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...
I'm glad you brought this up, because I've actually been doing something about what a world filled exclusively with "private" communities would look like and I don't think the idea quite pans out. It would seem as if it doesn't quite make sense to call a community "private" if it isn't within the context of a larger "public". So, an ancap community would seem like it would have its own "public" property.
ReplyDeleteJoe, not sure who that remark was addressed to, but it didn't seem substantive.
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