Resolved: The United States Should Implement a Progressive Consumption Tax

Pro’s country club example would be valid IF he can produce the contract I’ve signed with the gov that gives them ownership over me. A country club gets consent from its members, but a big gov does not. The default state of all persons born is that of subjugation – you’ve forfeited your rights unless you say otherwise. This is inherently non-consensual. If Pro’s example were honest, the members of the country club would have been kidnapped at birth and raised in the club, never having a say in whether or not they wanted to be a member. Even if they are allowed to leave, it’s clear that they’re being unjustly forced to live in the country club’s “society”. They never agreed to its terms, so they should not be bound by them. This situation is entirely equivalent to that of the gov – the idea of an unwritten “social contract” is nothing but faerie dust and no rational person would apply it to scenarios like the one I’ve described. A country club sends out armed gunmen to abduct you. Once at the club, you eat its food and drink its water. No one would say that you must pay them back. You did not choose to go to the club, so anything that you did to it is not your problem. It doesn’t matter if the gov implements taxes for so-called “noble” reasons. It doesn’t matter if the citizens, in the end, benefit from these taxes. If each individual does not consent, the policies are immoral. These pragmatic benefits are only relevant in a debate about what “should” be done if the means to them are not immoral. It doesn’t matter if PCTs would make every man a millionaire in a day – if Pro cannot show how something can be both coercive and moral, PCTs cannot be morally forced on citizens that do not consent to them. Pro makes the arg., both here and later on, that, since things like National Defence are necessary to preserve rights, it’s okay to fund them by way of violating rights. This is equivalent to saying that, since antibiotics are necessary to stop infections, if one has an infection it’s perfectly reasonable to inject snake venom to get penicillin. Both a lack of gov and a gov that violates rights are equally immoral for the same reasons, so to say that you can justify one because of the other is impossible. == Fiat Money == 1. Any economic manipulation of the value of currency is manipulation of the ability of individuals to trade their actual wealth. By being able to arbitrarily change the value of currency, the Fed is allowed to effectively set decrees about the medium of trade to be used by controlling the amount of goods that one dollar can buy. This allows the Fed to control the purchasing power of individuals’ fiat-currency fortunes at whim, essentially staking a claim on the products of their work and reducing wealth to something to be played with by bankers. 2. I agree that we give gold value. However, this does not make it “valueless” – it does the exact opposite. By giving gold value, it obtains value, not loses it. We give gold value because it has qualities which we value, viz. stability and aesthetics. Fiat currency’s only claim to value is its ability to be manipulated, something that should be considered a vice. You can intentionally manipulate the value of fiat currency MUCH more easily than you can manipulate the value of gold. You can print bills; you cannot print gold. 3. In the current system, fiat currency has been forced on the populace. You must use it to some extent. As such, to say that this gives the gov a claim on all of your wealth is ridiculous – such a justification would have to be rooted in the initial force used to make you use fiat currency. Pro says that “trading light weight paper-fabric mixes is probably easier [than trading gold]”. This ignores the fact that pretty much nobody who’s in favor of the Gold Standard wants people to literally carry gold around – fabric notes that are exchangeable for a certain amount of gold are to be used. The difference is that a Gold Standard would force banks to be accountable for their promises, instead of allowing them to play games with currency to embezzle money, and would also help reign in fractional-reserve banks by forcing them to keep some tangible wealth at all times, instead of operating on thin air. Even if gold prices are volatile, this is a reflection of the production and trade of a real thing, and, as such, gold would still be tied directly to something with inherent qualities regardless of its price. == Social contracts == The water was intentionally set up with cups beside it. It’s entirely unreasonable to say that the shopper “signed a non-verbal contract” to have guns pointed at him if he tried to drink water, given conventional social norms and expectations. Unless Pro can show otherwise, I did not sign a written contract, agree to a verbal contract, or “implicitly” sign an “assumed” contract. Pro makes the arg. that, since you use the gov’s legal system, vote in its elections, and so on, you’re doing so consensually. However, like in the example of the kidnapping country club, you are not consenting to a system by working within that system if you never chose to be put in that system originally. Quoting Lysander Spooner yet again: “[Individuals'] voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. [...] 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 [...] 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] == The “Common Good” == It doesn’t matter if the “common man” gets screwed by the elimination of social services. Unless Pro can refute my moral framework, the concept of the “common good” is entirely worthless. It would be begging the question to assume that this is a problem. Pro needs to show why society should put the collective over the individual rather than simply stating that that is how it should be. == Consensuality == Pro posits that democratic elections are the reason that the US is moral while the USSR is not. He says that “govs are at the will of the populace” and that “consent is given via popular vote” However, he never offers a reason as to why an individual being forced by a single person such as Stalin is any worse or any less consensual than an individual being forced by 51% of the country. In both cases, the only important factor is that the individual is being put in chains – it doesn’t matter to whom the chains are tied. Quoting Robert Nozick’s “Tale of a Slave”, showing the absurdity of this distinction: “ Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you. 1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master's whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on. [...] 3. The master has a group of slaves [...] 5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. [...] 6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. [...] You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. [...] 9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome. The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave?” [2] He then says that the rules of private property owners are comparable to the goval rules he’s proposing. This misses out on the fact that, if no rights are being violated, all interactions on private property would be completely consensual. There is no subjugation when both parties are in agreement. However, taxation and other such things completely ignore consent – they override the fundamental rights of individuals in a way that would not be possible in a free society. That distinction renders the comparison groundless. Pro says that the analogy I used fails because a consumption tax is “not even comparable to murder.” He ignores the point of the example – just because you have a way to avoid something, that thing is not always voluntary. If he rejects this, he must say that, under my described scenario, being murdered is voluntary. If he does not reject this, then he has effectively undercut his arg. . He then says that it’s “not that difficult” to avoid consumption. This, again, misses the point. It’s irrelevant if a PCT makes someone’s life twice as difficult or a thousand times as difficult. If it would violate the rights of individuals to restrict free trade by implementing a consumption tax, then it can never be moral. Every tax would be unjust, so they shouldn’t have to be avoided in the first place. He then says that a PCT would not be as bad as the current system. The debate isn’t about whether a PCT is more desirable than an income tax. It is about whether a PCT is desirable absolutely. I have shown that, since a PCT would violate rights, it could never be redeemed. Sources: 1.) http://praxeology.net... 2.) https://web.duke.edu...