These can only be a positive to help police absolve themselves from wrongdoing - until such point wrongdoing is so pervasive that it becomes a net negative for them. then the cameras are a liability.
to quote a line ive often been delivered by police -
“if you didnt do anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”
When transparency to the public is no longer important, it looks like being able to secretly abuse others has become more important for such agencies.
It's back to the public not actually knowing what really happened, except in situations where its recorded by a 3rd party or there is a whistleblower from their own ranks. And we have to hope these people are brave enough to step forward and handle the pressure placed on them because they did, in order for justice to prevail.
I basically agree with you, but also am not sure how to square this with my belief that we are really gathering way too much information as a society (it always leaks).
you smoking a cig in an alley on your 15 minute break? you should have every right and privilege on earth.
you running 10,000 person strong group of people with the legal right to use force against your fellow man fighting to deny people their personal liberties with a long history of corruption? i don't care if there's cameras in the bathrooms.
I think you misread the thread. The posters above weren’t talking about the bathrooms of the DEA. The are talking about the bathrooms of the people the body cam wearing DEA officers encounter.
I didn't misread anything. Poster up top accurately predicted that some cops would say some utter bullshit about protecting people they're recording as an excuse to not have their own actions monitored.
As a person who understands all cops are bastards, I didn't bother to consider for a second cops care about anyone who aint a cop.
If I thought of a more invasive analogy for how much cops should be monitored and untrusted, especially DEA agents, I would have used that.
I guess you can be whatever you want, but the type of language that you and they use is variously so general and insulting that any type of response should be on the table.
For example, do cops participate here? Or people with cops in their families? Yet, we have a person who, in my opinion, seems to struggle with concepts of daily life that is calling them bastards.
Is that opinion moderated? If not, are in-kind responses allowed?
Or perhaps this forum is institutionally skewed to the poster's juvenile opinion.
> Yet, we have a person who, in my opinion, seems to struggle with concepts of daily life that is calling them bastards.
> Or perhaps this forum is institutionally skewed to the poster's juvenile opinion.
Cops are as much bastards as criminals are. In an ideal society both should not exist. Nobody should be given the right to use lethal force against whomever they decide at the time to be necessary and it is totally fine to have this opinion and state it in public.
I mean, its not totally fine. It's psychotic (divorced from reality) and immature. I grant you that its not against the law. But see the fact that you have to skew the nature of police force in order to fake your point.
Since you are from a country other than the one in which this site originates, and are asking where I am from, maybe first you should post where you are from.
If your country did not have cops, who would enforce the laws that are enforced?
Would the most powerful gang simply become the new government? Who?
Would you prefer pre-civilization to civilization, wherein there are no laws?
I well know the dynamics of mafia, and how they relate to the Police.
The system is not perfect, but it is the core structure of civilization.
We try to limit police power via the law, internal controls, and hiring moral men.
Some of that is breaking down everywhere. But its not breaking down via the prescriptions of those who designed the system.
Where in your system have the fail safes failed? No judgement, just curious.
Does your country have the potential for law and order, or not? Why not? What would you do differently, which is realistic?
This forum is skewed towards capitalists, and cops protect property. Its not a juvenile opinion to point out how power works. Its actually my only hobby on this site.
And for people who have cops in their family, its not unknown to me. Its like having family in a gang. Or the mob. They're fine people, you can have dinner and enjoyable conversations. But when the gang comes up in discussion they're gonna protect the colors.
The fellow who responded and then blanked their post I think is European, which with no guns and a socialist safety net I might allow have a different flavor than US police, founded as possibly the town watch instead of slave catchers and immigrant beaters. But this is an article about the DEA, ACAB is very appropriate.
Do you have a design to steal or damage private property? I include human life in this category.
If or your friends you do, this is why the Police exist.
Who says that you know how power works, and are not instead one step removed from being feral in every negative connotation of the term?
Feral people quite frequently think that they know how power works, but their outcomes most frequently speak to the opposite claim.
How do you know that you aren't psychotic?
How do you know that you aren't a puppet of power? How do you know that everything that you believe wasn't fed to you by power?
How do you know that your "struggle" isn't that of the warrior but of the trapped animal?
Most people with your belief system have awful outcomes.
That isn't just because you are at odds with police. It's because, in a game wherein whomever believes the least lies wins, you believe the most.
Which lies do you believe in that have ruined your life?
