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There’s a thought experiment that those few remaining economic thinkers who still dare question the intrinsic morality of taxes like to play. It goes like this: If one person confronts you demanding your money under threat, that’s plainly robbery. But what if it’s three people? Okay: still robbery. Now, what if it’s 10, and they first hold a vote to take your cash? Maybe they offer you a vote, too, but you’re in the minority. What if it’s 1,000 people and they give some of your money to a soup kitchen? Maybe they give a portion of the money back to you. And offer you a bowl of soup, too. Now, think of many more people instead sending you a bill for the money, with their threat for non-compliance still clearly implied.

It’s not hard to see the point: Somewhere, when the number of people involved gets large enough — and the leaders bear titles like MP or premier or judge — the act of forcing individuals to cough up dough, framed as helping others, blurs from theft to legitimate taxation. Somehow it’s even seen as virtuous that we should all pay our share, even if some of that share goes to fund, say, Mike Duffy’s bountiful per diems, subsidies to solar farms that don’t actually produce power, or billion-dollar gifts to aerospace magnates. Suffering for taxes is righteousness, apparently — which, by the same principle, makes anyone found in the Panama Papers to have avoided them a detestable scoundrel.