Jake, oh Jake.

I hope you will "keep your tits calm" while I respond to your article. My subheading is a rhetorical question, not a middle finger to your arguments. Actually, it kind of is a middle finger to your arguments.

For readers confused by my introduction, Jake McCauley, a fellow Odyssey writer, wrote an article asking (“rhetorically”) when it is OK to rape women (I’ll link the article at the end for those who wish to read it, if only to provide the proper context). Great journalist technique to draw in readers I’m sure. Jake proceeds to make the rhetorical argument that since reproduction is necessary to maintain a well-populated society, it’s a criminal offense for a woman to refuse her fair share of the duty of sex, and that it’s OK to force women to have sex for the good of humanity. Jake then draws a parallel to the involuntary taxation of citizens to fund the government to maintain the country.

This is the ultimate edgy libertarian argument about taxation. Taking money from people to fund the government is literal rape. If you support taxation, you support rape. CHECKMATE STATIST! Bask in my logic skills! Yet we wonder why libertarianism gets such a bad rep in mainstream political discourse.

To my friends who support the concept of government and taxation as a means of funding it, are any of you convinced by this argument? I would totally understand if you weren’t. It’s hard to look past the huge leap from taxation to rape. Taxes are when your paycheck has some money taken away. It sucks, for sure. Many people don’t like what the government does with our tax dollars, and that’s fine to critique. But rape? Being forced to have sex with someone, the physical pain, the emotional trauma, the horrible process of reporting the crime, going through court, and the high likelihood of the DNA kit sitting in a police department lab untested? It turns out that taxation and rape are different things, and they affect people in different ways.

You don’t agree with that? Let’s see. Taxation is taking money. Rape is the actual invasion of a human body. They are different words for very different situations. Most people will believe you when you complain about taxation. You don’t have to go to the hospital to go through rape tests after your taxes are collected. You don’t have to go through a court system where everyone blames you for being taxed. You don’t have to deal with intense psychological trauma and health risks because you couldn’t spend that additional 30% of your income on vape mods and Bitcoin.

A woman’s body is not currency, and sexual interactions are not something men take from women. This relates to the old patriarchal notion that by being the first man to sleep with a woman, he “takes” her virginity and similar ideas. People often think of men as taking something from women when they have sex instead of it being, ideally, a mutually beneficial, enjoyable, and sometimes, though not necessarily, romantic action in which both are participating and adding to each other’s happiness, and is sometimes, but not always, done just to reproduce. Of course, in the case of rape, it is certainly not mutually beneficial, far from it. However, it is not extracting currency from the victim either; it is assaulting the body, doing damage to the vessel through which we experience life, and leaving the victim with scars that we can’t see on the surface. Again, this is a far cry from the idea of taxation.

Don’t get me wrong, Jake, I am an anarchist like you, and I despise taxation. However, I don’t feel the need to victimize myself as if I had gone through the unimaginable horror of rape. I have less financial freedom and the government is doing bad things with my money. But I have not experienced the forced breakdown of all physical barriers, the feeling of violation of my mortal temple.

I was a Democrat when I first heard this “taxation is rape” argument and I could not respect an argument that trivializes rape so casually. What it sounds like you want to critique is extreme utilitarian ethics, the idea that the means justify the ends of creating the best good for the most people to the point of violating individual liberty. That would be a great article, one I’m actually working on! However, is it necessary to use exaggerated, purposefully edgy arguments to defend liberty? You can critique utilitarianism and defend liberty without purposefully trying to target a population of victims of a horrible crime. It’s simply not a good way to put these ideas out there, especially when female college students, a major part of the Odyssey reader base, have a one in four chance of being sexually assaulted according to several large scale studies.

It is important for the intellectual development of society that the ideas of libertarianism and anarchism are a part of political discourse in a time where governments are becoming more authoritarian and crony capitalism creates terrible economic disasters. If right libertarians really want to open people’ minds to the concepts of individual liberty and private solutions to society’s problems, it won’t be done by being an edgy internet troll trying to get a reaction out of people. My transition from a hardcore Democrat to a social anarchist happened because I had a knowledgeable friend who showed me reasonable philosophical arguments that appealed to my core values. Some other libertarian friends of mine, who compared minimum wage laws to slavery and fetishized Bitcoin, only made me want to entrench myself in my Democratic stance. Using these “gotcha!” condescending arguments isn’t going to encourage any reasonable discourse on ideology and ethics.

So, to all my fellow taxation haters, for the sake of the reputation of anarchism and the ideals of liberty, find a better way to critique taxes than belittling rape.

Jake’s article: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/when-can-rape-be-...