No thief cracks an empty safe. Not out of virtue — out of arithmetic. The effort, the risk and the accomplices only pay where there is something inside. Where there is nothing to steal, there is no theft. The sentence sounds like a police-station truism. Applied to the State, it is an entire political program.

Before anyone reads it inside out: it does not say the poor are safe because they have nothing, nor that the victim should have kept less. It speaks of the other safe — the one filled with what was taken from you. Every scandal you have ever read about has the same anatomy: a large pot of other people’s money, managed by those who did not produce it, overseen by those who also want a slice. Change the party, change the name of the police operation, change the colour of the cash bags; the anatomy does not change. What changes the outcome is the size of the pot.

A confession about the yardstick

The corner of this site on the subject says, without hedging, that taxation is theft. The last essay showed why: at the end of every tax bill there is a man authorised to use force against someone who attacked no one. By the same yardstick, then, a minimal state that levies a minimal tax still steals. Less, but it steals.

I will not pretend otherwise. This is exactly where libertarianism splits. On one side, the minarchists — Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), is the most serious name — argue that a State reduced to a night-watchman, protecting only life, property and contracts, is the most that can be justified and the least that is needed. On the other, the anarcho-capitalists — Murray Rothbard, in The Ethics of Liberty (1982) — answer that no theft is small enough to stop being theft, and that security and justice, too, can be hired voluntarily.

My position, for this text: the minimal state is not the destination. It is the step. You do not reach voluntarism — a whole life organised by exchanges in which everyone said yes — by jumping from Brazil’s tax burden to zero. You get there by shrinking the vault, and every inch it shrinks is an inch less to steal. A step does not ask you to like it. It only asks that it lead upward.

The principles behind the vault

Four ideas hold the sentence up, and none of them is new.

The first is non-aggression: no one may initiate force against another person or against what is theirs. The second is self-ownership: your body, your time and the fruit of your work are yours before they belong to any collective. The third came from a Frenchman in 1850. Frédéric Bastiat, in The Law, called it legal plunder when the law, created to protect property, is turned to transferring it — and gave the definition no one has bettered: the State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.

The fourth is the most uncomfortable, because it is not moral — it is mechanical. James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 for a simple observation, that of public choice: politicians and bureaucrats are not angels who stop responding to incentives once sworn in. They are ordinary people in front of an enormous pot. Milton Friedman summed up the rest: no one spends other people’s money on other people as carefully as they spend their own on themselves. Add the two and corruption stops being a surprise. It becomes a forecast.

If corruption is a function of the size of the pot, the remedy is not to look for better politicians. It is to leave less on the table.

Where the vault shrank

No country in the world is a minimal state. But a few came closer than the rest, for long enough to leave a trail. This time, unlike the page on libertarianism, I bring the cases — defects included.

Hong Kong, 1961–1971: the man who did not want statistics

John Cowperthwaite was Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary for a decade and called his policy positive non-interventionism. It was more radical than the name: he forbade his own staff from collecting certain economic statistics, lest the numbers become an excuse to intervene. He held the standard rate at 15% — no one, not even the richest, paid more than that on gross income. In his decade, real wages rose by about 50% and the share of the population in acute poverty fell from roughly half to 15%.

Sixty years later, Hong Kong still ranks first in the Fraser Institute’s 2025 economic freedom index.

The defect: Hong Kong never sold land. All of it belongs to the government, which only leases it — and the premiums on those leases can be the second-largest source of public revenue: 16.3% of the total in 2020-21, behind only the profits tax. Taxes are low partly because the State is the city’s biggest landlord, with a monopoly that helps explain some of the most expensive square metres on the planet. And there is the larger defect: the index that puts it on top measures freedom to trade, not to speak. A place that has been closing newspapers since 2020 can be the freest in the world to open a company and one of the least free to criticise whoever taxes it. Economic freedom without political freedom is a step that can be pulled from under your feet.

Georgia, 2004: 21 taxes become six

After the Rose Revolution, a businessman named Kakha Bendukidze took over Georgia’s economic reform with a premise he stated out loud: what the State does not need to do, it should not do. In 2004 parliament passed a new tax code that cut 21 taxes to six and introduced a 12% flat income tax. The number of licences needed to operate fell by about 90%. The economy grew by an average of 9.3% a year between 2004 and 2007.

Here the title sentence appears almost literally. The new government dissolved the traffic police — notorious for living off roadside bribes — and started over, digitised tax payment, and cut the contact between inspector and taxpayer, which is where bribery lives. The World Bank devoted an entire book to the case as an example of fighting corruption in public services. Fewer counters, fewer stamps, less pot: less theft.

And Georgia did something no other country dared. In 2011 it passed an Economic Liberty Act, in force since 2014, that forbids the government from creating a new general tax or raising the top rate of an existing one without a popular referendum, and caps public spending at 30% of GDP, debt at 60% and the deficit at 3%. A lock on the vault.

The defect: the government that made the reforms was also accused of grave abuses — the prison torture scandal of 2012 cost its party the election. And years later the country turned toward an authoritarianism of another kind. A step built by a government that disrespects people is a step built on the very aggression it claims to fight.

Estonia: simple is not the same as small

Estonia does not tax profit a company reinvests. Corporate tax applies only when profit is distributed; while the money is working inside the company, the State does not touch it. Income tax is flat, at 22%. The rise to 24% planned for 2026 was cancelled by parliament in December 2025. By the Tax Foundation’s ranking, it has the most competitive tax system in the OECD for the 12th year running. A return is filed in minutes, online.

