đź’¸ Tax

Let’s beginn with a common argument in favor of taxation. Moving to a philanthropy model means more bias and preference for how people get “care” from the system. Tax puts the money in the hands of our elected leaders to distribute it in a more faceless and broadly beneficial way.

Overview

  • Taxation is the act of taking another’s money without their consent. Doing so clearly violates the Legal Principle.
  • Whether referred to as “taxation” or not, theft is always inefficient, destructive, and immoral, even when the thief uses the proceeds for worthy purposes.
  • The idea of taxation to help those in need flows from good intentions. Unfortunately, it’s clear from the $5 trillion cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone that tax revenues are often allocated destructively and wastefully. Instead of being forced to pay a cumbersome bureaucratic middleman, a more effective way of helping those in need is for us to give directly to them. Doing so also strengthens relationships and communities in the process.
  • Justly transitioning to a world without taxation is an entirely different and vital discussion. We cannot abolish taxes overnight, but we should be clear that zero taxation is the goal to aim for. We must reduce taxation reasonably and responsibly to meet earned obligations, avoid unnecessary chaos in society, and ensure that essential services, such as police protection, courts, and national defense, remain robust.

Alternatives to taxation exist and can work.

  • Just because governments have continuously relied on taxation does not mean they must always operate in this manner, or that alternative methods of achieving these essential goals could not exist.
    • Keep in mind that people in the United States somehow survived, and even thrived, without the federal government imposing and collecting any income tax. It wasn’t until 1913 when the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified that the federal government first possessed the Constitutional authority to levy an income tax.

Transitioning to an abolition of taxation will take time.

  • The 3L Movement does not advocate for the immediate or reckless abolition of all taxation.  Instead, the 3L Movement advocates for a careful, rational, fair, and steady transition, allowing time for alternative funding mechanisms consistent with the 3L Philosophy to effectively replace taxation without compromising any necessary services or benefits to people who are justly entitled to them.
  • However, the 3L Movement applauds any responsible movement toward less taxation as a worthwhile endeavor that should continue until we realize our goal of responsibly eliminating all taxation.
  • We must carefully transition to voluntary funding mechanisms to pay for vital services (like courts) and to pay off the earned and contracted benefits, pensions, and other unfunded government liabilities now entirely funded by taxation.

Applying the Legal Principle

  • Of course, any person, group, or corporation that earns money peacefully is the rightful owner of those funds.

Tax is theft

  • No person, group, corporation, or government has a legitimate right to forcefully appropriate another’s money without their consent. Doing so initiates nonconsensual physical force against another person’s property. Civilized people agree that theft is a crime. We all learn this rule as children.
  • Theft remains wrong regardless of who or what entity is acting. Most people indeed remit their taxes without any nonconsensual physical force being initiated. However, this point is irrelevant because the underlying threat of force compels them to remit payments. This situation equates to coercion. People send their money because they fear the consequences of not doing so.
  • Re-labelling the involuntary appropriation of another’s property as “taxation” instead of “theft” or “robbery” does not change the nature of the act. Naming poison as milk does not change the nature of the poison. Taxation is taking another’s money without their permission. This is theft and, therefore, contrary to the Legal Principle.
  • If you believe taxes are voluntary, you could effectively test your conclusion by refusing to pay them. We do not advise this, as you would be at risk of imprisonment for tax evasion. If you run this test, you will find out the hard way that there is nothing voluntary about taxation.

Taxation and democracy

  • Even if people hold a full, free, and fair election on the point, and the majority votes to approve the theft, any theft remains wrong. Does wrong become right if the majority agrees to engage in the wrong? What if most kindergarten kids fairly vote to forcefully take the toy of one of their classmates?

“Can’t you just leave the country?”

  • The fact that you are free to leave the jurisdiction does not change the analysis. The fact that people are free to run away from a thief and thereby possibly escape the theft does not justify the theft for those victims who choose to stand their ground despite the option to flee. We wouldn’t want a kindergarten teacher to advise the children in class if they do not want their toys forcefully taken by the majority of other children; the proper solution is to move to a different class or leave the school.

