Taxes: Legalized Theft

Taxes are legalized thief, plain and simple. The government is “legally” forcing money from you and we are expected not only to peacefully comply, but we are actually told that it is patriotic to pay taxes. I think I might drown in the bullshit…

Let me tell you why taxes are legalized thief in a simple example. Say you are walking home one night and suddenly feel a gun pressed into your skull. A man then asks you to either give him your wallet, or he will take it from your dead body (to reference Godfather, he is making you “an offer you couldn’t refuse”). Now do you really have a choice in this situation? Not really. You either lose your wallet or you lose your life, and a high majority of people would chose to save their life. Now I’m going to do this same example but change it up a little bit. Again you are walking home and a man comes up to you. He tells you to give him his wallet but gives you the explanation that he will use your money to pay for your kid’s school, your roads, provide healthcare to the needy, and protect you from terrorists. If say that sounds great but I would rather get those services from someone who specializes in each of those services. The man replies that if you don’t hand over the wallet he will shoot you, once again bringing up the lack of choice you had in the last scenario. Now I think we can all agree that the situation is the same, the man is still forcefully taking your money, but in the second scenario the man claims his motives are for your best interest.

To bring this back to the topic at hand all one has to do is replace the man with the government in the second situation and you have what we call taxes. The government tells you that you must give a predetermined percentage of your wages to the government or you will face the consequences. First being fines, then if you refuse to pay the fines you face jail time, and if you try to refuse the jail time? When then you will actually find a gun pointed at your head, except this time instead of a thief pointing the gun it’s a policeman (who is controlled by the government, but I think you get the point). But just like the second situation the government tells you that this is necessary for them to provide all those wondrous benefits they bestow upon us; public roads, public education, Medicare & Medicaid, national defense (which has somehow extended to well beyond our national borders), and so on with the thousands of government programs implemented in today’s society. But hold on… I thought we determined in the examples that regardless of what the man’s intentions were to use your money, that it was still wrong for him to forcefully take it from you?

Logically my next question is then how do we make this major exception for the government? How is it when the government takes your money in the form of taxes and does so with the stipulation that if you do not pay you will face punishment, that we just lie back and accept it? Quite simply I think we are both ignorant and fearful. We are ignorant of the alternatives to taxation and government control in general. And we are fearful of the implications of not paying taxes and also what would happen if government was not given money to fund all of its programs. Also a major factor is that of inertia. The fact is as long as there has ever been an entity label “government”, that entity has collected taxes on its members and this has remained true for thousands of years. So, taxes, having been around for as long as current written history, this force of inertia makes most people not even stop and consider the implications taxation truly has and whether or not it is just or not. The force needed to stop something such as taxation is so great that most people do not even bother to worry about it.

Regardless, I feel that there are things people should know about taxation and the government in general – firstly, that taxes are inherently wrong (which I feel I’ve already made a simple case for); second, that the government should not provide all the services it does and thus should have no need for taxes in the first place; and thirdly, that private enterprise can both provide for all the services government offers but do so at an incredibly efficient and fair fashion.