Essay: Taxation Is Theft

Our US government, self-proclaimed to be the destroyer of monopolistic trusts, is itself the largest monopoly of force and coercion in the land. There is nothing benevolent or gentle about the federal government in its nature or method of action. It does not produce any valuable good or service from which is voluntarily purchased by the people. Voluntary is the key word. If something is forced and not offered voluntarily, this is the fundamental reason why the very essence of government is inhumane, immoral, and wicked. All edicts and decrees issued forth are forced upon the people from the barrel of a gun or by threat of imprisonment or fine. This is not the definition of a civilized society. With slight variations this is the definition of Fascism, Communism, Totalitarianism, Democracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Kleptocracy etc. Virtually any form of government one can conceive of is the antithesis of Agorism, Voluntaryism, Anarcho-Capitalism, Free Market etc. The name is irrelevant. The principle is what counts and that principle is the Non-Aggression principle. This asserts that anything is possible except those actions which transgress on the freedom and sovereign rights of another.
Our overlords do not have any more power over us than the power we directly give them. Our form of government is as ephemeral and impermanent as the air we breathe in and out. Withdrawal of participatory consent is a powerful strategy that we can all do and it requires no violent overthrow, revolution, or coup. Cash cows who refuse to be milked for their labor and industry cannot be forced to produce. Of all the great technological and scientific advancements that we so attribute to the great blob that has become of the 20th century militaristic superpower we call the USA, none of them has ever originated from oppressive government bureaucrats. Of the scarce goods and services “produced” by the public sector, their quality is so wretched and sordid that no sane person would willingly purchase them. In order to understand the wastefulness to which our currency is daily subjected in the hands of the State compare the efficiency and quality of USPS vs. FedEx, Police law enforcement brutality vs. private security guards, government roads vs. private roads in the plazas of large corporations, Federal Reserve Notes depreciation vs. Bitcoin/silver/gold store of value, State subsidized GMO foods/monoculture farms vs. organic/local fruit/vegetable farms, government health insurance vs. private health insurance, government healthcare services vs. private healthcare services etc. Therefore it can be assumed that only through the application of violent coercive force will these abominable goods/services be foisted on the people. If the assertion arises “But I’m not forced to use USPS, buy GMO foods, use government healthcare, government insurance etc” it can be countered by the argument that the funding and subsidies necessary to ensure the survival of these State supported institutions is obtained through violent extortionary measures, known as taxation, with no semblance of voluntaryism in the equation. The immorality is apparent and obvious.
No society of peace has ever come about through the use of force, violence, and coercive laws that lie at the heart of all formal government institutions. Do not vote to propagate this system of violence. Voting is violent fraud. It is delegating and discharging the shame of stealing and extorting one’s neighbor to a politician who does so under the guise of serving the public welfare and the public good. Voting is deciding which political gang will steal the wealth and property of the people and distribute it to their favored friends and vested interests. Recognize that we are all individuals and entitled to our own intrinsic rights and are not bound by any Constitution. Constitutions are, after all, simply pieces of paper that have been arbitrarily written and can, just as well, be arbitrarily discarded and disposed of. Just as Federal Reserve Notes are fundamentally worthless without our consent and participation as to their use; so too is government fundamentally powerless without our consent and participation in its wretched propagation.
Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods.”
H.L. Mencken
Enough damage has been done by government meddling in the affairs of business. It is like a doctor who has successively been prescribing more and more medications to a patient in order to treat the side effects of the previous medications, after a while the process becomes self-defeating and redundant. The body must be slowly weaned off the medication until absolute independence is achieved. The economy was not created by man therefore no statute created by man and issued forth through his manmade institution know as “The State” can do anything to solve the problem. No law can forcibly abolish poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and sickness in the same manner that no law can forcibly create peace, prosperity, and wealth. Laws serve only to impoverish and injure the many at the direct expense of enriching the few. Every effort must be made to divorce sovereign individuals, of which we all are, from the inherently destructive and barbarously violent governmental institution.
We are, all of us, sovereign individuals with natural born inalienable rights. No government on Earth has given them to us and no government, with their fraudulent laws, can take them away. Even the “Bill of Rights” is a misnomer as this denotes our sovereign rights awarded to us by government. It should more aptly be described as a “Bill of Restraints” since, as is stated in the preamble, they were written to prevent the State from infringing upon those natural born inalienable rights.
