Taxation, forced labor, and theft: reply.

• Author: Feser, Edward
• Position: Controversy

In his comment on my recent article on taxation and theft (Feser 2000), James Rolph Edwards correctly notes that the provision of public goods--such as police protection, national defense, and courts of law--is an issue with which any critique of taxation per se must ultimately deal. That the provision of such public goods might be problematic in the absence of taxation, however, does not show that taxation for the purposes of financing those goods does not amount to theft, forced labor, or a violation of self-ownership.

Edwards argues that those who pay for the provision of public goods have a legitimate claim against free riders who, because they also receive the benefits of public goods but bear none of the costs, can be regarded as thieves; therefore, those would-be free riders can legitimately be forced, via taxation, to pay for what they otherwise would steal. This argument fails in several respects.

First, and less seriously, even if the argument showed that free riders can legitimately be taxed, it would not thereby show that the initial providers of public goods can be. Suppose all the initial providers changed their minds and decided to stop paying, or even that no one (in the state of nature, say) voluntarily agreed to fund the provision of public goods in the first place (perhaps precisely because they feared that free-rider problems would arise). Then Edwards's free-rider argument can give us no grounds for forcing, via taxation, those initial providers to keep paying, much less to start paying in the first place because no individuals can claim that they are taking illicit advantage of benefits provided by others--after all, until they "get the ball rolling," there are no benefits.

More seriously, though (in any society, no doubt, some people are willing to fund public goods voluntarily), the argument fails to show that free riders can legitimately be taxed because it is implausible to regard free riders (or at least all free riders) as thieves. That the free rider gets benefits--indeed cannot help getting benefits--for which he does not pay hardly suffices to make him a thief, nor does the fact that the payer might get more benefits if the free rider contributed. If a resident of my neighborhood opens a Starbucks, thus attracting a younger and "hipper" crowd than would otherwise spend time here and raising property values in the process, am I a thief if I fail to send him a check (or at least become a customer)? More to the...