Taxation Is Theft: The Question That Ends the "Fair Share" Argument

Try a small experiment. Tomorrow morning the government announces that taxes are now optional. No fines. No audits. No prison. You can still pay, of course. Anyone who believes in their "fair share" is warmly invited to keep sending it.

Be honest. How much would you send next month?

Not the answer you'd give at a dinner party. The answer your bank statement would give.

Now picture the loudest tax defenders you know. The columnist. The cousin at the ministry. The friend who says "taxes are the price of civilisation" over a third glass of wine. How many of them would keep paying in full, every month, for life, with nobody forcing them?

You already know. And the moment you admit it, something cracks. Because if nobody would pay it freely, then it was never a gift, never a contribution, never a "fair share".

It was always taken.

This essay is about that crack. Read it slowly. Then give it to someone you love.

The question nobody asks

We don't have to guess what people do when paying more is voluntary. The door is already open. In the United Kingdom the Debt Management Office runs an account for donations to reduce the national debt, and the government publishes a page on how to make voluntary payments. In the United States, the Treasury accepts "gifts to reduce the public debt". Every person who calls tax a moral duty can walk through that door today.

Where it has been open for years, we have the numbers. Since 2002, Massachusetts has printed an option on its state income tax return: tick a box and pay 5.85% instead of the standard rate. Same state, same schools, same roads. In 2013, out of more than three million filers, 1,083 people ticked it. About a quarter of a million dollars. Across the whole United States, gifts to reduce the public debt came to about $2.7 million in fiscal year 2024, against a debt of more than $35 trillion.

That isn't a fair share. It's a rounding error.

So the truth is out. People don't pay because they believe. They pay because the alternative is a letter, a fine, a frozen account and, at the end of the road, a cell. Fear of prison, not love of the "fair share", is what fills the treasury.

And something you only hand over because you'd be locked up otherwise has a name. Taking someone's property without their consent, under threat, is theft. When the state does it, it's called taxation, and it's legal because the people taking it also write the law.

Why the Greeks would call it robbery, not theft

Start with the law's own words. In England and Wales, the Theft Act 1968 calls it theft when someone dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another, intending to permanently deprive the owner of it. Robbery is stealing while using force or putting a person in fear of force. Blackmail is an unwarranted demand with menaces.

Now describe your tax bill without the official vocabulary. A share of what you earn is demanded. You are told in writing what happens if you refuse. If you keep refusing, people arrive with the power to take it anyway. If a private person did that, nobody would call it a contribution. The state escapes the label for one reason: it writes the definitions.

Theft is the quiet version: someone slips into your house while you sleep. Tax doesn't hide. It stands in the middle of the road, in daylight, and tells you exactly what will happen if you don't pay. Greek has a precise word for that: ληστεία (listeía), robbery with force or threat, and ληστής (listís), the robber who held up travellers on the road. Not a pickpocket. A highwayman.

And the Greek word for tax, φόρος (fóros), comes from φέρω, "to bring". It was the tribute subject cities had to bring to the power that dominated them. No pretence of a social contract. You brought it because someone stronger told you to.

Two and a half thousand years later the toll booth has a nicer logo. The mechanism hasn't changed.

The highwayman was more honest

In 1870 an American lawyer named Lysander Spooner made the comparison so precisely that it has never been answered. Of the highway robber, he wrote:

"The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber."

Read that again. The robber on the road takes your purse and leaves. He doesn't follow you home. He doesn't make you fill in a form declaring how much is in the purse. He doesn't come back every month. And he certainly doesn't demand that you thank him.

The state does all of that, and then calls you selfish for noticing.

"But you agreed," they say. "It's the social contract." Ask to see it. Where is your signature? When were you shown the terms? What happens if you refuse to sign? A contract you never saw, never signed, cannot refuse and cannot leave without losing what you own is not a contract. It's a story told to make the toll booth feel like a handshake.

"But you vote," they say. Spooner answered that too, a century and a half ago:

"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years."

Choosing which robber stands on the road every four years is not consent to the robbery.

The idea they never taught you at school

Here is the whole idea. It fits on a postcard, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

One: you own yourself. Your body, your time, your mind. Nobody else does. Not a king, not a party, not a majority.

Two: you own what you make with yourself. If your hours are yours, then what you earn with those hours is yours too. Taking a third of your income is taking a third of your working life. Four months a year, every year, you work for someone who never asked.

Three: nobody may start force against anyone else. This is called the non-aggression principle. You may defend yourself. You may not attack, threaten or rob a peaceful person. Not for a good cause. Not with a majority behind you. Not with a uniform on.

That's it. You already believe all three. You teach them to your children: don't hit, don't take what isn't yours, keep your promises. We simply refuse to make one exception, for the people who work in government.

And when you refuse that exception, the world rearranges itself in front of your eyes.

