Is taxation theft? watch

ByEeek · 19-02-2018 14:52

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
Taking something that's mine against my will. Theft. What do you not understand!

Perhaps it is theft. But then I hope you don't drive on state funded roads. I hope you have repaid your education bill at around £4500 per year for 13 years + uni. I hope you also pay the true cost for things like rubbish collection and have also paid for all your doctors appointments over the years at around £100 per visit. Then of course there is all that legislation and legal stuff that just makes society function - have you paid for that? And I hope you also shove a few thousand a year at your local police force to ensure you live in relative safety from crime and intimidation. And no doubt you insure yourself for health at several hundred to several thousand quid a year depending on your age and health.

Nah - you are right. It is all theft. Perhaps you should move to Somalia and live the dream? The government takes nothing from anyone there and it is everyone for themselves.

Axiomasher · 19-02-2018 15:32

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
I'm an advocate of an anarcho-capitalist country, and I've never heard an argument to prove that taxation ISN'T theft. Please provide your responses below

Where political philosophy is concerned there's very little room for 'proving' things, I'd even go further and suggest that if you are absolutely committed to anarcho-capitalism you are not likely to be persuaded by any argument, no matter how well constructed, which will cause you to doubt that taxation is theft. Bleak I know but adherence to political ideology tends to be like adherence to religious ideology.

HighOnGoofballs · 19-02-2018 20:51

(Original post by SHallowvale)
Assuming it were theft, why should it matter?

Because theft is bad. Libertarians like myself think that it is also a necessary part of a society. A necessary evil to keep the cogs running, if you will. However, since it's theft, and theft is bad, we should be trying to limit it as much as possible.

Simply speaking.

HighOnGoofballs · 19-02-2018 20:52

(Original post by Tootles)
if you can posit irrefutable and totally watertight proof that such a system would work, I'll accept that all taxation is theft.

Whether it would work or not is completely irrelevant to identifying tax as theft.

HighOnGoofballs · 19-02-2018 21:00

(Original post by OxFossil)
In doing this "labour", do you use water supplies that have been cleaned as a result of state intervention (for example, through legal control on pollution)? Do you breathe air that is clean as a result of state action? Do you benefit from education provided by the state - either as a pupil yourself or because you depend on state-educated doctors, or computer programmers, or street cleaners? Do you rely on their being a market to which to sell what you make? And do the people who constitute this market depend upon state-organised or provided systems and goods? Do you use money - which has currency solely because it is underwritten by state guarantees?

If so, then your existence is dependent upon the state. The goods that you benefit from are the result of collective effort, held in trust and turned into tangible, accessible benefits by the state. Although you have not contributed to it, the state allows you to benefit from this common stock, simply by virtue of your citizenship. Therefore, the state not only has the right to reclaim a portion of the money you are paid so as to be able to continue to underwrite and resupply the social commons, but your retaining personal cash is an act of private appropriation of what is, at root, social property. In short, you are the thief.

Well, tax money goes towards paying for all that stuff. Who pays taxes. The government? No. You, me, and everyone else. It's not theft to use resources you've helped pay for. It's simply getting something for very very cheap.

I can't see how you can say he's "not contributed to it". The whole point of the tax is TO contribute to it.

But this is all irrelevant. Stripped down, government taking something that is mine without consent is theft. Just because taxation is legal theft, doesn't make it justifiable.

Sceptical_John · 19-02-2018 21:00

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
I'm an advocate of an anarcho-capitalist country, and I've never heard an argument to prove that taxation ISN'T theft. Please provide your responses below

Perhaps in the sense that there's no objective moral facts there's nothing to compel you to help out others then tax if theft. It's simply a case that this is the best way we know how to run a society in which humans flourish.

if you want to see a society without tax then check out mad max fury.

Maker · 19-02-2018 21:46

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
Theft is a crime. Not an argument.

you are an accessory to crime since you knowingly use the proceeds of so called theft for your own benefit.

Nathan.Brown.00 · 19-02-2018 22:02

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
I'm an advocate of an anarcho-capitalist country, and I've never heard an argument to prove that taxation ISN'T theft. Please provide your responses below

It's not theft, here's why:

Just by being in the UK, you are assenting to your possessions being monitored/taxed. By being a citizen to the USA, you plead your Allegiance to the US, giving them powers over you (some are useful, like protecting Americans abroad and at home while some are not, like worldwide Income Tax)

Entering a country, same principle. Just by entering a country, you are giving permission for them to shoot you (in effect, like a private person can shoot you if you trespass).

OxFossil · 19-02-2018 22:02

(Original post by HighOnGoofballs)
Well, tax money goes towards paying for all that stuff. Who pays taxes. The government? No. You, me, and everyone else. It's not theft to use resources you've helped pay for. It's simply getting something for very very cheap.

I can't see how you can say he's "not contributed to it". The whole point of the tax is TO contribute to it.

But this is all irrelevant. Stripped down, government taking something that is mine without consent is theft. Just because taxation is legal theft, doesn't make it justifiable.

