Calling the view of approximately half the US population "unserious" is why we are where we are. People who cannot fathom or refuse to accept some widespread opinion/view/belief of another is why we are mired in identity politics and are beholden to bands of 80 year old children yelling at one another between oxygen hits and running the country into the ground.

I think you ought to be more charitable to the opinion expressed by others, it's far more constructive.

It's certainly not half, and really how we get mired in these things is way more complex than what you mentioned; I'd argue a lot of getting bogged down and accomplishing nothing is people whose views are not worth consideration (not all of them are, shocker!) clamoring about how oppressed they are that their disingenuous positions are not being taken seriously.

If someone really believes taxation is theft, that is past the point of consideration. That leaves little avenue for reconcile, makes the bias very clear, and puts on full display the lack of critical thinking.

I get the sense this discussion has more to do with which team you play for than the substance of the policy. Team A will lean hard into it because Team B is hard against it, and vice-versa.

Every year, we all have the option to donate more money to the government or related charities, voluntarily. That money could be put to good use on programs like this. How many people advocating for such policies do it? Probably very few. It's much easier to spend someone else's money than your own. Especially if we can convince ourselves that people with more money than us are bad people and don't deserve the same respect as we do. Where have we seen that play out before?

You can't seriously propose a solution for the tragedy of commons scenario. I wouldn't voluntarily donate money to the government because it is dumb to make your living worse for statistically zero gain (because a single donation is like that, and no one else would donate). But I fully support taxation (as a concept, current brackets and laws are very inefficient), exactly because it is enforced on all population at gunpoint. I would not join army voluntarily, but I actually was in one because we have a mandatory draft and unfortunately a reason for it now.

The only way humans can function in communities bigger than 100 people is enforcement of resource sharing, or they will be expelled/punished. This doesn't mean that enforced sharing is bad in absolute terms. It is relatively "bad" and inefficient, but the only alternative is chaos and no sharing at all.

You are saying that half the US population views taxation as theft.

Technically just the income tax, but yes somewhere between 40 and 55 percent view it that way, the exact number depends on who is asking. Pew number are more like 55%, MSNBC lower.

Come on, seriously. Show your source. I've got a Pew chart here that says 53% say they "pay the right amount" in taxes, while another 4% say they pay less than their fair share.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/10/5-facts-on-...

You're saying that half the population don't just say "more than my fair share", but that they view it as literal theft.

Calling it stealing in the first place is inflammatory.

Taxation by itself is inflammatory and has been the reason for most uprising, revolutions and wars since the beginning of history. Using a higher perspective it is easy to see that taxation is analogous to war.

Not every opinion deserves consideration.

Alas, that's the slippery slope that's led us here. In a conversation, all opinions have value.

>Calling the view of approximately half the US population "unserious" is why we are where we are.

A large amount of people think the Earth is flat. Am I now supposed to consider flat-earthers a serious position?

>People who cannot fathom or refuse to accept some widespread opinion/view/belief of another is why

I can perfectly fathom it, much like I can understand why someone would believe the Earth is flat. That doesn't make the position any less serious.

>I think you ought to be more charitable to the opinion expressed by others, it's far more constructive.

Much like a flat-earther, I consider those who think the taxation is theft have not put any actual research or thought into their position, and have simply come to that position by naively interpreting the first experiences they have come to understand from their senses.

And yet belittling still gets you no where. Sounds like you aren't interested in conversing with others and rather just want to garner votes from your tribe.

If you found my comments belittling, then you should consider if you have a personal attachment to the idea that taxation is theft. If I thought 2+2=5, and someone called me out as wrong, I wouldn't take personal offense to it.

If you seriously think taxation is theft, I think the best I can offer is to think about how do you define ownership? Before you have theft, you must have ownership.

* * *

>Is that a fair assessment?

Think about what you are saying when you say "my property". Owning something is not a natural law of the universe. If I go into your house and take your laptop how are you going to take it back? If I'm stronger than you, then tough shit. Or we have a war and if I win the war I take your stuff. Most people would call the police (the government) to sort it out, and the government will look at the law and decide who has rightful ownership.

Your right to property is given to you by the state and you pay your taxes for that right. Without the state, you don't have property; you are a warlord with a gun up until a stronger warlord decides to run you over.

>I still tend to think that government could fund all the welfare it needs if it simply stopped wasting so much money on cronyism and frivolous projects.

This is entirely different from the "taxation is theft" angle, but somehow "taxation is theft" only ever seems to apply when it's used for welfare and not for highway subsidies. It's strange that you are not "robbing peter to pay paul" when taxes are used to bomb russians.

The government collects revenue and must decide on the most efficient way to spend that revenue. Many economists have hypothesized that giving money directly to people is better than social programs such as food stamps.

> Your right to property is given to you by the state and you pay your taxes for that right. Without the state, you don't have property; you are a warlord with a gun up until a stronger warlord decides to run you over.

That's an interesting perspective. But I can't help noticing that it runs contrary to the founding principles of many societies - namely that theft is inherently wrong and one of government's roles is to enforce property rights. The very concept of theft itself presupposes the existence of property. Ie: your rights exist outside of any government. A government's role can only serve to enforce or restrict those rights - they are not granted by government. But I can also see how a difference of opinion on this could lead people to draw very different opinions with regard to a wide variety of other matters.

