No Taxation Without…

[Andrew Carnegie] was a very great millionaire who proved that it pays to work hard and save your pennies. He was wrong, but that doesn’t make any difference. He’s dead now and he left us a chain of libraries which makes the working people more intelligent, more cultured, more informed, in short, more miserable and unhappy than they ever were, bless his heart.

-Henry Miller from The Colossus of Maroussi

With the ‘Buffet’ tax on the wealthy and the American Jobs Act in the news the idea of taxation and how it affects us is prevalent on many minds. A little over 230 years ago the United States began when the American colonies rose up and demanded “No Taxation Without Representation.” The idea that began our country was formed because of taxation, but the colonists didn’t hate the idea of taxation, only the fact that by English law they shouldn’t have been taxed without a representative in parliament, but were anyway.

Facing the reality of this nation’s current situation the proposed laws don’t seem like such a bad idea. When one man is raking in 100 million dollars a year and another is barely scratching by with 12 grand (the wonders of a free market system), it hardly seems like a travesty to force the first man to pay more. Our current necessities aside, the moral idea of taxation of any kind is a different story.

Taxation is theft. Legally sanctioned theft. We are not asked to pay for social works, not asked for financial support to fund government spending, we are forced by the threat of penalty. Democracies and Socialists justify taxation as a way to pay for public provisions like education, health care and other social welfare programs, which are the cornerstone of our ideas of modern civilization. Very good, even though we fund these programs today through these means it is amazing how ineffective they are, the state of the education system, health care, social security, etc. are somehow all in shambles and generally sub-par. This system obviously isn’t working. Taxation is a law violating our basic liberties. Without our consent part of our income is taken by the government for their own uses-which we have little, if any, say in. An entity forcing another to hand over money, whether they are willing or not, with the threat of force behind it is essentially the basic definition of theft.

I don’t believe this system can change overnight, as of today, and for the foreseeable future, it is a necessary evil. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is wrong and we should gradually move away from it. Moving into the future, one step at a time, the middle ground between our current federal government and free market economy and true anarchism (anarcho-communism) would be the mix of anarcho-capitalism.

Anarcho-capitalists believe in the balance of the natural laws of the market. Free markets take care of themselves and any government interference can only be negative. In other words, government is superfluous to the system we are currently in. The social works we depend on can be funded through a variety of different means, including voluntary contribution. This may sound farfetched to say people will voluntarily give up some of their income to fund these programs, but odds are, if you have the choice to give up a small percentage of your pay check to ensure you’ll have proper hospital care and your children will go to a good school, you’ll do so willingly. No laws demanding a certain amount, or threat of force, necessary.

Over 200 years ago our ancestors fought against taxation under certain terms. The world may be readying itself for the next leap to abolishing taxation. Instead of “No Taxation Without Representation,” our new slogan would be much simpler: “No Taxation…” It may still be somewhere in the unforeseeable future, but it is possible. People have been naturally organizing themselves for the entirety of known history. Governments have made us believe it is impossible to do so without them; in reality governments are a hedonistic excess that drains wealth instead of creating it.