Is Taxation Theft?
Are we free to keep the fruits of our labour, or do they belong to someone else?
This is my response to the article “Is taxation theft” by Philip Goff. Philip is an associate professor in philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest. In his article he expresses a socialist attitude to economics; that the fruits of the individual’s labour are not his by right, belonging instead to the state. I am neither a professional economist nor a philosopher, but a Chartered Mechanical Engineer working in the private sector in Britain, raising my family on a heavily-taxed income. I have skin in the game. Does Philip?
It matters, because anyone can be dispassionate, writing about morals and philosophy, always keeping a safe distance from the cliff edge if it doesn’t affect them. But what happens when things get tight? What happens when one sees ever greater amounts of one’s hard won income taken by the government, spent on things that the individual would be far better placed to purchase themselves? That’s when things get real.
Instead of constructing a convoluted treatise on political theory, involving elements of subject matter which you are unlikely to have encountered, or are unlikely to take sufficient time or inclination to fully understand, I will use language which normal people - those outside of the ivory towers of academia - tend to use, and which should be easier to follow. I won’t attempt to get you to agree with me by propping up my arguments with statements or theories which you cannot disagree with, because you don’t understand them. Now that would be sneaky.
Unlike Goff, I don’t believe that there are two types of theft; legal and moral. I believe that there is one very simple example. This is because I am British, and in Britain we have a very strong sense of individual sovereignty, that the individual has god given rights to his own private property. Theft is taking another’s private property without his or her consent. It applies equally across all human beings regardless of race colour or creed.
Incidentally this very British invention scthe reason that English is the world’s language, that English common law democracy and private property rights have been successfully exported globally, along with our language. It is also the reason that a majority of Brits voted to regain their sovereignty by leaving the EU. It matters to us Brits.
I am assuming that Goff’s piece is written from the heart, in which case he is a socialist. I am therefore not surprised that he struggles to come to terms with the concept of theft.
For there to be theft, there must first be private property rights. As socialists struggle with the concept of private property, instead preferring a modern society structured as a neo-feudal system, one of partial slavery of the people by the overlords in the state, they can’t wrap their thoughts around it.
Individual Sovereignty
To analyse the concept of theft ee need to go back to first principles, much farther back than political philosophies, to the founding principles of individualism.
Does an individual have sovereignty? It seems that socialists like Goff would disagree. But individual free will is instilled into every human being at birth – observe any pre-school infant – so the system which aligns with this innate knowing is more likely to be successful than one which counters it.
It starts with the body. At a very basic level, you have corporeal rights as a unique person created under god. If someone violates your person, this is not only a criminal offence, but an unholy one too. If you want to know whether you are transgressing a natural, holy law, you will know because you will feel terrible. Children understand holy law, coming from spirit, they only learn the law of the land when they get here.
What about the choices you make with and about your body? Are these choices yours also? Should you be allowed to do what you choose with your body; eat and drink what you choose, decide whether you adorn your flesh with permanent inking or pierce it with metal? What about sexual acts? Should these be the choice of any other but you and your consensual co-creators? What about your time and effort? Are these yours to do with as you will, or are you somehow in debt to your earth / nation state / political party? If you are, then you had better hope that those who stake claim to your output are good natured, as you are now a partial slave, beholden to the whim of someone outside of yourself. You have lost your individual sovereignty
Individuality is a powerful force of nature, which expresses itself not just in animals but also in humans. Animals will distance themselves from other beings and situations which they find to be less than optimum, as they migrate towards more preferable conditions Even before anyone has taught them anything, children know that they are here to live their lives in the way that they choose.
Each child has its own specific character; likes and dislikes, and aptitudes, almost from birth. In this sense they are selfish. But it cannot be any other way. An individual can only genuinely think, speak and act from his own selfish point of reference. To be genuine, it must be transacted selfishly.
Taxation is the aggregation of public funds to be spent collectively by a governing body which has sight of the bigger picture, and where such expenditure can only be effectively done at a national level. Some obvious examples are the military, which requires specialist skills and is best managed at a strategic national and international level. The government must defend the realm from enemies both foreign and domestic. And when a citizen chooses to live in a country, there should be a prerequisite that they pay for the defence of the freedom that they enjoy.
To a lesser extent the police and fire services perform a similar function. They are necessary in a civilised society, and should be managed at a governmental level, and strictly monitored to ensure they don’t extend their powers unnecessarily.
There are also questions around the expenditure on public infrastructure, and certainly roads cost money to build. Certain diplomatic functions can help a nation state, and a civilised nation requires a safety net to assist those in dire straights.
For everything else, which an individual would better spend himself, the government has neither the right, nor the need to levy taxation. The multitude of other things that government raises taxes to pay for such as schools, hospitals etc, the individual should be allowed to fund himself.
