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?

[WillMagic]

tl;dr

certainly you can find a way to condense your argument a little...

[TomCollins]

Cliff Notes:

Property titles come from proper transfers of property. However, history has a lot of violations of property rights, so all property titles are invalid. Therefore, when I violate your rights, it's on titles that were invalid anyway.

[Nielsio]

[ QUOTE ]
Cliff Notes:

Property titles come from proper transfers of property. However, history has a lot of violations of property rights, so all property titles are invalid. Therefore, when I violate your rights, it's on titles that were invalid anyway.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I stole my labour earlier.

[Riddick]

[ QUOTE ]
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

[/ QUOTE ]

So you have finally admitted that self-ownership is so fundamentally self-evident and unquestionably irrefutable (as even Cohen admits) that the burden is on you to somehow find a way to justify violent intervention into unconsenting individuals' lives.

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Right wing libertarians... argue that redistribtion (and, for some, all government) is incompatible with recognizing people as self-owners

[/ QUOTE ]

Why do you never acknowledge the fact that before arbitrary redistribution there must first be violent intervention?

[ QUOTE ]
The problem of initial acquistion

[/ QUOTE ]

Your entire subject line begs the question. What is the problem with initial acquisition? = Why do you beat your wife?

What problem with initial acquisition can there possibly be? If I go to unchartered, undiscovered part of Antarctica and build an ice palace, I own that ice palace. This is self evident and irrefutable.

If someone came to my ice palace with a gun and said "Leave now, Im moving in," we would call this action a theft of property.

[ QUOTE ]
This is far too quick, however. Market exchanges involve more than just the exercise of self-owned powers. They also involve legal rights

[/ QUOTE ]

False. Legal rights are market exchanges. Legal rights are not somehow an external product outside of individual action; they are not magically created by a genie in a lamp. Legal rights are derived from self-evident axioms of human action, those which create peaceful social order.

Legal rights to property come from this social order, stemming from the two primal elements of scarcity - (1) your own body, and (2) the space which your body occupies. We consider them 'legal' rights because for a peaceful society to exist there must first be the unanimously established rule among consenting members that you do not physically [censored] with other people

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

You're twisting yourself up. The legitimacy of your title is derived from whether or not it was acquired by voluntary exchange (legit) or outright stolen (illegit), i.e. did you break the unanimous rule and physically [censored] with someone in order to coerce their property or not.

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

Now you are the one who is being too quick. How can you, one single individual with no prior claim on my property, have a say on the validity or invalidity of what I claim to be my property?

If someone had property in the past stolen from them, then they absolutely have a say in the validity of its current claim. That validity, of course, will be entirely an argumentative claim that will need to be presented to an arbiter capable of retreiving it (in our society you have one and only one option - call up the local police)

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]

You're somewhat right. Native Americans did not recognize much right over property below a vague tribal level, but a government illegitimately and forcefully stole the entire land from American Indians in essence.

[ QUOTE ]
Either the use of force 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.

[/ QUOTE ]

So the government's initial forceful acquisition (of Native American land) made the acquisition illegitimate, and so it follows that there is no reason from that point on that the government ought not initiate more forceful acquisition.

[img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] (This is where I had to stop)

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
Cliff Notes:

Property titles come from proper transfers of property. However, history has a lot of violations of property rights, so all property titles are invalid. Therefore, when I violate your rights, it's on titles that were invalid anyway.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep.

[moorobot]

[ QUOTE ]
So you have finally admitted that self-ownership is so fundamentally self-evident and unquestionably irrefutable (as even Cohen admits) that the burden is on you to somehow find a way to justify violent intervention into unconsenting individuals' lives.


[/ QUOTE ] Of course I don't agree with formal self-ownership- Cohen doesn't agree with it either. I don't know why you think Cohen believes in Self-ownership either; he was just trying to work on the opposition's premises for the sake of argument like I was.

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What problem with initial acquisition can there possibly be? If I go to unchartered, undiscovered part of Antarctica and build an ice palace, I own that ice palace. This is self evident and irrefutable.