Putting aside the definition of what is property, if one considers money as a medium of exchange representing one's individual productivity, some might view taking someone's money without their consent as merely one-step removed from taking their time and labour without their consent.

When you say the "one of government's roles is to enforce property rights", you do realize that you are talking about other people right? Leaving money out of it, you expect the government (another human being) to expend labour on your behalf?

Would you then consider that theft of the enforcement of property rights? The idea that "taxation is theft", but simultaneously the government should defend your property rights (for free I guess?), is strange. It makes more sense to say that not paying your taxes is theft.

What those taxes are can be argued in a democratic society (as opposed to a monarchy where you might not have any say), but to call it theft is just to be wholly ignorant of the social contract we have here. Furthermore, these arguments tend to be used exclusively when it comes to welfare.

> The government collects revenue and must decide on the most efficient way to spend that revenue.

That's a reasonable textbook definition. How closely one thinks this represents the reality of how government actually functions will lead to highly variable opinions about how much of the public's money the government should have access to.

> Many economists have hypothesized that giving money directly to people is better than social programs such as food stamps.

I agree, if we as a society believe that some level of social welfare is worthwhile, then giving money directly to the people who need it is better than the current strings-attached programs that tend towards locking people into the poverty cycle. But very seldom are these programs proposed as a replacement, they are usually offered as an additional program. This means, more taxes, more bureaucracy and more waste, not less.

>But very seldom are these programs proposed as a replacement, they are usually offered as an additional program.

Blowing up an existing system that, if flawed, supports millions of people for another experimental system seems like a bad idea. Just like how removing an API with no deprecation schedule just because a new one is launched is a bad developer experience?

Calling the op's serious opinion unilaterally "unserious" is belittling.

There will never be a sufficiently nice enough way to call someone wrong on the internet.

I'm not sure how this is a strawman. My point is simply that just because a large number of people believe something, it does automatically make it a serious position.

> A large amount of people think the Earth is flat.

Citation needed. I wager the actual statistic is a rounding error.

> Calling the view of approximately half the US population "unserious"

First, I don't think half the US population seriously thinks taxation is theft. Mainly because a vast majority of us support medicare and defense spending, which are funded out of tax.

But this is where you get into "unserious" territory. Let's say everyone agrees to abolish taxation. That means no government, which means no government services, which leads to a lack of policing. In that world, who is going to enforce your property rights? Only thing ensuring things you consider yours stay yours is if you are stronger than everyone else.

Are you saying that half the US population really want to go back to eras when you only trusted your own tribe, wars and pillaging were rampant and only the might was right? If you don't intend to say that, then please explain who will enforce property rights in a nation of 330M people without any services funded by taxes.

I'm assuming OP meant income tax. Those who say "taxation is theft" (Ron Paul's tribe) are referring to the Federal income tax exclusively. It's a catchy phrase that isn't descriptive enough. But too be fair, "federal income taxation is theft" isn't going to make a nice t-shirt.

Also, "half" doesn't matter and I shouldn't have mentioned it. What matters is OP made a serious statement and then the comment I replied to dismissed it out of hand. Regardless of total percent, its a view which you will encounter at a level high enough that this sort of dismissal has effectively shut you off to a very large group of people.

> I'm assuming OP meant income tax.

What are the principled differences between income vs other (sales, property, inheritance) taxes? And why does it matter whether it is at a federal level? We still need services at federal level, eg. to run our armies who are essential to deter potential invaders.

Mostly historic, federal income tax was illegal until the early 1900s. The other difference, as I understand (not well versed in this it's not my pet-problem, I just like to understand something of what drives others to think what they think) is that an income tax brings a double tax. Taxed on all incoming money and then taxed on nearly all out going money. Prior to the amendment that made the federal income tax, there was still a Federal government, they relied on tariffs and other such taxes instead.

> Mostly historic, federal income tax was illegal until the early 1900s.

So what? They followed a due process of getting the amendment ratified, which means there was overwhelming support for it. Seems pretty legit to me. If you don't like it, pass another amendment repealing it. If it is truly bad and people hate it, they will repeal it just like what they did to prohibition.

> an income tax brings a double tax.

And so? Ultimately, we the people want stuff (medicare, social security, defense, national parks...) so we gotta pay for it. If you think you have a better alternative, propose it. If you think the stuff people want is frivolous, propose repealing all that spending and see if people buy into your vision.

You should consider asking someone who cares and believes this. I literally just thought the other guy was being uncharitable. Taxation as theft ain't my hill to die on.

Not at all, I come from France, and we've been robbed by taxation since the country started. There was a time where priests, from the church, came to collect in exchange of telling us all was well, we were at the position God wanted us to be and we should obey the local lord.

Imagine paying taxes for that service and not calling it "stealing".

One can challenge how tax are allocated or extracted.

But it's hard because most people only care once it s so inefficient and unfair nothing works anymore.

Replying with some vague hundreds-years-old anecdote is also incredibly unserious.

>Calling taxation "stealing" is an incredibly unserious position.

Yeah, taxation is obviously a protection racket, not theft.

That is a more accurate description. Like organized crime forces you to buy its services under threat of violence if you don't, government forces you to pay taxes to fund its services under threat of violence if you don't. One difference is that you often can't even avail yourself of the services that the government is forcing you to pay for.