St. Paul and I Agree...
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Your post left me with the suspicion that something else was at play.
ReplyDeleteIt turns out that following the completion of the Tour Montparnasse building in Paris in 1972,
"Its simple architecture, gigantic proportions and monolithic appearance have been often criticised for being out of place in Paris's urban landscape and, as a result, two years after its completion, the construction of skyscrapers in the city centre was banned."
My understanding is that similar height constraints exist in other cities. For instance, in Washington DC no building is allowed to be taller than the statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol Building.
In Jerusalem the story is that no buildings are allowed to be taller than 10 stories (there are a few exceptions).
And to bring this full circle, "In Paris Gustav Eifel got himself into a lot of trouble when he built the tower because it was taller than the Notre Dame cathedral."