Then we should limit who people can vote for, since voters are so easy to manipulate into voting against their own interests. The basic principles of liberal democracy assume that a person has an absolute right to make decisions for their own life. These kinds of restrictions are unconscionable restrictions on the right of free people to their personal autonomy.
There is simply a massive difference between the theory of democracy and its actual implementation. Your personal autonomy is restricted by the government, massively, period, generally for everyone's own good. They decide what and how much medicine you can put in your body. Whether you can gamble, and where, and on what, and how much. What drugs you can take. What speed you can drive. Whether you must go to school or not based on your age. Which food you can buy at the supermarket. What you are allowed to see on television. Where and when you may protest. What behavior is allowed in public and what is not. What speech is considered 'free' and what isn't. What machines you may operate and under what circumstances. Which financial transactions you may or may not participate in and the terms of those transactions. The type of home you build and it's specifications. Which countries you may or may not enter and under which circumstances. Whether you are allowed to work or not. It's just the way things are.
But it looks like things are changing with regards to finance.
Because now, it is going to be much more difficult for the government to regulate your financial activities.
The "way things are" is changing, and changing for the better.
Don't like it? Then the government can send in its men with guns and attempt to stop it.
The technology is getting better and better, though. So it will soon become extremely difficult for those men with guns to do anything at all with your untraceable, untraceable, and unstoppable financial activities.
May the best group win. The government will need all the luck it can get.
>Your personal autonomy is restricted by the government, massively, period, generally for everyone's own good. They decide what and how much medicine you can put in your body. Whether you can gamble, and where, and on what, and how much. What drugs you can take. What speed you can drive. Whether you must go to school or not based on your age. Which food you can buy at the supermarket.
These restrictions violate people's basic rights and are to the material detriment of society at large. The more of a regulatory burden is placed on an industry, the more dysfunctional, bureaucratic and nepotistic it is.
Basic rights are defined by various charters, constitutions, international agreements, and that's about it. If you find that one of those restrictions contradicts the ones applicable to your country and legal system, you have a good shot at changing it. (Point in case: gay marriage, and other Supreme Court rulings.)
As for all other rights, those are determined by the government that is democratically voted in. If most people, via their elected representatives, decide that you shouldn't be allowed to speed, or smoke crack, and it's not constitutionally guaranteed, then it's not a basic right and it's not your right at all. Maybe moral right, but that depends on highly subjective morals and might therefore still get you into legal trouble.
Best course of action is probably to find a country with a legal framework that matches your morals. If there's no such country, perhaps the time for these ideas hasn't come and you want to lobby for them to be recognized as basic rights, since right now they're obviously not.
>Maybe moral right, but that depends on highly subjective morals and might therefore still get you into legal trouble.
We're intelligent human beings. We should be able to arrive at some kind of consensus on what our moral rights our, through rational discourse. That's what I'm trying to do right now. My argument starts with what "the law" means:
> We should be able to arrive at some kind of consensus on what our moral rights our, through rational discourse.
In the commonly used sense of the term, the scope of morals by far exceeds what you'll get even reasonable people to agree upon. "Rational discourse" means that you need enough of an uncontroversial set of base facts that either party is willing to work with. I don't think we have enough of those to derive a single valid system of morals without injecting other, subjective, more controversial opinions in the process.
Say, you have a basic statement such as "All people should be equal", something that most can agree with. By itself, this isn't actionable, and won't determine how to handle a situation unambiguously. You could come up with a libertarian doctrine that all people should be given the same treatment regardless of their background or current situation, or you could come up with a socialist doctrine that disadvantaged people should get extra support to balance out unequal origins and misfortune. Or anything in between. None of these can be rationally discarded, because there's not enough source data to come to any conclusion to begin with. If you attempt to expand the set of source data, you will find many who disagree with you. That's why it's subjective.
That said, trying to distill what basic facts we do have, so that they can be worked with in a constructive fashion, is a commendable goal. Good luck!
You do not have a right to speed on public property because others share ownership in it, and thus have a legitimate right to contribute to the rules that govern its use. If you owned your own private track, you would have such a right.
The basic principle of liberal democracy is that we have an absolute right to personal autonomy unless we violate other people's equal right to the same.
Making it illegal to offer a digital token for sale to other consenting adults, without approval from a central authority, is unconscionable.
You interfere with my right to personal autonomy by bankrupting yourself throwing good money after bad in stupid investments, leaving yourself destitute and in need of additional public services.
Or do you also intend to claim that the poor should be allowed to die on the streets as punishment for not being rich?
No one has a right to force you to support someone who made themselves destitute. You're using one infringement of personal autonomy to justify another.
I don't believe all taxes are an infringement on freedom. A tax on natural resource consumption, and to a lesser extent, immovable property within a state's jurisdiction, can be morally justified in my opinion. I also don't have a problem with a head tax, conditioned on the punishment for noncompliance being exile, rather than imprisonment. A tax on private transactions is an infringement on liberty in my opinion.
On that note, it's interesting that the first 'War on Drugs' used taxes on private transactions as its avenue to prohibition. Since the government at the time didn't have the Constitutional authority (this is before the Supreme Court was utterly corrupted by politics) to outright ban drugs, what it did instead is require that all targeted drugs pay a stamp tax, and then simply refuse to issue the stamp. This shows the prohibitive nature of taxes on private transactions.
