[The E]

And yet, in your second example, your neighbours would be justified in calling you an entitled heat moocher, living off of their hard-earned money.

[Phantom Hoover]

Yep. By not heating your own room you are making more heat leak through from theirs to yours, and thereby increasing their heating bills.

[Luis Dias]

****ing taker.

[General Battuta]

Ahh, now I see why you are confused.

Using public services just like any other service including private ones only counts if it is done willingly and directly.

Sure, I guess, which completely proves my point. When you consume a public good you either pay for it somehow or you're a free rider. Free riders are the collective death of organized social systems. You must accept responsibility when you choose to take society's resources and convert them into individual utility.

So you are willingly and directly using public goods, and taxes are your recognition of this.

The solution to your problem isn't to pay no taxes, it's to realize that you're willingly and directly tapping public goods, constantly, all the time. Your whole life and everything you have is predicated on it. If you realize that you are unwillingly and indirectly using public services, well, you're unwilling! Stop! Move to a bear cave!

(lol i sound like an elder)

[666maslo666]

All right, maybe that was a bad example, I was thinking of something that gives me indirect benefit without incurring additional costs on the payer. Thermodynamics dont work out that way in my example, lol.

[Phantom Hoover]

But there are no such things, on the scale of an entire society! No man is an island, entire in itself -- you can't just trivialise the complexities of infrastructure and management of a vast and complex system by reductively grinding it down to interactions between individuals.

[666maslo666]

Sure, I guess, which completely proves my point. When you consume a public good you either pay for it somehow or you're a free rider. Free riders are the collective death of organized social systems. You must accept responsibility when you choose to take society's resources and convert them into individual utility.

So you are willingly and directly using public goods, and taxes are your recognition of this.

The solution to your problem isn't to pay no taxes, it's to realize that you're willingly and directly tapping public goods, constantly, all the time. Your whole life and everything you have is predicated on it. If you realize that you are unwillingly and indirectly using public services, well, you're unwilling! Stop! Move to a bear cave!

(lol i sound like an elder)

All right, I dont think you know what "willingly" means here. It means that I want to do it, not that I can or cannot opt out. I have another example:

People in a block of flats decide to contribute towards a pool to insulate the building. All agree with the plan except one who is satisfied with what he pays for heating (he uses little heat) and doesnt want to put a hefty sum to the pool. The building must be insulated whole, they cannot keep one part uninsulated, so they pay for the whole building, including the wall of that guy. Is it theft to take his money then? Absolutely.


I repeat, just because you benefit doesnt make it any less of a theft. Not if it is indirect or unwilling benefit (more like a gift?).

EDIT: If I steal $500 from someone and then I offer them $500 worth of my services for free it is still robbery.

[The E]

Yeah, could you stop making up bull**** examples?

[Phantom Hoover]

The main thing you're demonstrating here is that analogies involving a handful of people are not a very good lens through which to view the government of tens of millions.

[General Battuta]

I think that situation is a really good example of your specific point, and an even better example of what you're not understanding about taxation, and why your whole point is fundamentally untenable.

When taxes are used effectively, taxation isn't 'we need to insulate the building'. Taxation is 'there is a bug problem' or 'the heating has broken' or 'we would like to turn our open refugee camp into an apartment building'. Everyone agrees that something must be done. YOU agree that something must be done - because otherwise you'd be just as happy in a bear cave.

But each individual agent now steps into a collective action problem. If they defect, they can get away with paying nothing and still obtain the benefit. But if everyone defects, the benefit will never occur, and everybody suffers.

The only solution is to align individual incentives with the global, either by punishing those who do not cooperate or by making cooperation mandatory. This is taxation. Your notional apartment building gets together and says 'We are at an unacceptable risk of fire. We must install fire safety.' You say 'I do not think the risk of fire is high enough to justify this expense'. (Like all actors you have an individually very myopic view of the situation.) But the building has voted, and now it will either allow you to free ride or coerce you into paying as well. Free riders destroy systems in the long run: this is a game theoretic inevitability. For the building to survive in the long run, it must coerce you. And you extract enormous benefit from the building's survival, even if you don't think it's at risk of fire.

Once you understand this, you can stop advocating for Lindahl taxation and start advocating for tax choice. In this model, taxes as a whole are mandatory, but you can hypothecate your individual contribution towards specific efforts. I don't know if this is actually a better system, but it's much closer to what you want to argue for in the real world.

Let's circle this back around to one last repudiation of your metaphor:

Your notional apartment dweller lives in an apartment building. He must pay the rent. The rent is not theft. But if he is born in the apartment, raised within it, and comes to take the apartment's existence - as well as the police who guard it, the firemen who protect it, the laws and landlords that arbitrate its disputes - for granted, he comes to believe that he himself does not need these services. 'My rent is theft', he says. 'Reduce my rent. Some of it is going towards services I don't benefit from. This is theft.'

