Calling taxation "stealing" is an incredibly unserious position.
>My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023
If charity was an effective case against poverty, we wouldn't need "more" charity.
I think you ought to be more charitable to the opinion expressed by others, it's far more constructive.
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.
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.
I think this gives an interesting insight into the point of contention. It appears that one side views the money about to be taxed as their property whereas the other side views that money as something else. Is that a fair assessment?
If someone views the money as their property and the act of taxation as the government seizing that property (especially if the government spends it unwisely), I can see a logical route to "taxation is theft."
However, if someone views society as a group bound by a social contract with a shared responsibility to ensure nobody falls too far down the ladder lest they lose their ability to contribute to society, I can also see a logical path to "taxes are a shared responsibility for the maintenance of society."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Citation needed. I wager the actual statistic is a rounding error.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, taxation is obviously a protection racket, not theft.
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. And I do wonder where the money could come for a universal income ... ourselves at best ? Foreigners at worst ?