Financing A Proper Government

This is one of, if not the biggest question facing a LFC country, in that Objectivists believe that taxation is force and therefore immoral. So without the force of taxation how is a nation to fund its proper functions?

There are three proper functions of government. They all help to ensure the protection of individual rights by providing for the defence of the nation and its citizens, by providing police services and by funding the judicial system.

But in a populous, modern and prosperous country the amount of money required to provide even those few services is staggering.

Because of the federal system, and because of administrative and bureaucratic divisions it is almost impossible to calculate the exact cost of spending that an Objectivist would consider the proper obligation of government. However, thanks to this page (http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/) we can make a rough guess. By adding the cost of the Department of Justice ($22.291b), the Department of Defence ($515.440b), The Executive Office of the President ($.365b), The Legislative Branch ($5.132b) and the Judicial Branch ($7.383b) I have come up with a grand total of $550.611billion

Now this figure includes a lot of what I would consider to be waste or things that are not the responsibility of government, but it also does not include the cost of police services. For that reason I will call it even because I am trying to prove that voluntary and administrative methods could be utilized to generate the operating budget for a LFC state.

Right now we have taxes. So many and so varied are they that many people can not even tell you how many there are. The US Tax code is 44000 pages long. It is so convoluted and complicated that entire industries have sprung up in its service. Many people, especially those in government will tell you that it is necessary to have this system to fund the government, to help the poor, to be equitable and to have progressive in taxation… Because, Surely you recognize progressive taxation as being the fairest method of taxation…

And so it is that invariably when people argue for taxation they refer back to taxation and its structure as a reason for taxation and the structure of it. Never do they question if another alternative is possible. The secret, the thing that those in control now do not want you to know or realize is that there are many possibilities many alternatives to the forceful appropriation of the property of citizens.

In a LFC nation I personally believe that as many as are practical could/would be used in collectively to fund a LFC nation. The possibilities include private donations, service fees, contract insurance, contingency funding, lotteries, punitive damages assessed against rights violators and contractual agreements just for starters.

I will post on each of these methods in turn but before get into that there is something that I believe needs to be clarified.

Rights are the prime mover in a properly governed nation. The state exists ONLY to protect individual rights. It can have no desires or needs beyond that function. So when talking about funding government it is improper to suggest that the government allows people to retain their earned money, it is theirs by right, not by grant. That is what is meant by the right of property, and that right is what makes taxation immoral and I would say that it would be constitutionally prohibited in a LFC nation.

TO BE CONTINUED…