Some libertarians say taxation is theft. I once agreed, but agree no longer. Here, in brief, is why.
The best argument for taxation being is theft is a general argument against political legitimacy. To feel the argument’s force, consider a case like the following:
Principled Peter believes that you don’t give enough money to charity. You’re living high while people die. One day he sends you an email: “FYI: I hacked into your bank account. I transferred a third of it to poor single moms.”1
Intuitively, this seems wrong. Peter had no right to take your money. Even if you were going to waste your wealth on foolish knickedy-knacks and trivial whatsahoozits, and even though Principled Peter was going to put it to better use than you were, his actions were still wrong. Peter stole from you. He’s a no-good, very naughty thief.
The libertarian challenge: Spot the difference between Principled Peter, and literally every government on earth. Just like Peter, literally every government on earth forcibly takes money from citizens, and invests it in what it thinks—often wrongly—are noble causes that help society. If there isn’t a difference, then, if you thought Peter was a thief, you should agree, on pain of inconsistency, that the state is a thief as well.
I think there is a difference. Of the many moral considerations that render regular robberies a sin, it happens that none of them are binding on the state in ordinary cases of taxation.
To grease the wheels, grant me, for the sake of argument, that there are government programs that make the world a better place. (Better, that is, than if those programs didn’t exist, or if there were no government at all.)
If you grant this, but still think taxation is wrong, it must be because you think the government violates some deontic constraint or constraints when it taxes us, just like Peter violated some deontic constraint or constraints when he hacked your account.
Here are some candidate constraints it might be violating. I believe, typically, that it violates none of them.
One deontic constraint it might be violating is one of property rights that stem from desert. Some of what we possess, we earn. And some of what we earn, we deserve. So when some outsider—Peter or the government—swoops in and steals those earnings from us, they’ve robbed us of wealth we deserved to keep. Now: Let’s agree, for argument’s sake, that some people deserve some of their wealth. Presumably, they deserve their wealth because they made good choices and worked hard for it. However, much of what people have, they don’t deserve in this sense, because the reason they have it is luck. An enormous part of the difference in earnings between the have-nots, the haves, and the have-yachts is entirely down to luck: physical beauty, IQ, education, upbringing, family wealth, country of birth, gender, race, the presence of role models, lucky coincidences, and random offshoots of the butterfly effect. Earnings that stem from these unchosen luck-factors are not deserved. Desert is a product of choice, and these factors were never chosen. For this reason, much of what we have is not deserved in any moral sense. (I suspect the proportion of people’s wealth that they don’t morally deserve, at least among high-earners, is rarely below 70%). So if the government (or Peter, for that matter) taxes people below the desert threshold, they don’t violate property rights based on desert.
Another deontic reason why theft is usually wrong is convention: as a contingent matter of fact, society has a convention that fellow citizens not steal each other’s money. Conventions frequently give rise to moral duties: It could have been that spitting on one’s food in a restaurant and throwing darts at the waiter was conventionally seen as polite, even by the waiters. In fact, it could have been that not spitting on one’s food in a restaurant and throwing darts at the waiter was seen as positively rude. But it isn’t. And, because it isn’t, because spitting on one’s food and throwing darts at the waiter is seen as rude, spitting on one’s food and throwing darts at the waiter is morally wrong. As a contingent matter of fact, however, there is no social convention in our society against the government taking people’s money and investing it in government programs. So, as a contingent matter of fact, this deontic constraint, though it applies to Peter, doesn’t apply to any government. (Be-tee-dubs, I’m inclined to think that the absence of any such convention is a necessary condition on the concept of a state. Libertarians often define the state as whatever entity has the monopoly on force in a certain geographic area. But suppose the British Government was controlled indirectly, in secret, by a legion of devils: the legion of devils, in that case, would have the ultimate monopoly on force over the UK. On reflection, I’m not inclined to call the legion of devils a “state”. This isn’t because they weren’t elected. There are plenty of unelected governments. Nor is it because they are devils: I can easily conceive of a government run by devils. Rather, it’s because there would be no convention in Britain exempting the legion of devils from the usual rules on coercion. If this convention were in place, I think the legion would count as a state.)
Another reason why theft is typically wrong is that people feel personally attached to many of their physical possessions. Sometimes, the attachment is sentimental. Other times, the property feels like an extension of the owner’s character. This is one of the reasons it’s wrong, say, when robbers steal jewellery or family heirlooms. But this reason largely doesn’t apply to taxation (and nor, for that matter, to Peter): while people put emotional and sentimental stock in particular objects, they don’t put sentimental or emotional stock in abstract shares of their income. So this deontic reason also doesn’t apply to most taxes.