The OP is positing a theoretical starting point where he "labours", gets paid by someone else, only to find a government stepping in to "steal" a portion of that payment in the form of taxation. It is this theoretical scenario, where the OP arrives like an alien from outer space, in which I say he is participating in systems to which he has not contributed.

Of course, it is not a realistic scenario. Indeed, it is unrealistic in ways which make his central argument even less plausible. i.e. in the real world, he has, of course, already benefited from common goods, including his prior education (state provided or facilitated), peacekeeping (state provided or facilitated), the money system (state underwritten) and so on.

The fantasy that a single person exists, or could exist, in some kind of isolation from the goods and services developed collectively through human history is absurd. By all means debate the role and type of state that you wish to live under, but there is a reason why no state has ever existed that does not tax its citizens in some way. It is the price it is necessary to pay for being able to benefit from the collective goods (and ills!) of society.

Your point about the state not paying taxes is just a rhetorical one, as far as I can see. What argument are you making here?

To claim that taking something that belongs to me without my consent is theft by definition only begs the question of what constitutes the legal basis of "ownership". This is historically and socially determined and always open to challenge and change. It cannot be divorced from its historical context. For example, you might claim to legally "own" a house a piece of your "private" property. You might argue that the only "theft" involved is if the state taxes it (say, through council tax). However, the land on which is stands was almost certainly at one time the common property of the local community, land on which they might have allowed stock to forage, collect firewood and so on. It was probably enclosed and turned into the private property of a single person as a result of a legal land-grab (as I type, I look out on a hill that in 1800 was common land, home to about a dozen families. A year later, a local peer of the realm drew up an act of parliament which granted him the right to turn all these families off the land, and made the whole hillside his personal property). So in your terms, "your" land was stolen from the common stock. Presumably, as a "libertarian", who wishes to reduce "theft" to a minimum, you would support calls to reappropriate the land for the commons....

This is not to mention the common goods and services, provide by the state, which make your property valuable (eg maintaining the peace and order of the neighbourhood, removing waste, maintaining the viability of mortgage lenders etc etc).

Far from being some kind of unique, intrinsic evil, taxation helps establish and maintain the underpinnings of civilisation. Opposing it on principle is naive.

jsk800 · 19-02-2018 22:15

It's crazy how in the US, less than the percentage that the UK gives to foreign aid, is spent on NASA!

Napp · 20-02-2018 00:07

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
Theft is a crime. Not an argument.

It is also an opinion.

TheBomber09 · 20-02-2018 22:20

Technically it isn't against the law, however morally it's very hard to argue that it isn't wrong but without an example of a tax free society working it become more of a impossible utopia than a plausible alternative

mydasnmaghaberry · 20-02-2018 22:23

(Original post by SHallowvale)
Theft is inherently an illegal act. There's no "loophole" here. Taxation is taking something legally so it cannot be considered theft.

everything hitler did was legal in germany at the time. law doesnt always mean moral

winterscoming · 20-02-2018 22:58

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
I'm an advocate of an anarcho-capitalist country, and I've never heard an argument to prove that taxation ISN'T theft. Please provide your responses below

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof

Amonkofmonk · 20-02-2018 23:00

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
I'm an advocate of an anarcho-capitalist country, and I've never heard an argument to prove that taxation ISN'T theft. Please provide your responses below

Anyone exited for the new shadow of cholosis

Mefan Stolyneux · 20-02-2018 23:01

(Original post by winterscoming)
Please read this: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof

Please read the thread, it has my arguments. Stop relying on other websites to do the talking for you!

winterscoming · 20-02-2018 23:04

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
Please read the thread, it has my arguments. Stop relying on other websites to do the talking for you!

I did. There is no point in repeating something which is clearly explained in that link.

Rinsed · 21-02-2018 02:00

(Original post by SHallowvale)
This is irrelevant to whether taxation is theft. My argument still stands - by definition, or perhaps by example, taxation isn't theft. If you can provide evidence of instances of taxation which have no legal footing, then sure, taxation would be theft.

I think the argument generally runs that in all practical and moral respects taxation is indistinguishable from theft.

Can the swish of a lawyer's pen make the immoral moral? It's a good question.

mojojojo101 · 21-02-2018 09:24

(Original post by Rinsed)
I think the argument generally runs that in all practical and moral respects taxation is indistinguishable from theft.

Can the swish of a lawyer's pen make the immoral moral? It's a good question.

The right is very confusing on this issue.

Tax is theft because it extracts value from a person by force and that is bad. However extracting force by way of employment in order to make a profit for your spec, that is a good thing.

Complaining about the government stealing your economic output is a nonsense when, for most, your employer will take a much, much bigger proportion of that output without question.

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
I'm an advocate of an anarcho-capitalist country, and I've never heard an argument to prove that taxation ISN'T theft. Please provide your responses below

'Anarcho-capitalist country'.

Proof, if you needed anymore, that AnCaps are not to be taken seriously.

Waldorf67 · 21-02-2018 09:31

(Original post by Mefan Stolyneux)
Theft is a crime. Not an argument.

But if your argument for taxation being a form of theft is that it is a crime, then you don’t even have an argument.

Taxation is legal, theft is not. There’s nothing else that can be said about it.

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