Consider that society is pumped full of lies specifically to entrap people like yourself. I mean "entrapped" in multiple ways, both legally and socially.
Your mob analogy is reductive and therefore inaccurate even if it has the potential to be true. Its reductive because the police are an armed group who are restricted from mob activities via the law, even if this doesn't work all of the time. And whose primary reason for existing is to protect the public from criminal mobs of all stripes. Who are not restricted by the law and who would run rampant without police, becoming the new government.
Is it your criminal gang who wants to be the new government? Is that why you hate the police so much?
Which criminal mob do you align with? Whose colors do you protect? What do you want to steal?
How does your specific existence, and those you support, justify police existence?
"different flavor"... this is priceless.
You people will create or highlight nasty stories for whatever you hate, and bury the nasty stories for whatever you don't. On behalf of greater society... yawn. You are beyond boring and ineffective. Stay in that animal trap. Or don't.
You're arguing against someone with a "belief system" you seem to know, but I don't know who that is. I've displayed a single preference here, which is anti-police. You can expand that to, I don't like people who wield too much power. I don't like gangs. If I was in a country run by a criminal gang, I wouldn't like them either.
If a perfect theocracy arose that imposed moral law perfectly to "protect us poor public," I wouldn't like them either.
You won't see many positive positions from me, I don't tend to believe in many positive things. I do believe making a list of the biggest bastards and working against them, in my time. That list changes, and when I eventually die off, there will be more people like me who do the same, with their own lists. I don't think we have any colors except those we prefer ourselves. There's no one running us, there's no one in charge. And I think over time you might be surprised how effective that can be.
> but also am not sure how to square this with my belief that we are really gathering way too much information as a society
I think a good starting point for squaring this is to examine it in the context of what else the administration is doing (or not doing) to protect the privacy of citizens. This move has an enormous deleterious effect on police accountability in exchange for a fairly small increase in citizen privacy, so if the administration is ignoring more effective ways to improve the citizenry's privacy you can safely infer what really motivated their decision to back away from body cams.
Other than the “sorry, we raided the wrong house” situations (which absolutely should out the whole swat team in jail) a judge has to sign a warrant to raid the house, for good reason. The responsibility for the kids being traumatized lies with their parents, committing crimes in the house.
> which absolutely should out the whole swat team in jail
Which doesn’t really happen, I mean cops murder innocent people and it’s a struggle to get meaningful consequences for _that_.
This is part of what ACAB means - the justice system is woefully against the interest of the public. If we hadn’t seen time and again cops get away with literal murder, if there were actually consequences, and if police unions didn’t have the ability to hold a community hostage, maybe fewer people would be ACAB. The fact that we even had to have a Supreme Court case about whether cops have a duty to protect civilians (surprise, it was ruled that they don’t) should be evidence that the system is rotten.
this is a really odd thing to hear when the premise of DOGE is literally accountability. there is a lot of hyperbole and misinformation around DOGE, but at its root it's elon saying "if you spend millions of dollars you have to, at minimum, write a single sentence as to why"
obligatory trump and elon suck, im not defending them. just pushing back against misinformation
The messaging around doge involves some mention of accountability, alongside many other things like claims of fraud etc. That doesn’t mean that’s what doge actually does. You’re taking them at their word when their actions speak loudly.
The entire purpose of DOGE is to attack the government while forcing them to use private services.
Don’t believe their lies because they’re just that lies.
Nothing they are doing is efficient because they don’t care. They just want to attack the government.
—-
For something HN relevant please look back at all the stupid comments Musk made after he was forced to acquire Twitter. Comments like there being hundreds of “ghost employees” or wanting devs to print their code changes.
People pointing out that the premise and actions of something are contradictory isn't misinformation. Rather, it's revealing misinformation - the premise.
We can't just believe everything anyone says, especially when their actions are so obvious in contradiction. It feels like I'm being gaslit.
The premise of DOGE is accountability to the personal whims and judgments of Elon Musk ... when we talk about accountability in government we usually mean, accountability to the public
So while we’re talking about government overspending, this money was already spent. What is going to happen with these cameras that are now going to be unused?
Cool, so since government accountability is now optional, I suspect we’ll get a few camps. At the very least, these two: honest officers who relish constant supervision and scrutiny, dishonest officers who relish violence and brutality above all else.
How would your honest officer group operate alongside the other group, hypothetically? It seems like the kind of thing that group 2 would stamp out pretty quickly and group 1 wouldn't be able to stop.
