How to Counter Arguments That Taxation Is Legitimate

Tags: Philosophy and Methodology, Taxes and Spending

11/04/2025 David Gordon

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

Sponsored by Jane Shaffer, in Memory of Butler Shaffer.

Recorded at the Mises Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida, on October 17, 2025.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.