Another constraint against theft, even against theft for a good cause, is that it breeds uncertainty and anxiety—for individuals ands society—who have to live in a state of heightened worry that an unspecified portion of their wealth could be snatched away at any moment. This constraint needn’t apply to governments, though: Governments (ideally, anyway) are fairly transparent and regular about how much they plan to take. If they aren’t, that’s naughty—but on the whole, they are.
Another constraint against theft is that it’s typically unequal and arbitrary: thieves randomly target individual citizens. They don’t steal fairly, proportionally, from everyone. But governments (ideally, anyway) don’t face this moral handicap: they needn’t target individuals arbitrarily. Tax rules are blanket rules, and they can be engineered to target income groups is an equal, proportional, and unform way.
Another constraint against theft is that—if the thief takes enough—the victim loses their autonomy to some non-trivial degree. Money is a gateway to the world: for many people, money is a prerequisite for pursuing their ground projects and chasing their conception of the Good Life. Take enough of it, and you inhibit their ability to do this, which is bad. But this needn’t apply to the government (or, for that matter, to Peter) if they take an amount below the autonomy-compromising threshold. Where this threshold lies can be debated, but plausibly a 3% billionaire tax doesn’t do this. So, as long as the government doesn’t take too much, taxation needn’t violate this constraint: low-enough taxes don’t prohibitively prevent real-world people from pursuing any reasonable conception of the Good Life.
A final constraint against typical cases of theft has something to do with the rule-consequentialist/Kantian worry about what would happen if everyone in society felt free to hack into people’s bank accounts and steal each others’ incomes. Obviously, if everyone in society did feel free to do this, there would be mayhem, everybody would die, and Moshi Monsters would rule the Galaxy. But if government is by and large a positive thing, and its programs have good consequences, then this worry also needn’t apply: even if it would be bad if citizens felt free to take money from each other at random in covert and non-transparent ways, the consequences needn’t be bad if governments felt free to transparently confiscate wealth and put it to better use.
In a nutshell, my argument is this: of the numerous reasons why theft is typically wrong, even when it’s for a positive cause, none of these reasons apply to most instances of real-world taxation. Thus, mostly, taxation isn’t theft.
Here are two caveats about my argument:
First, it doesn’t vindicate every instance of taxation, even when the taxes aren’t being used for useless and terrible things. Suppose the government taxes Peter Singer, who was going to give his money to something great, and uses the money for something only modestly good. In this instance, taxation is wrong: the government took money that was going to go to something great, and used it for something mediocre. Perhaps taxation of this sort has a necessary evil justification—maybe it would grind too many people’s gears if the government made exemptions for good people like Singer, or maybe it would be logistically impossible to make exemptions for good people without wasting a superhuman amount of money, or opening up zillions of loopholes for malevolent people like you. But, on an individual level, the taxation is still morally bad.
Second, this is not an attempt to solve the problem of political authority. As Michael Huemer explains, political authority consists in two things:
To have political authority, an organization must have (i) a special moral entitlement to impose its rules, by force, on the rest of society and (ii) a special capacity to generate moral obligations, in individuals, by issuing commands to them. The entitlement to forcibly impose its rules is what I call “political legitimacy.” The obligation to obey the commands of the state is what I call “political obligation.” So, in my terminology, the government has political authority if and only if (i) the government has political legitimacy and (ii) the citizens have political obligations to the government2.
I have only tried to justify political legitimacy, not political obligation, and only in the context of taxation. Nothing I’ve said justifies the government, say, in restricting immigration en masse, prohibiting drug use, or punishing people for selling their bodies for sex.
Interestingly, nothing I’ve said could be used to justify punishing tax evasion. On my view, it’s generally permissible for the state to try to tax people. But if it fails, because smart
people manage to hide their money or game the system, nothing I’ve said could be used to justify punishing them for their efforts.
So libertarians may be right about political authority—I’m not sure. But they’re wrong that, if the government uses its revenue for good, the means they used to get it are illegitimate.
Brennan, J. (2016). Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Washington, D. C.: Cato Institute: pp. 1-2.
Huemer, M. (2021). “The Illusion of Authority”. In: Huemer, M., & Layman, D. Is Political Authority an Illusion?: A Debate. New York: Routledge: p. 15.
Is there some law of which I am unaware stating that undergraduate philosophy students are duty-bound to go through a libertarian phase?
Also, the phrase "good people like Peter Singer" made steam come out of my ears.
This response fails at your "convention" premise. Imagine it was convention the spit on waiters and throw darts at them regardless of their consent. It would still be wrong even if it was convention. This is analogous to taxation and why it is obviously theft - the government takes money regardless of the consent of the owners, which is an immortal convention.
Also, justly acquired property is typically acquired through voluntary exchange and in rare cases homesteading. It doesn't matter if the person deserves it or not. You can't steal gifts people get.