It incarcerates around 1.9 million people and has another 3.6 million on probation or parole. It seizes and consumes more than a third of all production. It demands compliance with about 120 million words of federal rules. It's the greatest military power on earth. It's unserious to not to take that kind of power over our lives seriously.
> For another it consumes more than a third of all production
This is often a positive.
In times of financial panic, which free markets always come around to, the government is a spender of last resort that helps to kickstart production and demand when the free market is in absolute shambles, stashing gold in holes in its backyard.
Furthermore, when it's functioning well, it gives the fattest of the industrialists a haircut and returns that money to the populace where the revenue can actually deliver value instead of sitting in a vault somewhere.
I think the reason we ought to be making a society at all is to make the lives of those within it better, and moving resources from some to others within that society is, if done right, able to push things in that direction.
>>> For another it consumes more than a third of all production
>This is often a positive.
>In times of financial panic
Do you mean, for example, the credit crisis of 2008 ? That crisis that was actively encouraged by the US govt, that poured the gasoline with govt loan guarantees, insane macroeconomic policy and low interest rates ?
Are we saying we want to pay for arsonists, to work as firefighters ?
I just finished reading Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation. It didn't even get to the 2008 GFC, but it covered many other bubbles.
The market almost always uses the government to inflate their bubbles by giving stock to officials and other various schemes. The answer isn't to not have a government, it's even tighter regulation (which, since that requires the existing batch of officials to make less money on speculation themselves, is difficult to pull off).
Probably because the removal of thousands of dollars from my paychecks over the course of every year is a serious matter, as are many of the functions which those involuntarily-paid dollars support.
The US has worldwide, actually interplanetary taxation. Even if you leave you'll be under US tax net. If you renounce, again, that doesn't stop it because renouncing also costs a tax of ~$2000 and possibly an exit tax.
But this in any case all presumes not leaving = consent, which is flimsy on even a superficial inspection, and has some harrowing downstream deductions.
You are voluntarily remaining in-country because you are permitted to repatriate to a country that has no taxation. The existence of taxes in the US is not a secret, it's not a surprise bill every year.
You also don't have to leave! You can simply declare yourself sovereign and let the foreign country engulfing your independent domain decide how it wants to conduct foreign policy with you.
You were caught in a lie about being able to leave to end your forward tax obligations to the US, and now you are doubling down. Or you still don't understand -- the US still taxes you after you leave the country, for income earned outside the country, completely independently of anything involving the USA.
Lol no you're choosing to interpret "leave the country" as "become and expat". You ignored the equally-valid interpretations "repatriate" and "renounce citizenship". So that's on me for not being specific and on you for failing to follow the HN rules of choosing the most generous version of the other person's statement.
Let's be extra generous and assume you meant leave and renounce.
Now let's talk about those harrowing deductions, which you are somehow ignorant of.
So it is decided you have to do X, otherwise leave, but actually leaving isn't enough. You have to show up at my special location (embassy), outside the country, using the passport I may or may not issue you (if you owe me lots of tax, or child support, you do not get it -- even if you need to leave the country to earn more money) -- pay me $2350, possibly an exit tax, and deal with setting up appointments and probably returning a couple times when I say with bureaucrats.
And so by not doing all those things, you have given consent. Even though many people paying taxes don't even have $2350 to their name, so they can't even buy a passport from the people taxing them let alone pay the renunciation fee.
You would definitely not be comfortable with this definition of 'consent' for anything sexual, for most things financial, and for anything involving your personal effects. It is a bastardized version of consent using mental acrobatics specially for taxes.
----
PS
>You also don't have to leave! You can simple declare yourself sovereign and let the foreign country engulfing your independent domain decide how it wants to conduct foreign policy with you.
This plan doesn't work. The only reliable way available to renounce is to leave the country and show up in a country with consular access (embassy normally). Declaring your own country wouldn't allow you to renounce because you would have no consular access to renunciation without going back into US land/airspace to go into another country.
What are you talking about? Just walk, swim, boat, or drive (travel) outside of the country. No one in the US is going to stop you. Air travel and passports are expedited methods that use government services. You can avoid those!
> declaring your own country wouldn't allow you to renounce because you would have no consular access
You are again thinking within the system. It doesn't matter what the US thinks if you have exited its control. Just declare independence. If they fail to respect that, you are a sovereign person who can force them to respect it. Plenty of nations have no diplomatic relations with others.
