Re: My Dinner With Marc Andreessen

On Sun, 7 Jul 2024, Dave Yeo wrote:

D wrote:

  On Sat, 6 Jul 2024, Dave Yeo wrote:
 

D wrote:

In terms of european failure we can just compare european GDP (PPP) per
capita according to IMF (58,838 USD) with the US (85,373 USD) to see
that a more free society is a richer and more ethical society.

 Are you actually claiming that higher GDP equals more ethical? So
Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as various European
nations are more ethical then America as well as China's increasing
GDP is based on becoming more ethical.
Dave
 

 Yes, because they steal less from me in terms of taxes. Tax is theft. In
terms of violence, war, theft etc. governments are all bad. The
difference is the type of criminal activity, and if it is successfully
hidden. So yes, from a tax point of view, that is my opinion.
 One thing to note though, is that I say more ethical, and not _ethical.
No government is ethical. And all governments can become more and more
ethical as they strive to abolish themselves. So no, arabia is not
"ethical" but since they engage in less theft than for instance, sweden,
then yes, they are more ethical than sweden.

>
Why do you pay taxes if you consider it unethical? There's country's you could move to with little government and no taxes such as Haiti, or simply stop paying taxes by not taking the fruits of those taxes.
Dave
>

Sadly I have family commitment which are leveraged against me. If I could just stop paying taxes without jeopardising those family commitments and without risking violence I definitely would.
So what do I do instead?
I fight with lawyers and aggressive tax planning. I'm down to about 9% to 14% in taxes, which is much better than the 60+% or so I used to pay, but the journey towards 0% continues! =) Once my family commitments are not holding me back, I think, as you say, that it should be quite possible to shave off some additional couple of % from that figure! =)