My opinion is that taxation is not voluntary because for something to be voluntary you have to be able to choose not to do it. Since you cannot choose not to pay taxes without being thrown in prison it is clearly not voluntary. loosecannon is of the opinion that because you sign a paper prior to employment that allows the government a portion of your income that you're consenting to being taxed, but I disagree. For one this doesn't cover all forms of taxation, and two you have no other choice but to sign this paper. The government has made it illegal to work without giving them a cut of your income so you are forced by law to sign this paper or you can't legally work. If you can't work you can't live so there's obviously no choice there.
Taxes are clearly coercive, not voluntary.
When has choice ever meant "free of all constraint"? There are
always limitations to what you can choose (there's actually an entire discipline dedicated to fleshing out this principle--it's called economics). That doesn't mean there is no such thing as choice or you don't have choices. As you even point out in your post, there are alternatives to the choice you've made, you simply like them less. Alternatives are available to you right now, some of which have already been suggested in this thread:
- Emigrate. I suspect the tax rate in Mogadishu will be more to your liking.
- Lower your income. The destitution choice will free you from the onerous burden of income taxes.
- Pull a Thoreau. If you view your current situation as devoid of choice (and, perhaps, lacking in freedom), then presumably life as a wage earner and life as a prisoner lie on the same indifference curve for you. Try it out for a while.
Given that these alternatives are all available to you but instead you opt for paying taxes, by the definition you presented (
"for something to be voluntary you have to be able to choose not to do it") they
are voluntary. Similarly, illegality also doesn't absolutely restrict choices; you may have noticed that the crime rate isn't zero. What illegality does is alter the nature of the choice. If "A" is a legal option, and "B" is an illegal alternative, that doesn't mean there's some cosmic force or infinite potential well stopping you from choosing "B." Illegality simply means that with "B" comes some probability of sanction (a fine, jail time, whatever). That probability (and perhaps adherence to some particular moral tenets or conscience) is enough to make "B" the less desirable choice for most people but desirability doesn't determine whether the choice itself exists.
Quite a bit of what you probably consider to be voluntary is a bit more ambiguous if you want to take the position that constraint signals an absence of choice. Some examples: For many people, consumption patterns are dictated by the status group they happen to be in. Drug trafficking in a high unemployment inner city neighborhood may be the most immediately appealing option to a teenager facing a list of unpleasant options (just as paying your taxes is probably the most appealing option to you, given the list of alternatives I posted above). Choosing to go to work at a fast food joint while sick--even knowing one might, and probably will, infect customers--may be the only viable option for a low-wage hourly worker. A single mother may choose to settle for more less-than-healthy dollar menu meals and corn-based products for her children due to the relative prices and availability of fresh fruit and vegetables in her neighborhood.
These are all issues generally understood to fall under the umbrella of "personal responsibility." Life is full of constraints that make our actual choices less appealing than the choices we dream we'd make in some idealized world. But if you want to go down the road of suggesting that if the choices we're directed to make by ambient incentives and the contours of the world in which we live are not
choices at all if they differ substantially from our ideal (e.g. if we simply don't like the best option available to us), then you're also going to have to accept that a great many people in this world, even in "free" countries, have never had the luxury of making a single substantial choice in their entire lives.
