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rriepe | 4 years ago

Taxes are bad. Governments absorb wealth. They don't create wealth. No government has ever created wealth.

discuss

order

dang|4 years ago

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive and usually turn nasty.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27461853.

rriepe|4 years ago

Can you please ban me? I don't want to be part of this community any more. I appreciate you (you! specifically) holding this place together but it's become one of the most toxic places on the internet for anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-conservative sentiment.

spoonjim|4 years ago

LOL. I wonder what kind of information diet one would have to construct, and how long one would need to adhere to it, to get oneself to a place where they sincerely believe this.

tomtheelder|4 years ago

And even if you somehow DID believe that governments never create wealth, you'd need to have also convinced yourself that they can do no good aside from wealth creation. Or possibly that there IS no good aside from wealth creation.

Regardless of what it is, it is a viewpoint totally divorced from reality.

rriepe|4 years ago

It's usually just tax forms when you turn 18

yardstick|4 years ago

Didn’t DARPA essentially create the Internet? Lot of wealth has been created here thanks to them.

adamc|4 years ago

If you compare the results of having a government to chaos, they create a LOT of wealth.

skrtskrt|4 years ago

Not to mention 99% of all medical advancement derives from government-funded research

jjeaff|4 years ago

Governments don't save, they spend everything they earn and then some. Where exactly do you think all the tax money is going?

rriepe|4 years ago

Governments save all the time in various ways but that's not what I'm talking about when I say "absorb": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

What they never do is "earn." You wouldn't use that verb for money I took under threat of force or imprisonment, right? So why would you use it here? Try "steal," "rob," or, if you're feeling particularly generous, "take."

As for where it's going: Into a hole in the ground? My argument is that governments are inherently inefficient, not that governments shouldn't exist.

Government is emergent. It has to exist. If you see someone having the "Should government exist?" debate they're probably an anarchist in high school. Or an HNer, I guess. It's not a serious intellectual discussion topic. Drop 10 people off on a deserted island and they'll have a government 30 minutes later. There's no "no government."