David McElroy

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.

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Free speech isn’t very popular. It might be enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but that doesn’t mean most people like allowing it. That also doesn’t mean that the courts haven’t found ways to limit speech when they want to.

I heard a snippet of an interview on a TV news show Saturday while I was in a restaurant. The interviewer and a guest were talking about something untrue that one side had said of the other in a political battle between Democrats and Republicans. The interviewer seemed aghast at the blatant dishonesty.

“Shouldn’t it be illegal for them to say this since it’s not true?” he asked.

If you did a poll, I suspect a majority would agree with the interviewer, but that’s because they haven’t thought through the alternative to allowing unfettered free speech. If political dishonesty were declared illegal, who’s to judge what’s true? When two sides see the world in a different way, is one of them lying? And what about unpopular positions? Are those who warn that the mainstream is enslaving them guilty of telling lies?

And this brings us to anonymous speech. It’s come to be accepted today that a person who wants to engage in political speech is required to put his name on the piece. Ironically, using this standard, the collection of articles that successfully advocated for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution — the Federalist Papers — would be illegal today. It was accepted as an obvious right of free speech to hide your identity at the time, but those of the progressive left decided that’s not a good idea. So those who want to express their opinions are required to do it in a way that the money is essentially traceable in some way.

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For hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, today is Easter. It’s a day when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, which is central to the Christian faith. For many other people, it’s just a time to feel superior to religious people — on the assumption that religious people live by faith and the atheist world lives by “reality.” I’d like to suggest that faith is at the root of what everyone believes.

Faith means having a belief in something that you can’t prove with certainty. There’s no question that much of religious belief is completely based on faith. But what about the rest of life? What about all the other things that you accept as true, but which you couldn’t prove if your life depended on it?

On a mundane level, you have faith in a lot of things that you can’t prove. Have you been to Moscow? Or to the North Pole? Or to Cairo? Most of us haven’t been to those places, yet we believe in them, because we’ve seen pictures and read stories and heard experiences from other. We believe the evidence is strong that they exist, enough so that we wouldn’t question their existence.

You believe in atoms and various sub-atomic particles, even if you don’t have a clue what they really are. You can’t see them. You don’t really understand them. But you were taught in science class that they were the building blocks of all matter, so you believe. Can you prove it? No, you can’t. You just have faith that the people who should know something about this really do.

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