Is taxation theft?

[patrickj]

Tax collection isn't burglary, I know numerous individuals here would love a world without government however the fact of the matter is regardless of a portion of the things you loathe about government, it enables society to work. Another approach to take a gander at tax assessment is to consider it as a lease for living in the general public you live in, nobody would state its burglary to pay lease on an auto/house however for reasons unknown individuals assume diversely when its the legislature doing it.

[Lecam]

Personally, I do feel it is theft, I never consented to any taxation. I feel that this video helps explain the video quite well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMQZEIXBMs

I believe it's not. Paying taxes is our duty and responsibility as a member of the society. It is best to do our role. However, we must put in mind that what we are paying are for the own good of the every membersof the society. It is still for the development of the society and it's people.

[nova999]

In the US most people use more government paid benefits than the taxes they pay each year... the majority of people do not know nor believe this lol

[BADecker]

Tax collection isn't burglary, I know numerous individuals here would love a world without government however the fact of the matter is regardless of a portion of the things you loathe about government, it enables society to work. Another approach to take a gander at tax assessment is to consider it as a lease for living in the general public you live in, nobody would state its burglary to pay lease on an auto/house however for reasons unknown individuals assume diversely when its the legislature doing it.

What does Government have to do with taxation? Nothing.

Take a look at any corporation. Consider General Motors. Who do they tax? In the slightest ways they might do some taxation. Yet, they are a government. They are organized. They have leaders. They have followers. But they don't have taxation, and they are very successful.

Their employees get paid. If they don't like the pay, they can form a union and get the company to change. Or they can quit. But you can't do this with Government and taxation.

And car buyers pay for what they get. They don't throw a bunch of money at GM and get all kinds of things they don't want. Rather, they check out the vehicle and buy the options they want, and they don't get the options they don't pay for, but if options they don't want come as a package, they know about it, and go elsewhere if they don't like it.

It isn't this way with Government. Government takes your money, and you don't know if you are getting anything in return for it or not. Sure, Government says you are getting something. But you can't tell for sure. Maybe the thing you don't want is Government. But if you WANT Government, why not pay for the things that you want rather than getting all kinds of stuff you don't want, and never knowing if you are getting the best.

Buy what you want in Government. Forget what you don't want. Stop getting funds stolen from you for use in things that don't benefit you or anybody except to line the pockets of pedophile politicians.

[Elwar]

So many of these peoples' minds are going to be blown away when they start seeing seasteads running their governments with no forced taxation.

"But that's a special case!" they'll say "they don't have a huge military like my country!" they'll say. So many excuses they will create to hold dear to the idea that has been drilled into their brains their whole lives that taxation is necessary for government.

Propaganda since you are a child with your first coin. Spread by our fellow citizens no less.

[jenpot]

Taxation is the backbone of our government. Tax is the funds collected by the government to finance their projects for the development of its country and for the people living under its sovereign. Stealing money from the government is a theft, but taxing its people is never a theft.

[lesam0urai44]

No i don't think taxation is a theft because those money won't go away or go inside of someone else pocket, it will be used for the public purpose like building hospital, school,....

[felicity06]

For me it is not.... the tax system in every country is good... The government create it for the benifits of their country... Tax are imposed to make every country developed and also to protect the local industry and  also it helps to ensure the progress of every country by means of social welfare,  new infrastructure personal utilities and a lots...  Because of tax this things are possible...

[adonaiking]

For me taxation is not a theft but it is rather a  way to help our government.Even in the time of Jesus Christ  he also  paid tax for He said give to Ceasar what is due to Ceasar.

[BADecker]

For me taxation is not a theft but it is rather a  way to help our government.Even in the time of Jesus Christ  he also  paid tax for He said give to Ceasar what is due to Ceasar.

You are a little mixed up about what Jesus said. Jesus said "give." What does give have to do with taxation? Tax is forced extraction. Giving is voluntary donation. Besides, if you don't owe Government any taxes, why give them some?

