When the rules make it illegal to not pay tax then rich people will pay tax. The rules are made in such way that people can avoid paying tax, legally. So you should call your representative and make it clear that you want it, but I doubt they will listen to you.
A great deal of tax avoidance strategies used by the rich are illegal, but the IRS either doesn’t notice or frequently chooses not to prosecute them.
A recent great example of why they don’t notice. Rich individual 1 was paying for an employee’s children/grandchildren to go to school while deducting that money from his salary via a second set of books. Rich individual avoids payroll tax, employee avoids income tax, and on the surface it looks legal except the second set of books made it a clearly illegal action. It’s exactly that mix of personal and business activities that makes such criminal evasion so hard to track.
Another interesting example of not prosecuting, personal Roth IRA’s may not invest in companies under specific conditions and transactions must be at the fair market rate. Rich individual 2 broke both rules, but the IRS investigation decided to leave it alone. This is adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars in tax fraud, but if the IRS chooses not to prosecute then he’s free and clear.
It’s telling that local law enforcement frequently receives money from confiscated items but the IRS doesn’t. On one hand that’s great from a conflict of interest standpoint, but when IRS funding pays for it’s self via taxes collected it’s an interesting argument to starve them of funds.
I am advocating for state-sanctioned punishment for extremely deleterious behaviour.
Look up the punishments for being a traitor. In most countries, treason is punishable with the death penalty. I see rich people avoiding taxes as a low-level treason. They extract wealth, while damaging society across all strata -- in a way, they are betraying the fundamental underpinnings of society. That should be treated as a sort of treason, and suffer the same punishments.
Capital punishment is not murder. Even killing millions of innocent people, like the US likes to do for financial and racial reasons, is not technically a murder.
I think they were referring to the fact that the state has the monopoly of violence: it is the only moral agent, in the country, with the right to kill without making it a crime.
So it's a murder "technically physically" but not "technically legally".
PS: I'm not endorsing death penalty in anyway. I oppose death penalty.
Murder has a meaning that predates legal definitions.
Also, many groups in history are currently accused of murder despite it being legal at the time.
From slave owners to Nazis, from communists to African warlords.
They committed genocide. Even worse, obviously, but it fits the definition of word “genocide” better than “murder”, thus I believe we should be using that word instead.
Okay, let’s use another example. Is software piracy stealing? Some people claim it is. I don’t, because words have meanings.
If the government does it it's not murder, because murder is specifically unlawfull killing. I also agree that tax evasion should not be punished by the death penalty, but prison and extremely harsh fines would be a good start imo.
According to German law at the time, presumably, they were not committing murder. It's hard to say because it's entire possible for members of a country's military to follow illegal orders and be breaking the law.
According to international law, they were committing murder.
Murder is defined as illegal homicide. As such, it can only be really be discussed in the context of a legal framework. But there can be many legal frameworks at play in any one place/instance.
I'm saying there is a moral framework that supersedes a legal one, and I reject the "dictionary.com" definition as the conical definition.
From the Oxford dictionary, there is more to the meaning than your shallow lawful vs unlawful demarcation line:
. a. The most heinous kind of criminal homicide; also, an instance of this. In English (also Sc. and U.S.) Law, defined as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought; often more explicitly wilful murder.
In OE. the word could be applied to any homicide that was strongly reprobated (it had also the senses ‘great wickedness’, ‘deadly injury’, ‘torment’). More strictly, however, it denoted secret murder, which in Germanic antiquity was alone regarded as (in the modern sense) a crime, open homicide being considered a private wrong calling for blood-revenge or compensation. Even under Edward I, Britton explains the AF. murdre only as felonious homicide of which both the perpetrator and the victim are unidentified. The ‘malice aforethought’ which enters into the legal definition of murder, does not (as now interpreted) admit of any summary definition. Until the Homicide Act of 1957, a person might even be guilty of ‘wilful murder’ without intending the death of the victim, as when death resulted from an unlawful act which the doer knew to be likely to cause the death of some one, or from injuries inflicted to facilitate the commission of certain offences. By this act, ‘murder’ was extended to include death resulting from an intention to cause grievous bodily harm. It is essential to ‘murder’ that the perpetrator be of sound mind, and (in England, though not in Scotland) that death should ensue within a year and a day after the act presumed to have caused it. In British law no degrees of guilt are recognized in murder; in the U.S. the law distinguishes ‘murder in the first degree’ (where there are no mitigating circumstances) and ‘murder in the second degree’ (though this distinction does not obtain in all States).
