Jason Brennan, Who, By the Way, IS an AnarchoCapitalist...

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Demonstrates the exact thing I've been saying for the past couple of years on this site: the NAP by itself "isn’t a good argument at all" for libertarianism. And he demonstrates that he is not going after a strawman by citing the people saying it is.

Brennan notes that if one can show the state is a valuable social institution, then:
  1. The state (of the right sort) should exist.
  2. The state has the right to collect taxes (within certain limits as implied by ToJ) in order to promote justice.
  3. When the state collects the taxes needed to promote justice, it isn’t stealing your goddamn money or aggressing against innocent people. Instead, the money rightfully belongs to the state, not to the taxpayer. When the state taxes you (so long as it does so in accordance with ToJ), it actually takes what is rightfully its, not what is rightfully yours. If you were to withhold your taxes or resist paying, that would be equivalent to theft.
Yep. "Taxation is theft" is only true if you already have shown the state is illegitimate. It is nonsense to use it as a way of showing the state is illegitimate.

Furthermore:

"If you want to defend anarchist libertarianism, what you need to do is show that none of the arguments for the state work. You have to take them down one by one."

And finally:

"Many libertarians think they have powerful knock-down argument for anarchist libertarianism, but, on the contrary, that argument is completely impotent. A sophisticated non-libertarian can just shrug the argument off–it doesn’t even merit a response."

OK, this is a very good philosopher, who happens to be an anarcho-capitalist, telling you that this argument is no good at all: it doesn't even merit a response. Now do you believe me? 

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