I was talking on the phone to a friend earlier and he was telling me about how he was robbed several times back when he lived in Manhattan. One time, the burglers took absolutely everything - including his dirty laundry! His neighbour told him that he could go to a place on 29th street to buy it back.
I regularly hear libertarians say that taxation is theft. A lot of other people hear libertarians say it too, and it all sounds a bit extreme to them. It's not as if the government is breaking into their home at night to steal taxes. It also doesn't help that people who say it are usually foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog with a mouth full of toothpaste.
Copycats
I don't know who was the first to say it, but there was a guy named Murray Rothbard who wrote a book in the early 1980's in which he said it. A bunch of copycats latched onto it and began to furiously force the phrase upon others, even though they didn't practice Rothbard's other idea of tax resistance (neither did Rothbard, to my knowledge).
Fair Taxes
You're not likely to hear me talking about a fair tax. The reason why people pay them is because the government forces them to. Failure to pay will result in the confiscation of at least some of your property or even imprisonment, and you don't want to go to prison because they don't have Internet.
When comparing various types of taxes to one another, it's more appropriate to talk about which ones are 'less unfair' or 'less bad'. Milton Friedman famously declared land value tax to be the "least bad tax", and I'd have to agree. I would also say that sales tax is the most unfair or immoral tax - it's regressive, distortionary and is taxing money that's been taxed already!
Progressive Income Taxes
Progressive income taxes are like libertarians who support and defend authoritarians like Donald Trump - the label they've given themselves is a complete lie!
Farts
I sometimes hear people say that fiat money only has value because people have faith that it has value. When I point out that they're wrong, they often begin to splutter like a wet fart.
The money that government creates has value because it's the only thing that the government will accept for the payment of taxes. Fiat money is nothing more than tax credits which the government exchanges for goods and services. When you hand back those tax credits, they cease to exist, along with your tax liability (for now).
That's why some people say that cryptocurrencies aren't money - because you can't use them to pay taxes to any national government in the World. I'd say that money is whatever people happen to use as money, but at least you know why people say that about them.
Taxes are not theft. They are, in fact... (drumroll, please) extortion!
You Wrote An Entire Post Just To Say That?
Hey, terminology matters! If you bang on about how taxes are theft, most people are going to continue looking at you as though you have two heads. But if you say that taxes are extortion and back it up with facts about how the money system works, then they have no choice but to upvote you!
Here's an image I whipped up for you to add to your cocktail party icebreaker toolkit:
