The only reason that you can make the money you do is because you're standing on the shoulders of giants. Aristotle, Newton, Watt, Tesla, Von Nuemann, et cetera. Left to your own devices (and assuming that the other 7 billion people are in the same boat) you'd be starving as a subsistence farmer making the equivalent of about $1 a day. If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society. Your income taxes are only about a third of that. Who's the thief now?
> Left to your own devices (and assuming that the other 7 billion people are in the same boat) you'd be starving as a subsistence farmer making the equivalent of about $1 a day.
That's an unreasonable assumption. There are differences in productivity even among farmers. Some people are much better at farming than others.
> If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society.
So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%, nothing more? Also, you're arguing that I owe part of my success to the drug addict who gets high all the time, and to the drunk who starts drinking early in the morning, and to the mugger who robs people at gunpoint? Even to people who play World of Warcraft all day?
Society is a mix of people that make wildly different contributions, and in some cases hugely negative impacts. I am immensely grateful to people like Leibniz, Newton, Shakespeare and others, but not so much to people who just coast through life. I also wish Stalin, Hitler and many others would have never existed.
"There are differences in productivity even among farmers."
Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.
"So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%"
Pretty much useless to the subsistence farmer. Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work. Not to mention that society provides the source of your inspiration, provided your education, an outlet for your talents, et cetera.
Obviously my argument is a little bit of reductio ad absurdum. But much less so than "taxation is theft".
> Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.
I disagree with that. Half my native country is rural, with a really long history of agriculture, and it's far from homogenous. Work ethic and intelligence really matter, even for farmers (especially work ethic; some people just work harder than others). There's always that one farmer who has more cattle or pigs than the others (or takes better care of their crops), and a few who can barely feed themselves. This was true even centuries before modern equipment, like tractors and chemicals.
> Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work.
Not everyone is equally hard working; in fact, I'd say the differences among individuals are quite significant. Also, you're ignoring intelligence/creativity.
> But much less so than "taxation is theft".
Also, as I already said in another comment, I'm not arguing that "taxation is theft" (as I already asked another commenter, please point out where I explicitly claimed that). I'm only arguing that paying people so they don't hurt me is theft (or extortion or a protection racket).
Two ideas seem insane to me in this whole thread: 1) that "we should pay poor people to stop them from killing us" and 2) that "we as a society are punishing people who can't find a job", with the corollary of "we're rewarding people who do have jobs". So far, I've only been arguing against these.
