Resolved: The United States Should Implement a Progressive Consumption Tax

My opponent says that you don’t have to sign a written contract for such a contract to exist – I agree with this. However, you must sign some contract, agree to some statement of terms, or consent to some conditions. You cannot assume consent any time you like – if this was so, I could say that my opponent has “implicitly consented” to forfeit this debate. When asked to produce proof, I would just say that he did unconsciously and automatically. This is obviously not a valid defense, but my opponent tries to use it in the case of the gov. In other words, you cannot gain consent without the person in question actually giving consent, and this cannot hold in court unless it is shown that it was via direct and conscious action that such consent was given, with full knowledge of the implications of such action. My opponent’s attempt to show that my stance is absurd by bringing up children fails because there is a fundamental difference in the previous state of a child and of an enslaved man: the child, before being brought into the world, was nothing, and, as such, had no rights. Before the child becomes an adult, he has limited rights, since he does not have the rational and moral capacities that rights are aimed to defend. As such, in both childbirth and parenting, no rights are violated. The enslaved man, on the other hand, wasa free man – his rights were stripped from him by his slaver. He was initially in possession of autonomy and morality, but, in the case of taxation, the gov took these from him. As can be seen, the two cases are incomparable. My opponent has missed the point of the gunmen analogy – he says that the gunmen with the club are not comparable to the gov because the gov forms consensual relationships with its citizens via the provision of products, services, etc., and, if the citizens use these things or otherwise try to influence them via voting, they’re implicitly consenting to the gov as a whole. My analogy, however, shows that the mere use of resources (the food and water of the club) does not imply that the user consented to be within the system at all – they were merely working within a system that they were forced into. The same applies to the gov. Even if a gov is comparable to a private club in most aspects (they both provide services for a price), the distinction is that you did not opt into the system at any point. You were never asked to include your land under the reign of the gov. You were never asked to allow them to control your person. These things were done automatically, and, as such, any action from that point on by the gov is inherently nonconsensual, no matter if you use what they give you or not. Re: Voting = Consent: I refer back to the passage I posted from Lysander Spooner: “In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a gov that he cannot resist; a gov that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man takes the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot – which is a mere substitute for a bullet – because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.” [1] If you were not initially in the system consensually, working within that system does not imply that you consented to it. I don’t have to justify anarchism if I can show that statism can never be moral. It’s irrelevant to this debate if there is any moral society – as long as I show that taxation is absolutely and unquestionably immoral, I win. You can’t say that it’s “less” immoral to tax people than it is for anarchy to reign and use that to justify taxation – if they’re both immoral, then they both, by definition, should not be pursued. It doesn’t matter if the conclusion of this argument is that everyone should commit mass-suicide or whatever else – if the argument stands that taxation is immoral absolutely, then it should never be put into action, regardless of the alternatives. == Fiat Money == I’m conflating this whole section into one main argument: that the market-chosen and not govally-chosen currency/value of said currency is the better of the two because it responds to voluntary consent, not goval decree. This is not a new argument – I made it in point 1 of my last round (”Any economic manipulation of the value of currency is manipulation of the ability of individuals to trade their actual wealth. “) If the market opts for fiat currency, it would, by definition, opt for a non-goval fiat currency – a fiat currency detached from gov rule. The only way a fiat currency would be established in a market economy is through goval force, which, as argued before, is universally immoral. If this is the case, then the gov wouldn’t have the right to tax based off of its provision of fiat currency, so this point is irrelevant. The South was forced to abandon slavery because slavery is force. The force the North used was used in order to eliminate the force used by the South. It was wholly reactionary in nature and, as such, the example does not apply to this discussion – all it shows is that force is fine in retaliation to force, making the initiation of force immoral. == Social Contracts == 1. I’ll drop this particular argument because it has now become too overbloated to be useful – this dropping is irrelevant in light of the same point being made in other places. 2. Cross-apply my responses to the first segment of the debate. 3. My opponent says that my source “says voting actually is consent if it is fully voluntary”. However, he completely ignores the fact that the entire purpose of the passage was to show that, in the case of gov, voting isn’t fully voluntary, since you are operating within a framework that you never agreed to in the first place. No one forces you to vote, no, but someone did force you to live under the gov and someone did force you to be subject to democracy. Neither of these things were consensual, so voting to change them is not, in itself, proof that the individual did consent to them. == Common Good == Saying “this argument is sickening” is not an argument. Asserting that “no thinking person” can support my position does not refute it. There is nothing of substance in my opponent’s paragraph – he essentially just says “you’re wrong” without any reasoning against my moral framework. As such, all voters should consider this point dropped. == Consensuality == Yes, at a point in the story, the individual was excluded from voting. However, in step 9, his vote is given equal weight to the votes of everyone else. The exercise is to show that there is no distinction between not being able to vote and being able to vote if the framework of “voting” is one of rule by majority – i.e. one of subjugation of the individual. As addressed previously, even if you can leave, you shouldn’t have to leave. The gov isn’t a primary force – it doesn’t have eternal and absolute power. Why should you have to be forced to move to escape it, rather than it being forced to reign itself in? After all, it is the individual that is the starting point of all morality, not the state. If those people would starve, then so be it. It is not the fault of the escaped slave – he did not choose to be put in such a situation and should not be coerced into staying in it. My opponent says that “Bossy also says a PCT is bad because it makes people’s lives more difficult”. However, I NEVER made this argument. I literally said that “difficulty” caused by policies is completely irrelevant – quoting my last round, “It’s irrelevant if a PCT makes someone’s life twice as difficult or a thousand times as difficult“. I’m not sure how my opponent got what he did from what I said. My opponent then says that “millions of people living in poverty […] outweighs pretty much everything”. He never justifies this. Throughout this debate, he has never disproven the moral framework I put forth – the moral framework that makes it universally unjust to violate rights in any scenario for any reason. If my moral theory holds, then, by definition, the protection of rights would “outweigh” the costs of such protection (if such costs even exist, but that’s irrelevant). My opponent cannot refute my case by saying “but you’re wrong! I’m right!” – he must make logical arguments attacking my foundation. He has not done so. Again, even if a PCT would be better than the current taxes, I have shown that it is absolutely bad. Given that, I can definitely “brush it off” – I’ve shown that it can never be desirable. 1.) http://praxeology.net...