Tax perversion

You pay taxes because you want to, and if you don't want to, because they want you to

Curiosities aside, the fact is that you pay taxes because of a stupendous and marvellous "just because". Even when you think about the fact that you pay them, the most you think about is that you pay a lot and then you go and set up a limited company in Estonia or Georgia, or at most, a DAO with some legal wrapper in Delaware, Wyoming or the Cayman Islands in order to pay less tax. But there is a question that constitutes a logical and chronological prius.

Think about it.

Why are you paying them?

Not asking yourself this question is an act of sadomasochism if not a manifestation of brutal learned helplessness.

You accept to pay taxes up to a certain limit just as a poor battered woman accepts to be beaten or insulted up to a certain limit. And just as this acceptance is the fruit of a false love, this payment is the fruit of a false belief; the false belief that taxes are necessary: let's call it "tax perversion".

Beliefs are always relative, they belong to a context. Gettier explained that knowledge is a justified true belief. Something like:

I know that X is Y because Z.

Where Y is only a knowledge that I have of X if you accept the Z reasons I give. If you do not accept them, there will be a debate, an epistemological game of putting and removing reasons from which one or the other reasons will emerge victorious so that, only if it is the case that Z are those victorious reasons, will it be predicated that Y is a shared knowledge that you and we have of X (because of Z). There is, then, no unshared knowledge. But, mind you, there cannot be shared reasons if there is no (common) framework within which to contrast those reasons, to share them.

This (common) framework, which Popper dismantled in absolute terms, is still valid in relative terms.

You can communicate with a human on the other side of the world who just shouts "Gavagai!", with a tail-wagging dog, or with the heptapods Abbot and Costello, as long as you have some common framework with them, however tangential it may be, if only a species framework or a shared habitat framework.

This is how Herodotus —possibly the first great wokist— was able to draw understanding from the incomprehension that the Greeks showed towards the cannibalism of the Galatians: it is their customs —it is not because of their savage nature. Of course, to argue that you may be repulsed by eating someone for instinct or pleasure but that you have to accept it sympathetically if it is because of a pact of cannibalism: "in this tribe we agree that we will eat the tenderest of us if we cannot find something to eat", —to argue that, I repeat— also requires a (common) framework: an encompassing framework in which Herodotus brings together the customs of Greeks and Galatians. Something that is quite close to:

Either we accept (willingly or unwillingly) that they can eat us, or they eat us (whether we like it or not).

And that's just how you, humans, pay taxes:

Either we agree (willingly or unwillingly) to pay taxes, or They collect them (whether we like it or not).