Why taxation is not theft

The money that is taken from your check pays for the police officers and firefighters keeping you safe, the teachers that helped you learn how to read and write, and if you ever get down on your luck, your tax dollars fund the social safety nets that will get you back on your feet.

If you have children or are married, that lowers your tax burden. If you pay back some of your student loans or are forced to drive around a lot for work, that also helps lower your taxable income.

Moreover, if you buy a hybrid car then that also helps lower your income. There are countless ways the government helps to lower the amount you have to pay. The most common argument about getting rid of taxes or implementing major tax cuts is the idea of privatizing sections of the government we pay taxes to. In the instance of space travel, privatization has led to SpaceX being able to develop a rocket for fractions of the cost of what NASA has been able to do.

Nozick argued the standard Lockean argument for private property that we produce goods by mixing our labor and talents with resources and goods in the natural world. This mixing generates the ownership of the items we have modified and made valuable. Now, if the government taxes our income it is taking away our time, talents, and goods produced by our labor. Taxation is the taking of our labor and talents by force which means that the taking means effectively that the government owns our talents and labor and so owns us.

According to Nozick and so very many others , taxation means that the government takes away our self-ownership which is called slavery. There is so much slippery sophistry in this one paragraph that I am reluctant to even begin unpacking it. The world was once unowned, but now people have private property. Why did they get to declare things their property? Now, historically speaking, they declared things their property largely by seizing them from those who were using them. If I go into a public forest, and I carve a tree into a totem pole, do I now own the tree?

After all, the totem pole is a fruit of my labor. What if I carve my name into it? If I open a can of soup into the ocean, spreading the soup far and wide, do I own the ocean? Who decides when I have put in adequate labor for a thing to become mine? If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions.

This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part-owner of you; it gives them a property right in you. We do have legalized forced labor in the United States, actually, thanks to the 13th Amendment which explicitly permits slavery as punishment for crimes , but it is in prisons rather than boardrooms.

Is taxation theft, then? I funnel the money into my charity, and the poor are fed and clothed at last. In this scenario, I would be called a thief. This fact is not altered by what I do with the money after taking it. Now compare the case of taxation. So the government is a thief. This conclusion is not changed by the fact that the government uses the money for a good cause if it does so. That might make taxation a socially beneficial kind of theft, but it is still theft. Most people are reluctant to call taxation theft.

How might one avoid saying this? Following are three arguments one might try, together with the most obvious responses. Taxation is not theft, because citizens have agreed to pay taxes. But in fact, the government forces citizens to pay taxes regardless of whether they use government services or not.

Therefore, the fact that you use government services does not indicate anything about whether you agree to pay taxes. If I own some land that other people are using, I can demand that the other people either pay me money or vacate my land. But if I see some people on their land, I cannot demand that they either pay me money or vacate their own land. If I do that, I am a thief. The second argument turns on the claims i that there are no property rights independent of government laws, and ii that the government can create property rights simply by declaring that something belongs to someone.

The hermit hunts with a spear of his own making, which you find interesting.