Here's a common argument I've been hearing from self-described "libertarians" and "conservatives." It runs something like this:

"It's immoral to take someone's property away. Either they or their parents worked hard to get that property, and so if the government takes it away, it's theft. Now, it's all right to have taxes when we need to finance a war, or roads, or police, or any of that kind of stuff, but it's immoral to just redistribute wealth to other people in the form of welfare, national healthcare or other social programs."

I've made it my personal quest to destroy this argument.

Ok, first off, these people are saying that redistributing wealth is immoral, but then they turn around and say it's ok when it's paying for programs they support. However, when it comes to programs they don't like, it becomes immoral again. How is there any difference between redistributing wealth in the forms of police and redistributing wealth in the form of health care? I don't see how you can come up with any sort of rationalization for this. They're both services of the public good, one just happens to be a service that conservatives don't favor. You can't pick and choose which programs taxes are immoral for and which aren't. Theft is theft, and obligation is obligation. If taxes really are stealing and individuals owe nothing to society, then that means any form of government that has taxes is a government based on evil principles, thereby leaving anarchy and Communism (in the classic, utopian sense of Thomas More and Karl Marx) as the only acceptable social systems.

So we're left with two possibilities: taxes really are theft, and any type of civil government is immoral, or taxes are not immoral and government is acceptable. Well, if the former is true, than we all have duty as Americans to tear down our government and either set up a perfect Communist society or just have anarchy. Well, as far as I can see, both those possibilities are impossible. That means that we'll have to accept the latter: we have a duty to society to pay our taxes for the common good. This doesn't justify all taxes and all government programs, but it trumps the "taxes are immoral" argument. It's the social contract, the basis of our democratic system.


Please, stop with the haughty, holier-than-thou attitudes. Don't throw insults like "you support state-sponsored theft because you support welfare" into arguments. Unless you want to abolish all government and hope society just works out, then either we all support state theft or none of us do.

My question is: doesn’t the argument outlined above contradict itself? You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Taxes can’t be immoral in a system a police and a military aren’t.

I don't recall having ever participated in a debate about welfare, so this is somewhat new ground for me. For the record, I consider myself more of a libertarian than a conservative.

The problem I'm seeing is that taxes paid for public services such as roads and police are paid by all citizens for the benefit of all citizens. Tax dollars redirected to social programs like welfare benefit only a select group of citizens. While both the upper, middle and lower classes benefit from their tax dollars spent on roads and security, it is primarily the lower classes which benefit from the tax dollars of all three when discussing social programs such as welfare. Rather than everyone receiving a return for their tax dollars as with the roads and police, there is a redistribution of money from those not involved in social programs to those who are.

It seems to me that only the latter is actually a redistribution of wealth.

This is not to say that I don't disagree with income taxes, but at present I don't see a contradiction between support for public services and issues taken with limited social programs.

I'll go with the no person is an island argument.

Society is an organism made up of individual people, just as our bodies are made up of individual cells. If one body cell starts to take over the whole organism, we call that a cancer and cut it out, poison it, or somehow make the greedy little SOB go away.

So, we have a society based on capitalistic ideals and end up with greedy little SOBs trying to grab all the chips for him or herselves.

What to do? Could cut him/her out (jail), poison him/her (hemlock), or somehow make it so it's impossible to grab all the chips (anti-monopoly laws).

Another way is to use the taxation system to take money back and distribute it to lower income members of society in the form of social programs like Medicare.

I'll say that the use of hemlock is immoral due to the principle of not killing each other. Jail isn't exactly an efficient way to deal with the members of society because it costs so much to keep the greedy SOBs locked up. But it's not immoral, just inefficient.

Anti-monopoly laws don't work very well. Too many loopholes.

Which leaves taxation, but that has too many loopholes as well.

But the only immoral attempt at keeping control of individuals in society is hemlock.

Now, is it immoral for a society to constantly make the rich richer and the poor poorer? What if your brain decided it was the most important part of your body and your legs fell off? Or arms? Or your tush?

Yep, that's immoral because it results in the body as a whole falling apart. The body is a temple and needs to be cared for. Ergo, so is a constant upward flow of money immoral, the blood of society.

And from that, attempts at controling this flow through taxation are not immoral. They may be inefficient, but not immoral. I know of no moral principle that states, "Thou Shalt Not Be Inefficient."

There is a huge difference between providing services that benefit all and re-distributing wealth. I wouldn't call the latter theft, but I don't support it either. Imagine what kind of universal health care we could afford if we concentrated on the former.

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A less inflammatory debate of the constitutionality of welfare is here and a topic regarding a fair/flat tax system is here.