Quote from: comrade simba on Jan 22, 2025, 06:11 PMI am at peace.
Nonsense. You're only at peace because currently the taxman's cut doesn't constitute an existential threat. Once it does, the only way you'll be at peace is dead. You either have to rebel and not pay up or you'll die.
A similar strategy is that of the ascetic or monk who takes a vow of poverty. If you're OK with having nothing but subsistence level shelter and food, you're free of the taxman because of math. Even a 100% tax can't touch you, because 100% of 0 is still 0. Knarf here chose the monastic life, although it's not necessary to be at zero income here in the FSoA, simply low enough to be below the poverty line. I have also done this for the last 25 years, keeping my income threshhold just below where once I took the standard deduction, I either owed $0 or I got an annual tax return, usually in the neighborhood of about $500. My income from SS and my pension comes to just $80 less than the maximum allowed by Medicaid to be eligible for that. For the 10 years prior to that I only worked part time, about 25 hours a week to keep myself at the poverty line.
However, you can't go lower than this and still not care and be at peace. If you're homeless, even if you're OK with living in a tent, the Gestapo won't let you do that, they'll show up one day and toss it in the dumpster. I've never had to face homelessness, the closest I came was after my divorce. I had my mom to fall back on though and ended up moving back home with her, after 6 months living in my van while I worked 2 jobs and worked on my Master's. I slept in the van and showered at the university gym.
Doomsteading is another method, but as you noted the schools out in the boonies ain't so great, so if you CARE about your kid's education, you gotta quit on it and move somewhere. This was in the sphere of something you could control, but you weren't at peace because your kid wasn't learning anything.
Stripping yourself down to be able to be at peace and be happy with just what you NEED rather than all the things you WANT is fairly difficult to do. You wanted a good education for your kid, but it wasn't an existential threat. You could have stayed on the Doomstead and homeschooled.
Anyhow, no biggy, we all compromise sometimes on our philosophy. Despite my Jonne Donne philosophy,there's a certain point at which I stop caring about a homeless person. After enough years on the street, drug addicted and alcoholic, he's beyond salvation. Kids in my 9th grade Physical Science class who couldn't do basic math and busied themselves disrupting the class fit into people I stopped caring about also. Nobody's Perfect, even Jesus. He got ticked off enough to throw over the tables of the banksters. He didn't have infinite patience. lol.
RE