There are only two ways to get rich

In 1908 the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out something so simple it's almost rude. There are only two ways to get what you need. You can produce something and trade it freely with people who want it. He called that the economic means. Or you can take what someone else produced, by force. He called that the political means.

The baker, the plumber, the programmer, the farmer, the woman with a small shop: economic means. Every euro they have, someone gave them willingly in exchange for something.

Now look at what Oppenheimer called the state. The American economist Murray Rothbard, who built on his work, put it in one sentence in Anatomy of the State:

"The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion."

Think of every organisation you deal with. Your supermarket. Your phone company. Your church. Your football club. Your favourite charity. Every one of them has to persuade you. Only one can send people with handcuffs if you say no. In Oppenheimer's words, quoted by Rothbard, the state is the "organization of the political means".

Once you see that, you stop asking "how much tax is fair?" and start asking a much better question: why is one group of people allowed to do what would be a crime for everyone else?

Legal plunder: when the law itself becomes the thief

A French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, saw it coming in 1850. In a short book called The Law he wrote that the law was meant to protect your life, your liberty and your property. Then he gave a test so simple that anyone can apply it at the kitchen table:

"See whether the law takes from some persons that which belongs to them, to give to others what does not belong to them. See whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen, and, to the injury of others, an act that this citizen cannot perform without committing a crime."

Bastiat called it legal plunder. Not plunder that breaks the law. Plunder that is the law.

And he gave us a second weapon: what is seen and what is not seen. When the state spends your money, you see the ribbon-cutting, the new building, the politician smiling for the camera. You never see what that money would have become if it had stayed with you. The business you didn't start. The worker you didn't hire. The parent you couldn't help. The savings that would have carried you through a bad year. A bad economist, Bastiat said, looks only at what is seen. A good one looks at what is not seen.

Every tax has a graveyard of things that were never born. Nobody holds a ceremony for them.

"But who would build the schools and hospitals?"

This is the question anyone who questions tax hears first. It's a fair question. Here is the answer.

First, check the deal you were sold. In Britain you wait months for treatment while the tax bill keeps climbing. Potholes on the road to work. Schools asking parents for money for books and paper. Hospitals full of patients and short of doctors. Every year the bill goes up, and every year the service feels a little worse. Your money passes through many hands before a fraction of it reaches the child, the patient or the road it was collected for. Each hand keeps a little. And unlike any shop, you can't take your custom elsewhere.

Second, remember who actually built things before the welfare state. Long before governments ran healthcare and pensions, working people in Britain organised themselves. They formed friendly societies: clubs where members paid a few pennies a week and, when someone fell ill, was injured or died, the society paid the doctor, the lost wages or the funeral. Millions of ordinary workers belonged to them. Nobody forced them. They did it because it worked, and because they looked after each other.

The same story repeats everywhere: mutual aid societies, church hospitals, guilds, cooperatives, village schools built by the village. Society is far older than the modern tax state. It got along without it for most of human history.

Third, understand why it works. The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises showed why central planners can never calculate what millions of people need, because without free prices they are flying blind. His student Friedrich Hayek called the result spontaneous order: the language you speak, the market that puts bread on your shelf every morning, the customs that let strangers trust each other. Nobody designed them. They grew from millions of free choices, and they work better than anything a ministry could plan.

Order doesn't need a master. It needs freedom.

Who is really antisocial?

Now let's turn the accusation around, because it has been pointed the wrong way your whole life.

They say: if you don't hand over your "fair share", you're antisocial. You're a free rider. You don't care about other people.

Look at what your money actually buys once it leaves your hands. You don't get to choose. It pays for the hospital, yes. It also pays for the bombs. The subsidy for the industry you think is poisoning your children. The bailout of the bank that gambled and lost. The propaganda campaign you find insulting. The war you marched against.

In 2024, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world's governments spent $2,718 billion on their militaries, the steepest rise since at least the end of the Cold War. Not one cent of it was raised by asking. All of it came from people like you, under threat.

So ask yourself honestly: who is the antisocial one? The person who keeps what he earned and gives it to a kindergarten he can visit? Or the system that takes it by force and spends it on things that person finds morally abhorrent, in his name, without asking?

In 1849 Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay a tax that funded slavery and the war on Mexico, put it in a single sentence:

"If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood."

Read it twice. For Thoreau, paying was the violent act. Paying was the complicity. Your conscience doesn't switch off when the envelope comes from the tax office.

We do not tell you to do what Thoreau did. Refusing tax you owe is a crime, and a prison cell helps nobody. But his moral point stands: you are responsible for what your money funds. And today there is a way to act on your conscience that Thoreau never had: arrange your life, legally, so that less of your money passes through the machine at all, and more of it goes where you can see it doing good.

That isn't antisocial. That is the most social thing you can do.

