Morality Of Taxation

Wait. What are you saying? Taking other people's money without their consent is moral? Taking without consent is the very definition of theft, so you want to argue that theft is moral? Get out of here...

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

So... yes, taxation is moral. It's good to have taxation. At least as long as there's something called "property", there's no other ethical choice to make but raise taxes. You see, the libertarian mindset that wants to equate taxation with theft, reasons from the wrong point of departure, which I will address shortly. But even if we grant that taxation is theft, I can name any number of circumstances under which theft is the right thing to do. Like when someone steals a loaf of bread to not die, that's justified, but when someone steals a wallet so they can buy a new flat-screen TV, that's not justified. Or when you're Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy and just want the thing way more than the original owner, that's justified too ;-)

Rocket Raccoon: Question. What if I see something that I wanna take and it belongs to someone else?

Rhomann Dey: Then you will be arrested.

Rocket Raccoon: But what if I want it more than the person who has it?

Rhomann Dey: Still illegal.

Rocket Raccoon: That doesn't follow. No, I want it more, sir. Do you understand me? What are you laughing at? What? I can't have a discussion with this gentleman?

Then there's the "socially beneficial theft". There's a world famous story that's been told thousands of times in hundreds of languages about this kind of theft, and we all know its protagonist: Robin Hood. We forget, but taxes were once the implementation of the Robin Hood principle, and collected mainly from the rich, as it should be. We know that the rich have used their power to change that and now pay almost no taxes, while the middle class, to the extent that it still exists, crumbles under an ever increasing tax-burden. The rich, who use the roads and all the rest of the infrastructures we've built as a society, use their financial literacy (hired in most cases) to evade taxes and consequently fail to contribute their fair share to what we used to call the commons. Ultimately it's these commons that make taxation the moral thing to do.

The many arguments there are to justify theft are still conceding to the libertarians argument that taxes are indeed theft; strictly speaking it is taking away people's money without their consent. But I already said at the beginning that this point of view comes from faulty reasoning, and the fault lays in the assumption that property is not theft. A property right is the right to exclude others from using that property, with use of force if necessary, and therein lays the original theft. If I put a fence around a piece of land and call it mine, I've excluded all other people from using something that was hitherto accessible to everyone, I've erased some of what was previously not owned and commonly accessible. Libertarians will argue that I used my own labor to put up the fence, and since I own my body, my labor and my time then that which I make usable with my body, labor and time, is also mine. That presumes ownership of the self, which is as weird as saying I own a tree because I carved my name in it; I don't OWN me, I AM me, there's no ownership or property involved in defining what is me.

It's simple; those who own property have excluded everyone else from using that property under threat of force. That's the part libertarians forget or try to rationalize in creative ways. It's moral to take some of that back, proportional to the amount owned, it's beneficial for any society to have common ground, or there would be no society. Like all thieves, except for Robin Hood, the rich want to keep all their loot for themselves and taxing them is just taking a part of it back, balancing out some of the original theft called private property. The below linked video is based on a chapter from the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, and advocates the use of the same tactics as the rich; make of that what you will...

_{The Greatest Secret Of The Rich}

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