It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [128]
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So why do we acquiesce to the government taking our property? The answer to that question is wherein the true evil of taxation lies. It slowly convinces the people over time that its subversion of their natural rights is good for them. When our car is stolen by one person, we feel a sense of moral outrage because we know that what happened to us was wrong. However, when we are taught that it is acceptable if the theft of our car is committed by a democratic majority, it institutionalizes a mode of thought that the individual is a servant of the state, clamoring for some small share of its limited resources. In short, as the government sees us, we exist to support it, not ourselves. How better to define slavery?
The Democratic Majority and the Oxymoron of a Progressive Tax
The fact that the public need for taxation was decided upon by a democratic majority, instead of a dictator, should make no difference. After all, recall our “how many men” hypothetical. How many men are needed until it is no longer theft? Similarly, how much of a majority should be required, until the will of the individual can be trumped and the trump considered moral? Fifty-one percent? Seventy-five percent? Everyone but you? The fact of the matter is that, as far as a transgression of natural rights is concerned, the difference between a dictator and a democratic majority is not only meaningless, but hopelessly subjective. The only cogent distinction is that in a democracy, more of your neighbors desire to take your property than in a dictatorship.
Consider also that when taxation is called for by a majority, it becomes precisely the instrument of tyranny over a minority. That is the identical tyranny that the Founders had witnessed firsthand and sought to prevent by creating a federal system of government. Consider the following. All of us would certainly favor a system whereby we could “purchase” services—say education, for example—for less than they are actually worth; this is simply the human as a rational actor. The problem is that one group will necessarily be paying for this “windfall” that the other group enjoys; all costs must be eventually borne by someone. In a normal market, this unfair result is prevented by a number of laws which prohibit the taking of value by any means other than voluntary transfer. Stated in other words, these laws ensure that the value we get from consuming a good is commensurate to the cost we actually bore in acquiring it.
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In a democracy, however, the majority can hijack the coercive power of the state in the form of taxation effectively to sell itself services at a discount, with the discount being footed by the minority. To illustrate this point further, consider a democracy solely made up of a majority of baseball fans and a minority of curling fans. If the baseball fans grew tired of paying for tickets to go see their favorite team, they could demand that the government provide this service, and pay for it by imposing a tax on everyone. Because the total cost of maintaining a baseball team is spread across both groups, baseball fans are now enjoying a windfall; they pay less in taxes than the value they get from going to see a game. This difference is, of course, being made up for by curling fans. In other words, by imposing a tax, baseball fans have effectively sold themselves a service at a discount and stolen from curling fans. As Frédéric Bastiat once said, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
It should be clear that the principal problem