@Kylesa:

Yes, Ron Paul gives his money back to the Government, because he’s demonstrating he’s fiscally responsible.

How does returning money back to the thief who stole it demonstrate fiscal responsibility?

It seems to me that if you want to demonstrate fiscal responsibility with stolen money, the way to demonstrate it would be to return it to the owner it was stolen from. Not to spend a bit off the top and return the rest to the thief.

By returning money to the treasury that is superfluous in his budget, is he actively contributing towards the excesses of Government vis a via his actions

Sure: he’s providing them with more money to use in violating innocent people’s rights. So am I, through taxation. But I don’t have a choice in the matter; I get taxed whether I want to be taxed or not. Ron Paul does have a choice in the matter: he has a budget, and he could do everything he can to make sure that the money gets returned to the tax victims it was extracted from, or at least gets spent on things which, while wasteful, do not involve committing violence against innocent people. Or he could turn it back over to Treasury, which will use it to commit violence against innocent people. Doing the latter doesn’t make the violence his fault, exactly — it’s the fault of the people who commit it. But he would be doing more good for the world if he piled up all the surplus money on the National Mall and set it on fire than he does by returning it to the federal government for their future use.

Ron Paul believes the same thing, which is essentially why he does it? I get what you’re saying, I really do, but I just don’t think this is a valid reason to be opposed fiscal conservatism, because fiscal conservatism isn’t causing the problem, it’s actually the opposite–it’s antithetical to out of control government spending

If you think that “out of control government spending” is my primary concern here, then I don’t think you’ve really gotten what I’m saying. My point is that government spending is a secondary issue. The primary issue is government violence.

what’s the alternative?

Anarchy.

I’m not really interested in figuring out a way for Dr. Paul to keep his government job. If there isn’t any way for him to honestly handle the loot that he’s been allocated, then he ought to resign. That said:

Give it away? Keep it?

I’d prefer he give it away to a randomized selection of the tax victims it was stolen from. (Returning the money is the only honest thing to do when you come into some money that you know to have been stolen from living victims who you could identify and return the money to.) But, failing that, keeping it and using the surplus to buy beer and pizza for his office staff would still be preferable to returning it to the Treasury.

@aaronman:

This suggests it is a matter of principle,

No doubt. But what’s the principle?

If it’s something like “The U.S. government should be as efficient as possible in spending what it steals from innocent victims,” I can’t see why that principle is worth defending or acting on. The primary problem isn’t profligacy; it’s the stealing.

The money he sends back only delays the theft and destruction that has to occur for the government to continue

No, it doesn’t. It is not as if the IRS is going to collect $100,000 less in taxes or the Treasury is going to issue $100,000 less in government bonds thanks to the windfall. It’s not as if government returns surpluses back to taxpayers when they have surpluses; they just look around for new things to spend the extra money on.

Well I didn’t see this was just for his office budget, but if he inflated the value of staff labor just because he had extra money lying around he would be abandoning his market principles.

What market principles? In my view, there is no way whatsoever to live up to “market principles” when you are distributing stolen loot. All government spending is by definition a command economy, not a market economy, and no price that Paul chose to pay for labor or goods in his office budget, whether small or large, would be a “market” price, because (as Mises teaches us) there’s no way for a command economy to approximate market outcomes.

but you’re acting like what the Fed spends money on is worse than what Paul would spend money on locally

The money went to Treasury, not to the Federal Reserve. In any case, what the U.S. government spends money on is definitely worse than what Paul would have spent it on locally. Paul’s spending would merely be wasteful. The U.S. government’s spending is actively evil and destructive; it goes towards imprisoning, surveilling, hurting, maiming, and killing innocent people, both within the United States and abroad.

Paul spending money that is neither his nor should be spent is central planning as well.

Yes, I agree. There’s no way around central planning when government allocates money. All you can do is get the money away from government as quickly as possible — and, preferably, try to get it into the hands of some those net taxpayers it was originally stolen from. But that’s precisely why Paul shouldn’t give the money back to Treasury for more government allocation.

