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By Root 813 0

who cannot find employment, who lack the discipline and guidance of an older male, and who are left to their own devices. As economist Thomas Sowell has argued, the massive increases in the welfare state have caused the destruction of African American families; “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

Even more infuriating is that this decrease in living standards, caused by the government, ends up serving as the government’s justification for increasing public wealth transfers, and thus increasing taxation. In short, it is a self-perpetuating system of inefficiency. Recall when we discussed the government’s breach of the social contract: The government cannot create the necessity for providing its own services.

This brings us to public necessity. The problem with public necessity is that, as a term, it is inherently subjective and bears no restrictions; what Chodorov called “unspecified social betterment.” Moreover, history teaches us that the size of government has always been a function of the public’s distaste for taxation and taste for public spending, not what officials understand to be “necessary.” People opt for government programs not because they determine that society cannot function without them, but because they feel uncertain about their ability to provide for themselves. Thus, people favor stimulus spending during a recession not because it is necessary, but simply because it is comforting to think that the government is doing something to fix the recession. In any event, most government spending is not even debatably necessary by any stretch of the imagination. Remember the joke-telling robots?

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Furthermore, taxes cannot be necessary, because government programs now financed by taxes could be paid for by user fees instead, or provided by the free market. Not only would this not violate our rights, it would also be better public policy. Take public roads, for example. Why would it be fair for someone who never uses roads to pay taxes to support them? And if we had to pay for roads whether we used them or not, wouldn’t more people choose to travel on them, thus congesting highways and diverting consumers away from alternative means of travel, many of which are better for quality of life and the environment?

It is an accepted principle that if you do not pay in proportion to what you consume, then you will opt to overconsume, depleting scarce resources. Assuming we already had a car, we would be much more likely to use a road instead of a train if the road use was free. And the reverse is true. If trains were already paid for by taxes, no one would use roads. Why is it any more sensible to have a user fee for trains (i.e., a ticket), but not roads? The simple solution to both the fairness and the efficiency problems is, of course, to use privately owned tolls instead.

And even then, unless the government relinquishes its monopoly control over toll roads, which effectively taxes us in a different form; if we must drive to work on a government road, and the road has already been more than paid for with tolls, how is the toll at that point anything different from a coercive tax? Only competition can lead to less waste. Consider that the George Washington Bridge, which was completed in 1931, originally cost $19.6 million, or $273,538,789 today. Nonetheless, the bridge currently collects about $1 million in tolls each day. In other words, ignoring maintenance for a moment, its original cost can be made up in a quick nine months. No wonder the government does not want any competition! As we can see, not only is taxation unnecessary; it violates our natural rights and leads to wasteful results.

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Moreover, consider the effect that redistribution of wealth has on a market economy. The difficulty with forced taxation is that it discourages the production of goods and services, since the wealth garnered is not commensurate