Taxation: What is it?

Reader comment on: Times Tax Error

Submitted by Tibor Machan (United States), Nov 20, 2012 20:42

When monarch's ruled/owned "their" realms, they taxed those who lived there, just as an apartment owner charges tenants rent. After monarchies became suspect, resting as they did on fictitious divine rights, private property rights were instituted. Individuals became sovereign citizens instead of subjects. So their property could not be legitimately confiscated. It was, instead, extorted from them: "You hand over your resources--income, labor, skills, property, etc.--and the gang that's the government will permit you to live there in relative peace."

Just as with attempts to find a rational way to divvy up loot taken in a bank heist, there is no just or fair or morally sound policy of taxation no matter how much the tax-takers wish for it. It is all extortion, confiscation and needs to be replaced with a system of funding law enforcement that is proper just as paying for goods and services is proper as compared with extorting it. Moving in that direction would be taking the American revolution--disbanding the monarchy--where it needs to go: the abolition of taxation (just as serfdom needed to be abolished).

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