But I get what you’re saying and it’s not a bad thought, he could have paid himself the $100,000 and spent it at every business in town or something…

I think that would be better than giving it back to Treasury, but the best thing for him to do would be to just give it away directly to randomly selected net taxpayers without demanding any consideration in return.

@Sir Elliot:

He can’t keep the money. If he doesn’t use it, it must be returned to whatever general office staff budget is in place, since the books have to be balanced out.

I’m aware. What I’m suggesting is that it would be better for Ron Paul to use it on something wasteful but non-destructive, rather than giving it back to the U.S. government, which will use it for something both wasteful and destructive.

Maybe if the featherbedding gets too egregious, it would make it difficult for Ron Paul to keep his government job. But then, I’m not especially interested in figuring out ways to help Ron Paul keep his government job.

Maybe I’m not understanding OP’s point?

Maybe not. If it helps, my primary point is that it’s misleading (and indeed stupid, if not dishonest) to describe paying $100,000 back to the U.S. Treasury as “paying back the American people.” What it is, is paying back the American government, which is a different entity, and one which happens to be antagonistic towards, and parasitic on, the “people” it claims to rule.

@Kylesa:

That’s a pretty massive leap in logic to suggest that Ron Paul’s fiscal conservatism is aiding bankers.

I didn’t say it’s aiding bankers. I said it’s aiding the U.S. government. (The U.S. government, of course, does aid bankers — hence my mention of them — but it also does lots of other things. Like blowing up Afghan children.)

So in an essence, you’re faulting Ron Paul for sticking to his ‘guns’ (Being an honest politician).

No; I’m faulting those who claim that giving stolen money back to the pirate who originally stole it is a form of “honesty.” There is no “honest” way for any politician to spend tax monies; the only thing to do is to get them out of political hands.

Jeff: I have a little bit more of a social-contract view of taxation. If you live here, you’re bound somewhat by the will of the majority, and if the majority wants to deficit spend a little temporarily, you should pay the taxes to support it. This will-of-the-majority stuff is a dangerous road to tread, of course, but I’d hope a broad enough reading of the Constitution provides protection against tyrannies of the majority.

Well, since this conversation has been about setting out limits, what I’d be interested to hear from you is how far the suppression of minority preferences by the majority would have to go before you considered it “tyranny.” How gravely do my wishes have to be violated in order to satisfy the wishes of the majority, before I count as being tyrannized?

For example, do profound violations of conscience count? I ask because one of the things the Constitution clearly has not protected me from, and could not plausibly be expected to protect me from (given the basic list of enumerated powers) is being forced, by the will of the majority, to provide taxes that materially support the U.S. government’s wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am forced to cover the costs of these wars even though I oppose them as a matter of conscience; even though I consider what is being done with my money nothing short of an act of mass murder being carried out against innocent people. Set aside for the moment the question of whether or not you agree with me on the wars — I’m new to your blog so I wouldn’t know. But given that I believe what I believe does the fact that majoritarian politics has forced me to pay for acts that so fundamentally violate my conscience that I would die before committing or facilitating them voluntarily — from Bagram to Fallujah to Abu Ghraib — does that rise to the level of being tyrannized? If not, what would?

Jeff: … paying taxes is part of the social contract you’re in by living here. If you don’t want to have the government offer a service, fine, but if a majority of your fellow citizens do want that service offered, you’re bound to pay for it by that contract. By instituting a government, we’ve agreed to fund our collective endeavors. It’s up to the voters and their representatives to figure out what, exactly, those endeavors are.

Well, wait. Who’s the “we” here? I didn’t institute a government; I was never asked, and if asked, I would have declined. So if I’m not part of the “we” who instituted the government, how did I end up part of the “we” who allegedly agreed to the taxes and spending?

Stephan,

I understand that you don’t necessarily mean to endorse the argument you are presenting. But, just to get clear on the details of the setup:

1. In the argument, as presented, the people who you claim to be the rightful owners of the road system are “U.S. taxpayers” (since it was their money that was stolen to build and maintain the roads). You then suggest that this is a reason why rules of the road could legitimately be adopted which exclude or condition access for “outsiders,” which apparently you read as people who are not U.S. citizens.

