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Profit in a market economy is derived from a voluntary exchange of goods/services for currency. I buy a Ribeye because I obtian more value from the Ribeye than I do the $18 in my bank account, However if that ribeye goes to $25 I now value the $25 more than the Ribeye so I dont buy it instead I buy a Chicken Breast. These are choices I make in a free(ish) market. Companies offer their goods, I choose to buy or not Similar with labor, I go to the market offer my knowledge and labor for a Wage, if I set my price to high companies will refuse to hire me, if I set my price to low I am missing out on profit. Income Taxation is in no way voluntary exchange like that, the government with the full authority to initiate violence injects itself with a demand that for every hour of labor I sell I must provide the government with a 10-40% cut of not only my profit from the sell but the gross transaction price. They do so under the threat of violence (aka imprisonment) if I refuse their order. The fact is that the government, like a common thief, says to a person: Your money, or your life...The government does not, indeed, waylay a person in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful. |
Take a weekend off and calculate how much 'fees' you would have to pay for 'private defense services', infrastructure, judiciary, police and all the other things if they were made private.
> The fact is that the government, like a common thief, says to a person: Your money, or your life
What religious delirium.
> But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
The dastarty act of providing military, police, firefighting, law, justice, social services - all the things that make you live in a modern society instead of living in the former late feudal society where you wouldn't even have the social rank in order to be able to talk against your feudal lord in public like this.
There is no magical, divine, extraterrestrial or supernatural force that provides this modern society that you live in, and all the rights and freedoms that you have in that society. We, the people, have managed to make that happen through the mechanisms we invented. And one of those mechanisms is the state that is owned by its people.