Reply #140: Insane. This is the nightmare view of Democrats.

[JackRiddler]

You write:

A traitor is someone who commits treason, which is a crime that undermines the government.

Not paying your taxes undermines the government. QED tax evaders are traitors.

!!!

Simply undermining the government is treason? It's very much the philosophy of the Bushistas. It's near to totalitarianism. It makes of every lawbreaker a traitor. In fact, half of "Democratic Underground" just spent eight years trying to undermine the Bush government.

This country was founded on tax revolt and has a long tradition of it. Thoreau went to prison for it.

Not that I'm for tax revolt in every context.

For example, the 52,000 unknown names in the Swiss suit are probably not righteous tax revolters. All I'm saying in their case is that you know nothing about who they are, or why they've deposited money in Switzerland, or even how much money there is in these accounts. You and trostsky seem incapable of acknowledging this simple point, but it is true. You know nothing about them.

Thus there should be no presumption of guilt, let alone proto-exterminationist rhetoric of the kind you are advancing. I say proto-exterminationist because treason is a hanging offense, remember? In trotsky's offworld statement, (s)he magically turns them all into "billionaires," which would mean about 50,000 new billionaires who don't actually exist in the world.

Your idea that tax evaders = traitors is on a level with

"antiwar=traitors"

or:

"imprison all drug users!"

You want traitors? They are in your government, which is the government of the war machine and the mega-corporations. They pulverize 2/3 of your federal income taxes for WAR and interest payments (when they could have just issued the money instead of the T-bills). They hope to appropriate social insurance payments like FICA for similarly destructive purposes. The government and the corporations that run it are not the country. The country's state isn't bad because "billionaires" evade taxes, but because billionaires run the government.

Government policy is near indistinguishable from that advanced by the worst elements of the rich, so to pretend that you're for the government but against the "billionaires" is laughable. The welcome new administration is going to qualify as criminal in no time.

I love a country, not a government.

The federal government is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," said Martin Luther King, who (to show that things are a lot more complex than the "traitor" rhetoric allows) is commemorated in a federal holiday. At the time, a Democrat was president. It's still true today.

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