get through I'll have to ask for someone who speaks English and they'll tell me "oh the person who speaks English will call you back, what's your number?". I re-sent the transaction, I e-mailed the bank and told them to e-mail me back. If it's not resolved in the next day or so I'll just use localbitcoins to sell a BTC to transfer to the guy's bank account.
I just want to get all of my money off of these banks and exchanges and into wallets under my complete control. I should not need to ask permission or jump through so many hoops just to get access to "my money".
Just a lesson to all of those that still have money in these types of locations, get them off while you still can. Not your keys, not your coins. Money in the banks is not your money.
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Let me put things into a simple POV: Do you enjoy driving on the road? If you are in America you are likely to say no because the roads are quite bad, but if you are European you wouldn't be negative about the roads. (this is at least in most instances) If it wasn't because of Tax, you would enjoy driving much much MUCH less, because you would be driving in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road. Don't forget the government pays for the infrastructure that we all use every day. Now... Do we pay more than needed? That is a whole complete other question. But to answer your question, I think it is not theft. If the government did not have a monopoly on the roads...just imagine how much better they would be today. There was a government monopoly on telephones for 50 years from 1934 to 1984. Think of the advances in telephones during that time, and think of the advances after. We should be driving on smart roads right now. Or not on roads. Government fucked up roads. |
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I have no TA on this or anything but I will officially declare that weekend pumps indicate a bull market while weekend dumps indicate a bear market.
Let it be known.
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No. Taxes are most definitely not theft. What about the roads?! lol!
On a completely unrelated note I received this e-mail yesterday:
"I know who you are, I know where you live. If you do not send 2 bitcoins to this address within a week I will send a team to your house and you will never again see the light of day.
<BTC address hidden for protection of the extorsionist>"
To which I replied:
"Wait a minute...what do you plan on doing with those 2 bitcoin?"
The extortionist replied to my e-mail:
"Well, we will use a lot of it for ourselves, we will up our game with better teams of kidnappers, upgrade our operation while leveraging the operation to take out loans to buy some guns and fight our competitors. Also, we will be donating a very small portion to helping the homeless and educating children."
That was good enough for me. I sent the 2 bitcoins. Definitely not theft if some of the money is going to help the children.
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