Is taxation theft? A Review of 100 Years with Rothbard, Portugal

by Stephan Kinsella on August 5, 2026

John AB Da Silva “Is taxation theft?, Observador (July 27, 2026): “Call it public service, sovereignty, or territorial continuity. The name is irrelevant. The bill never was.”

Rothbard Takes Portugal: 100 Years with Rothbard: A Personal Account

TAP religiously held strikes in August and at Christmas, precisely when the most people depended on it, earning it the international nickname “TAP: Take Another Plane”. Then came the partial privatization of 2015, the relief of no longer having to pay for an expensive and poor service, the renationalization in 2020, and the return to square one. Since one cannot be half-pregnant, here is TAP again, with the deadline for binding proposals from Air France-KLM and Lufthansa closing on July 29th, the third attempt to sell it since 2015. Behind this are the Airbus funds scandal, the compensation authorized via WhatsApp to a public manager, the compensation claimed by the former CEO, dismissed after the supervisory body announced her dismissal without even hearing her side of the story, and an endless number of other absurdities.

It was in this context that an unusual sign emerged. On June 27th, Porto hosted Rothbard 100, the largest libertarian gathering ever held in Portugal, to mark the centenary of Murray Rothbard. Among Hans Hermann Hoppe, Stephan Kinsella, and the other speakers, the phrase that most bothers those who live off the state budget was heard again: “taxation is theft,” said, with some irony, in a city with a historical tradition of the left. A month later, I no longer found it only on billboards. I saw it printed on t-shirts, from Lisbon to the beaches of Sagres. Something has changed in taxpayers’ tolerance for the waste of public money. It is not necessary to accept that all taxes are theft to recognize that a tax levied on everyone to finance the losses of a few is hardly distinguishable from a forced transfer of wealth. That is what TAP and, let’s be frank, also CP have been doing for decades: transferring the cost of companies that never asked taxpayers if they wanted to be shareholders to everyone.