Image: Public domain.
I've spent a lot of time trying to explain to people that when someone takes your money without your consent, that is stealing.
The argument never seems to go anywhere. I have my own ideas about why that is–lots of stuff about projecting attachment to mommy and daddy onto the state, and about garbage ideas pumped into little kids in government schools. But let's leave all of that alone for the moment. Let's just put that whole argument about the rightness or wrongness of it aside.
Let's pretend that we really do need a monopoly entity that rules over people, in order for people to be safe and society to be civilized. Let's pretend that, without rulers, society would descend into chaos and everyone would be at each others' throats. (Yes, thank you, a little bit like what we're experiencing right now. But we're leaving that aside.)
This… "rulership" let's call it… needs money in order to provide its needed services to society. So it makes sense that the people being ruled would need to pay for those services, just as we pay for any other services: The production of food, building of houses, washing of cars, etc.
So just like when you go to buy a train ticket, to go from one city to another, and the guy behind the ticket counter asks for a full statement of all of your income for the past year so he can charge you a percentage of that for the ticket and throw you in jail if you don't tell him all of the truth about it…
Oh wait, hang on… That's not how train tickets work at all, is it? And it's not how groceries work, or buying gas, or getting your car fixed… in fact, it's not how ANYTHING works, except for this big "rulership" thing.
Isn't that odd?
Why is it that this one entity gets to have an entirely different arrangement for charging for its services? Why is it that while everyone else has to charge a certain price for the things they provide for others, these folks get to just demand a percentage of your earnings? Every single business in the world is able to figure out what it should charge people for its goods and services, based on what it costs to provide them and make a profit, and on what people are willing to pay.
But not the state. Every year, the state just demands a portion of your entire earnings, regardless of what its "services" cost to produce (and certainly without any regard for what people are willing to pay for them.)
And with no real promise regarding what will be provided in return. Maybe the state will protect you from acts of terrorism… or maybe it will make acts of terrorism more likely through its aggressive "foreign policy." Maybe it will protect you and your business from violent looters… and maybe it won't. It's all a crap-shoot. And you pay for it either way.
The US government is now 26 trillion dollars in debt. It will spend whatever it can, on whatever it wants, and will just create more when it can't. It knows that its "customers" cannot refuse its services, so it is under no pressure to either provide quality services or to keep its costs down. (Or, indeed, to refrain from caging and even killing some of those customers.)
You don't need to believe that a coercive government is morally wrong in order to see that this way of funding it is both unjustified and inherently dysfunctional. If the state really is providing needed services, and if we really do need them so badly that we must be forced to pay for them against our will, then at the very least, we should be presented with a bill for what those services will cost each year and be charged THAT.
I have to think that, even among the many many people who see nothing fundamentally wrong with basing a critical part of society on a non-consensual arrangement, there are those who can see the absurdity of taxation as a way of funding it.
