Lately there have been many “Taxation is Theft” memes floating around in the libertarian community; in fact, according to an article I read earlier in terms of the amount of times it has been searched via Google “Taxation is Theft” is at an all-time high. Surprisingly, I have seen many libertarians disagree, and, unsurprisingly, I have seen many non-libertarians vehemently disagree. I’ll go ahead and give you the TL;DR of this post:
Taxation is theft.
Most importantly, I must note an individual is not a slave, i.e., an individual owns the body they directly use. This norm *must* be presupposed as valid in argumentation because if that were not the case, then there would be aggressive violence involved making it no longer argumentation. Physical force would be involved and the discussion would no longer be solely decided by use of reason. Again, a person must have the right to the exclusive control of his/her body during argumentation, and as a result every speaker must presuppose as justifiable the norm of what is commonly called “self-ownership.”
Additionally, an individual can come to own external goods through three methods:
1) Homesteading (first-use-first-own)
2) Contractual Exchange (trade)
3) An act of aggression by another person
These are also presupposed in argumentation. I will not go too much into the weeds about this, but I will make a concise case for this position and then provide links for more full explanations.
We must presuppose norms concerning the ownership of external rivalrous (scarce) resources. If the opposite were true, nobody could own external scarce resources, and everybody followed the norm, then we would all die out quickly and all questions, including ethical questions, would disappear along with all argumentation. So, by arguing one presupposes norms justifying ownership of external scarce resources.
Note: I use “scarce” in the sense of “rivalrous” or “contestable” and not “rare.”
The first person to use an external scarce resource must be the proper owner of the scarce resource if we are to have argumentation. If this were not the case and in fact late-comers had a better claim, then we would all have to wait for late comers to arrive and tell us what we could do with the goods in our possession, including our bodies. The proposal of such a norm wouldn’t be possible since we could not even use our bodies to communicate and argue.
The purpose of property rights is obvious once we look at what ownership is. Ownership is the “right to exclusive control of a scarce resource.” The purpose of property rights, i.e., ownership, is conflict-avoidance. It is so that people may use goods without interference. Once we realize this, the second norm of property acquisition falls perfectly with homesteading: contractual exchange.
Contractual exchange is a conflict-free interaction between persons. The people exchanging goods for goods, services, or as a gift are voluntarily giving property rights to the other person. Any other transferral of property rights would involve conflict. Simply put, when somebody has ownership of an external scarce resource they have the ability to alienate it and give it to somebody else.
An aggressor, or rather a person who initiates violence, has no coherent argument against a proportional use of force against them. They are “estopped.” Their past actions will make their argument contradictory. For example, if a thief steals my wallet, then he implicitly has made the claim, “It is justifiable to initiate violence and take another’s wallet.” If I try to hit him, take his wallet, etc. to inflict proportional violence against him, then it would be contradictory for him to argue against the norm he implicitly claimed to be justified. Thus, I would have the right to legitimately take my wallet back and his wallet as well.
For more information on these concepts read: https://mises.org/…/argumentation-ethics-and-liberty-concise–
and https://mises.org/…/punishment-and-proportionality-estoppel…
Once these basic truths are shown, it is easy to prove taxation is theft.
The state — the institution with a territorial monopoly of taxation, force, and arbitration — has no valid claim to any person’s justly acquired goods. Taxation is involuntary. If a person does not pay taxes, then the state might send agents to arrest you. If you resist arrest, then they have the right to kill you, and if they capture you, then they have the right to keep you in a cell.
Imagine a private person doing what the state does to people. The private person would correctly be called a thief, murderer, and/or kidnapper. There is no difference between a private person and a state agent other than one has a cooler job title.
The conclusion every libertarian needs to reach: Taxation is theft.
I now address non-libertarians: Your property theories are incorrect, to put it bluntly. I have already provided an account of a correct property theory along with links to more reading, so from here on I will respond to the most common of rebuttals to “Taxation is theft.”
“It’s the price we pay for civilization.”
The state =/= civilization or society. We can have social cooperation without central planning, and we, including you, prove this every single day. We all go about our daily business without a guy from the state dictating our every move.
