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.
Well, I reckon it depends upon how good of an accountant you can afford.
Less facetiously, yes if you don't pay your taxes there is a penalty. But that penalty comes *after* you have voluntarily accepted the terms of the arrangement. I will restate my position: if you do not want to pay taxes the U.S. government, you are free to leave the country. Nobody is *forcing* you to stay here and work and pay taxes. You are free to go live on a boat in the ocean or in a hut in the Amazon rain forest. You may discover after doing that that it's not quite the life you expected, but that's your problem not mine.
What you cannot do is live and work in the U.S., accrue all the benefits of living and working in the U.S., which are substantial, and then argue that you shouldn't have to give up any portion of your wealth to help support the system which makes your lifestyle possible in the first place. I mean, you can do that, one of those substantial benefits is that it's a free country, but it's a dumb argument that has no credibility.
Just read your Damage article via email and was so impressed that I found the first place I could comment, which was here. Ben, that was one of the best (and concise) critiques I’ve seen. Also I have a similar pet-peeve about people bypassing left-wing critiques (of any number of things) and further amplifying right-wing voices. It’s not just mean to ignore us, it can channel people toward the right. “Oh that person makes sense", as they enter the rabbit hole.
It seems to me like there's at least two plausible kinds of responses to the Hermit's spear case that are plausible.
1) Say that taking the spear would be wrong, not because it is the Hermit's property, but because doing so violates some other moral duty you are subject to. For example, suppose people are subject to Rawls's natural duty of justice (the relevant part of which is: do your part to contribute to the building of just institutions when doing so is not too costly). Taking the spear would predictably foster distrustful attitudes in the Hermit and so would impede the construction of just institutions for the sake of avoiding the trivial cost of not getting something that you want. Thus, taking the spear would violate the natural duty of justice. Basically, the idea here is to find a way to say that it's wrong to take the spear but not because it's theft.
2) Say that taking the spear would be wrong because it amounts to theft, but it only counts as such because the Hermit has acquired a very weak natural property right to it. Basically, the idea here would be to grant that some quasi-Lockean story about natural property rights is correct, but only for property rights that hold in situations where others do not have sufficiently strong countervailing interests. Though the Hermit may have a property right to the spear in the stated case - where we are considering taking the spear solely because we think it is cool - they may not have a right to it in the case where you need the spear to survive and the Hermit only has it because they think it's cool (e.g., in either a case where they have many spears, or they have some other way of feeding and keeping themselves safe). The upshot of this would be that we gain a way of accommodating the intuition that taking the spear violates a natural property right that does not open ourselves up to attempts to argue from natural rights to the conclusion that taxation is theft. As long as the taxes we levy are being used to satisfy important, justice-relevant interests and that they don't leave those who must pay them without enough to satisfy their most important needs/interests, the premise that one can only have weak natural rights to property implies that there aren't any natural property rights to the money that's taken in the first place. This seems to me to be the kind of response you allude to when you say that the case is an easy one that many different views of property can accommodate.
The problem with your answer to the Hermit case is that it is non-responsive to Heumer’s point. The example shows that you can have property (and therefore theft) without a state. But you clearly can’t have property (or theft) without law. It therefore shows you can have law without a state and that it is conceptually possible for the state to violate the law.
Law is a matter of convention, not command. In fact,unless you already have a system of law, you can’t have authority to legislate. So there is law when groups that aren’t subject to a state confront each other, and theft will be resented and (if possible) punished.
The fact that most socialists morally approve of the kind of property the hermit has is totally irrelevant to the argument, which is a conceptual one. Property rights existed long before socialism (of the kind prefigured by a welfare state, at least) was possible.
The answer, though, is that just as law can give rise to property rights, it can also give rise to sovereign rights, which include the authority to tax. Sovereign rights might not be presupposed by property rights but that doesn’t show they are incompatible. Indeed, distinguishing them does require the development of some kind of state - and distinguishing them tightly depends on the development of the bourgeois state.
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.
What happens when you don’t pay the taxes, Paul?
Well, I reckon it depends upon how good of an accountant you can afford.
