Yes, Taxation is Theft
If you don’t think so, I’m happy to take your stuff off your hands.
Well, we are. Definitionally, if that taxation is derived non-voluntarily — and voluntary taxation is called “donation.” If what we’re talking about is taxation, then there is an element of coercion, and acquisition of another’s blood, sweat, and tears view coercion is theft.
If we don’t accept that up front, everything else that derives from their is a lie.
Now, it may be that some forms of theft are socially acceptable if the level of harm that descends from it is sufficiently advantageous, but it’s still theft. It may be that we accept that there is a certain level of coercion which profits us as a group and thus that we encourage, but it’s still theft. It may be that we still think of ourselves as good people even when we force others to give us their work and treasure in exchange for not hurting them, but it’s still theft.
If we aggressively reframe the truth to something more flattering, the truth still remains. If we take from others under duress by threats of force, and that’s exactly what taxation is whether it be on labor or capital ownership, it’s theft.
I’m generally opposed to theft because I don’t like it when things are stolen from me. Others can have different positions, but I reserve the right to give them a disdainful eye.
I used to be in the “taxation is theft” camp then the “property is theft” camp but then I realized “theft” is probably just a construct humans came up with to ensure smooth functioning of large-scale human societies and once it stops functioning as that, it’s mostly just posturing.
I’m curious about something. At some point did that series of words makes sense to you in your head? Because taken as an exterior statement, it makes no sense at all.
Of course “theft” is a construct humans came up with to ensure smooth functioning of large-scale human societies. All forms of descriptive behavioral activity are constructs humans came up with to describe some sort of behavior which occurs in human experience. The idea that “theft” is a constructed idea doesn’t change the essential fact that it’s definitely not posturing, it’s not an abstract, and it’s not desirable.
At least, any more or less than the idea that “freedom” or “liberty” are positive behavioral descriptors constructed to constrain ideation regarding human society — because they are most certainly those things. There also things that we want to have, experiences that we would generally seek to possess.
Actually, that’s unfair. There are a large number of people on earth who apparently have no interest in “freedom” or “liberty”, just as there are some people on earth who, apparently, have no interest in not experiencing “theft.” I’m sure they exist; we can gauge what people want by what they seek out and many people are definitely seeking less freedom, less liberty, and more theft — if not for themselves definitely for other people.
It is probably self-destructive to suggest that we should be more like them.
Currently, yes, large-scale well-functioning human societies have a patchwork of individual and communal property rights, and those societies which are the best functioning maximize individual and minimize communal property rights, because the former are effectively limited in scope of harm from a few participants who actively seek it, and the latter maximizes the amount of power and control in the hands of people who may not have your individual best interests at heart. Individual control, individual property rights, and the individual ability to succeed or fail are much safer and more effective social constructs than the alternatives.
As an experiment, just assume that I’m in charge of you and everything you own. Does that please you? Is that something you want? Does it matter to you? If that’s not to your liking — what you really want is individual choice and individual property rights. Now if it is something you want, let me know and I will be happy to take control of your personal life and all the minutia thereof, to allocate and use as I see fit for purposes I desire. I am perfectly willing to take your life off your hands if that’s what you want. But I’m unwilling to let you take my life off my hands.
Unless you are willing to risk that I command and control your blood, sweat, and tears, it’s disingenuous to suggest that communal property rights are something more desirable than individual property rights. Historically, I’m the least threatening kind of person that you will find being interested in governmental economic control.
I agree there are market distortions that harm people and they should be removed. The number of doctors in the US is very much artificially limited at this time, and a lot of them are allocated to doing work that other people could do (nurses, physicians assistants) because of lobbying groups.
Let’s be clear: a number of them are allocated to doing work that other people could do not because of lobbying groups because some people decided that increasing the amount of regulation on doctors was a way to improve some outcome at the time. That outcome may have been “make it more difficult for other people to enter the market and offer a product for as low a cost,” and those people may have been doctors. Some of those people may have been seeking the outcome “reduce the supply and activity of doctors to only that which we can absolutely, positively, only at this moment of medical understanding and technological development even though that knowledge is limited and will change in the future, pretty much say is safe,” and those may have been patients who had medical misadventures. And some of those people wanted the outcome “nurses and physicians’ assistants have to minimize their legal exposure because malpractice insurance raises the costs of having more nurses and physicians’ assistants and we’d like more of them,” and they may have been nurses and physicians’ assistants.
They were all terrible at foreseeing first through third order repercussions and how negatively their market distortions would impact the medical profession in the long run, but that’s pretty much par for the course for any people making judgments about the future which lead them to restricting the actions and operation of a free market. You’d think people would learn eventually, but they don’t.
We can’t just use the phrase “lobbying groups” as the catchall bogeyman for the U.S. Congress and state legislatures in acting bad law. In a real sense, there are no lobbying groups. There are just people who have self organized into a group to tell other people what their desires are. Some of those people can bring various economic or political pressures on the other people who are responsible for crafting or passing law. Unfortunately, they’re all people. It is no more reasonable to use “lobbying groups” as a faceless, powerful anthropomorphism than it is to use “corporations” in the same way.
People made bad decisions. People wanted things that ended poorly for other people because they engaged in active distortion of a market. A lot of the people that wanted things had good intentions — but the universe doesn’t care about good intentions, it cares about what actually happens, as should we. In actuality, bad decisions were made reducing the freedom of markets and ultimately ended up hurting people who engaged in those markets.
That’s the simple and straightforward truth.
If you want more of a thing, you make it easier to make more of a thing.
People have written entire PhD theses and spilled oceans of ink spelling that sentence out at disturbing length, but it’s really that simple. If you want more things in a market, you reduce external regulation. You reduce external control. You improve individual responsibility. You make it easier to make more of a thing.
Taxing a thing? Regulating a thing? Stealing people’s work and money? That’s how you get less of a thing — and it doesn’t matter what that thing is.
Really, it’s not hard. Taxation is theft. If you steal things, people make less things. It’s that simple.
