AZR and I agree on most everything and I have been lurking over this thread because it seemed to be chugging along nicely. Please excuse the length of my screed.
Some thoughts:
The NAP and civilization fit together nicely but all states violate the NAP for sheer survival and expansion. Absent the intiaition of force or the threat of fining, kidnapping, caging, maiming and killing the tax cattle depending on level of resistance, they cannot exist. It is one reason the 19.000 (!) police departments in the US have to exist. No ruler or political bad actor can have their way unless a well-armed constabulary can apply the wood shampoo where needed.
Per student loans and tuition, only two colleges in the US are private: Hillsdale and Grove City. Every other institution is a Federal academic enterprise because one student with one one Federal program under their belt on that campus means the entire 30 kilometer baggage train of regulatory madness follows them through the gates. Some savvy colleges like Harvard have simply become giant hedge funds posing as academic institutions. All of this is about to change for the better thansk to the online pressures on universities that are driving down prices and an emerging recognition that the problem solving abilities of blue collar workers may very well be on par or superior to so many of the tenured gray-beards who have the critical thinking skills of a lemur. In the end, college has become the vo-tech they have always looked down upon but taen on all the negative traist of votech without assuming the positive aspects.
There is a spectrum of slavery and taxes are part of that continuum; when the twin pillars of self-ownership and the ability to opt-out are removed, that IS a state of slavery and that is quite simply what taxes are. There tend to be two arguments for libertarian thought - consequentialist and moral. I subscribe to the latter and tend to be a starry-eyed idealist while the more practical libertarians (who also tend to minarchism) try to sell the less-to-zero- government idea on its foundations of efficacy. I think most humans will acknowlegde that most government programs are extraordinarily wasteful of comandeered resources (there is no other), indiffenrent to atomistic end-user adjustments and less than adequate one-size-fits-all prognositcations that tend to be iotragenic in their effect.
Many of the arguments here against AZR sent a chill up my spine because they are part and parcel of the same rhetoric used to sustain chattel slavery in humanity for more than five millennia: absent the forced ownership of other humans subsumed to the will of a master, how will we feed ourselves and how will our economies function if the slave force were paid equilibrated wages? History demonstrates that slavery and its abolition met both the moral and consequentialist problem sets posed earlier. Involuntary taxation is not only theft but a pernicious form of slavery.
I am being presumputuous but AZR is an abilitionist opposed to ALL forms of slavery. When all the "inflammatory rhetoric" and squabbling on the forum is distilled, it becomes a justification of whether we rationalize government violence for good or evil. When it comes to taxes, would anyne on the forum allow another person to come into thier home every month and take thirty to sixty percent of their belongings and face the threat of maiming or death (and a tax penalty addition) for resistance to the theft? That is civilization?
If so, I don't want it.
BTW, I also find it interesting in these forums when one wishes to have more freedom and liberty instead of less, they should find a way to GTFO? Since the Second Founding in 1791, America is demonstrably less free thanks to a government that is arguably the most expensive, most powerful and most aggressive political predator on the globe in these times.
Fight the fight, AZR because slavery ain't pretty in any variation.
My responses will be sporadic as we are literally rocking here in Kabul with the 0900 explosion(s) at the MoD during Hagel's press conference here.
