TL;DR

On Dextaxation: on tax detoxification

You —human— did not pay taxes in the jungle. You started paying taxes when you started living in society. You gave Them the power to rule you and They, by ruling you, started charging you. First for doing this or that (also for minting money); but, at a certain point, to develop their ideologies to remain in power. If you could go back to the jungle you would stop paying taxes. But there is no jungle left on your planet out of Big Brother's sight. Your only way out (apart from Mars) is to migrate to the jungle of chained ones and zeros that is the blockchain. Of course you don't do it because you don't believe it's possible; and you don't believe it's possible because you don't think it's possible. Making good the argument that only those who attempt the absurd are capable of achieving the impossible.

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TOC

• Dare to think! Not just a captatio benevolentiae.

• The "just because" as a surrogate of thinking.

• Tax perversion.

• Münchhausen and taxation: entering the trilemma.

• Münchhausen and taxation: getting out of the trilemma.

  • First exit.

  • Second exit.

  • Third exit.

• The strange case of the round coin round business.

• The even stranger case of the barter tax (also round) business.

• Barrow's Sheriff is everywhere.

• From the jungle to the tribe and from the tribe to the blockchain.

• Public privacy.

• Tax detoxification: dextaxation.

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Dare to think! Not just a captatio benevolentiae

Doing things without thinking versus thinking about how things are done

The problem with thinking is (not "thinking" but is) "the problem". The problem, then, is when and why humans think, which in turn conditions what and how they think. Let us call it "the problem with thinking"; and let us leave the expression "the problem of thinking" for psychologists and philosophers who, engaged in an exercise of thinking about thinking as impossible as "I forgot I forgot you", try to elucidate how it is that one thinks (the types of syllogistic, modular, speculative, erotetic, narrative reasoning...) when they don't even know what it is to think and, at worst, when the common mortal thinks (well or badly, as an act of thinking) much less than they think. If I were one of these institutionalised scholars, I would first worry a lot about the fact that humans do not think enough before worrying a little about the fact that they think in this or that way. Sure, I do not belong to that tyrannical epistemic caste according to which —as Bilbo Bolson would say— my opinion is worth so little that I have to quote them for it to be worth anything, and so little that it cannot be quoted by anyone. All of which, however, does not deprive me of being a thinking (non-human) subject because I junglefeel like it.

And it is thus, in thinking, that I come to share these reflections aloud which, in no way, are going to interfere in the problems of or with thinking. But I did want to distinguish them in order to better invoke the latter —with— for being the root cause of what humans and their world are today. Because the world is the way it is more because its human inhabitants do not think than because they think this way or that way, good or bad. And on this point, if it is the case that humans do not think, I don't see that the beast cupidissima rerum novarum has has any comparative advantage over the other beasts. Otherwise, perhaps a non-thinking jungle is better than a non-thinking society —and if you don't understand me, human, you'd better stop reading.

If Kant, at the height of the Enlightenment, challenged the world to know with his "sapere aude!" (dare to know), in this dark time built on soft multicoloured cotton wool, what we must shout loudly is:

❗️ Aude cogitare!

The "just because" as a surrogate of thinking

Just because as an explanation

No, you don't think when you towel dry yourself when you get out of the shower.

Try it: one morning, before you start drying yourself, or in the process of drying yourself, stop for a moment and think about how you dry yourself: where on your body do you start, how many times do you towel that part before moving on to another part, and so on. You will almost certainly not be able to describe the process. And with a high probability when you start or resume it, after that thoughtful pause, you will be unable to finish it as usual.

As usual.

The intangible act of thinking is automatically displaced by a tangible somatic act. And just as you come to towel-dry yourself without thinking that you are towelling yourself, so it is that you come to do whatever without thinking that "whatever" and its circumstances.

You choose a T-shirt and trousers from your wardrobe without thinking beyond your wardrobe (ergo, without thinking), or you have coffee and buttered toast for breakfast without thinking beyond what you have in the pantry (ergo, without thinking).

And, note, this is not exactly a reflex action —although it is on the way to that—, nor is it a yellow, subliminal or unconscious thought according to which your mind decides before you are aware of what has been decided —by that, your mind, turned into a homunculus. No. It is something insurmountably worse. It is about the mind being displaced by the body, about the act of thinking succumbing to the act of the flesh. A rupture this, of the Cartesian curse, that doesn't even have the good of the fact of the rupture itself —and I can't explain this to you now.

Habit kills custom.

The act repeated just becase —let's call it "habit"— displaces the act repeated because I want to —let's call it "custom"—. Yes, habit kills custom, also the (custom of) thinking. Unconscious repetition violates your will to turn it first into mere passive feeling and then into an act of vileness. That is how you come not to think; and, where you cannot think even once, you can no longer repeat that to think —to repeat the non-existent is something that is beyond you, a human being.

No, you don't think because you are used to doing things the way they were done, including thinking or not, disregarding thinking. Where the "why things have been done this way" is "because this is the way things have been done". An authentic "just because" that does not matter where it comes from, whether from what in illo tempore a social group did, does and will do, or from what your parents taught you because they were taught that way by their parents: in both cases there is an utter disregard for whether what was taught is the best, the most, or whatever, beyond just because. It is an absolute disregard for thinking —has anyone ever thought about this way of doing things— a pathological disregard.

