No, taxes are taxes and theft is theft.

Taxes are, in the case of a country like the United States, a legally sanctioned, representative approved (indirectly voter approved) means of supporting the needs of the nation/state as a whole.

Theft is distinguished from say, gifting money by consent. In a democracy mechanisms exist for our representatives to make decisions according to the consent of the people, to an extent.

You presumably live in a democracy so you presumably necessarily agree to abide by the laws of your nation which involve being governed by your democratically elected representatives.

Right, I didn't approve my money taken away.

How is it a bailout if the government just takes 5% of the shares?

The bailouts and or special treatment start afterward.

Why? We think the government would care about maximizing its own revenues?

That depends.

Is the government staffed by people with US market investments?

staffed by people with who have investments that rely on deals with OpenAI?

…staffed by people who believe they have more in common with sama than you?

Seems possible.

They could do that even if the government didn't have a stake though.

> Taxes are theft

lol what a weird way to start this post

Objectively it’s absurd to have an organization take a significant portion of your money on threat of imprisonment just to invest it in a corporation

First, the form: Starting a sentence with Objectively is not a magic way to make the sentence objective. It's a declaration of your intent to be objective, which isn't the case here, you're doing a reductio ad absurdum.

Second, the actual issue: socialisation of common costs seems reasonable to me. You use it, you participate, it's not an absurd concept.

Is there a way not to participate and not be taxed? If there's no choice then it's a moot point

Yes, if we only look at absolute morals and first-order effects, yes.

But if we think more deeply about this from the lens of human society, we ultimately end up with something like taxes.

So we might as well just have taxes.

Precisely. But don’t worry a bunch of responders will soon tell you that the end justifies the means.

The state / government is the only reason they're able to have money and profits in the first place.

There literally was no state (in its modern sense) until private property and the capitalist market. Feudalism or the Roman empire had an entirely different structure. The development of the modern state happened in concert with the development of classical liberal ideology, acts of enclosure, private property, and the capitalist market system.

Capitalism needs the state, taxes, police, and the military to coordinate competing interests, maintain property laws and social order, and to ensure its own stability generally.

... Now, what Trump and Bessent and Lutnick are busy engineering is a bit beyond that -- rentier / parasitical capitalism in which the state acts more like a committee of oligarchs taking a cut for themselves than a "neutral" cabinet of technocrats seeking market stability.

You are assuming a lot from the current state of affairs.

> The state / government is the only reason they're able to have money and profits in the first place.

Nope, money/currency precedes modern states and, its predecessor, credit/trust, is how human economies worked for most of history. The pursuance of profit is merely the consequence of humans being rational actors, i.e. we have been seeking profits since the start of consciousness as we know today.

> There literally was no state (in its modern sense) until private property and the capitalist market.

Private property precedes the modern state by quite a lot, and so do markets. Depending on how you define them, private property and markets exist since the inception of humankind. The liberals merely formalized these relationships.

> Capitalism needs the state, taxes, police, and the military to coordinate competing interests, maintain property laws and social order, and to ensure its own stability generally.

Except the state has been the one consistently violating it throughout history, both in its modern and ancient iterations. Socialist states are peak demonstration of this (although some could say they are also capitalist: state capitalist).