By Scott Lazarowitz
The main enabler of the government’s institutionalized criminality is the income tax, the government’s seizures of private earnings and wealth.
Government and all its intrusions into our lives are funded involuntarily with the government having the illicit power to take people’s income and wealth.
The income tax is a scheme in which one side (the government) demands a take from the earnings of the other side (the workers and producers), involuntarily. Such a transaction is in the absence of a voluntary contract, making such a transaction illegitimate, and criminal in fact. No different from a robber demanding your money on threat of violence.
Don’t you have a right to not be robbed? And also do we not have a right to our privacy?
In a free society, no one would have the power to demand your private information to have to report to the authorities, such as where you work, what you do for a living, what investments you have, how much you make, what you do with your income, and so on.
If it’s none of your neighbors’ business, then it’s none of the government’s business, I always say.
As Murray Rothbard explains in his book, The Ethics of Liberty,
For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift … Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as “taxation,” although in less regularized epochs it was often known as “tribute.” Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.
It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.
And, Rothbard elaborates on the nature of the State in his Anatomy of the State,
The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the “organization of the political means”; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory… The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.
The truth is, most of the government programs that are funded involuntarily by America’s workers and producers are mainly embezzlement, extortion and money laundering schemes. Such schemes just would not receive any actual funding from the general population in any voluntary way, because no one in his right mind would voluntarily fund such crap.
Sadly, the statists among the Republicans and so-called conservatives, who allegedly profess “moral values,” don’t want to address the criminality of government thefts of private earnings and wealth. Statists are drawn to the involuntarily funded government racket.
And, yes, the government is a racket, especially the larger and more centralized it is. Take the D.C. Leviathan. (Please.)
And the involuntary income tax-thefts are enablers.
The involuntary tax-thefts enable the FBI/DOJ gestapo to investigate parents who complain at school committee meetings as “domestic terrorists,” enable the FBI/DOJ gestapo to concoct kidnapping schemes to entrap hapless patsies, and enable the FBI/DOJ gestapo to instigate Capitol riots and hold innocent people in solitary confinement and torture them for their political beliefs.
Would you voluntarily pay for an investigative service that treated its customers the way FBI and DOJ have been treating innocent Americans?
Would CIA and FBI agents have the time to do their election interference with Twitter and other shenanigans were they not funded by the involuntary income tax-thefts?