FYI... Within the Irvine school district (Orange County, CA), many property owners voluntarily paid extra money to help fund the public schools. Because the state of California is brain damaged in the way it determines how much money different districts are allocated.

Volunteer fire departments are also along this same vein of thought.

Which brings me to another personal pet peeve of local government.

In Southern California, every time someone calls 911 for an ambulance. The fire department will respond with an ambulance, a paramedic unit, a FIRE TRUCK and sometimes a police car.

FOR EVERY FREAK'N 911 health response.

Stupid.

There are volunteer fire departments =/= we could have a volunteer government for obvious reasons.

Was Greece clown's voluntary tax country? Because it didn't work out so well.

I think it's pretty amazing that volunteer fire depts are as efficient as they are. Gives me faith in humanity

The world would be a lot better if we could undo letter bombs.

donating to specific government programs is completely different then voluntarily donating a % of your income for the government to dole out as it sees fit.

I'm not talking about some bloated state with voluntary taxes. I'm talking about a lean state. Like I said it would be the measuring stick for what is acceptable.

Also maybe I just live in an amazing neighborhood or something but voluntary stuff happens here all the time. People usually do care about stuff on a local level.

Kindergardens and schools have extra funds from donations, voluntary fire departments, food drives for the poor.

But yeah local stuff is different obviously there is some federal/state level stuff and there you'd just say...all right lets do 20% and see what they can do with the money. Then each year there's transparent and agreed upon measurments and you readjust your funding as you see fit. Crowdsourced government if you want.

Yeah, I was mainly joking. There are obviously complex layers like free riders in a voluntary tax system. I also wonder if there are issues of scale whereby people find the benefits of their payments easier to see in a local context than a national one, and whether small scale consensus building is easier and more powerful than on a national level.

As a corollary, I'm a big believer that devolving power down to communities rather that making decisions centrally would be positive for the UK at least.

I agree with you, but I think of them as on a par with running a cub scout pack, rather than paying for the country.

People will do things for each other. I have faith in people because we are not all RMoneys ****ing each other over for a dollar.

So allow each person to designate where his voluntary tax money goes. I guarantee you'd collect more tax.

On another forum, we're discussing what to do with a counterfeit $10 bill. One woman says she would spend it at a gas station, because "a gas station is better able to take the loss than I am."

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your ability to know whether or not you're trolling is impressive

so basically a network of non-profits replacing government?

libertarian wishful thinking itt

Even hipster doofuses managing non-profits could do better than the gov't.

i wasn't against the idea i actually find it intriguing

When your proposed system is "everyone shares everything and lives happily and no one is poor" then you can't criticize other plans on the basis of "wishful thinking"

I've never suggested that as a plan though

i'm really interested in this idea that there is a moral dimension to wealth inequality.

The more i think about it, the less it means to me. Can any one give me a (preferably non jaundiced) description of what it means to say that there is a moral component to the poor being poor and the rich being rich?

Morality is largely subjective, so it would have the same moral dimension as any equity issue.

Can I ask you to look at it from another angle? What if I said to you, can you give me a description of what it means to say there is a moral component to slavery?

Too "jaundiced"? Not interesting?

I mean, there's a moral dimension to wealth inequality if you think wealth inequality is immoral, and there isn't if you don't, and it's tied into whether you think that people are or are not equal and deserving of equitable treatment. This seems to me purely subjective and you could equally take up either stance.

You know what, it completely failed to occur to me that arguing that wealth inequality is, to whatever extent, immoral is to say that there is a moral component to wealth inequality. To the degree that I thought you were asking me to consider not the position that slavery is immoral, but that it is somehow moral.

No, I thought that the people who brought up a moral dimension to wealth inequality in the last few pages were arguing that the rich being rich and the poor being poor was not immoral, rather that it was morally correct. Maybe I was wrong. That's the argument I am immediately interested in. Although perhaps it's useful to think about the opposite, I'm not sure.