> but it also wiped out a large percentage of the wealth of the poorest people.
This is a blatantly incorrect statement (that shows the bias of the author). Old currency could be turned into bank accounts, and then out to new currency.
The inconvenience was around the logistics of getting new notes into circulation (which was indeed managed badly in many parts), but no way can this be conflated with 'wiped out a large percentage of wealth'. The author's bias is making that leap.
You're right but the author isn't totally incorrect.[0]
>But with the note shortage in India, cash is precious and the queue-jumping jugaad has a dark side. As banks quickly run out of cash, many have to go hungry if they cannot make it to the front of the line. Others have to take days off work to wait in line. One man, standing in the queue at the bank, who does odd jobs for a launderette, says he will phone his boss when he reaches the front, so that he can come and make a cash deposit. “Every man, whether he’s rich or poor, has a mouth to feed. But somehow, only ordinary folks like us end up standing in line,” he says.
However counterproductive India's change might have been, I don't think you can call statements like "it also wiped out a large percentage of the wealth of the poorest people" and "One could argue that the Indian government recalling bank notes had a positive impact on citizens (more tax revenue for education, roads, etc). Yet it also harmed millions by eroding their wealth" anything other than a misrepresentation of what the Indian government actually did.
I don't think it serves the Bitcoin ecosystem well when CEOs of some of its most trustworthy platforms make such flatly wrong statements on basic finanical issues. More generally, it's a counterproductive line of rhetoric to take when the average person in the developed world is several orders of magnitude more likely to suffer significant wealth loss through BTC volatility, platform malfeasance or government crackdown on domestic bitcoin use than hyperinflation or generalised currency seizures by Western goverments.
> The inconvenience was around the logistics of getting new news into circulation (which was indeed managed badly in many parts)
86% of the currency in the market was wiped out to target 6% of unaccounted income in cash. There is no way to even justify such a policy forget manage it.
The reality is that the vast majority of the bank notes were actually deposited and did not get wasted.
Actually, some who have a slightly darker view of the actual reasoniwho behind why this was done contend that one of the biggest reasons behind "demonetizabehind was that the govt expected a significant chunk of money to NOT be deposited into banks, thereby helping the govt's finances (cash is essentially a loan owed by the govt. Cash that was not converted and therefore made valueless meant the govt owed less money). If this view is correct, one of the biggest failures of demonetization was that such a large percentage of cash was converted that the govt didn't benefit from this avenue.
Furthermore, all the articles about how day laborers go without food ignore the fact that day laborers routinely went without food even before demonetization. The question should have been how much worse it made things for day laborers, something which few articles even attempt to answer.
Finally, it's hard for Westerners to recognize how much more integrated digital services through cellphones are in the daily lives of poor people in Asia and Africa compared to NA and Europe.
Are you aware of stats for how many of the cancelled currency was deposited? I heard stories of families losing significant fractions of their savings, but of course that's anecdote, not data.
It is a statement which is de jure incorrect but de facto correct.
The timelines were completely unrealistic from a logistical standpoint. India is not yet at a stage where poor people can make their day-to-day transactions with debit cards instead of cash. Being able to deposit their savings in time by the deadline is a pointless irrelevancy if the bank cannot give them enough valid currency in return for their daily needs.
One needs only look at the downturn in India's recent economic figures to see the macro results.
Talking about pragmatic human rights: Fiat money exists as legal tender in many countries in one form or another. No shop keeper can turn you down for wanting to pay with Dollars. With Bitcoin that's a different story.
While I wholeheartedly agree with all the benefits a currency like Bitcoin can offer, I think we're a long way from being able to use Bitcoin as an embodiment of basic human right.
No shop keeper can turn you down for wanting to pay with Dollars.
I do appreciate your point, although 'legal tender' is generally only a relative term with regard to payment of debts. A seller is not otherwise obliged to accept dollars.
That's not true, my local german bakery simply doesnt accept big euro bills with the premise it could be fake money, which is nonsense as the smaller bills get faked more often, shit like this can't happen with bitcoin.
They also dont accept debit cards so u can be screwed if u have only a 100 eur bill with you..
Kind of sad when people make such suggestions, not because it's alright if the government interferes with ones wealth, but because they thereby implicitly water down the concept of human rights.
Basic human rights are being treated as an equal to other human beings and with human dignity, being allowed to live, prohibition of slavery, being treated equal in front of the law and getting due process, and not being tortured. Everybody should be able to agree on them.
Yes, maybe controlling your own wealth should a right. But please don't put it on a par with basic human rights.
There are also plenty that would insist that insisting on a right to property is fundamentally incompatible with liberty, and can even be incompatible with a right to life (e.g. if enforcement of property rights de facto takes away peoples realistic ability to provide for themselves).
EDIT: We even have good historical examples of the latter, such as the Great Famine in Ireland, where food exports continued - people died because other peoples property rights were put before their right to life, and people had no realistic prospect of acquiring or growing food in time to compensate for the crop failures. Notably, in contrast, in at least one past famine, the government had banned food exports to force prices down.
"if enforcement of property rights de facto takes away peoples realistic ability to provide for themselves"
Removal of property rights intrinsically takes people's ability to provide for themselves away and replaces it with dependency. Some people seem to prefer this arrangement and I can respect that, but when they describe it as 'liberty', I assume that they must have lost their minds.
In a functioning society, there are always going to be rules. Rules depend on someone or something enforcing them. If a society decides to adopt 'liberty' defined as the lack of all rules and no enforcement to create the dependency you mention, then this will merely breed a different kind of rules. Whoever is strongest will make the new rules and liberty will disappear as quickly as is was put in place.
Defining liberty as an absence of dependency cannot work in any society because it's going to degenerate into an unfree one more or less immediately. What's worthwhile to pursue is that all rules apply to everyone in the same way and that everyone has a realistic opportunity to shape the rules together with all the other people. This means participation in the political process, division of powers, transparency to avoid corruption, education for everyone, and enough executive power to prevent some random billionaire from unilaterally seizing power. It does not mean abolishing the organization tasked with guaranteeing those rights.
You are jumping to the conclusion that any removal of property rights intrinsically and automatically removes peoples ability to make use of property.
That is a direct parallel to the entire point of the "property is theft" argument: that strict enforcement of property rights is a limitation on peoples ability to make use of property, by monopolising use of it.
You can destroy the ability to make use of property by going too far either way.
A good example of how carveouts can increase the ability of people to make use of property and improve their ability to provide for themselves is the Scandinavian "freedom to roam": In Norway anyone can use "outland" - areas that are not part of urban settlement. Owning the land gives you a monopoly on certain users (e.g. you will own hunting rights and forestry rights, for example) but far fewer than most other places.
Apart from providing liberty in the form of being able to go where we want without having to ask permission of land owners, for centuries this has been an important means for people to help provide for themselves: Nobody can deny you the ability to e.g. pick berries or mushrooms, or let your sheep graze, for example. It provides a substantial increase in utility of land that would often see substantially less use, and makes a lot of people able to be independent and work for themselves instead of someone else. That is one way it can increase liberty.
If you choose to give up your life in the pursuit of liberty, that's great for you and great for us.
But rights are things that circumscribe government actions, not individuals. A government's first job and most important job is to safeguard the lives of it's citizens. Liberty is it's second job.
I suspect the real reason for this is that security is easier to define and agree on than liberty is. Ditto for property vs liberty.
I have sympathy with your argument, but I'm not 100% convinced. If controlling your own capital means having access to the economy so that you can buy food and housing, then it becomes a prerequisite for basic human rights like actually living; doesn't that at a certain point put it on the same level?
It's sort of like countries that take steps to ensure everyone has access to the internet as a basic right: they acknowledge that participating in the modern economy, and the things that flow from that participation (security, dignity, basic sustenance) require internet access to do it meaningfully. How else are you going to apply for jobs, when companies no longer sort through CVs sent in by post?
(As an aside, this is one reason I rage at people -- and this has been a strain of thought popular in Britain recently -- that make negative comments about the homeless having "luxuries" like smartphones. How else are they supposed to find work, be contactable to do that work, etc.? Being able to make and receive phone calls, SMSes, and emails is essential in 2017, at least in Europe. Madness.)
Anyway, point is, it's not enough to say that "everyone has the right to life and not be tourtured" and other abstract concepts. Having a right, truly, means being able to exercise it meaningfully -- just having it under the law is not enough. Therefore, the prerequisites to exercising those rights need to also be in place, and form at the very least a part of those basic rights, even if you do not want to classify them as seperate, also basic rights. (But I think arguing about Linnean distinctions is a little pointless.)
