Taxation is slavery, Taxation is theft

[Philosophy Explorer]

Here's my take:

1) Taxation is authorized by law. You can try to minimize or delete it through your reps.

2) If you're benefitting directly? (e.g. entitlements) or indirectly (e.g. clinics), then I don't see where it's so detrimental.

3) As I hinted in (1), you can try to alter the level of taxation so it may not be an either/or situation with taxation, just how much. So, for example, you may agree to a progressive philosophy of taxation where the more well to do may be taxed at a higher percentage of their higher income (but what should be the cut-off percentage of the higher income?) And what about not taxing those who shield their income offshores?

That's my response to the theft portion. As for so-called slavery, slavery always involves taking orders so who would I be taking orders from? Where am I being limited (aside from a lesser take-home pay?)

PhilX

Taxation is supposed to be used for the good of ALL the people. When it is misappropriated, wasted and extravagant salaries are taken by government officials then it is theft.

Can you specify where and how much? If it's wasted, that's not theft, just lack of foresight and mishandling (if a company did the same, would you call that theft?) Extravagant salaries!!!? You must be kidding. Many look to leave government to work in private industry for that reason, among others. It's well known that civil service doesn't pay much compared to private industry (although post office workers did see good increases in pay over the years).

Again, can you give specific examples to back up what you're saying?

PhilX

[Wilson]

I see. You know,this association between god and natural rights is part of the Christian fiction we inherited as a culture. Putting this aside is frankly pretty early in the game for me. Philosophy begins with the world as it presents itself minus our fictional contributions. In other words, what is really there as opposed to what we made up? we may have invented economics, but certainly the basic needs upon which this rests are given, int he fabric of things, so to speak.

so, is there anything int he fabric of things that supports natural rights? Of course, I say: pain and joy and all that is encompassed by these.

Without a belief in God, there's really no way to prove that any natural rights exist. In other words, without an arbiter, it's all individual opinion. You feel that pain and joy are the criteria. Yes, those are as good as any, but they aren't universal. For a radical Muslim, or a radical right-to-life Christian, or a sociopath, the pain and joy of certain people are not important. And even if I find their views repugnant, they are just as human as we are, so logically you can't ignore their point of view if you're trying to establish a list of "natural rights".

-- Updated October 23rd, 2014, 2:13 pm to add the following --

Taxation is supposed to be used for the good of ALL the people. When it is misappropriated, wasted and extravagant salaries are taken by government officials then it is theft.

I agree with PhilosophyExplorer. Is government inefficient? Yes. Is money wasted? Yes. Would life be pleasant without government? No. Is there any alternative to taxation to fund government? No.

Certain corruption and wastefulness in government seems criminal to me and should be punished. But the issue of this thread is whether taxation is at its core theft. And of course it isn't. That would be like saying that retail selling is theft because occasionally it's not honest.

[Hereandnow]

Wilson: Without a belief in God, there's really no way to prove that any natural rights exist. In other words, without an arbiter, it's all individual opinion. You feel that pain and joy are the criteria. Yes, those are as good as any, but they aren't universal. For a radical Muslim, or a radical right-to-life Christian, or a sociopath, the pain and joy of certain people are not important. And even if I find their views repugnant, they are just as human as we are, so logically you can't ignore their point of view if you're trying to establish a list of "natural rights".

Yes, many think this way. But let's pretend we did not have this theistic fiction in our heads and all stick our hands in some boiling water. Are you saying that the pain here is so mediated by culture and localized moralities that one has to defer to these to find out if something "bad" is happening? Granted, culture steers our thinking and makes one thing right here that is wrong there, but are you willing to say that antecedent to, logically, that is, these complications society creates, there is nothing "in nature", given, not made up?

[Philosophy Explorer]

Let me add this to the thread. President Obama can claim he's being robbed under Misty's theory. Why, because he's being underpaid. What! you would say he makes $400,000 a year in salary plus other perks. That's right, but that's nothing compared to what other celebrities make (in millions such as sports players) and the President has one of the most demanding and responsible jobs on Earth. So don't kid me that the US government are a bunch of thieves.

PhilX

[Mechsmith]

Hi Phil,

What about the head of Fannie May that made $1.3 million and nearly broke the country? When you are paid more than you are worth it's stealing. When those who are running the country have had to borrow trillions of dollars from us and our kids it's obvious to me that somebody is being paid more than they are worth.

However the number of people that think they are overpaid is vanishingly small. With little or no natural checks on government I am afraid they will bust it up someday. They always have so far. The "they" is people so immoral that they will use the powers that the people have granted them to steal from them. Unhappily they are a fairly common subset of humanity.

[Philosophy Explorer]

Hi Phil,

What about the head of Fannie May that made $1.3 million and nearly broke the country? When you are paid more than you are worth it's stealing. When those who are running the country have had to borrow trillions of dollars from us and our kids it's obvious to me that somebody is being paid more than they are worth.

However the number of people that think they are overpaid is vanishingly small. With little or no natural checks on government I am afraid they will bust it up someday. They always have so far. The "they" is people so immoral that they will use the powers that the people have granted them to steal from them. Unhappily they are a fairly common subset of humanity.

Hi Mechsmith,

If he was acting within the scope of his duties, then he's only guilty of doing a poor job. Was he prosecuted? Did he go to jail or have to pay a fine or at least fired? I've heard that Fannie May was having problems. Could someone else have done a better job? Do we have all of the pertinent details? (without referring to the internet)

PhilX

[Sim Al-Adim]

Suppose there is no government yet, just a clan of nomadic people, carrying their babies and possessions in coyote-skin bundles. The men hunt, sometimes for days with no kill. The women build shelters of pine boughs, gather firewood and dig up roots, make clothes out of animal hides. When the men return empty-handed from a hunt, the women don't let them sit by the fire or eat any of the wild carrots, because they have nothing to trade for these things. When one man kills a rabbit, he doesn't let his cousin eat any of it, unless he can pay. Of course, nobody would dream of feeding an orphaned child that can't hunt or forage for itself. How long do you expect such a clan to survive?

