Taxation is a theft?

[...] taxation is a form of theft. This claim [...] has to be understood with care, however. As the law stands, you do not have legal title to all the pre-tax money that others pay to you in form of wages, salaries, sales, etc. You only have legal title to your after-tax earnings. Thus libertarians [...] must concede there is no ilegal crime of stealing involved with taxation. Instead, [libertarians] must argue that taxation is the moral equivalent of stealing. Hence [they] must argue that people have a moral right to keep and controol all their earnings [...]

the existence of our economic opportunity is highly dependent on the goverment's activities of enforcing contracts, protecting legal property rights, keeping the peace, maintaining the national defense, printing currency, insuring bank deposits, preventing monopolies, fighting inflation, negotiating trade agreements, maintaining transportation infrastucture, and so on. [...]

"Sure, without my fellow citizens' work I wouldn't have been able to earn the money I did", the libertarians seems to say, "but that doesn't mean I owe my fellow citizens anything for their work". The exploitative nature of this is obvious; this surely means that in fact one has no moral right to all of one's pre-tax earnings. A moral right to commit the moral wrong of exploting one's fellow citizens would, after all, be a strange moral right indeed.

Craig Ducan, in Libertarianism for and against

[aL]