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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (11338)	2/9/2006 10:00:15 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541698

Tim, on the subject of legitimacy and tax collection, your distinction, as I read it, is between opposition to the notion of government and thus unwillingness to pay taxes and support of the government and willingness. For me, the issue is a bit more complicated. I agree with you that there is little opposition to the notion of government that leads to unwillingness to pay taxes. Most people simply do it without thinking. But that's my point. We are using "legitimacy" in slightly different ways. For you, I gather, it's active belief, for me it's more like acceptance. Paying taxes without thinking about the justifications, that it's simply one more part of the mundane, is a profession of legitimacy. If large numbers of citizens either publicly and actively oppose the collection of taxes or silently do so by finding the numerous ways there are to avoid paying them, government is undermined at its roots. Since we started this discussion with my off the top of the head sentence about that populations bestow the right of tax collection on governments, I'm left with the argument that such passive acquiescence is such. The best criticism I know of the position I'm putting forth is a methodological one, that it's impossible to know why people do or not pay taxes short of what they tell you. And in this area there is massive incentive to be less than honest. I don't see any counter to that argument. Just leaves both of us trying to summon whatever circumstantial evidence we can find.