Can any government – however sophisticated – replace the unique preferences and careful management of an individual or a household’s money? Have you ever worked for a government organisation? They can’t even manage basic functions efficiently. People who think that government is better placed to spend the public’s money on their behalf either work for government and so are the direct recipients of said tax money, or they have never encountered the real world, having spent their whole lives cocooned in institutions like schools and universities, and so, like career politicians, have no idea what they are talking about.
In a world where the individual chooses what is best for himself, a free marketplace arises. A market economy is made up of millions of individuals making selfish choices about where they feel they should transfer their resources. Each transaction must be mutually beneficial, without coercion, or it doesn’t take place. There is no threat of recourse if you fail to transact, it is a willing transaction. This is the most efficient way of managing resources as it fulfills both parties, a win-win situation. Does the same apply to payment of taxes? If you don’t pay your taxes, what happens? You get threatened with force and eventually thrown in prison. It’s easy to tell when someone is breaking a natural law, they need to use force against the individual to justify themselves.
When there was one person, there was no economy, when another person showed up, the economy became more productive as one person fished whilst the other spent his time finding and chopping wood for the fire. Fast forward millions of years and we have a very unique economy, where people have specialised to the degree that we are far more productive than we were back in the early days.
In a free market, individuals receive in relation to their contribution. If you contribute to many peoples’ lives you will receive a great deal. If you benefit one individual’s life you will receive less. Goff cites the example of a lab technician hunting for a cancer cure vs. a hedge fund manager, stating that
…it implies that the market distributes to people exactly what they deserve for the work that they do. But nobody thinks a hedge-fund manager deserves many times more wealth than a scientist working on a cure for cancer, and few would think that current pay ratios in companies reflect what philosophers call desert claims. Probably you work very hard in your job, and you make an important contribution. But then so do most people, and the market distribution of wealth patently does not reward in proportion to how hard-working people are, or how much of a contribution they make to society. If we were just focusing on desert, then there is a good case for taxation to correct the amoral distribution of the market.
I think there are at least two people who think that a hedge fund manager should be paid many times more wealth than a scientist working on a cure for cancer; the person paying the hedge fund manager, and the person paying the scientist. This simplistic argument misses the very obvious point that the majority of hedge funds fail to outperform the market, and the majority of scientists who a searching for a cure for cancer, never find one. If you were to compare the salary of a successful hedge fund manager with the salary of the scientist who has found a cure for cancer, you will see that they would be both highly valued by the market, arguably the scientist would be paid more. But as is often the case with socialists, they confuse intention with results.
As to the so called amoral distribution of the market, this is typically the result of government. Government, through its use of force, manages to set up and maintain monopolies and oligopolies. The BBC, the civil service, the EU, BT, power infrastructure companies, basically anyone the government grants a licence to is a monopoly or oligopoly player, and the government then has to regulate them in the position that government created. Would this be necessary in a market where the individual could choose for himself? One suspects not.
The place where the biggest discrepancies exist between value and earnings tend to lie in the governmental sector, which lies outside of the normal competitive marketplace. Civil servants, and those who work for the state or extensions of the state receive far higher salaries than their private sector equivalents. This includes those who work in Banking, which is effectively an arm of government, and in universities where mr Goff operates. The state can do this because it steals other peoples’ money and can spend it on whatever it sees fit. It didn’t have to provide goods and services as any other business might to get that money, it took the money first and spent it later, inefficiently.
Private property rights are on of the prerequisites of a civilised society. Before property rights and the means to enforce them, people would go around taking what they wanted, and this constant warring of tribes took up so much of peoples’ time that society couldn't advance in the other ways. If you’re constantly looking over your shoulder to see whether someone is coming to take your money, wife, horses, not only do you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to prevent this from happening (as we see with tax evasion), but you are not freed up to be creative in other ways that could enrich the world.
I can only suggest that is Mr Goff feels that he doesn’t have a claim on his income, that he give it up. But for the rest of us who do feel entitled to keep the fruits of our labour, I would suggest that we be left alone to manage our own affairs, and to expend our money, which we feel that is rightly ours to spend, in ways that we consider to be valuable.
We are not born with rights. To have a right we must assert that we have a right, and then we must protect that right. In this case, we must protect our rights to safeguard our private property form those who seek to take it from us. People like Goff. Britain is not just a global powerhouse punching well above its weight because politicians have asserted that each citizen has some kind of moral claim on his gross income. This state of affairs has arisen out of the realisation that a nation where private property rights exist brings about a much better place to live than one where the state own the output of an individual.
It naturally follows that a state which does not, through use of the Police, protect those property rights, the fabric of society falls apart, as we are seeing in London with thefts and murder rates escalating while the police investigate incidences of hate speech on Twitter. As we regress from the attributes that made Britain Great, it is not only this great nation which loses, the the wider world too.
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Read Goff’s article here:
