“Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”
― Murray N. Rothbard
For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance).
Only
the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as "taxation," although in less regularized epochs it was often known as "tribute."
Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects.It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft.
Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.It is true that State apologists maintain that taxation is "really" voluntary; one simple but instructive refutation of this claim is to ponder what would happen if the government were to abolish taxation, and to confine itself to simple requests for voluntary contributions.
Does anyone really believe that anything comparable to the current vast revenues of the State would continue to pour into its coffers? It is likely that even those theorists who claim that punishment never deters action would balk at such a claim.
The great economist Joseph Schumpeter was correct when he acidly wrote that "the theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind"
It has been recently maintained by economists that taxation is "really" voluntary because it is a method for everyone to make sure that everyone else pays for a unanimously desired project.
Everyone in an area, for example, is assumed to desire the government to build a dam; but if A and B contribute voluntarily to the project, they cannot be sure that C and D will not "shirk" their similar responsibilities.
Therefore, all of the individuals, A, B, C, D, etc., each of whom wish to contribute to building the dam, agree to coerce each other through taxation. Hence, the tax is not really coercion. There are, however, a great many flaws in this
doctrine.
First is the inner contradiction between voluntarism and coercion; a coercion of all-against-all does not make any of this coercion "voluntary." Secondly, even if we assume for the moment that each individual would like to contribute to the dam, there is no way of assuring that the tax levied on each person is no more than he would be willing to pay voluntarily even if everyone else contributed. The government may levy $1000 on Jones even though he might have been willing to pay no more than $500. The point is that precisely because taxation is compulsory, there is no way to assure (as is done automatically on the free market) that the amount any person contributes is what he would "really" be willing to pay. In the free society, a consumer who voluntarily buys a TV set for $200 demonstrates by his freely chosen action that the TV set is worth more to him than the $200 he surrenders; in short, he demonstrates that the $200 is a voluntary payment. Or, a club member in the free society, by paying annual dues of $200, demonstrates that he considers the benefits of club membership worth at least $200. But, in the case of taxation, a man's surrender to the threat of coercion demonstrates no voluntary preference whatsoever for any alleged benefits he receives.
Thirdly, the argument proves far too much. For the supply of any service, not only dams, can be expanded by the use of the tax-financing arm. Suppose, for example, that the Catholic Church were established in a country through taxation; the Catholic Church would undoubtedly be larger than if it relied on voluntary contributions; but can it therefore be argued that such Establishment is "really" voluntary because everyone wants to coerce everyone else into paying into the Church, in order to make sure that no one shirks this "duty"?
And fourthly, the argument is simply a mystical one. How can anyone know that everyone is "really" paying his taxes voluntarily on the strength of this sophistical argument? What of those people- environmentalists, say-who are opposed to dams per se? Is their payment "really" voluntary? Would the coerced payment of taxes to a Catholic Church by Protestants or atheists also be "voluntary"? And what of the growing body of libertarians in our society, who oppose all action by the government on principle? In what way can this argument hold that their tax payments are "really voluntary"? In fact, the existence of at least one libertarian or anarchist in a country is enough by itself to demolish the "really voluntary" argument for taxation.
It is also contended that, in democratic governments, the act of voting makes the government and all its works and powers truly "voluntary."
Again, there are many fallacies with this popular argument.
In the first place,
even if the majority of the public specifically endorsed each and every particular act of the government, this would simply be majority tyranny rather than a voluntary act undergone by every person in the country. Murder is murder, theft is theft, whether undertaken by one man against another, or by a group, or even by the majority of people within a given territorial area.The fact that a majority might support or condone an act of theft does not diminish the criminal essence of the act or its grave injustice.
Otherwise, we would have to say, for example, that any Jews murdered by the democratically elected Nazi government were not murdered, but only "voluntarily committed suicide--surely, the grotesque but logical implication of the "democracy as voluntary" doctrine. Secondly, in a republic as contrasted to a direct democracy, people vote not for specific measures but for "representatives" in a package deal; the representatives then wreak their will for a fixed length of time. In no legal sense, of course, are they truly "representatives" since, in a free society, the principal hires his agent or representative individually and can fire him at will.
As the great anarchist political theorist and constitutional lawyer, Lysander Spooner, wrote:
Quote
they [the elected government officials] are neither our servants, agents, attorneys, nor representatives. . . [for] we do not make ourselves responsible for their acts. If a man is my servant, agent, or attorney, I necessarily make myself responsible for all his acts done within the limits of the power I have intrusted to him. If I have intrusted him, as my agent, with either absolute power, or any power at all, over the persons or properties of other men than myself, I thereby necessarily make myself responsible to those other persons for any injuries he may do
them, so long as he acts within the limits of the power I have granted him. But no individual who may be injured in his person or property, by acts of Congress, can come to the individual electors, and hold them responsible for these acts of their so-called agents or representatives.
This fact proves that these pretended agents of the people, of everybody, are really the agents of nobody.
-The Ethics of Liberty, Murray N. Rothbard
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