How do you know that you owe some taxes to Government? Is it because some Government person told you that you do? Was he telling the truth, or lying to you?

He was telling the truth, because he has Government paperwork that says he is telling the truth. Or did a buddy of his write the paper just to trick you?

Jesus didn't say anything about taxation in that little quote you made, or in the Bible area of that quote. But the tax man tricked the church leaders and ministers and priests into telling you that it was all about taxes.

The Herodians asked Jesus about taxes. They were trying to trick Him. But He tricked them, by not answering about taxes at all. If they had been honest, and if they had been humble enough to not think that they had a question that He couldn't answer, they would have said, "Yes, it is right to give to Caesar the things that Caesar owns. And it is right to give to God the things that God owns. But what about paying taxes to Caesar?"

Of course, if they had asked that question, Jesus might have said, "Since you are being forced by Caesar to use his denarius, you must be his slaves." And the Jews and Herodians all talked as though they were free. Remember that they said to Jesus in John, "We have never been slaves of anyone?" So, how could they have been forced to use Caesar's money if they were free? Nobody likes being a slave. Especially not Jews.

The fact is that we ARE free in America. We are free to remain ignorant. And we are free to gain knowledge. We are free to use man-to-man common law to show the tax man that He is wrong. And we are free to pay the tax, and complain or not.

This means that if you decide to remain ignorant and pay the American tax man what you don't really owe him, you are voluntarily supporting all the politician pedophile slavery that is going on in America and in other places around the world. It means that you are voluntarily supporting the conquering of Middle East countries by America, which is really what Big Oil is using Government to do.

Wake up! There is a lot more to this than you are thinking.

Here is what you are voluntarily supporting with your tax dollar.

15 Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country

When I was 12, Saddam Hussein, vice president of Iraq at the time, carried out a huge purge and officially usurped total power. I was living in Baghdad then, and I developed an intuitive, visceral hatred of the dictator early on. That feeling only intensified and matured as I did. In the late 1990s, I wrote my first novel, "I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody," about daily life under Saddam's authoritarian regime. Furat, the narrator, was a young college student studying English literature at Baghdad University, as I had. He ends up in prison for cracking a joke about the dictator. Furat hallucinates and imagines Saddam's fall, just as I often did. I hoped I would witness that moment, whether in Iraq or from afar.

I left Iraq a few months after the 1991 Gulf War and went to graduate school in the United States, where I've been ever since. In 2002, when the cheerleading for the Iraq war started, I was vehemently against the proposed invasion. The United States had consistently supported dictators in the Arab world and was not in the business of exporting democracy, irrespective of the Bush administration's slogans. I recalled sitting in my family's living room with my aunt when I was a teenager, watching Iraqi television and seeing Donald Rumsfeld visiting Baghdad as an emissary from Ronald Reagan and shaking hands with Saddam. That memory made Mr. Rumsfeld's words in 2002 about freedom and democracy for Iraqis seem hollow. Moreover, having lived through two previous wars (the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988 and the Gulf War of 1991), I knew that the actual objectives of war were always camouflaged by well-designed lies that exploit collective fear and perpetuate national myths.

Read more at https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/20/15-years-ago-america-destroyed-my-country.

[Betheng10]

Personally, I do feel it is theft, I never consented to any taxation. I feel that this video helps explain the video quite well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMQZEIXBMs

If you pay fairly and you do your obligation, you can demand for theft if you feek it's not given back appropriately.

Tax help the government establish projects and without tax it won't be possible. Let's say, home for the elderly, they survive because of tax payers remitted money. Which will be enjoying as we reach the certain age accepted by the country.

[BADecker]

Personally, I do feel it is theft, I never consented to any taxation. I feel that this video helps explain the video quite well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMQZEIXBMs

If you pay fairly and you do your obligation, you can demand for theft if you feek it's not given back appropriately.

