Another long awaited Stephen Hall post!!! Thank you Stephen.
One of the favorite mantras of libertarians, and their would-be anarchist allies, is the idea that all taxation is necessarily theft and by extension the fact that it is a government which imposes that taxation that taxation is thereby violence.
Usually this is followed by left-wing statists mocking them with “m’uh roads”, attempting to articulation in their monosyllabic grunts that roads, police, and fire services, that is public goods, provided by the government would not exist to their present extent but for the government, therefore all government programs are justified because a few of them are reasonable.
I am tempted to say that reality exists between these two absolutist extremes, but that is a false linear dichotomy and you, my faithful reader, know me far better than that simplistic view.
Late medieval society transitioning to a more mercantile society opens a window onto this type of philosophical debate far better than the modern philosophers centuries removed from the direct real world clashed of these perspectives.
The leading proponent of the absolute statist view was one Thomas Hobbes, coming out of the European chaos of the medieval period with petty warlords fighting to establish and expand kingdoms and to develop a culture stable enough that the fiefdoms thus created would remain stable and intact like Rome, and not disintegrate upon their death like the Empire of Alexander.
Coming from the feudal agricultural mindset, where the state owned all of the land, Hobbes reflected upon the increased stability and security that the powerful state afforded its people, protecting them from invasion of neighboring rival states and from a lawless anarchy and thievery domestically.
Which brings up some interesting historical trivia that just short of a capitol offense was the concept of ostracizing one from the feudal society. They were officially deemed an “outlaw”, which did not mean what its modern connotation denotes, it literally meant that the individual was placed outside of the protection of the law.
This meant that they could not hold property, tenancy of the land being a function of the law, and they could be cheated, robbed, assaulted, battered, even murdered and the legal authorities would do nothing to protect them or punish those who had done them harm and naturally they could not inherit property, marry, contract, or any other legal function within society. They were essentially on their own.
It somehow seems fitting that one of the worst punishments that could be thought of in an authoritarian society was to force the offending individual to essentially become an anarchist, yet modern day mis-educated youth imagine that society itself would magically become better if simply everyone were an anarchist and there was no state.
Turning from the authoritarian state to the absence of any state, the primitive stone age cultures, Taoists, and many various smaller communal experiments, such a non-society is naturally defined as the absence of government, more precisely the absence of any hierarchic structure of the society.
So if we imagine a compete society of equals without the civ, i.e. the government, then there exists no civ, or state to tax the civilian, or member of that state. There can exist only a collection of individuals.
This is where they put forth that the state, in order to tax, must initiate violence to take the tax by force from those unwilling to pay the tax. They reason that if you do not pay your taxes, men will come and either take the taxes by force or take you away by force and imprison you. (In the modern context, that is probably correct as the concept of “outlawing” someone is rather antiquated and doesn’t occur to them being rather impractical with current population densities.)
I find it amusing that the fear of someone using force to take their property is the basis for the anarchist’s criticism of the state, yet if the society were anarchist there would be no restraint upon anyone using force to take that same property.
What is to stop the free member of the anarchy from taking your stuff by force? Nothing. However, they maintain that the state, which can only exist with taxation, guarantees the use of violence, however with your neighborhood marauder there is only a chance that they might use violence. (Ignoring the difference between a threat of possible controlled violence, a.k.a. the legal process, and the actual employment of violence.)
What if they do? Well, the anarchists tell us, the people will band together to prevent this or punish this. In other words, their first recourse is to form a communal or collective government to counter violence with violence. The first reaction of any anarchist to violence against them is to have recourse to forming a hierarchy to use violence.
In the face of theft, a true anarchist would either take it upon themselves to recover their own property or accept that the property is now belongs to the person who took it. In the face of battery or murder, a true anarchist must hold that it is the victim’s duty to defend themselves and never any business of his neighbor who must remain indifferent to the actions of others around them.
If that seems contrary to human nature, it is. Anarchy, as an abstract, requires absolute individuation, a disconnect from that which does not directly concern us. It does not require evil per se, but it does require an indifference to good or evil. There are examples in the animal kingdom but not really among humans, who are by nature a social creature.
It is this natural predation of man upon man which Mr. Hobbes refers to as “the natural state of warre among men.” (Yeah, I kind of like the medieval spelling, so I’m keeping it. I’m a little anarchic that way . . . or is that anachronistic . . . either way.) In order to protect man from this natural state of disorder and chaos of the constant threat of predation, Hobbes recognized the basic organization of state authority, which he then presumes to be an all or nothing proposition. The condition of anarchy being to him so abhorrent, he opts to support the absolute power of the state.
The natural state of warre to which man is subject, as Hobbes describes it, is essentially the medieval version of The Purge, except it didn’t last only a day but was a everyday way of life. Naturally, in such a non-society people band together to form gangs and war-bands, much like what happened in Somalia forming rival groups fighting for supremacy until one group wins, becomes dictator, and establishes a stable absolutist government.
Anarchy will always create and eventually fall to a conqueror. I can hear the anarchists and libertarians screaming “not always”. However, they can in no way explain how it could be prevented other than the assumption that people would band together, i.e. form a state, to protect them from the war-lords.
“That to secure these rights, [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .” It is the perspective that the Founding Fathers sought to create a government to secure the good and proper functions of the state, but never to attain the absolute authority which would be granted it by the statists.
Too easily this becomes viewed as a midpoint on the line between anarchy and statism, but this is a mis-conception. The limitation on government is not arbitrary but principled, it is the specific connection of the power of the state to the function of the state limited to what economists have termed “public goods”, and never to extend beyond “public goods”.
Taxation used to fund public goods is an allocation system of costs among the beneficiaries of those public goods, those who profit from the state but have a natural disinclination to voluntarily pay for those goods which are of a public nature.
One could thus argue that any taxation in excess of those core, limited functions of government, ceases to be an “allocation of costs for public goods” but rather a “redistribution of wealth from the taxed to the beneficiaries”. This type of taxation is theft precisely because it is the taking from one person to give to another. Ergo all taxation to fund “social spending” is theft, however taxation to fund roads is not theft but a legitimate allocation of the costs of providing that public good.
Is taxation then force or violence? Yes, but it does not follow that all taxation is theft as taxation is warranted for the funding of public goods.
Violence is inherent in society itself, so the false pretense that a non-state would be non-violent is as foolish as stating that a totalitarian state is not maintained with the threat of violence. If violence is going to exist regardless, then it is fraudulent criticism that another system promotes violence if the system you advocate promotes as much or more violence.
Think of violence upon a parabolic scale, the parabola being always above the axis, therefore there is always violence. Thus the goal of taxation in the context of an ever present societal violence should naturally be to minimize that violence in society. Both statism and anarchy are vastly more violent than a principled limited state. (This does not hold true for the unprincipled limited state, but that requires a departure into another type of antiquated societal structure.)
Is taxation violence? It is violence to curtail greater violence. So, is taxation theft? It depends upon the purpose for which it is taxed.
