The Legal Right to Rob You
I’m strapped for cash, but I think I’ve come up with a solution: I’m allowed to rob you. Having to earn money is just too inconvenient, so I gave myself permission to rob you. I’ll be by your house around noon tomorrow to see which of your things I want to take.
Now, this isn’t just a threat. I’m not merely saying I’m going to rob you. By writing this down, I gave myself the moral right to rob you. Maybe I should have worded it like this: “I hereby grant myself the absolute moral right to steal your stuff.”
You see, since I just gave myself the moral right to take your stuff, I’m sure you’ll give me a warm welcome when I show up. And in case you think I can’t give myself the right to rob you, some friends of mine helped me out with this one. They signed it. So it isn’t just me now; a lot of people have given me the right to rob you.
Just in case you weren’t impressed with these simple printouts, my friends and I held a very formal meeting and put together this somewhat verbose but official-looking document. You can read all the details if you want, but the long and short of it is that now I’m allowed to rob you. This document makes it all legitimate. I now have moral permission to rob you.
Since I’m sure you’re a fine, upstanding citizen, I’m sure you’ll cooperate when I show up tomorrow. If you could have your valuables laid out by noon, so I can see which ones I want to take, that would be good. And then we can—
What? Why are you giving me that look? Surely you don’t doubt that this gives me the right to rob you. Surely you’re not questioning the legitimacy of this document. Surely you wouldn’t still claim that I don’t have the right to rob you. I do. See? It says so right there.
What? You don’t think this is good enough? You don’t think it’s binding on you? You don’t think this gives me the right to rob you? Let me show you something.
This is a copy of the United States Constitution, and what it says, among other things, is that Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes. In other words, a long time ago, a bunch of guys got together and wrote down on a piece of paper, “We have the right to rob you.”
Now, they didn’t call it robbery. They called it taxation because it sounds nicer. But it’s essentially the same thing: “We have the right to take your property from you by force, if necessary, without your consent.”
They also wrote a whole lot of rules about how the robbers would be appointed, the legislative rituals that would have to precede the robbery, and the different kinds of robbery they’d be allowed to carry out. But, in essence, what this piece of the Constitution says is, “We have the right to rob you.”
And did you believe them? When I wrote down on paper that I had the right to rob you, you gave me a funny look. When they did it, did you believe them? Did you accept that this gave them moral permission to take your property without your consent? I bet you did.
If you’re like 99.9999% of the population, you have accepted as unquestionable gospel the notion that this piece of paper gave some mere mortal human beings the moral right to forcibly confiscate wealth from other people and call it taxation. In fact, if you’re like 99.999% of the population, you’ve never even thought about this until right now.
Think about the IRS: its hundreds of offices across the country, its 100,000 employees, all the properties it has seized, all the bank accounts it has wiped out, and all the people it has prosecuted and thrown in prison. All federal taxes—income, estate, employment, and excise—and all federal tax collection stem from this scribble of ink on a piece of parchment. This is supposedly the source of the authority for every bit of it: a few words scrawled on parchment a couple of hundred years ago.
By writing this, they claim to bestow upon those people calling themselves Congress a right that you and I don’t have: the right to take money, by force if necessary, from other people. And I bet that, up until now, you’ve accepted that as unquestionably legitimate.
You accepted the notion that this little bit of ink on parchment, written hundreds of years ago, actually gave moral permission for certain people to rob millions of other people. And I bet you look down on those who don’t believe it—people who are called “tax cheats” because they try to avoid being robbed, even though this piece of parchment says somebody is allowed to rob them.
I bet you think they’re despicable criminals. I bet you cheer when those people have their bank accounts wiped out, their houses seized, and themselves thrown in jail, because you really believe that a little ink on parchment from a couple of hundred years ago gave some people the moral right to steal from others.
Wow. They must have had some powerful magic ink. By writing “We have the right to rob you” on a piece of paper, they actually altered morality. They made stealing into a good thing in certain situations.
Now, I’m betting you immediately realized, when I showed you my piece of paper, that it was bogus. It was silly for me to claim that a piece of paper could give me the right to rob you. It doesn’t matter if I wrote it in magic marker, printed it out, wrote it myself, or had other people sign it.
Nothing—no ritual, no document, no legislation that I or any number of people could enact—could give me the right to rob you, any more than it could give me the right to murder you.
But that’s not what you were taught in school. You, most of your friends, and most of your neighbors were all taught to believe that this scribble on parchment gave certain people the moral right to rob millions of others. Well, that belief, as widely held as it is, is several degrees more absurd than believing I could give myself the right to rob you with my piece of paper.
For starters, at least my piece of paper claims a source for this alleged right to steal: I have the right to rob you because I said so, or because my friends said so. The Constitution doesn’t even do that. It says Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, but it doesn’t say where that power came from.
Second, my scribble on a piece of paper identifies a living, breathing person to whom this supposed right to steal is being given: me. The Constitution claims to grant this power to people who weren’t even born when the document was written—people who wouldn’t be born for another 200 years.
Likewise, while my scribble identifies a living, breathing victim—you—the Constitution purports to give the right to rob people who wouldn’t be born until 200 years after it was written. That’s like me writing, “My great-great-grandchildren shall have the right to rob your great-great-grandchildren.” In fact, it’s worse than that, because there are no time limits in the Constitution.
In short, what this scribble of ink on parchment alleges is that the people calling themselves Congress will, until the end of time, have the moral right to forcibly confiscate wealth from people without their consent.
Let me put this as bluntly as I can: if you believe that my piece of paper gave me the moral right to rob you, you’re out of your mind. If you believe that the Constitution gave Congress the moral right to rob you, you’re certainly not alone. But you’re still out of your mind.
It’s time to get back into your right mind and rethink some of the absolute bunk you’ve been taught all your life.