The Cost of Rights
Government does not reflect rights that are somewhere out there in the universe, but defines and ensures rights itself. And that takes money, which requires taxes.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
2people
2016–2025years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- In undergrad, reading these two books really changed my outlook. I went in skeptical and a little conspiratorial and these helped bring me closer to reality and even a little hopeful.
- The Cost of Rights (1999) by Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein
- A Theory of Justice (1971) by John Rawls
- Here are books I recommend to everyone and got me interested in economics and philosophy:
- The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner
- The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes by Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein
- Wittgenstein's Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow
- A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
- The Cost of Rights
http://www.amazon.com/The-Cost-Rights-Liberty-Depends/dp/039...
is an interesting read on this topic. It basically talks about how taxes are necessary and these movements to eliminate taxes completely are completely off base. I would argue that a sufficiently extreme distribution of wealth makes democracy impossible and the "rights" that the Saudis afford their people are not "rights" at all in any meaningful sense but rather just a way of placating people so they can hold onto control of the oil.
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