 Our next speaker will be Marcus Flinders. And Marcus is the founding attorney of Marcus Flinders law firm, specializes in corporate and business law, as well as tax planning and litigation, if you need some help, see him afterwards. He also has over 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur and businessman. Marcus holds a BS in philosophy from Utah Valley University, a JD from Valparaiso University, and an LLM in taxation from the University of Denver. Marcus served a mission to Côte d'Ivoire for the LDS church, is married and has three children. I'll also add that Marcus is currently serving as general counsel for the Mormon Trans-Humanist Association. We are well represented there. Please welcome Marcus Flinders. It's a creative name for a law firm, isn't it? Just name it after your own self. I was tempted to just prepare this while everybody else was talking, as I normally do for my lessons in church at the sacrament meeting. It would probably be better than what I have if I would have done that. And furthermore, as you know my name, Flinders, the Flind effect did not go to me. It didn't pass to me. Hopefully my kids will get it, but arguably I did not get that increase in IQ. So, interesting topic at an MTA conference, I'm sure is taxation. I do appreciate that I get to speak about this before you eat. That way maybe we'll still be awake at the end of this. I just wrote down some ideas and concepts and hopefully I can breeze through some of these and answer some questions and maybe it becomes interesting to you. As I was thinking about what to talk about, Lincoln and I actually went through some discussion as to what I could bring to the discussion and I think taxation becomes important and for this reason. You know the Mormon Trans-Humanism Association, trans-humanists in general postulate an idea of immortality. And I think sometimes we focus on this immortality as overcoming physical pain, overcoming the concept of illness, sickness and death. But sometimes I feel like in discussion that we lose sight of this issue, joyous immortality. So how does that relate to taxation? Taxation is a concept that is created. It's not created in advance of society, it's created as a result of society. So how do we put together a society that not only gives us immortality, but joyous immortality? A community of people that take care of each other that get along. I like this quote Benjamin Franklin gave in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes. I think we have a pretty good group of people who are trying to overcome the first and I do believe that we need to overcome the second. And not overcome in the sense that we're trying to overcome death, where death is non-existent. Create something that is joyous, joyous taxation. Those are two words that I've never heard together until now and here we have them. So one thing comes up, why do I use the word taxation? And instead of tithing or offerings or contributions, and I think that it does us a disservice to use the term tithe. Tithe automatically denotes acceptability, right? I mean it says that God made us do it, God told us to do it, so we must do it. And tithe denotes a 10%. I think that's antithetical to our goals and our missions to think of a 10% contribution as being acceptable or solving our problems. Taxation additionally is synonymous with more of a secularism, although we do see it in the scriptures, King Noah was head of the church and he taxed the people. And then, and I think we need to overcome the idea that for there to be some sort of a taxation or a gift program that must be within the confines of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You know, we are a 2% people if you're talking about the church itself and for us to hope that the church is the theocracy of the whole world I think puts us behind the eight ball, puts us backwards into our thinking. We need to accept the idea that there are good and just men and women who will help us and will be part of this taxation and community structure. So that's why I use the term taxation. Taxation in the scriptures is always negative. It's always negative. King Noah taxed the people. You know, Broplkesh taxed the people. And tax is a burden. But the reasons for the burden are for this. If you go in Messiah, when King Noah taxed the people, he did it for his own personal gain, right? Greed, lust, desires. He built up personal materialism for himself. That is all the way through the scriptures. Every time we hear the word tax, it's one entity or person taking from, and most likely, or people to be lazy. It basically pays their way to sit on their thrones. Well, when we use the word tithe, most of the time it's a 10%, but in church history, tithe has also been at different rates. But the word tithe is always positive. When we tithe the people, it's positive. Well, the reason it's positive is because the tithe is never just for one person. It's given to Zion. It's given to the church to distribute to the poor and the needy, or it's given to the needy, the fatherless, the widows. We read about that in Deuteronomy that the widows, they're giving directly to the widows, the needy, the fatherless, and the Lord is happy with them, and then they can say that they've given to the people. So the biggest differences that we have, and when we just talk about some of the positive versus the negative aspects of this concept, are positive, it goes to the people. Negative, it's focused on one singular entity. It's a very greedy laziness idea. The other thing that I feel like we have to overcome when we talk about taxation, at least leading up to a millennial world or a paradisical state or a celestial type state is the idea of agency. And I hear this all the time, especially in our current political discourse, that it's good to give to people, but I don't want to be made to give to people. And that the United States government or whatever government we have makes me pay taxes. And God doesn't make me pay taxes. However, if you go back and read almost every scripture that has to do with tithing, there's a subsequent scripture that says you're going to be burned at the coming of Christ or suffer endless damnation. And I ask my friends in these discussions to say, would you rather have five years in prison for tax evasion in the US government or eternal damnation? Like, I think the government is less persuasive than God for believers anyway. So I don't think that we can just totally say, let's take away this idea of persuasion. I think when we talk to each other, we're fairly agreeable that when good people get together and a majority of them make a decision, that seems to be good. And it requires a community effort. That's okay to set laws with consequences. And then agency in turn becomes, and I'll quote Lincoln from a Twitter message he put out a while ago, was agency is the choice between consequences. Now, that can only go so far because at some point when they start draining your bank account without your knowledge and maybe tie your hands, you do fall into more of a tyranny and a tyrant state. And then it's, you know, you're taking care of people and it's beyond even duty and blessings. So taxation usually involves, you know, a governing body. I think a lot of people, when I talk to them, anticipate a life in their celestial world without a governing body. To me, that seems bizarre because we believe in order. We believe in structure. We believe in doing what we like to do, right? And not all of us like to create laws or to be involved in making the community a better place. And so some of us just wanna write books and some of us wanna be computer programmers, but we don't wanna