> ... doesn't that at a certain point put it on the same level?
I don't think so, no.
Basic human rights are something that we agree shouldn't be taken away, from anyone, even from prisoners.
Control of wealth is not one of those things, I don't think. There are times when it's fair for your country to take your money from you against your will. There are times when it's fair for your country to audit or freeze your finances against your will, or simply stop you accessing them.
Is control of money & access to the economy important? Sure. It's important enough to be in the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war are expected to be paid, and have access to a shop.
There are times when it's fair for your country to take your money from you against your will
And there are times when you can be jailed against your will. There is a huge gray area between absolute private property and absolute state property that's where every country in the world is, including worst tiranies. Also free societies are more on the more private property half of that area.
You seem to be suggesting a positive correlation between private property and freedom, but I think that's a far more complicated relationship than an implied correlation allows... as shown by the fact that 'socialist' democracies like New Zealand, Canada, Denmark, etc. consistently rank highest on indices of freedom (e.g. Cato) and laissez-faire democracies like the US tend to trail them.
Edit: BTW, my point was that your previous point is nonsensical. The fact that the State can suspend one right doesn't mean that right is less important.
Also you don't seem to understand that "social democracy" is actually what happens in every western country, even the USA. The goverment seizes at least half the production of the country. Maybe USA spends a lot in the military while other countries spends more on public health. But that's how they spend the money. The fact that money is collected and percentage of wealth seized is the same.
What (hopefully) we're talking about here is the legal safety that you have for the money that you have after taxes. If the State can arbitrarily seize money, raise the taxes to confiscatory levels or use another trick to crush you, that's lack of control.
I don't think that's worse in NZ than in the USA. Actually I believe it to be the other way around.
> Edit: BTW, my point was that your previous point is nonsensical. The fact that the State can suspend one right doesn't mean that right is less important.
You're analysing my point backwards. Fundamental right aren't more important because the state can't suspect them... they are more important, so the state shouldn't suspend them.
Do we now agree, or do you still disagree even with the order corrected?
> Also you don't seem to understand that "social democracy" is actually what happens in every western country, even the USA.
Okay, slow down and take the time to read what I actually wrote, because you're quoting and arguing against something I didn't say... and being kinda rude with it. I'm fine being easy-going about your manners, but if you're not going to bother reading what I wrote then writing more is kinda pointless.
Look, if you stray from initial point and keep moving goal posts, don't expect me to be kind. You first wrote this:
Basic human rights are something that we agree shouldn't be taken away, from anyone, even from prisoners.
That seems like a clear (and wrong) point. Free speech, freedom to move and so on are human rights and everybody understand that. One prisoner has none of these.
So first you make an obliquous attack on private property, you don't say it's not a human right, but you create a distintion between "basic" and "advanced" human rights and proceed to define a rule that separates ones from the others.
But that rule doesn't work. We suspend basic human rights to prisoners because, well, they're prisoners and there are good reasons to do it.
Now you say that the point is backwards because casuality is the other way around. But it makes no difference. Please explain what it is said difference if you disagree. But then, you would have no point at all, it's just your opinion on what should be.
Also you blatantly misrepresent what I said:
You seem to be suggesting a positive correlation between private property and freedom
That's taking a clear point (that without private property there is no freedom) and introducing a scale of "more private property" vs "less private property", that's also misleading, because all the countries that you mention have well protected private property.
So you're consistently trying to dilute others' points, making distracting distinctions and then ignoring the original points. I hadn't complained, but it's not a nice way to discuss, FYI.
> Look, if you stray from initial point and keep moving goal posts, don't expect me to be kind.
I'm not asking you to be kind. I expect you to either read what I write, or be polite enough to discuss the misunderstandings without being rude. Neither of those have consistently been the case so far.
You feel like I'm moving goalposts, I don't see how that's true because I've spent most of this conversation trying to interpret and reword the things you're saying to openly attempt to understand what you're getting at. I haven't found your comments so far very clear.
>... Also you blatantly misrepresent what I said
Not at all. I said openly that I didn't follow your point: "Sorry I'm not sure what your point is here. You SEEM to be..." [emphasis added]. I don't think it's a reasonable position that I'm "blatantly misrepresenting" what you said there. I openly stated my confusion at the point you were trying to make.
I'm happy to discuss opposing views but please drop the attitude. It's neither helpful nor necessary... but I'll have another go at trying to find the source of our disagreement.
> That seems like a clear (and wrong) point. Free speech, freedom to move and so on are human rights and everybody understand that. One prisoner has none of these.
I disagree. Prisoners should have fundamental rights (and do in many cases, it varies wildly). There are organisations who spend a lot of time watching for & correcting human rights violations within the criminal justice system (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, ACLU).
Freedom to move is a point worth discussing too. I think "freedom to move" while often discussed as a fundamental right is interpreted as freedom of residence, or to not be stopped while travelling around a state; I don't think it means everyone should be allowed to go everywhere at all times. I don't think anyone would think it reasonable to let serial killers roam around freely.
> But that rule doesn't work. We suspend basic human rights to prisoners because, well, they're prisoners and there are good reasons to do it.
So your assertion here is that prisoners are stripped of all human rights? Which country does that?
>doesn't that at a certain point put it on the same level?
No, it's only a prerequisite as a result of the existing economic model. Human rights should transcend that.
I think capitalism is mostly effective at producing good outcomes, and as such it should be supported in as far as it does. But the important thing is the outcomes, not the capitalism.
>I appreciate my smartphone, but understand a trail of human misery was used in its creation.
Are you implying all mining produces human misery? I suggest you look into how a modern mine works in a developed country. A mine that kills people is a reflection of the country, not the act of mining itself.
Mining still kills people in developed countries. It's also associated with long term heath issues like black lung, which is vastly under reported in the US.
Maybe underground coal mining. But that has little relationship to mining precious metals. I suggest you take a look at how open pit ore mines are operated to understand how silly your suggestion is of issues with black lung.
Exactly. "Human rights" should be universal. "controlling your own wealth" is not. Because it implies:
- control
- wealth
- ownership
3 concepts that are tied too our current society. You can imagine other societies where those don't hold anymore, but where human right should still hold.
The problem is that there's a certain segment of the population that views that right so broadly that it encompasses a bunch of stuff I and most others don't agree with.
Property rights are weird. We all mostly agree that no one should be able to steal your phone off your desk at work. We very much don't agree that governments should not be able to tax income. When someone says "controlling your own wealth should be a basic human right", I don't know whether I agree or not until I know quite a lot more about what that person means. Which probably means I disagree that it's a basic human right.
>Property rights are weird. We all mostly agree that no one should be able to steal your phone off your desk at work. We very much don't agree that governments should not be able to tax income.
Stealing your phone or taxing your income is fundamentally the same. And it doesn't matter how many agree that it's acceptable. In a lot of countries, a lot of people agree that those who make blasphemous statements should be imprisoned or put to death. They do not see any inherent right to free speech. By your logic, if a lot of people agree that blasphemy should be punishable by the state, free speech is not necessarily a human right.
"Nobody has the right to steal" is a tautology: theft is by definition the unsanctioned removal of something, so all theft implies the violation of some right. All property rights accomplishes in this sense is making stealing easier by extending the human rights to encompass basically anything, making it easier to find a means to violate someones right.
>doesn't that at a certain point put it on the same level?
No, it's only a prerequisite as a result of the existing economic model. Human rights should transcend that.
Not very convincing. Do you have some alternative to the "existing economic model"? I ask because I can't think of a single example of a free society where there's no private property.
The people that think such things as the State having no right to collect taxes are terribly naive. But it's equally naive to think that you can be free in a society where you don't have economic freedoms.
>Do you have some alternative to the "existing economic model"? I ask because I can't think of a single example of a free society where there's no private property.
I don't know if there is a viable alternative economic model, but I can certainly conceive of them, and I don't think "Human Rights" should preclude those models, nor do I think they need to.
If the current economic system requires certain prerequisites to meet our Human Rights, then those prerequisites are implied by those rights in the context of that system.
>But it's equally naive to think that you can be free in a society where you don't have economic freedoms.
To "be free" is a nebulous concept. There are many possible freedoms one can have, and many of them conflict with each other.
To some, economic freedoms mean the freedom to deny food to the starving. Many people disagree on whether this is a freedom worth defending.
I don't know if there is a viable alternative economic model, but I can certainly conceive of them
So you neither know nor you acknowledge that's absurd.
