Tolstoy - Honest question: In your mind, is there *ever* a limit to which a unit of value should be taxed as it moves through the economy in a fiscal cycle? A dollar is earned (and taxed), it is spent, and taxed again (sales tax, profit for corporation, etc.) and it repeats this cycle over and over again throughout the year...each time, the dollar's effective value is reduced as bits of it are put aside for government use.

Is there any limit to how small a value that dollar can be taxed in a fiscal cycle, and do you believe that shrinking that dollar through taxation benefits the economy if it is taxed ad nauseum? Because in a functional economy, you want that dollar to return to a point where it is converting raw material to something of value...but once it becomes too expensive to do so, the economy slows...and stops...

No, it is not "deceptive" at all. Mitt Romney doesn't have any self-employment tax to pay (which goes right on the 1040, BTW, so it is part of the federal tax liability) because his income is from capital gains (and even if he did have regular income, SE tax only applies to the first $108K in income). And since Romney is rich enough to live wherever he wants, I'm sure his state of residency for tax purposes is one where there is no state taxes on capital gains even though he has a nice big house in Malibu.

krellin, as a near-anarchist, I would like to see a system where there are zero taxes and government services (where they exist) are paid for either voluntarily or through user fees.

But if there is going to be this enormous federal tax burden on the American people, I believe it should be distributed fairly, instead of the hideous mess we have now where truly rich folks like Romney and Obama pay a fraction of what I do as a percentage of their overall income because they have the resources to structure their incomes in ways the tax code rewards and I don't.

You included property tax. If he has a nice big house in Mailbu, then he is paying property tax. And I've lived in multiple states at the same time. Believe it or not, they talk and you are obligated to pay the state tax for any month you live in that state. So if he stays in the Malibu home, then he must pay state taxes every month he stays there. I have to pay state taxes for my cabin in KY for 3 months of the year when we stay there in the summer, so if he isn't paying Cali taxes but living there, he is actually breaking the law and I somehow doubt that is the case.

Tolstoy...would a "fair" tax system...in fact the fairest...be "If you *earn* a dollar, it is taxed. I.e., not tax on what you buy, or anything else...but what is your salary...what did your "labor" earn you. If you buy something and sell it for a profit you take a salary from it and pay a tax on it. there should be no differentiation between how a dollar is earned, and there should be differentiation between how a dollar is taxed based upon how many other dollars were earned along with it, correct?

As for anarchism...sigh....really? For real? Hell, even NPR has done stories of nice little liberals that put together community farming projects where you just do the labor you feel like doing and take what you need...and nobody plants and nobody seed and nobody weeds...but everybody wants free vegatables...and they *only* work when the "commune" is divided up and people are assigned responsibilities and given a defined take from the distribution....i.e. capitalism. Even NPR admits pie-in-the-sky idealism doesn't work because humans are horrible, selfish corrupt beings.

Romney doesn't live in his Malibu house for months at a time. And with all the loopholes, deductions, and credits in the California tax code (worse even than the Federal), I'm sure Romney and his tax accountants are able to weasel his way out of any tax liability resulting from any stays there.

Then blame the politicians who put in the loopholes, not the people smart enough to use them.

"Hell, even NPR has done stories of nice little liberals that put together community farming projects where you just do the labor you feel like doing and take what you need."

That's not anarchism per se, that's socialism. You can mix anarchism and (voluntary!) socialism, but you can also mix anarchism and capitalism (my preferred blend). Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

"would a "fair" tax system...in fact the fairest...be "If you *earn* a dollar, it is taxed."

No, I do not think so. Taxing labor is a kind of slavery. The fairest system in my mind is a tax (where taxes exist) on the value of natural resources (particularly the undeveloped value of land) consumed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

tolstoy, although georgism would be more fair, im just generally against taxation. i consider it theft by the government. if someone tells you that you must give a part of what you earn/ worked for, or face consequences is illegal, why is the government doing the same thing legal.

Tolstoy - the value of natural resources is subjective. further, taxing "required" items to live causes people to kill each other...

Wow, I thought the debate had progressed a little further along than should tax be paid at all. How can you prop up govts abroad like Afghanistan, Israel, etc, etc without US taxpayer dollars, what about your nukes, they cost, having armies living abroad in various countries (UK, Germany et al) I'm sure costs a small fortune. What about infrastructure like roads, etc. They get paid for by taxes.
OK so we accept taxes are needed, surely any system of taxation should be based on the ability to pay, are we good with that i.e. if you have more money you can afford to pay more tax, this is simple shit at the moment guys, nothing nuts here.
OK so now we move to the perpetuation of a market 'capitalist' economy whos success is highly dependent on consumer purchasing power. If we break down consumers into groups and then work out what % of money received (not necessarily earned) those groups spend purchasing, we can then model the likely effects of a change in cash received by various groups to consumer spending and the change in economic growth as a result. If you want to grow your economy give more money to poor people.
Of course a market economy can exist without growth but who wants`that, we want the economy to grow constantly, our house prices to only increase in value, our stock investments to rise, our wages to rise, our taxes to fall ...... this is bullshit and completely unsustainable. If we consider a model of no GDP growth then we have to take what we have now and use it more effectively. To increase consumer spending we make slight changes to tax spending patterns, the same for increases in Capital spending, infrastructure/roads/housing/energy, etc.
If you move to a very low or no growth economic model you don't have to give more to consumers who don't contribute to taxation (i.e. state handouts).
It's the desire/push to keep the current continual growth (inflationary) model that is driving the need to give more to the poor as they are your best consumers.
Sustainability should be the key driver for both private and public economic strategy and decision making, failing to plan long term means you are planning to fail long term, the sooner long-term sustainable thinking replaces short-term unsustainable greed the sooner you can heal your economy and maybe even your society.
This is not exclusively an American issue but a problem the world over. When China goes ex-growth that could be messy but that could be years before we see that.

Anarcho capitalism is not anarchism.

While "anarcho"-capitalists obviously try to associate themselves with the anarchist tradition by using the word "anarcho" or by calling themselves "anarchists" their ideas are distinctly at odds with those associated with anarchism. As a result, any claims that their ideas are anarchist or that they are part of the anarchist tradition or movement are false.
"Anarcho"-capitalists claim to be anarchists because they say that they oppose government. They use a dictionary definition of anarchism, however, this fails to appreciate that anarchism is a political theory. As dictionaries are rarely politically sophisticated things, this means that they fail to recognise that anarchism is more than just opposition to government, it is also marked a opposition to capitalism (i.e. exploitation and private property). Thus, opposition to government is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being an anarchist -- you also need to be opposed to exploitation and capitalist private property. As "anarcho"-capitalists do not consider interest, rent and profits (i.e. capitalism) to be exploitative nor oppose capitalist property rights, they are not anarchists. It would be fair to say that most "anarcho"-capitalists are capitalists first and foremost. If aspects of anarchism do not fit with some element of capitalism, they will reject that element of anarchism rather than question capitalism (Rothbard's selective appropriation of the individualist anarchist tradition is the most obvious example of this). This means that right-"libertarians" attach the "anarcho" prefix to their ideology because they believe that being against government intervention is equivalent to being an anarchist (which flows into their use of the dictionary definition of anarchism). That they ignore the bulk of the anarchist tradition should prove that there is hardly anything anarchistic about them at all. They are not against authority, hierarchy or the state -- they simply want to privatize them.