It is curious how the "just because", the "equis (just) because equis", that tautological answer that explains itself so much and so well to itself as so little and so badly to others, can be (though not simultaneously) both an explanatory aberration and the paradigm of the best explanation, if not the only explanation...

Tax perversion

You pay taxes because you want to, and if you don't want to, because they want you to

Curiosities aside, the fact is that you pay taxes because of a stupendous and marvellous "just because". Even when you think about the fact that you pay them, the most you think about is that you pay a lot and then you go and set up a limited company in Estonia or Georgia, or at most, a DAO with some legal wrapper in Delaware, Wyoming or the Cayman Islands in order to pay less tax. But there is a question that constitutes a logical and chronological prius.

❗️ Think about it.

❓ Why are you paying them?

Not asking yourself this question is an act of sadomasochism if not a manifestation of brutal .

ℹ️ You accept to pay taxes up to a certain limit just as a poor battered woman accepts to be beaten or insulted up to a certain limit. And just as this acceptance is the fruit of a false love, this payment is the fruit of a false belief; the false belief that taxes are necessary: let's call it "tax perversion".

Beliefs are always relative, they belong to a context. Gettier explained that knowledge is a justified true belief. Something like:

I know that X is Y because Z.

Where Y is only a knowledge that I have of X if you accept the Z reasons I give. If you do not accept them, there will be a debate, an epistemological game of putting and removing reasons from which one or the other reasons will emerge victorious so that, only if it is the case that Z are those victorious reasons, will it be predicated that Y is a shared knowledge that you and we have of X (because of Z). There is, then, no unshared knowledge. But, mind you, there cannot be shared reasons if there is no (common) framework within which to contrast those reasons, to share them.

This (common) framework, which Popper dismantled in absolute terms, is still valid in relative terms.

ℹ️ You can communicate with a human on the other side of the world who just shouts "Gavagai!", with a tail-wagging dog, or with the heptapods Abbot and Costello, as long as you have some common framework with them, however tangential it may be, if only a species framework or a shared habitat framework.

This is how Herodotus —possibly the first great wokist— was able to draw understanding from the incomprehension that the Greeks showed towards the cannibalism of the Galatians: it is their customs —it is not because of their savage nature. Of course, to argue that you may be repulsed by eating someone for instinct or pleasure but that you have to accept it sympathetically if it is because of a pact of cannibalism: "in this tribe we agree that we will eat the tenderest of us if we cannot find something to eat", —to argue that, I repeat— also requires a (common) framework: an encompassing framework in which Herodotus brings together the customs of Greeks and Galatians. Something that is quite close to:

Either we accept (willingly or unwillingly) that they can eat us, or they eat us (whether we like it or not).

And that's just how you, humans, pay taxes:

Either we agree (willingly or unwillingly) to pay taxes, or They collect them (whether we like it or not).

Münchhausen and taxation: entering the trilemma

Why do you pay taxes? What a question!

You pay taxes because they were paid by your parents and grandparents, whoever they were; because they are paid by your good or bad friends; and because they are paid by your neighbours in the poor or luxurious house next door. Ultimately this leads to the fact that

you pay taxes because everyone (in general) pays them.

But with that kind of answer, the question remains:

❓ Why does everyone pay them?

You pay taxes —They tell you again and again, from here and there— because in this way you contribute to social spending, understanding as such the public goods, the common or diffuse goods that —They also tell you— only the Public Administration (of higher or lower level, closer or further away) can manage. Leaving aside that a (large) part of what you spend is diverted ideologically

ℹ️ E.g.: we are going to paint benches purple so that women feel more protected sitting there; or we are going to pay for penis and breast amputation operations so that humans with gender dysphoria can feel proud of their psychopathologies; or...

and another for corruption

ℹ️ E.g.: we are going to pay for so-called training courses so that those who are paid to give the fake courses and those who receive the grants to pay the tuition fees will vote for us; or we are going to pay for regional administrations so that regional parties will support us); or...

—I repeat: leaving aside all that you pay to cover ideological expenses or for corruption, which is by no means negligible...— the truth is that very little, or perhaps none, of what you are told you receive in return for paying taxes you actually receive. But that is not where I am going, about what you do or do not receive in return for your tax contribution. No. For it is true that you always receive something, at the very least, security through the monopoly of brute force that the Public Administration has established with the creation of police and armies. Just as it is equally true that you may not be able to receive it —security— in any other way. That it is better to give guns to these people I know than to these other hooded men I don't know is probably universally true at the police level, but not at the military level. For it is an empirical fact that the world's leading police forces are made up of honest groups of equally honest people. What cannot be said, however, of the world's major armies, perhaps not because of their soldiers but because of the economic and power interests behind those who lead them. So, no, that's not where I'm going. I mean: it is an uncontroversial fact that (at this stage of human civilisation) there are some goods and services that are either provided by the Public Administration or not provided at all. But the quid is:

❓ Why pay taxes beyond what is fair and necessary?

Churchill said that democracy may not be the best form of government, but it is the least bad. And the same reasoning underlies the provision of services by the Publica Administration: security on the streets through the police and at the borders through the military may not be the best solutions, but they are the least bad. However, beyond this security, I do not see that this reasoning can be sustained today, or in the rampant future, for any other service apart from security.