But “taxpayer” and “citizen” are not the same category. Not all citizens are taxpayers and lots of taxpayers aren’t citizens. Many citizens are net tax recipients; all immigrants, both government-approved and undocumented, pay at least some taxes to the local, state, and U.S. governments (gas tax, sin tax, sales tax, property tax through markups on rent, often income tax, etc.) and many, probably most, are in fact net taxpayers (since immigrants are ineligible for most welfare benefits that citizens are eligible for). So if you’re considering “taxpayers” to be the class of people who rightfully should have joint ownership of the roads, wouldn’t that suggest that your average undocumented worker has a substantially better claim on having a say in forming rules about who can use of government roads than upstanding citizens like Fritz Henderson, military-welfare recipients like Jim Gilchrist, or milfare administrators like Marvin Stewart?

1. Presuming, arguendo, that U.S. taxpayers (not necessarily citizens) are the rightful owners of government-funded roads (certainly the government is not, so…), do you think it likely that the shares and distribution of rightful ownership would be uniform across all taxpayers and across all roads? So, for example, have I, living on Rochelle Ave. in Las Vegas, earned a vote over what people living and working on Cass in Detroit can or cannot do with their road? Have the folks on Cass earned an equal say to me over who can or cannot use Rochelle here? When we’re trying to figure out what a private property owner would do, do we have to conceive of, say, the policies of a single private proprietor or a single private entity who owned all 2,500 miles of I-10? Or might the patterns of rightful ownership — hence the distribution of use policies — be somewhat more decentralized than that?

Geoffrey Transom:

As I read Mr Preston’s piece, he – like me – doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether you, or I, or anybody else is gay, bi, bi-curious, or whatever:

I dunno, dude, when someone starts complaining about “cock-ringed queers,” “bearded ladies,” “pissed-off, man-hating, dykes with an excess of body hair,” and “persons of one or another surgically altered ‘gender identity,'” quote-unquote, and states, without any qualification, that fewer such people ought to be “in our midst,” in order to make the kind of person he thinks of as the “average young rebel” (who, we can glean from the textual evidence, is supposed to be white, male, straight, and not an immigrant) more comfortable joining up — well, I get the impression that he does care, and moreover that he expects other people to care. Not so much about the fact of sexuality per se, but more about how far one is open about sex and gender in a way that makes things uncomfortable for those who believe in a very rigid set of gender norms.

the thing he is warning about is the futility of efforts to ‘buddy up’ to the GLBT LOBBY (by which, I am sure you know, we mean a militant group who seeks legislative action in its favour).

Geoffrey, I know what lobbying groups are, and I’m aware of several of the different lobbying groups concerned with a legislative “gay rights” agenda (HRC, OutFront, Stand OUT for Equality, ACT UP, etc.). However, I don’t know what “the GLBT lobby” is — there is no such single coordinated group. There are many different groups with many different aims and many different tactics. And I don’t know how “the GLBT lobby” is supposed to encompass who Keith Preston was actually talking about — his post was not about people engaged in lobbying the legislature or attempting to seek “legislative action in [their] favour”; it was about people currently engaged in the anarchist movement, who are calling for non-legislative, non-governmental forms of cultural activism which Keith feels to amount to “reacting to those with un-PC views on ‘gay rights’ with hysteria, shrillness, rudeness, slander, villification, and threats.”

Talking about ‘you and your friends’ in lieu of a ‘lobby’ is a tad disingenuous. After all, the leadership of the Soviet Union could have been said to be ‘Lenin and his friends’

Let me repeat this in case there is a chance of your getting it.

