Sometimes people say that if you don’t like your taxes, your government, their wars, their policies, etc., that you should just go somewhere else. This is an argument used by redneck right-wingers and quasi-commie social democrats; the “if-you-don’t-like-it-get-the-fuck-out” argument. Reasonable adults should be able to agree to disagree, without resorting to violence.

No, they tell me, If I don’t like being stolen from, I should just leave. If I try to defend myself from the thieves, they’ll shoot me. You see, the penalty is always death. This is what passes as a legitimate method for solving problems: if you don’t like it, we’ll fucking kill you.  Yeah, that’s mature.

But this argument has been exposed as absolute bullshit for some time^#. The U.S. government has levied, or attempted to levy taxes on wealthy expats, for some statutory period (I think 5 years) on the presumption that they are expats solely because they are trying to avoid paying U.S. taxes.  This strikes me as a pretty suspect argument, insofar as it violates the two most-commonly cited justificatory arguments in favor of one’s obligation to pay taxes.

1. The justification for taxes is usually: the government provides these things which you should pay for because you use them.
2. Sometimes the justification is more sophisticated: if you didn’t pay for them, they wouldn’t be provided at all; it is necessary for all to pay so that some may benefit, the greater good and what-not.

For starters, does it matter why someone renounces citizenship? As a matter of equity and fairness, it ought not. A non-citizen is not using the government, is not “protected” by the government, and so on.  But, whatever. I’m not going to belabor the merits of these arguments at present.  I’m just going to conclude that for years, the government has essentially been saying that they don’t have to justify any level of taxation with even a pretense of benefit or obligation. (How’s that for “progressive”?)

If that hasn’t got you all worked up by now, it’s about to get a lot worse.  If you don’t like it, maybe you should leave.

Except, you can’t.

You probably didn’t notice this little provision inserted into the Heroes Act of 2008, passed by Congress on June 17.

[A]nyone voluntarily giving up his or her citizenship will be taxed on ALL of his assets as if he or she had sold them — paying capital gains on assets that have increased in value, even though they have not been sold!

Does anyone still disagree when I say that Taxation is Theft?  Can anyone, anywhere, honestly explain how this amounts to anything more than ransom for permission to live?

We don’t need a Berlin Wall to keep people enslaved.  The government can simply expropriate their properties (a practice generally admonished by “civilized” politicians) and take whatever they damn please.  This government, the Land of the Free government, has finally  succeeded in erecting an imaginary wall that keeps everyone imprisoned. You can’t really leave, not anymore.

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1. The not inconsequential question of why one is obliged to move, simply because he does not like what others are doing to him, without his consent, and
2. As others have noted, pretty much every territory on earth is controlled by one state who wants to steal from me, or another, and is populated by citizens cut from the same cloth as the idiot who tells me to get out of this particular country.