Taxes are Theft?

If taxes are theft, so is property.

Claims to property are secured by force, by the state.  Your claim initiates force.  As a democracy, we secure these claims under civil law.  As a private gang, you secure those claims with your private military.

You take from the commons, expect others to respect your claims, that's theft.  However, we agree to recognize each others' claims and live in civil society.  As citizenship is voluntary, we agree to abide by the laws of the nation and allow for private ownership.

We agree to pay taxes on income or anything else our elected legislatures tell us to pay.  "Theft" is illegal taking, taxes are not.

Inflation Tax Isn't a Thing

It could be that Friedman's "inflation tax" is the federal deficit itself, mitigated by debt service on US securities. The tax he refers to is on savings by way of inflating the "money supply".

By running deficits at the top, the "job creators" continue to accumulate these savings. Yet it is sold to us, the public, as a tax on our retirement savings.

Pensions could be provided without specific taxes by running the same deficit, but that would mean that "savers" would have to invest their money, or at least continue to earn it in the private sector, rather than gleen interest from US securities as they do now.

Simply said, liberal democracy begets the very liberal market economy that Friedman claims to have championed. Liberty and democracy are not opposing ideas; they are essential to each other-- two sides of the same fiat coin.

This has been the case since Magna Carta was signed, at swordpoint, granting rights to a handful of nobles, leading to the creation of Parliament.

There is no market economy possible except where rights are secured. That is the purpose of a democratic republic, to secure the rights of every citizen equally under the law, no matter how much money they have or how much they earn.

Raising the standard deduction to 100k would cost $220bn/yr, taking the income tax entirely off 95% of the population. There's no use in taxing at lower incomes, other than to mitigate the impact of public spending on those higher. 

And there's certainly no use shifting the burden of taxes to the poor, or continuing to perpetuate this myth of "job creators" and "trickle down economics".

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Source document:  (I have zero affiliation with the website)
http://wwww.naomiklein.org/files/resources/pdfs/friedman-pinochet-letters.pdf