How do you know you're a person open to reason?

[OngBonga]

I'm not asking why the practice has utility. I'm asking why you claim on one hand that something can be immoral regardless of the law but then claim that something else can be immoral only within the confines of law.

How can theft be immoral outside the confides of law when theft doesn't exist outside the confides of law?

We could have this very same argument about murder. If you kill someone who is going to kill you, is it murder? The law says no, because the law says muder is the unlawful killing of someone, and you are within your legal rights to protect yourself. Take away law, and muder no longer exists, because one can no longer kill someone unlawfully.

The law does not reflect morality for one critical reason... morality is subjective. What I find immoral, another person might not. There is no such subjectiveness in law. Something is either unlawful or it is not.

[wufwugy]

How can theft be immoral outside the confides of law when theft doesn't exist outside the confides of law?

You're holding two opposed positions. One is that you believe it can be immoral to engage in an act that resembles theft except in that it is not called so by the law. The other is that you're appealing to definition, i.e., saying that something described by the law is only that way because the law describes it as such.

The law does not reflect morality for one critical reason... morality is subjective. What I find immoral, another person might not. There is no such subjectiveness in law. Something is either unlawful or it is not.

Exactly. Which means that you believe the difference between something you believe to be wrongful taking and the same taking when codified as theft is not a moral one, but a legal one. This is where the idea that taxation is theft comes from, because if the only distinction is a legal one, it's a technicality.

So how about I'll rephrase my original statement: taxation and theft are different by technicality; by the logic commonly used to justify why theft is wrong, the technical difference between taxation and theft is that one the law calls theft and one the law calls taxation. By this I derive that it is reasonable to say that taxation is theft, just a legal theft.