Fuxk it, I’m a citizen of the Roman Empire!
It’s all private and you need to sign up for services at birth
By printing more money out of thin air.
sovcit
I have no idea what this is… I’m going to assume, a soviet citizen?
Close enough, but no cigar… its Sovereign citizen
The Soviet Union ceased to exist long ago though
The “sovereign citizen” in Russia seem to believe that they are citizens of the Soviet Union, funnily enough:
A Russian movement of conspiracy theorists, known among other names as the Union of Slavic Forces of Russia (Soyuz slavyanskikh sil Rusi), or more informally as “Soviet Citizens”, holds that the Soviet Union still exists de jure and that the current Russian government and legislation are thus illegitimate. One of its beliefs is that the government of the Russian Federation is an offshore company through which the United States illegally controls the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement#Russia
Every country seems to have their share of those crackpots. In Germany they think pretty much the same, except it’s the Reich (the WW1 one) that’s still totally real.
Sovereign citizen. People who think the law is magic, and also not at all what it is as printed. They think if they string enough legal references together, they don’t have to pay taxes, have a magic clone of themselves that accrues debt for them and other equally insane bullshit.
Are SovCits against the concept of taxation in general? I thought they just convinced themselves they have loopholes that allow them to avoid it personally…
The ones I’ve seen posted here seem to want all of the benefits of living in a society without any of the restrictions or responsibilities that go along with it. Taxation is just one part of that.
Some think they shouldn’t even have to pay other things, basically believing that there’s a part of loans that is voluntary and their esoteric knowledge means they can just get loans and not pay them back, which itself comes from a misunderstanding of how the rich use loans to get to spend their assets and keep them.
That misunderstanding itself is that there’s an overall fair system in place, if you have the esoteric knowledge to use it, and you just have to know what magic words to use to make judges agree with you and police back off. They don’t realize that the rich following a different set of rules isn’t based on fairness under a secret system, it’s based on the soft power that comes with being rich and having the resources to make someone’s life better or worse with a phone call.
All the posers here thinking they are very smart, while never asking similar “stupid” questions about their own political ideologies.
In general, smart people ask stupid questions about everything.
As of this specific question, there are various possible answers:
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Crowdfunding;
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Custom fees as a source of income;
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Close to taxes, but paying some fixed fee, like a membership fee.
Variants which are taxes, but relevant for the question in spirit:
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Georgism;
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Only one simple income tax, only one simple property tax, no other taxes;
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Deciding every citizen’s payment into budget on a popular vote every N years (may even make it not a sum, but a percentage of property or something), as the average of submitted numbers or something.
Not a sovcit, but they do have a point in saying “fuck you” to the authority.
How very libertarian of you. Who’s going to make me pay those “not tax” taxes? Your private military? Well, my private military is bigger so I say NO to your desire for my money.
This post is not about libertarianism, idiot. Bunch of lefties overloaded me with their bullshit yesterday and now the slow ones come to have a shot, thinking those of yesterday didn’t buttfuck themselves publicly with triumphant look.
In general when you are doing such things like they did instead of normal discussion, you are robbing yourself of an ability to make a case for your wrong opinion.
You’re definitely misunderstanding this post. Yeah, there’s value in bucking authority. But you’re also just describing taxes. It sounds like you’ve read up on the modern form of libertarianism. Which is another crock.
The problem isn’t that they’re questioning authority. Generally most people (especially on lemmy) are down with that. We’re talking about the leaps of illogic that sovcits rest their entire belief system on. This post is to highlight the absurd hypocrisy in what they preach. Not to call their disobedience of authority foolish, but their methods and entirely unfounded beliefs.
You mean that they are imagining a phantom republic so resilient that they can live by its “true” laws while most people violate them day and night, and that these “true” laws make functioning of said republic impossible?
Many people believe in rule of law, yet revolutions and forceful changes are a necessity, states recognize facts made against existing law all the time, every state and system in existence has been erected by illegal violence, and with all that many say that another revolution (in hypothetical scenario, not right now) would somehow be less legal than existing systems. There’s a clear contradiction here, the only answer to which is usually that the current situation is in common interest and you can’t do that, because “fuck around and find out”.
There are such contradictions in free speech, of which everyone here certainly knows - one can use free speech to kill free speech. There are such contradictions in property rights, as everyone ridiculing ancaps certainly knows. There are such contradictions in personal freedom. There was another example but I think I’m writing too much. Got this habit while learning English at school.
But you’re also just describing taxes. It sounds like you’ve read up on the modern form of libertarianism. Which is another crock.
I’ve read up on many forms of it. Yes, I’m literally listing ways to make taxes acceptable for a libertarian.
TL;DR: Nobody employs pure ideology. If sovcits were to make their own state, they’d have taxes with the reasoning that these are necessary in practice. Same as NEP in Soviet Russia.