Furthermore, the state does not need to provide security and law. The incentives for the state lead to bad outcomes. To illustrate, both the police and the courts are slow. They have little reason to be fast and efficient. Private companies, however, must work efficiently and to the tastes of the consumers. If somebody were to find in a private company, especially in those companies providing security and justice, corruption and deceit like what is filling police departments and the court system, then the company would quickly lose all subscribers and their reputation would be no better than some criminal’s reputation.
“It is a necessary evil.”
I can say it no better than how Chase Rachels said it in his book Spontaneous Order, “Evil, by its very nature, is destructive and thus completely unnecessary to achieving the ends of life, liberty, and prosperity. Moreover, something that is truly necessary cannot be given the title of evil.“
“[Something about a social contract]”
According to contract theory those parties bound by a contract must agree to it, but people throw out contract theory when they are talking about a “social contract.” Suddenly conceptual consent comes into play, or rather, non-consent comes into play. The social contract advocates suppose simply because you did not move out of the country you consent to the social contract; however, this is absurd. A person is not morally obligated to leave the country if they do not wish to consent to the social contract. According to the social contract theorists, it seems the individual acquires this obligation just by being born, which is a decision one does not make themselves.
Furthermore, I have seen many times where somebody explicitly says they do not consent to the social contract, yet the advocates of the social contract often reply with “If you don’t like it, leave it!” Firstly, there is no way this person consents to the social contract unless we take explicit non-consent as consent, or rather, we take something as its opposite. Secondly, again, why does the moral obligation fall on the person who dislikes the social contract? They simply were born here or moved here and justly obtained goods. They owe nothing to society as whole, and they have every right not to be plundered.
For critiques of many social contract justifications: https://mises.org/library/social-contract-critique
“The state protects our life, liberty, and property and without taxes it wouldn’t exist, so we need taxes.”
This does not stop the fact the state is forcefully taking goods from people who justly acquired them. The state is still robbing those people. It is contradictory to say that the state’s purpose is to protect our life, liberty, and property when it steals our possessions and threatens us with violence if we resist.
“The state uses the funds to build things like roads and bridges and to provide fire and police departments.”
This argument appeals to the fact that the state provides goods and services. This argument is the “benefits argument.” The problem with this argument is straightforward: Theft, robbery, murder, etc. does not become justifiable because the thief, robber, or murderer provides goods and services that are beneficial to their victims. If this is the case, then all a trespasser would need to do to make his actions justifiable would be to clean up the house he breaks in to. Their cleaning of the house, obviously, does not make the trespass that-which-excludes-trespass.
———
Every attempt to justify the state or taxation fails, and every attempt also justifies aggression. These are inescapable truths. Whether one wishes to admit it or not this much is true:
Taxation is theft.
(And Happy Easter!)
I will attempt to argue against your argument that taxation is theft. Feel free to debate any of my points or assumptions, although I would prefer if you wrote your arguments out rather than referring strictly to external sources (or at least referenced the specific portion of an external source that you are referring to). Now, to start, your first point is that:
“Most importantly, I must note an individual is not a slave, i.e., an individual owns the body they directly use. This norm *must* be presupposed as valid in argumentation because if that were not the case, then there would be aggressive violence involved making it no longer argumentation. Physical force would be involved and the discussion would no longer be solely decided by use of reason. Again, a person must have the right to the exclusive control of his/her body during argumentation, and as a result every speaker must presuppose as justifiable the norm of what is commonly called “self-ownership.””
This, I would argue, is completely false. For starters, it defines argumentation so narrowly that almost no discourse would meet the criteria to be considered argumentation. The idea that argumentation must be decided solely by reason means that we are not engaging in it now. When I read your post, I had some emotional reaction, which influenced both my decision to reply, and some of my thinking in the reply. In turn, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, upon reading my reply, you had some emotional reaction, and that emotional reaction had some influence on your reply. This needs not be a large reaction, but the mere fact that it is there means that the discussion is not SOLELY guided by reason.
