Yes!

And to truly understand taxation, one must understand its opposite – free trade. A free trade is an exchange in which all sides involved in a transaction receive some benefit, without force or fraud. For example, say you buy a loaf of bread for five dollars. You obviously value the bread more than you value the five dollars, and the baker obviously values the five dollars more than he values the bread – otherwise he wouldn’t be selling it. Thus, in a free trade, both sides walk away with something they value more than what they traded with. Their standards of living have both improved, even if by an infinitesimal amount; society moves slightly forward. Multiply this by millions of transactions and you get a roaring economy in which everyone’s standard of living is consistently rising and everyone is making more and more money.

But say you don’t want to buy the loaf of bread, but you have a gun aimed at your head and you’ll be lugged away to prison if you refuse. It doesn’t even have to be bread. Perhaps it’s a donation to some lazy sluggard that hurt his foot twenty years ago and now doesn’t think he should work or contribute to society since he would rather watch TV. Maybe it’s a collection to purchase schoolbooks for innocent six-year-olds telling them they’re irredeemably prejudiced because of the color of their skin. It could be spent on coaxing fentanyl kingpins and millions of illegal aliens besides across the southern border by offering them luxurious services inaccessible to the law-abiding American. Perhaps you’d rather not pay for some Marxist drag queen to read your wide-eyed kindergartener some social-justice-themed storybook. It doesn’t matter what it is; that’s not a free trade, that’s force and that’s fraud. Introduce either negative element into any transaction and odds are that one party will suffer a loss. Society will move backward. The economy will shrink. Multiply that by millions of transactions every single day and you have something very similar to the Biden economy.