| Mr Khan said:
But "wrongful" is not up to personal opinion. Never has been. To state otherwise annihilates millennia of discourse on ethics, or reverts us to relativism (and relativism is the "Godwin's Law" of ethics debates, so we must avoid it at all costs). Unless we could successfully build an argument that the social contract itself is flawed, or that there is a point upon which the government is deemed to be no longer legitimate on the whole, and then all of their actions from authority become "wrong." But a government which is legitimate, applying its power and excercising its need to collect funds to accomplish such cannot be "wrong." Wrongness could also come into play if the government had an amoral means by which to collect taxes, but taxes cannot be amoral so long as the government is legitimate. |
An act of a legitimate government is not necessarily moral or legal ...
Legitimate governments may have the right to collect a head-tax and (for example) say that every man woman and child was required to pay $10,000/year to cover the cost of running the government or face legal penalties for tax evasion; but I doubt you would see that as either a moral or legal tax.
Ultimately, the "social contract" could be said that the government should be empowered to collect taxes in a reasonable way to cover essential services that only it can provide. When you're dealing with the federal government that essentially means that they can collect taxes to cover national security, international relations and trade, and intranational relations. At the state level different services may be added, and at the municipal level even more services can be added; but these should be funded through taxes collected at these levels.
When you have the federal government collecting tax money to buy votes in different regions or from different demographic groups it can quite fairly be considered theft.
