How can anybody be against murder and theft while supporting war and taxation? and Thomas Jefferson on Taxation

How can anybody be against murder and theft while supporting war and taxation?

Afterall, isn't war just mass murder and taxation just theft on a massive scale?


Taxation best answer:

Answer by DreamTrue
Umm no. First of all War is what protects you from another countrys attacks. Without it, others would just attack us and we'd lose more lives. Its only murder if you attacked another country just to try and take it over and kill the opposing side. (AKA the Iraqis). And without taxation the government could not support or help its people in anyway.

Taxation

Thomas Jefferson on Taxation


Image by elycefeliz
from The Unsettling of America - Culture & Agriculture, by Wendell Berry

As our present economy clearly shows, the small can survive only if the great are restrained. And there is nothing undemocratic or anti-libertarian about restraining them. To assume that ordinary citizens can complete successfully with people of wealth and with corporations, as our government presently tends to do, is simply to abandon the ordinary citizens. Restraint by taxation is the smallest, most obvious, simplest and cheapest answer. This is not my idea. It is Thomas Jefferson's. Writing to Reverend James Madison on October 28, 1785, Jefferson spoke of the desirability of freehold tenure of property. And then he said:

"Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometric progression as they rise. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that employment be provided to those excluded from the appropriation."

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