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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (432)	2/2/2005 1:03:32 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Personally, I think your assertion that lower taxes = more freedom is incorrect, and here is why: I live in the Principality of Monaco, where there is no income tax and no capital gains tax. We don't vote for anything and basically whatever the Prince wants goes around here. He can kick you out if he doesn't like your behavior (drugs, drunk driving accidents, etc) and you have no rights against it. Apparently you didn't pay attention to the long version of the answer. Lower taxes in and of themselves do equal more freedom, but it is certainly possible for a very low tax state to have a low degree of freedom and for a higher tax state to have a much higher degree of freedom. There is any number of oppressive third world dictatorships where both freedom and taxes are low. Sweden has high taxes but is much freer. My point is not that a state of having low taxes equals a state of high freedom but rather that higher taxes decrease freedom when considered in isolation. Do you think we are "more free" than you, living in a democracy, with well-defined rights and equality for all? I would be interested to hear your argument. I pretty much already made it in my previous post to you and repeated it above, although it was more general and didn't deal with your specific situation. To make it more specific - I haven't examined the situation in Monaco in detail, so I'll take your word for it. Assuming what you say is true you are probably less free then in the US despite having lower taxes. However both Monaco and the US would be freer if their taxes where lower AND nothing else changed, and both would be less free if their taxes where higher AND nothing else changed. If other things changed those changes could possibly swamp the difference resulting from the tax changes. If you have zero taxes you have no government, and thus anarchy That is demonstrably incorrect. There are tax havens with zero personal tax 1 - It might not be universally true but its pretty close. 2 - I said zero taxes, not zero personal tax. If you tax trade, or have a corporate tax, or you tax tourists you can have taxes without having personal income taxes. You could also have sales taxes or a VAT, or property taxes, or inheritance taxes or any of a huge number of forms of taxes on different people or items or transactions. You could also have a country with oil wealth or something similar, where the government owns the oil wells and sells the oil for profit to get revenue for government programs. Strictly speaking that wouldn't be a tax (although it would be socialist), but the government does need some form of revenue. Tim