The Djokovic lesson: cut out the middlemen

Want proof that people give generously when they're free to choose? Look at one of the most famous athletes on Earth.

Novak Djokovic became a resident of Monaco in 2007. Monaco does not levy personal income tax on its residents (French nationals are the historic exception). Djokovic himself said he went there mainly for privacy, because in Serbia he couldn't walk down the street. Fine. What matters is what happened next.

That same year, 2007, he and Jelena Djokovic founded the Novak Djokovic Foundation. Its mission is concrete: get every child in Serbia into preschool. Not "awareness". Buildings, rooms, teachers, toys.

• By November 2023 the foundation said it had built, reconstructed or equipped 57 preschools, benefiting more than 54,000 children.
• In February 2025 it opened its 74th kindergarten, in Popović, a village of about 300 people in the municipality of Rača that had never had one.
• For one of those kindergartens, in Vajska, Novak and Jelena doubled the money raised from donors out of their own pocket.
• In March 2020, when Serbian hospitals needed ventilators, Novak, Jelena and the foundation pledged €1 million for ventilators and medical equipment, and the foundation's team handled procurement and delivery itself.

We don't know how much tax Djokovic would have paid in Serbia, and nobody outside his family does. So we won't pretend to compare numbers. Compare the model. Money that passes through a ministry gets filtered by procurement rules, political priorities and the people in the middle. Money that goes through a foundation with your name on the door goes to a village that has never had a kindergarten, and you can drive there and see it.

Not sending your money through the state does not make you antisocial. It can make you more social, because you decide where your money helps, and you can see that it arrived.

Society is not the state

This is the oldest trick in the book: they taught you that society and the state are the same thing. So when you question the state, you sound like you're attacking your neighbours.

They are not the same thing. Society is your family, your neighbours, your parish, the village your parents came from, the child who needs a kindergarten. Society is voluntary: every friendship, every marriage, every job, every purchase, every donation is a yes from both sides.

The state is the one actor that doesn't need your yes.

The philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe went further. He argued that democracy didn't tame this monopoly, it made it worse: a politician who holds power for four years treats the country like a rented car, not like a house he has to pass on. Spend now, borrow now, let someone else pay later. Look at the debt your children have already inherited and ask yourself if he was wrong.

You can love society with all your heart and still want to hand the middleman as little as the law allows. In fact, that's exactly what loving society looks like.

Imagine

Imagine a world where every service had to earn your money. Where a hospital that kept you waiting for months lost your custom to the one down the road. Where you gave to the school, the clinic, the club and the cause you could see with your own eyes. Where the money you earned on Monday was still yours on Friday.

Imagine a world where nobody, not even someone in a uniform, was allowed to take what is yours without asking.

That world isn't utopia. It's simply the rules you already live by with everyone else, applied to everyone. The question isn't whether people can live without being robbed. The question is why we ever agreed to believe they couldn't.

You won't get that world by next Tuesday. But you can start living closer to it, legally, today.

You can't fight the robber. You can take another road.

Here is where we have to be very clear, because it's where people make expensive mistakes. Not paying the tax you legally owe is tax evasion, and it's a crime. That's not the road. The robber on the highway is armed; you don't win by fighting him.

You win by choosing a different road. The tax you owe depends on where you live, how your income is structured and which country has the right to tax it. Those are choices. Wealthy families have always made them. Djokovic made his in 2007. Here is what that looks like for normal entrepreneurs and professionals today:

• Change where you live. A Cyprus tax resident who is not domiciled there (the Non-Dom status) is exempt from Special Defence Contribution on dividends and interest, for up to 17 years. Residence can be built with the 60-day rule when the conditions are met.
• Change how your profit flows. A Cyprus holding company can receive dividends from subsidiaries and sell shareholdings largely free of Cyprus tax, so profit isn't taxed again every time it moves.
• Leave properly. Moving from a high-tax country has an exit side. Done in the right order, it holds. Done sloppily, your old country keeps taxing you.
• Do it step by step. Our complete Cyprus relocation guide shows the order that actually works: residence, tax residence, company, bank, then the structure on top.

And then do what Djokovic did with the difference. Fund the school in your hometown. Pay a nurse's salary at the clinic your mother uses. Back the local club where kids train for free. You'll know exactly where every euro went, and nobody in the middle will take a cut.

And remember why this works. Monopolies don't get better when you complain. They get better when you can leave. Every person who moves legally sends a message that no petition ever will.

What you must never forget: print this and give it to someone

Give it to the parent who has paid every bill on time for forty years and still waits months for a hospital appointment. Give it to the grandparent who isn't online. Give it to the friend who thinks wanting to keep your own money is greed. Then ask them one question: if it were optional, would you pay?

If the honest answer is no, then it was never a contribution. It was always the toll on the highway. The good news: the highway isn't the only road.

Frequently asked questions

Is "taxation is theft" a legal statement?

