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...
Man, reading that article gave me déjà vu. You used some of the exact same passages from your blog posts on Fukuyama made within the last 6 months (that seems like a long time to write an article).
ReplyDeleteAnother thing: what is up with the concentration of ancaps on TAC? The connection between them, FEE, and Mises seems to confirm my growing suspicions that ancapism is more like a certain kind of "frosting" that people with parochialist conservative tendencies, particularly paleos, tend to have. Commonalities like the use of certain phrases (i.e., "welfare-warfare state", "statism", etc.) and certain theories (i.e., certain things regarding norms, culture, and so forth) reinforce this.
I use the blog as my scratchpad in writing a review.
DeleteTime: There were three months between my finishing and publication.
McCarthy was once an ancap, and I think some of his connections from those days followed him to TAC.
Oi. It seems to me like anarcho-capitalism is just one of those niches that is just particular to conservatism, like Posse Comitatus.
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