Taxation isn’t theft. Taxation is simply the “price” of a trade between the individual and governance. It sounds good to trumpet a self-righteous proclamation of taxes as theft. It makes you feel good to be the victim. (sniff) If you enjoy the benefits of society, then you ought to be tickled to death to pay taxes to support those benefits. You like electricity? Good. There are many parts of the country that had zero electricity until government taxes created the Rural Electrification Authority and began creating the “electrical grid”. But that just happened magically, right? It couldn’t possibly be federal tax dollars that kicked off the program. Do you like driving on a road? At several million dollars a mile for that nice concrete ribbon, you might need to have a few bucks to get up to 70 mph. But of course, tax dollars were stolen from you to provide that little luxury. The list is practically endless. Look at any infrastructure project in the country and find the ones that were exclusively private money. There may be some, but even those probably relied on tax breaks.
So taxes aren’t theft. They’re simply the price we all should be happy to pay to enjoy our way of life - unless you need to be a victim of big bad government.
I see. So because you can think of other examples of misleading language use, it’s ok. Because that’s just “how language works”: two or more wrongs make a right.
It is ironic that you choose “discrimination” as your example, in order to highlight a point that disfavours discrimination - between two differently meaning shades to the same word because that’s just the way it is. Are you pro-obfuscation? I am not.
This is indeed a consistency that I have noted amongst those who favour the right over the left. Blinding themselves to subtlties in order to protect the faith in tradition. Unmoving, unadaptive, anti-creative tradition (despite your own point about how “we’re pretty adaptive when it comes to understanding new applications of language”). Either that or inability to see them in the first place, but I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Essential to “stealing” is the idea of possession (followed by a lack of it).
It is not just about consent (or lack of it).
One has to see that which is taxed as “first yours”, before it is the government’s. For most people this is never the case - they would have exactly the same money if employers were “pre-emptively” taxed what employees would otherwise be taxed. It’s the presentation of taxation that merely makes it “feel like” taxation is being shared. Perhaps taxation might be presented as going straight from revenues to the government (simulating a public service), without ever passing through either employees or employers.
Anyway, going back to trade, if someone gives you a product that you wanted in exchange for your money, and then that person “steals” the money you agreed to give in exchange - is that stealing? How about if someone “steals” your money and then gives you a product that you wanted anyway, for the price they stole from you? You would probably say it was because there was no knowing prior consent. But what if you knew they would, because that was a condition of you living in the society you lived in, and you chose to live in such a society in this knowledge? This is essentially what taxation is.
And like tent says, it gives us all things that we take for granted, even if we are rich, like roads and the electrical grid, and myriad other infrastructural necessities for private business to function at all. No matter how rich its employers are.
And these rich people could physically not be rich without poorer people from whom to take money, through, for example “consentual” wage acceptance (offset significantly by power imbalances, which is the whole point):
Charging X for a product and paying X-Y to employees is fine (because there are other employees that are not counted as being within the same business, that other “expenses” (Y) go to - ALL expenses are someone’s wages…). But when Y becomes disproportionate to the detriment of the whole system, not just to the lives of the majority, such that struggle is inescapable, removing all semblence of reward for harder/better work from anyone who isn’t a Capitalist (which must increasingly be the case for Capitalism to continue) - that’s a different matter.
Accepting being stolen from doesn’t negate stealing. Just because I accept some mob taking money from me for protection, and I don’t want to pay that much for it, doesn’t mean they aren’t stealing from me. And this is exactly the same as employers offering employees wages that bear little semblence to the value that said employees contribute to the business - which seems standard these days (yet without these employees, the business would be nothing).
In essence, I am arguing perspective. The right CANNOT accuse the left of stealing when they are in power, without being complete and utter hypocrites, and if anything, worse for doing their stealing in much more crafty, underhand and dishonest ways!
That's not exactly my point. My point is closer to "It's only misleading to YOU, Silhouette, the rest of us get it just fine". But I'm trying to be nicer than my usual self.
So if taxation isn't a way of taking my money, who's money is it? It can't be the State's money already, because the percentage of taxes I pay is based on how much wealth I own [i]pre tax[/i]. But hell, this is philosophy- if you want to redefine property ownership to say that people don't own any of their money except the portion that the State decides they aren't going to take through taxes, then you can absolutely do that. Nevertheless, I can't imagine it's a surprise to you to learn that most people don't see it that way- they see taxation as a process by which the Government takes some of their property. As such, I would hope that the taxation = stealing comparison isn't mysterious to you, even if you ultimately don't agree with it, like I said above.
So I don’t own the money that I pay in taxes because, if the tax system worked in a way completely other than how it works, I wouldn’t own that money? Not sure I see the logic there.
So we should change the way we talk about taxation in order to shape people’s perception of taxation in a way closer to how you think they ought to see it. When we go back to the part about how conservatives like obfuscation, I’m just going to laugh at you. Fair warning.
You just defined it as such, so I guess so?
How is taking money from a rich person to pay for a poor person's college education/food stamps/unemployment/medical costs an example of giving the rich person a product that they wanted? There are some very few, basic things that work in the way you describe- highways and the military and stuff- and virtually no conservative opposes taxation for such things. Libertarians may, but they crazy.
I largely agree with your point about the social contract. My only reservations there are 1.) The contract keeps on changing. We keep talking about people paying their 'fair share', but that's not a figure, it's just whatever we decide it is moment to moment. Social contract theory is predicated on predictability. If you don't know what you're getting from one year to the next, it's not a contract, it's just bullying. 2.) When people opt out of the contract by taking their persons or their money elsewhere, we direct all sorts of rage and hatred to them. If your point is that people agree to the rules by agreeing to stay here, then you have to cheerfully accept it when a billionaire expresses his disagreement with the rules by leaving, or investing in some other place with rules he likes better. Which in turn gives us a motivation to rethink the rules- it can't be as simple as 'whatever we say goes if you want to live in the USA' (whoever 'we' is) because too many rich people leaving or investing elsewhere is bad for us, and you can't exactly make it illegal for them to go.
And I suppose we’d need some gigantic conversation spanning months to fully examine whether or not that’s an accurate description of any nation in particular.
Ok, so how does this point apply to your point about taxation and the social contract above?
More deflecting issue to issues… It’s true that taxes need to be predictable in order for busineses and individuals to know how to run their ways of making a living. Perhaps we ought to ask all the Norquist idiots when they will be willing to get off their NO TAXES bullshit and sit down and do some serious compromising in re-writing the tax codes. If anything is keeping the tax issues held in limbo, it certainly isn’t the “liberals”.
And should the uber-wealthy decide to take all ther money and leave? THEY ALREADY HAVE. That’s what all the off-shore banks are about along with the “front” businesses in any country with the lowest tax rates. And yet, they are here because they need consumers, gated communities, a strong military defense system and all the other perks that taxes have provided.
If things are so much better somewhere else, let them leave. I’m sure we could cripple along without them somehow. Perhaps their absence would allow entrepeneurial businesses to actually begin providing jobs again.