It's libertarian extremism. It's simply the reverse of communism, where the taxation level is 100%, and the state provides everything. Under this model, the taxation level is 0, and the government provides nothing.

Neither of these models works at all.

I actually have a hard time thinking the other way around.

> Every sufficiently large collection of people in the history of the world has had taxation.

That's not really an argument in favor of taxes, many things have existed for a long time. And many wars were fought purely or most importantly on taxes: most of the american revolutions of independence were largely about taxes or tax-like sanctions.

Taxation has always been a contentious topic.

> Reasonable people can and do question taxations levels but not on the necessity of having taxes. It is unreasonable to consider taxation theft.

There are many arguments and school of thought within libertarians and anarco-capitalists. I'm no expert, but the taxation is theft argument does have nuances.

Taxation IS theft, because it is involuntary, and unless you concede the tax man a privilege over yourself, he is stealing from you. To me this is a non-negotiable concept: you are one way or another being forced to give your labor under threat of liberty.

But the reality is there are ways in the which theft can be justified, the same way we tend to forgive a robber that eats for sustenance, theft can be justified to pay for the military that gives you freedom in exchange of their lives.

You can eliminate taxes 100% if you made contributions voluntary. This is utopic in today's world, maybe, but not in the next world, the one we get to design and work towards to.

henvic doesn't like roads. :)

Who-would-pay-for-roads is as dumb a meme as taxation-is-theft. I complain about taxes all the time, but I wouldn't complain as much if the publicly funded roads I drive on most weren't absolutely shitty and if the snow removal that's part of my local government budget was actually done anywhere near where I live. I wouldn't complain as much if my state wasn't going into debt for the next 70 years to do upgrades and talking about charging tolls for other upgrades. I wouldn't complain as much if any significant percentage of my taxes were actually going to roads, and not political agendas, pet projects, wars on drugs and unauthorized wars on brown people who don't like our foreign policy. And I wouldn't complain as much if I didn't have to spend days and hire professionals to figure out how much I owe the road makers. Fuck the roads.

It’s not a meme. It’s a proper question to those who decry taxation as theft. Without taxation who would pay for government services? Your complaint about the road system indicates that taxes ought to be higher or are currently misallocated. The ire is not at the concept of taxation it’s at the allocation and level of taxation.

The fact that a government agency fails to provide the services you're taxed to pay for does not mean they should get more money. I pay far higher taxes where I live now than when I lived in an openly socialist country that had better roads, faster police response times, better (and universal) healthcare. Every time I dig into specific government projects the amount of waste and corruption is disgusting. Wanting to throw more money at it is stupid, and the burden of proof is not on the people who want to be taxed less that it's actually doing anything.

You apparently missed the “or are misallocated” part and completely missed the point of what I wrote. It seems like you are doing some projecting. My post does not in any way imply a “throw more money” attitude. Also, the original statement I responded to was an attitude that taxation is theft. It was not a statement about whether or not taxes should be reduced. Indeed, in my first post I specifically mentioned that reasonable people can and do question taxation levels.

I have complaints about the roads in the area where I live, and also how my taxes are spent.

If I didn't have roads in the area where I live, I wouldn't complain about it, I'd leave.

There's a pretty big difference between these two situations. It's easy to focus on the bad side of taxes, but it's important not to forget that they pay for some very basic stuff that shouldn't be taken for granted. There are plenty of things we would disagree about spending taxes on, I'm sure, but it's rather silly to pretend that you disagree with the existence of taxes completely when in fact you depend on them.

You may have noticed that I'm not saying taxation is theft. I'm saying I'm against the massive portion of government spending that I think is rank with abuse, waste and misuse of power. I actually spent several days in the last year looking into what my property taxes are supposed to be paying for at the county level and exactly none of the services are being done near my property, except for one, and that one service complains about not having enough money even when they get massive bumps in their budget - no matter what they ask for, when they receive it it's not enough for them to fulfill their obligations. Taxation in general - no I think it's necessary one way or another for our society. But I think the vast majority of it is wasted without enough accountability or integrity. But I guess I can always vote against the people doing, right? Yeah that's working great. But it's just justified with, "but we have to have roads."

I wonder what would happen if we allowed everyone paying taxes to dedicate a small percentage to a field they feel is important and underpaid, e.g. by choosing a category like education, road infrastructure, social services, military... for planning reasons this could be done a year in advance.

Would that make people feel more agency and ownership in their nation? Or would it produce (small) chaos?

