Apparently I’m anti-American.
I can’t say I’m particularly surprised. It so happens that whenever I bring up the topic of America’s record on civil liberties (warantless searches, removal of habeas corpus, secret prisons, torture, high imprisonment rates) or foreign policy (thousands of innocents dead from unjustifiable and illegal war in Iraq), the more intelligent readers of this blog have pointed out these are anti-American left-wing views.
Hang around libertarians and you’ll soon hear someone declare that “taxation is theft”, or that tax is money “extorted over the barrel of the gun”.
The natural rights argument against tax runs something like this:
Setting aside the logic of the above argument, let’s consider a hypothetical situation where tax is organised through voluntary contract.
The setting is Libertopia; there’s no tax and all services including the military, police and courts are provided by privately run firms. Along comes GuvCorp who starts buying land and leasing it to Libertopians with an unusual set of terms: Rather than paying a fixed rent each month, tenants are instead charged a percentage of their income. Furthermore, GuvCorp reserves the right to pass laws governing the social and economic conduct of tenants while they remain on the lease. GuvCorp stipulates that the terms of the lease may be changed at any time, provided a two-thirds majority of shareholders agree to the change. GuvCorp undertakes to provide various social services as well as to defend tenants from non-GuvCorp coercion.
Tenants may break the lease only be leaving GuvCorp land.