Once civilization grows too big for all the people to know and care about one another, somebody has to organize the process of sharing out resources and assets, making sure that all the citizens are fed, sheltered and protected; storing food for lean times; overseeing the construction and maintenance of public works; administering justice; levying men and materiel for armed defense; collecting the excess from those who have and distributing bare essential to those in need. In a money economy, that's done through taxation.

How well or how badly it's done is unrelated to the necessity of doing it.

I agree with this analogy. I would add that if the men come home empty handed they will take the carrots and what not anyway - sit by the fire anyway.

Also, when the clan grows big to a point that kills and hunts bring back enough food for everyone, the whole clan is fed bit only those involved in the crucial work gain recognition. And so some members of the clan get reduced to peeling the wild carrots, for example.

[Mechsmith]

Phil,

$1.3 million to do a poor job Yes that is what we get. From the newspapers a good portion of that was a bonus that was paid from public monies. That IMO is pretty close to theft, although legal.

[MHopcroft1963]

One of the problems with the taxation-is-theft line of thinking is that, if all tax money is stolen, then anyone to whom tax money is paid out is themselves a thief.

It would be no different than someone buying a flat-screen TV from a pawnshop, not knowing that it was sold to the pawnbroker by a burglar who broke into someone's home or shop to steal it. You still have stolen property, and when the real owner steps forward you have no claim to it.

Now when we apply this to the real world with taxation, we run into the problem that everyone benefits from government expenditure in some way. Governments build roads and infrastructure. Governments pay soldiers, police, firefighters, schoolteachers, and paramedics. All these people perform vital functions, but if tax money is all stolen then all these people are thieves. Does that make Mick Jagger right when he said "every cop's a criminal"?

[Sy Borg]

Some people want everything for nothing. It's not just roads, clean water supplies, plumbing, lights, footpaths, hospitals, nature strips, parks and gardens, museums and all the research behind that work. There is so much more.

Some people start to become independent in life - always in part through the efforts of others before them. Once they are okay they immediately want to deny the same assistance that they unknowingly received. It's not miles from a big cat growing strong enough to kill cubs that could one day grow to be competitors. It's akin to a previous hard right wing prime minister of Australia who had been the beneficiary of free university education; soon he slashed funding to universities, who were forced to put a hefty price tag on tertiary education. How to cement your power.

That's what libertarians want, to create a world that will advantage them personally with no regard for others.

[Alias]

I suspect libertarians don't exactly know what they want. They see government abuses and blunders and think "Without Government, this wouldn't happen." In a way, they're right - but they haven't really considered the alternatives. They've been seduced by Ayn Rand, who sounds plausible, until you start to analyze her philosophy. The same thing happens with Pauls: the more they talk, the more their logic unravels. It's not necessarily hypocrisy; often it's just sophomory.

[Sy Borg]

I'd agree with that. A "what have the Romans ever done for us?" situation.

Having said that, democracies are now breaking down. The politicians we pay to represent us are increasingly focusing on the wealthy and hanging the rest out to dry through a loaded media, although that doesn't seem to be libertarians' main concern. It should be.

[Alias]

Is this the best government money can buy... ? Maybe it's a transitional form. Maybe he's not so much an autocratic prime minister as he is a semi-competent CEO.

[MHopcroft1963]

That's what libertarians want, to create a world that will advantage them personally with no regard for others.

Which a true Objectivist is OK with, on the theory that those who are able to gain these advantages are the superior people and deserve all the money, all the power, and all the toys. If he who dies with the most toys wins, then the surest path to victory is to make sure nobody else has any toys at all.

Rand's followers refer to the need for things you don't get for yourself as "parasitism". You are siphoning off wealth from those who have earned and deserve it when you ask for public health (or, for that matter, private charity). The theory is that everyone acts for their own advantage whether they admit to it or not, and that if yhou do pretend to care about others' welfare it is because you expect something in return down the road. Better to be honest about it and ignore the needs of others.

Ayn Rand had no children by choice. It might have changed her perspective if she had, because nothing teaches altruism like parenthood. And for a woman who practically worshiped wealth, she was not good at handling her own money and was forced to use the Social Security system she so thoroughly despised. Which implied not so much hypocrisy as an inability to live up herself to the standard she set for others.

[Alias]

...the theory that those who are able to gain these advantages are the superior people and deserve all the money, all the power, and all the toys.

Except that they don't "gain" advantages - they inherit and steal them. They assume the privileges of money - which cannot exist or have any value or be owned without the framework of a government that issues and guarantees the currency, regulates its exchange, protects its rights. on a level field, these sugared behinds, and all their stuff, would fall prey to the first big dark-skinned homeless person they'd fired from a janitorial position made redundant in the last round of downsizing.

If he who dies with the most toys wins, then the surest path to victory is to make sure nobody else has any toys at all.

Except the police, whose job it is to defend the rights of property against the people who would like to play too - but their toys are bought with tax dollars, collected from the people they're paid to keep from touching the toys of the rich. (As Zathras would say, "But at least there is symmetry.")

Rand's followers refer to the need for things you don't get for yourself as "parasitism".

And choose to overlook the fact that almost no modern civilized person gets anything for himself: every ownable and consumable thing is the product of many people working in co-ordinated systems. I have a fantasy where denizens of Wall Street, in their pretty Italian shoes, are shipped to the Yukon and dropped off, to fend for themselves. (Too bad they'd be rescued by natives, who have a very different notion of human decency.)