Why taxation is theft

The only legitimate bar to redistribution is economic reality. Read the full blog here. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website.

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How does tax impact human rights? The goal of government is to protect individual rights, not provide a safety net. A safety net is the job of charities and other voluntary community groups. We have lost our community because we have tasked the government with the job of the community, so our sense of community has withered on the vine.

Some politicians demand your money to not be spent on a new pair of shoes or backpack for your child, but instead to go to their pet project. If the project was noble and made sense, why not start a charity and ask for donations? They believe the project is moral and they, in their wisdom, are forcing morality on you. Morality requires choice. A current example is the taxes on vaping products, which have no tobacco or nicotine, just passed by the House because some people believe vaping is wrong and they want to punish people who do it.

This reply on my part would be confused. What matters is that I took your money without your consent. It also does not matter if you benefit greatly from the book. Suppose that unable to convince me to take it back you wind up reading my book, which turns out to contain such useful advice that you end up much better off including financially better off than before I came along.

None of this changes the fact that I am a thief. The temporal order also does not matter: if I give you the unsolicited book first, then wait for you to profit from it financially, and then forcibly take away some of the money you earned, I will still be a thief.

If taxation is theft, does it follow that we must abolish all taxation? Not necessarily. Some thefts might be justified. If you have to steal a loaf of bread to survive, then you are justified in doing so. Similarly, the government might be justified in taxing, if this is necessary to prevent some terrible outcome, such as a breakdown of social order.

Why, then, does it matter whether taxation is theft? Because although theft can be justified, it is usually unjustified. It is wrong to steal without having a very good reason. What count as good enough reasons is beyond the scope of this short article. But as an example, you are not justified in stealing money, say, so that you can buy a nice painting for your wall.

Similarly, if taxation is theft, then it would probably be wrong to tax people, say, to pay for an art museum. When the government plans to spend money on something support for the arts, a space program, a national retirement program, and so on , one should ask: would it be permissible to steal from people in order to run this sort of program?