But he does benefit from this service - his preference revelation is myopic. He is playing a game with enforced rules and he benefits from those rules. What he is really saying is: 'Let me be a defector. I will allow the cooperators to continue to cooperate; I do not need to.' But he does not understand that if everyone defects, using the same logic he does, he will suffer enormously.

Taxation is a rule used to solve collective action problems.

EDIT: If I steal $500 from someone and then I offer them $500 worth of my services for free it is still robbery.

If every day year I pay $10 to prevent a disaster that would cost me $10,000, this is not theft. It is insurance.

If I am born with $10,000 dollars and every year I repay $10 to the foundation that gifted it to me, this is not theft.

You should be focusing on the issue of tax choice and on how to determine where taxes can most effectively be spent. Taxation is not theft. But taxes can be grossly misused, and you have every right to attack that problem.

[zookeeper]

It's funny how the social contract thing works both ways. See, you can also make the argument that if society demands its individuals to play by its rules with threat of force if necessary (because living in a cave isn't much of an option really), then the least it should do in return is to provide for them.

[StarSlayer]

Condo Civilization

I was going to use Public Education as an example but bravo.

[General Battuta]

Education is a great example of a public good. It benefits everyone hugely - basically a unilateral good, I'd be tempted to say - and it enables a lot of productivity. So the payoff for being educated and having educated labor is enormous. But the payoff for conducting education is very low for the educator, who extracts little material benefit. Left to individual choice, people will defect and the educational system will collapse, with enormous consequences for society as a whole.

So there has to be some kind of top-down incentive or tax to allow education to continue. Mere individual choice cannot find this global optimum. It takes a global search function.

A tax to pay for education is a great example of a tax people might protest (I don't care about underprivileged kids in Detroit! I want to fund local education) which actually globally benefits them by enforcing the rules and social infrastructure of society. They just have trouble detecting the causal pathway by which the benefit reaches them (say, ideally, crime falls in Detroit and more jobs spring up, freeing up resources and generating wealth, helping the national economy).

[Luis Dias]

I was gonna say that this thinking process is akin to those who think nowadays that "vaccines are just bad **** that shouldn't be enforced". We are so used to being without the diseases that the vaccines eradicated that we live now in a situation where idiots like this actually think they are being reasonable when they say we shouldn't get vaccinated, etc. Of course, all the "defector" problems that General Battuta delineates start to happen and now we get children having diseases that we thought as being eradicated.

It's the thinking process of a spoiled entitled pseudo-libertarian brat.

[Herra Tohtori]

Legality != morality.  The legal system is not the objective arbiter of what is and isn't moral.  As I said, theft is "depriving the rightful owner of personal property", which fits your definition.  Taxation simply happens to be a legal form of it.

That's not exactly right. Legislation is (and must be) based on the morals of the society (although there are examples of famously ineffective laws which went against social morality, which resulted in them having very little legitimacy).

I am, of course, talking about democratic systems of governance where people actually have a say in the content of legislation, rather than dictatorships (either theocratic or secular) where laws are imposed on people as the Great Leaders see fit.

If a law is immoral (ie. opposing to the moral code of the general public), I would actually argue that in a properly functioning democratic system it will end up being contested and changed.

If that doesn't happen, I see it as an indication that the democratic system is not functioning properly...

What I find interesting is your opinion that taxation is theft despite it being legal. You are not the rightful owner of the taxes you pay. It's that simple.

This is a very dangerous position to hold.  Who, then, is the rightful owner of that portion of your money?  The state?  If you take that to its logical conclusion, then is a person only entitled to as much property as the state deems, in its sole discretion, to be appropriate?

I'm so tempted to quote the bible on this occasion that it isn't even funny. You know, the part where they discuss whose face is stamped on coins and who they belong to.

But that would be no argument for or against anything, just a literary anecdote.

Instead I'll point out that you're trying to construct a straw man here. Taxes don't limit overall ownership, and no one can (legitimately) say how much value a person can own. Nor do they attempt to do such a thing (excluding attempts of implementing communist societies with no personal property, and they've all pretty much failed).

No, taxes are actually more of a transaction fee.

An employer pays you salary and part of it is taxed; in most sensible setups the taxed part never arrives on your bank account but rather the employer pays that part directly to state's accounts. So if you never were in ownership of that representation of value, who did it belong to, to begin with?

In a way, money does belong to the state that authorizes it as a legitimate tool of exchanging value. They provide the security that any currency needs - the knowledge that this abstract representation of value actually can be exchanged for physical goods and services, and to measure the value of all other items.

