How often do we hear the phrase “it’s not the government’s money, it’s our money”? I’m sure that many of us here at the JLF have used this expression. But, in fact, this is a euphemism. The legal reality is that at the moment the government confiscates our income in the form of taxation it ceases to be our money. We, as individual owners, no longer have any decision making power over those funds. Ownership means nothing if not control, and when the government takes it from us, we lose all control over it. We no longer have any legal claim to it. In fact, that’s what taxation is–the coercive transfer of legal title and claim to money from those who earned it or had it gifted to them to the apparatus of the state. At the moment of transfer, i.e. the moment of taxation, the money goes from being our money to being the state’s money and then ultimately to being the money of those who it is allocated to–government employees, general motors, welfare recipients, favored big banks and investment institutions, etc.  We as conservatives and especially libertarians need to stop using the euphemism of referring to resources that the government has control over as “ours.” While we may continue to believe that we have a moral claim to that money–as I do–all legal rights have vanished. By referring to this money as “ours” we lend legitimacy to the idea that state is simply a caretaker of those funds. This plays into the hands of the political class, enhancing their status and ultimately legitimizing their power over us.