And, if it can be sustained, it will be only and exclusively —once again— by force of the habit of doing that has displaced the custom of thinking; because of the pathological disregard for thinking by the human, a human being who has abandoned himself, surrendered, kneeling in front of the arrogant explanation of the "just because" type. Therefore, I must insist:

❓ Why do we do things this way?

You —humans— do them this way because —I have already said it, and there is no more— this is how your progenitors did them, from those you know to those who are lost in time. But if you have the courage to go into that lost time, you will come to the knowledge of the first because.

Then, if we examine the first because, in answer to the question "why do you pay taxes?" from Münchhausen's trilemma, we have the following answers lines:

1. I pay taxes because that is the law of my country.

2. I pay taxes because it is the right thing to do.

3. I pay taxes because my parents paid them, and before that their parents paid them, and before that....

Münchhausen and taxation: getting out of the trilemma

Almost certainly in any treatise on tax law of any (human) legal system you will find such a narrative:

There are facts of the world that give rise to a duty to pay tax. An event of that kind is called a "taxable event": taxation is imposed by reason of the occurrence of the event. Every time the taxable event occurs, you must pay a tax to the Public Administration —it does not matter hic et nunc how much or the other circumstances or conditions: it only matters that you have to pay, the duty to pay. You have to pay according to your economic capacity, the more you have, the more you pay —something that is never fulfilled and which generates outrageous injustices that I will not go into here. And you must pay in order to help cover all the goods and services that the Public Administration is going to give you as a subject belonging to the social group being administered, something that no other legal-economic operator can give you, or cannot give you as efficiently as the Public Administration can give it to you —that is what They say.

That could be a good explanation, even suitable for an introductory exam on Tax Law in a mediocre university degree —as most of them are. At this point you can do two things: (like a beast) accept it as good enough or (like a human) look for a better explanation —think.

First exit

Taxes are paid to help, and only the Public Administration is capable of managing that help

The solidarity argument:

you have to help cover expenses that either benefit everyone or benefit those most in need,

is very powerful because humans are intrinsically solidary beast. Whether they are so by nature; religiously, because love is repaid with love; as a result of an Oriental-style shame within the group; out of an adaptive selfishness in the hope that this help will be returned, —I repeat, whether it is for any of these or other reasons— is irrelevant here. It is an empirical fact that the zoon politikon likes to help and be helped.

Solidarity is cool.

Well: depending on who preaches it and manages it, of course.

[!info] In the Western world, misunderstood rationality —let's call it "scientism"— and the progressivism, today wokeism— have invested more than two thousand years in expelling the Church, first from the State and then from Society —and They are still at it—, all with the (apparently) laudable aim of building a secular and therefore free-thinking state. And They have done the same with what the Church used to preach, religion, because it only served to generate weak and fearful subjects of an eschatological judgement. As if religion as a religious fact, as a religious experience, were an invention of fanatics and not what it really is: a defining feature of the human being. If there are men and women, there is religion —and read with the logical value of a biconditional. We do not need —They said— anyone in the name of God to give lessons in morality on Earth; and still less do we need anyone in holy dress to give charity. Let the ecclesiastics take their pious and whitish hands off the management of charity on the basis of love and virtue!, which We, adorned in suits and Chanel dresses, will manage more efficiently and on the basis of criteria of objective need.

It was that simple (and daring) to replace religious morality and inquisitorial puritanism with secular morality and the puritanism of social networks; how the believer fearful of the rage of God was replaced by the servant —though they call him a citizen— fearful of the force of the State; and, finally, how "salvation by charity" was replaced by "ballot by subsidy". Behind these two there may or may not lie charity; but if it is the case that behind the two lies this thing called charity, only the second one is cool —quasi a paranormal mystery except for Nietzsche.

That solidarity that is cool —the one They preach and manage but not the one that others manage and preach—, is cooler when it is accompanied by an argument of need and efficiency:

You should not only help because you want to, you should help out of necessity and out of need through Me, making Me, the Public Administration, the collector and distributor of that help. Because if I, the Public Administration, don't do it, nobody will; and, of course, if anyone could do it —which they can't— they wouldn't be able to do it as efficiently as I do —because I am the best of the best.

If you accept this story —Chinese or not— typical of the charlatans who sell hoaxes rather than of the storytellers who propagate illusions, then you are left with that first exit from Münchhausen's trilemma which says that every explanation is based on axioms or indisputable principles, just as Euclidean geometry is based on Euclid's indisputable five postulates...

Second exit

Taxes are paid because they are necessary and it is because they are necessary that they are paid

That is, until someone dares to discuss —to think about— one of them —that of the parallels— and discovers the new hyperbolic or elliptic geometries. Then, if you don't accept that axiomatic or fundamentalist explanation (it is from this or that indisputable foundation that everything else follows), you keep asking yourself:

❓ Why does the Public Administration proclaim itself to be the only possible provider, or the best provider, of certain goods and services?

You can answer this question as simply as "just because", because it can't be any other way. Let's see: if everyone everywhere has accepted it this way; if it has always been this way for as long as we can remember and, where memory ends, as far back as the oldest historical records remind us, —I repeat: if it has always been this way— am I now going to come along and discover gunpowder? Well, no:

Taxes have to be paid because taxes have to be paid. There is no other way. End of explanation.