So when people exchange money, the state demands a transaction fee. Whether it's you paying the VAT for products, or the employer paying the income tax of your salary, it is the same thing in both cases.


Of course, this model is simplified and you could rightfully say it doesn't apply to doing business in unsanctioned currencies like cryptocurrencies or foreign currencies, but I believe there are pretty strict definitions for tax evasion and money laundering that deal with those issues.

On the baseline, Battuta's argument is right. Taxes are a common payment for all the use of public goods everyone in the society uses. Providing a stable currency is just a small part of those services.

If you consider taxation to be theft despite it being sanctioned by the legislation...

...then logically you should consider killing people in war to be murder, regardless of the fact that it is sanctioned by the government waging the war, and in many cases sanctioned by the international legislation as well.

War is a special case because soldiers essentially put their life up as collateral when they fight.  Killing civilians in war could be described as murder.

Taxes are a special case because taxpayers get much of the value of their taxes back in public goods. You don't get anything back from theft.


See, if you can add stipulations to things, I can do that as well.

But if we keep things simple and define theft as taking another human's property without consent (as you seem to do in the case of taxes), and murder as taking another human's life without consent (which is an analogous definition)...

...then if taxes are theft, killing in war is also murder.


All I'm saying is, if you want to think in black and white terms, go ahead, but at least be consistent about it - if you apply one type of logic on how you define taxes to be theft, you can't really opt out of that same logic on other topics.


And, again, if my money were taken from me - with or without my consent! - and then used for a. helping people and b. murdering people, I would be far more upset about the part where people die than the part where my money was used to pay for someone's education or surgery costs.

Or, like Battuta says, determining where my tax money goes is more important than how much I have to pay. I have a privilege to live in a country that doesn't spend billions of eurobux on killing people on distant lands, so that's something I don't really need to trouble myself with. Instead I'm more interested in how well the money is used - repairing roads, maintaining the good education system, public health care, etc. etc.


Of course, war has been described as exactly that - a calculated, condoned slaughter of human beings, to quote a veteran of First World War. I don't personally believe soldiers who kill in battle to be murderers - but neither do I think taxes are theft.

A more appropriate extrapolation is abortion.  Abortion is morally equivalent to murder, as it is the taking of an innocent life without justification.  The fact that it happens to be legal doesn't change this.

There are more than enough justifications for abortion in most cases, and even if you disagree on that the analogy doesn't really compare because there is no commonly agreed upon definition on when human life begins, so it's entirely subjective whether abortion even qualifies as murder - if there's no human life taken, it can't be murder. But this is not the place for that particular discussion (which we've had several times with very little effect on anyone's views on the matter).


EDIT: Adding this relevant piece of art to remind us of the problems related to redistribution of wealth

[666maslo666]

I think that situation is a really good example of your specific point, and an even better example of what you're not understanding about taxation, and why your whole point is fundamentally untenable.

When taxes are used effectively, taxation isn't 'we need to insulate the building'. Taxation is 'there is a bug problem' or 'the heating has broken' or 'we would like to turn our open refugee camp into an apartment building'. Everyone agrees that something must be done. YOU agree that something must be done - because otherwise you'd be just as happy in a bear cave.

But each individual agent now steps into a collective action problem. If they defect, they can get away with paying nothing and still obtain the benefit. But if everyone defects, the benefit will never occur, and everybody suffers.

I agree mostly with everything in this post, except the conclusion that taxation is not theft. It shows well why taxation can be neccessary, why this kind of theft can be justified as a lesser of two evils, but thats all.

Regarding the benefits, I dont think the benefits recieved from the government and taxes payed are very related, there is at least no system in place to make it so, and even opposite relationship may be true. So while this whole "freeloader" thing could be used to justify some part of taxation, most of tax burden exists because of different reasons. Namely humanitarian ones (cant let people be without basic needs, which includes justice and healthcare IMHO), the simple fact that nobody has come up with a better practical system that would be more just, utilitarian ones (the needs of the many outweights the needs of the few) etc. And these reasons are compatible with the view that taxation is (justifiable) theft.

[StarSlayer]

Last time I checked the government printed the money, the properties you own are yours because of the laws and protections government provides.  Otherwise you would be subsistence farming and anything you owned was your's so long as you could fend off those who would otherwise take it from you.  So since you are using the government's money and laws in order to exist I'm not sure how paying the upkeep costs to use those services is theft?  If you've decided to live in society, part of the deal is paying to maintain it, otherwise by all means you can live in the bear cave or move to Mogadishu.


Out of curiosity what do you think would exist without taxes, other than 1990s Somalia?