Any ruler, even a philosopher king, will always have the unintended effects of hurting his/her subjects in one way or another. Government, by its very essence, can only exist on the basis of extorting money from the private productive sector and giving it to the parasitic public sector. Voluntary Anarchy is the only way towards a peaceful existence. No government founded on violence and coercion can ever truly achieve lasting peace and prosperity.
There are three ways the State can receive funding for its various endeavors; taxation, currency creation, or borrowing. Through the collusion between the State and Central Bank of any given country one may assume that procuring funds through taxation and borrowing from foreign countries is negligible and unnecessary when compared to the tremendous benefits that are showered upon the elites through the magical elixir of currency creation, also known the Mandrake Mechanism, and the subsequent currency devaluation that it brings. If it can be seen that taxation is not the primary method relied upon by the State to receive funding then what purpose does taxation in fact serve? After such logic the inevitable conclusion one arrives at is that taxation is merely the means by which the dominant ruling elitist class maintains its power over its subjects through systematically depriving them of the fruits of their labor and industry. It is not about paying your fair share, performing your civic duty, or paying for infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and tunnels. When the State may employ, through the Federal Reserve, Quantitative Easing or any other fictitious asset purchase with currency made out of thin air to pay for it’s over $1 trillion per year massive military-industrial budget, war campaigns, and global imperialistic conquests the notion that it relies on taxation to fund itself is fundamentally absurd and puerile.
The power to tax is the power to destroy.”
Chief Justice John Marshall, McCulloch vs. Maryland 1819
Given that some slaves are content, nay proud and willing, to surrender an arbitrary portion of their wealth to the ruling class is incontrovertible proof of the success of government educational institutions, tertiary education, and the propaganda spewed forth by the lamestream media. These are the people that will impede, in whatever way they can, the efforts of others who strive to unshackle us all from our institutionalized confines. They must be pitied and gently educated, not destroyed. Hopefully they will not become a hindrance to the cause of liberty. If they do not understand the reasons for which we resist please let them step aside.
Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of a pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this world would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain slaves of the Bankers and pay for the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.”
Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920s, the second richest man in Britain.
It is no coincidence that the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and the Federal Income Tax were all created in 1913. They are all symptoms of the same cancer that has, since 1913, metastasized to gargantuan proportions that today primarily functions to suck the monetary life blood from the working, productive, and thoroughly dwindling middle class. All the State derived jobs and the people they employ cater to this monstrosity are to be held in wretched condemnation for the parasitic abomination they support. They may be good people who mean well and they might be doing it in order to simply make a living for themselves and their families but there are various other less destructive and less harmful ways of earning a living than assisting in the violent subjugation of one’s fellow man.
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone.”
Frederic Bastiat
The key to the complete and absolute overthrow of a society is not through overt military invasion but through the gradual whittling away of societal prosperity through inflation, the growth of the State, and the piecemeal removal of civil liberties. It is in this spirit that taxation of a populace is most effective. Inflation is, by its very nature, a hidden tax on the purse of the people that is scarcely felt until the damage is severe and irreparable. Every unit of currency that is created derives its value by stealing it from all the currency that is already in existence. This is the most insidious tax of all since it is truly a silent economic killer.
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.”
John Maynard Keynes
Paying your taxes like a good little slave is supporting the biggest mafia on the planet, which routinely uses that currency to kidnap, torture, pillage, rape, and murder others who would not bend over and submit to its treasonous and criminal intent. Given that we are, all of us, sovereign beings answerable to no government and with sovereign inalienable rights that no government can give nor take away, it follows that we only consent to being taxed through our fundamental ignorance of this assertion. Taxation is only theft to the extent that the ignorant and indoctrinated masses allow their wealth to be stolen by the extreme minority of psychopaths, for if they truly understood the enormous power they possess in sheer numbers they would not stand for this injustice one day longer.
Let them march all they want, so long as they pay their taxes.”
Alexander Haig, Secretary of State to President Reagan
 
