Colin Butler
Staff Writer

We are faced with an endless catalog of social injustices, dilemmas, and issues. There is no greater perpetrator of injustice than the State. The State is a territorial monopolist of violence and grants itself the unique power to tax. It is this unique power, specifically in the form of the federal income tax, which needs an illuminating light shone upon it. Let us consider three reasons why the federal income tax in our country (and for the sake of its citizens, any other country) must be eliminated.
Taxation is economically detrimental, violates your inalienable right to the Pursuit of Happiness, and finally is wholly immoral.
“The sum of all voluntary human action is the Market,” (quoted directly from Samuel Konkin III who nearly directly quoted it from Ludwig von Mises). The State operates in the opposite manner, by coercion; the Market produces and the State takes from this production. Anyone who has ever been employed has seen this. On a paycheck, there is the gross pay and the net pay. The gross pay is what the company attempted to pay you, and the net pay is what the State is allowing you to keep. The government has granted itself the power to take from you what it decides necessary for itself to function. By this way the State sucks out present goods and services from being used properly now or being exchanged for future goods and services.
The State systematically lessens the potential production of the Market. The numbers being arbitrary, imagine you are paid $100, but $50 are taken away leaving you with only $50. This is economically detrimental to you because you can do more with $100 than you can with $50. This is true any time the State steals from anyone, so the Market is hampered by taxation of any kind.
We are all familiar with the Declaration of Independence insofar as being able to recognize the line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Following closely the fact that you can do more with more money, it is easy to see our right to the pursuit of Happiness is severely repressed. By the government’s continual plunder, you are not able to invest, donate, spend, or produce as you would if it were not taken from you; it restricts your choices and your life.
Taxation is the moral equivalent to theft. You are taken from without your consent. Moreover, the government decides entirely independent of you how much it will take. Your money, as demonstrated by the paycheck example earlier, is held captive by the State until it decides what it needs, and hence how much you can keep. Adding insult to injury, the government uses the money it stole from you to pay for inmates who may be incarcerated for breaking laws that you do not believe should be laws, to buy totally unnecessary amounts of military equipment, to invade countries and decimate their citizenry with indiscriminate weapons, to give to those who are not working at all, to pay for medical attention given to other people, and a host of social programs you may (should) be opposed to.
When a friend first suggested to me four years ago the idea of suspending the federal income tax for two years, I thought he was nuts and quickly told him it was a ludicrous idea. However, after a short time of thinking about it on my own along with reading educated authors who largely held the point of view very briefly presented here, such as Murray Rothbard and Hans Herman-Hoppe, it became clear that a moratorium or “tax holiday” for two years would not suffice. It must be entirely eradicated. We are continually coerced by and stolen from by the State (all levels of government, not just federal). The federal income tax is a great place to start your journey of recognizing government plunder and corruption.