Well, apologies beforehand. Our perspective can be a little jarring to those who have been steeped primarily in the government’s perspective.

Have you ever noticed that:
– The difference between rape and sex is consent.
– The difference between theft and charity is consent.
– The difference between employment and slavery is consent.
– The difference between theft and trade is consent.

Taxation is without consent. It is without voluntary agreement. It is based on threats of violence.

You are charged for “services” which you did not order, most of which you do not want, many of which are so abhorrent to you that you would actually pay to stop. All of them are over-priced, inefficient, wasteful, destructive, counterproductive, and poorly done — yet forced on you with a FU attitude as though they are doing you a favor out of the goodness of their hearts “for free”.

The main beneficiaries are the buddies of the people who take your money —- who get big juicy contracts to do little, who get giant benefits packages and pensions worth more than you will ever make; who gets violently enforced (through law) monopolies to keep out competitors and to force you to buy their products or use their services. And for this, they need only kickback a small portion of the money that was stolen from you back to their buddy, your ruler.

You have no opportunity to stop these “services”. You are allowed no alternative. It doesn’t matter whether you use the service or not.

You are told you authorized them by “voting” in an election, rigged by the cronies even before you knew who was “running”, in which you never had one bit of chance to significantly impact any of the myriads of “services” that are so “valuable” that you have to be forced to pay for them. In government Catch-22 style, if you instead offer to not vote at all, you are told, “Well, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”

You must pay, otherwise, your justly earned property will simply be taken out of your bank accounts, or your home and assets seized. If you resist then you will be visited by armed men who will kidnap and cage you. (The cage is one of the terrible services that you pay for, terrifying in that you will likely be beaten and raped there.)

If you resist the cage, the men with guns (each of whom you are charged for) will beat you and maim you and even kill you (yet another “service” you are paying high prices for!)

Most of the taxes are hidden:

• taxes and regulations on “corporations”, which are passed through to you in terms of fewer jobs, lower wages, higher prices, lower innovation, lower quality, fewer start-ups, bigger corporations, more cronyism;
• inflation, taxes where your rulers stealthily steal the value of your money away, like helium out of a leaky balloon, to fill the coffers of their financial contributors.
• And it is not just you who must pay, it is your children and your children’s children. Humans who are not even born today, who certainly are not giving their consent to anything, who are not even participating in the “services”. Your rulers are selling your unborn into tax slavery through intergenerational debt. And your off-spring will face the same or greater violence should they dare to refuse to pay for all the “services” your rulers’ cronies are benefitting you with today.

From our libertarian perspective of judging the actions of rulers just as we would judge the actions of any other human, taxation isn’t just theft: it’s extortion; it’s bullying; it’s strong-arming; it’s cruel; it’s child abuse.

And no number of fancy parchments, shiny badges, expensive pageantry, 5th-grade civics platitudes parrotted by government teachers, somber rituals, pledges of allegiance, or flyovers by F15s can change its inherent immorality.

Republished with permission by Dennis Pratt