I mean you can walk into Mexico without documentation. But that's beside the point that dude is free to leave the country and therefore consenting to the terms of living here.
I thoroughly sympathize with even more callously cynical views, but what all good people should remember, daily if able, are the unsung work horses that have ploughed through endless, self healing bureaucratic rot mires and festering heaps of wriggling legalese to preserve the creaking vestiges of liberty and dignity that we take for granted. If not for those who take such initiative and toils, we'd be in an alternate reality. A terrible one.
Maintaining a semblance of justice and fairness is an overtime job. The ravenous hovering ghouls of corruption make alpha vultures seem blind and sessile.
The DEA has been caught doing some incredibly sketchy things in the past. Considering most drugs should be legalized or at least decriminalized, they provide little benefit and are now allowed even more freedom to exert their unnecessary power.
I didn’t know Biden had issued an executive order on this. That’s exactly what we needed.
These can only be a positive to help police absolve themselves from wrongdoing - until such point wrongdoing is so pervasive that it becomes a net negative for them. then the cameras are a liability.
to quote a line ive often been delivered by police -
“if you didnt do anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”
When transparency to the public is no longer important, it looks like being able to secretly abuse others has become more important for such agencies.
It's back to the public not actually knowing what really happened, except in situations where its recorded by a 3rd party or there is a whistleblower from their own ranks. And we have to hope these people are brave enough to step forward and handle the pressure placed on them because they did, in order for justice to prevail.
Their counter argument will be "the privacy of the people we interact with" i.e. a SWAT team storming a house when a young child is in the bathroom.
Having the recording, viewing the recording internally, and releasing the recording to the public are all separate things.
These are solved problems. Hundreds of agencies use body cams now, and this has been dealt with.
I basically agree with you, but also am not sure how to square this with my belief that we are really gathering way too much information as a society (it always leaks).
its about power.
you smoking a cig in an alley on your 15 minute break? you should have every right and privilege on earth.
you running 10,000 person strong group of people with the legal right to use force against your fellow man fighting to deny people their personal liberties with a long history of corruption? i don't care if there's cameras in the bathrooms.
I think you misread the thread. The posters above weren’t talking about the bathrooms of the DEA. The are talking about the bathrooms of the people the body cam wearing DEA officers encounter.
I didn't misread anything. Poster up top accurately predicted that some cops would say some utter bullshit about protecting people they're recording as an excuse to not have their own actions monitored.
As a person who understands all cops are bastards, I didn't bother to consider for a second cops care about anyone who aint a cop.
If I thought of a more invasive analogy for how much cops should be monitored and untrusted, especially DEA agents, I would have used that.
[flagged]
> It seems you also didn’t bother to consider you are on HN and not Reddit.
Here in HN people can't be against cops?
I guess you can be whatever you want, but the type of language that you and they use is variously so general and insulting that any type of response should be on the table.
For example, do cops participate here? Or people with cops in their families? Yet, we have a person who, in my opinion, seems to struggle with concepts of daily life that is calling them bastards.
Is that opinion moderated? If not, are in-kind responses allowed?
Or perhaps this forum is institutionally skewed to the poster's juvenile opinion.
> Yet, we have a person who, in my opinion, seems to struggle with concepts of daily life that is calling them bastards.
> Or perhaps this forum is institutionally skewed to the poster's juvenile opinion.
Cops are as much bastards as criminals are. In an ideal society both should not exist. Nobody should be given the right to use lethal force against whomever they decide at the time to be necessary and it is totally fine to have this opinion and state it in public.
I mean, its not totally fine. It's psychotic (divorced from reality) and immature. I grant you that its not against the law. But see the fact that you have to skew the nature of police force in order to fake your point.
> It's psychotic (divorced from reality) and immature.
Would you mind sharing where are you from? There are many countries were the cops are literally criminals, like mine.
I would love to be able to have the same innocence as you, treating cops as heroes that risk their lives to protect society.
Since you are from a country other than the one in which this site originates, and are asking where I am from, maybe first you should post where you are from.
If your country did not have cops, who would enforce the laws that are enforced?
Would the most powerful gang simply become the new government? Who?
Would you prefer pre-civilization to civilization, wherein there are no laws?
I well know the dynamics of mafia, and how they relate to the Police.
The system is not perfect, but it is the core structure of civilization.