“Don’t the ends justify the means, especially when taxing the rich?”

  • Theft is still wrong, even when coercively appropriating based on a progressive graduated income scale to address wealth inequality. Even if we use the proceeds of the theft for essential charitable purposes, theft remains wrong nonetheless. Taxation is legalized theft on a governmental level.

“How would we provide essential services without tax?”

  • Before the abolition of slavery, many slave owners, when confronted with the issue of ending slavery, similarly wondered who would pick cotton if the law abolished slavery. Slave owners argued that many other dire consequences would befall us if slavery were outlawed.
  • Even if ending slavery would result in the cotton going unpicked and other harmful economic consequences, this would be no reason to continue the practice of slavery.
  • There are several ways to fund various essential services without taxation, including selling government assets and then responsibly investing the proceeds, conducting voluntary lotteries, and charging reasonable fees for services.
  • We can achieve a peaceful, prosperous, and civilized world without taxation.

Applying the Aspirational Values

  • Any breach of the Legal Principle inherently breaches the aspirational values as well—aggressing, including through taxation, is not being voluntarily kind to others, nor is it characterized by win-win thinking, tolerance, civility, or high character.

Voluntary Kindness

  • Acting as an excellent human, including voluntary kindness, is essential for a virtuous society. Forced kindness is not. The cultural expectations of 3L are that members be voluntarily kind, in ways they define for themselves. By helping those less fortunate than ourselves, we mitigate some of the challenges of eliminating taxation.

People are generous

  • We should have confidence in the willingness of civilized people to engage in voluntary kindness. Even with a heavy tax burden, the statistics demonstrate that humans have a high propensity for generosity. For example, in the USA:

Giving increases as taxation falls

  • As wealth increases, so does the amount given to charity. It is reasonable to expect charitable giving to rise if people stop being constant victims of theft by governments.
  • Further, the free markets that would result from a 3L society would raise standards of living, as all the restrictive laws that don’t align with the Legal Principle are removed. As living standards rise and people become wealthier, we can expect more people to spend their money on the less fortunate voluntarily. Additionally, in a growing free market of charities, we should expect more efficient charities to play an even more critical role in the absence of forced wealth distribution.
  • As standards of living rise, as they always do in a free society, fewer and fewer people will be unable to afford essential services.
  • Alternatively, governments could charge fees for the use of their assets, such as roads, bridges, or courts, to help fund essential services.

Impact of tax on indigenous peoples

  • Taxes make a self-sufficient and environmentally-harmonious way of living unworkable.
  • This point was illustrated by the British “Hut Tax,” imposed on Indigenous Africans in the late nineteenth century.
    • By demanding monetary payments, the British forced self-sufficient communities into the colonial money economy, compelling men to leave their homes to work in mines, plantations, or colonial projects to earn the coins required to keep their families from punishment or eviction.
    • In doing so, the tax severed traditional reciprocity networks, replaced shared stewardship of land with monetary dependency, and established a system in which subsistence life was redefined as idleness.
    • It marked a turning point in the colonized world’s transition from gift-based, relational economies to the extractive monetary systems that Charles Eisenstein describes as central to the “sacred wound” of modern economics — the loss of connection between people, land, and value.

Imagination is our limitation.

  • It can sometimes be challenging to envision how voluntary mechanisms would replace services currently provided by the government. When the Soviet Union collapsed, a citizen there asked: “If the government no longer manufactured and sold shoes, how would it be possible for the free market to deliver shoes?” What was unimaginable to this Soviet citizen is evident to us. Not only can private companies deliver services previously administered by the state, but they do a much better job. It’s hard for us to imagine things like national defense being voluntarily organized, just as it was hard for someone to imagine shoe manufacturing being voluntarily organized after the fall of the Soviet Union.
    • As an example to demonstrate how complete privatization could function, consider Disney World, a private, for-profit amusement park where everything is privatized.
  • There are many creative ways to fund vital services voluntarily. Not being able to imagine them yet should not be a justification to aggress against others.

“The only difference between a taxman and a taxidermist is that a taxidermist takes only your skin.” ****Mark Twain

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