Comments by "Mat Broomfield" (@matbroomfield) on "Taxes Aren't Illegal. Taxes Aren't Theft" video.

It was utter nonsernse then, and it's still nonsense now. Given that Franklin owned slaves, and had a net worth of $43.5 million, it was a particular hypocrisy. If a man cannot better his lot beyond the requirements of his personal needs without the fruit of his labour being considered the property of the public, then the desire to build anything that produces more wealth than his personal needs is eliminated.
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Well that was utterly pathetic David. For starters, "legal" is simply a judicially determined rule that has no bearing upon something's "rightness", nor upon the beliefs or values of the people upon whom it is applied. The Social Contract is a concept put forwards by Rousseau, which you butchered. My parents do not have the right to make legal decisions in my childhood that will contractually obligate me to ANYTHING except citizenship as an adult. Rousseau's social contract refers to the agreement of the governed to BE governed providing they receive reasonable value from that governance. Your version amounts to a South Park, redneckian version of "If you don't like it, you can git out," which is about the weakest possible argument that you could make, not least because there is NOWHERE on the planet that you could go to avoid being subject to the taxation of ANOTHER state. Your silly argument about simply not paying taxes is PRECISELY what anti-tax proponents mean when they talk about being forced to pay under threat of violence. It is LITERALLY coercion to obey a rule you had nothing to do with creating and cannot opt out of. As you yourself said, you have almost zero chance of eliminating taxation by lobbying or even standing for office. The strongest argument in favour of taxes is simply that if you wish to avail yourself of the things that taxes pay for, then you need to contribute your fair share to receive those things. The strongest argument against taxes, is the astronomical misuse of those taxes on weapons, vanity projects, needless drug enforcement, despicable politicians and more. Frankly, from a man that I respect and usually agree with, this was an embarrassingly poor refutation of the position of those who oppose taxation.
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@Lies Bus I rebutted the argument with my third sentence. The fact that BF was a capitalist oligarch simply serves to highlight the hypocrisy of his statement which stood in opposition to the way he lived his own life. He died with more money than he could possibly need. Moreover, I was not putting forwards a strawman. Don't use the terminology if you don't understand it. I did not construct a false version of the OP's position then knock that down. I addressed his quote directly and rebutted that.
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A semantic argument. A rich person's wealth can easily be converted into tangible assets. Dollars are simply a convenient way of denoting his spending power.
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@Nanook128 Taxation is not a product of free market, it's a product of might is right - that's why those with the most wealth pay the least taxes as a percentage of income. Taxation is universally misspent, but it's not even an option on the ballot. The problem with any electoral system that has a vaguely democratic (ha ha) basis, is that citizens have to vote on the package that is offered. At best a slight reduction in taxation is occasionally offered, never its abolition. That said, I 100% agree with taxation - we all need and use the things it is spent on. But I also think that we should be able to limit the ways that it is used. I don't want the equivalent of thousands of years of my wages wasted so that Trump can play golf, or on a military that is ridiculously excessive, or on police that are increasingly focussing on thought crimes and protecting snowflakes.
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