Tax help the government establish projects and without tax it won't be possible. Let's say, home for the elderly, they survive because of tax payers remitted money. Which will be enjoying as we reach the certain age accepted by the country.

You are wrong. All the things that Government does for you, can be done by purchasing these things from big business. After all, that's where Government gets these things to give them to you.

Buy what you are paying for rather than paying the tax and getting nothing, or getting some things you are not paying for, while supporting all kinds of things that you don't want to exist.

[shizzle_my_nizzle]

I think that people would be more willing to pay taxes if they could have more control on where they go. Just like with business, you can actually choose
which product to buy.
So my idea would be to have a part of taxes where you can decide to which department they go.

[FFrankie]

You can't possibly think that taxes are theft because it pays for public goods that everyone enjoys. I think you could argue that the rate of taxes are too high and that more wealthy persons can use their assets to essentially pay less than the average middle class worker

[akalanka]

some radical libertarians hold that all taxation is immoral, on the grounds that it amounts to the state stealing the money of private citizens. This is an extreme position, but the sense that tax involves the government taking ‘our money’ is ubiquitous, and hugely influential in real-world politics. The former British prime minister David Cameron, for example, repeatedly made a ‘moral case’ for low taxes, based on the need to give back to you, the citizen, more of ‘your money’. And even those who believe in relatively high taxes tend to start from the assumption that one has some kind of moral claim to one’s gross income, a claim that is overridden only by the greater good of equality or the need to fund public services. Outside of academia, almost everyone assumes that the money I get in my pay-packet before the deduction of taxes is, in some morally significant sense, ‘mine’.

This assumption, although almost universal, is demonstrably confused. There is no serious political theory according to which my pre-tax income is ‘mine’ in any morally significant sense. Moreover, this matters: this confused assumption is a major stumbling block to economic reform, causes low and middle earners to vote against their economic interests, and renders it practically impossible to correct the economic injustices that pervade the modern world.

In addressing the question of whether taxation is theft, it is important to distinguish two senses of ‘theft’: legal and moral. In 18th-century North America, it was possible to ‘own’ a slave, in the legal sense of ownership. If someone deprived me of my slave in order to give that slave liberty, then this constituted ‘theft’ in the legal sense. But of course the laws underpinning slavery were morally abhorrent, and hence few these days would class liberating a slave as ‘theft’ in any moral sense. Conversely, we can have cases of moral theft that are not legal theft. The laws of Nazi Germany enabled the authorities to seize the property of Jews who had been deported; although strictly speaking legal, such actions constituted ‘theft’ in a moral sense.

And so, when we ask ourselves whether taxation is theft, we have to specify whether we are thinking of the moral or legal sense (or both). If we wanted to say that tax is legal theft, then we would have to argue that people have a legal claim to their pre-tax income, and hence that the government commits legal theft when it takes the pre-tax income of its citizens. This idea can be quickly dismissed. Clearly if Ms Jones is legally obliged to pay a certain amount of tax on her gross income, then she is not legally entitled to keep all her pre-tax income. It follows logically that the state does not commit legal theft when it enforces the payment of this tax.

The more interesting question is whether taxation is moral theft, and this depends on whether citizens have some kind of moral claim on their gross income. It is to this question I now turn .
Your gross, or pre-tax income, is the money the market delivers to you. In what sense might it be thought that you have a moral claim on this money? One answer might be that you deserve it: you have worked hard and have done a good job, and consequently you deserve all your gross income as recompense for your labour. According to this line of reasoning, when the government taxes, it takes the money that you deserve for the work you do.

This is not a plausible view. For it implies that the market distributes to people exactly what they deserve for the work that they do. But nobody thinks a hedge-fund manager deserves many times more wealth than a scientist working on a cure for cancer, and few would think that current pay ratios in companies reflect what philosophers call desert claims. Probably you work very hard in your job, and you make an important contribution. But then so do most people, and the market distribution of wealth patently does not reward in proportion to how hard-working people are, or how much of a contribution they make to society. If we were just focusing on desert, then there is a good case for taxation to correct the amoral distribution of the market.

