Inflation is taxation on your savings. It's effectively the same thing as any other tax.

Laws and regulations are the reason as to why taxes exist in the first place. The government holds the monopoly of force, therefore it can issue any laws and regulations it wants. Because of that it can have a monopoly on the currency and tax its people.

You're completely missing his point. It's not the exact same thing. If I made a million a year as a company owner or shareholder (ignoring tax evasion schemes) I would receive a salary or dividends (ignoring choosing to hold it alone) then reinvest that money into other assets. That can be effectively an instant transfer. I don't lose any money because my capital is in interest-adjusting money earning places, rather than sitting in accont become ever less valuable. The system has some merits but in the end it's not a tax on the rich (who would minimize cash savings) or the poor (who, unfortunately, by definition have no capability to amass any) but instead on the middle class.

I'd argue that's far, far less fair than standard progressive income taxes.

My point is that taxation is unjustifiable ethically. That includes direct taxation and inflation (under a monopolistic currency dictated by the government).

You can only justify taxation under an authoritarian standpoint (eg. "we must tax people so that..."). Going that way, whoever has more guns wins the argument.

Making a relative assessment of which taxation scheme is more "fair" seems to be pointless to me, in the same way it would be pointless to discuss what crime would be preferable given the choice of rape or murder.

> My point is that taxation is unjustifiable ethically.

That's entirely dependent on your ethical axioms, on which there is no universal consensus. There are certainly frameworks within which some taxation is justifiable.

> You can only justify taxation under an authoritarian standpoint (eg. "we must tax people so that...")

(1) that's not true, and

(2) that's an instrumentalist/utilitarian argument, not an authoritarian one. An authoritarian argument for taxation would be that the existence of government, itself, justified taxation to the extent government ordered it, not that taxation was necessary to serve some social benefit.

> That's entirely dependent on your ethical axioms, on which there is no universal consensus. There are certainly frameworks within which some taxation is justifiable.

You're right in that there are multiple ethical systems that could justify the arbitrary nature of taxation. That doesn't mean those ethical systems can survive the scrutiny of philosophical razors.

Being specific, from the perspective of the ethics of private property (derived from the concept of self ownership), you can't justify taking away someone's property by force (eg. taxation). You can't fight the self ownership premise without contradicting yourself: if you can argue, it means you are not me, therefore you "own" yourself.

If your ethical system agrees with the idea of taxation "to serve some social benefit" it necessarily doesn't agree with the the premise of self-ownership, as it would imply that "society" has an existence of its own, therefore it can have property, which would extend to the ability of "owning" individuals and their property. However, the "society" is an abstraction, it doesn't really exist (only individuals exist), so that ethical system would fail under Hume's razor.

Individuals are an abstraction too, we're just a bunch of cells.

Human beings evolved to live in a society. Exile from society being tantamount to a death sentence. And no society exist where there is no taxation, even if it's only in the very mild form of losing social credit if you didn't share food with others.

> Individuals are an abstraction too, we're just a bunch of cells.

A bunch of cells that collectively constitutes an organism that can perform arguments, therefore it has the ability to declare self-ownership. Ownership implies private property, with property being defined as something that is scarce, is delimitable, modifiable and which its owner can protect and defend.

Societies don't "exist" (within the self-ownership context) exactly because they can't perform arguments on their own, as they are just an idea, or abstraction, being composed of individuals that perform arguments and can never fully agree on all possible arguments collectively. Therefore, "societies" can't have self-ownership (and no private property, by consequence).

> And no society exist where there is no taxation

Groups of people have coexisted peacefully through history without a central government imposing taxation on them.

What you're calling "social credit" in the context of "societies" that didn't have a central government imposing taxation is nothing but a contract acquired voluntarily. If people in those "societies" decided to leave the groups and move to other groups, or just live on their own (which could be hard, but always a possibility), they could do so.