Taxation and Choice

I’ve been reading Act on Campus for some time and one post that really interested me was this one.

Basically it was a rebuttal to the following leftie argument concerning taxation:

“Taxation isn't taken by force, because I agree to it being taken.”

In his rebuttal, the blogger goes on to comment that “we should [sic] be worried about the bastardisation of 'agreement' where it might well happen to be the case that there is agreement, but it cannot be true agreement because disagreement was never an option. If the author of this ridiculous sophism was to change his or her mind, they would find themselves under force.”

At first glance, this appears a logical argument – however, upon further thought, it actually isn’t.

Of course under the present system, if you don’t want to pay tax, and you choose not to pay it, you get thrown in jail. However, what if it was under a different system? – i.e. a libertarian system? People do have the freedom to vote for a system that requires them to pay no tax.

If people generally did not want to pay tax, they do have a choice. Vote for a political party that supports no tax such as the Libertarianz. It’s not hard.

Last election they got 0.04% of the party vote however, which would seem to demonstrate that the general population of New Zealand does support paying tax. Rather, it is how much tax people should pay which is the contested issue.

So is this blogger right? I’d say no. We live in a democracy which means we can choose how we want to be governed. We do have a choice. The downside of this is that if the party that you don’t support wins, then you have to live with it for three years. However, that’s the beauty of democracy.

I’ve mentioned this before to right-wingers and their excuse is normally something along the lines of “our ideology is fairly complex and difficult for the average person to understand and therefore we are seen as a fringe group. People would vote for us if they understood our message.”

I like this argument, because it’s a concession that people don’t always act rationally (if we could even define what is ‘rational’). It sounds awfully like MY argument, when I support the present government’s policy of banning soft drinks at schools. Case in point, kids and sometimes adults act irrationally – they eat food in excess that is bad for them. For instance, I remember back in my school days at Intermediate where my mother would give me lunch money two times a week, thinking I would be buying something like a nice filled roll. I usually got a fatty battered hot dog and a chocolate donut. No wonder I was tubby as a kid. The crux of the issue was that I was unaware of the damage I was doing to my body, and yes – in this case – the state ‘knows best’. Had this kind of food been restricted (or dare I say it – even banned!) I would have been a lot healthier and would have had better self-esteem as a teenager.

Anyway –I’ve gone off in a tangent. What I’m trying to get across is that people do have a choice, contrary to what this blogger says, and they overwhelmingly use this choice to vote for parties that support taxation.

Thank the flying spaghetti monster for that.