Wouldn't change my feelings much because it doesn't do anything to address my current problems with the system. I would bet the same amount I pay in taxes that all it would do is increase the demand for money by agencies without any increase in accountability or thriftiness.

The one rule that annoys me the most in local tax spenders is how you cannot give money back to the state that you don't need that year, because then you will get less next year as well since obviously you didn't need it. At the end of the year you can see employees spend money on the most ridiculous things since they have to spend it all. At this point I think it's because the money is not meant for their task at all but rather to stimulate the (local?) economy, and that is not done by saving.

I'm not sure how the rules would have to be changed to allow for giving money back (and use it to pay for state debt, but that is probably not politically wished for either), since there most probably would be side effects. Still, this rule.. (Germany, but I've heard about others as well)

Does somebody know why this rule exists? At some point I complained to a state minister at some election thing, but I think he was too drunk to understand since he kept saying he didn't know what I was talking about and wanted to know who is doing this thing.

Okay, I'll agree that you didn't say taxation is theft if you will agree that I didn't say that roads are a justification for higher taxes.

The context of my comment about roads that you jumped on was that I was responding to a poster who was saying taxation is theft.

Yes, the parent comment was equally stupid. Parent comment doesn't wage the longest war in US history without ever voting on whether or not to wage it, make me pay for it, and then blame roads.

I think if you actually listened to the people making the roads argument instead of reacting to what you incorrectly think people are saying, you'd discover that most of them (myself included) oppose US military spending.

EDIT: Given the things you are complaining about, it seems like we're fairly in agreement about how we would like tax spending to be allocated.

It seems like you believe that removing/reducing taxes is more realistic than reallocating spending. It's a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I can see how this is choosing a realistic imperfect solution over an unrealistic perfect one.

In fact, I'd agree with you if you could separate the issue of taxation from the issue of spending allocation, but unfortunately, you can't. Taxation isn't actually strongly correlated with spending in the US. Historically, conservatives have decreased taxes while increasing spending (largely on the military). If you vote for people who run on a platform of decreasing spending, what you end up with historically in the US is people who cut a few token programs (welfare, for example) and pump far more money into the military than was saved by their cuts, increasing the national debt. The result is that by pushing for tax cuts you actually exacerbate the allocation problems you've pointed out.

>> the issue of taxation from the issue of spending allocation

Yeah and I think that mismatch is exactly how it's gotten so bad. How is it that we still have "the war", undeclared, after 16+ years? It's because everything is now enabled through whether or not there's a budget for it, and you can pretty much accept the budget or shut down the government, and everyone keeps choosing to just accept the budget and not hold their party responsible for promising shit again.

How much of the federal budget of any country do you think goes to roads.

Alternative viewpoint: traditionally taxation was done by the monarchs/oligarchs because they had the power to do so and in order to secure their position even further. This simply continued into the modern age. The evidence seems to suggest that consolidation and reallocation of resources through taxation is extremely inefficient.

I consider it unreasonable to claim it is unreasonable to consider taxation theft. It happening for a long time isn't a strong enough argument.

Taxation has been done by governments because all governments need money to function. Even in the monarch era localities needed money to run as well. It’s not the case that under monarchs taxes only went to the monarch to further his/her position.

The proper view is that government regardless of political system needs taxation to function. Calling taxation theft is unreasonable because the evidence is that it is a necessary aspect of having a society. It is not theft by any reasonable interpretation of the word.

I disagree that there is evidence showing it is a necessary aspect of having a society, though. What we have is evidence that societies with tax can function reasonably well, not that societies without tax are not able to function.

It is obvious that any system doing useful work needs resources, and money is a fungible way of representing those resources. However, in my opinion, it is unreasonable to say with certainty that taxation is the uniquely existent solution to this problem or even the best one.

Taxation has an inherent element of force to it, taking forcefully the product of someone's labour to redistribute it to other parties. I would say the element of forced redistribution qualifies it for at least some reasonable definitions of theft (albeit a theft with a good intent, under some definition of "good"). In any case, I am having a hard time drawing a clear line between taxation and, for example, Robin Hood-style redistribution, other than the current governments of the world being recognised as a sanctioned, official, good-enough Robin Hood occupying a local minimum.

Another problem of taxation is the well known market inefficiency of the very act of piling up resources in a central place and then trying to allocate them manually to where they are needed. There is plenty of empirical evidence that systems like this tend to swell in size for no good reason other than serving their own existence.