Michael Huemer's Unconvincing Case Against the Redistribution of Wealth
A few points about libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer's "charity mugger" and "hermit's spear" examples
In a short article at libertarianism.org, libertarian philosophy professor Michael Huemer starts with a simple thought experiment:
Imagine that I have founded a charity organization that helps the poor. But not enough people are voluntarily contributing to my charity, so many of the poor remain hungry. I decide to solve the problem by approaching well-off people on the street, pointing a gun at them, and demanding their money. I funnel the money into my charity, and the poor are fed and clothed at last.
No one would say that this wasn’t theft because he stole for a good cause. Even if you regard it as “a socially beneficial theft,” you wouldn’t claim that it counted as non-theft.
Similarly, he thinks, even if we think that what governments do when they levy taxes to pay for social welfare programs is socially beneficial, we shouldn’t deny that it’s theft. Perhaps theft can be justified in some extreme circumstances. But it’s at least usually wrong.
But wait. If he’s right (as he surely is) that we’d consider the actions of a Charity Mugger to be theft (despite the money going to a socially beneficial purpose), that gives us some reason by analogy to suppose that “taxpayer-funded social welfare programs are socially beneficial” isn’t a sufficient defense against the claim that taxation is theft. But a good response to a particular argument that taxation isn’t theft isn’t the same thing as a good argument that taxation is theft.
To be fair, Huemer doesn’t actually go straight from the premise that what a CM does is theft to the conclusion that what the Internal Revenue Service does is theft (and that we should think so even if we approve of everything being done with the revenue). Instead, he first asks why we think what a CM does is theft.
The answer seems to be: because I am taking other people’s property without their consent. The italicized phrase just seems to be what “theft” means.
His actual argument, then, is that (a) the most plausible explanation of our intuition that what the CM does is theft is that it matches the italicized definition, and so, since (b) taxation matches it too, we should conclude that (c) taxation is also theft.
Since everything hinges on the italicized definition, let’s zoom in on that.
First, though:
Some readers might bristle at my use of the phrase “taxpayer-funded social welfare programs.” The devotees of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) reject the claim that social spending is funded by taxation, at least in countries like the United States where the government prints its own currency and has sovereign control over it. There are a few reasons why I’m happy to leave Huemer’s “taxation funds spending” assumption in place, though (even beyond my own reluctance to open this particular can of warms).
First and most obviously, a response to Huemer that doesn’t rely on bringing in a giant controversial empirical premise is more valuable than one that does. Second, even if Huemer conceded MMT, he could still argue that governments that don’t control their own currency but do engage in social spending (e.g. national governments in Eurozone countries, or even state and local governments in the U.S.) are indeed redistributing stolen resources. Finally, along the same lines, if Huemer is right about everything except the assumption that taxation funds spending, then nationalizations of private companies, for example, would still count as theft. From a socialist perspective, then, basing a reply to Huemer on MMT wouldn’t get us very far.
The definition of theft as taking other people’s property without their consent is a perfectly adequate one for most day-to-day purposes. If we see Jane take a vase from Janice’s house, and we want to know whether what we just saw was Jane stealing from Janice, we’d need to know, first, whether the vase belonged to Jane (maybe she lent it to Janice and now she’s taking it back!) and second, if it did belong to Janice, we’d want to know whether Jane had Janice’s permission to take it. Crucially, the permission question only comes up once we’ve settled the ownership question. If the vase belongs to Jane, it’s not stealing for her to take it back without Janice’s permission.
When we take a closer look, though, we can see that the the phrase “other people’s property” is ambiguous. What exactly do we mean when we say that the vase is “Janice’s” vase, for example?
Pretty clearly, we don’t just means that it happens to currently be in Janice’s possession. If Janice borrowed Jane’s vase six months ago, and Jane happened to be standing in Janice’s living room and said, “wait, is that my vase you never returned? I’m taking it back now!” without waiting for Janice’s permission, no one would call that theft.