Less facetiously, yes if you don't pay your taxes there is a penalty. But that penalty comes *after* you have voluntarily accepted the terms of the arrangement. I will restate my position: if you do not want to pay taxes the U.S. government, you are free to leave the country. Nobody is *forcing* you to stay here and work and pay taxes. You are free to go live on a boat in the ocean or in a hut in the Amazon rain forest. You may discover after doing that that it's not quite the life you expected, but that's your problem not mine.
What you cannot do is live and work in the U.S., accrue all the benefits of living and working in the U.S., which are substantial, and then argue that you shouldn't have to give up any portion of your wealth to help support the system which makes your lifestyle possible in the first place. I mean, you can do that, one of those substantial benefits is that it's a free country, but it's a dumb argument that has no credibility.
The distinction you make between law and morality presupposes a society with classes and states, which the Hermit example doesn’t include.
Just read your Damage article via email and was so impressed that I found the first place I could comment, which was here. Ben, that was one of the best (and concise) critiques I’ve seen. Also I have a similar pet-peeve about people bypassing left-wing critiques (of any number of things) and further amplifying right-wing voices. It’s not just mean to ignore us, it can channel people toward the right. “Oh that person makes sense", as they enter the rabbit hole.
Michael Huemer also had an interesting debate on this topic with Philip Goff :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLEDJcNF5s4
It seems to me like there's at least two plausible kinds of responses to the Hermit's spear case that are plausible.
1) Say that taking the spear would be wrong, not because it is the Hermit's property, but because doing so violates some other moral duty you are subject to. For example, suppose people are subject to Rawls's natural duty of justice (the relevant part of which is: do your part to contribute to the building of just institutions when doing so is not too costly). Taking the spear would predictably foster distrustful attitudes in the Hermit and so would impede the construction of just institutions for the sake of avoiding the trivial cost of not getting something that you want. Thus, taking the spear would violate the natural duty of justice. Basically, the idea here is to find a way to say that it's wrong to take the spear but not because it's theft.
2) Say that taking the spear would be wrong because it amounts to theft, but it only counts as such because the Hermit has acquired a very weak natural property right to it. Basically, the idea here would be to grant that some quasi-Lockean story about natural property rights is correct, but only for property rights that hold in situations where others do not have sufficiently strong countervailing interests. Though the Hermit may have a property right to the spear in the stated case - where we are considering taking the spear solely because we think it is cool - they may not have a right to it in the case where you need the spear to survive and the Hermit only has it because they think it's cool (e.g., in either a case where they have many spears, or they have some other way of feeding and keeping themselves safe). The upshot of this would be that we gain a way of accommodating the intuition that taking the spear violates a natural property right that does not open ourselves up to attempts to argue from natural rights to the conclusion that taxation is theft. As long as the taxes we levy are being used to satisfy important, justice-relevant interests and that they don't leave those who must pay them without enough to satisfy their most important needs/interests, the premise that one can only have weak natural rights to property implies that there aren't any natural property rights to the money that's taken in the first place. This seems to me to be the kind of response you allude to when you say that the case is an easy one that many different views of property can accommodate.
You have way more patience than I...
The problem with your answer to the Hermit case is that it is non-responsive to Heumer’s point. The example shows that you can have property (and therefore theft) without a state. But you clearly can’t have property (or theft) without law. It therefore shows you can have law without a state and that it is conceptually possible for the state to violate the law.
Law is a matter of convention, not command. In fact,unless you already have a system of law, you can’t have authority to legislate. So there is law when groups that aren’t subject to a state confront each other, and theft will be resented and (if possible) punished.
The fact that most socialists morally approve of the kind of property the hermit has is totally irrelevant to the argument, which is a conceptual one. Property rights existed long before socialism (of the kind prefigured by a welfare state, at least) was possible.
The answer, though, is that just as law can give rise to property rights, it can also give rise to sovereign rights, which include the authority to tax. Sovereign rights might not be presupposed by property rights but that doesn’t show they are incompatible. Indeed, distinguishing them does require the development of some kind of state - and distinguishing them tightly depends on the development of the bourgeois state.