To "be free" is a nebulous concept. There are many possible freedoms one can have, and many of them conflict with each other.
That is terribly wrong. Freedom is not some abstract idea, it's freedom from tirants that try to keep you enslaved using a variety of means. That's why freedom is a whole.
Come on, that's like politics fundamentals. Is this really news to you?
I think your notion of freedom is overly simplistic.
A freedom is the ability to choose to do something. But choosing to do some things will limit the choices of others. Therefore we must inevitably trade some freedoms against others.
Generally we agree on certain trade-offs. We agree that freedom from murder is more important than freedom to kill. We agree that freedom from slavery is more important than freedom to enslave.
But there are many cases where people do not agree on the trade-offs. If you respond to these cases by insisting that your preferred trade-offs are somehow correct by definition, you're avoiding the argument. Why are those freedoms preferable?
And freedom to control property is one of case where people disagree. In order to own property, you must deny others the ability to use that property, and in extreme cases that means denying the starving the ability to eat. Many people believe that in such cases, the freedom to survive is more important than the freedom to control property.
This is not my notion of freedom. This is what political thought looks like since the liberal revolutions and for good reasons. At the time there were very real obstacles to freedom in european countries: absolutist regimes with a strong intellectual support. The liberals realized that the tyranny had many tentacles and that the fight for freedom should address every one of them.
And make no mistake: that's also true for modern tyrannies, communism, right wing dictatorships or theocratic regimens.
My point is very simple and I'm sad to see people answering to my comments are not properly addressing it.
My point is that there is not a single country that can be considered free where you cannot safely own wealth. This is not just an idea: it's a fact that you can easily check.
If you come to think about it, it's a very similar reasoning to the one that originated socialism. You can't be free if you're starving or if you're so poor that you can't get out of poverty, or you can't afford proper healthcare, or you can't give your children an education.
In the same way, you can't be free if the State has arbitrary power to ruin your life. There must be some safety, a rule of law that assures that reasonable expectatives are met.
> This is what political thought looks like since the liberal revolutions and for good reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_freedom really? Notice that almost this entire article is discussing the various differing opinions on what constitutes freedom, and in particular the trade-offs between positive and negative freedoms.
Yes they share some broad similarities, and everyone agrees that obvious historical tyrants are bad, but there's a lot of nuance once you get into the details.
>My point is that there is not a single country that can be considered free where you cannot safely own wealth.
That depends what you mean by "safely". Plenty of countries charge property taxes, and many have eminent domain laws which can force you to surrender land. Property is not absolute, nor do I think it should be.
Which is why I don't think these kind of economic decisions should be considered Human Rights.
That depends what you mean by "safely". Plenty of countries charge property taxes, and many have eminent domain laws which can force you to surrender land. Property is not absolute, nor do I think it should be.
Of course property is not absolute, it's you who said it, not me.
Which is why I don't think these kind of economic decisions should be considered Human Rights.
That's not a good point. Free speech is a human right and it's not absolute, is it?
Anyway, you're missing the point. What we are talking about (if for no other reason, because that was TFA's point) is safety for personal wealth that was acquired legally and after due taxes are paid. We're talking about arbitrary seizure, not about taxes.
Actually I have learned today that for some reason, there is people that conflates them. So it's either communism or wild capitalism. Honestly I didn't expect that.
Consider Proudhons famous "property is theft" for a moment.
His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it.
Sometimes that may be worth it: the deprivation of others may be small, and the benefits to the individual of being able to wall something off might be high.
Even the vast majority of anarchists and communists would draw a sharp line between private property + the "means of production" vs. personal property. To put it rather pointedly: Pretty much everyone agrees that granting every random stranger the right to use your toothbrush deprives us of more rights than it provides us.
Where exactly the line goes on what should be shared and what should not is one of the major differentiating factors of political ideologies, but that there is a line is recognised by every present-day government in the world.
The enforcement of exclusionary property rights might enhance everyones rights and freedoms when what is walled off is so common that there is no perceptable increase in freedom from protecting part of it or when the benefits of exclusionary access are large enough to overcome the downsides, and it might enhance some peoples rights all the time, but it may also cause a drastic, profound reduction in the rights of many once something is scarce enough that allowing some people exclusionary control of it has the potential to significantly deprive others.
To take an extreme example: If all the resources you could have used to obtain food belongs to someone else, you've just de facto lost the right to live and having a de jure right to life does not help you.
This also acts as its own counter-example: If you don't have right to control your own wealth, then the ability to eat depends on the willingness of socity to let you.
And therein lies the problem with looking at a right to controlling your own wealth: Depending on how the society you happen to live in today is structured in terms of your ability to obtain wealth, and who has ownership, you may have more de facto rights with a right to control your own wealth or more without it. And that structure can change, and suddenly reverse the effect.
In other words, a "right to control your own wealth" does not provide a universal good, but one that is conditional on circumstances. That is my biggest problem with considering it as suitable to be a human right.
>His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it.
That makes absolutely no sense. That's like saying preventing people from feasting on your flesh makes them all poorer. I'm using an extreme example to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument that enforcing exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources that you've appropriated and applied work to in order to turn it into something highly valuable (whether that be soil, water CO^2 and sunlight that you converted into food and then into bodily mass, or sand that you melted into silicon and turned into a microprocessor), deprives others of their rights.
The resource has to belong to the public to begin with. Your body belongs to you exclusively.
We can play your game the other direction. If using "practically free" natural resources doesn't deprive you of your rights, you would have no objections to a company rolling into your neighborhood with bulldozers and taking all of the nutrient-rich soil so that they can turn it into something highly valuable and sell it to other people. You would have no objection to a company like Nestle claiming ownership of a local river and prohibiting nearby residents from drinking from it.
But your body came from natural resources initially. If you do not have a legitimate right to appropriate natural resources and make exclusive use of what you transform said resources into, it follows that you cannot have a right to your own body.
I have no problem charging private entities rent for the appropriation of natural resources. What I have a problem with is demanding a share of the private property that they fashion out of those natural resources. From a public standpoint, it should make no difference if someone appropriates a ton of iron ore and places it in their living room as a collector's item, or if they use it to create a supercomputer. They should pay the same fee to the public in both cases, since it is the natural resource usage that should be charged, (and that the public has a legitimate right to charge a fee for), and not their private actions upon that material. But current tax laws, and Proudhon's argument which the parent comment cites, delegitimizes the value that one adds in the process of creating the latter.
I don't disagree with you on policy, I'm just pointing out that thought experiments pushed to their logical extreme don't really make sense.
Before your body was formed, there was no "you", so the concept of ownership didn't apply. The "offender" in that case was the laws of physics, or some deity if you prefer.
I suppose that if we want to take the "a legitimate right to appropriate natural resources and make exclusive use of what you transform said resources into" argument to its own silly-extreme, we could say that slavery is a natural right, because that sounds like a fairly good description of parents making a baby.
> exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources that you've appropriated and applied work to in order to turn it into something highly valuable
Things like land, mineral resources, and water are definitely not "abundant and practically free", but in most places, scarce and highly contested. Furthermore, the people who control them to a large extent did not work for them, but inherited them. So to what extent you have access to some portion of these scarce resources doesn't depend on your own labor, but on whether you happened to get lucky in the birth lottery and get born to someone who, in the 19th century, signed a favorable water-rights contract in California, or a favorable ranching/mineral-rights contract in Texas. You'd have to have quite some metaphysical faith in the "labor mixing" theory to believe that because some pioneer in the 1850s got a good deal on land or water, it metamorphosized into "his land" in perpetuity, even though he didn't create it. Or, in many cases, even put any actual labor into it in the first place (many of these deals were "paper" deals where east-coast financiers acquired Western land holdings, and sent other people to work them).
Natural resources that are scarce can be justifiably taxed, but the argument the parent comment paraphrased is not a Georgist one of taxing only land and other natural resources. It is claiming that no form of property rights are legitimate, and that all enforcement of property rights is a violation others' rights.
You quoted Proudhon who considered none-natural-resource classes of property theft as well. But your argument is also absurd:
>What I did claim is property rights over any scarce resource inherently reduces the liberty of others.
All property is scarce, which is why it has market value. You're saying people have no right to the property they create, if it happens to be scarce (which it always is).
Maybe you have some vague arbitrary definition of "scarce" that allows you to claim that the property rights you exercise over your possessions are legitimate, while the property rights of those with much more than you are not.
It's not absurd at all, and your first example is nonsensical.
