Property rights, taxes, and theft

[moorobot]

This post is cross posted in the SMP forum as "current world-ownership and self-ownership". I could have easily called it 'deeper into taxes and theft' because this post demonstrates that we can accept completely full self-ownership AND that redistributive taxes are not necessarily theft, if I am right. There are at least two parts to it. I'm working on the 2nd one; they can be read independently because they are different arguments that forced redistribution is not theft.

Right wing libertarians, extremely rare in academics but unfortunatley rather common in the politics forum here, argue that redistribtion (and, for some, all government) is incompatible with recognizing people as self-owners, and incompatible with true property rights. According to this viewpoint, modern liberal redistribution, unlike classical liberalism but like utilitarianism, allows some people to have partial 'property rights' in other people, hence self-ownership is denied. Elsewhere I and others have argued that self-ownership is not really a good/true moral principle.

However, critics of right-wing libertarianism have also argued that self-ownership does not necessarily yield absolute property rights, and that it is compatible with various regimes of property ownership, including a Rawlsian one (I should also mention that critics have argued self-ownership has no determinate content and hence no implications; but I will not discuss this here). My style of discussion here is discussed at greater length on the works of the 'socialist egalitarian' G.A. Cohen. See also the articles availbale at the website of the left libertarian Peter Vallentyne

The problem of initial acquistion

Some people claim that since market exchanges the exercies of individuals' powers, if individuals own their powers, they also own whatever comes from the exercise of those powers in the marketplace.

This is far too quick, however. Market exchanges involve more than just the exercise of self-owned powers. They also involve legal rights (or, in AC, pseudo-legal rights) over things, over external goods, and these things are not created by self-owned powers. If I own some land, I may have improved the land, but I did not create it myself, therefore my title to the land (and therefore my right to use the land in market exchanges) cannot be founded completely in the exercise of my self-owned powers.

Hence, we need a theory of how to get a title in the first place. It seems that most right-libertarians want to say that my title to external goods like land and money comes from the fact that others have transfered the title to me, in accordance with some principle of transfer. But this assumes, of course, that the earlier owner had a legitmate title. If someone sells me the land, my title is only as good as the first one, and her title was only as good as the before her, and so on. But if the validity of property rights completely depnds on the validity of past property rights, then determining the validity of a person's title over external goods requires going back to the beginning of the chain of transfers. But what is the beginning? It can't be the point at which someone created the land, because no one created it. It existed before human beings. So the series of transfers starts when someone first appropriated it as private property; therefore we need a theory of legitimate appropriation of external goods. If the first person did so in an illegitmate fashion, then that person has no legitmate title to it, and hence no legitmate right to transfer it to somebody else. So how can we come to own external resources? Everything that is now owned by people has some element of nature in it. But how did these things, historically, come to be part of someone's private property?

The historical answer is generally that natural resources came to be someone's property by force, usually directly but often indirectly. Most of New England was stolen forcefully from American Indians, for example. This is really bad news for those who wish to argue that taxation is theft because it is a forced transfer of property. Either the use of force made the initial acquistion made the initial acquistion illegitmate, in which case the current title is illegitmate, and there is no normative reason why government should not confiscate the wealth and redistribute it. Or the initial use of force did not necessarily render the acquistion illegitmate , therefore using force to take property away from its current owners is also not necessarily illegitmate. Either way, the fact that a distribution arises from market transactions is irrelevant, since no one had any right to transfer those resources through market exchanges. Either way, the de facto owners of property in the U.S. do not have a right to what they own in the United States right now.

Because most of the current property titles are illegitmate, Libertarian theories cannot justify existing inequalities. But we still need a way in which the external world can be appropriated legitmately. If there is no way that people can appropriate unowned resources for themselves in an ethically acceptable way, right libertarianism never gets off the ground; it could never provide an argument against redistribution.

A view held by some right-libertarians here, and by Rothbard, is that we own anything we mix our labor with. But this is deeply implausible, as well as unworkable and strikingly arbitrary. Implausible, because it is simply a 'first come, first served' viewpoint; whoever reaches a piece of land first in practice owns it, and at some point in Rothbardia there is going to be no resources for anyone to claim, so the younger generations won't own anything. Some will have vast wealth, while others will be entirely without property. These differences will be passed on to the next generation, some of home will be forced to work at an early age, with others born into privilege. Unworkable, because A) most products and capital goods are 'mixed with the labor' of many different people: do they all equally own those goods? and B) the ocean problem, (as recognized by Nozick, "Anarchy, State, Utopia", pg. 174, contra Rothbard): If I add some homemade tomato juice to the ocean, how much of the ocean do I now own? If I put a fence around some land, do I own the land inside the fence, or only the land under the fence: that is what I have mixed my labor with!!!

Most fundementally, it is completely arbitrary to choose this instead of a utilitiarian, or egalitarian, or even communitarian theory of just initial acquistion! . Why can't we use Rawls difference principle (inequalities are arbitrary unless they work to the most advantage of the least well off group) as a standard of legitmate appropriation? Van Parijis argues that appropriators should be required to fund a basic income as a condition of legitmate appropriation, as compensation for those who are left propertyless (See his Arguing for basic income, pgs 9-11, 1992 edition). The point is that there is a lot of literature offering various models of accpetable initial acquistion, but virtually no theorists agree with the view that people can acceptably appropriate unrestricted property rights over vastly unequal ammounts of resources.

Why can't we just vote on what standard we should use?