Theft is when someone takes something that doesn’t belong to them. Either governments own “their people” as slaves, or taxation is theft. You own yourself. Therefore, taxation is theft. Because you own your body, your labor, and what you acquire by trade, taxation is theft. Governments are institutions used by the super rich to concentrate wealth and power. Since they are not earning money by offering goods or services for us to choose from freely, theft is their primary mechanism. Taxation is just a word that makes us more likely to go along with massive, widespread, organized theft.
It is not right for one person to steal. It is not right for two people to steal. It is still not right for 51% of a voting population to vote for a representative who will hire a tax collector to steal for them. One of the great government lies is that theft can be moral when performed by enough people and called taxation. Theft is theft. Even if some of the money stolen is used for legitimate purposes, that doesn’t change the simple fact that taxation is theft.
Some politicians will try to make the case that taxation is voluntary, and in a warped sense, for some people, it is. If you believe that governments exist to serve the people, all your tax dollars are put to good use, and you pay your taxes enthusiastically, then you might be more susceptible to the lie that taxation isn’t theft. But even if you happen to be so lucky, and you feel that taxes are “the price you pay for a civilized society,” you are living in a civilized prison. The moment you decide that you don’t like what your tax dollars are spent on, either you are submitting to the coercion behind every tax law, or you are going to jail.
We can only meet our potential when all relations are voluntary and cooperative. Every relationship between a government and a citizen is involuntary. The amount of coercion actually applied is irrelevant to assessing the effect of the threat. When a tax is imposed on a population, it means a large chunk of the wealth is no longer allowed to serve the needs of the people who earned it, but rather the needs of government. Only when all the diversions of resources by taxation are taken into account can we begin to grasp the massive potential lost.
Governments use taxes not only to steal from us, but also to control our behavior. Generally, taxes are imposed to the greatest degree possible, taking as much as they can from whomever they can. But sometimes, governments can take more money from us overall if they take in a specific way intended to modify behavior. For example, if a government imposes a tax on an unpopular behavior, it can get people to see government as an effective way of stopping that behavior, while really using it as an excuse to steal from an unpopular group of people and boost its credibility.
One of the great lies of taxation is that it’s a way for the poor to band together to take back from the rich. This could be dressed up to avoid the language of theft as in, “Successful people show their gratitude to the society that helped them by paying more in taxes.” Some people even believe taxation is a way to take the power back from the super rich, corporations, and banks. The people who have the money to pull the strings of politicians have rigged the system so the net effect of taxation is always a tax on the poor. Some tax systems are actually set up to steal more from relatively rich people, and some unpopular or unconnected rich people end up at a disadvantage, but from their results, it is obvious that governments exist to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.
Because people respond to incentives, targeted taxation has precise effects. When any product, service, or activity is taxed, it becomes more expensive and the market responds as it would to any price increase. This is true with the income tax, which allows some governments to take their victims’ money before they get control of it. But “hiding” a tax does not diminish its disastrous effects. It only makes collection more efficient. The incentive problem is not avoided, and when governments make any activity (like earning an income) less profitable, people will do it less.
Sales taxes are just as much theft as any other taxes, even though everyone chooses to pay them as they make consumer choices. A sales tax is simply conditional theft, just like import taxes or any other taxes on trade. While a consumer might have the choice of not buying something, a vendor has no choice but to build the cost of taxes into the price if they want to do business openly. Unfortunately for governments, taxation does nothing to diminish the black market. It encourages it.
The taxation racket has developed, evolved, and adapted to new circumstances and technologies. Widespread application and profitability ensure taxation techniques are always at the cutting edge. They have come a long way from the chief of a small tribe demanding tribute to the massive surveillance, investigation, seizure, and imprisonment operations of today. If the racket is not stopped soon, it will only get more invasive and destructive.
Taxation is an inescapable part of the government racket. If governments never stole, they would cease to be governments. If we could withdraw our financial support from them at any time, they would be voluntary cooperatives, or service providers. Because taxation is backed up with the threat of force, it is theft, plain and simple.
If governments could only steal through direct taxation, they would still be huge burdens on society. Unfortunately, this only represents a small part of the taxation racket. Government sponsors have devised far greater ways of stealing from us through the banking system.
Most currencies used in the world today are just pieces of paper or digital numbers created by central banks. When they print more money, supply and demand still applies, so the money loses value. Authorized banks employ fractional reserve banking, which allows them to create money out of thin air with a loan to someone while only holding a fraction of the cash behind it. Because the printing or digital creation of more money inflates the supply, this is referred to as the “inflation tax.” This delicate combination of force and fraud is designed for theft on a massive scale.
If people could avoid the inflation tax by using money that doesn’t consistently lose value, they would. To impose a currency, governments must outlaw competing currencies. This means if you use a different device of accounting for trade than the official money, you will be locked in a cage or face other “legal” sanctions. Eventually, a government’s money becomes so widely used that no one even questions it. Propaganda about how essential this racket is to the economy keeps it going.
