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@ The Modern Sovereign
2025-05-17 10:57:15
Taxation: The Legal Plunder of the Modern Nation-State
In the name of "social good" and "public service," modern governments have institutionalized what 19th-century economist Frédéric Bastiat called “legal plunder”—a process by which wealth is forcibly taken from some to be redistributed by political decree. At its core, taxation is not a voluntary exchange, but a coerced transfer, backed by the threat of fines, asset seizure, or imprisonment.
Unlike theft by individuals, state taxation is sanitized through legality. Yet legality does not equal morality. When a private citizen takes what is not theirs, we call it theft. When the state does it with legislative backing, we call it taxation. The result is the same: the rightful owner loses their property by force.
This isn’t a denial of the need for governance or infrastructure—it's a critique of how resources are obtained. The state, rather than earning revenue through consent and competition like every other entity in a free market, simply extracts it. Whether you're funding wars you oppose, subsidies for industries you don’t support, or bloated bureaucracies that fail to deliver, you have no real say once the law is written. You either pay or face punishment.
Taxation is the cornerstone of the modern state’s power, and with it, it can create dependencies, buy political loyalty, and expand indefinitely. As long as we accept that the government can take what it wants in the name of the "greater good," liberty will always be conditional—granted by the very institution that profits from its erosion.
It’s time to ask hard questions. Should morality end where legislation begins? And if the state can take without consent, is any of our property truly our own?
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