 We should not have to say taxation is theft. It should be as pointless a statement to make as water is wet. Theft is the removal of property without an owner's consent. Taxation is the forceful imposition of property removal. It is theft. But unfortunately the average person has not only had the wall pulled over their eyes as to this. They've even come up with their own excuses on behalf of the thieves to just make their job even easier for them in what can only be described as an epidemic of Stockholm syndrome that most of the entire world is suffering from. So today I'm going to list the most common arguments we hear against this simple and true statement and easily arrive at the conclusions that water is still wet, the sky is still blue, the sun still rises and Taxation is still theft. So here we go. One, taxes give you free stuff. Well, if you have to pay taxes for something, it's not free. That's because nothing is free. If you're not paying for something, then somebody else is. How much of another person's salary are you entitled to? None of it. The terminology used for these services like the NHS is that it's free at the point of use. Fine, but that is very different from being free. There is still a massive cost to these things. For the 2019-2020 financial year, the NHS budget was £134 billion. Remember that our population is 63 million. That is one hell of a budget and could not be further from free. The fact is that money must come from somewhere and it comes either straight out of your paycheck and everyone else's or it is collected annually, lest you be sent to prison. That is theft on a greater scale than any normal robber could ever dream of. Two, they're used for good things. Sure, breadcrumbs fall off the table to give welfare to those in need, as well as those who are not in need and abuse the system. But have you ever taken the time to think about the bad that they're used for as well? The lion's share goes to war, special interests, corporate welfare, law enforcement, spying and paying the salaries of whichever politician you believe to be evil, as well as the ones you believe to be good. Taxes make pacifists pay for war, vegans pay for animal agriculture, non-smokers pay for tobacco production, the eco-conscious pay for fossil fuel burning and car industry subsidies. And every single person who earns and saves money pays for the central banks who devalue the very money they save after these taxes are levied. Consider this, if people want something, they will choose to pay for it. If they don't want something, they won't pay for it. Imagine that every year you received a slip from the government on which you could choose to voluntarily pay for public services and choose which ones you do. If every expenditure was listed that the government undertakes and was listed honestly, I bet you would find at the very least 50% of them to be morally reprehensible or at least questionable and choose not to fund it. If the government is so good and benevolent with their expenses and our money, why are they afraid to give you a choice as to where they go? An interaction involving such immense one-sided coercion will only be done because one party greatly distrusts the other. It's up to you to decide if that is the government not trusting you to fund their mass immoral endeavours alongside their token good gestures or it's you not trusting the government to be honest, which is more likely that you're a bad person or a politician is. Did you know that the amount of people murdered in the 20th century by governments was over four and a half times the amount murdered by non-governmental agents? When you consider government workers make up only a small amount of the population, if that doesn't help you answer the question, then I have no idea what to even say to you. Three, but it's the law. And, depending on how you look at this statement, it can be labelled as multiple fallacies, either appeal to authority, appeal to force, appeal to common practice, appeal to tradition, etc. What a fatal error it is to conflate legality and morality. Here's a few things that were legal, but completely unjustifiable. The slave trade, the holocaust, the Weckbug II wedding party airstrike, the Husqamenya wedding party airstrike, the Kunduz hospital airstrike, Agent Orange, the Waco siege, internment of Japanese Americans. Should I go on, I think you get the point. A law is a piece of paper. A crime is a crime. Crimes don't become lawful by the grace of paper, signatures and stamps. And harmless, victimless actions don't become crimes by the same virtue. And do you not think that political power permits the greatest crimes humanity has ever witnessed? Here's busty art to help clue you in. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. If you still haven't lost respect for the law, you haven't been paying attention to what modern governments have been doing or what they've been doing since recorded history began. Legality has never pushed mankind forward. Free individuals have, and frequently do, indirect contradiction to law. Those who harboured slaves and Jews were criminals. If you still let law dictate your moral compass, then you can be dictated to participate in evil with no resistance at all. You're a useful idiot. I'm sorry to say it, but there's no polite way to phrase it. If you'd like to believe that you were the man in Germany who didn't salute, but when you hear about a new war crime, you shrug it off by saying hard times need hard measures or some such phrase, then guess what? All of those people would have said exactly the same. And it's time for you to take a long look at yourself in the mirror. For the social contract. You know what? I recently watched a fantastic new