There's a fundamental difference between creative capitalism, which is the application of intelligence and organisation to the creation of new resources and opportunities from new materials and ideas, and extractive rentier capitalism, which is a zero sum game that works on the principle of monopolised control of limited resources - to the extent that it may actually deliberately limit those resources purely for profit. (See also Enron, pharmaceuticals, OPEC, and many other examples.)
If I own a significant amount of property in a town I can increase rents to "the level the market will bear" - which will have the sole effect of enriching myself at the expense of everyone else in the town.
Proponents of capitalism who don't understand how capitalism actually works always say "Yes, but someone can always compete with me and charge lower rents."
Except they won't, and this never happens, because once an exploitative individual begins creating a monopoly, the feedback loop never works in that direction. It's incredibly hard to destroy a monopoly through market means alone, and lower prices certainly aren't enough to do it on their own.
Why worry about monopolies? Because they're the inevitable outcome of limited ownership. Unequal access to resources is magnified until either a monopoly or a cartel results.
Any suggestion that equates the ability to create this outcome with a basic human right is preposterous. A more nuanced definition of economic rights would severely limit rentier capitalism while encouraging creative capitalism - but intervening to maintain innovation before monopolies or cartels become the main political and economic players.
>It's not absurd at all, and your first example is nonsensical.
It is absolutely absurd, and my first example makes perfect sense if one has the capacity to understand what is being discussed.
>There's a fundamental difference between creative capitalism, which is the application of intelligence and organisation to the creation of new resources and opportunities from new materials and ideas,
Proudhon's argument is that all property is "theft", so there is no such distinction in his philosophy. He was the angsty teenager with the edgy arguments of the 19th century.
>It's incredibly hard to destroy a monopoly through market means alone, and lower prices certainly aren't enough to do it on their own.
Government is a monopoly of force. You want to cure market monopolies by expanding the power of a monopoly that employs threats of violence. Good luck with that.
>Why worry about monopolies? Because they're the inevitable outcome of limited ownership. Unequal access to resources is magnified until either a monopoly or a cartel results.
This is unscientific quackery. You have provided no evidence at all for this inflammatory fearmongering. You're making a very specific argument about the cause of a particular outcome, in a system with an untold number of factors at play that could explain any set of outcomes.
>Any suggestion that equates the ability to create this outcome with a basic human right is preposterous.
Violently attacking someone and/or throwing them in prison for their refusal to hand you a share of the currency they received in private trade is a grotesque violation of human rights.
Trying to justify this grotesque violation of human rights with economic quackery that you are trying to pass off as fact (just another variation of the "if you don't rob the rich guy, you'll starve to death" snake oil that is always used to justify socialist ideology that violate human rights) is childish idiocy.
> Violently attacking someone and/or throwing them in prison for their refusal to hand you a share of the currency they received in private trade is a grotesque violation of human rights.
This argument will be a lot more interesting as soon as someone demonstrates a functioning advanced economy absent a sovereign state, as we commonly think of it, and without someone or something else becoming the de facto sovereign in short order, since then we'll know the state isn't entirely necessary for the levels of wealth and advanced commerce and industry we presently enjoy, as it currently very much appears to be. I'm not holding my breath.
I am not opposed to the existence of a state, and my argument does not necessitate that it be abolished. I think there are legitimate sources of revenue that a state can rely upon, and legitimate functions it can serve in society.
> Government is a monopoly of force. You want to cure market monopolies by expanding the power of a monopoly that employs threats of violence. Good luck with that.
Or you could destroy it by reducing the power of government to use violence to guarantee exclusionary land use.
> Violently attacking someone and/or throwing them in prison for their refusal to hand you a share of the currency they received in private trade is a grotesque violation of human rights.
I would be fully for giving you the right to live untaxed if you also agree to not make use of any of the shared goods paid for by those taxes. That would be including most roads, of course. Have fun trying to earn more that way.
>Or you could destroy it by reducing the power of government to use violence to guarantee exclusionary land use.
Exclusionary land use is necessary for anything as basic as having privacy in your home and personal security. Shifting taxes from income to land would certainly be beneficial, but it would not eliminate monopolies.
>I would be fully for giving you the right to live untaxed if you also agree to not make use of any of the shared goods paid for by those taxes. That would be including most roads, of course.
And that would be absolutely fine. The vast majority of taxes are used for forcible income redistribution (social welfare) and government largess (e.g. miliarily occupying other countries).
If government stuck to providing national defence and roads, it could collect all the revenue it needed from something like a split-rate property tax, and there'd be no need for a human-rights-violating income tax.
>Government is a monopoly of force. You want to cure market monopolies by expanding the power of a monopoly that employs threats of violence. Good luck with that.
I really wish libertarians would stop using this facile rhetorical device: "Government must be bad, it relies on THREATS OF VIOLENCE!!"
But if you're talking about property rights, unless you're suggesting enforcement by stern warnings, you're already talking about using threats of violence to coerce people.
Threats of violence, and by extension government, are not always evil. It's evil when it's used to violate one's human rights. Punishing someone for driving dangerously on public roads, or stealing someone's wallet, is a legitimate exercise of force. Using violence to punish someone for refusing to hand over a share of currency they receive in private trade, or for being 'too successful' at selling a widget and therefore being categorised as a monopolist, is not.
I mean if you're going to criticise libertarianism, at least learn the basics, like what the Non Aggression Principle (notice it's not called the Non Violence Principle) is.
Libertarianism is just the formalization of common decency and common sense. People denigrate it so that they can term basic decency as the tenet of some fringe ideology and get a pass to promote tyranny over other people through political action.
>Threats of violence, and by extension government, are not always evil.
Of course. But my objection is that libertarians like to imply that violence coercion is inherently bad for rhetorical effect when criticising government.
>Using violence to punush someone for refusing to hand over a share of currency they receive in private trade, or for being 'too successful' at selling a widget and therefore being categorised as a monopolist, is not.
Well clearly we disagree. I think asking participants in society to pay for the benefits it affords, and discouraging anti-competitive practices are perfectly reasonable uses of violent coercion, and lead to better outcomes overall.
If you disagree that those policies are effective, that's fine. But please don't elevate your economic theories to morality.
>at least learn the basics, like what the Non Aggression Principle is (notice it's not called the Non Violence Principle).
I know what the NAP is, and I agree right up until libertarians start trying to define aggression to include theft. Honestly, the NAP seems at best like an awkward attempt to simplify a political philosophy, and at worst like a rhetorical device to hide property rights inside something that seems superficially unobjectionable.
>Libertarianism is just the formalization of common decency and common sense.
Yes, that's certainly how it likes to portray itself, but my impression is that as soon it gets into details, it's all about property rights.
I think society should be designed in the way that leads to the best utilitarian outcomes, and I think property rights are a very effective tool and should be part of that system. But they are not perfect, they are not morality, and they're certainly not "common decency".
>Of course. But my objection is that libertarians like to imply that violence coercion is inherently bad for rhetorical effect when criticising government.
I was implying that using threats of violence against non-violent people engaging in voluntary trade with other consenting adults is wrong.
>Well clearly we disagree. I think asking participants in society to pay for the benefits it affords, and discouraging anti-competitive practices are perfectly reasonable uses of violent coercion
So you're willing to use violent coercion against non-violent people for their refusal to pay a debt they did not voluntarily assume and/or for their engaging in too much voluntary trade with other consenting adults. Your moral framework is essentially sociopathic.
Well you can define the word "theft" that way if you want, but I see a big difference between punching someone in the face and picking up an object, whatever words you use for it.
So you can't use the moral weight of the former to make responding to the latter with actual physical violence seem significantly more necessary to me than responding with physical violence to people who don't pay taxes.
I think it's perfectly appropriate to use violence to take back the object that you crafted and someone stole from you. I don't think it's appropriate to use violence to force someone to hand over an object they crafted and which they never agreed to cede to you.
People starve to death because we find protecting property rights more important than letting them eat. How does it not make sense?
I am not saying that reducing enforcement of property rights does not negatively affect the owner. I am saying that there are plenty of cases where property rights reduces the ability of others to make us of it.
This makes it a tradeoff, not something worthy of absolutes.
> That's like saying preventing people from feasting on your flesh makes them all poorer.
And of course it would - if they enjoy human flesh and were denied it, they would certainly be poorer for it - but we thankfully value your right to keep your own flesh higher than someone elses abiltiy to be able to feast on it.
Liberty is not some absolute - pretty much every one us would agree that directly harming someone infringes more on their liberty than outlawing it would.
