Taxation as Legislated Crime via Majority Hegemony

This paper presents a categorical moral analysis of taxation, arguing that non-consensual seizure of property enforced by threat of penalty is morally indistinguishable from theft, regardless of legal procedure, democratic authorization, or scale. Rather than treating taxation as a policy instrument subject to degree-based justification, the paper examines it as a moral kind defined by structure: absence of consent, coercive enforcement, and override of exclusionary property rights. The argument proceeds from widely accepted moral axioms governing theft and coercion and shows that commonly invoked distinctions—legality, majority vote, social need, or distributive goals—do not alter the underlying moral classification. Democratic mechanisms are analyzed as coordination tools rather than moral solvents; aggregation of will is shown not to confer moral permissions unavailable to individuals acting alone. Special attention is given to wealth taxation and asset seizure as explicit cases of normalized expropriation, where ownership itself becomes the target rather than specific harms or transactions. The paper also addresses economic consequences, arguing that secure property rights generate growth through incentive alignment and voluntary exchange, while coercive redistribution predictably shifts behavior toward rent-seeking and stagnation. The conclusion is deliberately narrow and categorical: if theft is wrong because it violates consent, then seizure by statute is wrong for the same reason unless one introduces the unargued premise that numerical superiority confers moral authority. The work is situated within moral and political philosophy and does not contest the legal enforceability of taxation, only its moral classification.