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Originally Posted by Frownland
I don't. Equating taxation with theft ignores most of what taxation accomplishes, sort of similar to saying that a cashier robbed you of your money would be leaving out the fact that it was a purchase and you received something in return and it's also another great example of how heightened language doesn't help a stance.
Taxing can be theft when the funds are mismanaged and taxpayers do not receive anything in return, which brings us back to accountability of tax distributors.
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Would you agree with me that some form of voluntary taxation would work better then? I am not against taxation or government in practice as I understand that voluntary association is highly unlikely to produce the kind of societies we see in the West. But giving people the direct choice of where their tax dollars go to would feel a lot less like theft to me.
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Originally Posted by riseagainstrocks
Where I lose the thread is how taxation, under our current government, could be considered theft, and therefore an act of aggression. I'm not aware of any definition of theft that comports with a civil society that chooses their representatives, on a regular, repeating basis who then set taxation rates, which pay for a bevy of programs and institutions, some specifically provided for by the Constitution, others implied. Anti-taxers (fittingly, as ill informed as anti-vaxxers) seem to have a problem with civilization as a whole. They'll rail how the implicit threat of force by the state makes 'taxation' not voluntary and therefore an act of violence. There are plenty of uninhabited islands in Micronesia, ripe for anti-state, anti-tax folks to settle down. With all the no roads and lack of hospitals their non-tax dollars (well, I guess shells) to not pay for.
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Would you agree that moral and ethical discussions should not be based on the system you happen to be born into? The fact that roads, schools and other services were provided by the tax dollars of those who came before me doesn't change the question of whether taxation is actually theft or not.
Had those people not been taxed, maybe we wouldn't have the same level of infrastructure. But what you could not say is that they were potentially stolen from.