When taxes are used more on things one does not support than on things one does, it is remarkably akin to theft.
Let's be clear; no, it isn't. This is basically libertarian propaganda in favour of government that does nothing except prevents certain kinds of violence and enforces property rights (including, curiously, the complicated system of artificial monopolies called "intellectual property" (1), a purely state-created subsidy for creative works, which must take a bit of doublethinking; if the market can take care of everything else, why can't it take care of this?) because they are somehow sacred; a Humpty Dumpty exercise in using words to mean whatever you choose them to mean. "Theft" has a meaning, and this ain't it.
There was this whole revolution fought over "no taxation without representation."
Well, I'm not proposing to take the vote away from anyone.
There's a reason any legitimate taxation takes the form of a fungible good: it is the least onerous and most equal way to take the "share" of government costs from those for whom the government (at least theoretically) works.
I can think of something less onerous; something you aren't using anymore and have no intention of ever using. The assertion that fungible goods are least onerous is completely unsupported here.
Nobody has a right to property created or bought by another, outside of bankruptcy. His heirs inherit because of his right to choose disposition of his property.
Actually, in most jurisdictions his heirs don't inherit all of it; the state takes a decent wodge - and good for it; I can hardly think of anyone who can less onerously be taxed than dead people.
Taxes are monetary because it's the least invasive form of legitemized theft: it takes a wholly replaceable good - that is, something fungible - rather than something that, even if he labored just as hard for ten times as long, he might never be able to replicate or replace.
This doesn't really make sense for two reasons. First of all, if I write a book and the state declines to give me an artificial monopoly on copies of it - not "taking anything" from me, note, but declining to give me something, which is what the situation actually would be with works being placed in the public domain - I can still make copies of it as well as anyone, so I'm certainly not in the situation that I can't replicate or replace it. I've lost the ability to make money off it, but again; if I own a bicycle which I plan to sell, and the government gives everyone a bicycle, that is unfortunate for me but it is absurd to argue that the government has stolen my bicycle.
Secondly, it is very much the case that if you take fungible goods from someone, they might never be able - no matter how long and hard they labour - to replace them. There are two kinds of rich people; clever people who know they're lucky, and lucky people who think they're clever; and equally amongst the comfortably-off middle class (like me, I admit) success is a matter of good fortune as well as wits and ability; most poor people work harder than any of us, but are often in the situation where a run of bad luck can ruin them regardless, and once you're on skid row you don't tend to come back.
1) In all fairness to "libertarians", not all of them favour state interference here.
