| | Ted wrote, If you own land, and are unwilling to pay property taxes, who will protect you from invasion, foreign or domestic? The question is who will protect you from invasion by your very own government when it has the right to expropriate your property in order to protect you from having it expropriated? You talk of being "unwilling" to pay property taxes, as if they were voluntary and as if you could be "unwilling" to pay them. But, of course, they're not voluntary, and you can't be "unwilling" to pay them; you are forced to pay them. Taxes are a form of armed robbery by the greatest thief this country has ever known -- its very own government. Property is a political institution. The American Indians didn't pay taxes, see where that got them? Yeah, right; the reason the American Indians were conquered by the white settlers is that they weren't robbed by other Indians and forced to subsidize their own defense! Brilliant! And one always has the Russian alternative. Few people there pay taxes, but 80% of business pay protection money, and those who protest the Russian system inherit little plots, six feet deep. If you don't want to pay taxes to protect overseas shipping, to whom do you complain when your imports are pirated on route? And what's wrong with piracy, Ted? Is it that piracy takes people's property without their consent? And what do you think taxes do? They take people's property without their consent. So in taxing people to protect them from piracy, you are stealing people's property in order to prevent their property from being stolen. No contradiction there, right?Sure, we can try a lottery or try selling of public lands or even taxing the airwaves or coal mines and other limited common resources. Taxing the airwaves or coal mines as an alternative to property taxes? How is that any better? Maybe a tax on court-enforceable contracts will prove a workable solution. Are you referring to Rand's proposal? What she proposed was not a tax, but a voluntary payment in exchange for having your contracts enforced. To call it a "tax" is to obliterate the distinction between choice and force -- voluntary payment and compulsory payment -- money freely given and money coercively extorted -- which is a distinction that is evidently lost on those who defend taxes as a legitimate function of government. But this is a premature non-issue in search of a disagreement. A premature non-issue in search of a disagreement?? Are you serious?! Taxation is grand theft on a grand scale, and is responsible for virtually all the evils of the welfare and warfare state. To call it "a premature non-issue in search of a disagreement" reflects a failure to understand what Objectivism stands for, which is respect for individual rights. This continued fantasy of no taxation as opposed to a reasonable accommodation to an unregulated economy with minimal taxes amounts to opposing the good as not good enough. How do you think we got to the stage at which we are now being robbed of almost half our income to support the kind of government programs that should never have existed to begin with? We got here precisely because we gave the government the power to tax our income and our property -- to take our money without our consent. The only way to prevent this sort of thing from happening is not to give the government that power in the first place. If you give it the power to steal your money, then on what grounds do you complain that it is stealing "too much"? You've already conceded the principle that it has the right to determine what is done with your property -- that in any disagreement between you and the government over how to spend your money, it is the government that has the final say. Good luck trying to persuade it to respect your rights when you've already conceded that it has the right to violate them!
- Bill
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