Stripped to its bare essence, taxation is the word provided by the ruling class to justify theft of the fruits of industry and labor of the working productive class. The percentage of taxation and items taxed is entirely arbitrary as can be seen by the fact that since 1913 income tax, excise taxes, import taxes etc have all been increasing. The wealth of a man is his property, and just like his real estate, his possessions, his inventions etc, he is absolutely justified in resisting, to the full extent of his being, any man or entity, which includes the State, attempting to rob him of that property. Rarely are any taxes or laws repealed, rather they are most often added or augmented in scope.
The authority of the State to institute laws with impunity, which includes taxation, may be freely challenged by anyone who recognizes the inalienable sovereign status of all individuals. Ask those who would exert their influence over you “Where do you get your authority?” In a pyramid hierarchical society, such as the one we have been conditioned to accept, each bottom layer places the blame of their actions on the next layer above. This continues until perhaps the President is reached. From where does the President obtain his authority? If he answers God, then we have descended into the ungrounded justification of the god-kings of antiquity who have claimed their right to rule directly from the gods themselves, resistance against whom would be considered blasphemous. If he answers the Constitution, then one must ask from what divine source does the Constitution derive its power to rule and subjugate? The Constitution is, after all, just a piece of parchment paper, with scribbling, albeit fancy calligraphical scribbling, by dead white slave masters. Such an insignificant piece of paper cannot realistically possess the magical authority to prudently guide the development of any nation state. The impossibility of this task becomes more apparent the larger the State becomes. Verily as the State grows in size subsequent amendments, alterations, substitutions, transmutations, deletions, and additions must be made in order to accommodate and validate the expansion. This becomes the norm such that the intent of the original document itself becomes adulterated to such a degree as to scarcely be recognizable. Thus paper documents are insubstantial for the purpose of justifying the authoritarian claim to power.
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.”
Voltaire
 
If 0% taxation is freedom and 100% is slavery, then at which point does a man become a slave? I would argue that anything above 0% is some level of economic slavery since even 0.5% taxation is involuntarily collected by means of violent force and is therefore immoral, unjust, and must be resisted. The fact that the American people have allowed the excessive growth of the State and that of insufferable tax laws to asphyxiate them to the extent that it has is testament to man’s docility and complacency when subjected to the gradual losses of freedoms and progressive encroachment of oppressive bureaucracy. For a free people to remain free no amount of taxation must be tolerated. This is known as the boiling frogs syndrome. Complacency and a lack of vigilance only breeds further exploitation and theft.
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” Robert A. Heinlein
 
Another way to look at the immoral issue of taxation is from the perspective of plunder. Here is what the great Frederic Bastiat has to say on the matter:
The question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all, and there are only three ways to settle it: 1) The few plunder the many. 2) Everybody plunders everybody. 3) Nobody plunders anybody.”
Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”
 
When we are governed by an entity that functions solely through coercion and brutality, what type of person is attracted by these positions of power? It seems only logical to conclude that psychopaths and mad men would vie for the ability to rule and dominate others. Most sane people are content to maintain order in their own home, let alone try to govern one’s neighbor, street, town, city, state, or country. Thus elections can be described as congregations of psychopaths vying for the unique opportunity to dominate others using the only monopoly of violent force in the land, the State.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
 
We must protest everything “compulsory” regarding government which includes education, healthcare, taxation etc. We must de-legitimize and nullify its power! It has no power! We give it all the power! It is a hollow entity that does not exist in its own right. We can destroy it and free ourselves anytime we wish. However first in order to do so we must understand the nature of our own slavery.
I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
Harriet Tubman

About Danilo

A practitioner of Eastern Healing arts with degrees in Acupuncture and Chinese medicinal herbs, I have always questioned the status quo, a path which led me to peaceful anarchism. Through my journey, I have worn many hats, that of a classical pianist, avid chess player, philosopher, comedian, and now father of two little anarchists. My wife brands me as a Cultural Critic, but I am simply following my thirst for knowledge and passion for writing.

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