[The E]

That's the common story, but it isn't true.  Yes, there are people who are simply unable to make ends meet, but they are vastly outnumbered by the people exploiting the system.  They purchase iPhones and expensive TVs and then the complain that they don't have enough money left over for food and utilities.  Other people discover that they can make more money churning out babies and getting welfare checks than working at a job, so they choose the rational economic action and stop working.

If you subsidize laziness, you get more of it.

Please provide statistics for this. Seriously.

My parents ran a sole proprietorship business for years, and they have plenty of experience seeing what the welfare system produced.  As an example, the US has a requirement that people receiving unemployment benefits must demonstrate that they are actively searching for a job to continue receiving them.  So that led to people coming into the office and asking if there were any job openings.  If there were, they would simply leave.  If there were not, the people would ask our office to sign a form stating that the person applied for a job but there was no job available.

You do know the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", right?

As another example, there were three separate instances of female employees applying for a job, getting it, going out on maternity leave eight months after getting the job, and then quitting once maternity leave was exhausted.  And this was in an office with a staff of only five people, so one person on leave was a significant burden.

See above.

Look, I do not doubt that there are people who exploit the system. But, as following the relevant discussions in my own country showed me, hell, what being dependant on state subsidies for most of my adult life showed me, is that a) living off of welfare is no ****ing picnic, b) getting out of it is very very hard (and not helped by the fact that, if you're like me and have to take an apprenticeship position somewhere, losing those subsidies will result in you haveing a LOT less money available despite working 40 hours per week), c) the claims of widespread social assistance abuse come mostly from the various tabloids out to troll for profit.

Just for reference, a single person living in Germany off of welfare qualifies for a grand total of 350€ of assistance (with rent covered separately), an amount that is barely enough to actually live with. With rent included, the maximum amount payable is around 700€. If you're working, or in a rehab program (like I was), I qualified for an extra 150€ on top of that, an amount that barely covered the added expenses for food and travel that said program incurred.

Given all of that, living off of social security may be possible, but it sure as hell isn't fun (and being at the mercy of people who can cut your funding instantly if they believe you did something wrong doesn't help either).


There's another part of your argument here that I want to come back to, so let me requote:

They purchase iPhones and expensive TVs and then the complain that they don't have enough money left over for food and utilities.

Yeah, that's really bad. How dare these people want a slice of the luxury pop culture throws at them as objects of desire and emulation! How dare they purchase entertainment from the money we gave them! Can't they have the decency to behave like proper poor people!

As you may have guessed, I find this statement to be absolutely disgusting. You are effectively saying "they're living off of MY money, so I should have a say in what they should and should not buy with it", which in my considered opinion is wrong. They're not using YOUR money. They're using the state's, given to them with the express permission to use it freely. That sentiment of yours? It's degrading to poor people. You are pretty much telling them that they aren't capable of making competent decisions with regards to money.

Hell, there are people in my life who are asking me "Why do you pay money for PC games? Why do you visit the Cinema? You know you can't very well afford it, you know you should do the smart thing and save up!". And yeah, they're right. In a perfect world, where everything went right? I totally should do that. As it stands though, I'm pretty certain that neglecting those few luxuries I am able to buy would result in me crashing down into depression once more, because try as I might, I am not immune to the lure of materialism, the appeal of forgetting that you are poor, if only for a little while.
Neither are the people you are angry about.

[Nuke]

im convinced that our welfare systems spend more money on bureaucracy than on actually helping the poor. i kinda think the whole system needs to be dismantled and replaced with a negative income tax type system. tax pays back if you are below the poverty line. if you have no income, tax pays you (why its negative) an income equal to the poverty level. tax becomes positive at the minimum wage, which would be kept greater than the poverty level.

one problem with welfare programs is there is no cash incentives to do any actual work. any money you make (from a part time job, for example) just gets gets deducted from the entitlement, and you end up with the same amount of money whether you have a job or not. so the gap in income between the poverty level and the minimum wage must be kept large enough to provide incentive to work. the size of the gap determines how much you can earn before your earnings cut into your entitlement, anything you make over that amount without passing the minimum wage line is subtracted from the entitlement until the entitlement becomes zero (and at which point you are making minumum wage). this rewards working members of the negative tax bracket.

people in the positive tax bracket would pay a flat percentage of income tax. to be fair the negative portion of the tax bracket would have the same rate as the positive side. this system would greatly simplify the tax code. it also makes any entitlement fraud tax evasion, so you dont need a separate oversight department to keep people in line. this also makes things like social security and food stamps obsolete. you eliminate a lot of bureaucracy this way.

[Wobble73]

I think that if you are working, be it a low wage, part time etc. they should only deduct a percentage of your wage over the welfare you get. such as 50p in every pound (or 50c in every dollar whatever). That means if you are working, you still get a benefit for working, does that make sense?