Professor and financial advisor Mark Skousen
maintains that a civilized society is one in which persuasion, not force, is used to achieve order.
The late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Taxation is the price we pay for civilization.” Skousen refutes this idea, saying:
"Chief Justice Holmes was a great man, but his statement on taxation–-which is inscribed on the IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C.-–is plainly wrong. Taxation is not the price we pay for civilization. Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society, since taxation represents force. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete failure of the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.
"Raising taxes to solve our problems indicates that our leaders don’t have the vision to seek voluntary solutions. Moreover, raising taxes reduces the funds private citizens and organizations have available to engage in charitable causes, thus worsening our social welfare crisis."
Comments:
I don't think taxation per se is unjust because I think the government is necessary due to the Fall.
As Alexander Hamilton wrote,
“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”
Regarding taxation, the first question to ask is: what is the legitimate purpose of the state, and second, is the state using its power to tax justly or unjustly? Is it taxing its citizens to fund legitimate functions of the state, defense & justice, for instance, and if not then the state's taxation is illegitimately taking money and redistributing it.
From the way I read the article, Skousen is not a pie-in-the-sky type who doesn't think there are any cranks or sinners, but he rightly places the emphasis on "voluntary" associations to do the work of charity, etc.
Hyperindividualism and hypercollectivism are both unhealthy states in society.
This is not to say that everything currently funded by taxation is a wise or even constitutionally legitimate function of government. But a society (beyond a subsistence-level tribe, which still typically has compulsory service to the community--taxation in time rather than money) without taxation will be nothing more than anarchy.
It would be nice if we could simply persuade everyone to all just get along, to borrow Rodney King's famous line. Anyone who thinks that will actually happen in this world is delusional.
That's not to say that a police state is what we aspire to. Yet there do need to be boundaries drawn by resort to force when necessary, within which persuasive rather than coercive interactions can be the norm. Example: I sign a contract with someone, a matter of mutual agreement. If he takes my money without fulfilling his side of the deal, I first try to persuade him to make good, but if he refuses, I have access to courts to compel compliance (either doing the work or refunding the money). Without knowledge of an available court system, I would be much more reluctant to sign the contract in the first place, thus limiting my ability to get the benefits of someone else's skills (and him to get my payment).
So I'm with Holmes. Skousen is engaging in utopianism, which has an unbroken record of really awful failure.
An officer, is a leader who is appointed not from his personal charisma(though hardly excluding) but from a regularized machinery. He is obeyed as much from institutional loyalty as from personal loyalty. And he is himself as much a servant as a leader. A society that discovers this concept has intuitively grasped what Jesus said, that a leader should serve.
Thus Xerxes, who OWNED the Persian empire was a ruler. Leonides the Spartan, though called a King was an officer. And for all one says about the faults of Sparta. In this at least they got it right. For THAT WAS SPARTA.
Civilization is a word that is hard to define and is offensive today. Jane Jacobs once defined it as a fruitful symbiosis between the warrior code and the work ethic(Guardians and Traders she called them) and one can see what she meant if one thinks about it. Ancient Greeks thought a "polis" was the image of civilization because it showed a development to the point where complex elements could work with each other without compulsion. But even Ancient Greeks thought taxation was necessary; the price of a shield and brestplate and about two weeks service a year was needed for the right to vote.
We might consider how we normally use the words. When we admire a complex society we call it "civilized". When we admire a simple society, we call it "heroic". Which reminds us that the concept, "civilization" is both a descriptive and an evaluative term, which makes it confusing.
One weakness I have noticed in the libertarian argument is that "property" falls under the same objection as "legitimate authority". Most of us believe it exists, but actually defining it is the problem. If society has a right to define a given piece of property as belonging to a given person it has an equal right to define taxation as a legitimate exception because the State is a legitimate authority.
Furthermore, complex societies(which is often used as the definition of civilization)cannot function without a state. Consider how many transactions you habitually make that you would never dare to make without a government. With no government you cannot afford to have any more possessions then you can defend. There can be no large-scale generation of resources because much of it necessarily would have to be beyond the protection of your good right hand, however formidable it might be.
You also couldn't afford to mix with strangers on an amiable basis. With no government, the only protection is the thread of blood feud. That indeed is essentially the state of being that remains between governments. But without government the only protection from your next door neighbor is threat of blood feud which is a lot different.
So in an important sense taxation IS the price we pay for civilization. If, that is, we define civilization as something possible within the context of a fallen human race. We can say, of course, that it is the price of failing to build civilization. But defining it as that can only mean defining civilization as "unfallen society". And while it is useful at times to be reminded that man is a failure, it is not necessarily helpful to an astute political or anthropological scholar who must look at greater and lesser failures.