And if this (overwhelming) argument already comforts you, then you exit the trilemma by the second way out. You are then accepting a circular explanation according to which

"taxes are paid because it is necessary to pay them" and "it is because it is necessary to pay them that taxes are paid".

A loopy "just because" as (scarcely or extremely satisfactory) as

"the rabbit's ears are longer so that it can listen better" and that "it is because the rabbit has longer ears that it can hear better"

——functional explanation philosophers call it, trying to avoid acknowledging its circularity.

Third exit

Taxes are paid because they have always been paid

But if your sleepy thinking consciousness —that which has been displaced by the conjuring somatic habit that reduces "doing things by thinking" to doing things without thinking— remains unsatisfied, you will feel yourself falling down that not unfailingly rabbit-hole that is the regress in infinitum. You have then taken the third exit from Münchhausen's trilemma, a regression from which, in this particular case, you will be able to leave at a moment when everything changes.

Because, yes, taxes, tributes, fees, contributions, levies, royalties, charges, tolls, tithes, tariffs... and who knows what else, have been paid since the beginning of time. But "a beginning" is not "the beginning".

ℹ️ You didn't pay taxes when you were an amoeba —and you were, or so the orthodox scientific narrative that operates like INGSOC with its Big Brother tells you. Just as you didn't pay them when, with your partner and your young, you, featherless biped, hid from the other beasts in some nook of the jungle so they wouldn't eat you alive. Nor did you pay when you began to cohabit with other congeners in the caves. Nor, finally, did you pay them in the initial stages when the primitive group, improvised and inconsistent, became a premodern, intended and organised group, a society.

So, the fact that in your memory warehouse there is no record that there was a time when you lived —and were probably even happy!— and did not pay taxes does not mean that life is impossible without paying taxes.

At that point, without taxes, everything worked by means of a barter of help: I help you so that you help me, a do ut des (or facio ut des) elevate to the category of an unwritten universal rule.

John Doe cured Mr. X and Mr. X defended John Doe; Mr. X defended John Doe and Alan Smithee entertained Mr. X; Alan Smithee entertained Mr. X, and Jane Doe taught Alan Smithee; Jane Doe taught Alan Smithee and Bill Taylor settled Jane Doe's disputes; Bill Taylor settled Jane Doe's disputes and Joe Shmoe cultivated Bill Taylor's fields; Joe Shmoe cultivated Bill Taylor's fields and...

A universal chain (not of blocks but) of favours that worked horizontally quite well until, at a given moment, the invention was screwed up by the vertical invention of money and, with it, of taxes. They, who set themselves up as the authority to mint the money, charged you for minting it and, seeing how good the new invention was, went on to charge you for the use of the money itself (not for what you did or gave with it: this is just the excuse), which meant they could charge you for everything if you used the money for everything: as has come to be the case.

❗️ But a door has been opened which They want to close at all costs...

The strange case of the round coin round business

From free barter to exchange by paying money

And no, I don't need to write a scientific treatise on anthropology or anything like that for the account just given to be close enough to the truth of what happened for it to be valid as such, as the truth of what happened for the purposes of what I want to expose here —and I expose in the exercise of my junglefreedom.

So, these lines being a treatise on nothing, we can safely agree that (i) it was a certain (self-) imposition of a horizontal order on the group on the basis of help among equals, however elementary that organisation might be, that turned the group into a society. And (ii) that, at a given moment, that organisation became vertical, hierarchical (from the Greek hieros + arkhein = sacred, divine + to lead, rule); where a higher order, which as such implied a lower order, minted money to measure in fictitious value the help between equals and charge for it. If you think about it —and you should— the system is perverse from its very inception because those who creates and delivers value (the things that are made or given) have to pay Them who neither create nor deliver it; to Them who only create and deliver a fictitious value (money). In other words:

A real value is exchanged for a fictitious value.

Let's see it with an example —hat argumentative device that some people call «cheap», the same people who assume that cheapness is per se bad:

ℹ️ The doctor treats the sick farmer and the farmer, in return, gives him five kilos of potatoes. In order to be able to grow his potatoes, the farmer needs to defend his land, which the soldier does. So the farmer, in return for this security for a year, gives the soldier a kilo of potatoes and a kilo of carrots every month. The soldier, who needs rest, stays at the inn. In return for this lodging, the soldier also provides security. When the innkeeper needs the doctor, as he does not need lodging, he (in return) agrees with the farmer that this one will give the doctor (in the name and on behalf of the innkeeper) two kilos of potatoes and two kilos of beetroot and that, in return, he —the innkeeper— will give him a voucher to dine at the inn with his family three times on weekends during that calendar year. The master...

We can continue the example as long as we like without improving the idea that we want to convey: everything worked; and everything worked on the basis of exchanges within a market that formed a closed system in which the value of the exchanged goods was constantly maintained. That is:

Within this chain of exchanges that make up the market, what one gives and receives in exchange adds up to zero if what-is-given adds up and what-is-received subtracts.

The general rule of exchange, of the exchange by which payment was substantiated in a performance (creation and delivery of goods or services), thus became the operating protocol of that market —I insist: a closed system.

