A Radical Challenge to the American Way

Why aren't taxes officially considered theft? The simple answer is there are no laws that make them illegal. The 16th Amendment of the Constitution sets taxes as a legal instrument of the state. Nevertheless, there are people who strongly believes that mandatory taxes are a kind of theft and we should abolish them. A person has no choice in paying taxes and one is punished otherwise. In principle, saying taxes are theft is a reasonable argument given those conditions.

The main counter to that idea is the social contract theory. In a democracy, people agree to pay taxes in order to live in that society, including participating in choosing the folks who set the taxes.

Social Contract Theory - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosopy
However, as the argument goes, there really is little choice about being in this "contract." One could always emigrate, but there are no habitable places on earth at this time where taxes don't exist. The other alternative is simply to be poor enough not to have to pay taxes. That isn't an appealing option for most people. There are many critiques of the social contract. The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest. -- Bertrand Russell

What of theft itself? What qualifies? If someone stole something precious from you and then sold it or passed it down to his children what is the status of that article? At what point is that article no longer to be considered stolen? The entirety of the U.S. was stolen from the original descendents. Is the US still a stolen country? That land of yours, does it really belong to you? Let's say you are a successful silversmith working in Boston. You have done everything right in your life, always followed the law. Then one day a factory opens that makes silver things with machinery far more efficiently. Your shop closes down. Did that factory steal your livelihood? Some would say yes, some no. What if that process is repeated over and over again for more than two centuries? Now you live in a world where the vast majority of wealth is owned by a tiny number of people. Now you have to work for them, and they get to choose how much of the value of your labor they give back to you. See, that's how they are so rich to begin with. Some people believe that capitalism is a kind of theft, a form of wage slavery. Are they right? Not according to the law, but then again taxes aren't theft according to the law either. If one is not going to use the law as a basis of right and wrong, how does one decide what's right?


"Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it." -- Chief Seattle

There are traditional societies, lots of them, that have no concept of private ownership, hence no concept of theft. It's perfectly fine for some Inuit cultures to walk into a neighbor's home and take things. For many cultures the land itself belongs to no one. The whole concept of private property is simply a cultural trait, not some kind of universal law. Private property is a human law and by definition so is theft.

What is theft then? Philosophically, it depends who you ask, legally it depends on the laws. That's it. You want to believe taxes are theft, that's a perfectly fine personal belief. Go ahead and advocate for it, but don't fool yourself into thinking that somehow you hold the truth. Theft is a human idea, a cultural construct and there is nothing absolute about it. To include or not include taxes in the category of thievery is an arbitrary choice.

Taking a more practical approach, let's say enough people decided taxes should be voluntary and voted in new laws, I suspect tax revenues would drop off just a bit. What do you think? How many people would continue to pay taxes if they didn't have to? Would you?

If that were to happen, it would mean a bare bones govermnent, just a skeleton of what it is today. Can you imagine a large country with such a government? Certainly nothing like that exists in the world, with the exception of a couple of states that have collapsed from war and violence and have never recovered.

Countries with the Highest and Lowest Taxes - Investopedia You have to ask yourself why there isn't even one successful nation with voluntary taxes? There isn't even one in history unless you go back to pre-state societies that were far smaller and simpler. And by the way, most of those had no concept of private property. One would think that there would be at least a few examples. You may argue that it's because the powerful control everything, well that's exactly it, see. There are no such voluntary taxes governments because that power is a central part of how humanity functions. I hope that someday we will have voluntary taxes because that will mean humanity has evolved to a level where most people will have a true spirit of voluntarism that benefits the whole of society. We do evolve. At one point slavery was the basis of civilization and we have moved far from that. If we want to change the world it will take investing in people and reimagining culture and civilization itself as we once did with slavery. It will be difficult, there will be setbacks, and it will take generational change.