Government money that isn’t backed by anything allows all who benefit, either as early recipients of the new money or bankers authorized to create it, to siphon off massive amounts of wealth from the entire economy. It doesn’t matter if banks have monopoly power from governments, or governments themselves run the banks, they exist to serve the super rich. As with all taxes, the purpose is to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. In the case of the inflation tax, it is also a great way to convince the poor they aren’t being taxed at all. The inflation tax hurts the poor and working class the most, and no one who uses government money is safe from it.
Taxation is a massive and complex undertaking for any government. Stealing from almost everyone in a country is no easy task, but governments have a way of making it look even more difficult and complicated than it really is. This is not due to the challenge of the task, or by accident, or the result of ineptitude. Governments intentionally create complex tax systems to favor special interests and make it difficult to challenge tax collectors.
A complicated tax code (along with a complicated legal system) allows for arbitrary enforcement. If a government agent wants to go after an individual, it is easy to show how they have not been in perfect compliance with the tax code, because perfect compliance is nearly impossible. As long as society accepts that taxation is not theft, you could be jailed at any time.
If you have the money or means to challenge the tax collectors in a government court, it can be very expensive, and you might end up with more money if you just give in. However, if you choose to fight some particular theft against yourself, you might lose and have to pay legal fees as well as whatever taxes (plus interest) the government wants to impose. Resisting government theft by turning to governments might seem silly, but the only alternative is to conduct our business so they can’t see it.
IV. Land Theft & Property Taxes
Governments create many illusions to keep their citizens compliant and convinced they are being served, rather than ripped off. One of the most important illusions is a false sense of property. As long as you accept your government’s conditions of ownership, it wants you to believe that you own yourself, your possessions, your home, and your land. In reality, it acts as if it owns you and everything within its territory.
Governments used to steal vast expanses of land with little excuse. When it was more commonly understood that they were violent monopolies, they didn’t need to come up with elaborate excuses to make it seem like theft was not theft. Because the standard of the property illusion is pretty high these days, most governments have to come up with better reasons to steal land. Governments will say they are taking land in the interest of public safety, for public works, or for “development.” Theft justified by any of these excuses is still theft. It is particularly offensive when they don’t even fabricate some noble cause, but simply kick people off their land and hand it directly to special interests.
Sometimes governments will claim that stealing someone’s land isn’t theft, if they are adequately compensated. This is like a carjacker telling you that it’s fine to steal your car if you get to keep the air freshener. Being involuntarily removed from one’s land makes it theft. The only “adequate compensation” that makes it not theft is whatever it takes to persuade a person give up their property and leave it voluntarily.
Property taxes are based on the idea that we must pay for the privilege of living in a particular area and a tax on ownership is a reasonable price to pay for government services. You are really paying a ransom to keep your property, assuming you actually own it. If you do not pay your property taxes, government will eventually kick you off your land. If you believe governments own all the land, then the price of your property is for a usage license and your property taxes are rental fees.
To governments, property is merely a matter of temporary control. They can steal whatever they want, as long as they have a good enough excuse for the enforcers to carry out the theft and keep people from revolting. If your government says you can own property and maintain control of it, but only if you pay property taxes, you are a renter, not an owner. Governments get away with these rackets because enough people still believe they somehow represent “the will of the people,” as opposed to their sponsors.
V. Intergenerational Child Abuse
When governments take on debt, it has very serious implications, especially for future generations. Because their primary source of revenue is theft, government debt is a promise to steal from someone in the future. In some countries, children today are born with a debt that would take them a lifetime to repay, even with extreme tax rates. When those who haven’t even had a chance to vote are forced to pay for the mistakes of past generations, that is intergenerational child abuse.
People under governments with runaway debt generally oppose increasing it. Many want to eliminate it altogether. We generally vote for politicians who vote for increased spending because that money goes to special interests that give some of it back to politicians, who spend it to trick us into thinking they’re going to change something for the better. Enough people vote for them, because we can be tricked into thinking we can vote our problems away and avoid critical thinking without adverse consequences.
Examination of this problem is very revealing about governments, because that which is wrong about creating an expectation of theft against the next generation, is also wrong about what is happening now. It’s not just about people not old enough to vote or influence the system, it’s about everyone who doesn’t get a real say in how that money is spent. That includes the vast majority of us. It should be no surprise that the greatest rackets the world has ever known have found a way to extend the ranks of their victims into the unborn.
What message does government debt send to young people born into debt slavery? This practice is not sustainable, and discontented youth will be the undoing of governments. Eventually a generation will come along and say, “It’s not my debt!” and simply disown it. Do we want to pass on to our children a free world of opportunity, or one in which they are born into debt slavery to pay for our mistakes?