Tax Evasion Morality

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Libertarian Political Doctrine 101
 
>I wonder if people are really trying to just avoid taxes through
>privacy.
 
Avoidance is legal, of course, so I assume evasion is what you mean.
Is taxation legalized theft or the price we pay for civilization?
 
- From an individual rights point of view, the assumed government
"social contract" is bogus because it is not voluntary. It is a
coercive monopoly, like a Mafia protection racket with a flag.
Muscle in on the TG's (Territorial Gangsters) turf at your own risk.
But might doesn't make right. Just because thugs in D.C. control
military machines, doesn't give them the right to rob and kill us.
 
Are we obliged to obey them, or should we resist evil?
 
Aside from the support of an elite or a few marginal basket cases, are
we better off with the existing system or with competing courts and
defense agents? Such a non-coercive alternative might provide order
and efficient defense against retail criminals without giving wholesale
power to a centralized gang of political tyrants.
 
A well-connected network, being necessary to the integrity of a free
State (of Being, man), the right of the people to keep and bear strong
cryptography shall not be infringed.
 
Kent - j.hastings6@genie.geis.com
 
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If you wish to avoid having the negative penalties of the social
contract, you simply avoid accepting the positive benefits.  If you
don't require the society, don't participate in it -- at all.  Any
`income' that you acquire without interacting with society will not be
taxed. This route is not for everyone. Most people prefer to enter
into the contract.
Yes, I'm being more than a bit facetious here, but not completely.

I not only respect, but I agree with most of the complaints typically
voiced by the `libertarian' segment here, but the extremes of the
economic arguments are ridiculous. Some -- certainly not all or even
most -- manage to come off sounding like spoiled teenagers:
``Everything that I have I have completely because of my own doing and
the fact that there's this social structure all around me had nothing
at all to do with it.''

There is a degree to which a social contract is not a completely
unreasonable thing.  Of course, most (all?) government's to date have
gone about a zillion times overboard . . . .
* * * * *
Ok, now the cypher connection. I've been working on, and using, a
package to add PGP support to Emacs-based messaging.  I call it PGP
Enhanced Messaging (PEM), a blatant rip-off of an already used
acronym.  It is initially targeted at doing sign (standard or as an
X-PGP-Signed header), verify signature, encrypt, sign-and-encrypt,
decrypt, extract key block, and insert key block.  Lots more on the
wish list :-)

npgp.el defines region oriented PGP operations.  The process
interaction is different than other packages in that it runs PGP
asynchronously and notices when PGP asks questions and passes them up
to the user.

pem.el defines message oriented operations.  It knows about message
headers and bodies, etc., but is not tied to any specific package.

The user layer is a set of interfaces to other packages.  Currently
there's pem-mhe.el (works with mh-e.el, an interface to MH) and
pem-gnus.el (works with GNUS). Since pem.el does most of the work,
new interfaces should be relatively easy. A pem-vm and pem-rmail
would be nice, but they're not my top priority.

If you're interested in Alpha testing let me know. Basically, it
works fine in my environments (Sparc-10, SunOS-4.1.3, lemacs-19.10 at
work, fsf-19.24 at home), but the first Alpha tester has demonstrated
lots of places where environment differences, different Emacs
customizations, etc. cause problems.
When it's a bit more stable, I'll ask for Beta testers, probably here
and on a newsgroup or two.
Rick