It’s commonly said by conservatives and libertarians that taxation is theft. What happens to you if you don’t pay your taxes? The government will send police to your house and you’ll be escorted to prison. Ergo, the government forces you to pay your money to them, just like a mobster who will shoot you if you don’t hand him your wallet. So they say, anyway.
Unlike the mobster, the government prints and issues all of the money you have ever held in your life. So it is really theirs, not yours. One of the very few things in the Bible that actually has a point to it is Jesus’ question, “Whose face is on this coin?” The answer: Caesar’s. So, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s…”
The same thing holds true now if you replace “Caesar” with “United States government.”
A similar conclusion was reached through a different method by enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Paine. Where did the businessman get his goods? Think about it. When you walk in a store and shop for a microwave, where did that microwave come from? It came from people taking plastic, metals, and various other things and transforming them into just the right shapes to be put together into a microwave. But where did the metals and other materials that were used to create the microwave come from? They come from the earth. Who owns the earth? We all do. So, when someone mines for metals or takes any other material out of the earth, they are taking something that belongs to all of us. Taxation is the only way for “everybody” (represented by our democratically-elected government) to be repaid their share of the goods that were harvested out of the Earth.
Besides all that, most people who make the “taxation is theft” argument have benefited greatly from public highways, free public schools, social security, subsidized public colleges, discounted student loans and ten thousand other things that the government provides people with that are paid for with tax dollars. So if taxation was theft, the people pointing it out are thieves.
