It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [130]
But, a critic would retort, they are receiving the benefit of living in a more educated society. If this is how we define the benefit, then the parents who do choose to send their children to public school are getting a windfall, paid for in part by the parents who send their child to private schools and by taxpayers who do not have school-age children. Moreover, the law does not recognize such tenuously defined exchanges. If you decided to give your friend a watch as a gift and changed your mind and kept it at the last moment, it is unfair to force you to give up the watch on the grounds that “you are getting the benefit of living in a society that can tell time better.” It is clear that that argument is simply trying to circumvent the requirement of a bargained-for exchange and convince someone that the transfer is something it is not.
More fundamentally, the taxation-as-a-social-contract argument fails on the grounds that it is not voluntary. You must pay taxes whether you like it or not, or suffer the consequences of the criminal law. Critics, however, say that it is unethical to receive benefits and then not pay for them, which is certainly true. Thus when you use roads, you voluntarily agree to pay taxes. However, this justification for taxation must fail. First of all, there is no way to avoid all of the benefits which the government provides, such as the safety ensured by the existence of a military. Thus, you cannot be said to accept those benefits willfully. Second, the government has a legal monopoly over the provision of many of its services, and thus it is unfair to require people to go without those services if they disapprove of the “exchange.” This would be similar to someone draining all the water on your land, and then trying to sell you water at an inflated price. This exchange could not be said to be voluntary; the alternative is to die of thirst.
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Finally, contract law imposes a requirement that parties execute their contractual obligations with good faith. Thus if I enter into a contract with you to purchase cars, and there is a clause which allows me to void the contract if the cars are not fit for use, I cannot get out of my duty to purchase from you if I find one small mark on the inside of one car’s bumper. If there is any agreement between the individual and the government to pay taxes in exchange for governmental services, then the Constitution imposes a requirement that the government only make those expenditures which are “necessary and proper” to achieve its enumerated powers. When the government flouts this requirement, as it does when it spends $4.8 million in tax dollars to study bears’ DNA, it has breached the social contract. Additionally, many of the “public necessities” at which spending is directed were caused by the government itself, such as war and recessions. This also violates the doctrine of good faith, and amounts to a breach of the social contract.
A Budget Not Even a Mother Could Love
But social justice legitimizes our system of taxation, right? Before you settle on the image of government as a self-described nurturing caretaker, consider the following statistics. America on average gives Egypt, a country which the Human Rights Watch sought fit to characterize as having a “poor human rights record,” $1.3 billion a year in military assistance. Or, what a colleague of mine likes to call “Military Expenditures on Shifty, Suspicious Dictatorships and Unsavory Polities” (MESSD-UP). Interestingly, MESSD-UP’s military aid to Egypt works out to around $867 for every homeless child in America, certainly enough to provide each with warm clothes for the winter, that is, if the government were in the business of providing clothes.
“Okay,” a critic will concede, “perhaps taxation isn’t legitimized by social justice, but what about stimulating the economy and job creation? Are we supposed to just sit in unemployment