Taxation is both theft and immoral

Argument 1: Theft Premise One: My opponent makes the assumption that governmental decrees make the law. The law is much more fundamental; just laws are the proper rules governing the organization of individuals. Natural law is the determiner of theft, and has primacy over the State’s “law”. Frederic Bastiat, in The Law, shows why placing coercion above rights when determining the law is nonsensical: “Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life; elements, each of which is rendered complete by the others, and that cannot be understood without them. For what are our faculties, but the extension of our personality? and what is property, but an extension of our faculties? If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his property, a number of men have the right to combine together to extend, to organize a common force to provide regularly for this defense. Collective right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness, in individual right; and the common force cannot rationally have any other end, or any other mission, than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of The Law another individual—for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes. For this perversion of force would be, in one case as in the other, in contradiction to our premises. For who will dare to say that force has been given to us, not to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren? And if this be not true of every individual force, acting independently, how can it be true of the collective force, which is only the organized union of isolated forces?” Premise Two: In the case of the injury caused by the company, the company willfully violated the rights of the injured party; in doing so, they consented to whatever moral consequences followed. Consent =/= desire over alternatives. The most telling line of the debate: “If a person fails to pay taxes and are jailed as a result, this is not indicative of some injustice done to the person in question. It is, again, the legal prescription for what to do if a person does not pay the taxes they are legally required to pay.” Here, my opponent makes the claim that, because an act is legal (in the governmental sense), it cannot be unjust. I must ask if slavery, being legal, was just merely by virtue of the State’s allowance. This is obviously absurd, and I doubt that even my opponent would accept the full implications of his claim. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Argument 2: Immorality “[T]he term "proper" is in and of itself a word that is synonymous with morality[.] Because of this, the opponent has failed to actually define morality.” Besides the fact that there is no standard for definition besides synonymy (how else could something be defined, if not by a synonym?), my opponent misses that I am not putting forward a positive ethical system; instead, I am dealing with the prerequisites of any morality. In this way, my argument is purely metaethical. If people purposefully act, then they must hold some moral system, and the implications of this make up my argument. The Objectivity of Morality Opting to defend subjectivism, my opponent gives no response to my argument for the objective impossibility of moral coercion. The fact of the matter is that one must always assume that a given moral framework is true; every action implies that the agent believes that that action should be done. For subjectivism to be the case, one agent, X, must be able to freely advocate action Y being done to agent Z. Agent Z must also be able to freely advocate action Y being done to agent X, for subjectivism would grant both agents equal power to act as they please. However, if action Y involves stripping the power to freely preform actions from its target, this results in a contradixion: if agent X advocates an action which, if directed to him, would deprive him of the ability to advocate that action, he is debasing his ability to make such a choice at all. Therefore, action Y is a priori immoral, for all actors, and has to be objective. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- General Arguments There Is No Consent For a government to require one to either abide by its arbitrary laws or leave is not freedom if said government has no moral right to its land. My opponent assumes that the State’s relationship to the citizen is equivalent to a citizen’s relationship to a landowner, but this is unfounded – the State is inherently illegitimate, due to the necessary requirement of its coercive monopolization over the use of force. Just as a slaveowner cannot assume consent because his slaves sleep in his shacks, the State cannot assume consent because citizens drive on roads. Just as a slaveowner holding a vote to determine what is served for dinner does not magically grant him the consent of those who are “represented” via the vote, the State does not gain warrant from the political system. Lysander Spooner, in No Treason, dispelled the fiction of voting equaling consent (a point that equally applies to the “You can just leave!” argument): “In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man takes the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot – which is a mere substitute for a bullet – because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.” The Utility of Government Coercion If my claims about morality hold true, the “pragmatic” aspects of taxation cannot outweigh the immorality of force. It is a red herring to speak about public utility; my opponent assumes a moral framework in which public utility is of the highest important, and I have dealt with this already by explicating the limits of morality. Quoting Robert Nozick: “The claim that the proponent of the ultraminimal state is inconsistent, we now can see, assumes that he is a 'utilitarian of rights'. It assumes that his goal is, for example, to minimize the weighted amount of the violation of rights in the society, and that he should pursue this goal even through means that themselves violate people's rights. Instead, he may place the non-violation of rights as a constraint upon action, rather than (or in addition to) building it into the end state to be realized. The position held by this proponent of the ultraminimal state will be a consistent one if his conception of rights holds that your being forced to contribute to another's welfare violates your rights, whereas someone else's not providing you with things you need greatly, including things essential to the protection of your rights, does not itself violate your rights, even though it avoids making it more difficult for someone else to violate them.” (Anarchy, State, and Utopia) Conclusion It has been shown that natural law is the only law; taxation violates natural law; that which violates natural law is immoral; taxation is immoral; the “utility” of taxation plays no part in this judgement.