Taxation is theft. There's no easier way of skirting the issue. The government has a gun at your head forcing you to work a good chunk of your life for them.
Taxes is my favorite Libertarian issue. In my opinion nothing is as clearly bad as taxes, nothing else leads to as many abuses by government. Taxes are a good portion of the cycle of power that drives abuses by our government, cut taxes and the power of our government is reduced significantly.
I oppose all taxes on principle AND on practical grounds. There are much better ways (more efficiently, with more quality) to fund nearly everything that the government currently funds through our tax system. But on a much more basic level taxes are immoral, they require the initiation and constant threat of force by the government to be implemented. Is all tax money wasted? Probably no, but we are far away from getting value from our money.
I would like to eliminate all taxes, starting with the income and sales taxes. I don't totally oppose taxes that can be directly tied to a service (e.g. the gas tax as long as it is used solely for roads), but I still believe that private industry can better server these products and services.
Everything that we fund through taxes is more expensive than it would be if we contracted directly with producers, be it school, roads, infrastructure, etc. Just the bureaucracy required to keep the money flowing from the working man to the treasury departments, and back again to where it is used is a big waste of time effort and space.
So, how do you propose we run government if we don't have taxes? Libertarians have struggled with this question for a while, and there are many answers. First of all, you need to realize that the kind of government that we propose would be so small that the problem of how to fund it would be a lot smaller. Given that, there are plenty of valid ways to fund government, contract insurance is particularly interesting. Court costs, voluntary donations and citizen legislators that charge a lot less (instead of the fulltime critters we now have) are other things that would work well.
I particularly oppose taxation without representation. Millions of legal residents and children pay all sorts of taxes (income, sales, etc.) while at the same time get no say in how these taxes are used. At the same time, millions of people on welfare get a say while on the public dole: a conflict of interest if I ever saw one.
Roberto Leibman
email: statesenate@leibman.net
web: http://www.leibman.net/statesenate2004