John Krull, writing in the State House File, has a great column entitled “To coin a phrase” that you should go read. The passage that prompted me to write this post:
Because conservatives have spent the better part of the past century equating taxation with theft—and arguing, along the way, that good government is the world’s only free lunch—they always find themselves in a quandary when they have to pay for something.
The free lunch line is a good way of capturing the dynamic you frequently see out of libertarians and “small government” champions. Typically they’ll rail against government in the abstract. When pushed on examples of the many necessary and useful things that government does, they’ll often retreat to some variant “oh, I’m not advocating for anarchy, obviously *some* government is necessary.” The massive amounts of fraud, waste, and abuse that they are sure exists usually lies elusively just over the horizon. Or maybe they’ll extrapolate anecdata into something systemic.
And, as Krull points out, “the entire civilian federal government payroll in 2022 came to $271 billion. Even if Musk and Trump fired everyone and allowed meat to go uninspected, Social Security checks to go unprocessed and planes to fall from the sky every day, they still would be $130 billion short of paying for that tax cut that will help them line their own pockets.”
Whatever sound and fury gets kicked up, I think we’ll find that the point of the exercise is for Musk, Trump, and their cronies to rob us blind so that they can stuff a few more billion dollars into their pockets. (I always like the counterargument that “they are so rich that they’ll be incorruptible, they couldn’t possibly want more money.” As if the guy with 57 guitars couldn’t possibly want a 58th guitar.)
Tesla paid no taxes in 2024 Musk stated they used a loophole to avoid taxes. Musk said congress needs to close the loopholes.
So true. Most people who keep repeating the mantra about government “waste, fraud and abuse” don’t have much actual knowledge of what government does, or why, or how.
Conservatives don’t say and don’t believe that taxation is theft. Libertarians are not conservatives.
An essay which attributes views to people without quoting anyone is intellectually feeble . The claim that libertarians have not provided detailed alternatives to government is specious and reveals a lack of reading. I question whether you have read any book by a single prominent libertarian thinker. If so, which one?
To quote from Cambridge Dictionary:
Theft: the act of taking something that belongs to someone else and keeping it
How does that not apply to taxes? Does the money taken not belong to the person who earned it? Does government have first claim on the fruits of our labors?
If theft is not theft because government does it, is slavery not slavery because it was legally sanctioned? Was Jim Crow — forcing Rosa Parks to the back of the bus — not immoral because it was legally required?
Your essay is so thin, so deficiently reasoned, that it was barely worth this reply. One useful rule for life is that one shouldn’t write on a topic about he knows little or nothing. But if he does write, he should at least make the effort to give it some substance. To do that you would need to be well read.
That’s a lot of words for “nuh uh.”
But lets look at this sentence:
First of all, is “earning” the same as “acquiring?” What if a group of people work together to create value but one of those people takes most of the profit from that work and leaves only scraps for the rest of those people? Who earned the money? Who does it “belong” to? What if the government took the money from the guy who acquired it and gave it to the people who earned it?
You might respond with something about contracts and property rights. But then you will probably ignore the whole government created and maintained infrastructure whereby property rights are defined and contracts are enforced. Without that infrastructure, there is no “property,” just stuff you’re temporarily strong enough to hold onto and perhaps some opinions about who ought to possess the stuff.