If you're forced to pay, it's theft

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for April 22, 2026)

Taxation is theft. People are free to disagree because everyone is free to be wrong. You might debate what kind of theft it is; whether extortion, a ransom, or an armed robbery, but it's theft.

We used to know it. The story of Robin Hood has morphed into a socialist fairy tale of someone who "robbed from the rich and gave to the poor", but originally, he was a hero who recovered stolen property from tax collectors and returned it to their victims. Government and other socialists don't want this story told, for obvious reasons.

If you are taking someone's property- their money- under threat, when they'd rather keep it to use as they see fit, you are a thief. No document or political criminal's opinion makes it something it isn't. No bureaucrat can change an unethical act into something right and good. No matter what the money ends up being used for.

I don't want any money going to fund government agencies, programs, or projects. If something can't be funded without stealing money through taxation to pay for it, it needs to go away.

Yes, that too.

However, if you are forced to pay for something anyway, you have every right to use it with the others who are also forced to pay.

If the local mafia uses your stolen money to dig a well, posting armed guards to prevent you from getting water at the creek, you aren't wrong to get water from the well. Until you can remove the mafia.

Roads are another example.

Driving is a right, not a privilege like government tries to brainwash the population into believing. That argument simply doesn't hold up to critical thinking. Licenses are another tax; more theft.

Do you really believe Benjamin Franklin would have complied with any absurd rule to register his horse or buggy with the state and get a license to travel on a road his stolen money built and maintained? I don't think so, and I suspect he would have supported hanging anyone who tried to impose or enforce such a rule.

These are examples of the authoritarian government most people have been trained to accept. One tick at a time, we are being robbed and enslaved.

Taxation is theft; you can reason it out in your mind, and you know it in your bones. Don't get complacent about it or let anyone claim otherwise without being corrected.

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