'Taxation is Theft' is a familiar refrain that we hear these days in the public sphere. In this article I want to examine what it means and why it is not correct.
The argument goes like this:
- Stealing is when someone takes something that does not belong to them from somebody else, against that person's wishes.
- Taxation is when the government takes peoples' money from them against their wishes.
- These definitions match up, thus taxation is theft.
This is a valid argument, but it is not sound because whilst it is well formed it's premises are not correct. Why they are not correct is not immediately obvious to everyone, but I intend to explain why they are not in this article.
Before I do this, however, I want to first discuss the merits of some common objections.
The Pragmatic objection
The first objection, and one of the most common, is that you need to pay taxes because otherwise the government would not be able to function. This argument does not actually refute that taxation is theft but instead justifies it on the basis of necessity. However it is problematic for society to be based on something that it is agreed is morally wrong. It also poses the question how something that is necessary and good can be morally wrong. This argument is nonetheless powerful since most people agree that we need some kind of government.
The Social Contract objection
This argument states that there is a social contract, an unwritten set of rules that govern society, that we implicitly sign up to by the act of participating in society. The problem with this argument is that the social contract can simply be denied to exist, and there is no obvious way of NOT giving assent.
An objection based on the true nature of property rights
The defects in the previous two arguments make them inadequate for refuting conclusively the Taxation is Theft argument. However I believe I have an argument which does.
As already mentioned, whilst the taxation is theft argument is valid, it is not sound. The premise that taxation is the taking of peoples' money without their permission is incorrect. This is because the concept of ownership contained within the argument is inaccurate. It presupposes that there is an absolute bond between the owner and the thing owned that transcends any legal concepts of ownership that exist within society. Of course, people who believe it still expect to take advantage of such concepts when they come to buy and sell the things that they own.
What ownership is however is simply the ability to have control of and use an object for one's convenience. When one has this control, one can be said to have ownership. When one doesn't, one is not the owner. Clearly this is dependent on how others within a society perceive the relation between the claimant and his supposed property.
If a society recognise an individual as the owner of a piece of property and there is a framework of laws which codify this ownership, then the individual does not even need to have the object in his possession to be able to class himself as the owner. If on the other hand, society decides that he is not the owner, then he is only the owner in as far as he can retain it within his possession with whatever force he can muster. Against the rest of his society he will likely struggle to do this.
The society as a whole is therefore the ultimate arbitrator of ownership. In modern societies this is a role that the government performs. Since the government determines ownership, it cannot be said that the government can ever deprive anyone of their rightful property. This obviously applies to taxes. If the government is logically unable to commit theft then clearly taxation cannot be theft.