Thursday, January 11, 2018

If Taxes are Not Extortion, You Cannot Pay Them


A major foundation of my personal libertarianism is that I see it as a self-evident truth that government is, by definition, an act of violence and even murder. While this does not discredit all government action, it does mean that it is immoral for the government to do anything that I would not personally be willing to kill someone in order to accomplish, a pretty narrow list. It occurred to me that there are some very interesting implications as to the morality of paying taxes if you reject this premise.

I assume all my readers can agree that it would be immoral to sell me a gun knowing that I planned on killing my wife with it. It would not matter if I were otherwise a very decent fellow and used the gun to guard a battered women's shelter. (As it has been demonstrated with the recent revelations of sexual abuse in Hollywood, there is no contradiction between supporting women's rights in general while violating the particular women in your life.) If you were to give me the gun, you would be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. Now imagine that I was connected to the government and threatened you that if you refused to pass guns to mafia hitmen with which they could take out their opponents you would be put in jail. I assume that you would be morally obligated to go to jail rather than participate in a murder.

Now I do not question that the United States government has done a lot of legitimate good around the world. That being said, there have certainly been cases in which the government, particularly the CIA, has literally helped arm gangsters in order to commit murder. This means that, as taxpayers, there can be no illusions; by agreeing to pay taxes, we are literally complicit in murder.

While I believe that it is immoral to pay taxes to the American government in much the same way that one is not allowed to be a gun runner for the mob, I still pay taxes. There is a simple reason for this. I fully believe that there is a gun to my head and that I would be killed for refusing to pay. Keep in mind that I would not be refusing out of venal greed, but because I reject, on principle, the moral authority of the government to do certain things. This is treason and the penalty for treason is death. Furthermore, consider that the people involved in those actions I most object to are likely acting out of idealism. Like the Operator villain, in Serenity, they kill because they believe they are making a better world. If these men are already committing murder to further their aims, surely they would be willing to kill ideological tax evaders bent on stopping their better world from ever happening.

If you believe that taxes are not extorted at gunpoint, but are willingly given then you have no such excuse. Either you endorse every action of the government and as not wrongfully murdering anyone or you believe that the government is guilty of murder. If you believe that the government is guilty of murder, why do you pay taxes? Just as none of you would ever willingly buy guns for the mob even if it paid well, you should not feel any need to buy guns for the government. Keep in mind that our government spends far more on the military than on social services. So, when you pay taxes, you are supporting the military industrial complex with some welfare programs thrown in on the side as cover.

This argument is of little use against conservatives, who are likely to take a strong moral stance in favor of the American government. What intrigues me here is the reasoning of liberals, most of whom seem to view the American government even less charitably than I do. At least I acknowledge that radical political Islam is a threat and that it theoretically might be justifiable for the government to take action against it. I am even open to fire-bombing cities. The more you believe that the American government is a blood-soaked racist entity the more you need to feel directly threatened in order to justify paying taxes. From this perspective, it is not just libertarians who need to assume that taxation is theft at gunpoint, but liberals perhaps even more so. 

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