Taxation, Forced Labor, and Theft
2000; The Independent Institute; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1086-1653
Autores Tópico(s)Property Rights and Legal Doctrine
Resumo—————— ✦ —————— he injustice of taxation—of taxation per se, not merely of this or that particular tax policy or of especially high levels of taxation—is a familiar theme of popular libertarian rhetoric. Curiously, it is less evident in the more sophisticated statements of libertarianism emanating from libertarian political philosophers and economists, who tend to base their arguments on appeals to more abstruse considerations of utility maximization, rights theory, and the like. To be sure, a critique of current tax policies, perhaps even of most taxation as such, may often follow from some of those more fundamental considerations; but even so, the connection often has the appearance of an afterthought, something to be passed over quickly on the way to treating more pressing matters. One simply does not find many libertarian intellectuals—certainly not many libertarian academics—insisting that the institution of taxation that sustains the Leviathan state they oppose is clearly and fundamentally illegitimate: illegitimate not merely as currently administered, nor only for reasons that are inconclusive and in any case highly derivative from other considerations only slightly less inconclusive; but illegitimate for reasons that do not require a great deal of argumentation and are difficult in good faith to avoid recognizing—illegitimate for the same sorts of reasons that slavery is illegitimate. Two important scholars who have insisted on this illegitimacy, however, are Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard, who presented in their paradigmatic forms the main libertarian arguments against taxation. Strangely, however, those arguments have not been widely discussed even by other libertarian intellectuals. Whatever the reason for that neglect, it has nothing to do with the quality of their arguments. These arguments can be defended against the objections made against them by the (relatively) few
Referência(s)