*Taxes Are Theft?---and those who don't pay the taxes they owe are
thieves.second to least favorite commercial:"I owed the IRS $20K dollars
but only had to pay $2k."least favorite commercial:"Ask your doctor if
you're healthy enough for sexual activity."*
On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 4:43:19 PM UTC-5, MJ wrote:
>
>
>
> *Taxes Are Theft? *By Robert Murphy
> <http://www.libertychat.com/author/murphy/> on October 9, 2014
>
> In the opening essay of my pamphlet *Chaos Theory*
> <https://mises.org/books/chaostheory.pdf> I write:
>
> Just as right-wing hawks embrace the Orwellian notion that War is Peace,
> left-wing egalitarians believe that Slavery is Freedom. The hawks wage
> endless war to end war, while the social democrats engage in massive
> theftor “taxation” as they call itto eliminate crime. It is high time
> to abandon such monstrous paradoxes.
>
> Indeed, it is quite popular in libertarian circles to point out that
> wearing a badge, or winning a popularity contest, doesn’t give a person
> special moral prerogatives that others lack. “Conscription” is a fancy name
> for kidnapping and slavery, while “war” is a euphemism for mass murder. It
> is very useful to bring up these points periodically, in order to remind
> people that agents of the State well, get away with murder.
>
> Naturally, if something is a wonderfully effective rhetorical device, the
> people who want the institutional theft and systematic mass murder to
> continue, will object to these debating techniques. For example, Scott
> Sumner recently explained
> <http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/10/words_and_meani.html> to the
> readers of EconLog that contrary to what they might have thought, not all
> forms of terrorism are bad. You see, there’s good terrorism and bad
> terrorism. In his words:
>
> Many people like to attack ideas by linking them up with words that have
> ambiguous meaning, but either very positive or very negative connotations.
> Then they use the word as a sort of crude cudgel, to bash their opponent.
> This is a particularly reprehensible way of arguing, and shows a poverty of
> imagination I sometimes hear people say that the bombing of Hiroshima was
> an act of terrorism, which killed many more people than 9/11. Of course the
> term ‘terrorism’ is not well-defined, recall the old joke that one man’s
> terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. But I do find the claim to be
> plausible. After all, we killed many thousands of innocent Japanese
> civilians with the goal of terrorizing the Japanese into meeting our
> political demands. But here’s what I object to. The people that make this
> claim often believe they have thereby advanced the argument that bombing
> Hiroshima was a bad idea. But they have not done so. Was it good terrorism
> or bad terrorism? Did ending the war quickly save many more Japanese
> civilian lives on the mainland (recall the horrific civilian casualty total
> in the attack on the relative small island of Okinawa.) I don’t wish to
> debate the issue, and indeed I don’t know the correct answer. All I know is
> that taking a word with an ambiguous meaning and negative connotation and
> attaching it to a policy you don’t like doesn’t advance the argument one
> iota.
>
> Contrary to Sumner’s take, I actually think labeling the atomic bombing of
> Hiroshima as an act of terrorism does advance the argument many iotas–in
> fact it should be pretty decisive for most people.
>
> Let me try it like this: Suppose Harry Truman somehow captured all of the
> children, under 10 years old, of the Japanese Emperor and every general in
> the Japanese military. Truman then sent a message to this group of Japanese
> fathers, saying, “We will shoot one of your kids every hour, until you
> unconditionally surrender.” Would Americans be OK with that policy? I’m
> pretty sure most of them wouldn’t. And yet, what Truman ordered the
> American forces to do in practice was the quite deliberate killing of tens
> of thousands <http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200708230009.html> of Japanese
> children (as well as tens of thousands of adults). Hiroshima and Nagasaki
> were not military targets; the point of obliterating them was to cause,
> well, terror in the hearts of the surviving Japanese so that they would
> capitulate to the political demands of the American government. There’s a
> word for killing children in order to achieve political objectives. It
> starts with a “t.”
>
> Now it’s interesting that I imagine some readers will object to the above,
> and say that the two scenarios are different. The US officials weren’t
> singling out children per se when they dropped the a-bombs. But that’s kind
> of weird. Suppose somehow the authorities could have given a warning, such
> that the adults in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were able to flee to safety,
> leaving only tens of thousands of children to die. Would that have suddenly
> turned the acceptable military choice into an unacceptable act of
> terrorism–by killing fewer civilians?
>
> It’s also interesting that we can use Sumner’s rhetorical device against
> him. Notice in the beginning of his passage, he says that people who label
> the a-bombing of Hiroshima as terrorism “use the word as a sort of crude
> cudgel, to bash their opponent.” Well gee whiz, Sumner says that as if it
> advances the debate on rhetoric by one iota. But why should we think that?
> If a-bombing kids is acceptable, why can’t we bash people with a crude
> cudgel if they’re advancing a really monstrous argument? There’s good
> cudgel-bashing and bad cudgel-bashing, right?
>
> Later in his post, Sumner singles out the libertarian claim that “taxation
> is theft.” Here too he complains that this is pointless, because the real
> question is whether taxation is “good theft” or “bad theft.” (I’m not
> making this up; go read his post.) This prompted people in the comments to
> link to this LessWrong post
> <http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/>,
>
> in which the author also complains about such standard libertarian
> rhetorical moves.
>
> Now if you click that new link, you’ll probably agree that the particular
> versions of the argument he showcases, do indeed sound dumb. But that’s
> because he makes the person wielding the argument into a shouting fool. In
> fact, every single example has an exclamation point at the end; I think
> really what the LessWrong author has shown us is that shouting is a poor
> way to argue.
>
> This is why I was a smart aleck and put a question mark in the title of
> the present post. I agree with Sumner and the LessWrong author that just
> shouting “taxation is theft!” or “a-bombing Hiroshima was terrorism!” do
> not end the debates. However, it is very instructive to ask people, “What
> are the defining attributes of theft (or murder or terrorism or slavery)?
> Why do we abhor it in most circumstances, but not when agents of the State
> do it?”
>
> Last thing: I am not being here an absolutist in a pejorative sense. For
> example, we can imagine a starving guy in the woods who stumbles on an
> abandoned cabin, breaks in, and eats some food. Yes this is technically
> theft, but I think most of us would be OK with it.
>
> But if you start tweaking the scenario, you’re not as sure. What if the
> guy makes it a habit of getting hammered at his own cabin, then wanders out
> in a drunken stupor, such that he “has no choice” but to break into his
> neighbor’s cabin every weekend? At some point you start to think, “That’s
> theft, and it’s immoral.”
>
> I have a hard time seeing how anybody can explain away the systematic
> taking of large percentages of income–against the owners’ wills–performed
> year in and year out by the US government. If any reader still thinks, “Oh
> c’mon, it’s just different when the government does it,” I invite you to
> watch this John Oliver bit on “asset forfeiture”
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks> (what an antiseptic term).
> You’re telling me those cops aren’t just robbing people at gunpoint?
>
>
> http://bit.ly/1tpjS15
>
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