documentary called The Monopoly on Violence, and at one point the philosophy professor and author Michael Huma absolutely decimates the social contract argument. So I'm going to play that here. Numerous arguments have been used in attempts to justify the state's authority. For a time it was the divine right of kings. More modern justifications argue the state's authority comes from the consent of its people, often referred to as the social contract. There are basically three versions of social contract. There's like the explicit contract theory, the implicit contract theory and the hypothetical contract theory. The explicit contract theory might sound like a strawman, but it's not. So it's the theory that some people actually literally got together and said to each other, hey, that's established a government like they literally explicitly agreed with each other, either writing it down or saying it in words. That might sound like a strawman. Nobody thinks that that really happened. But actually John Locke thought that that happened. He thought that with all of the cities, there was a time like when a city was first founded, there was a time when the founders got together and explicitly agreed that they were going to set up a government for their city. Okay. And then so it was explicit for the first generation, then according to Locke, it's only implicit for the later generations. Okay. Because he's not totally stupid. But the explicit contract theory, you know, that's basically not true. So the like the governments that control that control, you know, the land existing today, almost all of them got it by conquest or usurpation. This is discussed in David Tune's famous essay of the original contract. So conquest meaning like a bunch of people sail from Europe over to this place that we're in now and they just kick the shit out of the people who are living there and take the land. And that's how we have control of the land. Usurpation is where, you know, there's a government and then somebody just like takes over the government by force. Like there's a military coup, they said, of any government. The hypothetical contract theory is a theory that, well, people would agree to set up a government. This didn't actually happen because like you weren't actually given a choice and there was already a government when you were born. But if somebody asked you, and if you were rational, you would have agreed to have a government, right? And then so that makes it okay to impose a government on you. Okay. Now there are some cases where a hypothetical agreement is valid. Namely, it's valid if it's impossible to actually ask the person. And you have good reason to believe that they would in fact consent based upon their actual beliefs and values. So there's an accident victim who's been brought into the hospital and they're unconscious and you need consent to operate on them. But the person's unconscious. The doctors go ahead anyway. And the argument is, well, look, almost certainly this person would consent to be operated on because almost everyone values their life and etc. But it doesn't work if, first of all, you can ask the person and you just don't want to because you're afraid they're going to say no. Okay. So then you cannot appeal to hypothetical consent. Secondly, it doesn't work if you say, well, they would consent if they had different philosophical beliefs from their actual beliefs. They say, no, you can't do that. So that would be required for the hypothetical consent to the government because there are actual people, they're called anarchists, who we know would not consent. Okay. But that's not generally legitimate. So like, if you have a patient who you know they wouldn't consent to be operated on because like they said that many times when they were conscious, you can't say, oh, they would consent. Also, if you have the patient and they're perfectly conscious and you just don't want to ask them, like that's not legitimate. You can't say, I don't want to ask the patient because I'm afraid he might say no. So I'm just going to argue that you probably would say yes or we're just going to like Yassim and then do the operation. You can't do that. Okay. That's like the situation with the government. Why is the government not like they could ask us? They could like the IRS, when they send out your tax return, they could have a question on it that says, do you agree to the federal government of the United States? And then if you say no, then you could get a full refund of your taxes. I wonder why they're not doing that. And it's not because they already know everyone would agree. It's because they know too many people would not agree and then they would have to give back the money and they don't want to give it back. Five, but who would build the roads? This one is the classic and we have heard this thousands of times. I need to give this question its whole video, not because it's complicated to answer, but just because it's so prolific and frankly annoying. Remember when I said that if people want something, they'll pay for it? Right. Well, do people want roads? I should bloody hope so. Let me ask this question. If there were no roads, how would car companies make money? How would fuel producers make money? How would food and drink get from farms to factories to supermarkets? Who uses roads? Everyone. It is literally in everyone's interests to have roads and especially ones that are well maintained. If everyone was bursting tyres and ripping off bumpers while driving over crappy roads, insurance companies would race hell when all the claims start coming in and put the responsible company over the coals demanding restitution and making life miserable for them. Could you imagine insurance