Abstract
This chapter argues, given that taxation is a form of extortion, that taxation is ethically justified to resist it in a variety of ways (all the while keeping due process in mind). Prominent objections are considered and rejected; an alternative to funding legal services is suggested.
Reprinted from Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice 2(2): 80–91 (2010). Copyright © 2010 Tibor R. Machan.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 169. A worthwhile scholarly exploration of how Nozick’s arguments have been dealt with by defenders of taxation may be found in Edward Faser, “Taxation, Forced Labor, and Theft,” The Independent Review 4(2): 218–235. I should note that my position on taxation is not that it is theft but that it is extortion. It involves stating to citizens, “You must hand over a portion of your resources or you will be prosecuted and when convicted you will go to jail and if you resist you will be forcibly recaptured and might be killed in the process, all according to law.”
- 2.
Some have misunderstood this right to amount to one that legally guarantees one’s happiness but in fact it amounts to requiring respect for one’s right to the freedom to pursue happiness, including by means of establishing a legal order that will secure one’s rights.
- 3.
For a discussion of this idea, see Tibor R. Machan, “Dissolving the Problem of Public Goods: Financing Government without Coercive Measures,” in T. R. Machan (ed.), The Libertarian Reader (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 201–208. For another similar position, see Ayn Rand’s “Government Financing in a Free Society,” The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet Books, 1964), 135–140.
- 4.
For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan (2006), “Rights, Values, Regulation and Health Care,” Journal of Value Inquiry 40(2–3): 385–391.
- 5.
Tony Judt (2009), “What’s Living and What’s Dead in Social Democracy,” The New York Review of Books 56 (December 17).
- 6.
Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (W. W. Norton & Co., 1999). See, also, Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004), which defends what are usually referred to as positive or welfare rights which impose involuntary obligations – servitude? – on all who are able to fulfill them. There are other approaches than Sunstein’s to defending such “rights”. See, in particular, James Sterba, How to Make People Just: a Practical Reconciliation of Alternative Conceptions of Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), who argues the enigmatic view that negative rights imply positive ones because in some (in my view exceptionally rare) cases not being coerced isn’t sufficient for people to take the actions required for their survival and flourishing in life. Cf., Tibor R. Machan (1976), “Prima Facie v. Natural (Human) Rights,” Journal of Value Inquiry 10(1): 119–131, which argues, among other points, that the existence of such extraordinary cases is no reason for fashioning a legal system by what they seem to imply. As the saying goes, “hard cases make bad law”.
- 7.
Whether orders that governments issue in societies that fail to meet the proper criteria of legitimacy should still be dubbed “laws” is a widely debated matter among those concerned with the foundations of legal systems, including, especially, natural law theorists. Perhaps it would be clearer to label those edicts “rules,” and the “governments” involved as “rulers,” as in “the ruler or rulers of Dubai”.
- 8.
http://www.lonang.com/curriculum/2/s21b.htm and Jean M. Yarbrough, “Jefferson and Property Rights,” in Ellen Frankel Paul and Howard Dickman (eds.), Liberty, Property, and the Foundations of the American Constitution (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989).
- 9.
For a discussion of the general principles of revolutionary action, see Tibor R. Machan, “Human Rights, Political Change and Feudalism,” in A. Rosenbaum, (ed.), Philosophies of Human Rights (Greenwich, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).
- 10.
Quoted in Felix Frankfurter, Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court, (New York, NY: Atheneum, Originally Published by Harvard University Press, 1965), 71.
- 11.
It is worth mentioning in this connection that a strong clue to the truth of this conclusion comes from discussions in families, usually around April 15th, as to the variety of ways that earnings by family members ought to be protected, including by means of competent tax advisors who may well indicate what might by champions of taxation be construed as dubious – illegal (?) – forms of tax dodging and avoidance. But see, for an enthusiastic, dogmatic call for merciless action against all tax evasion and dodging – that is, against all those who would escape the extortion that is taxation – Raymond Baker and Eva Joly (2009), “Illicit Money: Can it Be Stopped?” The New York Review of Books, December 3: 61–64. (The authors try to lump together escaping taxation with all sorts of looting by various criminal agents but their sophistry is blatant.)
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Machan, T.R. (2012). Taxation: The Ethics of Its Avoidance or Dodging. In: McGee, R. (eds) The Ethics of Tax Evasion. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1287-8_4
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