It's not a zero sum game - a lot of our laws centre around reducing our liberty in ways that increases it more in other ways: Making violent crime illegal and backing it up with the willingness to deprive those using violence of liberty is a restriction on all of us, and certainly even more so of those we justifiably lock up for our protection. But one that simultaneously increases our overall liberty by constraining a tool of oppression.
> I'm using an extreme example to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument that enforcing exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources
If something is abundant, then the argument doesn't apply. That is the entire point: It applies to scarcity. If something is abundant then everyone who wants it can have access.
But land is one such thing that is distinctly scarce. Suitable farmland even more so.
> deprives others of their rights.
If you starve to death because you can not afford food, much less land to grow a crop, nor afford to move anywhere else, you might think otherwise.
That is not really a hypothetical example. E.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland, Irish food exports increased while hundreds of thousands starved to death because their crops had failed and they could not afford to buy the plentiful amounts of food being exported from the island.
They were deprived of their right to life because others property rights were given precedence - to the extent of the UK giving military escorts to ships exporting food.
>People starve to death because we find protecting property rights more important than letting them eat. How does it not make sense?
You're not framing the situation accurately. The question to be asked is: should people starve to death because we refuse to rob someone? The answer is yes.
Even if you don't care about the moral reasons for this, you must see that a legal system which allows those who are resource-poor to legally plunder those who are resource-rich perverts incentives and misallocates capital, leading to less innovation and development, and consequently, less progress in reducing the total number of deaths.
>And of course it would - if they enjoy human flesh and were denied it, they would certainly be poorer for it - but we thankfully value your right to keep your own flesh higher than someone elses abiltiy to be able to feast on it.
My point was that even if they would be richer for being able to cannibalize you, denying them that 'right' is not morally wrong. They do not have a right to feast on you. Even if a group of people were starving, and murdering and cannibalizing you would let them all survive, it would be morally wrong for us as a society to allow that to happen.
>It's not a zero sum game - a lot of our laws centre around reducing our liberty in ways that increases it more in other ways: Making violent crime illegal and backing it up with the willingness to deprive those using violence of liberty is a restriction on all of us, and certainly even more so of those we justifiably lock up for our protection.
Liberty is historically and conventionally defined as rightful action with one's own person and property. Denying someone access to another individual's person and property does not limit anyone's liberty. That is simply contrary to what liberty means.
>If something is abundant, then the argument doesn't apply. That is the entire point: It applies to scarcity. If something is abundant then everyone who wants it can have access.
You're not getting my point. I'm saying that if someone takes abundant resources, applies work to it, and produces something of value that is scarce, they should have full moral rights to it, yet Proudhon's argument, as well as yours, denies them that right.
>But land is one such thing that is distinctly scarce. Suitable farmland even more so.
And therefore it's perfectly suitable to tax valuable land. What is not appropriate is taxing everything a person generates.
Let's say that each tonne of iron ore extracted from the crust costs society $10.00 in diminishment of natural resources, and in environmental damage. Let's say society charges an iron ore miner $50 to extract a tonne of iron ore, to compensate for these costs.
Now if the iron ore miner pays the fee, mines the ore, smelts the iron, and fashions the iron into an incredible machine, you have absolutely no right to what the machine produces. An income tax is not a tax on using scarce natural resources, or a charge for damaging the environment. It is robbery against someone successfully generating economic value. It is a human rights violation.
Proudhon's argument rationalizes the violation of human rights and legalized plunder against those who strive and succeed.
>That is not really a hypothetical example. E.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland, Irish food exports increased while hundreds of thousands starved to death because their crops had failed and they could not afford to buy the plentiful amounts of food being exported from the island.
The Corn Laws prevented the Irish from importing food. It was not liberty that caused the Great Famine in Ireland.
The lack of freedom to submit, or not, to what basically amounts to socialism, instead of being able to choose the use of your labor or its rewards, is in essence its own slavery.
I feel his argument was a utopian and philosophical one, and is quite hard to consider practically, hence the other replies less articulate indignance to the idea.
> Consider Proudhons famous "property is theft" for a moment.
> His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it.
I keep hearing this argument. And its so obviously illogical.
Establishing the concept/law of property and property ownership is probably the first thing a society does as soon as it gets formed.
>Private (not personal) property doesn't a priori have to be more of a natural law than any of those.
Private property is every bit as natural as personal property. Both are enforcing exclusive usage of some part of the natural world for one's own self. Both are required for one to be able to enjoy the full value that they create through their own efforts. The personal/private distinction an arbitrary one with no philosophical basis. It's purely done for sophistry.
When enforcing the access to scarce natural resources or paying someone only part of what their labor is worth, you're enjoying more than just the value of your own efforts. It is way less natural that owning a toothbrush or a laptop.
I can image a society where the first is considered ridiculous. The second, not so much
>When enforcing the access to scarce natural resources
We could require all owners of property to pay rent for their use of natural resources, at a rate commensurate with the value of said natural resources, and there would still be trillions of dollars worth of private property, and socialists claiming a right to an equal share of it based on some contrived justification.
>or paying someone only part of what their labor is worth, you're enjoying more than just the value of your own efforts.
If someone voluntarily gives you more labour than what you pay them for, that's still a voluntary transaction, and anything you earn from that labour is legitimately yours. If you build me a shed in exchange for $1, because you're such a generous guy, I still have full rights to that shed. Of course in most cases people do not accept a job that pays them below market rates.
I assume you're implying that profits are the surplus value of labour that is unfairly provided to employers, which is simple Marxist ignorance.
Profits are the compensation the employer earns for the organisation and capital they provide. Labour is worth whatever its market price is, not whatever revenues are generated in enterprises where it's employed.
It's sad that I have to debunk 150 year old Marxist fairy tales on hackernews.
> Both are required for one to be able to enjoy the full value that they create through their own efforts.
That is demonstrably wrong, given that a large number of people throughout history has enjoyed the full value that they create without enforcing property rights.
If you want to make an argument that property rights are beneficial, then make that argument, because that is an argument that you may be able to defend depending on your underlying assumptions.
But the very point of property law is to limits others ability to make use of property. Its very point is to reduce the liberty of those who does not have ownership.
It's ok to feel that this is an acceptable, justifiable reduction of liberty, but it doesn't change the fact that it places substantial restrictions on others, and trying to pretend that it doesn't will not change that.
>That is demonstrably wrong, given that a large number of people throughout history has enjoyed the full value that they create without enforcing property rights.
That is not demonstrable at all. That's idealising the past for ideological convenience.
>But the very point of property law is to limits others ability to make use of property. Its very point is to reduce the liberty of those who does not have ownership.
Liberty is historically and conventionally defined as rightful action with one's own person and property. Denying someone access to your own person and property does not limit anyone's liberty. That is simply contrary to what liberty means.
Theft implies concept of ownership exist. Proudhons says ownership imples theft. Its just useless nonsense.
So my point was not that if something is accepted in society ==> Its right. There is no such thing as right/wrong/moral/etc. Its about consistencies in the contracts we humans sign with each other.
Pre-property rights, I have the freedom to walk and inhabit any space I want.
Post-property rights, I no longer have the freedom to walk and inhabit any space I want. I can't walk into your living room and stay there. I can't sleep in your bed. Your "right to own property" has severely curtailed my ability to move freely about the world. Men with guns will come after me if I don't leave your bedroom.
Your "private property" has imprisoned me into a tiny rabbit warren of publicly-owned spaces.
Everything is a contract including basic human rights. By birth, you have not signed any. You dont have anything that you can lose. But usually you would implicitly sign "right to freedom" and "property laws" with people around you.
So you did not lose right to move in private properties (because you did not have any) but you gain right/assurance to move freely in public properties without danger to your person.
If aliens invade earth and set their own property laws it would not be stealing. It would be nothing. Because we dont have any contracts with aliens that we can claim aliens have broken.
There's never been a pre-property era. Humans have always been territorial, and even intra-group, have recognized private property. Non-human animals are also territorial and observe principles like First Possession, which is the foundation of property rights.
Then give an example, because the existence of property law, and the fact that property laws can be used for good, does not in any way imply that restricting access to property does not also reduce liberty for those affected.
That does not automatically mean it is bad - to determine that you need to first consider whether a given reduction in liberty is justified. Sometimes it will be, and sometimes it isn't.
Exactly. Resources are limited, so a person's rights to personal property must always traded-off with others persons' rights to live in dignity or being able to live at all. Otherwise you'd have to accept the case that the personal rights of property of a few can essentially deny the right to live in dignity or live at all to others whenever resources are distributed in an extreme way to only those few.
