Is Taxation Theft?
Not If You’re Not Entitled to Your Paycheck in the First Place, Says Philosopher
Philip Goff argues that libertarians make a variety of unsupported and unsupportable assumptions when they claim that taxation is theft. We defend the libertarian claim against Goff. (What else did you expect us to do?)
https://aeon.co/essays/if-your-pay-is-n ... is-the-tax
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/ ... ciety.htmlSome radical libertarians hold that all taxation is immoral, on the grounds that it amounts to the state stealing the money of private citizens. This is an extreme position, but the sense that tax involves the government taking ‘our money’ is ubiquitous, and hugely influential in real-world politics. The former British prime minister David Cameron, for example, repeatedly made a ‘moral case’ for low taxes, based on the need to give back to you, the citizen, more of ‘your money’. And even those who believe in relatively high taxes tend to start from the assumption that one has some kind of moral claim to one’s gross income, a claim that is overridden only by the greater good of equality or the need to fund public services. Outside of academia, almost everyone assumes that the money I get in my pay-packet before the deduction of taxes is, in some morally significant sense, ‘mine’.
It turns out that there's no contradiction between these principles: Even though a worker is paid the value of his or her marginal product, it is still true that the rest of society benefits from the worker's contribution to the economy. And look at it another way: If highly productive workers were suddenly to become monks, the rest of us would be materially poorer, even though those workers were paid the value of their marginal product before becoming monks. In this essay, I'll reconcile the apparent tension between these two standard principles, by explaining first the role of specialization and then the distinction between inframarginal and marginal units.
