They live on the streets and act as arbitrary law-enforcement officers, robbers, teachers, traffic controllers, and just about anything they can – but, above all, as coercive tax-masters who impose illegal tariffs on the helpless, particularly small roadside businesses.
Such "coercive taxes" are illegally levied without approval from the state legislature, the group argued.
"One of the worst sins of government, according to the Founders, was the exercise of coercive taxing powers to take property from one group and give it to another," he wrote.
Conservatives, from white evangelicals to corporate C.E.O.s, found common ground in their support for an aggressive national defense and in their opposition to what they saw as a coercive, redistributive tax collecting and intrusively regulatory domestic government.
Under a coercive uniform tax system respondents lower their willingness to pay possibly to ensure that they are not forcing others to pay at a level that corresponds to their own – higher – valuations.
This is not some kind of coercive socialistic tax, as some might suggest.
The decline has been slower the past two decades despite increasingly elaborate smoking-cessation programs and increasingly coercive tactics: punitive taxes; limits on marketing and advertising; smoking bans in offices, restaurants and just about every other kind of public space.
To avoid it, an array of choices is provided, far less coercive than a single tax would be.
The world's top professional philosophers, economists, students and political scientists attend annual conferences to debate and discuss these ideas; true outcasts in a society haunted by the idea of large coercive regulation and antiquated tax codes on the world's population.
[Note, also, that the opponents would have to argue that a single tax was less coercive than providing freedom-of-choice among private insurers to escape a fine--I would like to hear them argue that one!].
The Eritrean embassy described the allegations as "baseless, ongoing, deliberate and distorted" and said the Eritrean government had never used coercive methods or intimidation to collect the tax.
