Taxation as theft

[3] Under this view, government transgresses property rights by enforcing compulsory tax collection, regardless of what the amount may be.

According to Samuels: "If ordinary citizens could assassinate, steal, imprison, torture, kidnap, and wiretap without incrimination, that authority could be transferred to government for its democratic arsenal of policymaking weaponry.

[12] Lysander Spooner, a 19th-century lawyer and political philosopher, who had argued before the United States Supreme Court, wrote the essay No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.

Bastiat held that the state's only legitimate function was to protect the life, liberty, and property of the individual.

[15]Murray Rothbard argued in The Ethics of Liberty in 1982 that taxation is theft and that tax resistance is therefore legitimate: "Just as no one is morally required to answer a robber truthfully when he asks if there are any valuables in one's house, so no one can be morally required to answer truthfully similar questions asked by the state, e.g., when filling out income tax returns.

Standards of justice should be applied not to the distribution of tax burdens but to the operation and results of the entire framework of economic institutions.

[19] Institutions such as the IMF and economist Alex Cobham, of the Tax Justice Network, argue that since public services in the form of education and infrastructure provides a foundation for wealth creation, a portion of those economic gains should therefore be used to continue to fund basic provisions that provide the opportunity for future economic growth.

[20] The libertarian response to this is that they do not consent to the social contract, and that any compact that would involuntarily bind people to it is tantamount to slavery.