A WORLD WITHOUT TAXES
Anything worth paying for, including government services, should be paid for voluntarily
BY JOE SOBRAN

Joe Sobran is an author, syndicated columnist and editor of a monthly newsletter, SOBRAN'S. See sobran.com for more information or e-mail Sobran at joseph@sobran.com. Other stories by Joe Sobran

More than a decade ago, Steven Spielberg did a film about the “Amistad” affair, a revolt aboard a Cuban slave ship that caused a sensation in 1839. The African slaves took over the ship and wound up in the United States, where they were tried for mutiny and murder.

Abolitionists argued that the Africans should be treated as free men acting in self-defense. Former president John Quincy Adams took their case before the U.S. Supreme Court and won a dramatic victory.

The movie is reportedly designed as an inspirational tale of victims triumphing over their oppressors — “a kind of moral analogue to Schindler’s List,” according to Newsweek.

If so, the Spielberg version of the “Amistad” story may avoid telling the unedifying sequel: the leader of the revolt, having gained his freedom, went home to Africa and became — what else? — a slave trader.

One of the simple-minded assumptions most people make is that slaves were always opposed in principle to slavery. They weren’t. Most of them couldn’t imagine a world without slavery. They didn’t want to be slaves themselves, but they didn’t think abolishing slavery was even a possibility. It had always existed, and the natural expectation was that it would continue to exist forever.

This was true not only in Africa, but in ancient Greek and Roman civilization, and probably nearly everywhere else. Slaves were, for one thing, spoils of war. If you couldn’t sell your captives into slavery, many reasoned, you might as well kill them. So in that respect, slavery saved many lives.

That doesn’t justify slavery, but it does remind us that there are odd moral complications even in immoral practices. We ought to drop the provincial habit of talking as if slavery had its origin (or its termination) in America.

It’s probably safe to bet that slavery will be back. The human tendency to live off the labors of others is too strong to be suppressed forever. When chattel slavery is outlawed, the tendency will take other forms, such as what Hilaire Belloc prophetically called “the Servile State” — a system, neither capitalist nor socialist, in which one part of the community is taxed to support the other.

The “ideal” form of taxation is that everyone is forced to pay his “fair share” for the common good. But in real life, some are forced to pay far more than their fair share so that others may get free services and income.

It’s bad enough when a democratic majority abuses the taxing power to exploit the minority; in that case the minority may still be able to defend itself. But we now support a large population of parasites by running up huge debts that will be passed on to those who can’t vote yet — and even those who don’t yet exist. The old can tax not only the young, but also the unborn.

The abuse of the taxing power is probably inevitable. The only way to control it is to abolish it. That is, there should be no taxes, period — no income tax, no sales tax, no inheritance tax, no value-added tax, no capital-gains tax, no graduated tax, no flat tax, no poll tax. Anything worth paying for, including government services, should be paid for voluntarily. To force people to pay for “benefits” they neither want nor receive is tyrannical.

This is of course a “utopian” idea — just as the idea of abolishing slavery in ancient (democratic) Athens would have seemed utopian. The advocates of the status quo will snort at the “impracticality” of a world without taxes, just as the sensible Athenian would have derided a world without slaves.

The modern world considers it one step from insanity to make proposals that you can’t reasonably expect to see enacted in your lifetime. Of course the modern world very recently considered it “idealistic” to advocate communism, which was indeed enacted within many people’s lifetimes —and very short lifetimes at that.

But a voluntary society? Perish the thought! It could never work!

The really scary possibility is that it might work — but that it wouldn’t work for the people who prefer to live off other people’s taxes.