In case you're interested, there are quite elaborate theories of distributional justice. For example, New Theory Of Fairness And Social Welfare by Marc Fleurbaey and Francois Maniquet is a very good recent book on the topic, if you're fine with a decent amount of economic apparatus.
I think the point was that "prerequisite for basic human rights" is not the same thing as "basic human rights." I want everyone to have access to fast, affordable internet. I think it makes the exercising of your basic human rights much easier! That doesn't make the internet a right, and it's certainly not a basic human right on the same level as your right not to be enslaved or murdered.
it's certainly not a basic human right on the same level as your right not to be enslaved or murdered.
You are forgetting that you can be enslaved in a lot of indirect insidious ways that doesn't involve chains or swords.
Most people in absolutist societies weren't murdered or technically slaves. But we considered them not free. Also free expression is a basic human right and we should consider private property the same. Of course every right has limitations, but freedom is a whole, either you are free or you aren't.
I agree free expression is also a basic human right - I'm not sure exactly what you mean by private property. I believe the concept is a basic human right but that doesn't mean every person has the right to a specific piece of property unless you mean something like food or shelter.
>If controlling your own capital means having access to the economy so that you can buy food and housing, then it becomes a prerequisite for basic human rights like actually living; doesn't that at a certain point put it on the same level?
Nope. I think the OP is talking about universal human rights (which are universal in space and time).
Given the current structure of society, controlling your own capital is a means to obtain your basic human rights, and it's totally fine to view it that way, and enforce laws related to it. However, it is not a human right in itself - it is the path to one.
If we made it a basic (universal) human right, then we are putting ourselves in handcuffs - not allowing for a society that could potentially give all the basic human rights, simply because this one human right is forcing us to structure society in a capital oriented way.
Without money you are homeless. Another human right that should be a right is a right to a job. That is necessary to survive as a human with any level of dignity in our society.
I think the parent comment is trying to say that 'basic human rights' are the ones that apply regardless of society.
The claim is that there are some rights that should be due to us because of the context we are in, and some rights that should be due to us simply because we are human.
'Right to a job' would definitely be a right based on context, especially since there are contexts where the concept of 'job' might not make any sense at all.
The question is whether right to property is of the context type or not.
No, without shelter you are homeless. If money is for some reason absolutely necessary to acquire shelter in a particular society (which I don't think it is), then it is implied by a right to shelter.
The issue is that you can quite easily imagine a society where everyone is guaranteed shelter, food, and water by the social structure, and money might be used primarily for luxuries. Money-as-a-right wouldn't necessarily make sense in such a society.
It exists in classical liberal societies because liberalism doesn't really have a consistent concept of positive duties, either on the individual or the societal whole. But there's definitely other forms of political thought, liberalism is just seductive because it claims to arise from the natural state of things.
I can't quite easily imagine such a society. No one can ever explain to how that gets paid for without the government taking even more money from me by force.
Guaranteed by the social structure means that people have collectively agreed to guarantee this to others, and if you don't agree, you're prevented from access to the benefits of the social structure (including those guarantees for yourself). (Part of) left-libertarianism or left-anarchism, basically.
Whether it's taken by force is irrelevant as to whether such a society is possible. A right to shelter does not require a right to property, so you can't use the former as an argument for the latter.
This functionally exists in nz, the uk, australia, where you can claim welfare benefits indefinitely as long as you demonstrate to the system that you're looking for work. (Probably a lot of other places but I don't have direct experience of those). You don't actually have to be really looking of course, you just need to satisfy the clerk at the dole office.
The fundamentals of social structure are so close to the U.S that you have to squint a bit to see the differences.
Yeah it gets abused and it's pretty hard to live on it, but the alternative (as far as a slim moral majority tends to vote) is worse.
Yes, taxes are a bit higher. It's not the end of the world.
Still got problems with homelessness, because that's a hard problem. You can live off benefits but you need to be basically functional to do it.
Watch a few episodes of the UK Who Do You Think You Are tv show and what comes across in many of these people's ancestral stories is that some people had it all (and it didn't always work out for them), women had no right to own a damn thing, and that many, many people suffered and died because there was no welfare state in Europe pre WWII. The lives of ordinary people were often awful and governed by pure chance. The welfare state is one of the greatest achievements of human-kind.
Only if you dream away all the important implementation details. You can easily imagine a being like superman. That doesn't mean a being like superman is possible.
So if you and I are on a desert island, and you have some money, and I have a right to a job, then you are required to offer me a job. I have a right to it, correct? But in so doing, I make you my slave, since you are obligated to employ me. So my "right" to a job violates your right to liberty.
Thus the distinction between negative and positive rights. The fundamental (natural) rights of life, liberty, and property are negative rights in that others may not violate those rights with impunity. (I have a right to defend my life with violence)
Jobs, healthcare, education, income, etc are all positive rights, in that they require someone else to act in order to fulfill my right to those things. Thus all positive rights eventually violate the natural rights of another, since when reduced to the desert island example, the other becomes my slave.
We're on a desert island and:
I have a right to education, and you're a teacher
I have a right to a kidney transplant, and you have two kidneys
I have a right to healthcare, and you're a doctor
I have a right to eat, and you have lots of food
I have a right to shelter, and you have the only hut on the island
In all of these cases, you become my slave, since you are forced to fulfill my "right" to something.
Of course, we're talking about a legal ethic here, not a moral one. If I need shelter, and you have the only hut on the island, then it would be properly moral for you to share with me, but I cannot legally compel you to do so, from a natural rights perspective.
But positive rights are not generally fulfilled by forcing people to work, but by limiting people's right to property slightly through taxation, and using the resulting revenue to pay to fulfil those rights.
Regarding due process, in some criminal cases the U.S. government freezes the funds of the accused, so they can't pay for adequate legal representation and have to take a plea bargain. Would you say that violates basic human rights?
What about those who don't have funds to begin with, hence can't pay for adequate legal representation and have to take a plea bargain. Would you say those don't have basic human rights to begin with?
"Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for by law and by the general principles of international law."
> Everybody should be able to agree on them.
The major problem with rights-based reasoning is that, while you might be able to get people to agree on the rights, you can't necessarily get people to agree on the implications or interpretation of the text.
E.g. Article 8 ECHR effectively overrides the immigration system, which is not immediately obvious from the text.
Throwing someone in prison for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade is no less egregious a violation of human rights than invading their privacy or their right to free speech.
The right to control one's own wealth is arguably the most important human right, since its infringement is the cause of so much death and poverty around the world.
Surely, the problem is in defining what it's "one's own wealth". It's there where opinions are going to diverge.
Very few people will dispute your right to own a pair of boots, but a lot more could have problems with you owning more land that all the farmers of your country together or more money that an entire country.
In most cases, it's not a problem defining what one's own wealth is. If I receive currency in private trade, that's my own wealth. The fact that the government needs me to surrender my privacy and disclose how much currency I received in order to be able to enforce a tax on currency transactions (e.g. an income tax) is an indication that currency received in trade is truly 'private' property. A law requiring me to hand over a share of that currency, and requiring that I be imprisoned if I do not comply, violates my human rights.
The edge cases are natural resources - the most prominently example being land. But the current bevy of economic laws make no distinction between this class of property and other classes, and limit one's right to what is clearly their own wealth.
There is not such thing as "clearly their own wealth" because there is not a natural right to private property but a society agreement. What you can or can't own depends on the circumstances.
For instance, can you be the owner of 1000 can of food?
Absolutely, if you are in the bay area, because the society there allow you that.
What about an island without any other food that is inhabited by 40 other people? I doubt it very much.
The right to private property is every bit as natural as the right to one's own body. Both come from the act of appropriating natural resources and converting it into something of greater value that is personally useful, and making exclusive of the resulting property.
>What you can or can't own depends on the circumstances.
You're confusing the act of protecting a right with the right itself. A right does not cease to exist because the law fails to protect it.
"Both come from the act of appropriating natural resources and converting it into something of greater value that is personally useful"
Where is that written?
I would like to point to you that your "private property", including your own body, could be considered as a "natural resource" ready to be exploited by other agents in the environment.
I doubt that throwing copies of "Atlas Shrugged" to their heads is going to change their mind (even signed copies!).
That is how property has historically been justified. Read up on property rights if you want to learn more about it.
>I would like to point to you that your "private property", including your own body, could be considered as a "natural resource" ready to be exploited by other agents in the environment.
The principle of property rights is that you cannot make use of natural resources that have already been appropriated and turned into someone else's property, so no, another person couldn't simply exploit my property/body under the property rights framework.
