In a fully free society, taxation—or, to be exact, payment for governmental
services—would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government—the
police, the armed forces, the law courts—are demonstrably needed by individual
citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should)
be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.
The question of how to implement the principle of voluntary government
financing—how to determine the best means of applying it in practice—is a
very complex one and belongs to the field of the philosophy of law. The task of
political philosophy is only to establish the nature of the principle and to
demonstrate that it is practicable. The choice of a specific method of
implementation is more than premature today—since the principle will be
practicable only in a fully free society, a society whose government has been
constitutionally reduced to its proper, basic functions.