What philosophical premise finds objection with taxation in general??
Depends on the country but normally your success benefitted from things like your and your employees's education, police, infrastructure etc.
Taxes are a way to pay back. The amount is debatable not the existence as such.
The whole point of centralised laws is it's much more efficient than negotiating with everyone you meet as to whether they will k!ll you and/or take or stuff or not.
The scale of interactions in modern societies requires simplification of the management of those interactions - laws and enforcement of - what's allow or not is decided once, not every interaction.
BTW without governments opayed through taxes things like officious intermedler doctrine wouldn't exist instead you get the good old nice-place-you-got-there-be-a-shame-if-anything-happened-to-it doctrine.
Nice place you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it
So he is saying he hasn't asked for the government services but is been forced to pay for them. The obvious answer is that by being a member of society you have implicitly agreed to it's rules - you can't pick and choose.
That's such nonsense though, since as an individual you have virtually no impact on anything unless you were born into extreme wealth. No government that I'm aware of operates hypothecation (where you can specify what your taxes get used for), and voting for representatives based on policy commitments is crude, unreliable, and too slow to be adequately responsive. Nobody in the private sector has a job where they are only subject to performance review every 2/4/6 years.
In the US, few people truly support the roughly $1 trillion annual cost of 'defense' and nobody thinks it's efficiently allocated, but any proposals to significantly cut that sum are political suicide so it's never going to happen. Much of our current political angst stems from people's intuitive awareness that their taxes are a real fact of life whereas their influence on the political process is largely notional.
I'd argue that the democratic ties between the people and the actions of the government in the US are extremely fragile - money is more important than people now in the US electoral system.
Another American disease is to then extrapolate that malaise and assume the rest of the world is in a similar position.
The solution isn't to dissolve society - that removes the only mechanism ( government ) that the majority have to control the powerful, further entrenching the power of the rich.
The solution is to take money out of US politics and get it working again for the majority,
Imagine without asking you someone cleaned your car ,while you were shopping, and then demanded payment.
They're comparing the services provided by taxes to this.
It is silly. None of us consented to our parents / guardians raising us.. but for better or worse they did.
The real world tends not to be full of absolutes. It's unhelpfully reductive to go from "property is a right" to "taxation is theft".
And the above is a trade-off, the state polices & punishes murder and theft etc, with an aim of reducing it overall - so you are less likely to be murdered or stolen from.
Then this central mechanism needs paying for. Tax is simply a way of paying for it - and it's not voluntary to stop free-riders.
The reality is you need government & laws when people start living in complex societies where people are no longer self-sufficient, but rely on a complex web of interactions.
Laws are there to arbitrate between people - if you live on a homestead in the mountains they may seem unnecessary - if you live in a big city, where even essentials like food and water depend on a complex web of interactions - they are essential.
Property exists even in stateless societies
If it's a "buy-in" to a system people should have a way to "buy out" as well, which of course doesn't happen, because there never was any "buy-in", it was "pay us your wages or we'll hunt you down". Slaves could buy their own freedom in Rome and other places, so why can't "free" people under taxation?
Property rights should rank far lower than human rights. So if you want to collect taxes, go after property instead of after people. But it is the property owning class who runs the two-sided coin of capitalism/socialism, so good luck on that.
Almost nobody would pay taxes if there weren’t the implicit threat of a man with a gun.
And do you think you'd be free of violence in a government free world?
Sure, in the end, all laws are enforced by physical violence - arrest, imprisonment etc - but that just underlines the physical nature of the world - the threat of a man with a gun doesn't go away when you remove collective will.
Positive rights are a fiction to euphemize theft and slavery. From a purely logical standpoint, negative rights can be the only true rights.
We have that consensus, and relatively efficient enforcement of it, it just happens to disagree with you on what stuff's inalienably yours.
They don’t, and they wouldn’t, because we do not have that consensus.
Either way, my point isn't that the consensus is unchallengeable. My point is that it's exactly the same consensus that makes "property" and "theft" actually things. Without any sort of consensus, "theft" is just a change in who's using an object and if you try to stop them you're the one initiating force. Quite a lot of people wouldn't willingly refrain from driving your car.
“Rights” are a mental abstraction. The only real rights you have are the ones you can defend with force.
> Negative rights versus positive rights, this is an old and well-documented dichotomy.
You can go on about "negative rights" all you want, but they're meaningless unless there's "a man with a gun" making sure they're respected. You may say that, you'll be that guy with the gun, but then what happens when there are more bandits than you can handle? Try to solve that problem, and pretty soon you've invented government with taxes and everything. Refuse to solve that problem, and you're a serf to some bandit lord.
The libertarian dream is like an unstable element that has a half-life of a microsecond. Sure, maybe you can imagine conditions for its existence and people can (and do) write books about how it would work under those conditions. However, that's all moot because those conditions are unstable and it will quickly decay into something else.
To me it's like similar to full communism, both of them mean well but in practice don't work well.
If you get more out of a system than someone else you should be probably willing or want too contribute more to it's upkeep.
I think they also don't know how long the history of taxation really is. Taxation is pretty much as old as civilization itself.
Extreme libertarianism, which is seriously flawed, but people still fall for it (out of greed and/or seduction by an oversimple toy model that can't actually work in practice).
You may believe that a violation of people’s natural rights to own things and be free from violent coercion is justified in service of building a central government, but it is still a human rights violation.
Surely all it is, is something most people agree on.
Take ownership of land for example - doesn't really make sense - at some point it wasn't 'owned' then somebody declared they owned it and could pass that right on in perpetuity.
Such a construct doesn't exist outside a system of laws ( created from an agreement from the majority of people ) - it's not some magic 'natural right'.
Again there is no 'natural right' - just something most people agree makes sense.
The idea of rights was a tool to try to get wide agreement ( internationally ) on the basics that most people agree on whatever culture. It's a useful tool - but to imbue some sort of existence outside society is an attempt at a Jedi mind trick.