The Downside of Using Violent Means for Charitable Ends

Here’s a nice animated video, called “George Ought to Help” that attempts to show that when people call on governments to mandate contributions to otherwise charitable causes, they are using disreputable violent means to feel-good ends:

It still perplexes me when I talk to people from the substantial pacifist contingent in the war tax resistance movement and find that for many of them, while they’re not convinced violence or the threat of violence would be an appropriate response to the aggression of, say, a Nazi Germany, or even to an armed intruder trying to break into your home — the government using violence to force people to contribute to education, the arts, scientific research, and other such nice things is peachy keen. Would they go door-to-door taking donations for the National Endowment for the Arts at gunpoint, I wonder?