We try to limit police power via the law, internal controls, and hiring moral men.
Some of that is breaking down everywhere. But its not breaking down via the prescriptions of those who designed the system.
Where in your system have the fail safes failed? No judgement, just curious.
Does your country have the potential for law and order, or not? Why not? What would you do differently, which is realistic?
This forum is skewed towards capitalists, and cops protect property. Its not a juvenile opinion to point out how power works. Its actually my only hobby on this site.
And for people who have cops in their family, its not unknown to me. Its like having family in a gang. Or the mob. They're fine people, you can have dinner and enjoyable conversations. But when the gang comes up in discussion they're gonna protect the colors.
The fellow who responded and then blanked their post I think is European, which with no guns and a socialist safety net I might allow have a different flavor than US police, founded as possibly the town watch instead of slave catchers and immigrant beaters. But this is an article about the DEA, ACAB is very appropriate.
Do you have a design to steal or damage private property? I include human life in this category.
If or your friends you do, this is why the Police exist.
Who says that you know how power works, and are not instead one step removed from being feral in every negative connotation of the term?
Feral people quite frequently think that they know how power works, but their outcomes most frequently speak to the opposite claim.
How do you know that you aren't psychotic?
How do you know that you aren't a puppet of power? How do you know that everything that you believe wasn't fed to you by power?
How do you know that your "struggle" isn't that of the warrior but of the trapped animal?
Most people with your belief system have awful outcomes.
That isn't just because you are at odds with police. It's because, in a game wherein whomever believes the least lies wins, you believe the most.
Which lies do you believe in that have ruined your life?
Consider that society is pumped full of lies specifically to entrap people like yourself. I mean "entrapped" in multiple ways, both legally and socially.
Your mob analogy is reductive and therefore inaccurate even if it has the potential to be true. Its reductive because the police are an armed group who are restricted from mob activities via the law, even if this doesn't work all of the time. And whose primary reason for existing is to protect the public from criminal mobs of all stripes. Who are not restricted by the law and who would run rampant without police, becoming the new government.
Is it your criminal gang who wants to be the new government? Is that why you hate the police so much?
Which criminal mob do you align with? Whose colors do you protect? What do you want to steal?
How does your specific existence, and those you support, justify police existence?
"different flavor"... this is priceless.
You people will create or highlight nasty stories for whatever you hate, and bury the nasty stories for whatever you don't. On behalf of greater society... yawn. You are beyond boring and ineffective. Stay in that animal trap. Or don't.
I love a "you people."
You're arguing against someone with a "belief system" you seem to know, but I don't know who that is. I've displayed a single preference here, which is anti-police. You can expand that to, I don't like people who wield too much power. I don't like gangs. If I was in a country run by a criminal gang, I wouldn't like them either.
If a perfect theocracy arose that imposed moral law perfectly to "protect us poor public," I wouldn't like them either.
You won't see many positive positions from me, I don't tend to believe in many positive things. I do believe making a list of the biggest bastards and working against them, in my time. That list changes, and when I eventually die off, there will be more people like me who do the same, with their own lists. I don't think we have any colors except those we prefer ourselves. There's no one running us, there's no one in charge. And I think over time you might be surprised how effective that can be.
> but also am not sure how to square this with my belief that we are really gathering way too much information as a society
I think a good starting point for squaring this is to examine it in the context of what else the administration is doing (or not doing) to protect the privacy of citizens. This move has an enormous deleterious effect on police accountability in exchange for a fairly small increase in citizen privacy, so if the administration is ignoring more effective ways to improve the citizenry's privacy you can safely infer what really motivated their decision to back away from body cams.
Can't see them traumatising children.
Other than the “sorry, we raided the wrong house” situations (which absolutely should out the whole swat team in jail) a judge has to sign a warrant to raid the house, for good reason. The responsibility for the kids being traumatized lies with their parents, committing crimes in the house.
> which absolutely should out the whole swat team in jail
Which doesn’t really happen, I mean cops murder innocent people and it’s a struggle to get meaningful consequences for _that_.
This is part of what ACAB means - the justice system is woefully against the interest of the public. If we hadn’t seen time and again cops get away with literal murder, if there were actually consequences, and if police unions didn’t have the ability to hold a community hostage, maybe fewer people would be ACAB. The fact that we even had to have a Supreme Court case about whether cops have a duty to protect civilians (surprise, it was ruled that they don’t) should be evidence that the system is rotten.
