Is taxation theft?
The assumption that you own the contents of your pay-packet, although almost universal, is demonstrably confused
By Philip Goff
Some radical libertarians hold that all taxation is immoral, on the grounds that it amounts to the state stealing the money of private citizens. This is an extreme position, but the sense that tax involves the government taking ‘our money’ is ubiquitous, and hugely influential in real-world politics. The former British prime minister David Cameron, for example, repeatedly made a ‘moral case’ for low taxes, based on the need to give back to you, the citizen, more of ‘your money’. And even those who believe in relatively high taxes tend to start from the assumption that one has some kind of moral claim to one’s gross income, a claim that is overridden only by the greater good of equality or the need to fund public services. Outside of academia, almost everyone assumes that the money I get in my pay-packet before the deduction of taxes is, in some morally significant sense, ‘mine’.
This assumption, although almost universal, is demonstrably confused. There is no serious political theory according to which my pre-tax income is ‘mine’ in any morally significant sense. Moreover, this matters: this confused assumption is a major stumbling block to economic reform…