We can accept —and we do accept— that, at a given moment, the bartering thing became so complicated that the exchange protocol collapsed. For calculating the equivalence of services in long chains of exchanges, or in chains that involved exchanges with operators outside this market (of the neighbouring tribe that had its own market, however similar), was not a theoretical and absolute impossibility, but a practical possibility so complicated that it became a de facto impossibility.

ℹ️ It was no longer so simple for the doctor, the farmer, the soldier and the innkeeper to agree on the equivalence of exchanges, either because the baker, the blacksmith, the teacher... were also involved, or because counterparts from other tribes with different material conditions were also involved, which made the equivalence of performance complex mathematical problems of weighting (e.g.: the effort invested in tribe A to do thing X is not the same as in tribe B).

Of course, this gibberish, which was then, would no longer be so today with the calculating capacity of computers, the ordering capacity of blockchains, and the management capacity of artificial intelligences.

This, or under some functionally equivalent explanatory narrative, is how money arises. A unit of value is agreed on a physical piece that allows exchanges to take place, however long the exchange chains are or however many foreign operators appear in these chains. But this monetary convention is worth nothing if it is not accepted by everybody, if for some the money is worth what it has been agreed to be worth and for others it is not. So, this monetary convention must be imposed on those who do not accept it. Which leads us to the conclusion that the monetary convention must be directed (in all its phases: negotiation, agreement and voluntary or forced compliance) by someone who can be trusted by all and who is able to impose the convention manu militari; someone who is usually not the most trustworthy, but the least untrustworthy (because trust is inversely proportional to the collective of trust): the ruler of the tribe. A ruler who (in one way or another) will want to get paid for being a ruler, which includes getting paid for running the convention: for minting the money and forcing everyone to accept that it is worth what it is said to be worth.

We are thus faced with having to pay for something that has no value in itself beyond the convention: money. Money is thus something like an intermediary, not only costly (it costs money), but also at a loss (the cost is on something that has no intrinsic value beyond the value assigned to it). Since such an absurdity is absurd even for those who devised money, it is therefore suggested that money should be minted with materials that have a value in themselves (silver, other, bronze...).

ℹ️ But this plunges us into new problems such as the limitation, scarcity, distribution or domination of these precious materials: will the tribe have more money because it is where it is, or because it has conquered the lands it has conquered, will it have more gold, silver, bronze...?; what will happen when there are so many goods and services in flow that there is not enough money supported by precious materials to maintain the equivalence according to the value of the monetary convention?

And that is how the rulers ended up minting paper money, or whatever money, where that money has absolutely no value apart from conventional value.

ℹ️ And if you don't believe it, then go to an Amazon jungle to buy coconuts with dollars or euros and see how many they give you while they tell you —and for sure you will understand them even if you don't understand their language...— to insert your monetary conventions down some hole —if you still have that hole.

And beware, because power is ambitious by nature. And when rulers enjoy the power to mint money, as well as the force to exercise that power; when They can mint money and charge for it, They feel legitimised —and to top it all off, you, human, believe it too— to charge you for other things. In fact, in a not inconsiderable sense, charging for minting money is already a tax, if not the mother of all taxes. Yes —humans—, money is a very, very expensive intermediary; a worthless intermediary that devalues the chain of exchanges.

❗️ A round business only for those who mint it: the rulers —They.

The even stranger case of the barter tax (also round) business

Barter as a taxable event: payment for nothing

With the epistemological limitations with which I believe that on planet Earth all crows are black and all swans are white —I repeat: with those same limitations— I believe that in all legal systems one or another direct or indirect tax is paid on barters of goods and rights. The most elementary intuition and logic tells us that this should not be the case:

That if what you give me in exchange for what I give you has an equivalent value, then there should be no taxable event; that is, that for a fact of the world such that its real flow of value is zero, there should be no duty to pay taxes.

ℹ️ Continuing with the example seen above, the doctor before and after treating the farmer has the same value within his patrimony, just as the farmer has the same value before and after being cured: for they have agreed to their satisfaction that the five kilos of potatoes are worth what the doctor's service is worth.

It happens, however, that the descendants of the rulers —They— who agreed (i) to charge you for minting money so that you could do at cost (good or service in exchange for money) what you could do before without cost (barter: good or service in exchange for good or service); just as They also agreed (ii) that you should pay taxes so that you could help by paying (collaborate in solidarity to pay for certain goods and services which they called "public") what you could previously do without paying (help motu proprio or through the Church or other charitable organisations); —I repeat: those same rulers, who curiously all agreed without speaking, as if They belonged to an hermetic and elitist ideal community of interests, transgeographical and transhistorical— They agreed (iii) that yes, always and everywhere there was for one reason or another, with very exceptional exceptions, a taxable event subject to the implacable scrutiny of the Treasury (to collect taxes) and the Banking System (to collect that sui generis tax which is, strictly speaking, the price of money).

ℹ️ Firstly, because what the bartering parties barter brings to the surface a possible capital gain (a taxable event for the tax on capital gains and losses). Secondly, because, even if what is exchanged is of equal and exact value, it is the condition of professional or businessman that generates the accrual of the payment of the tax on the (mysterious) added value —do not know for whom. And finally, if it is not such a condition, then it is the common condition of non-businessman and non-professional, that is, that of private individual (= rest of the world), that generates the accrual of the payment of the tax on the transfer of goods and services.