Committing crimes like registering to vote and being told they could vote?
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/florida-voter-fr...
> a judge has to sign a warrant to raid the house, for good reason
We’re arresting and irrevocably detaining folks not only without a warrant, but in violation of court orders.
One more reason for the cameras to be always on
This administration is allergic to accountability, so this tracks.
this is a really odd thing to hear when the premise of DOGE is literally accountability. there is a lot of hyperbole and misinformation around DOGE, but at its root it's elon saying "if you spend millions of dollars you have to, at minimum, write a single sentence as to why"
obligatory trump and elon suck, im not defending them. just pushing back against misinformation
The messaging around doge involves some mention of accountability, alongside many other things like claims of fraud etc. That doesn’t mean that’s what doge actually does. You’re taking them at their word when their actions speak loudly.
The entire purpose of DOGE is to attack the government while forcing them to use private services.
Don’t believe their lies because they’re just that lies.
Nothing they are doing is efficient because they don’t care. They just want to attack the government.
—-
For something HN relevant please look back at all the stupid comments Musk made after he was forced to acquire Twitter. Comments like there being hundreds of “ghost employees” or wanting devs to print their code changes.
> just pushing back against misinformation
People pointing out that the premise and actions of something are contradictory isn't misinformation. Rather, it's revealing misinformation - the premise.
We can't just believe everything anyone says, especially when their actions are so obvious in contradiction. It feels like I'm being gaslit.
I refuse to believe a person this credulous exists who is also not either a supporter or somehow "neutral" on Trump and Musk.
You're a troll.
There is already a government accountability office, www.gao.gov
The premise of DOGE is accountability to the personal whims and judgments of Elon Musk ... when we talk about accountability in government we usually mean, accountability to the public
Body cams can be removed at light speed but somehow the process of rescheduling marijuana moves at the speed of molasses.
So while we’re talking about government overspending, this money was already spent. What is going to happen with these cameras that are now going to be unused?
now they can be carried at option rather than at mandate, thus self serving functions for cams now on the table.
Cool, so since government accountability is now optional, I suspect we’ll get a few camps. At the very least, these two: honest officers who relish constant supervision and scrutiny, dishonest officers who relish violence and brutality above all else.
How would your honest officer group operate alongside the other group, hypothetically? It seems like the kind of thing that group 2 would stamp out pretty quickly and group 1 wouldn't be able to stop.
[flagged]
Aren't a lot of these bodycams provided for free, and in exchange you have to use their cloud to store all the footage until the end of time?
(give the razor, sell the blades...)
We don't have treaties with half the world mandating body cams.
(I want weed legalized too, but it's a thorny issue.)
[flagged]
It incarcerates around 1.9 million people and has another 3.6 million on probation or parole. It seizes and consumes more than a third of all production. It demands compliance with about 120 million words of federal rules. It's the greatest military power on earth. It's unserious to not to take that kind of power over our lives seriously.
> For another it consumes more than a third of all production
This is often a positive.
In times of financial panic, which free markets always come around to, the government is a spender of last resort that helps to kickstart production and demand when the free market is in absolute shambles, stashing gold in holes in its backyard.
Furthermore, when it's functioning well, it gives the fattest of the industrialists a haircut and returns that money to the populace where the revenue can actually deliver value instead of sitting in a vault somewhere.
> Furthermore, when it's functioning well, it gives the fattest of the industrialists a haircut and returns that money to the populace
Rarely, and many orders of magnitude less than what we're owed.
What makes you think you’re owed the money of another?
Don't owe it to me, set it on fire (its deflationary lol) but money is a proxy for power and we all are owed the right to be free from tyranny.
And if that means making sure no single person or small group of people have too much power (money), then taking their money is what it takes.
Maybe we arent even owed, as its a responsibility shared by all.
I think the reason we ought to be making a society at all is to make the lives of those within it better, and moving resources from some to others within that society is, if done right, able to push things in that direction.
What makes you think the wealthy are owed all of a country's money and resources, simply because they took it by hook and crook?
>>> For another it consumes more than a third of all production >This is often a positive. >In times of financial panic
Do you mean, for example, the credit crisis of 2008 ? That crisis that was actively encouraged by the US govt, that poured the gasoline with govt loan guarantees, insane macroeconomic policy and low interest rates ?
Are we saying we want to pay for arsonists, to work as firefighters ?
