Does selfishness exist?

Why should we force (other) people to pay taxes?

The fact that we ourselves must pay taxes (or face the consequences) is not a sufficient reason to force other people to do so... What argument can there be to force other people to pay taxation? There can be no argument that to do so is in their self-interest, because how can we know this any better than they do? Even if it is in our self-interest (to make them pay taxes), which is debatable, it is not valid to force people to pay taxes for this reason (even if we are in the majority) because they have a right to govern themselves, as a consequence of self-ownership...

So, is it in the collective good to force someone to act against their wishes? Is it better for everyone if each of us is forced, for some period of time, to "work" for someone else? Does it make sense for us not to control our own time, but to have it owned (to some degree) by the collective and in return to receive a portion (our share) of forced labour to our benefit?

If this arrangement were (found to be) mutually beneficial there is no reason why people could not engage in this practice on a smaller scale, for example two people could arrange that for one day a week, half of the day would be spent with one acting as a master to the other's slave, the other half of the day (being) in reverse. If this arrangement is mutually beneficial for them then it is natural to think that such an arrangement would arise spontaneously in the free market. Yet, we do not see such arrangements.

It is not more efficient to force someone else to do something that we want (to be) done if we can do it ourselves... since we can assume that we will be similarly inconvenienced at some later time.


People can be trusted to (eventually) do what is right and look after each other without being forced to do so... it is for this reason that the species survives. If we leave people alone and do not force them to pay taxes they will find people to look after, if not, at least they will look after themselves and do no harm. It is legitimate for the State to react against people who are doing harm...

If people have other people that they want to help (perhaps they are motivated by a particular charity) then paying taxes for them is a serious inconvenience since they believe the money would be better spent elsewhere, according to their preferences. But how can we isolate the virtuous people from those who would not spend their money wisely? It is a false dichotomy to think that we can make such a distinction since any money spent is spent by the spender for what they consider (to be) virtuous reasons.

If we only want to spend "our" money on ourselves, who is the State (or anyone else) to object?

Tuesday 5th May 2009