Eliminating Taxation

If you are like most people in the United States, you probably go to work five days per week and then return home at the end of it, satisfied with your labor and the income you’ve produced. But imagine that for one of those days each week, your hard work goes entirely unpaid; instead, it is stolen from you and given to inefficient, deeply wasteful programs, of which you will never reap the benefit. Operating under a system like this would surely be considered, by most, highly frustrating and seriously unjust. But according to philosopher Jessica Flanigan, under a 20% income tax system, this is already the world that you live in.

Given the futility and extreme coercion involved in income tax systems, Flanigan claims, they should be eliminated entirely, and anyone who would find something unsettling about the thought experiment she presents should agree. Of course, most people are reluctant to concede that all taxes are fundamentally corrupt, or that they should cease to exist. Perhaps, Flanigan says, we could find a better way of funding the programs currently covered by income tax: for instance, a property tax, which allows you to pay taxes in return for the maintenance of a property system. Through such a fee-for-service system, we could ensure that the state still has some method of collecting funds, without coopting people’s work and bodies by unfairly stealing their hard-earned money.

Flanigan’s position is atypical, to say the least. One of the biggest concerns with the type of anti-tax argument she advances is that, in short, it allows the rich to become richer while leaving impoverished masses to suffer. But Flanigan thinks this is misguided. In the flourishing economic system that a truly free market creates, she says, even the poorest citizens will be far better off than the lowest class in a stifled and highly regulated economy. After all, they will have access to lower-priced goods as consumers, far more control over their occupations, and free entry to the labor market in the first place. Not only this, but when we put the onus of working for others on individuals instead of the state, we encourage self-interested charity without having to force the conditions for such charity. It may be “alienating” in the Marxist sense, but according to Flanigan, this isn’t a bad thing: alienation is simply what it means to choose freely to provide goods and services that will benefit distant others.

Another option for a revised tax system is that perhaps people should have to pay taxes in order to access state-funded programs, while still being able to opt out. For example, a person might refuse to pay taxes that finance the public criminal justice system, but if she is charged with a crime, she will have to deal with these charges outside of the state’s judicial system.

Flanigan doesn’t find the concept of large-scale privatization distasteful. In fact, it might reduce the abuse and mistreatment that state programs are able to perpetrate, because private programs would be necessarily limited by the fact of competition: if they were too vicious, consumers would simply go elsewhere. Furthermore, Flanigan thinks that many people already have anarchist intuitions. Many dream of a stateless society that operates solely on individuals’ personal egalitarian ethos and voluntary charity; privatization is a natural step toward minimizing the state and increasing this freely-chosen social contribution.

Obviously, any of the potential systems for replacing income tax would have their flaws, as Flanigan acknowledges: in particular, they might not generate nearly as much money as income tax. But because these other systems could put citizens’ money toward only those programs that would benefit the paying citizens themselves, and because citizens could choose not to participate, they would be both far more efficient and far less coercive than income tax, and so would bolster the economy in the long term.

Another way of attempting to fill the gap that would be created by eliminating income tax is by imposing more tariffs on foreign goods. But Flanigan does not find this proposal promising. Imposing high tariffs, she claims, is undesirable insofar as it is a jingoistic policy that discriminates against foreigners while simultaneously punishing domestic citizens, since Americans benefit immensely from the market remaining open and free. And it’s not merely that tariffs hurt all economies involved; they also restrict consumer freedom and encourage other countries to reciprocate with higher tariffs, further damaging trade. And Flanigan thinks that the purported benefits of tariffs, such as protecting American citizens or boycotting abusive economies that run on slave labor, cannot justify their harmful effects. Tariffs are not instrumentally better than real economic improvement when it comes to reducing injustice, and American workers have no right to hold the economy back for the sole purpose of reducing competition.

Some people may think that the best form of political protest is to evade taxes entirely. But Flanigan is wary of any claims of moral righteousness on this point. If tax evasion is good, she says, it’s because the state is simply not entitled to the money, and not because it indicates any sort of moral character. When a person stops paying taxes but keeps the extra money rather than donating it to charity or using it to support more just institutions, he is simply acting for his own sake, even if his ability to spend extra cash is consequentially better for the economy. Of course, this does not mean that tax evasion is bad, particularly when it is practiced en masse in order to create real policy change. But Flanigan cautions against adopting a political or philosophical self-importance when it comes to tax evasion; after all, it’s the sort of thing that amounts to giving oneself a raise, which is a wholly self-interested endeavor.

Flanigan’s arguments, have significant implications for how we think about the power of the State conscription in general. If coercing citizens to pay taxes is wrong, then other things—like military drafts, abortion bans, and forced child support—are likely wrong for similar reasons.

In order to support the elimination of the income tax, we need not commit ourselves to thinking that we have no enforceable duties to benefit others; we need only recognize that in the case of an ineffectual income tax, the benefit just isn’t enough.