State shouldn’t tax the people unless funds are for public good

Kenya isn’t the first state to tax its citizens. Nay – Nairobi didn’t invent the practice. But there are do’s and don’ts of taxation. Let’s stipulate first that the state is the servant – not the master – of the citizenry. The state’s existential rationale is simple. It’s supposed to facilitate our lives, not the other way round. The state doesn’t exist for itself. Or because of itself. No. It exists because we, the people, voluntarily deliver unto it some of our inherent rights so that it can exercise them on our behalf. We can snatch those rights back at any time by overthrowing the state. That’s why the right of the people to revolution is natural and inherent. Full stop. 

Put differently, the state doesn’t have a single right that we, the people, didn’t donate to it. This includes the right to tax us. That right – to tax – is framed as an obligation on citizens. But lost in translation is the unarguable norm that it’s citizens who gave the state the right to tax them. The consequence of this argument is that we can take back the right of the state to tax us. In other words, we can reject the obligation to pay taxes.