I talk about “me and my friends” in lieu of a “lobby” because I am not part of a fucking lobby, and neither are my friends. I (we) do not attempt to get legislation passed in my (our) favor. I do not attempt to meet with or communicate with legislators in an attempt to influence their opinions. There are groups that do these things. I am not a member of those groups, and I am opposed to both their agenda and their tactics. I am an anarchist, an anti-electoralist, and specifically an advocate of direct action and counter-economics. The people Keith Preston is complaining about in his post are people like me and my friends, not members or supporters of political lobbying groups. The activism that he is complaining about has to do primarily with calling him names and suggesting that people dissocate from him; it doesn’t have to do with attempts to influence the legislature. The people he is calling for a “purge” of are not members of GLBT lobbying groups — you can’t purge people who were never part of the movement to begin with — but rather anarchists who are vocal gay liberationists (which would include not only “me and my friends,” but also, presumably, organized, anti-legislative anarcho groups like Bash Back). If you want to have a conversation about statist GLBT lobbying groups we can have that conversation; it will be a short one: I’m agin’ ’em, just like I’m agin’ all statist lobbying groups. But you don’t get to rewrite the entire past conversation in order to pretend like Keith’s target is actually something completely different from what he explicitly said it was.

It’s straightforward that if there is existing group-owned infrastructure which has been funded by current inhabitants, then immigrants need to ‘buy in’ to that infrastructure if it is not priced on a ‘user pays’ basis.

Immigrants who use the roads pay gas taxes and other sales taxes to support the roads. To the extent that non-immigrants “buy in” to the government roads by funding them, immigrants “buy in” in exactly the same way. I think this kind of argument is nothing more than special pleading in an attempt to find an argument for a predetermined conclusion; for a more detailed discussion, see 1 and 2.

That said, Mr Preston makes no reference to the State monitoring the borders – he leaves that to militia (which at least renders it voluntary, and reduces the likelihood that such enforcement would last long or be very effective).

Bull. He calls for the use of Minuteman-style militias in addition to existing government border checkpoints (checkpoints staffed by whom? , screeners, Fugitive Alien courts and immigration enforcement squads (to do the screening of people coming here and the deporting of people already living here), etc., not in place of them. He calls for more government laws, not fewer (e.g. having government further criminalize peaceful labor contracts between immigrants and willing employers — to be policed and enforced by whom, if not by a government immigration bureaucracy much like the present one, with its “papers-please” I-9 form monitoring and its paramilitary workplace raids). There is no honest reading of his expressed position that would suggest any reduction to the intensity or scope of government enforcement of state borders.

The rest of the stuff he wrote about was predicated on the existence of state benefits, so it seemed clear that he was talking about current conditions, not some future state-free situation.

It’s true that if you combine something fundamentally moral (free immigration, without government monitoring or control, and without respect for politically-fabricated “borders”) with something completely immoral (a coercive welfare state), you may get bad results from the combination. But when somebody responds to that situation by crusading against the moral part of the combination, and calls for massive saturation deployments of state surveillance and state violence, which target everyone on the basis of a morally irrelevant feature (their nationality) regardless of their intentions or their conduct, to suppress the moral part of the combination, rather than, y’know, focusing on the immoral part — well, then it seems to me that that’s a pretty cracked way of responding to current conditions. One which happens to strengthen the State rather than weakening it, to move us further away from a future state-free situation rather than closer to it, and to guarantee that lots of innocent people are going to get jailed or shot right here and right now, for no good reason at all.

Still, immigration ‘policy’ is one in which even the most ‘with it’ anarchists can disagree;

If your idea of a “with it” anarchist includes Anarchists For National Borders And Police States to Enforce Them, well, then, yeah, I suppose you’ll see a lot of disagreements.

Frankly, I would like to live in a world in which you didn’t feel obliged to mention that you’re ‘an out bisexual man’.

I’d like to live in such a world too, because the reason I “felt obliged” to mention the fact had to do with the fact that LGBT folks were being rhetorically attacked in the conversation, based on a number of claims that are not actually true of me or of a number of other LGBT folks here, and mentioning that we are present in the conversation is an important part of dealing with such attacks. I’d much rather live in a world without such attacks, and hence without the need to go out of my way to formally declare it.

