What is compulsory and what is voluntary?

 I often meet an argument for the taxation which says: "most of people pay their taxes voluntarily". It not so often that this argument is used in defense of government regulations or interventions, but sometimes they suggest that citizens are agreeing to them indirectly by voting for politicians who later introduces those policies.

But this argument is absolutely wrong, and the reason why is that they essentially do not understand the concept of "voluntariness".  Unfortunately it is not enough to point on the psychological phenomenon of conscious consent of an individual or a of group to recognize an interaction as a "voluntary".

The voluntary nature of interaction is not only a matter of the acclamation of A and B saying that they freely want to engage in interaction X. Such an acclamation is necessary but not sufficient to recognize interaction X as a "voluntary " one. We need another condition to be fulfilled before so.

That condition is fulfilled when A and B (and each other person involved) are free to refuse their engagement in interaction X, and since then they are not going to be forced by others with the use of violence to do it anyway. When either first condition and the second one are met, we can finally say that interaction X is voluntary for real.

So, next time your statist friends say something like "we pay our taxes voluntarily" or even "most of the people do so", ask them if they would be punished with violence when they refused to pay their taxes.