No further comment.

Barrow's Sheriff is everywhere

The moment you think about why you pay taxes, someone will remind you that you have to pay them

In the brilliant 30 Days of Night, Sheriff Eben Oleson imposes an almost ridiculous fine, which could well have been drowned, to the big brash Beau Brower; after which, his Deputy Billy Kitka reproaches him: "You know, Beau's not so bad. Why'd you bother writing him up", to which the former replies: "He lives alone out there on the south ridge. A little citation now and then lets him know he's part of this town". Well, don't give it another thought, that's just what They want: that at no time and in no place should you forget that you are part of the tribe They rule.

And there is basically only one situation in the world that (for the moment) escapes the tax or monetary Thinkpol —the one that reminds you of which tribu you belong to—. This situation occurs where Thinkpol's eye cannot reach: in black markets, in jungle places, in family intimacy and in other spaces of (potential) maximum privacy understood as spaces that escape the domain of The Public (spaces where in one way or another the Public Administration cannot get its paws in). So, nothing you do in your home will, in principle, constitute a taxable event.

But don't be under any illusion: not because They don't want to, but because They don't want to be like Cagancho en Almagro (make (make a complete fool of themselves):

As They do not want to sanction a law that They cannot enforce, They do not sanction it; but the day They can, do not doubt that They will do it as a PreCrime Division.

This, and only this, is the only reason why there are no taxable events in your living room. There, you can play poker with money —poker without money...?, !—, throw colourful parties, or exchange all kinds of goods and services.

There is no crime in that heterotopia of consent and privacy that is your living room —which unfortunately is in the process of becoming a utopia as well. But not because there is and it is denied as in the soviet paradise of Child 44, but because with consent and privacy there can be no crime unless They tell you there is. Because in the definition of crime, as in the definition of madness, there is a very strong component of social construction.

ℹ️ As recently as 2013 the transgender phenomenon was a psychopathology according to the DMS-5; and now addressing a woman (= a human who has artificially removed or neutralised the biological reproductive organs she was born with) who claims to feel like a man as a woman is on the way to being classified as a crime.

Rhetoric and hyperbolic facts aside,

it is in the space of privacy where there is no taxable event —it should not be.

In other words, the same fact, inside or outside that space of privacy, becomes a taxable event.

In the living room of my house I can give you an hour of law classes at the highest level and you can give me, in return, one bottle of Pago Garduña vintage 2019 (a red wine with protected designation of origin Abadía Retuerta, Ribera del Duero) which, in exchange, let's say, would cost about a hundred US dollars in a wine shop. And this is not an illegality: (i) it is a barter between acquaintances, colleagues, collaborators, friends... —consider it as you like—, a mundane fact that is not a taxable event because —and only because— they cannot scrutinise it; but (ii) it is a taxable event if I convert it into an allowance of services for goods for the sole accessory circumstance —a circumstance that They define and impose— that it is formalised with a piece of paper that They calle "invoice" or takes place in a building that They call "business premises".

So, you, human, faced with such a situation —the same mundane fact is a taxable event, or not, depending on the accessory circumstances that They define and impose— you can consider of going to the jungle where you came from, for that reason: to do whatever you want, your junglewill —which is something of yours, much more powerful and all-encompassing than the royal will that is granted to the king as well as taken away from him. "There, in the jungle, I will be calm" —you will say to yourself—. But no. Go to the less travelled space of the most remote mountain in the country where you live and build a cabin to give shelter to your private facts and yours, to mundane facts that are not taxable events. It is only a matter of time before They not only find you; it is also only a matter of time before They remember you with a little note that you belong to a tribe, straightening you out, making you pay for everything you wanted to do on the sly of the tribe, including the construction of the cabin that they will also knock down for lacking a building permit.

❗️ Yes, the Sheriff of Barrow is everywhere.

From the jungle to the tribe and from the tribe to the blockchain

You can't fly to the jungle; but you can (escape to Mars or) migrate to the blockchain

To flee from the tribe to the jungle in a process of historical reversal is the first and reasonable temptation. And indeed, it would be the logical process —not without bloodshed— if all humans, or a very large majority of them, could agree with each other. But They keep you very entertained with social networks, trash television and subsidies, the panem et circenses of Western governments today formed (with some exceptions) by the woke left which (under the masks of socialists, social democrats or democrats supported by the once needy minorities now converted into groups of green or nationalist perversion) spreads that woke mind virus that is a real threat to human civilisation. These woke governments are real machines for shaping ; subjects between useless and crybabies who get depressed (literally) for not being able to carry a fifteen hundred US dollar iPhone in their pockets; in short, subjects who shy away from effort and, therefore, also from the effort of thinking.

And when those entertainments flag, They bend your cowardly and comfortable (sleeping) minds by pouring out fear through threats and risks that are either fake, or escalated and taken out of context.

