When individuals don’t pay taxes, the government goes after them with guns, even though they haven’t used force on anyone else. Thus, taxation is an initiation of physical force against the individual’s right to life, liberty and property.

Because taxation is forcible extortion, it violates your right to property.

If you don’t pay taxes, you can be jailed, hence depriving you the right to liberty.

And if tax “evaders” fight tax collectors to the very end, they can be killed. That’s against the right to life.

In fact, the first government agency to attack Waco, Texas’s Branch Davidian cult in 1993 was an IRS bureau, and it wasn’t to stop cult leader David Koresh’s alleged pedophilia or gun-stockpiling, but to collect the $200 gun tax it said he still “owed” it.

(Incidentally, the Oscar-nominated 1997 documentary, “Waco: The Rules of Engagement,” convincingly argued that the Clinton administration exhibited greater cruelty here than did Koresh.)

Isn’t that paradoxical? After all, taxes keep governments alive, and, without government, there’d be no police to protect our life, liberty and property in the first place.

So aren’t taxes required to keep society free? No. There are voluntary methods of funding government, with the state remaining able to adequately function.

First, government should allow individuals to say, “Because I refuse to pay you, you have no obligation to protect me from harm. In turn, you and I will leave each other alone, peaceably.”

That arrangement isn’t currently allowed, as shown previously.

Yet, if some refuse to pay for government protection, and the army still defends them from other nations, wouldn’t they be unfairly mooching off those who do pay?

No, because domestic crime is a closer threat than foreign invasion, and a fear of this is enough to scare a person into paying for the entire “package” of government.

Could the government collect enough money to run all its operations this way? Truth be told, most state operations should be cut. The National Endowment for the Arts, Amtrak and other government social services are monopolies that could be privatized (with competition allowed).

The government would need less money if its functions were limited to the police, military, and courts, and more funds could be diverted to these branches without all the other agencies around.

Furthermore, the federal government could raise revenue by selling off its many assets. It’s the nation’s largest owner of land and gold. The gold is going to waste, because it backs not a single dollar and it doesn’t earn any interest.

Our government could also hold lotteries, as France did to pay for building our Statue of Liberty. Some have argued that this isn’t feasible, because, in a free market, any private capitalist could out-compete a government lottery.

But the government lottery’s competitive advantage would be that it could honestly point out that money spent on it would help raise funds for the protection of everyone’s rights, while the private competitors’ wouldn’t.

That’d only be untrue if the private competitors donated some of their earnings to government, and that’d benefit the government as well.

The government could also own organizations that buy and sell stock in publicly-traded companies, thereby earning net profits, with no organization allowed a tax bailout. New Zealand’s mass transit system is run successfully that way -- because it isn’t allowed bailouts, it went from working at a loss to making profits.

Also, there’re still voluntary financial contributions. After all, what Americans voluntarily donate to the defense of Israel every year amounts in the billions.

Even if none of these measures were implemented, and the government were still funded by taxes, the system could still be made more humane by adding a “check-off” system.

A tax form could ask, “What do you want your money going toward?” and list items like, “Education, mail delivery, welfare,” etc., and people could check the boxes they liked.

But people shouldn’t settle for a “check-off” system, because the real issue is whether taxation is really necessary at all to run a government free of waste, limited in its functions to protecting rights through cops, soldiers and judges. This can be done without a hypocritical use of stolen money.

Yes, this issue is complicated, but it doesn’t have to be as much as the IRS has tried (often successfully) to make it.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com (If you would like to continue seeing Stuart Hayashi's editorials on this site, please let Hawaii Reporter know at info@hawaiireporter.com)

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