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In the liberal imagination, taxes work something like this:

“Rich people earn lots of money. Some of them use some of that money in bad ways. So the government taxes them, taking away some of their money and redistributing some of that to useful things that help people who don’t have as much as the rich.”

In this formulation, taxes are a mechanism to make the rich “pay their fair share” and fund socially necessary public goods.

But that’s not actually how redistributive taxes work! Instead, it goes something like this:

“The state uses violence to facilitate exploitation by the rich of the working class. The rich take so much from the working class that members of the working class might die from destitution. To keep enough workers alive for the rich to continue exploiting, the state caps how much the rich can take, requiring the rich to give a little bit back in the form of taxes.”

In the presence of capitalism, welfare spending is certainly preferable to no welfare spending. But that welfare spending by the state would not be necessary if the state didn’t first facilitate capitalist exploitation. The rich *do not pay for welfare.* They’re simply not allowed to steal as much.

c4ss.org/content/4790

Center for a Stateless SocietyCitizens United — Is the Gas Pedal Stuck?Kevin Carson on the broader concerns campaign finance debates point to.
novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

@HeavenlyPossum this is a good point. The rich need the state to exist because they need something to enforce their property rights. And the reason the state can enforce their property rights more effectively than they could by themselves is because it has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force (so no one really challenges its propertarian violence) and — far more importantly imo! — also because the state has the right of legitimate taxation, which means it can, without many people even questioning it, expropriate by gun and boot and baton money from the very people it is going to use violence to protect property from, to fund its property protection efforts! Without taxation to subsidize protecting their property, the rich would be forced to foot the entire bill for protecting their fiefdoms themselves, instead of relying on expropriating everyone else in society to protect themselves against that very society, and they would quickly find that the greater their wealth and the more they use it for rent and exploitation instead of actually using it themselves, the exponentially more expensive that property gets to protect. So in essence, taxation exists to socialize the costs of protecting the rich onto everyone else, and without that it wouldn't be cost effective to be rich!