I just finished reading Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation. It didn't even get to the 2008 GFC, but it covered many other bubbles.
The market almost always uses the government to inflate their bubbles by giving stock to officials and other various schemes. The answer isn't to not have a government, it's even tighter regulation (which, since that requires the existing batch of officials to make less money on speculation themselves, is difficult to pull off).
Probably because the removal of thousands of dollars from my paychecks over the course of every year is a serious matter, as are many of the functions which those involuntarily-paid dollars support.
It's voluntary as you choose to remain in the country.
The US has worldwide, actually interplanetary taxation. Even if you leave you'll be under US tax net. If you renounce, again, that doesn't stop it because renouncing also costs a tax of ~$2000 and possibly an exit tax.
But this in any case all presumes not leaving = consent, which is flimsy on even a superficial inspection, and has some harrowing downstream deductions.
What are the "harrowing downstream deductions"?
You are voluntarily remaining in-country because you are permitted to repatriate to a country that has no taxation. The existence of taxes in the US is not a secret, it's not a surprise bill every year.
You also don't have to leave! You can simply declare yourself sovereign and let the foreign country engulfing your independent domain decide how it wants to conduct foreign policy with you.
You were caught in a lie about being able to leave to end your forward tax obligations to the US, and now you are doubling down. Or you still don't understand -- the US still taxes you after you leave the country, for income earned outside the country, completely independently of anything involving the USA.
Lol no you're choosing to interpret "leave the country" as "become and expat". You ignored the equally-valid interpretations "repatriate" and "renounce citizenship". So that's on me for not being specific and on you for failing to follow the HN rules of choosing the most generous version of the other person's statement.
Let's be extra generous and assume you meant leave and renounce.
Now let's talk about those harrowing deductions, which you are somehow ignorant of.
So it is decided you have to do X, otherwise leave, but actually leaving isn't enough. You have to show up at my special location (embassy), outside the country, using the passport I may or may not issue you (if you owe me lots of tax, or child support, you do not get it -- even if you need to leave the country to earn more money) -- pay me $2350, possibly an exit tax, and deal with setting up appointments and probably returning a couple times when I say with bureaucrats.
And so by not doing all those things, you have given consent. Even though many people paying taxes don't even have $2350 to their name, so they can't even buy a passport from the people taxing them let alone pay the renunciation fee.
You would definitely not be comfortable with this definition of 'consent' for anything sexual, for most things financial, and for anything involving your personal effects. It is a bastardized version of consent using mental acrobatics specially for taxes.
---- PS
>You also don't have to leave! You can simple declare yourself sovereign and let the foreign country engulfing your independent domain decide how it wants to conduct foreign policy with you.
This plan doesn't work. The only reliable way available to renounce is to leave the country and show up in a country with consular access (embassy normally). Declaring your own country wouldn't allow you to renounce because you would have no consular access to renunciation without going back into US land/airspace to go into another country.
What are you talking about? Just walk, swim, boat, or drive (travel) outside of the country. No one in the US is going to stop you. Air travel and passports are expedited methods that use government services. You can avoid those!
> declaring your own country wouldn't allow you to renounce because you would have no consular access
You are again thinking within the system. It doesn't matter what the US thinks if you have exited its control. Just declare independence. If they fail to respect that, you are a sovereign person who can force them to respect it. Plenty of nations have no diplomatic relations with others.
> Plenty of nations have no diplomatic relations with others.
Good luck showing up at their border without documentation. I guess maybe you can walk into a refugee camp and avoid hearing from the IRS again
I mean you can walk into Mexico without documentation. But that's beside the point that dude is free to leave the country and therefore consenting to the terms of living here.
I thoroughly sympathize with even more callously cynical views, but what all good people should remember, daily if able, are the unsung work horses that have ploughed through endless, self healing bureaucratic rot mires and festering heaps of wriggling legalese to preserve the creaking vestiges of liberty and dignity that we take for granted. If not for those who take such initiative and toils, we'd be in an alternate reality. A terrible one.
Maintaining a semblance of justice and fairness is an overtime job. The ravenous hovering ghouls of corruption make alpha vultures seem blind and sessile.
The DEA has been caught doing some incredibly sketchy things in the past. Considering most drugs should be legalized or at least decriminalized, they provide little benefit and are now allowed even more freedom to exert their unnecessary power.
I didn’t know Biden had issued an executive order on this. That’s exactly what we needed.