Furthermore, this argument implies that it would be impossible to engage in argumentation with someone experiencing or threatened with violence. Would it be impossible to argue with a civilian in Syria? Are people held in jail completely unable to engage in argumentation? I would say no, it is entirely possible to do those things. To further push this point, let’s assume that the overall argument presented is correct, that taxation is theft, and states engaging in collecting taxes are committing theft. We can further use the same argument to state that state laws are violence towards its citizens, as neither you nor I explicitly consented to live under the various state laws imposed on us. Furthermore, these laws involve a concrete, and fairly explicit threat of force for breaking them, and this threat is constant – we are not free from it when we are at home, or anywhere else within the country we reside. As such, we do not have self-ownership for practical purposes, as we do not have exclusive use of our bodies. As such, by the arguments originally presented, we are incapable of engaging in argumentation, and therefore it is impossible to prove that taxation is theft, as argumentation is required to do so, and we are not, and cannot, engage in argumentation.
I hope that this has shown how absurd the initial claim is. In reality, all that is required to engage in argumentation is some ability to communicate with one another, and some ability to engage in logical thought and create logical statements. The level and quality of argumentation may change with the degree to which these criteria are met, but there is no need to require complete freedom from violence, nor any requirement for the sole use of reason during a discussion for one to engage in argumentation.
On to the next point:
“We must presuppose norms concerning the ownership of external rivalrous (scarce) resources. If the opposite were true, nobody could own external scarce resources, and everybody followed the norm, then we would all die out quickly and all questions, including ethical questions, would disappear along with all argumentation. So, by arguing one presupposes norms justifying ownership of external scarce resources.”
Here, I think that the basic presumptions of what private property and private ownership entails is, at the very least, somewhat misleading. When private ownership is presented here, it is described as the right to exclusive use of a property. And, for example, if I own a piece of land, I can use it however I like, whereas I would not with your land. However, a more accurate assessment of what private ownership entails would be seen by comparing ownership with lack of ownership. For example, if I owned a piece of land, I could build a house on it, build a farm on it, harvest berries from it, etc. However, I could also do these things on a piece of land that was unowned, meaning one that was not owned by anyone at all. On my land, I could further tell people to stay off of it, or post signs to stay away. However, I would also be able to do so on unowned land. After all, I am simply making statements, and I am within my rights to place messages on land that nobody owns. Therefore, it is not so much the right to use property that defines private ownership. What does then? Well, if someone else is using unowned property, I am not within my rights to force them off, nor am I within my rights to use violence, or make violent threats against them. However, these actions are permissible to prevent others from using my personal property. These are the main, substantive rights that private property entails: the right to use force and violence to prevent others from using property.
So then, is it really true that humanity would die out quickly and completely if we refrained from using violence to prevent each other from using property we claim as ours? I don’t think so, and there are multiple examples of societies that were not built on the idea of using violence to prevent people from using resources, and who used, for example, communal use and distribution of land and resources. Granted, one might argue that such societies did not grow or prosper as well as ours, and I would agree with that argument. However, the point was that without the concept of private property, we would all die out quickly, and to an extent that argumentation could not be engaged in, and this point is untrue.
“The first person to use an external scarce resource must be the proper owner of the scarce resource if we are to have argumentation. If this were not the case and in fact late-comers had a better claim, then we would all have to wait for late comers to arrive and tell us what we could do with the goods in our possession, including our bodies. The proposal of such a norm wouldn’t be possible since we could not even use our bodies to communicate and argue.”
This again presumes that one needs ownership for use, which I have disproved above. Further, this argument is self-contradictory. It is claiming that ownership is determined by first use, meaning that the first person to use a resource then gains ownership of it. This explicitly states that one gain ownership (at least in this way) of a resource without using it. However, it is then claimed that one cannot use a resource until one has ownership of it, meaning that one cannot use a resource to claim ownership via first use, as one did not have the ownership of the resource to be able to use it in the first place. I hope I have made it is not ownership that is necessary for use.
I will leave it here for now, and eagerly await any rebuttal to my argument here. Thanks for reading.