So you're saying that it does not violate my rights when someone else claims to own an arbitrary portion of my income? With 25% taxes, I work for 3 months of the year for someone else. If I choose not to pay, then people with guns come to lock me up. How is that not slavery?
> It's everyone's, in the form of the government.
Government is not society. Government is a group of people who consume the productive output of society by force.
jonathanstrange is right: Property rights are a complex issue, attempts to align them with "basic human rights" have limited success, and invariably muddy the waters.
You and I are on an island. You have money (or coconuts, or whatever). We agree that if I work for you, then you will give me some payment. That payment is my income.
How does that example depend on the state or a tax system?
The income you and I have today is inextricably tied to the system of government, taxation, and trade that we are in. You can't talk about holding one fixed and changing the other in any meaningful way.
Now the toy examples - two guys on an island have some of their own problems. If it's just you and I on an island we won't bother with currency or payment (this is part of why it's a toy model). Their tends to be furious hand-waving between this sort of example and a "real" economy, and part of the reason for that is much of the mess as it scales up in practice (e.g. in actual history) tends to be creation of exactly the sort of institutions OP is trying to elide. I'm not sure I buy it, but there is at least an argument to be made that they are necessarily tied together.
You can talk about purely theoretical systems with a different basis - but they are completely different systems. Ones that nobody has actually worked out how to implement, for that matter, though there is lots of theorizing. Always worth remembering that the majority of economic theorizing seems to have a fairly loose connection to the observable world.
Fwiw: the desert island scenario, along with Smith's bartering villages are flawed enough to be probably best avoided.
> The income you and I have today is inextricably tied to the system of government, taxation, and trade that we are in.
Yes, that is our current context.
> You can't talk about holding one fixed and changing the other in any meaningful way.
Yes, the world is complex. I simply wish to see one with more voluntary interaction and less coercion. Too few hold liberty as a political value, settling for lesser subjective things such as "fairness."
Here is a better one: on the island there is you, me and Bob. Bob does not participate in our trades, but is responsible for things like protecting the island from neighboring tribes, putting out forest fires we accidentally start while camping, and building the paths and roads we use to get around the island.
These things not only benefit us, it can easily be argued that our everyday trades would not be possible without them. Without roads I would not be able to reach you, without Bob's protection I would be robbed or worse on the way to meet you.
This is why Bob is inherently entitled to a portion of our income. Without Bob, the environment in which you and I can comfortably conduct business would not exist.
The real counter-examples comes at larger scales. At a certain point it becomes impractical for a large number of people to individually make voluntary agreements about their responsibilities to each other, so generally people agree to some system of deciding rules, and agree to the outcome of those decisions in advance, without consenting to each one individually.
You're free to choose another place to live. You're free to choose how you earn your living, or even whether or not you do earn a living. Nobody will beat you senseless if you decide to take a vacation this week. Nobody has absolute control over every detail of your life. You can marry and associate with whom you choose. You can object to paying 25% of your income, hand out tracts to that effect, and vote for politicians who may change that. You can't be bought and sold.
I would like you to realize that it requires indoctrination to agree with you. Indoctrination that the end result of due process is "right". Indoctrination that the word tax is exempt from scrutiny.
If that were the only way taxes were spent, then taxes would be very low indeed, and we may not even need to have this discussion.
> and needs
Taxes pay for way more than "needs." Do we need to bomb people in the Middle East? If there no other way to pay for things than by the threat of violence?
> You're free to choose another place to live.
Am I? The United States must grant permission for you to renounce your citizenship, and until then, they claim taxes on your income no matter where derived. The government also controls the movement of people and may detain me if I attempt to leave the country. Of course I must also have the consent of some other government to gain entry and a work visa.
I did not freely choose to live in my country of birth. I did not consent to the obligations of taxes.
> You can object to paying 25% of your income, hand out tracts to that effect, and vote for politicians who may change that. You can't be bought and sold.
But in the end, you must pay...
The slave trade was abolished, I don't think you really need to write a thesis on it. Everyone accepts that, and now would like to elevate attention to more nuanced inequalities.
Starting at 10, you put in about twenty minutes of work defending you, your family, and your possessions from other, less scrupulous folks (defense). Then you spend about forty five minutes putting a little bit aside for your future self (SS, Medicare). After that, another 15 minutes of work provides insurance against becoming catastrophically poor and sick (Medicaid). The rest of the time covers everything else: building infrastructure so you can move around, inspections so that you, your food and your medicine are safe (FDA, USDA, OSHA, EPA), regulations so that you can save and invest with confidence (SEC, CFPB), and the like. You maybe spend thirty seconds, maybe a minute on research (which forms the basis for new treatments that keep you alive, lays the groundwork for new products that delight you, and even helps you understand your place in the universe). At the stroke of noon, you spend an instant working on some things that perhaps you're not sure about (National Endowment for the Arts, NPR (maybe)), and then you're back to making money for yourself.
I would argue this is a fantastic deal!
The normal response by anti-tax people is that all of the roles of government should be funded by opt-in systems, where you agree to pay a fee to get the service.
However, this doesn't work for a lot of public goods that suffer from free loader problems; you can't prevent people from benefiting from the good if they don't pay. Take, for example, roads; either roads are public, and a freeloader can choose not to pay and use them anyway, or they are private toll roads, and a person could be literally imprisoned because every road to move around requires payment to use.
An even more obvious example is something like pollution control. Society has an interest in preventing people from dumping toxic waste into rivers and lakes, so we create restrictions. However, someone has to enforce those restrictions, and that requires funding. Without taxes, we would have to volunteer to pay money for the enforcement; however, why would I pay? I get to enjoy the clean water whether I pay or not, so why not just freeload? This will mean enforcement funding will not be there, and people can just pollute as much as you want.