I don't understand how you can have a truely private trade. If a trade depends on roads or schools or the internet or police, don't the people who provide those things have a right to share in the benefits of that trade?
where is the money in that private deal coming from if not the state? And what it is the state if not and element (for best or worst) of how we, as a society, have chosen to organize?
You can use private currency. No need to use government issued money. Yet tax laws make no distinction between trade involving government issued currency and trade involving wholly private currencies/properties. And you're making a fallacy of composition in claiming we as a society have decided something. What you're really arguing is that the majority has decided something and that they have a right to force their will on everyone.
The only principle that I want society to follow is to not rob others of their right to their person or property. Everything else can be organized through voluntary association.
Natural resources, from which most current wealth is created are 'edge cases' ?
And your first paragraph is pretty much "all taxes are theft", that is usually the mantra of fanatical libertarians.
The economic illiteracy required to come up with your conclusions is astounding. But then I actually looked at your comment history and the pattern became clear.
Most current wealth is not in the form of natural resources.. Buildings, machinery, intellectual property (including trademarks) are not natural resources. We could charge every appropriator of natural resources a fee commensurate with the value that they are appropriating, and there would still be vast amounts of private property in the world, and that socialists would still think they have a right to forcibly redistribute.
>And your first paragraph is pretty much "all taxes are theft", that is usually the mantra of fanatical libertarians.
One person's "fanatical libertarian" is another person's human rights advocate.
>The economic illiteracy required to come up with your conclusions is astounding.
> Most current wealth is not in the form of natural resources.. Buildings, machinery, intellectual property (including trademarks) are not natural resources.
Incorrect. Buildings stand on land (natural resources) and require significant amounts of energy to be erected (natural resource). So does machinery.
IP is the only thing you have going for here. How useful is IP without infrastructure and capital to support it? Is it useful, for example, to know how to make a solar panel if you have no means of producing it or extracting the metals and materials needed to make it, because that area is controlled by someone else?
> One person's "fanatical libertarian" is another person's human rights advocate.
No. Fanatical libertarians are a fringe group, as is evidenced by elections and the amount of ridicule they rightly garner in any factual discussion. There's no human right to "not be taxes while enjoying the benefits of infrastructure". Perhaps some libertarians' positions are more nuanced, but you wouldn't know it from their comments.
> Worthless ad hominem.
Worthless libertarian drivel. Calling someone illiterate or incompetent in a subject is not an ad hominem when it is based in fact. It's clearly not your area of expertise, so it's not shameful to admit so.
>Incorrect. Buildings stand on land (natural resources) and require significant amounts of energy to be erected (natural resource). So does machinery.
Everything is made from natural resources. That goes without saying. The question is what portion of the value of the property is constituted by the value of the natural resources.
The value of the natural resource inputs to production form a minor fraction of the total value of what is produced. This is because the effort it takes to configure and organize those natural resources into something with added value is what holds the majority of the value. This is why economic systems make such a big difference in the success of economies. Good laws incentivize and reward effective efforts.
>No. Fanatical libertarians are a fringe group, as is evidenced by elections and the amount of ridicule they rightly garner in any factual discussion.
Ok let's play this game:
Libertarians are the ultimate human rights advocates. The majority believes in a lot of silly stuff, like using violence against non-violent people. The majority believing something doesn't make it right.
Your inane insults are typical of anti-libertarian extremists who can't tolerate someone advocating that other people be left alone and not violently forced to conform to a plan imposed by others.
>Worthless libertarian drivel.
Everything you've written has been worthless and intolerant authoritarian drivel. It's the product of an infantile and narcissistic mind, that psychologically projects their own characteristics onto others in the form of insults.
As desirable as it is, it's important to realize that a right to one's own wealth cannot be absolute. Since a right to one's own wealth does not say anything about a right to obtain wealth - that is the role of equal chances, equality in front of the law an other fairness principles encoded in modern societies -, it is for itself perfectly consistent with a society that has Gini index 1. That means that only 1 person owns all resources and everyone else owns nothing.
Such a society would be not be just and nobody wants to live in it. The general idea to prevent this kind of barbarism is that additional fairness criteria are needed that ensure that everybody can live in dignity, and only if your wealth does not violate these principles should you have a right to it. Fair resource distribution principally conflicts with the right to one's own property and unfortunately out of the box also with the Pareto efficiency of transfers.
>That means that only 1 person owns all resources and everyone else owns nothing.
That's like saying we should not have an absolute right to be more intelligent than the average person since such a right is perfectly consistent with a society where one person is infinitely more intelligent than everyone else.
Material equality is not a right, and the pursuit of a society with material equality does not grant any party a right to imprison someone for their refusal to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade.
The problem is that extreme inequality under a property system is functionally equivalent to slavery. If one person owns all of a society's resources, then everyone else must work for them if they want to survive. To claim that the enforcement of property rights is still just in such a scenario, is to argue that autocracy is just.
It's not functionally equivalent to slavery. Slavery has nothing to do with being resource poor. It has to do with threats of violence being used to compel one person to work for another.
There is a fundamental moral difference between using violent threats and physical confinement from using offers of payment to compel work.
Taking a job because the alternative is to starve is still a consensual interaction. We need to work to survive. We can go out into the wilderness, and live off the land, which would let us survive at subsistence levels, or we can go into civilization and work within an employment contract that gives us a much higher standard of living.
The freedom to choose ensures that generally speaking, people in a market economy are choosing one of the better options available to them, rather than one of the poorer ones. It also ensures that when people DO interact with others, it is because it is generally mutually beneficial. This basic dynamic leads to an emergent property of actions carried out in markets generally being a net-value gain for the economy as a whole.
I would say that privacy in all forms is a basic human right. I do feel uncomfortable that I'm just a number controlled by the "state" and corporations. It affects my well being and sometimes my creativity.
Property is a basic human right in exactly the same degree and for exactly the same reason as prohibition of slavery. People have a right to the product of their own labor and the benefits that entails. The right to provide for oneself is a really basic thing. One might argue for exceptions, but one can also argue for exceptions to the right to life. They are both still basic human rights.
So you're saying that it does not violate my rights when someone else claims to own an arbitrary portion of my income? With 25% taxes, I work for 3 months of the year for someone else. If I choose not to pay, then people with guns come to lock me up. How is that not slavery?
> It's everyone's, in the form of the government.
Government is not society. Government is a group of people who consume the productive output of society by force.
"Your income" doesn't even make sense outside of the context of the government and tax system it was created in. Starting from the assumption of the converse is a fundamental error that derails many potentially useful/interesting discussions in the area before they get off the ground.
jonathanstrange is right: Property rights are a complex issue, attempts to align them with "basic human rights" have limited success, and invariably muddy the waters.
You and I are on an island. You have money (or coconuts, or whatever). We agree that if I work for you, then you will give me some payment. That payment is my income.
How does that example depend on the state or a tax system?
You missed the point; I must have been unclear. I'll try again.
The income you and I have today is inextricably tied to the system of government, taxation, and trade that we are in. You can't talk about holding one fixed and changing the other in any meaningful way.
Now the toy examples - two guys on an island have some of their own problems. If it's just you and I on an island we won't bother with currency or payment (this is part of why it's a toy model). Their tends to be furious hand-waving between this sort of example and a "real" economy, and part of the reason for that is much of the mess as it scales up in practice (e.g. in actual history) tends to be creation of exactly the sort of institutions OP is trying to elide. I'm not sure I buy it, but there is at least an argument to be made that they are necessarily tied together.
You can talk about purely theoretical systems with a different basis - but they are completely different systems. Ones that nobody has actually worked out how to implement, for that matter, though there is lots of theorizing. Always worth remembering that the majority of economic theorizing seems to have a fairly loose connection to the observable world.
Fwiw: the desert island scenario, along with Smith's bartering villages are flawed enough to be probably best avoided.
Natural rights should hold in simple and complex examples, without resorting to utilitarian arguments.
> The income you and I have today is inextricably tied to the system of government, taxation, and trade that we are in.
Yes, that is our current context.
> You can't talk about holding one fixed and changing the other in any meaningful way.
Yes, the world is complex. I simply wish to see one with more voluntary interaction and less coercion. Too few hold liberty as a political value, settling for lesser subjective things such as "fairness."
I was using "complex" in a way that should have been made tighter. I meant that the issue of property itself is very complex, in a way that makes their clear definition as a right at the same level as "basic human rights" at best very difficult, which is why it has not been done successfully.
