"But What About The Roads?" Toine Manders' Transcript For Future Debates.
Many Agorists/Voluntaryists/Anarchists/Libertarians are familiar with Dutch politician Toine Manders' "schooling" of a collectivist/statist in this video that's been circulating for some time. The reason it's so popular is because he nonchalantly gives a fantastic summary of everything that liberty is all about. Here's the transcript.
"My vision is that everybody has rights to their body and their property and everyone may do as they please as long as they don't violate those rights of others. That's a fundamental human right, the right of self determination.
The government violates that right in several ways, including compulsory military service that still hasn't been abolished, and also by imposing taxes. I earned my living by advising people who were obligated to serve compulsory military service on the subject of avoiding conscription, because I knew it to be a great injustice, a form of forced labor on innocents.
When that was suspended I focused my attention toward tax avoidance because, according to the same principles, i believe taxation is a violation of property rights, the rights to own the fruits of your labor. For the first few thousand years the state used that money to enrich the nobility and the king. After than they began giving part of that money away to the people. They distributed gifts to the people to legitimize taxation, but that doesn't legitimize it.
The term 'theft' is applied when property is taken from you under threat of violence when you have not caused damages that you refuse to compensate and when you are not in breach of an agreement that you voluntarily entered. And that's exactly what the government does. If you have to pay taxes, according to the rules the state imposes, and you don't do it, then people will come to empty your home. If you resist, you'll be treated as a criminal. If you don't make tax declarations, you'll be locked in a cage for a maximum of four years for failing to file tax declarations. That's how the state gets its money, by threatening to lock people in cages.
And I have no problem with that if you do it with murderers, rapists, robbers, or fraudsters. But if you do that with innocent people who haven't hurt a fly, such as those called for military service or taxpayers, then that's a huge injustice, and I fight against that injustice.
And that's why I've not only spent a large part of my life spreading those ideas in the form of my leadership in the Libertarian Party, but I also decided to devote my career protecting those individuals against the injustice the state decides to inflict upon them. And the fact that part of that money isn't used by the political elite to line their own pockets, but is distributed as gifts that we didn't ask for- doesn't legitimize theft."
What a boss.
He truly is.