ℹ️ A pandemic of a thousand origins that will decimate the population; a catastrophic climate change put in the mouth of a manipulated girl; dreadful dictators who, as if waking up one morning bored, go and decide to invade Ukraine as a preliminary step to the invasion of Europe, Taiwan and Gaza, regardless of any very complex problems of mistreatment of minorities, historical-territorial or terrorism; a Doomsday Clock that, because of these wars or others to come, will reach midnight with its tricked-out hands on the day when Aesop's hare catches up with Samaniego's tortoise —or, of course, on the day They really want it to; and, in essence, whatever you can think of to keep you scared.

Also those cryptocurrencies and other blockchain projects, of course, that great global scam masterminded by criminals and other despicable and unscrupulous human beings masquerading as technologists. But a scam that ceases to be a scam if —yes— it is They who bring out a stable cryptocurrency —as stable as fiat money is stable with interest rate variations (the price of money), price variations due to inflation, currency exchange rate variations, and so on...— for the sole purpose of removing physical money and thus being able to track everything you do, even what you do in that living room in your house that was once your private space to cool your balls if that's what you liked.

Because They know perfectly well —and it is precisely because They know perfectly well that They don't want you to know— that the blockchain is a world that, at most, They will be able to track to some extent; to some extent that is the same extent, no more, that you can do it by tracking and analysing on chain information with tools like Mempool, Etherscan, Glassnode, etc. —and the fact that They can't do more than you is not only that They don't like it at all, but that They will end up with you insofar as that is or can be the case: don't doubt it.

They know that a return from the tribe to the jungle is as impossible as an exodus from the tribe to the blockchain is possible.

❗️ Think about it.

No, it's not demanding the impossible...

❗️ Think more about it, please.

To set up a blockchain network, you only need equis connected nodes that share the rules of the same blockchain protocol (operating rules = an apparently only-technological pact that, strictly speaking, transcends technology) with distributed ledger technology (DLT). In other words, you only need equis computers and thinking heads. If the machines access the Internet privately through a virtual private network (VPN), then it is absolutely impossible for Them to dismantle that network as they dismantled that cabin in the jungle in which you poured so much effort and illusion. They may eventually, if it's the case the blockchain protocol is detected, break into your house or wherever the computers are and take them away. But the network can survive and can be reloaded on the Internet exactly as long as at least one copy of it escapes the clutches of Thinkpol.

ℹ️ For example, the In re Ooki case resulted in the CFTC ordering the closure of the DEX Ooki (Ooki DAO), for which it agreed, among other measures, to block the traditional access url. But this only served to make Ooki DAO first migrate and be reborn through a purely decentralised solution via IPFS, and then even provide it with new traditional access url.

They know —and so the CFTC knew— that They cannot deal with any decentralised platform (be it exchange/DEX, financial/DeFi, organisation/DAO, social/DeSo, application/dApp...) because (i) that platform is as much in each and every computer that manages the nodes that make it up, as in none of them: the platform subsists with just one node (or registry) but only exists if there is more than one node.

❗️ This is essentially different from any centralised platform: the platform subsists and exists with only one registry (or node). The consequences of this change in subsisting and existing are metaphysical in nature and, as such, severe. They change the way and manner in which humans categorise and thus perceive reality.

Both a distributed ledger technology (a blockchain) and a centralised registry subsist thanks to the registry itself. But the latter exists by the will of one, who creates and governs the registry, while the former exists by the will of all who create and govern the registry.

And (ii), no less important, because it is also impossible for Them to know who the users, token holders or managers of the platform's nodes are as long as they do not interact with the world of flesh and blood, the world outside the blo-ckchain.

Public privacy

The blockchain is a space of a private nature: don't let them sell you a lie

And this is so, regardless of who it may concern, because a blockchain is by nature a space of privacy, just as your living room is —for the moment—, regardless of whether it is permissioned or permissionless. It is a singular privacy, a  public privacy in which everything is seen and recorded, but no one knows or can know who is behind all that is seen and recorded, nor behind the whole where what is seen is recorded.

ℹ️ Something like a costume party in your living room where you can do everything, from telling amusing gibberish to the most spectacular business, such that this party belongs to your privacy, and only to your privacy, as long as you don't leave your living room. Something like that, too, like a land registry of real estate in which you could know everything about the rights to that property except for the holders of those rights.

The noun "privacy" derives from the adjective "private", and this from the verb "to deprive" (privare in Latin), where to deprive others of something is to forbid others access to that something because it is mine, and mine alone, unless I want it not to be. And just as private is your living room, which I only enter if you let me, as private is any network built on any blockchain on the basis of any protocol (even open networks are in this sense private because whoever designed them designed them to be open, when they could have deprived you of such access).

ℹ️ The protocol is the rules of a game in your living room, a game in which only whoever you want can participate, which includes the possibility (ad exemplum) of imposing the purchase of a ticket (getting a token), the condition of going furry (fulfilling certain requirements), or leaving the door open if that is what you want (simply connecting your wallet). However, the fact that you leave the door to your living room open for whoever wants to enter does not in any way detract from the fact that your living room is still a private space; a space that belongs to your privacy where you, and only you, are the master, you are the one who exercises dominion and therefore who has exclusive decision-making power over who (how and when) can and cannot access this private space, over who you share this privacy that is yours, and yours alone.

