It's totally fine to think of taxation as theft, so long as you think of using public roads as trespassing.
And there are other solutions:
- Tax property owners to pay for roads near their buildings
- Toll roads
- Private ways (actually very common in housing developments and usually work even better than public ones because the landlord / homeowners association is incentivized to keep them well taken care of to keep people from moving out)
- Local income tax (something most libertarian's aren't against because living in a locale is a choice that is easier to change than, say, what country you are a citizen of)
- etc
An interesting mental trap people fall into is thinking that because currently something is paid for one way that taking away that source of income will mean it won't be paid for. The market has a way of working things out.
It's perfectly valid if I'm having the argument with someone who wants to pay zero taxes, but is fine using the roads currently in place.
Now, if they're saving up to buy land in Montana and live off the grid - fine, they're trying to work their way out of a circumstance they didn't ask to be placed in. But if someone's an armchair libertarian who hypocritically feeds off the teat they claim to loathe, then I find their argument a bit harder to swallow.
I would find it hard to find that person even if I went to a gathering of Libertarians.
Being anti-income tax is different than being anti-tax.
Many Libertarian's are OK with (in one form or another):
- Luxury sales and use tax (not on necessities like food and basic clothing)
- Toll roads
- Property tax
- Local income tax
With property tax being a little less common (although I am personally OK with it) because a lot of people will argue that if you have to pay taxes on it you don't really own it.
Then again... I take that back... I WOULD be able to find that person at a gathering of libertarians but my personal experience is that he would be in the minority.
Edit: to add to the lats sentence, perhaps a very loud vocal minority.
So you pay a tax, that tax supports a system we call "society", which kills or controls the masses who would otherwise murder you and take everything you think you own.
I call it the zombie tax because the best way to imagine the alternative would be the unstoppable hordes of zombies we see in hollywood films.
It's not that different from kids playing pretend in their parent's basement, inventing any rules they want for their game. They can do whatever they want, because there isn't anyone else around to tell them differently.
A lot, I mean a _lot_ of people do not often think about this fact, they sort of assume that these concepts were handed down by some impossible deity (god is not real.) But the truth is they emerged from intelligent self-aware people who for various reasons simply decided that these things should exist.
So with that in mind, if property is make-believe, how can you "own" something? What precisely is ownership? Just more make-believe, using different words.
If it exists at all, it's a social contract, and when it's you versus everyone else, hate to break it to you but it means nothing.
Just because it is that way doesn't mean it should be.
An obvious answer, though not satisfying, is that some states are too poor for that.
Police and medical should be paid for by other taxes (probably also property tax but there are other solutions).[1]
None of them should be paid for by income tax.
I live in a state with no income tax that receives no federal funds (to the best of my knowledge) for fire and police yet I still have service... go figure...
[1] Oddly enough as against taxes as I am, I don't think someone should have to pay a month+ income to get an ambulance ride to the hospital but that is a whole other can of worms unrelated to this article.
Also: it's fairly easy to pay lower taxes with a good accountant. A cry to lower taxes is made by the elite to convince the middle class to vote for corporate-friendly interests.
The only people that 100% literally mean taxation is theft are anarchists.
Then the best thing would be to just stop saying it, and discuss the substantive issues instead. The real issues of what functions need funding, by how much, and how, is a never-ending debate that isn't helped by trite aphorisms, even if, superficially, they seem to cut the Gordian knot.
Because it is an anarchist argument which attempts to equate government to organized crime. Those hyperbolic anarchists are the ones using the term as intended.