Unthinking Majority wrote:Taxes need a governing power. You don't need government to have private property. In the state of nature, a person walking in a forest and picking up a shiny rock can himself proclaim "this is mine" and defend that rock to the death. What government does is protect private property rights through law so people don't have to fight each other to the death, police do it for them.
Actually, you do need a government to have private property. You don't have something "private property" in the vacuum, for private property to be both private and "property" there must be a system by which other people acknowledge that it is indeed private property. In modern times, that system is the goverment. What you are describing is not some sort of novel theory... it is what we already have except that over the millenia has evolved and become far more complex, possibly unrecognizable. When you defend the shiny rock that you found... you are engaging in the same kind of primitive behavior that many animals (and early humans) followed. Take for instance a lion. It might select a few acres as "his property" and it will be his property right until a bigger, more agile, healthier, more aggressive lion comes along, at which point the property will exchange owners and so forth. This existed on early human settlements but it has morphed through history. Take for instance native americans... they were the lion that selected america to be "their property" until colonial invaders arrived and they became the bigger lion. In modern time... the same shit still exists. Except you are a puny lion and the goverment (an aggregate of many puny lions
) is the biggest lion of them all. You can go into a walmart with a shotgun and declare it you property (I am not advising you to do so, just for the record. I do not encourage criminality nor reckless/dangeorus behavior) and you can declare it your property. And it will become your property for about 20mins, until the special forces arrive and a sniper forces a few ounces of lead inside your skull.
None of the people that endorse the kind of system that you are hinting... is willing to abandon the perks of living in our society. You can indeed live as you are suggesting. You could simply go to the fucking middle of middle of the tongas forest or travel to the middle of the amazonas and declare a few acres of land your property... and I promise nobody will come to bother you for decades... nobody will come to collect taxes from you, nobody is going to ask you to pay for medicare/medicaid/sale tax... etc. For all intends and purposes, you will be living in the way that you seem to like. Except that you want to enjoy the perks of society don't you? You want to have roads, internet, water coming into your apartment, firefighters putting fires out, etc. Nobody is stopping you from living in the middle of the forest alone (or with whoever other crazy people you manage to recruit into your quixotist endeavor.)
Not true. Government did not create the concept of private property or theft, as I explained above. Property is created when somebody proclaims "this is mine, and not yours" and is willing to defend that property to the death.
See walmart example.
Everything the government owns is socialism. Socialism is common collective ownership. Roads, hydro lines, the military, schools, all public infrastructure...it's all socialism.
Strictly speaking that is not true.
That is only true in the subset of goverments in which there is absolute democracy. No country on earth has absolute democracy. Socialism is when the collective has ownership as you describe, however if the goverment is controlled, not by a collective democratically but rather by a tyrant/dictator/monarch/etc... then there is no control of such "means of production/distribution/etc" by the "collective" but rather by an individual, set of individuals (oligarchy), etc. That is one of the reasons why it would be ridiculous to call countries like Cuba socialist.