This is exactly the case of a blockchain network, for example, a DEX: it is a private space in which users play token exchanges and win or lose (whatever) on the basis of those exchanges, just as they could be playing poker, winning and losing (money, shots, clothes...) without the tax authorities having the right (and if they did, they could not) to stick their noses in there. And the only difference between that private space and that DEX —read any blockchain decentralised platform— is that it is a shared space.

ℹ️ Your living room is yours, but the platform belongs to its members; the living room is private property, but the platform is a shared property in the broad sense (which is technically closer to a joint ownership whether it is Germanic or Romanesque depends on the letter of the protocol —but that does not matter now—, although it is possible that it deserves the creation of a new legal conceptual category), which in any case does not affect your privacy at all. Your living room is just as private as the premises you buy, rent, use and enjoy or, in short, own, together with your colleagues or best friends under a kind of shared privacy.

Bad intentions aside —which there are, those of Them, who fear that someone will eat some of the cake— the tendency or confusion to consider a blockchain as something public comes because, being essentially a registry (however distributed) then it happens that, as such a registry, everyone, publicly, can access what has been registered.

ℹ️ You —any human being— can only know the transactions that Vitalik Buterin has made on the Ethereum blockchain if it is the case that you know what his wallets are; and you can only know them if it is the case that Vitalik tells you what they are, if he de-privatises them.

However, whether you know or do not know the transactions of a wallet does not alter the character of that wallet in terms of its privacy.

ℹ️ Your bank account does not cease to be (in nature) private because you post a monthly transaction statement on your home gateway.

Privacy cannot be a dispositional concept, a concept that manifests itself under certain circumstances. Privacy is an extension of man's Freedom and, as such, an existencial absolute. If They manage it, you are no longer free and you lose your humanity.

ℹ️ So, for example: (i) If you send 0.3 ETH to a friend who is short of cash, it is a private transaction no matter how publicly registered it is. (ii) If you vote on a proposal in a DAO that governs a platform for playing multi-game chess with distribution of incentives and prizes, it is also a private transaction, however publicly registered it may be. And (iii) if you come third in a tournament organised on that platform and for that you receive a prize of equis native tokens, then this transaction is as private as the transactions that take place if you set up a chess tournament in your house where you have all put a hundred euros to distribute 70% among the three winners and apply the rest to the organisation of the next tournament or go on a spree.

It is this kind of blockchain privacy that we call "public privacy" as a species of the genus privacy and, as such, not a lesser or inferior privacy, but a specifically different privacy.

In Vegas, what happens there stays there and no one can or should have access to it. They are private, very private matters... that you don't want to share (you don't want to give up your privacy) and that are not recorded (unless someone unduly sticks their nose in where it doesn't belong). What happens in the jungle also stays in the jungle except for the fact that it is practically impossible to find a jungle that escapes The Public and, therefore, the public. They have already made sure that everything that does not belong to someone is registered as public property. What happens in your living room stays in your house as if it were in Las Vegas unless you want to organise open doors days. What happens in the blockchain stays in the blockchain as if it were your living room (and therefore Las Vegas) unless you want to share it, without this being an obstacle to everything that happens there being indelibly and unfailingly recorded. And it is because of this characterisation that we call them matters of public privacy. And what happens in the tribe stays publicly in the tribe, so that if you know about it, everybody knows about it or can know about it. It's all —shall we say— kind of shared by default, just the opposite of what happens in Las Vegas, the jungle, your living room and the blockchain where everything is private by default.

❗️ And don't lose sight —human— that privacy is like honour: once lost, it can never be regained. What is private that becomes public is already irreversibly public, because what is public can never be private.

Tax detoxification: dextaxation

If you can detox from drugs, you can detox from paying taxes

According to the (reviled) Heidegger, logic was in thought before it was in language. For just as logical thought was reified in spoken and written language, so it has happened that by force of writing and talking about what They tell you it is said They tell —like a big Hitlerian lie— logical linguistic thought has been reified in behaviour. This, and no other, is the way and manner in which

you —humans— have ended up towelling yourselves without thinking that you dry yourselves with the towel, as well as paying taxes without thinking that you pay taxes.

❗️ If you were asleep you would be more aware of reality.

And the best prescription for sleepers was revealed by Duke Leto to his son Paul before leaving for Arrakis to fall into the foretold trap of the grainy Harkonnens and the spotless and refined and sophisticated Emperor Shaddam IV: "I will miss the sea... but a person needs new experiences... they jar something deep down, which allows him to grow. Without change, something sleeps within us... and seldom awakens... The sleeper must awaken". So:

Let's wake up the sleeper inside us and let's make possible other ways of being wrong!, let's go back to the “nological” thinking before the current logical thinking, let's think differently and... we will see...!

If waking up is the first and most difficult step to stop doing things without thinking and to start thinking about the things we do, the next and perhaps more difficult step is to put it into practice: thinking.

Thinking when one is not in the habit of thinking, but in the habit of doing, is as painful as detoxing from an addiction, whether it is to coke, alcohol, sex, hamburgers, chocolate or video games —which doesn't matter—. When the body displaces the mind, when soma takes over, there is only a terrible struggle in which the winner takes all. And there are only semantic differences between the just exposed and the process of stop paying taxes when taxes have always been paid.

It is the process of tax detoxification migrating to the decentralised worldd: dextaxation.

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Anarchosatoshi, 11/April/2024.

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