How would you refute the common agurement that "taxation is theft"?
Refuting Liberterian Talking points
Isaac Clark
Other urls found in this thread:
world.std.com
world.std.com
Ethan Brooks
profit is theft
Andrew Ramirez
While taxation is undesirable and inefficient, taxes are used by the state to fund public services like education, healthcare, security, transportation, etc. Meanwhile the surplus value which bosses extract from their workers' labour is only used by the boss to accumulate wealth for himself. This is theft, not taxes.
Liam Harris
farming my own land is commodity profit
work is a voluntary contract
Lincoln Stewart
Why refute it?
Stealing from rich people is good.
Hunter Brooks
Taxation is theft, it steals from the worker to fund the state which tramples him to serve the interests of the capitalist. Most "tax cuts" in bourgeoisie politics results in raising taxes on the workers by transferring the tax to consumption while lowering it on high income or other capitalist sources of wealth. The lolbert "fairtax" is a glaring example of this, as the workers would suddenly find themselves paying huge amounts of money to fund their existence while the capitalist is able to accumulate significantly more wealth due to the smaller portion of his income he spends on consumption than the worker has to.
Joshua Hill
If my options are "work or starve to death" then it isn't really voluntary.
Easton White
Ok let me just starve then
Nicholas Hughes
Taxation IS theft, but why must taxes exist in the first place if the government simply withholds the amount of money necessary to take care of their expense in the first place? It's not taxation, i think.
Xavier Richardson
Start here:
world.std.com
The rest of the site is also excellent:
world.std.com
It's the result of 24 years of concentrated USENET autism
Christian Cooper
You can't, and you also shouldn't. Libertarianism is an absolutely inconsequential and, apart from it, absolutely idealistic concept, consensus can't be had. Thus, arguing with libertarians is a waste of time, unless you are personally vested in a person.
"taxation is theft" is a completely moral and arbitrary judgement, stemming from a ridiculous idea that the economy is a system of ethics, not an objectively real system that functions independently of what people think about it.
Easton Wilson
Farming a particular plot of land is production. Why mystify it?
Wyatt Cruz
Taxation is theft, but so is private property.
Noah Wood
Wage is theft
Jason Wood
That's not an argument, that's an opinion.
Aaron Green
This pretty much.
Taxation is immoral, but in our world we are choosing between bad and worse, and taxation is a lesser evil.
Kevin Gonzalez
Some taxes are, but governments that issue fiat currency just incinerate all of the taxes that they collect. They pay for things with checks that banks (who benefit profoundly from this relationship) honor.
Noah Morgan
What exactly does this mean? If you choose to suck my cock in response to me putting a gun to your head, is that voluntary? You can say it's not voluntary because you have a right not to get shot, but who has the authority to choose, decree and enforce such a right?
This is the kind of sillyness you get when you conceptualize freedom through the behaviour of conscious actors rather than the availability of options.
Ryder Bell
Landon Reed
Why are all the "authoritarian" countries that liberals harp on so based?
North Korea, Albania, Romania, DDR, etc.
Jose Parker
taxation is theft but it's a way softer theft than the one of private property in general. workers face the biggest theft every single day of their disgusting but honorable lives. Period.
Ethan Cook
post this pic
Also, in a theoretical society that's actually voluntary/democratic it's not theft if you agree on the taxes.
fpbp
Liam Hernandez
Avoid trite autism phrases, because they can be just as autistic back. Point out to them how that no free market exists, and then groups of people MUST organize to protect themselves from profit.
The libertarian already agrees that money buying politics is bad. But as long as there is money, and as long as there is a government, this will be an issue. The only solution is for the state, controlled by the people, to regulate monopolies.
This isn't irregular at all, electric companies are forced to keep their prices low despite having natural monopolies. Today, electricity is cheap and wide spread. Where is the socialist hellhole you said would occur? Where are the gulags?
Isaiah Rodriguez
see hooktube.com/watch?v=t-puqQYlbFM
Zachary Parker
...
Wyatt Ward
Yep.
"Voluntary" implies something that you do even if you didn't had to.
Engaging in anything in which the "other option" is to die, to starve, to become homeless, etc, isn't voluntary at all. Nothing that you have to do to survive or to keep your well being can be fit into voluntary.
Levi Morales
The absolute state of mental gymnasts
This idea that you have a right to receive for free or for cost of labor anything that you need that is owned by another person because it would be exploitative to ask you to perform some task in exchange or pay a price that compensates them for the value of the object is one of the top 10 dumbest assertions I've ever heard. Is it not exploitative to force someone to give up something they have in exchange for nothing or for an arbitrarily fixed price that they don't agree to?
Bentley Ortiz
the bourgeoisie doesn't 'have' the MoP except in the form of legal fiction and the physical force to enforce aforementioned legal fiction.
read Proudhon