be sitting in the Senate. And there will be, I anticipate, a council of gods. We read from Joseph Smith that he says the same thing. The council of gods made decisions for us or with us and agree and be agreeable. And of course we read Joseph Smith and Brigham Young all the time, talking about common consent and we could go into hours of discourse as to what that is and what agency really is. So now how do we, why did I even get into tax? And this will help with the final aspect of this is that taxation to me is infinitely interesting. Now you guys are like, oh my gosh, this guy is bizarre. You think that may be the most bizarre statement you've ever heard in your life, okay. But taxation is truly the truth of society. If you study taxation over the course of time, you take a societal structure of taxation and you can, based on the, it's a game to play, figure out all the little channels and intricate relationships, kind of determine what the society was like. It's symptomatic. Our United States taxation system is very symptomatic of who we are. Case in point is state taxes. You know, we get mad at this as state tax because we've got people telling us we shouldn't pay taxes when we die. But yet we as a society have come to this idea that it's important that wealth not be hoarded, that it is important for an economy to have money being exchanged. And if someone dies with $2.5 billion in their bank account or in their own stocks and it only goes to their family and rests in the small little group, it is bad for the economy. So for a while, the rules were so bad that it hurt the economy. It hurt entrepreneurship, it hurt farmers and then we came up with the next step. We gave all these credits to farmers because we want people to continue to farm and understood the capital structure and we changed that. And then we gave all these big exemptions for the estate tax to allow people to keep a considerable amount of wealth. I mean, $5 million per person in a relationship, $10 million for a couple without a tax aid. That's a pretty good amount of money to pass on to your generations. And so it also gives us one other thing really believe in, charitable organizations, that are designed for benevolent purposes. So it encourages, because you can give as much as you want without taxation to give that money to charities. And by the way, the MTA is a charitable organization. You can give your money anytime you want, we'll take it. So the future and what it holds then is how, and so I went to school to sum that up, partially because you can make money with no one how to understand this complicated tax code and I like money and I like the law and I have a business to run. But more importantly actually was the idea of really studying the intricate details of our sociology. Stuff I think we don't even understand about ourselves is written in that tax code and the regulations, it's about that big, it's on one and a half shelves in my office of the regulations and then that doesn't even include the publications and everything else and then the court determinations of what everything means. It is fascinating and I learn a lot about me and us by studying tax. So where do we go in the future? What makes a joyous taxation? I think very clearly whatever we do has to be for the purpose of people and we have to be a loving people. Where we are going to find excitement with the MTA is this and this is where I'm gonna postulate this, propose it out, I haven't developed it to the point where I can make a bold statement but eventually money is gonna be non-existent. I hope so. It's such a facade of power, of success. It is so deceitful to us in determining our future positions in the world of gods and abundance, we hope will be prevalent, right? We'll have food and we'll have stuff, the stuff that we think of in current taxation. Well, I think that the MTA's focus and Mormonism in general focuses on atonement and for our tax structure to be joyous, we have to focus on atonement. That everything we do is for the purpose of other people, is for the purpose of being Christ and I see a world where our taxation and Lincoln and I have discussed this before, taxation is something focused on charity, love, kindness, companionship, giving, offering and the interesting thing as I started to contemplate this was that when we're all sharing this world that we've just been talking about, where we're all gods and we have everything we need and we're fully satisfied, if there is no way to then contribute to each other's needs, do we cease to be gods? Do we cease to be Christ's? The answer is yes, we do. So what's the next step and that is where we talk about progression and we create and have our own world such as this with people that we can nurture and take care of and devote our whole lives to. I think the first time in my life even going through my mission and everything else where I truly felt what Joseph Smith said when he said we were becoming like gods, when we were willing to give up and take upon us the sins of another person in hopes that they gain eternal life. When my grandfather passed away, he struggled his life to live the laws the way that we would think and for the first time in my life I knelt down and I prayed and I asked the Lord to let me suffer for his sins so that he could live in eternity of happiness. That is joyous taxation. And that's what I present to you through the MTA. Thank you. It seems often in the LDS church when we talk about the idea of taxation in government, a lot of people have the view that well in this life it's great to have a free market but in the next life will be in some kind of communism but it'll be okay because it'll be voluntary. And my feeling is that we actually need more regulation in this life because there's a tendency to be abusive whereas in a celestial society you could have free market with less regulation. And one of the things I was thinking about is you said that you think, you would like to see a society that doesn't have currency, understand that right? But currency isn't that a pretty efficient way to represent what is valuable to each individual person and how would you have a society without some kind of a symbol like that to trade and maximize everyone's joy I guess. I think you present, I think there's several questions and commentaries there. First of all, I find it disturbing and also unproductive to talk and communicate to each other about one day Jesus will come and everything will be good, right? And I think that that's one of the things that gets brought down into Mormonism that hurts us is that and that's why I love the MTA is we talk about a proactive creation of the millennium. We are creating the society that we want. As far as the currency goes, when I say currency, I mean pieces of paper that designate success that are so easily and artificially creating power and wealth. If we revert back to the dark ages or the old ages, you had currency in the form of what you find valuable as pelts or food or chocolate or whatever became of value. And currency I think can be, I mean I haven't put as much thought as maybe you would have liked that I did into this next aspect but currency is love and charity, kindness. If that's what's traded, we can expect to receive back that which we give, consideration, that can be our currency. If that's what's important to us, then that could be our currency. I mean I listened to that Ted broadcast the atheism 2.0 and he kind of talked about some similar concepts behind that what is valuable to us will be that which we trade and we give back even without the idea of God. Anyway, I wish I would have thought about it more but that's my answer.