Legalized Theft

Our western capitalist societies are built on legalized theft. I'm going to, for once, side with libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, and agree with them that taxation is indeed theft. Why this sudden reversal of opinion from this staunch socialist? Well, read on.

Taxation is theft. This is a mantra repeated by libertarians and proponents of the neoliberal world order alike. You know, if you've been reading my posts for any time at all, that I don't agree with that assessment. In my opinion taxation is simply a recognition of the fact that we're a society, and not just a bunch of individuals who happen to share the same geographical space. But, technically speaking the libertarians are right of course: taxes are collected involuntarily under the threat of state violence, so yes, that's the same as pointing a gun at someone and saying "your money or your live!" I'm willing to make that concession, sure. But only if libertarians grant that privatization is also theft. Which they won't.

You see, private property is protected by and with the state's monopoly on the use of violence as well. And that's not a coincidence. If we go back far enough in our history, you'll see that every single piece and instance of private property began as theft, mostly violent theft. Whether we speak of European riches built on imperialism, colonization and conquest, of American wealth that's founded on the genocide of indigenous people and the theft of their land, or the riches of the Roman empire or... You get the picture. The land is of course the prime natural resource from which all other resources sprout, so he who owns the land has the power, and will have to defend that property with fences, barbed wire, legislation, all of it backed by the same (threat of) violence that made owning that property possible in the first place.

In our highly individualized society and accompanying mindset we don't immediately see how privatization of something that was once owned collectively, or not owned at all, is akin to theft. But it is theft nonetheless. It's legalized theft, deemed "legal" only as a function of the threat of violence behind it. Thus we come to my leftist and socialist persuasion; if that which we depend on to survive and thrive is put in the private hands of a few owners of the means of production, it's only fair that some of the wealth generated by these few owners flows back to the community on whose backs this wealth was created in the first place. Taxation is theft, but it's only partially stealing back what was stolen before.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality" the following quote;

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

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This is how we've arrived at the antagonistic society we live in currently, with capitalists stealing from the planet and the masses, and the latter two trying to steal some of it back. The fact that privatization is indeed theft is illustrated best with the victory of capitalism over communism. Where there were two opposing world-ideologies before, after the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1989-1991, we went from a bipolar to a uni-polar world; capitalism had won. There was a joke circulating in Russia in 1992 that went something like this: "What did capitalism accomplish in 7 years that communism couldn't do in 70 years?" Answer: "Make communism look good." This joke is mentioned in the second part of the below linked video, in which it's also mentioned that many of the citizens of the former Eastern Block wish for a return to socialism, when healthcare and education was free, employment guaranteed, live expectancy a lot higher, suicides and crime a lot lower and homelessness nearly non-existent... Watch the video and be sure to click on the link to part two as well.

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