That leaves us with two options. When we say that theft is taking “other people’s property” without their consent, we might mean the property to which other people are legally entitled or the property to which they’re morally entitled. The difference is irrelevant in day-to-day contexts where the cops, judges, and so on who enforce laws against theft (and even individuals enforcing informal social norms against theft) aren’t typically going to stop to ask themselves whether the property laws of the society in which they operate are morally just. Even those of us who strongly object to the current distribution of property generally seek to change it by changing the law (either in reformist or revolutionary ways) rather than trying to individually take the law into our own hands.
On the other hand, when we shift from the everyday context of trying to decide whether a particular action (like Jane picking up the vase and putting it in her bag) taking place within the context of a particular social order counts as theft to the very different context of trying to decide whether one of the basic practices that underlies that order (taxation) counts as a form of theft, we can’t afford any vagueness in our definitions. The distinction between legal and moral entitlement matters a lot. If theft means taking things other people are legally entitled to without their permission, then taxation to pay for public healthcare, or for that matter nationalizing the means of production in order to move past capitalism entirely, can’t be theft (at least assuming the taxation or nationalization was enacted using proper legal procedures).
And that brings us to the Hermit’s Spear example.
Huemer apparently thinks that his initial argument about mugging for charity is is all the positive case he needs to establish that taxation is theft. He stops, though, to consider three arguments that it isn’t theft.
Taxation isn’t theft because without a state supported by taxes there would be no law and order, chaos would reign, and you wouldn’t be able to make any money in the first place, whereas nothing like this is true about the kinds of actions we normally think of as “theft.”
Taxation isn’t theft because all the citizens being taxed have consented after all. “By using government services (such as roads, schools, and police), and remaining present in the government’s territory, you indicate that you accept the social contract.”
“The government can’t be a thief, because it is the government that defines property rights through its laws.”
Taking these in the order I’ve presented them here:
Huemer responds to the law-and-order argument in ways that parallel his point about the CM. Security might be a fine thing to have, but the fact that a thief uses the money he stole from you to deliver a fine thing is irrelevant to the definition of theft.
On the social contract, he argues that no such contract exists since none of us have signed a literal and explicit contract, and we aren’t given the choice of refusing all government services (and thus being exempt from taxation). As to the part about the government’s territory:
[T]he government does not in fact own all the land that it claims as “its territory”; this land is, rather, mainly owned by private individuals. If I own some land that other people are using, I can demand that the other people either pay me money or vacate my land. But if I see some people on their land, I cannot demand that they either pay me money or vacate their own land. If I do that, I am a thief.
It’s worth pausing long enough to note that this response doesn’t really work. That phrase about how land is “mainly” owned by private individuals suggests that the state does legitimately own some of it. As a practical matter, it’s impossible to function enough in the world to make any money that could then be taxed without using public property like roads, sidewalks, and public airspace. So, if the government is indeed entitled to say that anyone who wants to use its property has to pay up, that’s enough to justify all actually existing taxation, even if it wouldn’t justify taxing hypothetical super-businessmen who can just teleport back and forth between pieces of property they own. I suspect that Huemer is being a bit cagey here, and that his real position is that there’s no such thing as government property. We’ll get to that.
Meanwhile, his most interesting response is to the claim that the government can’t steal from you by passing laws because theft means taking away property to which you’re legally entitled.
Imagine that you travel to a remote region outside any government’s jurisdiction, where you find a hermit living off the land. The hermit hunts with a spear of his own making, which you find interesting. You decide (without the hermit’s consent) to take the spear with you when you leave. It would seem correct to say that you “stole” the spear.
Fair enough. One of the two main things we mean by “stealing” is “taking something someone else is morally entitled to without their permission,” and that one fits the Hermit’s Spear case.
It’s also a very easy case. Different philosophies and political ideologies will entail different answers to questions like “who should own the means of production?” or even “how much income inequality is acceptable?” but no one anywhere disagrees that a hermit who made his own spear he needs to hunt is own food should be allowed to keep it.
So, to review, Huemer thinks what the CM does counts as theft (despite the money being used for benevolent purposes) because it fits the definition of theft as taking other people’s property without their consent. But that definition contains an important ambiguity. Do we mean the property other people are legally entitled to or the property they’re morally entitled to?
