Words on paper don’t give governments the right to rob us

By David McElroy · April 10, 2012

A week from today, millions of Americans will rush to post offices to mail last-second tax returns to the IRS. Many of them will grumble about what they’re having to pay, but most will accept the process as legitimate. They believe it’s moral for governments to take money from us.

I’ve said before that taxation is theft, but this is a good time of year to revisit the question. Most people have never even questioned the morality of taxation. They were brainwashed from an early age into believing that they owe unquestioning obedience to the governments that rule over them. They were taught to love the national government — and the things they were taught confused them into believing that loving the land in which they were born was the same as loving a government.

If you’ve been taught to be “patriotic” and love your country — and if you’ve been taught that your country is “the best in the world” — it’s natural that you’d grow up trusting the national myths you were taught. And even when you got old enough to realize that politicians are lying to you and are leading the country down the wrong path, it doesn’t occur to most to question the basic system. For the most part, people just start believing the fiction that dishonest politicians have hijacked the pristine and holy system that was handed down by the Founding Fathers.

In other words, it never crosses the mind of most that the problem might be that coercive government is flawed and immoral as a basic idea.

There are two primary reasons why most people never question the assumptions behind taxation. First, they’re emotionally committed to the idea of their nation-state, for the reasons I just outlined. They grew up being taught to virtually worship various leaders from the past and being taught to revere the government. The second reason is that they don’t believe there are any alternatives to provide the services that governments currently provide. When the idea of taxation is questioned, they ask how roads will be built, how schools will exist and who will protect us from criminals.

It’s a legitimate question to ask how we’re going to provide those services, but the question has nothing to do with the moral issue. I’m sure slaveowners wondered how the cotton would ever get picked if their slaves were taken away, too. When you see things such as this as pragmatic issues, you miss the moral question — which is whether anyone has the moral right to take your money just because they assert the right to do so.

Larken Rose is a well-know tax protester who has spent time in federal prison for his refusal to pay taxes. Most people would consider him a “tax cheat” who deserves to have been punished. In the video below, he briefly explains why writing something on a piece of paper doesn’t give someone the authority to take your money. The production values of the video aren’t very high, but the message is worth the 10 minutes to watch.

I don’t recommend taking the route that Rose did and I think some of the arguments that he presents against taxation on his site are overly convoluted. I pay taxes, not out of a sense of moral obligation, but because I don’t want to be harmed as a consequence of standing up for my rights. If a thug with a gun demands your money, you generally give it to him — not because he has a moral right to it, but because you don’t want him to shoot you. That’s the basis upon which I pay any taxes.

If enough people would understand the immorality of the coercive government system, there would come a point at which the government wouldn’t have the ability to punish all of those people. As long as you believe that you have a moral obligation to turn money over to the state, you’re the worst kind of slave. You’re the kind who doesn’t even understand that he’s enslaved.

If you want to find a way to escape this slavery, it’s going to be a long-term process of finding enough people who agree and who want to escape with us in various ways. Even though it’s a long-term process, though, there’s a clear first step. Before anything else can happen, you have to free your mind of the brainwashing that taught you that someone else owns you and the things you produce. Until you do that, absolutely nothing else can change.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts