Libertarians, such as I usually tend to be, have been circulating
a sort of bumper-sticker slogan which seems to be gaining a lot of popularity
lately. It is very encouraging to me to see this happening, and the more the
idea catches on the more freedom will be returned to our society. The slogan
I'm speaking of is, "taxation is theft." While I understand the
reasoning behind their argument, as taxation is commonly being used today, and
agree to that degree, I have to also say that they are mostly correct, but also
partly wrong. Wrong enough that should they get their way the country could be,
at some theoretical point in the future, in some serious trouble.
It is said in some small circles that sanity is the
ability to distinguish differences and similarities. Just a brief description
of this concept, by example, would be a person who couldn't tell the difference
between a car and a tomato. You would say that he's insane because he's trying
to eat his car and drive a tomato to work. See? So a person who could tell the
difference between a car and tomato, using the car to drive to work and the
tomato to make a BLT would be sane, at least on the subject of cars and
tomatoes. By comparison a go-kart is a similar thing to a car but it would
still be pretty insane to take it on the freeway for your morning drive to
work.
Do you ever wonder why the government and other large,
liberal, sections of our society seem so insane? Well a big chunk of that is
because they are; at least in terms of how insanity is defined above. Look at
what I've said there, "sanity is the ability to distinguish differences
and similarities." Your run of the mill, rank and file liberal, has no
idea what the difference between taxation and charity is, so they treat them as
if they are the same thing.
A slightly different class of the same kind of thing, should
the Libertarians get their way, (oh please God, let this happen!!!) is that
there are some cases where taxation is not exactly the same thing as theft;
although taxation should always be kept at the very lowest minimum in a free
society.
Words mean different and specific things, and because of
that it's important to understand exactly what they are attempting to convey.
The many different dictionaries have many different definitions for words; some
of them correct and some of them, well, otherwise. Their overall goal is to
define the words by how they are commonly used in a given society but what
happens when they are commonly misused? Then the obvious result is that nobody
knows what anybody is talking about. It's obvious to them what they are saying
but why doesn't that other person get it?
Thus, when I define a word, I like to do it while
including a few practical, easy to understand, examples. It's kind of like the
difference between tomatoes, cars and go karts. See? It's hard to
misunderstand. In the same way that Forrest Gump, while not too bright, was
always the most sane character in the movie—it was because his mother always had a way of explaining things so he could
understand them—it is important to define words in terms that can be
explained so they are understood. In this simple way much of the societal
insanities, particularly socialism, can be prevented.
My hope in these simple explanations is that the next
time you see it you will recognize it for what it is and be able to come up
with the correct action to combat it. So I would encourage you to look at this
very closely and please bear with my indulgence in Mrs. Gump's foray into explanations—because they need to be so simple even a liberal can understand them. It's a low bar, I
know, but it needs to be done if our freedom is to survive.
True principles are always simple.
Now—after my rather lengthy introduction—to the definitions
of the words in the title of this article, and ultimately the point of it all.
Theft is when someone uses force, or threats of force, to
take something from someone else against their will, for the use of someone
other than who it's being taken from. Joe holds a gun to Bill, threatening to
shoot him if he doesn't give him money. It doesn't matter if Joe is going to
take the money for his own use or to buy his mother's expensive prescriptions, it
is still theft. It also doesn't matter if Joe has a lot of friends who think his
mother deserves to have expensive medical care, "and besides, Bill has too
much money anyway." The point is that Bill has had something taken from him
against his will under threat, it's still the same exact underlying principle
as theft.
Taxation is when money is taken by a government for the
express purpose of serving some common, broad based, necessity across a
locality, state or country. It is important to distinguish a difference here
that makes it very different in principle than theft. The money taken has to be
spent on something that anybody in the area it is taken from, can benefit from,
mostly at any time they choose. A county decides they need a road. They decide
to use tax money to pay for it. Anybody in the county can use the road at any
time they choose, to their own benefit. Assuming your wish to live in that
county, that road is partly still yours, and the money is being taken of your
own will by your choice to live there and drive on that road.
We've all heard the socialist argument that taxes are a
good thing because of roads, police, fire departments and other such things.
Here's what they are trying to argue. And here is also where they fail to
distinguish the difference between taxation and theft. Money taken from Bill,
to pay for Joe's mother's medication, is not taxation because the medication paid
for by that money can't be used by everybody in the area where it is taken.
Bill can never benefit directly by the money taken from him because he can't
take Joe's mother's expensive medication. Only Joe's mother can take her
medication. The roads can be driven on by us all. The military protects us all.
The police and fire departments are supposed to do the same in theory if not entirely in practice.
Now we come to charity. Charity is when some individual
gives money of his own free will, to the benefit of another organization or
individual, whether or not he receives any direct benefit from it. Maybe you
like Joe's mother. I certainly think that assuming Joe's mother is a nice
person and has always treated other people well—raising her son to be a thief
notwithstanding—someone should be willing to contribute to her medication. At
least I would hope that there would be enough people with a positive attitude
towards her that they would be willing to cough up enough money to pay for her
expensive illness, lacking the ability to pay for her own insurance. And given
a government that is willing to stop taking excessive amounts of money from us
by force, it could become likely for people to have enough money to give to
charities of their choice. But I digress.
The underlying principle that distinguishes charity from
theft is the willingness of the person the money is being taken from. The
underlying principle that distinguishes taxation from theft is whether the
people the money is being taken from is being used to benefit them directly and their willingness to pay it.
It should be very emphatically stressed that it is impossible to use taxation as charity.
If you do not pay your taxes, which will end up paying for Joe's mother's
expensive medication, and persist with that attitude for any length of time,
nice men with guns will sooner or later show up at your door, incarcerate you,
confiscate your property, seize and liquidate your assets, then use it to pay
for Joe's mother's medication anyway. You might as well just let Joe hold you
up at gunpoint and be done with it for all the difference it would make. I
could make the argument that it might be better this way, because it would give
the government less chance to take and waste their share through graft, but
again I digress.
Charity, by its own definition, implies the freedom of
choice to give it. Otherwise the definition is violated and it becomes theft.
So thus, I come to the point of my meme. "Socialism
is the consideration that large groups of people have the right to take what
they want from small groups of people." In other words, by theft and threatened
use of force, they take what they want from people who are forced to pay
through no individual choice of their own, for benefits they will never
experience directly, to other people who have no connection to them. And very
often the people in the government, who drive the idea of socialism into a
society, do so with the end goal of lining their own pockets through graft, rather
than using the money to benefit the entire society they are taking it from.
However that is a whole different can of worms and not exactly the point of
this article.
The bottom line is that socialism cannot exist without institutionalized
theft.