No. It's a moral and philosophical argument. Legally, tax is owed, and not paying what you owe is a crime. Ask yourself why the money has to be taken under threat of punishment, if it were really given gladly. The point of the article is that you can lower what you legally owe by choosing where you live and how you structure your income.

Did Djokovic move to Monaco to avoid tax?

He said privacy was the main reason. Monaco does not levy personal income tax on its residents, except French nationals. We use his story for what it shows: money given directly, through his foundation, reaches the people it is meant for.

How many kindergartens has the Novak Djokovic Foundation supported?

The foundation reported its 74th kindergarten in February 2025, in the village of Popović in Rača. By November 2023 it had said 57 preschools and more than 54,000 children.

Isn't not paying tax antisocial?

Evading tax you owe is illegal. Legally owing less and then giving directly to causes you can see is not antisocial. It is often more effective, because no middleman takes a cut. The state that calls you antisocial is the same one that wants half of your success when things go well, and leaves you on your own when they don't.

What is the legal way to pay less tax?

Not by fighting it. By walking out of its reach. Change your tax residence and structure your income correctly, for example Cyprus Non-Dom residence and a Cyprus holding company, after taking advice in the country you're leaving.

Why call the state your enemy?

Because from the day you are born to the day you die, it always wants something from you: a form, a fee, a share. When you do well, it wants half of your success. When you fall, it leaves you to your family, your church and your neighbours. Love your country, your faith and your roots. Just never confuse them with the machine that lives off them.

Isn't paying tax the social thing to do?

You don't choose what your tax funds. It pays for hospitals, but also for wars and policies you may find morally wrong. Legally owing less and giving directly to causes you can see can be the more social choice. It never asks your permission, and it never sends you a refund for what it wasted. Evading tax you owe is still a crime.

Sources

• Novak Djokovic Foundation, About us (founded 2007 by Novak and Jelena Djokovic): https://novakdjokovicfoundation.org/about-us/
• Novak Djokovic Foundation, Beočin preschool, 8 November 2023 (57 preschools, more than 54,000 children): https://novakdjokovicfoundation.org/the-novak-djokovic-foundation-has-equipped-a-preschool-from-175-children-in-beocin/
• N1, 26 February 2025, 74th kindergarten in Popović (Rača): https://n1info.rs/vesti/fondacija-novak-djokovic-otvoren-prvi-vrtic-u-selu-popovic-kod-race-nas-74-po-redu/
• BP info, Vajska kindergarten, founders doubled donations: https://bpinfo.rs/otvoren-novi-vrtic-u-vajskoj-uz-podrsku-fondacije-novak-djokovic-33/
• novakdjokovic.com, 27 March 2020, €1 million for ventilators: https://novakdjokovic.com/en/news/media/novak-jelena-and-the-ndf-donating-1-million-euros-to-help-serbia-fight-covid-19/
• Monaco Tribune, August 2024 (Monaco resident since 2007): https://www.monaco-tribune.com/en/2024/08/novak-djokovic-a-career-path-paved-in-gold/
• Tennis.com, 23 February 2011 (privacy as reason for the move): https://www.tennis.com/news/articles/djokovic-living-in-monaco-to-protect-privacy
• UK Debt Management Office, Donations and Bequests Account: https://www.dmo.gov.uk/responsibilities/public-sector-funds-crnd/miscellaneous-accounts/donations-and-bequests-account/
• GOV.UK, Voluntary payments and donations to government: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/voluntary-payments-donations-to-government
• TreasuryDirect, Gifts to reduce the public debt: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/government/public-debt-reports/gifts/
• Cyprus Income Tax Law 118(I)/2002 and Special Defence Contribution Law 117(I)/2002, CyLaw: https://www.cylaw.org/
• Massachusetts optional 5.85% rate, 1,083 filers in 2013: New England Public Media, 13 April 2015: https://www.nepm.org/regional-news/2015-04-13/heres-a-question-massachusetts-do-you-voluntarily-pay-higher-taxes
• US Treasury Fiscal Data, Gift Contributions to Reduce the Public Debt (FY2024 total about $2.68 million): https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/gift-contributions-reduce-debt-held-by-public/
• Theft Act 1968, sections 1, 8 and 21: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60
• Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36145
• Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850), Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44800
• Murray N. Rothbard, Anatomy of the State, Mises Institute: https://mises.org/library/book/anatomy-state
• Franz Oppenheimer, The State (1908), Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51544
• Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849), Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71
• SIPRI, 28 April 2025, world military expenditure 2024 ($2,718 billion): https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/unprecedented-rise-global-military-expenditure-european-and-middle-east-spending-surges
• David G. Green, Reinventing Civil Society (IEA, 1993), on friendly societies: https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/reinventing-civil-society

This is an opinion and educational essay, not tax or legal advice for your case.