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"As for dick's "and/or" point, I don't accept that the additional criteria (e.g. permission, acknowledgement) can be granted by anybody other than the owner (ie the worker). I ignored this point because I thought this obvious and was getting sick of explaining the obvious to a person who strives only to twist words and annoy people. And from past performance, the dick would simply have not understood anyway. And no - I'm not going to explain this again." There was actually no need for 24601 to explain, as I anticipated that she might contemplate trying to wriggle off her petard with an argument such as this. The rebuttal, had she so attempted, would been as follows. The first response would be to point out that at issue here is not what 24601 accepts or does not accept. After all, 24601 may "accept" that she is infallible, or may "not accept" that her simplistic tax=theft position has^ been demolished, but that would not make it so. Further, when I suggested to 24601 last year (in post ID 457218) that her proposition that tax=theft runs against most people's understanding of what theft is, she replied (in post ID 870622) that "I don't believe that is true. I think most people would accept that theft is 'to take the property of another without their permission' or 'the taking of another person's property'. Indeed, this is what it effectively is." Thus, 24601's argument was not premised on others "accepting" her view of either the appropriate allocations of rights (including the right to give permission or acknowledgement) or the meaning of particular terms; rather, her view was that people would be forced to agree that tax=theft based on what 24601 thought was the generally-held* meaning of theft, which she (mistakenly) equated with dispossession without consent. Thus, the issue here is not what 24601 may or may not accept; what is really at issue is what the terms "theft", and subsidiary terms including "unlawful", "dishonestly or wrongfully, especially secretly" and "without right or permission [or acknowledgement]", actually mean, rather than what 24601 thinks they should mean, and whether taxation meets the requirements for theft embodied in the definitions that contain these subsidiary terms. The second response would be that 24601 cannot have it both ways. That is, at the same time, 24601 is arguing that the term "permission/acknowledgement" in the definition of theft is code for consent of the owner, and that the term "right" in the definition is also code for the owners' consent. I have pointed out that the definitions themselves place no restriction on who might be in a position to give permission/acknowledgement or have the right - this is an additional judgment that needs to be made to determine whether dispossession is wrongful etc and is thus theft. However, let us assume for the purposes of argument that one of the terms, say "permission/acknowledgement", does in fact refer to the owners' permission/acknowledgement and thus is a requirement for consent. If this were so, the "right" referred to in the part of the definition that says "without right or permission/acknowledgement" cannot mean be the right of the owner without introducing redundancy into the definition. Further, were it intended that these two terms mean the same thing, the term between them should not be "or"; rather it should be "; that is" to indicate that the latter term, "permission/acknowledgement", was an example or elaboration of the former term, "right". But the definition does not do this. The third response is that, even if 24601's preferred interpretation of the above words in her preferred (Macquarie) dictionary definition were accepted, the meaning of theft/steal she has chosen does not refer to the dispossession of money or physical property, and thus taxation cannot be stealing under it! Rather, the meaning refers to the stealing of "ideas, credit, words" and this is about plagiarism and intellectual property issues. To spell this out, the Macquarie gives 10 meanings for steal, but 24601 conflated (probably in good faith) the first two of them when she set them out in her second 'Arbeit macht frei' post on this thread. The second of these definitions reads "to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgement." It is the Macquarie's first meaning of steal - "to take or take away dishonestly or wrongfully, especially secretly" - that could apply to the taking away of money, as is involved in taxation, although only were it the case that taxation was deemed to be "dishonest or wrongful, especially secretive". As I have pointed out previously, only a small minority of people, essentially some Libertarians, would accept that taxation meets those criteria. Thus, it remains the case that, as I have conclcuded previously: "there is no credible basis for 24601 to continue with her simplistic tax=theft rhetoric; at best, she can argue (credibly) only that tax is theft if certain non-standard conditions apply."
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"I made some other points in my last post related to the implicit metaphysics in the dicks philosophy. He points out that this is not directly related to the tax=theft debate. Of course, it wasn't meant to be - so dicks point is irrelevant. Which is an improvement over his other comments." I'll leave this for the keeper. ...
But this will be my last post on the issue. The dick and I seem beyond agreement. Each reader will have to determine for themselves where the truth lies. Indeed, Black Knight. Richard _________ PS: For background on the process of lodging this post on the forum, see the posts Banning users from the site by Web Guy, Banning users from the site by me, The third option by 24601, andCensorship on the Libertarian website (full version) by me. ^ The original version of this post unintentionally had the word "not" at this point. It has been deleted from this version. Note that this does not affect the representation of anything 24601 has said. * These words ("generally-held") have been included to add clarity - specifically, to ensure that the sentence cannot be interpreted to mean 24601's version of the meaning of theft, even though this is interpretation is not specifically indicated by the former words (but is not explicitly ruled out, either) and even though my intended meaning should have been clear from the context.
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