The defect: Estonia’s tax burden is around a third of GDP — as high as Brazil’s. Estonia proves a system can be simple, predictable and respectful of those who invest. It does not prove it is small. Simplicity takes from the inspector the chance to extort; it does not take from the vault the money that attracts those who want to divert it.

Switzerland: the tax with an expiry date

Switzerland’s tax burden was 26.9% of GDP in 2024. Brazil’s, in 2025, hit a record 32.4%. What I think about that, you already know: barrosef.com/libertarianism.

But the difference is not only in the number. It lies in two mechanisms no politician likes.

The first: the 26 cantons compete with each other. A canton that charges too much watches companies and families move next door. It is what the economist Charles Tiebout described in 1956 as voting with your feet: when leaving is easy, the vault has to justify itself.

The second is rarer still. The Swiss Constitution puts an expiry date on the federal government’s right to levy income tax and VAT, and caps the top rates. To keep collecting, the government has to ask the people. It asked in 2018; the current authorisation expires in 2035. Imagine a tax authority having to ask its citizens, every fifteen years, whether it may go on existing.

The defect: 26.9% is not a minimal state. Switzerland has mandatory health insurance, a robust public pension and a machine that works precisely because it is watched closely. It does not show that the State can almost disappear. It shows something more modest and more useful: that a vault under the direct control of those who pay grows more slowly.

Próspera: the city that exists only while the neighbour allows

On Roatán, a Honduran island, a company built a private city under the ZEDE law — zones with their own rules, courts and taxes, at rates far below the national ones. It is the closest anyone has come, this century, to a jurisdiction designed from scratch on libertarian principles.

In 2022 the Honduran Congress repealed the law. The investors took the country to international arbitration, initially claiming US$10.8 billion — now reduced to around US$1.6 billion — and still without a final ruling.

The defect: it is in the heading. An island of freedom surrounded by a large State depends on that State’s tolerance, and tolerance changes with each election. There is also the criticism from neighbouring residents who were never consulted — and a libertarian cannot ignore the argument from consent when it points at his own side.

Argentina: the step that hurts

Javier Milei took office in December 2023 with a campaign chainsaw and the line that the State is the problem. In 2024 the country posted its first annual fiscal surplus in over a decade. Annual inflation, which neared 300% in April 2024, fell to 33.5% in August 2026, with 1.7% for the month, the lowest monthly rise in fourteen months. No Latin American government has shrunk the vault so fast in decades.

The defect: poverty, which had fallen from over 50% in early 2024 to 28.2% at the end of 2025, rose again to 32.3% in the first half of 2026, and formal private employment shrank for more than a year. An honest libertarian has to say two things at once: that Argentina was paying, through inflation, an invisible tax on the poorest, and that cutting spending is not the same as freeing the economy. The vault shrank; the counter, the stamp and the burden are still there.

The cases that sting

There is a list of countries that tends to come up in conversations about low taxes, and I cannot use it without saying what it carries.

Singapore has low income tax and one of the highest GDPs per head in the world. It also has a State that builds and controls the housing of about 80% of the population, state funds that rank among the planet’s largest investors, compulsory pension savings, and a regime in which the press and the opposition live under supervision. Taxes are low because the State owns a lot. That is not a minimal state. It is a large State with different bookkeeping.

The United Arab Emirates, Monaco, the Cayman Islands levy no personal income tax. But they live off oil, luxury tourism or finance. They do not tax the citizen because the State owns the well. The Emirates, by the way, are an absolute monarchy — and when the well was no longer enough, they introduced VAT in 2018 and corporate tax in 2023. The pot always wants to grow.

The Chile of the Chicago Boys is the most cited case and the most tainted. The liberal reforms of the 1970s and 1980s made the country one of Latin America’s most prosperous. They were carried out under a dictatorship that, according to the Rettig and Valech commissions, killed or disappeared more than 2,200 people and tortured more than 27,000. By the non-aggression principle, there is nothing to discuss: economic freedom imposed at bayonet point is not libertarianism. It is the same aggression with a different spreadsheet.

These cases do not refute the thesis. They refute the shortcut. A small vault surrounded by soldiers, or a small vault next to an oil well, says nothing about what happens when free people decide, themselves, to leave less on the table.

What the cases teach

Three lessons, if I have to sum up.

The first: where the pot shrank, theft shrank with it. Georgia did not become less corrupt because it changed people — people stayed people. It became less corrupt because it removed the counters where money changed hands. That is the title sentence at work in the real world.

The second: a small vault does not stay small on its own. It needs a lock. Georgia put the lock in a law that requires a referendum. Switzerland put it in the Constitution, with an expiry date. Without a lock, the pot grows — as it grew in Brazil, which closed 2025 with the highest tax burden on record and still found room to fill a fund that pays for the advertising of those who set the size of the next tax bill.

The third: the authoritarian shortcut taints the step. Every country that shrank the vault with force borrowed from dictatorship left a bill to be paid in another currency. The step is worth it only if it is built on the very principle it promises: no one strikes first.

One more step

Go back to the empty safe. The thief does not crack it — not because he has converted, but because it does not pay. Now imagine a State whose vault was so small that no one would run for anything to get near it. No electoral fund to fight over, no state company to pack with allies, no overpriced public works to inaugurate. Imagine campaigns run by people who want to serve, because there would be nothing left to take.

That is the minimal state. It is not the end of the story. A small vault is still filled by force, and the libertarian does not forget it. But it is the point from which the next question becomes visible: if the vault is already this small, if security, justice and the road can already be hired by those who use them — why do we still need a vault?

That question is the next step. For now, it is enough to climb this one. Where there is nothing to steal, there is no theft. The task is to leave less and less.

References