Therefore, taxes are necessary to justly redistribute wealth. Circumstances such as the unfair concentration of wealth earned without the provision of commensurate benefit serve as an instance which proves the universal prohibition of taxes on the grounds that they are immoral to be falsely constructed.
Taxes are an issue of the redistribution of wealth in a society by the government. The social value involved is collectivism, which asks each of us according to our ability to contribute to the collective good. (To begin a flawed argument from authority) No less a mind than Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated that “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society” in a famed public pronouncement. He was not of the orientation toward arbitrary uses of governmental interference.
A government’s levy of taxes are a propos as a matter of principle because they enable the redistribution of wealth in circumstances where the redistribution of wealth is justified. This does not justify taxation in all instances. Constraints are necessary as a practical matter, and thus government authority must be checked. This is because governments should not just tax incautiously as their directors see fit. It is beyond the scope of the present argument to prove or demonstrate the general conditions where redistribution of wealth is justify. Suffice it to say that taxes are not always unjustified. That is the position of the present argument.
However, this issue has been framed successfully by the libertarian camp as a matter of morality, more specifically as matter of all taxes being immoral. An influential expression of this is by the argument against taxation from Robert Nozick. The purpose of his argument was to show that the rich are unfairly taxed for the benefit of the poor. Nozick argues that taxation is forced labor because taxation imposes conditions that require labor under the threat of punishment where the laborer does not directly benefit from the labor, and therefore taxes are immoral (Waller, 2011). This argument has been rigorously reconstructed by Jason Waller and is surely valid through the logical chess moves of material implication, hypothetical syllogism, conjunction, modus ponens, and instatiation. However, it is an unsound argument because it contains falsehoods in its premises and ignores other important facts. I shall discuss the false premises without reproducing the entire argument here.
It is not true that all the benefits of taxes go to someone else. In fact, taxes often just pay for the common defense, public goods that all enjoy and that are enabling conditions for capital development and profitability, and the satisfaction of debts incurred by the government. Nor is it true in reality that severe punishment is administered to the rich for failure to pay taxes. Through accountants and lobbyists particular interest influence tax policy so as to mitigate the amount of taxes they have to pay. Our free society enables them to do just this very thing via their right to petition government for the redress of grievances. Government’s authority to levy taxes was derived from legitimately enacted statutory law, and thus because we have a duly and truly constituted government the labor required by taxes is not forced, because the power of taxation was voluntarily given to government by the consent of the public and has not be rescinded.
The other important facts that the argument ignores are that often the earnings of the rich are earned from the surplus labor of the working class. Their earnings are also enabled by the generous subsidies which the American government provides American business, such as a well-trained and –educated population, for which the business community are not required to pay. The benefits of one rich person’s labor may need to be distributed to the locus of where the benefits were properly earned.
Therefore, taxes are necessary to justly redistribute wealth. Circumstances such as the unfair concentration of wealth earned without the provision of commensurate benefit serve as an instance which proves the universal prohibition of taxes on the grounds that they are immoral to be falsely constructed.
Waller, J. (2011). Nozick's Taxation is Forced Labor Argument. In M. B. Barbone, Just the Arguments 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy (pp. 242-3). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.