You need a way to get everyone to contribute for public goods, which is why we need taxes.
a public good is a good that is both non-excludable
and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be
effectively excluded from use and where use by one
individual does not reduce availability to others
It's hard to imagine a society not oriented around roads, since the government has been building them for so long. But lots of people have an economic interest in using and maintaining the roads.
> An even more obvious example is something like pollution control.
Ah, the good old, "Libertarians can't handle externalities."
Well there is lots of free-market scholarship on pollution and courts going back decades. If you're actually curious about it, I can point you in that direction. If you've already made up your mind, then there's no point elaborating.
One quick aside: during the Industrial Revolution, government courts sided with industry in pollution matters, granting them the right (sometimes monopoly) to pollute. Plaintiffs were ignored by the government in pollution cases, since industrial progress was more important than their health. So government actually made pollution worse...
An income/sales tax is not "all taxes".
Even more so, they are often so unsure of their ability to judge whether you are unwilling to work vs unable, they'll give you money in the form of social benefits if you are poor, just in case. You have the choice in these nations to live (albeit a modest life) without working at all. That's the opposite of slavery. It's closer to aristocracy!
It's conditional upon you choosing to work, but the demand made upon you is illegitimate nonetheless. You choosing to work and consequently earning income does not grant someone else a moral right to force you hand over a share of that income to them (to labour for them).
>You have the choice in these nations to live (albeit a modest life) without working at all. That's the opposite of slavery. It's closer to aristocracy!
Given it's a life dependent on income forcibly redistributed from others, it's similar to the life of a slave owner, but a very poor one that shares the loot with millions of other co-recipients.
But it's not slavery because you are not forced to produce on threat of death. My issue was the devaluation of the term "slavery", not the legitimacy of the confiscation. If you consider it entirely illegitimate, then what was described is armed robbery.
(This assumes that the government has crowded out private charity, which is the case in most developed countries.)
These are public goods that we all benefit from and share the cost of. That is what taxes are supposed to pay for. That's why it's not slavery. You are paying for those things that damn near everyone agrees they want.
As for social programs where money is simply redistributed from one citizen to another - that's a whole other story. I agree with you there that is slavery. Those citizens can vote themselves money from your pocket and if you disagree - the guys with guns show up and take it anyway, and maybe even lock you up for disagreeing.
> You expect there to be... That's why it's not slavery. You are paying for those things that damn near everyone agrees they want.
If those things are important to me, then I will pay for them. Just because someone else "expects" certain things doesn't mean I do. Everyone manages to put shoes on their feet without the government. And charity could certainly take care of the rest without shoes.
Taxation is not a prepayment for services rendered. Or an insurance policy. Or a usage fee.
> social programs ... I agree with you there that is slavery
Excellent. Then let's agree to move in the direction where government only does the "public goods" stuff. Once we get there, we can disagree again on how far we want to go.
That is part of the terms of your citizenship here, an agreement to which your parents consented on your behalf when you were too young to consent.
If you refuse to pay the tax, people with guns do not come for you. Your wages may be garnished, or money taken from your savings accounts, because that money you owe in tax is not yours. It's all of ours, to use for public goods and services, to be shared by all of us.
People who refuse to pay tax are stealing from all of us.
People who don't like the tax arrangement in this country are free to 1) try to change it or 2) leave. I welcome both options. Stealing from us, that just makes me angry.
Seriously? People get put in jail for tax evasion all the time. Certainly lots of guns involved in that process.
> money taken from your savings accounts
Not theft?
> public goods and services, to be shared by all of us
No. Tax money is distributed to favored interests. It is not shared among all.
So what portion of your property do I have a right to? Which part of your home or possessions may I come and direct to my purposes? Or to "the rest of us" even? May I go to your fridge and distribute some fruit to your neighbors or to the homeless? How is a claim to income different than a claim to your other property?
The vast majority of people who do not pay tax--who steal from the rest of us--simply have it taken from their accounts or paychecks by the legal machinery we've established to do so.
And again, garnishing paychecks or withdrawing from accounts is not theft, because it is not your money.
Remember, by definition, your tax obligation is not yours. It never was. Keeping it from the rest of us is stealing from us.
And last....
"So what portion of your property do I have a right to? Which part of your home or possessions may I come and direct to my purposes? Or to "the rest of us" even? May I go to your fridge and distribute some fruit to your neighbors or to the homeless? How is a claim to income different than a claim to your other property?"
Great questions! That's what the democratic process is for, for us to settle those questions. Right now, we have one set of answers to those questions. We won't always, because laws are always changing to reflect the society that writes them.
Hey, if you reeeeeally hate taxes, maybe you can make some pamphlets and get enough of us on board to vote in your new tax-free system.
What a strange debt: one that a person assumes without their consent, and which you only know about by violating their privacy.
With regard to the last point: if I trade $1 million worth of goods with another private party, you have no way of knowing I "owe" you and the rest of society anything unless you somehow get details about that private trade. If myself and the private party do not divulge any information about our private activities, you would need to violate our privacy rights and force us to divulge information about our private interactions for you to uncover the existence of this debt that we owe you.
How absurd your moral framework is..
Because they will not come with guns if you choose not to work.
I do not think you understand slavery, where you cannot choose not to work.
If that's all the government funded, then taxes would be very low indeed.
> some of our profits
But it's not "some" is it? It's over 50% in places.
It's everyone's, in the form of the government.