companies doing that to the government? Always remember that the government is a monopoly and they have more power than any private monopolist could ever wish for. When they make the roads, they make them according to their standards, not the markets. When those are the rules you're playing by, you'll always sell to the lowest bidder, produce the lowest quality and accept no accountability. Six, people wouldn't pay if they had the choice. Let's run the numbers and see just how wrong this is. Survey suggests that 60% of people give to charity every year. So if we're generous and say that 50% of the government budget would still be paid, which is 421 billion, we can safely imagine that this amount would be voluntarily given per year. And there is absolutely no doubt that if you allowed public works to actually be efficient, competitive and desirable, that the bill would actually be a great amount lower than this and would easily prevent any buildup of deficit. For the third time I'll say this, if people want something, then they'll pay for it. Now, if people want something but can't pay for it, someone will try to make it affordable for them, as it is in their own interest and every new customer reached is more money in their pocket. Thanks to their monopoly, the government can set whatever price it likes for its services. Without a monopoly, prices are determined by the buyers. If you release people from their tax burden and offer them the good services without the bad and of better quality at lower prices, yeah, they would pay for it if they had the choice. There's no reason to think otherwise. Seven, you use the things they fund so you consent. You don't have any choice with a regular monopoly, let alone a monopoly that will throw you in prison if you don't pay while also not using their services. If a mugger puts a knife in your face and says give me your money and I promise I'll give you some food, you're still being fucking mugged at knife point. If I was given the ability to opt out of state police, I would. I'd use the money to buy a security system and a gun. If I could opt out of state healthcare, I would. I'd use the money to buy health insurance. Remind me again why the hell I need to be forced to do it. Ah, that's right, because if we had the choice, we would always go for the better option. And a government is forever incapable of providing the better option for anything. Eight, actually wage labor is the real theft. I've saved this one till last not because it's best, but just because it's the most niche complaint out of the bunch. This is the communist response to taxationist theft, that agreeing to work for a wage is theft as your employer earns more than you, but you do the work. Hang on a second, there was a word I used there that stands out. Yeah, it's that one, agreeing. Because you know there's that thing you sign upon accepting a job that's called a contract. Yeah, that's real. The social contract is bogus, but the literal contract is not. Above all, this theory of exploitation actually relies on two things. The labor theory of value and the dismissal of private property. The labor theory of value says that any worth that an item has, it has because of the labor that the worker put into it. Exploitation apparently occurs when one good or service is traded for another good or service that had less labor put into it. So if your labor is objectively 10 pounds an hour, and it takes you four hours to make a chair, but you only get paid 30 pounds and the chair sells for 40, the remaining 10 pounds is surplus value, which you have had stolen from you, they say. This theory was debunked hundreds of years ago, and in all honesty, it's shocking that it's still in use. How do you determine that your labor is objectively 10 pounds an hour? Did you decide it was? If you say it's worth 11, but an employer says it's worth 9. Who is right? Obviously neither of you are. It's subjective, and it differs person to person. All you can hope to do is estimate the worth of your labor by weighing up your skills, attributes and work ethic and take the highest offer you can find. If you have the power to decide objective value on your labor, why on earth would you stop there? Why not shoot for the hundreds, thousands, millions and onwards? Also, what happens if the mentioned chair doesn't sell for 40 pounds? What if the market decides that is overvalued and the seller can only fetch 30 pounds? Was there no exploitation after all? You receive the full value of the sale of the chair. I don't even need to go into an analogy like this, I only need to tell you that Belle Delphine selling bathwater debunks this theory completely. And for the dismissal of private property, I'll refer you to a video I've made where I lay out the deontological justification of private property. To cut it short, I'll say this, your body is your first line of private property. No one else is entitled to your body, and you are not entitled to anyone else's. Anything that your body's labor creates, which doesn't interfere with another thing that someone else's labor created, is yours, and yours alone. If somebody owns a tool and says, use this tool to make this good and I'll pay you for it. The tool is theirs, you agree to the terms, and so what you create is not yours. You sacrifice this creation of property for a wage. If you don't want that sacrifice, get your own tools and your own resources, and bear the risk that comes with it in order to get the reward. Stop acting like you are entitled to the property of another person. So, there's my list over with, and yes, taxation is theft. Please like the video if you've managed to listen to me ramble on this far, and be sure to subscribe for the next one. Take it easy.