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You are not robbed as a matter of course. The government takes your taxes as a matter of course. Not taxing you (by giving you a 10k tax deduction, for example) is, in a practical sense, basically identical from the government's perspective as giving away money.


Except that it isn't. If you adopt that framing, you are working with a mindset that the government gets to figure out what to do with your money first and you get the leftovers. That is a completely different mindset than setting the expectation that the the people get to decide (via representatives) what money the government gets and how it should be spent.

Those two mindsets are very different and I would argue is one of the ways that the left and the right are different.


People living in certain parts of the world are robbed regularly as a matter of course; does that mean robbers are giving somebody money if they band together one day and decide to stop robbing that person?


I think you'd have to try pretty hard to come close to the normalcy of western taxation. Maybe organised protection rackets?

I don't know, I feel like it's somewhat reaching to make them alike. Government taxes are virtually universal across an entire country.




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