This is for all the statists out there...
The defining characteristic of a State is that it is funded by taxation. All governments, throughout time, have had this feature, regardless of other trappings, ideologies,or policies.
My challenge to you is simple: Defend that practice.
My contention is that taxation is theft. Taxation is the extortion, by violence or threat of violence, of the funding necessary to run the government. Refute that, if you can.
Simple, we all live in a social group called a community. In that community there are services that the general public uses and needs to be maintained. The system we use to collectively pay for these services are called "taxes or taxation". To be specific here are some of the services that fall into this category: National defense, prison, major roads, Public Utilities, Fire & Police.
You may feel compelled to challenge these but each one fits a very important public good. I do believe people can operate outside of a social group but those are rare and we are social beings at the core of our nature.
Being that you call people who would give reasoning to taxes, a statist, lends me to believe you challenge the legitimacy of a state. Is this true?
Dalkore
If you ask that question, this must be the first of my posts you have read.
Yes, I challenge the legitimacy of the state. I'll be getting back to the other conversation in a little bit, but first, I wanted to take care of this post.
First, I don't deny that those are all useful and indeed in some cases, necessary services. (maybe not so much prison, but that's another debate)
What I contest is that those services need to be paid for by force. All of those, even prison, can be provided on the open market, and paid for, voluntarily, by those who need them. A little reference material for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_anarchismNow, back to the greater debate.
1. Then let's stop wasting time. I'm proposing we vote on people with guns to go door to door demanding payment for land use, and distribute that between residents of the jursidiction. Either call that a tax and dispute it, or call it restitution and don't. Every other libertarian I've ever talked to calls this a tax. Your call.
2. The deer and tomato are natural capital.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_capitalIf you're collecting tomatoes in a public place, you should reimburse everyone else whose tomatoes you're taking. If you've paid land taxes to farm them in private, we're already getting reimbursed for the factor of production so any surplus tomatoes you can grow belong to you.
Example:
Plot of land will naturally yield 10 tomatoes.
We allow you to privatize it.
Under your wise supervision, the plot yields 100 tomatoes.
We still deserve reimbursement for the 10 tomatoes we can no longer pick, but not the 90 that are a result of your labor - those are yours.
All of this depends on whether you define land in it's state of nature as being unowned, or collective property.
If you allow that all land, and indeed, all things not man-made, are collectively owned by all until appropriated by someone, then you have an effective argument for taxation. I do not. And it's not just on principle that I reject this notion. There's a very practical reason why I reject it. It's inefficient.
Let's take your tomato example. Let's say that I and 10 of my neighbors grow tomatoes. To illustrate the concept, I'll limit the redistribution to just those 11 people. I start out with 100 tomatoes, and so does everyone else. the land, naturally produces 10 in that area, so the government comes along and takes those 10 from each of us. Now, it has 110 tomatoes, and we each have 90. The government then takes it's cut - 11 tomatoes, leaving 99 - and redistributes the others evenly. So now the government has 11 tomatoes, and we each have 99. The net effect is that someone has come along and stolen 1% of our tomatoes, and given us nothing in return.
Scale this however you want, it comes back to the same fact: paying everyone else for the use of your property is, at best, a shuffling of resources with no net effect, and at worst, a waste of some percentage to whatever administration oversees that shuffling.
