Taxation Is Essentially Legal Plunder
Claims (i) that there are no property rights independent of government laws, and (ii) that the government can create property rights simply by declaring that something belongs to someone. There is no obvious reason to believe (i) or (ii), and both statements are counterintuitive. Imagine traveling to a remote area outside the jurisdiction of a government, where you find a hermit who lives off the land. The hermit hunts with a spear of his own making, which you find interesting. You decide (without the consent of the hermit) to take the spear with you when you leave. It seems fair to say that you “stole” the spear. This shows the implausibility of (i). Then imagine that you are a slave in the American South of the nineteenth century. Suppose you decide to flee your master without his consent.
If (ii) is true, then you would be violating your Master`s rights by stealing from yourself. Note that you would not be violating just a legal right. If (ii) is true, the government creates moral rights and duties through its laws, so that you would violate your master`s moral rights. This shows the implausibility of (ii). Taxation, therefore, is still theft. but I am quite willing to consider a service fee for MY small community – as long as there is no monopolistic and arrogant authority telling me “who” services “my” community “must” have. But in the exchanges that people have with each other, there is only one thing that can and can be compared, and that is human work, that is, the services rendered and received. Only these services are proportional to each other; they alone are profitable; In them alone dwells value; And it is quite correct to say that man is essentially only the owner of his own work. After Mr. Recital has established that there are two types of rights – natural rights, which are expressions of relations that flow from the nature of things themselves, and conventional or legal rights, which exist only on condition that artificial relations are in force – Mr. Recital continues: to pay their taxes, and they are not voluntary. This is what Frédéric Bastiat called “legal looting” – the theft of property from a legally sanctioned person.
As Bastiat explained: 1. LVT, increases national income like other tax systems, but it should replace them. 2. The cost of collecting the LVT is lower than that of all other production-related taxes, as tax evasion becomes impossible – the different locations are visible to all and their ownership is known to the public. 3. Consumers pay less for their purchases due to lower production costs (see below). This creates greater satisfaction with the management of national affairs. 4.
Speculation and restriction of unused land are eliminated (see paragraph 7) and the economy stabilises. It no longer knows the 18-year corporate boom and bust cycle, due to periodic speculation on land values (see below). Strange as it may seem, I maintain that the system of private property before our eyes tends to make such a utopia an increasingly reality. That is why I said at the beginning that property is essentially democratic. So, in this second generation, there are two types of individuals, those who inherit the capital created and those who do not. There are also two types of capital, initial or natural capital and created capital. The latter legitimately belongs to the heirs, but the former legitimately belongs to all. All second-generation individuals have the same right to original capital.
However, it has happened that the heirs of the capital created have also taken possession of the uncreated capital, intervened in it, usurped it, appropriated it. Therefore, the current property system is illegitimate, contrary to justice and essentially based on plunder. During Bastiat`s six short years as a writer and politician (1844-1850), he produced six large volumes of letters, pamphlets, articles and books that the Fonds Liberté translated as part of his Complete Works of Frédéric Bastiat (2011-2015). What emerges from a chronological examination of his writings is his gradual realization that the state (which he often wrote as the STATE) is a giant machine deliberately designed to take the property of some people without their consent and transfer it to others. The word he increasingly uses during this period to describe state actions is “spoliation,” though he also uses “parasite,” “rape,” “theft,” and “looting,” which are equally harsh and relevant. In his scattered writings on the plundering of the state, written before the 1848 revolution, he identifies the individual groups that, at different times in history, had access to state power to plunder ordinary people. These include warriors, slave owners, the Catholic Church and, more recently, commercial and industrial monopolies. Each group and the particular way it has used state power to exploit ordinary people for its own benefit should have a separate section in its history of plunder. If he had defined the state before the Revolution of 1848, he could have written: “The state is the mechanism by which a small privileged group of people lives at the expense of all others.” Self-possession is innate and morally indisputable.
Self-ownership allows everyone to use 100% of their own resources to survive, thrive and prosper. The reduction in the ability of peoples to use 100% of their own resources by any means, including taxes, finally shows that we do not have the right to property and are therefore still slaves. Taxation is theft and anyone who claims otherwise is only exposing their utter contempt for their fellow human beings because anyone with more than 2 brain cells knows that taxation is not voluntary and consent is not required. But even those who believe in a relatively large government tend to share this understanding of taxation as the government`s appropriation of “our money.” Most people on the economic left assume that it is wrong for the state to take away our money, but they believe that this prima facie evil is justified by the public goods that make taxation possible. Alain de Botton, a well-meaning intellectual, encourages us to consider taxes as charity: we abandon what belongs to us for the good of our society. The current system of ownership is therefore illegitimate and essentially based on plunder. “The government says it`s legal, so it`s legal” logically has some advantages. While there are all sorts of behaviors that were legal when government X did it, I bet the author would have significant problems, so this argument falls flat.
Now, let`s say that instead of being all 50 agree, there are 2 recalcitrant who did not want to pay and instead wanted to do the work themselves. Should they be forced to pay or banned from using the road? That would be up to the city. And that`s the goal. All arguments in favour of taxation assume that people must need a governing body to meet all their needs. Then there is taxation. It has become a coveted livelihood. We know that the number of government jobs has been steadily increasing and that the number of applicants continues to grow faster than the number of jobs. Have any of these candidates ever wondered if they would be equivalent for the public services they expect? Will this scourge soon end? How can we believe it when we see that public opinion itself wants everything to be done by this fictitious being, the state, which is a collection of paid bureaucrats? Having judged that all peoples, without exception, were capable of governing the country, we declare them incapable of governing themselves. Very soon there will be two or three of these bureaucrats around every Frenchman, one who prevents him from working too much, another to give him an education, a third to give him credit, a fourth to interfere in his affairs, etc., etc. Where are we led by the illusion that leads us to believe that the state is a person who possesses inexhaustible wealth independent of ours? I love it when someone calls me “selfish” and “stupid” and then asks me questions. If you think I`m a stupid egoist, why are you asking me questions? You shouldn`t care in the least about my opinion.
The argument you made was completely misleading and baseless. Since I have not resorted to such insults with you, I will instead ask you a few questions: Please indicate how these highly-taxed companies are “better off than most countries in the world”? Please explain how these highly-taxed businesses, which are (apparently) “better off”, actually make the tax process more legitimate? It doesn`t matter if their situation improves or not – that does NOT make the government`s theft of people`s income any more legitimate. Obviously, you also don`t understand what inflation is if you think it will rise because of a lack of taxation. Please explain WHY the money supply is inflated without the tax system? An essential feature of plunder that distinguishes it from the acquisition of wealth through voluntary exchange is the use of force and what he called “cunning.” .