His discussion of the HS case seems to suggest that the only sense of theft he’s interested in is the moral one. Let’s see.
Huemer nicely draws out the radicalism of the “taxation is theft” position by showing that, even if you stop short of concluding that all taxes should be abolished, the position at least commits you to opposing many ordinary and ordinarily uncontroversial uses of public money.
It is wrong to steal without having a very good reason. What count as good enough reasons is beyond the scope of this short article. But as an example, you are not justified in stealing money, say, so that you can buy a nice painting for your wall. Similarly, if taxation is theft, then it would probably be wrong to tax people, say, to pay for an art museum.
He’s surely right that the position that taxation is theft can’t be reconciled with support for taxing citizens to pay for art museums. So, let’s really think about art museums.
An art museum I’ve always loved is the Detroit Institute of Arts. It’s worth going just for the series of frescoes painted by Diego Rivera, depicting the history of industry.
Now, let’s rerun Huemer’s Charity Mugger case with a twist. The CM’s victims are all employees of the DIA. Does that make a difference?
If Huemer is right that Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb Counties (which jointly fund the museum) are doing something morally objectionable by stealing money from taxpayers to keep the DIA’s lights on, those employees must not be morally entitled to their salaries. It’s not as if they don’t know that those salaries are paid for by taxation! Whatever ways we can become morally entitled to money or other goods on Huemer’s account, I can’t imagine that “knowingly accepting stolen property” makes that list.
Similarly, does Huemer think public school teachers, cops, firefighters, doctors and nurses at public clinics, and so on who get their wallets snatched by pickpockets or extracted from them by threats of force in dark alleys are victim of “theft”? Some of them might be, since they might be morally entitled to their incomes (if the acts of theft that generated those incomes were justified), but we won’t know the answer in any particular case until we go beyond the scope of Huemer’s article to decide what counts a “very good reason” that would justify taxation.1
And this is where it gets interesting, because on an intuitive level, no normal person who wasn’t a libertarian ideologue would hesitate about calling any of these cases “theft.” Even many a libertarian ideologue might feel a strong initial initutive impulse toward saying so (even if they hesitated on reflection), just as socialist ideologues like me might feel a powerful intuitive pull toward saying that if, say, the son of a factory owner, who lives off a modest monthly stipend from his dad, is mugged in a back alley, that’s theft.
The reason is that, again, in ordinary everyday contexts, when we throw around the word “theft,” all that’s really relevant is legal entitlement. Crucially, our reasons for feeling a powerful moral aversion to theft in the that sense—the legal sense—really have very little to do with any deep belief that the victims were morally entitled to their property. Whether we’re talking about a pickpocketing, a brandished knife in an alley, a break-in while the home-owner was on vacation, or digital thieves quietly draining your bank account, the victim is losing something they had a reasonable expectation of keeping under the current rules. And, to varying extents for various items in that list, losing it in one of these ways is a disturbing and frightening thing to have happen to you! Even apart from more immediate material harms, this kind of experience gives you a vivid sense of vulnerability and powerlessness. You start spending a lot of time looking over your shoulder.
Libertarians might want to change the rules by defunding the DIA (which would force DIA employees to get private-sector jobs) and socialists might want to change them by nationalizing the factory (which would force the factory-owner’s son to get a job, period). In either case, though, we could all reasonably agree that someone doing individual-level vigilante redistribution was doing something wrong. But trying to harness our intuitions about that to support a position about taxes (in other words, an objection to the rules being constructed in a way that violates libertarian principles) is just a bait and switch.
The clever thing about the HS example is that, even though it’s only theft in the moral sense, not the legal sense, it’s one where many of the reasons most of us feel the way we do about legal theft (i.e. vigilante redistribution in individual violation of the rules, as opposed to collective redistribution by changing the rules) do apply. The hermit would have assumed that, in letting you come visit him, there was an implicit understanding about how the two of you would treat each other that rules out taking away any of the items currently in his possession. The way you breached this understanding would have a lot of the same psychological effects that legal theft does in everyday circumstances. But none of that is at all applicable to libertarian objections to taxation.
