Ayn Rand, a heavily influential Libertarian author, survivor of communist genocide in Soviet Russia and political philosopher from the 1950s and 1960s, brought up an interesting idea that caught my eye when I read her book, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.” In one of her numerous essays, she makes the following statement: “When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism — with the separation of state and economics, in the same way, and for the same reasons as the separation of the state and church.”

She goes further on to explain that theists or non-theists are buyers (in relation to her separation of state and church analogy) of religious ideologies and irreligious ideologies. The clergy are the sellers and the believers/non-believers are the buyers.

    In the case of the separation of the state and economics, the sellers would be the government and the buyers would be its citizens. This is under the assumption that no completely free-market economy has ever existed, which is essentially true. Taxes are, in essence, a form of oppression if this analogy holds true. They hold a citizen accountable for being a reliable and active member of its community (i.e. to be held liable for not committing a crime and to continuously be enslaved to the industrial media-voting machine complex).

What if someone doesn’t believe in taxes and doesn’t want to be part of the “community?” That’s where the term oppression comes in handy. One could say that taxes are an organized form of robbery, from a crime syndicate that has the source of the government. I personally believe both taxes and the government are of this nature. Should you be taxed into oblivion as politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders suggest, to give a greater balance in income inequality? Taxation is not worth the price we pay, literally and figuratively.

If we had a 100%, completely unregulated economy, then businesses would flourish. Some small businesses, if not most, cannot even survive on the current taxation system that the state places on us. America calls itself the “land of the free,” but are we upholding our potential? I don’t think we are.

To get rid of taxes would mean to get rid of most things that we find convenient, of which in a better world, we could probably do ourselves, even without state funding. Practicing self-sufficiency and many other self-taught things would benefit our so-called “society” as a whole. We can live without taxes. So what’s holding us back?