Anonymous,

1. When your grandparents came to the United States in 1900, there were no immigration quotas, and hardly any immigration laws at all. There was no INS, no visa system, and no green cards. It’s a bit disingenuous to say, “Well, they should do it just like my grandparents did,” because, what your grandparents actually did in 1900 was just to enter without any visa at the most convenient entry point (most Mexican immigrants just walked across the border in the middle of town; European immigrants usually came in through a port of call in a major city), and anyone who does that now gets spit on as an “illegal,” chased, and, if caught, exiled from their new home.

2. Undocumented immigrants are taxpayers. All undocumented immigrants pay most or all of the state and local taxes that cover the costs of government-run hospitals and government-run schools. (Sales taxes, cigarette taxes, room taxes, property taxes — either directly, or indirectly through the rent their landlord charges — etc. In a state like Nevada, which has no state income tax, they pay all the state taxes that documented immigrants and citizens do.) And, in fact, the numerical majority of undocumented immigrants also pay federal income taxes, as well. (Either through an ITN they requested from the IRS, which you can get without disclosing immigration status, or through W-4 withholding at a job they got using a false Social Security Number.)

Are there some undocumented immigrants who evade income taxes? Well, sure. So what? I hear some citizens do that too. Do you not know anybody who cheats on their taxes? Really?

1. You write: “If they don’t like that designation, they can go back to their country of origin. They are not welcome here.”

You ought to speak for yourself, dude. You may not welcome undocumented immigrants. I welcome anyone who’s peaceful and productive, regardless of what country they came from, and regardless of whether or not they got a permission slip for existing from the U.S. government. Since we disagree on this, it seems to me like the question is, whose welcoming should matter? And I think the answer is, that we should agree to disagree: you can welcome or not welcome whoever you want on your own property; and I can welcome or not welcome whoever I want on my own property. That’s how people handle disagreements like this in a civilized society, rather than by fighting to try and force a one-size-fits-all policy on everybody.

But if that’s the rule we adopt, then your home may be your personal property; if you own your own business, your workplace may be too. But the entire territorial expanse of the United States of America certainly is not. You have no business telling me who to welcome or not to welcome into my own home or workplace.

Bianca,

If I’d been able to make it to my local Tea Party, I would have done so, unironically.

The reason I would have done so is that I don’t approve of 30% of my income being taken away from me in order to fund the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to blow up innocent people in foreign countries. Or to throw a few trillion dollars at failing corporations, so as to force me and my fellow workers to cover the costs of their bad investments, all for the explicit purpose of trying to use the force of the state to preserve the economic status quo.

Of course, you could say, “Well, aren’t there some things the government does that you do find useful?” Sure; I drive on the roads like everyone else. But if you total up the numbers, the government is spending more money — a lot more, by several orders of magnitude — on things that I find foolish, destructive, or morally appalling, than it is on things that genuinely help people. If I had a choice, I would certainly be happy to direct my money money away from the government’s war-machine and its corporate bail-out machine and direct a fair amount of that of my money towards things like roads and liberal education and mutual aid for my fellow workers. But, then, if I had a choice, we wouldn’t be talking about taxes anymore. We’d be talking about donations. The distinguishing feature of taxation is precisely the fact that the government makes me pay taxes in, whether or not I approve of the uses that they’ll be put to; and that I have no direct control over what purposes the government puts my money towards.

Well, I can speak only for myself, not for American political culture as a whole. But I oppose and hate taxes because taxes pay for the government. I’m an anarchist, so I oppose and hate the government. So I also oppose and hate the taxes that make it possible.

You mention that taxes pay for social welfare programs. Sure they do; they also pay for missiles to blow up houses in Pakistan and for bombs to murder Iraqi children with. You might say that what you’d like to do is to pay in for the welfare and not pay in for the warfare. I’m sure you would; so would I. But if you got to pick and choose which projects your money went to, that would be a fine thing, but it wouldn’t be taxes anymore, would it? If you get to choose where it goes, then it’s voluntary mutual aid, and for that you need neither a government nor taxes, which necessarily entail that money is taken from people and put to purposes which the government, not those people, decide on.

Take this example: a village council decides that the farmers who live there have to give a certain percentage of their grain crops for a common grain storehouse for use in emergencies. The chief and elders request it and it’s done by the citizens. This is an example of taxation.

