The speaker makes two comparisons that do not wash. First he claims that slavery is the theft of a person's labor and therefore slavery and taxation are equivelent. They are not. Slavery is the ownership of another, it is the mandate that one person isn't ACTUALLY a person at all but a thing that can be bought or sold as any other commondity or product. This is not theft nor can it be seen as such. I am not "stealing" the labor of the computer I am typing on - I own the device itself.
Secondly, he claims in a round about way that, in short, we should not have to pay a portion of our income on what our government produces - societal order. I liken this to a person who stays at a very posh hotel (America is a very nice place to live). He lives here, avails himself of all of the order, peace, predictability and opportunity afforded to him and then believes that these things should be free. Imagine staying at this hotel and when you get the bill, saying "you are holding a gun to my head, I am being extorted out of my money and labor".
Fair enough, I am not trying to push my views but only to help people understand libertarians, many clearly don't, that is fine if you disagree but I just wish people would take the time to understand how the Libertarian philosophy is rooted. It seems to me as If you didn't really listen, People only hear what they want to hear and to be fair we are all guilty of this.
You bring up the slavery point like it was a simple point and that my friend said outright that taxes=slavery, in fact he separates the two later in the speech, and then you insinuate that this is the major framework of the entire argument when its really not not that important to draw this connection. If this was what he said then I would have to agree, this comparison wouldn't be fair as you said slavery implies ownership much like you said, the better word would of been thievery.
To put it very simply and not so long winded with philosophies and metaphors that everyone will interrupt differently as syncos is trying to get across above:
To be a libertarian or understand libertarians you only really have to understand one thing
1) You must believe in the individual over the collective.
In the second half of your post you clearly show that you believe in the collective. Ok thats all good...but this is where the misunderstanding comes in:
People who believe in the collective generally either actually believe
or are trained to believe that Libertarians are selfish/greedy/ignorant/foolish/misguided/inpractical as you exemplified, its really not that simple and simply not true, in many ways it is misguided to have these thoughts, to not give the individualist its fair shot at philosophy, to dismiss it out of falseness.
A libertarian would say:
To believe in the individual is to believe in the collective as the individual is part of the collective.
So that's the argument, its not that, we don't need people to build roads or we are just arrogant pricks in our own little world. Quite the contrary, as syncos put above, to be a libertarian one must have faith in humanity, Although libertarians vary greatly from one individual to another this idea serves to guide us all and its guided by humanitarian causes, the rights of the individual. As a left leaning libertarian I believe in the people to do whats right over any corporation or government. I only hope you could at least come to understand it even if you disagree, at least to understand we are not some kind of selfish brutes.
Its an ancient argument:
Collectivism vs individualism
[video=youtube;30NL_iDna9E]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30NL_iDna9E[/video]
