The sentiment that was often expressed, including quite openly at conferences by well-known lawyers of the period, was that all taxation was theft. Their consequent suggestion was that they were quite entitled to undertake transactions in any form that they could to prevent that theft from taking place.
Unsurprisingly, I found that opinion abhorrent. Implicit within it was the idea that the state was malign. It is necessarily implied that the law was imposed. It presumed that government was always in opposition to private interests.
That’s why they put you in jail if you don’t pay your taxes, right?
Why there have to be tax campaigners who make sure people pay taxes, right?
The sentiment that was often expressed, including quite openly at conferences by well-known lawyers of the period, was that all taxation was theft. Their consequent suggestion was that they were quite entitled to undertake transactions in any form that they could to prevent that theft from taking place.
I’m calling Bullshit on that one.
Never happened. Or at least it never happened outside Murphy’s mind.
Taxation is theft. For it not to be there would have to be some agreement about what you get for being parted from your cash and some recourse if you don’t get it. If I am considering buying something I may decide not to buy it and hang onto my money. The government spend my money on all kinds of stuff that I don’t want but I don’t get the choice of not paying for any of it. If that isn’t theft what else would you call it ?
@Stonyground
Tax is the price you pay for participating in the economic system your government hosts. It is optional. There are competing economic systems. Government doesn’t make it easy for them or their participants. Part of their costs.
Damn bint stole my duct tape from my cabin luggage when I was flying back from Perth. Didn’t know the damn security regs said you couldn’t carry it on board. (I’d been carrying it as the soles of my sneakers were coming off.)
All government is based on theft and compulsion. Doesn’t it say somewhere in the Bible that men are as the beasts of the field? Quite accurately.
Dennis beat me to it but this was interesting
I believe in democracy.
Well let’s see now
– opposition to immigration is ‘unacceptable’
And Far Right even if expressed democraticall
– Brexit has to be revised because populism
– the election of populist leaders in Europe is unacceptable
So his belief in democracy is rather like the Korean Democratic people’s republic or the German Democratic Republic. A perversion of the term
As with so many of his recent posts, the nauseating nature of his utterly unmerited self- regard is enough to make one physically sick. What a thoroughly obnoxious, loathsome piece of crap he truly is.
There’s an American chap who claims to have demonstrated that the federal income tax is theft on the grounds that the constitutional amendment that allowed it did not, in fact, pass. The federal government had then simply lied about it.
Seems far-fetched to me, but, y’know, governments.
Otherwise I think this “tax is theft” stuff is juvenile balls. Except for retrospective taxation, obviously.
I wonder what his reaction would be if I told him that I get 80% of my income from the UK, but pay not a penny in tax.(The authorities in New Zealand take enough of it though.)
“No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer’s pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue”.
Lord Clyde – Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services v Inland Revenue [1929]
Stoneyground @ 3.34 – Kerry Packer said “Anybody in this country who does not minimise his tax wants his head read–I can tell you as a government that you are not spending it so well that we should be donating extra.’
I wouldn’t mind quite so much if they just didn’t waste so much of it or spend it on shit I don’t like.
Of course taxation isn’t theft.
It’s extortion.
Actually, I’d be more explicit: it’s extortion with menaces.
DK