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Crowdfunding;
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Custom fees as a source of income;
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Close to taxes, but paying some fixed fee, like a membership fee.
these are just taxation with extra steps
they do have a point in saying “fuck you” to the authority.
The don’t say “fuck you” though - they say “gotcha!”. The way I understand it, the Sovereign Citizens Movement is a cargo cult. They hear about all the billionaires who barely pay taxes thanks to clever accounting and all the criminals who escape punishment on technicalities, and figure that “if the law can be manipulated - why can’t we manipulate it?”
Do they “have a point”? Maybe, in the same way alchemy had a point that lead and gold are made of the same fundamental matter and therefore one can be converted to the other. In the same way humoralist medicine had a point that the human body has various substances that must be balanced to maintain health. They’ve all had a point in that they’ve managed to glimpse at the nature of the problem - and they all fail by grossly underestimating the actual complexity of the model and the amount of effort, resources and expertise required to achieve their goals.
I wouldn’t be surprised if an expert legal team could achieve some of the things SovCits are trying to achieve. But that would require lots of hard work from them, and SovCits have managed to convince themselves that all it takes is a few magic phrases. I leave it to anthropologists to figure out how they came to think they could so easily figure out what these magic phrases are.
The way I understand it, the Sovereign Citizens Movement is a cargo cult. They hear about all the billionaires who barely pay taxes thanks to clever accounting and all the criminals who escape punishment on technicalities, and figure that “if the law can be manipulated - why can’t we manipulate it?”
Ah, there is that, yes. There are people who believe that law is some magic where they can prove anything if they know it well enough and know some secrets.
It’s not a bad belief, frankly. They want to prove something they consider right, so they believe the law would be on their side if they worked hard enough. Just naive, but not worth ridicule.
In the sense that its connection to justice is not 1-to-1 they are right, but there are no secrets that bend it, just raw real power which a sovereign citizen doesn’t possess.
I wouldn’t be surprised if an expert legal team could achieve some of the things SovCits are trying to achieve. But that would require lots of hard work from them, and SovCits have managed to convince themselves that all it takes is a few magic phrases. I leave it to anthropologists to figure out how they came to think they could so easily figure out what these magic phrases are.
Oh, you already said that.
I don’t know what you mean by “figure out” (as in what else there is to figure out), but this is indeed a common enough plot point in fairy tales.
I was talking about the emotional part where right and common sense matter more than the law. The law is supported by force, so it’s morally acceptable to use force to protect right and common sense against it. Oh, well, speaking of USA, that’s in their Constitution anyway, and what’s more important, those founding fathers they like to mention have many times said that this is a natural principle and the Constitution doesn’t create or support it, just mentions it.
- Crowdfunding;
Sounds like someone has never gone on a charity drive and hasn’t experienced how limited one could get funding from it.
Wait you’re calling us stupid and you think the government can fund themselves through crowdfunding.
The government tells people they no longer have to pay taxes but they can if they want. That’s your pitch is it?
I don’t.
Why can’t leftists argue without distorting their opponents’ words?
No one’s distorting your words, that’s literally what you said, you literally said the government could fund themselves through crowdfunding, it’s right there, you said it.
How the hell would that work. People already dodge taxes that they have required to pay, I WAS if you’re not required to pay taxes then they definitely won’t do it at all.
I don’t need to rearrange your words to make them sound stupid.
Why can’t leftists argue without distorting their opponents’ words?
This is what’s called a strawman fallacy kids
We aren’t distorting your words. Just rearranging them so your logic becomes clear.
Please, tell us what you exactly mean then.
How would crowdfunding work if it isn’t based on non-mandatory donations?
What if my neighborhood can’t crowdfund enough money to keep a fire department in operation because we can’t afford to?
Just let our houses burn down?
The fire department sends us a bill?
You buy insurance like many other people, most of which won’t have a fire. You call them, they come.
If you exchange “buy insurance” for “pay taxes”, you’re awfully close to reality!
From where? You didn’t fund enough to have a fire department. And since you’re so clever as to not pay for support services, wait to you see the cost of your exceptional insurance…
Folks, we either have a sovcit who discovered this group or an anarchist-type just stirring up shit.
Ah yes, insurance against fire. I can’t see a problem ever happening there.
Wait, that’s already a problem?
So if I get this right, your solution is to do something insurance companies aren’t willing to do.
Should they be forced to?
Not a sovcit, but they do have a point in saying “fuck you” to the authority.
No they don’t. Fighting “authority” for the sake of it stupid and meaningless because it’s so vague it’s dangerous. You fight the injustice or the lack of transparency, but what you prescribe as “authority” could be anything from schools that educate to laws that protect to support of groups you don’t belong to.
If you said “Authoritarianism”, you’d have a point.
