Privatization cp ddi 2012 1 Privatization + Coercion 1
Taxation is an invasion of property
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- Government taxation is coercive and unnecessary
Taxation is an invasion of propertyMurray Rothbard , Scholar who made major contributions to economics, history, political philosophy, and legal theory; Man, Economy, & State, 1993, http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap13.asp Those economists and others who espouse the philosophy of laissez faire believe that the freedom of the market should be upheld and that property rights must not be invaded. Nevertheless, they strongly believe that defense service cannot be supplied by the market and that defense against invasion of property must therefore be supplied outside the free market, by the coercive force of the government. In arguing thus, they are caught in an insoluble contradiction, for they sanction and advocate massive invasion of property by the very agency (government) that is supposed to defend people against invasion! For a laissez-faire government would necessarily have to seize its revenues by the invasion of property called taxation and would arrogate to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over some arbitrarily designated territorial area. The laissez-faire theorists (who are here joined by almost all other writers) attempt to redeem their position from this glaring contradiction by asserting that a purely free-market defense service could not exist and that therefore those who value highly a forcible defense against violence would have to fall back on the State (despite its black historical record as the great engine of invasive violence) as a necessary evil for the protection of person and property. Government taxation is coercive and unnecessaryFrank Chodorov, ideologist, 1962, Taxation is Robbery from Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist pg 216-239; Ludwig von Mises Institute, http://mises.org/etexts/taxrob.asp Just so are the citizens of a community better able to carry on their several occupations because the streets are maintained, the fire department is on guard, the police department provides protection to life and property. When a society is organizing, as in a frontier town, the need for these overall services is met by volunteer labor. The road is kept open by its users, there is a volunteer fire department, the respected elder performs the services of a judge. As the town grows these extracurricular jobs become too onerous and too complicated for volunteers, whose private affairs must suffer by the increasing demands, and the necessity of hiring specialists arises. To meet the expense, it is claimed, compulsory taxation must be resorted to, and the question is, why must the residents be compelled to pay for being relieved of work which they formerly performed willingly? Why is coercion a correlative of taxation? It is not true that the services would be impossible without taxation; that assertion is denied by the fact that the services appear before taxes are introduced. The services come because there is need for them. Because there is need for them they are paid for, in the beginning, with labor and, in a few instances, with voluntary contributions of goods and money; the trade is without compulsion and therefore equitable. Only when political power takes over the management of these services does the compulsory tax appear. It is not the cost of the services which calls for taxation, it is the cost of maintaining political power. Impact- Nuclear War/Extinction Viewing the state as critical to human relations generates nuclear statism. The more we need the state and the greater our sense of duty to the state, the more likely it is that the state can wage nuclear war, risking extinction.George Kateb, Professor of Politics and director of the Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton, 1992“The Inner Ocean” pg. 121-123 The virulent practitioners of state activism are, of course, the police state, tyranny, despotism, and totalist rule in all their varieties. Whenever a nuclear power is also one of the latter regimes, then the disposition among a compliant population is to get used to the idea that the state, as the source of practically all benefits and penalties—all those outside the intimate sphere and many inside it—has the right to dispose of the fate of the people in any way it sees fit. The way it sees fit seems the unavoidable way. Such compliance strengthens the readiness of officials to think seriously about using nuclear weapons. Just as the people are used to the idea that the state has the right to dispose of their fate, so the state gets used to the idea that it may even use nuclear weapons in disposing of its people's fate. My concern here, however, is not with the mentality of unfree societies but rather with that of democratic societies. I propose the idea—it is no more than a hypothesis—that the growth of state activism in a democracy is the growth, as well, of that compliance creating and resting on dependence which makes it easier for the government to think of itself as a state—not only in our earlier sense of an entity whose survival is held to be equivalent to the survival of society itself, but in the related but separate sense of an entity that is indispensable to all relations and transactions in society. The state, in this conceptualization, is the very life of society in its normal workings, the main source of initiative, response, repair, and redress. Society lives by its discipline, which is felt mostly as benign and which is often not felt as discipline or felt at all. The government becomes all-observant, all-competent; it intervenes everywhere; and as new predicaments arise in society, it moves first to define and attempt a resolution of them. My proposed idea is that as this tendency grows— and it is already quite far advanced—people will, to an increasing de¬gree, come to accept the government as a state. The tendency of execu¬tive officials (and some in the legislative and judicial branches) to conceive of government as a state will thus be met by the tendency of people to accept that conception. People's dependence on it will gradually condi¬tion their attitudes and their sentiments. Looking to it, they must end by looking up to it.I believe the "logic" of this tendency, as we say, is that officials become confirmed in their sense that they, too (like their counterparts in unfree societies), may dispose of the fate of the people. Entrusted with so much everyday power, the entire corps of officials must easily find confirma¬tion for the rationalization of the use of nuclear weapons proposed by the foreign-policy sector of officialdom. There may be a strong, if subterranean, bond between the state as indispensable to all relations and transactions in everyday society and the state as entitled to dispose of the fate of society in nuclear war, even though officials receive no explicit confirmation of this bond by the people. Under pressure, however, a people that habitually relies on the state may turn into a too easily mobilizable population: mobilizable but otherwise immobile. My further sense is that a renewed understanding of the moral ideas of individualism is vital to the effort to challenge state-activism.I say this, knowing that some aspects of individualism do help to push democratic government in the direction of becoming a state, and to push the state into state activism. Tocqueville's prescient analysis of demo¬cratic despotism must never be forgotten. Even more important, we must not forget that he thought that democratic despotism was much more likely in those democracies in which individualism was narrowly or weakly developed and in which, therefore, the power of a full moral indi¬vidualism had never corroded the statist pretensions of political author¬ity. His main anxiety was for France and the Continent, not for America. Thus, following Tocqueville, we may say that individualism provides no remedy for the deficiencies: the remedy is to be sought from individualism itself. One task of a renewed and revised individualism is to challenge every¬day state activism? Remote as the connection may seem, the encouragement of state activism, or the failure to resist it, contributes to nuclear statism and thus to the disposition to accept and inflict massive ruin and, with that, the unwanted and denied possibility of extinction. Impact- Violations o/w Extinction Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 1.35 Mb. 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