Taxation: The Federal Income Tax

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Discussion about government revenue is incomplete until the pairing of death and taxes is mentioned. Professor Thomas Sowell put it best when he wrote that “death and taxes have long been regarded as inescapable realities” (780). Taxation is the government’s primary method of acquiring revenue in order to provide government services, fund national defense, and to create and enforce laws. Taxation seems to be a fair price to pay for those benefits in order to provide a sense of law and order, but the simple fact is that the current tax code is overly complicated and invades upon the civil liberties and the privacy of the American people (Moore). Primarily, the federal income tax is an act of theft that robs citizens of their hard earned money; …show more content…
All three of these arguments are fallacious. For the first argument, despite any and all citations to John Locke, there is no physical document that fits the description of a “social contract.” Additionally, if such an agreement existed, it would ensure that people who don’t use these services would not be forced to pay for them. Correspondingly, this issue is present for those with private insurance, but still have a medicare withholding from their paycheck. In the case of the second argument, both claims are “counterintuitive” …show more content…
In view of that analogy, the second claim, stating that government can create property rights by saying something belongs to someone, would also be dissolved from a moral standpoint. Finally, the third argument is dissipated in the principle that taking somebody’s property without their consent is still theft, even if the thief provides some form of benefits for the victim. Given these arguments and their refutations, income tax is truly a form of theft. However, in order to maintain some form of law and order taxation is necessary, only if it is justified and permissible to do so in a way that does not take the American people’s hard earned money without their consent. To that end, the most logical action to take would be to explore a means of eliminating the income tax and replacing it with a system that would maintain and improve current