Taxation forces people to pay for things they disagree with, and indeed for things that they may oppose morally, at the deepest personal level. People may have fundamental moral objections to foreign wars, mixed-sex schools, even bank bailouts – yet they are still forced to finance these things through taxation. Their values may be just as profound as those of the majority, their feelings as keen, their views just as rigorously constructed. Yet we force them to live with the dismal thought that their money is being used for purposes they consider highly immoral, and that things they regard as evil – perhaps as plain murder – are being done in their name. This should give the tax authorities huge discomfort – though there is scant evidence that it does.

When government takes money from people in taxation, it denies them the freedom to use their own earnings, capital and savings as they believe is right for themselves and their families. This extinguishes an important part of their moral being. People can only be considered moral – or immoral – if they actually have control over their own actions, and are free to make moral choices. A person whose choices are made by another is not a whole human being, but a mere cypher. Taxation eats into people’s moral integrity and makes them, in part, mere agents of government.

But institutions like government do not have values. Only individuals have values. Only individuals choose, act, and hold ethical beliefs. They may combine on collective projects such as mutual defense or welfare or the creation of large infrastructure projects. But that collectivity is not some super-human being with values and beliefs of its own, to which the values and beliefs of individuals can be legitimately sacrificed. Individuals remain the ultimate ethical units. And since no person has any more or less moral worth than another, individuals must be treated as ends, not as means to someone else’s ends.

This is why the argument that some people must be forced to pay money for the benefit of others is extremely thin. The state has no prior moral right to people’s property. If it did, there would be no logical stopping point; no level of government expropriation which any of us had any right to resist.

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Dr. Eamonn Butler is director of the Adam Smith Institute and author of The Best Book on the Market. In his next piece, he will show how taxation erodes personal responsibility.