It’s a necessary evil and should be regarded as such. Unfortunately, many regard it as a positive good. The results may be good, depending on how the money is spent, but forcing people to give up what they earned by the sweat of their brow is not a good thing and should only be done to provide essential services. Not just things that are nice to have.
That depends on the species. Species range from communistic to completely individualistic to the point where they are hostile to all others of their species except when mating. But whether communal or individualistic, they tend to defend what they regard as theirs. You won’t find a single creature that says, “Hey, feel free to use my(or our) territory for your own needs, we’re all one brotherhood!”
Humans are a combination of communal and individualistic.
If the results are nicer than what everyone would have produced by acting independently, then yes, we absolutely should tax people to pay for non-essential things. Humans are a communal species. It’s in our nature to work together for the common good. Attempting to undermine this tendency goes against how our brains are wired.
That’s also fine as a principle, but we first have to start from the premise that taxation is a necessary evil. Then we can decide what is worth doing it and what is not. Most of our leaders start from the premise that they should have a big bag of money to dole out based on political calculations rather than the common good.
Fortunately, voters have been pretty good at protecting their own interests. Unfortunately, there is now a disconnect between what voters want provided and what they want to pay for. That has to be resolved, and I’m pretty confident that will be resolved in favor of spending less.
OP, you do not have to pay (federal) taxes. Just earn less than $9500 per year and you get everything society offers for free. You don’t even have to file a tax return. In fact, the government might even subsidize some of your living expenses if you make $9500.
If you want to make more money that $9500 you have to partake in our tax system, but it is completely optional.
Why? I start from the premise that private property is a necessary evil. We’d all be a lot better off if we were willing to follow Marx’s mantra of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” But we’re clearly not able to do that, because we kind of suck, so we need something like private property to motivate folks to do stuff. But that doesn’t mean private property is a good thing. It leads to all kinds of suffering, even as it prevents other kinds.
Taxes aren’t themselves a necessary evil: they’re a cure for the evils engendered by private property.
My homeowners association, like most, requires me to pay dues as part of my home purchase contract. I can move, or I can try to organize a campaign to reduce or eliminate the dues - which probably wouldn’t work because of the services offered.
Is that extortion also?
Are taxes still extortion if you strongly support them and vote for them, or are they extortion if you oppose them and lose elections where they are levied. (In California we vote directly for many of our taxes, so we don’t even have the representatives who may or may not follow our will problem.)
Gasoline prices are higher than I think they should be, even at the cheapest stations. I have no choice about buying some. If I try to pay only what I think the gas should be, I’ll be arrested. Is this extortion also?
I don’t buy it. You have no say in how much the mob collects or how it uses its money. By electing a government, the people say how much it collects and how it spends it. It’s not extortion when it’s being done by your (through your elected goverment) request.
Why pick that as a starting premise?
As **LHoD **says, why not start from the premise that PROPERTY is the necessary evil?
Oh come on now. You seem infinitely reasonable compared to the OP, but I challenge you to conjure up one plausible scenario in which not paying taxes could directly result in a person’s death.
Start from the premise that society is the necessary evil.
P.J. O’Rourke wrote one, in which refusing to pay taxes lands you in jail, and attempting to flee from your unjust imprisonment gets you (legally) shot dead by a guard.
I doubt it. I think a lot of people regard it as a net positive because of its benefits, and perhaps some of them make their case forcefully because it’s become so common for people to say taxes are tyranny, theft, extortion, a racket, slavery, and on and on and on.
Among territorial animals, you only get as much territory as you are capable of defending yourself. You stop defending your territory, another one of your species moves in, and nobody does anything about it. If another member of your species can kick your ass, they get as much of your territory as they want. That is the kind of “property rights” that exist in nature.
Fortunately, for those of us who enjoy having property without having to constantly defend it, government provides us with much more substantive property rights. So I can have my vacation home in Florida that I leave empty half the year and still be confident that when I get back to it no one else has moved in.
But that’s kind of bizarre. Humans are not solitary hunters or scavengers. We evolved to live in groups. Humans who are not allowed to live in a group (or scavenge on the periphery of a group) tend not to survive very long.
I love this post so hard.
Oh shit. Were we supposed to read Atlas Shrugged for book club this month? Because I’m only on like page 950.
Look, here’s the deal. You pay “extortion” to your local, state and federal government so they keep the roads, schools, parks and police up and running. And in return, you don’t have to pay actual extortion to every jerk who decides to simply take whatever he wants from anyone who is weaker than him.
Most economists believe that not every service should or even could be provided by the private sector. Imagine if the only security or health care or education were provided by the private sector. There will always be people who fall off the supply/demand curve any product or service. You would have enclave of wealthy people behind walled private communities while many, if not most people would live in shantytowns with no infrastructure, without the ability to ever rise any higher.
“All property is theft” is a stupid and meaningless expression.
I would go further and say PEOPLE are a necessary evil.
There is a definite difference between a contract you voluntarily signed with a homeowners association before moving into the association, and a country you were born into no?
Also, if it is imposed on you by the association, it IS still similar to extortion to the extent that any dues should only be for things that you cannot be excluded from, and that can only be properly carried out by the association. I am not making the case that public action is always unwarranted, only that the warrant be very clear.
They’re always extortion if there is a significant minority that opposes them. 100 people. 51 think that Coca Cola should be free for everybody. 49 don’t agree. Should the 49 pay for Coca Cola just because it’s a majority ruling?
I have no idea how this is relevant. Taxation is not voluntary payment for consumption of a private good like petrol. That is why the petrol is a private good in the first place. Its benefit very clearly goes to you, hence you pay for it.
Taxation is enforced payment for consumption of a public good(in the economics sense of the term). Government does certain things that it thinks benefit everybody, but it enforces payment from everybody. Therefore, there should be every effort to ensure that the goods/services provided by taxation meet the criteria under which this is valid i.e essential, with significant externalities.
People only ‘say’ how their money should be used through a very inefficient and inexact process. Representative democracy has significant issues(not that direct democracy doesn’t), in particular owner-agency issues(owner being the voter, agent being the politician voted in) which are exacerbated by the breadth of the functions government is required to handle, and by the fact that the only real ‘metric’ agents face is getting votes. Again, this is not an argument for anarchism, but for limiting the functions of government to those that can be clearly identified as essential and having significant externalities. If you want me to give you a concrete example, I’d say healthcare(beyond stuff like sanitation and basic primary healthcare) is something government should stay out of. Secondary and tertiary healthcare in particular are very much private goods. Their benefit goes first and foremost to the person receiving the service. That person should pay for it.
Man, like, the space-time continuum is a necessary evil, dude!