Replacing chattel slavery with even more taxes which is what the US did from say 1860 to 2019, is not progress, neither is right no need to compare them to each other, they should be compared to more creative and moral systems. I don’t like to use the word tax because it sounds so cooperative and voluntary, when the process is coercive and involuntary.
We all pay our taxes, myself included, but few of us decide what all of us pay. While I respect that voting is a way of deciding things in groups, it is not fully voluntary either, you are compelled to face the results even if you do not participate. If there are 100 people and you decide for yourself, you decide 100%, if there is a dictator, you decide 0%, if you vote, you decide 1%. I believe that force is to be used only as a responsive measure against the less enlightened/more violent among us. A liberty based system, vs an entitlement based system such as voting, is what we use for most human organization and action, I am not clear why we resort to voting for the leftovers.
Are forced extraction financed entitlements a large part of Hawaii’s government and culture? My sense is yes. I hope this helps you know where I got my statements. Feel free to read on. Feel free to post this or not, though if you do not, I ask you to remove my post above your response.
Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.
1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master’s whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.
Perhaps calling what we do taxes is about as off as calling it slavery…
2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.
3. The master has a group of slaves, and he ong them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.
4. The master allows his slaves four https://maxloan.org/title-loans-nh/ days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.
5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three sevenths of their wages. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.
6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.
He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him
Let us pause in this sequence of cases to take stock. If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed monster can do this also.