How to Counter Arguments That Taxation Is Legitimate
Dr. David Gordon | Mises Institute Senior Fellow
Sponsored by Jane Shaffer, in Memory of Butler Shaffer

Dr. David Gordon explained why the leading philosophical defenses of taxation—from Rawls’s difference principle to Nagel and Murphy’s “myth of ownership”—collapse, and why natural rights still say taxation is theft.

It’s no secret that Generation Z is fed up with the economic status quo. And rightfully so. They face a housing affordability crisis and an increasingly thin job market. They’ve suffered years of unrelenting inflation at this point. The frustrations of Gen Z, and the economic establishment’s disinterest in addressing them, have driven young Americans to reject the economic dogma that has dominated for decades and to instead seek out answers from outside the economic mainstream.

Rowan Parchi has worked in financial markets since 2002 and is the founder of Praxis Path. Previously, Rowan worked in institutional equity sales at Credit Suisse in Sydney, New York, and Hong Kong, and at the hedge fund Platinum Asset Management in Sydney. His work has been featured on the Mises Wire.

The Misesian: How did you first discover Austrian economics?

Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest
By William Easterly
Basic Books, 2025; 448 pp.

This article is adapted from a lecture presented at the 2025 Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida.

I want to start with a confession: I love falling prices. I love deflation. I want all prices to go down to a nickel.

I stole that line from Murray Rothbard. It’s not inflation that we should fear, it’s the opposite— deflationphobia, which is the fear of falling prices. We should fear deflationphobia because it leads to a very dangerous institutional monetary policy: inflation targeting.

So, let me begin with some facts about deflation.

In a recent interview, Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of Kalshi—a company with a marketplace where users gamble on the outcome of future events—said “the long-term vision [of the company] is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”

This article is adapted from a lecture presented at the 2025 Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida.

Economic freedom should include freedom in money. It’s a freedom even, as we say these days, that advanced economies don’t have. My guiding text for this talk is Friedrich Hayek’s celebrated essay “Choice in Currency.” That is chapter 7 of this excellent book—Hayek for the 21st Century: Essays in Political Economy—that the Mises Institute has published. It’s a classic text, and I hope you’ll all take a look at it if you haven’t.

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