[/ QUOTE ] This is not at all self-evident to me or to most others. This is the 'mix your labor with it' idea that I critiqued in the OP-a terrible theory and unworkable theory of initial acquistion. You completely ignored it. I made an argument against this theory, I did not beg the question against it.

[ QUOTE ]
So the government's initial forceful acquisition (of Native American land) made the acquisition illegitimate, and so it follows that there is no reason from that point on that the government ought not initiate more forceful acquisition.

[/ QUOTE ] All current titles are illegitmate by your own definition of illegitmate. Unless they are returned to the legitmate owner (however we would discover it), then anybody can do whatever they want with resources; nobody owns them morally on libertarians own theory.

[ QUOTE ]
False. Legal rights are market exchanges. Legal rights are not somehow an external product outside of individual action; they are not magically created by a genie in a lamp. Legal rights are derived from self-evident axioms of human action, those which create peaceful social order.

[/ QUOTE ] Legal rights are those decided by whatever institution(s) create the law, by definition. Legal rights are derived from human decisions about what legal rights could and should be. This idea of legal rights contradicts all of the most fundemental ideas of the concept of law from the positivist and legal realist traditions, by far the two most influential conceptions of law in the west. if you would kindly show me who argued for this interpretation of legality, and his criticisms of all the most prevalent legal theories in the west, I would appreciate it. Legal rights are decided by the procedure determining what the law is in that particular area of jurisdiction.

I think you are thinking about moral rights here.

[moorobot]

[ QUOTE ]

Property titles come from proper transfers of property. However, history has a lot of violations of property rights, so all property titles are invalid. Therefore, when I violate your rights, it's on titles that were invalid anyway.



[/ QUOTE ] Not quite, it's a denial that redistribution is a violation of rights, because you don't have a right to your de facto property because it was illegitmately acquired on your own definition of illegitmate and legitmate ways to acquire it. You and others have not followed your view of the way to get property rights in your pursuit of property.

[moorobot]

[ QUOTE ]
How can you, one single individual with no prior claim on my property, have a say on the validity or invalidity of what I claim to be my property?

[/ QUOTE ] We need a theory of validity in order to assess these claims. By YOUR theory of what is your property, NOT MINE, your current claim of what is your property is invalid.

I'm trying to argue from right libertarian premises, remember. I don't believe in property rights to things, at least not in the way you guys do.

[moorobot]

[ QUOTE ]
You're twisting yourself up. The legitimacy of your title is derived from whether or not it was acquired by voluntary exchange (legit) or outright stolen (illegit), i.e. did you break the unanimous rule and physically [censored] with someone in order to coerce their property or not.


[/ QUOTE ] Once again, your lack of knowledge about legal theory gets you into trouble. Most people regard the use of force by government as morally legitmate; that is why the state is often defined as: the entity who has a monopoly on the use of LEGITMATE force in a particular area. that is what is agreed on. There is no "unanimous" rule against this; the vast majortiy of people disagree. Most people think that for people to get along we NEED an entity that uses force legitmately, contrary to what you are assuming here. For an area to be peaceful in practice (which is what is truly important) you need the possibility of violence to make decisions binding.

One of the main reasons is because of disagreements about morality: we need a procedure that adjuciates between these claims (judical branch), and an entity that makes sure that what is decided on by that procedure is followed by people living in that area (executive). As long as their are disputes about ethics we need the coercive state; which is the opposite of what you guys seem to think: if there was universal agreement on and compliance to ethical norms then anarchy might have a chance. But since that will never happen, we need states to enforce the law, Which is distinct from morality.

[ QUOTE ]
Why do you never acknowledge the fact that before arbitrary redistribution there must first be violent intervention?

[/ QUOTE ]

The possibility of violence prevents the occurence of real violence from occuring for countless reasons

This is why taxation is not actually violent. The possibility of violence prevents the 'cheaters' who would try not to pay from doing so. If these cheaters were able to defect the system would collapse because of the deep tendency towards reciprocity found in most human beings. This is the only way that human beings can get along because of their nature-there must be a mechanism which prevents potential cheats from doing so. Read some evolutionary theory.