Once again, taxation isn’t theft, you didn’t own that money before, the market gave it to you as a reward, more specifically, it was passed to you from your employer, who could adjust how much you’re given at anytime regardless. Pre-taxation income was decided from the beginning by your employer, the federal minimum wage (which you stand against), guarantees a basic living wage so that they have less power over your already-arbitrary income. The taxation afterwards is just another filter, yet another method of using income, something you weren’t liable to in the first…  Read more place, yet seem to want to be. When you sell something, or get funds from your employer, that money is not yours, it is passed through different hands, but at no point are you contractually assigned THIS money, as YOUR personal property. In general, you wouldn’t have it without the government, no matter what currency system is done, a market in general cannot operate entirely without a government, or it’ll just create a new government by accident later on. The difference is not that you don’t own it though, it’s that the government has the authority, as stated even in our bare basic Enumerated Powers. The companies have the authority to give money to their employees after they gain monetary increase, while the government has the ability to take back a bit from the surpluses of that income to give back, no matter how that may be. You “own” post-tax income in the most unofficial sense, but are not contractually obligated to it should the government raise taxes later on. (In certain situations). In being a citizen, you have already agreed to pay taxes, that was part of the social contract, and without it, roads are left in disrepair, cities crumble, water systems collapse, and militaries cease. We need taxes, they make us strong, we agreed to them, you never owned pre-tax income, the government was granted that authority already, and they created and backed the currency of the US, which would remain regardless of how it was changed.