No it’s not. Tax collectors don’t “request”; they threaten. If people voluntarily agree to support a common project, then you’re not describing taxation anymore. You’re describing donations.

Found it! The comic you seek is “Dan Rather” (1992).

While I was looking through the archives, I also found this strip from 1990.

This is the text of the communique issued today by a newly-formed activist group, the Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left:

This is the first communiqué from the Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left.

Today, April 15^th, guerrilla educators affiliated with Southern Nevada ALL struck targets in the streets of southeastern Las Vegas and on the UNLV campus. Flyers—with slogans including Taxes Pay For Torture, Taxes Pay For War, and Your Money Or Your Life,—were raised to reach out to unwilling taxpayers and potential new ALLies, and to raise public consciousness about taxes.

On the filing deadline for 2007’s federal income tax—when countless honest working folks are sick of meddlesome government—when they are tired of being forced to fill out complex forms—and when they are forced to take (on average) 30% of the money that they worked to earn in the previous year and render it as tribute to the United States federal government—against their will, and whether or not they approve of what the government will do with the money—we have a perfect opportunity to spread our message about the violence of government taxation.

Taxes mean violence, both at the point of collection, and at the point of government spending. Collecting taxes is inherently violent because taxpayers are forced to pay the government whether or not they want to, under the threat of government violence. Those who refuse to turn over the money are subjected to government fines, confiscation of their homes and effects, or locked away in prison. It must never be forgotten that anything is funded by taxes could have been funded voluntarily, if enough people could have been convinced to donate the money willingly, or to give it freely in exchange for something that they get in return. In the last analysis, there is no reason to fund a project by taxation unless there is no honest and peaceful way to persuade people to support that project voluntarily. But if there is no honest and peaceful way to fund something, then it should not be funded. Taxation ought to be considered the last resort of the scoundrel and the thug. Morally, there is no difference between tax collection and highway robbery.

But the violence of taxation is even worse than the violence of highway robbery—for while the robber takes your money violently to satisfy his own greed, and then leaves you alone, the tiny handful of people who constitute the the ruling faction of the federal government take your money violently, and thenthey use that money to fund yet more violence — whether by locking nonviolent drug users away in government prisons, or in the form of police brutality, or in the use of torture by government intelligence agencies in the name of “National Security,” or in the form of government wars and occupations. The government’s ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost more than half a trillion dollars, and which cost millions of dollars more with every passing day, and the only reason that this government can afford to continue with their occupation and their bombings, long after the majority of people in the United States have concluded that the wars are hopeless and fundamentally wrong, is that tiny handful of people have the power to force the millions of us who are against these wars to fund them anyway, against our will and in violation of our own conscience. Taxes pay for police brutality. Taxes pay for torture. Taxes paid for Guantanamo. Taxes paid for Abu Ghraib. Taxes pay for war. And when taxes pay for something, what that really means is that unwilling victims, including you and me, are forced to pay for it even if they don’t think that it is worthwhile. Even when they think that it is abhorrent to their own beliefs.

We believe that there is another way. Southern Nevada ALL is working to raise public awareness, and to work towards a new, consensual society, in which no-one will be forced to pay for torture or war, and in which working folks will be able to keep what they have earned, rather than being forced to turn it over to be used at the whim of the violent minority faction known as the United States federal government. We are starting small, and we are starting here, because that is what we have, and this is where we live. We ask that everyone in Southern Nevada who believes in peace, voluntary co-operation, mutual aid, and individual liberty join us in our struggle.

—ALLy C.J., 15 April 2008.

The Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left can be reached through its website, sonv.libertarianleft.org, or through its e-mail list ALLSouthernNevada.

These are the flyers that were found posted today on the streets of southeastern Las Vegas:

How Government Works (#1)	How Government Works (#2)
Taxes Pay For Torture (#1)	Taxes Pay For Torture (#2)
Taxes Pay For War (#1)	Taxes Pay For War (#2)
Your Money Or Your Life!	Your Tax Dollars At Work (#1)
Your Tax Dollars At Work (#2)