If we have a moral claim on our gross income, it is not because we deserve it, but because we are entitled to it. What’s the difference? What you deserve is what you ought to have as a result of hard work or social contribution; what you are entitled to is the result of your property rights. Libertarians believe that each individual has natural property rights, which it would be immoral for the government to infringe. According to Right-wing libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard, taxation is morally wrong not because the taxman takes what people deserve, but because he takes what people have a right to.

Therefore, if taxation is theft, it’s because it essentially involves the violation of people’s natural rights to property. But do we really have natural rights to property? And even if we do, does taxation really infringe them? To begin to address these questions, we need to think more carefully about the nature of property.

[BADecker]

You can't possibly think that taxes are theft because it pays for public goods that everyone enjoys. I think you could argue that the rate of taxes are too high and that more wealthy persons can use their assets to essentially pay less than the average middle class worker

If you think that taxes aren't theft, you are the kind of person who donates money to things that you don't know about... like you just don't care. Just throw that money away, and don't really even wonder if you got anything good out of it or not.

And if you happen to think about all the pedophile politicians, then stick your head in a hole in the sand  like you don't realize that it was your tax money that paid for it.

[BADecker]

This assumption, although almost universal, is demonstrably confused. There is no serious political theory according to which my pre-tax income is ‘mine’ in any morally significant sense. Moreover, this matters: this confused assumption is a major stumbling block to economic reform, causes low and middle earners to vote against their economic interests, and renders it practically impossible to correct the economic injustices that pervade the modern world.

If you think that pre-tax money isn't completely yours, then you might as well say that you are a slave.

The actual money isn't the thing that is important. What is important is the value that the money represents. What is this value? It is your labor.

Are you your own property? Or do you belong to someone else?

You take your body and strength, and you go to work for somebody. You give him your strength, be it physical or mental. It was yours, and you gave it to him on the job. What does he give you in return? He gives you money. It would be difficult for him to give you food, water, clothing, gas for your car, a new roof for your house, etc. So he gives you money. The money is the representation of the value of your time and effort that you gave him. What does taxation have to do with that?

You might say that Government set up the money system. But if you look back to a time before Government existed, there was still money. Government takes way more of your money than they ever did any good for you. And you don't really need them with regard to your money or anything else. You can buy what you want without Government.

[artichandra]

For me no because its a blood of the government. On the other hand you gets from the governments program thats why i think its not a theft. But For those corrupt official who stole our money from the government. That is a theft and plunderer for me because You get the money which is not yours.

[BADecker]

For me no because its a blood of the government. On the other hand you gets from the governments program thats why i think its not a theft. But For those corrupt official who stole our money from the government. That is a theft and plunderer for me because You get the money which is not yours.

For me, yes, because it is the blood of people the Government has been stealing from them.

You get some programs from Government that you don't want.

You don't get some programs from Governemnt that you do want.

All programs that you get from Government, you can buy cheaper with better quality from business.

Corrupt Government officials use tax money to protect themselves from prosecution.

Taxation is a way for corruption to continue.

[Elwar]

In what sense might it be thought that you have a moral claim on this money? One answer might be that you deserve it: you have worked hard and have done a good job, and consequently you deserve all your gross income as recompense for your labour.

It is not whether you deserve it or you have a right to it. You have created a private agreement between individuals to do X for Y. That is all. Just an agreement between two people.

If I have bitcoins and want someone to create a painting for me for 1 bitcoin I make an agreement with an individual to do so. The person does it and I send him the bitcoin, what moral right does anyone else have to interfere with this private agreement between us?

The question comes down to "do you own your own body?". If you believe the state owns your body, then you are a slave to the state and nothing you do is your own life, you are merely granted permission to do things by the state. If you actually do own your body then you own the product of your own labor.


Some radical socialists would tell you that you do not own your own body. This is an extreme position.