RE: Why taxation is even worse than theft
I know I won't be well recieved but :
I come from a country where tax is one of the heaviest in the world and yet I believe tax is not theft and good.
If you don't pay taxes you would pay them but in other forms. you would pay medical bills, school, roads, etc. Look at the US, most of the people can't even afford to get sick. And even though they are the "n°1" of the world they are among the worst among developed countrieshttps://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/06/16/u-s-healthcare-ranked-dead-last-compared-to-10-other-countries/#7e11a7b6576f.
taxation is not theft it's for the greater good, taxation is theft if it's used not in the interest of the people who paid for it, basically how manders says "the king gets the money and gives gifts"
If there are no taxation, who would pay for roads ? For public service(health, firemen, police ?) If they are not paid by the state then it becomes a private service. And with that comes more cost because a private company needs profit because their income is not stable.
For instance take firemens, if they have no funding they won't go and help you out they loose money, so you would have to pay them some kind of insurance, same for police , same for health.
And I guarantee you it will be much more than taxes because they will want more and more profits not just enough for them to run.
Finally, we would have no research, sure companies do research, but it's always research to improve xxx device, not research to improve our understanding of science which may not lead to profit.
Do you like using your cellphone thanks to sattellites ? Well if we went without taxes, the father of rocketery wouldn't have been able to research because there would have been no funding. And so today we wouldn't have things to go in space.
tl;dr taxes are vital, but it can be theft if misused.
Thank you for such an elaborate reply. :)
I am also from a country which heavily taxes its people, and I still think it's theft. Taxation is a very poor way to allocate resources as it puts one monopolistic central organization (the state) in power of much of society's spending. In Holland, the government spends approximately 50% of the nation's GDP. Do we really need to spend this much for roads, hospitals, police etc?
The problem with monopolies is that they are not encourage to innovate, and to provide good services. Take for example the North-South metrostation line in Amsterdam. It's taken more than 10 years to build, and still it's not finished. A private company would have been pressured to spend their resources efficiently or else go bankrupt.
If companies want more profits, you are free to stop using their service and in a free market probably be able to make use of the services of a competitor. With government services, there's hardly any choice. You have paid for them in taxes, and then you are not provided much freedom to choose.
I think what you are focusing on are services and goods that you can see after government has built or financed it. What you don't see are the services and goods that would have been provided when consumers would have been allowed to keep and spend all their money according to their personal preferences. Private law, private court, private protection agencies etc would naturally erupt in a stateless society. See for example how social order emerged in the Wild Wild West when people moved west much faster than the government did.
Good point! I think you really have to highlight MISUSED. Misused tax is really a crime. Seeing Macau, a small city in southern china where it's known to be a gambling city of the east, what I see is that the tax paid by the people are being used properly by improving the city and helping its people improve themselves by giving education subsidies, for example. The point is, our taxes should be USED WELL by governments.
I think ALL taxes is theft and misused, but if it's greatly misused it's even worse. Macau seems, compared to other nation states, quite good in handling taxes. There's undoubtedly corruption, but nothing more extreme than what happens anywhere else in the western world.