I said earlier that I suspect Huemer of being cagey about his position on public property. That phrase about land “mainly” being owned by private individuals suggests that some of it is (in more than a legal sense) the property of the state. Does Michael Huemer actually think that, though? And, if he doesn’t, why the caginess?
One reason might be that he wants to present his extreme libertarian views as an outgrowth of normie intuitions about theft. But moral common sense about theft doesn’t distinguish between public or private entities. If a gang of guys with ski masks and sophisticated devices for disabling security came into the DIA one night and took a bunch of paintings for their own private use without the museum’s permission, normie intuitions about theft would apply. But is the (public, taxpayer-funded) museum entitled to those paintings according to Huemer’s theory of property rights? If not, this isn’t an instance of taking “other people’s property” without their permission. The more skeptical Huemer turns out to be about the legitimacy of (much? all?) public property, the more cases there will be where his position is going to be misaligned with normie intuitions.
Here’s a fun one:
Does the government legitimately own, say, Yellowstone National Park? I don’t see how Huemer could say it did. In his debate with me a few years ago, he told me he thought John Locke’s theory of property rights was basically correct. That theory includes two mechanisms for becoming a legitimate property-owner. Either a previous legitimate owner transfers the property to you, or you become a legitimate original owner by mixing your labor with nature. But national parks are simply declared public property by government fiat. So, presumably, no one legitimately owns them, and any enterprising entrepreneur would be well within his rights to stake a claim, start mixing his labor with the land through various acts of economic productivity (ranging from farming to strip-mining), and using force to keep out any tourists or park rangers who tried to enter the newly claimed land without permission.
I suspect that anyone who actually did that, though, would lose a popularity contest with a Charity Mugger.
Without being too petty about this, I’d be fascinated to find out whether those very good reasons extend to financing the salaries of UC-Boulder philosophy professors.
It seems like Huemer's argument just boils down to "under my theory of property rights, taxation is illegitimate." Which of course runs into the problem that virtually nobody accepts his theory of property rights (which I assume is Rothbardian rather than Lockean - those provisos, and the actual lineage of real-world property, would seem to make Locke at least a Georgist, and maybe a communist).
By defining theft without reference to legality or even morality, Huemer is sneaking all of his property theory into his argument inside the word "property" in a way that seems designed to let him evade his burden of defending the theory. I mean, the obvious response to "taxation is theft" is "Taxation is legal by definition. Theft is illegal by definition." And I think his response to that would be "Taxation is illegal. It's just natural law that's being violated, not government-made law. We know that there are property rights in nature. See Hermit's Spear. Taxation is consistent with the government's law by definition, but it violates natural law, and is therefore theft." Except that the claim that taxation violates natural property rights, which is the real nub of the thing, remains undemonstrated.
(Possibly I'm restating your points, Ben, or missing some nuance in Huemer's argument.)
I know you're trying to make a reasoned point, Ben, but Huemer's argument is laughably stupid from the start: taxation is not theft because paying it *is* voluntary. The taxpayer is *not* paying their taxes without consent, which is Huemer's definition of theft. You may grumble about paying those taxes, but it is not coerced. The IRS doesn't come to your house with a gun and demand money.
Paying taxes in voluntary, full stop. Anybody is more than welcome to decide the United States is not for them, and leave. Go. If you don't want to enjoy the benefits of living in the United States, or Canada, or Italy, or anywhere, if you don't want roads to drive your Lambo on, and mail and police protecting your property, and firemen that will come and rescue your McMansion if it catches fire, and laws to protect your rights, and rights at all, if you don't want to pay some amount of your personal wealth to secure those things, then go. Get the F out of the country. Nobody's making you stay here.
Good luck finding another country that doesn't tax you, but that's not my problem. I pay my taxes, enjoy the substantial benefits of the community, and don't whine and carp about paying my taxes.
The whole argument that taxation is theft is stupid, and it's done a tremendous amount of damage to the country because it undermines the very idea of a union of people, and the people who push it are acting in bad faith. They know it's wrong, they're just being selfish brats.