Jonah Goldberg wrote one heck of a post for National Review’s the Corner called “Taxes &Tyranny.” I strongly urge you to read it in its entirety. Moneyquote:

According to that Reason video I posted below, Americans work an average of 103 days a year just to pay their taxes. If you had to work 365 days a year to pay your taxes, that would be a kind of slavery or indentured servitude, because all of your productive labor would be going to the government. You would have no resources of your own to provide for the life you wanted. Instead the government would provide you not with what you want, but what the government decides you need.

That sounds like a kind of tyranny to me.

And, I think if we had to work 364 days a year it would still be a kind of serfdom (after all, serfs were allowed a little plot of their own). Ditto 363 days, 362 days, 361 days etc. Now, at some point the difference of degree becomes a difference in kind; working one day a year to pay for the government doesn’t sound oppressive to me. But it seems to me that it’s hardly absurd to think that 103 days a year is too much, or to believe that if that number goes even higher, we’re losing something important.

I would also add that it’s sort of crazy for liberals to equate government hand-outs (positive liberty, FDR’s economic bill of rights, and all that) with “freedom” but to equate the desire to keep more of the money you make yourself with greed and oppression of some kind.

Now, taxes are not per definition “tyrannical,” or at least not inherently evil. Instead, they are a necessary evil. Without taxes, I firmly believe, society will collapse.

But they are a necessary evil, nothing more, nothing better. They are an infringement upon people’s natural right of property. When you work, you make money. That is your money, not the government’s, nor society’s. This means that taxes have to be limited.

Working more than 100 days a year just to pay your taxes means the government charges you too much. It always has to limit your freedom somewhat, but 100 days is out of bounds. It means you have become a servant of the state. We are never completely free in modern society – that is natural – but we do not have to nor should we be servants either.

The most optimal society is one in which its members enjoy as much freedom as possible without society collapsing. This should be our goal: to limit, not do away with government.