Bob:

But it’s hard to see how working for an institution that pays you with money collected via taxation is parallel to that example.

Well, you know, Auburn University is getting about $156,000,000 this academic year from state government, plus about $17,000,000 from the Feds’ “fiscal stabilization” grants to state government institutions. And about $315,000,000 from tuition and student fees. And about $150,000,000 from other sources (e.g. endowment income, gifts, etc.) Now for those (like Roderick, like me) who consider taxation to be theft, the $173,000,000 from government appropriations represents money that was stolen from taxpayers and then handed over to the University. That sucks, and governments should not do that. But the $465,000,000 from students, gifts, endowment income, etc. does not represent money stolen from taxpayers. I don’t know what you imagine to be happening in the accounting department at AU, but I can promise you that they don’t have a special vault where they put all and only the stolen money, so they can (ha ha, take that taxpayers!) pay professors or staff out of the pelf they have seized. What actually happens is that it all gets thrown into a big general fund and then apportioned out to a number of smaller funds, with the (minority of) funds that are stolen getting mixed in with the (majority of) funds that were not stolen, in such a way that it is impossible even in principle to divvy up the payments in order to determine which portion is the stolen portion, or to trace back the stolen portion to any particular set of victims that it would have been stolen from. If you want to get all down in the casuistry here then you ought to take more care to represent the case accurately: Roderick is not being paid out of “money collected via taxation,” but rather out of money which was partly collected via taxation, mostly collected via voluntary means, and which is managed in a way little different from that of any other government-subsidized enterprise. (To be sure, I think that government subsidies to companies suck, and that they ought to be abolished. But I do not think it is ipso facto hypocritical for a taxation-is-theft anarchist to work for, say, General Motors or to work as a doctor or nurse at their local government-subsidized hospital.)

For one thing, by working for the state, you certainly contribute to its projects.

I don’t know what you’ve said that would entitle you to that “certainly.” Could you explain what specific projects of the state (of Alabama?) Roderick is contributing to, and how he is contributing to them? If the answer is something like, “Well, he is contributing to the successful operation of Auburn University by teaching and doing research,” then don’t you think it matters whether or not the “projects” in question are, or are not, things that would be done anyway, and would be worth doing in their own right, if (especially if) the state were not involved in them?