Thr currency you receive in private trade is unquestionably your own private property. The fact that income tax law requires you to surrender your privacy rights and disclose all of the transactions you engaged in in order to collect an income tax is an indication that the activity being taxed is private.
And as long as we stay on that island and live our lives trading coconuts, we can live without much government or taxes. Well, at least until you kill me in my sleep and steal all my coconuts.
It doesn't, because it's an overly simplistic example.
Here is a better one: on the island there is you, me and Bob. Bob does not participate in our trades, but is responsible for things like protecting the island from neighboring tribes, putting out forest fires we accidentally start while camping, and building the paths and roads we use to get around the island.
These things not only benefit us, it can easily be argued that our everyday trades would not be possible without them. Without roads I would not be able to reach you, without Bob's protection I would be robbed or worse on the way to meet you.
This is why Bob is inherently entitled to a portion of our income. Without Bob, the environment in which you and I can comfortably conduct business would not exist.
This still isn't a great example. It would be perfectly simple for you to come to a voluntary arrangement with Bob in exchange for his protection, without suggesting that he's inherently entitled to anything.
The real counter-examples comes at larger scales. At a certain point it becomes impractical for a large number of people to individually make voluntary agreements about their responsibilities to each other, so generally people agree to some system of deciding rules, and agree to the outcome of those decisions in advance, without consenting to each one individually.
Yes, obviously it's not a great example, but I used it because the parent seemed incapable of contemplating any scenario more complex than "a few people on an island".
I really hope you're not serious - having to provide for the support of common infrastructure and needs is very, very different from the condition of slavery, something that our country has a very tarnished history of.
You're free to choose another place to live. You're free to choose how you earn your living, or even whether or not you do earn a living. Nobody will beat you senseless if you decide to take a vacation this week. Nobody has absolute control over every detail of your life. You can marry and associate with whom you choose. You can object to paying 25% of your income, hand out tracts to that effect, and vote for politicians who may change that. You can't be bought and sold.
> having to provide for the support of common infrastructure
If that were the only way taxes were spent, then taxes would be very low indeed, and we may not even need to have this discussion.
> and needs
Taxes pay for way more than "needs." Do we need to bomb people in the Middle East? If there no other way to pay for things than by the threat of violence?
> You're free to choose another place to live.
Am I? The United States must grant permission for you to renounce your citizenship, and until then, they claim taxes on your income no matter where derived. The government also controls the movement of people and may detain me if I attempt to leave the country. Of course I must also have the consent of some other government to gain entry and a work visa.
I did not freely choose to live in my country of birth. I did not consent to the obligations of taxes.
> You can object to paying 25% of your income, hand out tracts to that effect, and vote for politicians who may change that. You can't be bought and sold.
Call it theft, call it extortion - whatever your preferred perjorative is. I'm simply arguing that it's not slavery - and that terming it so deemphasizes the real horror of actual slavery, current and past.
Your primary argument is that basic human rights can't be compared to other basic human rights because of the magnitude of certain ones you find more objectionable?
The slave trade was abolished, I don't think you really need to write a thesis on it. Everyone accepts that, and now would like to elevate attention to more nuanced inequalities.
Income taxes are a 100 year old concept, local and national government was decent at supporting infrastructure and schools when it was just property owners paying taxes.
I would like you to realize that it requires indoctrination to agree with you. Indoctrination that the end result of due process is "right". Indoctrination that the word tax is exempt from scrutiny.
So if we say all taxes are theft, then we are left with no way to force everyone to contribute to public goods.
The normal response by anti-tax people is that all of the roles of government should be funded by opt-in systems, where you agree to pay a fee to get the service.
However, this doesn't work for a lot of public goods that suffer from free loader problems; you can't prevent people from benefiting from the good if they don't pay. Take, for example, roads; either roads are public, and a freeloader can choose not to pay and use them anyway, or they are private toll roads, and a person could be literally imprisoned because every road to move around requires payment to use.
An even more obvious example is something like pollution control. Society has an interest in preventing people from dumping toxic waste into rivers and lakes, so we create restrictions. However, someone has to enforce those restrictions, and that requires funding. Without taxes, we would have to volunteer to pay money for the enforcement; however, why would I pay? I get to enjoy the clean water whether I pay or not, so why not just freeload? This will mean enforcement funding will not be there, and people can just pollute as much as you want.
You need a way to get everyone to contribute for public goods, which is why we need taxes.
a public good is a good that is both non-excludable
and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be
effectively excluded from use and where use by one
individual does not reduce availability to others
You assume a road is a public good. Sunshine is a public good. A road is not.
It's hard to imagine a society not oriented around roads, since the government has been building them for so long. But lots of people have an economic interest in using and maintaining the roads.
> An even more obvious example is something like pollution control.
Ah, the good old, "Libertarians can't handle externalities."
Well there is lots of free-market scholarship on pollution and courts going back decades. If you're actually curious about it, I can point you in that direction. If you've already made up your mind, then there's no point elaborating.
One quick aside: during the Industrial Revolution, government courts sided with industry in pollution matters, granting them the right (sometimes monopoly) to pollute. Plaintiffs were ignored by the government in pollution cases, since industrial progress was more important than their health. So government actually made pollution worse...
It's not slavery because you could choose not to work at all and pay no taxes. In fact, in most first world nations, the effective tax rate on the lower income brackets is 0.
Even more so, they are often so unsure of their ability to judge whether you are unwilling to work vs unable, they'll give you money in the form of social benefits if you are poor, just in case. You have the choice in these nations to live (albeit a modest life) without working at all. That's the opposite of slavery. It's closer to aristocracy!
>It's not slavery because you could choose not to work at all and pay no taxes.
It's conditional upon you choosing to work, but the demand made upon you is illegitimate nonetheless. You choosing to work and consequently earning income does not grant someone else a moral right to force you hand over a share of that income to them (to labour for them).
>You have the choice in these nations to live (albeit a modest life) without working at all. That's the opposite of slavery. It's closer to aristocracy!
Given it's a life dependent on income forcibly redistributed from others, it's similar to the life of a slave owner, but a very poor one that shares the loot with millions of other co-recipients.
All of that is true, and I nearly entirely agree. I hope we find a better system.
But it's not slavery because you are not forced to produce on threat of death. My issue was the devaluation of the term "slavery", not the legitimacy of the confiscation. If you consider it entirely illegitimate, then what was described is armed robbery.
Then you are a tax consumer, living off the productive output of others. Your agents within the state apparatus extract income from the rest of society by force and give it to you. Aristocracy, indeed.
(This assumes that the government has crowded out private charity, which is the case in most developed countries.)
>With 25% taxes, I work for 3 months of the year for someone else. If I choose not to pay, then people with guns come to lock me up. How is that not slavery?
Because they will not come with guns if you choose not to work.
I do not think you understand slavery, where you cannot choose not to work.
Correct, it does not violate your rights that you are obligated to pay a portion of your income to the rest of us, in the form of the government.
That is part of the terms of your citizenship here, an agreement to which your parents consented on your behalf when you were too young to consent.
If you refuse to pay the tax, people with guns do not come for you. Your wages may be garnished, or money taken from your savings accounts, because that money you owe in tax is not yours. It's all of ours, to use for public goods and services, to be shared by all of us.
People who refuse to pay tax are stealing from all of us.
People who don't like the tax arrangement in this country are free to 1) try to change it or 2) leave. I welcome both options. Stealing from us, that just makes me angry.
> If you refuse to pay the tax, people with guns do not come for you.
Seriously? People get put in jail for tax evasion all the time. Certainly lots of guns involved in that process.
> money taken from your savings accounts
Not theft?
> public goods and services, to be shared by all of us
No. Tax money is distributed to favored interests. It is not shared among all.
So what portion of your property do I have a right to? Which part of your home or possessions may I come and direct to my purposes? Or to "the rest of us" even? May I go to your fridge and distribute some fruit to your neighbors or to the homeless? How is a claim to income different than a claim to your other property?
People rarely get put in jail for tax evasion, and never for simply failing to pay.
The vast majority of people who do not pay tax--who steal from the rest of us--simply have it taken from their accounts or paychecks by the legal machinery we've established to do so.
And again, garnishing paychecks or withdrawing from accounts is not theft, because it is not your money.
Remember, by definition, your tax obligation is not yours. It never was. Keeping it from the rest of us is stealing from us.
And last....
"So what portion of your property do I have a right to? Which part of your home or possessions may I come and direct to my purposes? Or to "the rest of us" even? May I go to your fridge and distribute some fruit to your neighbors or to the homeless? How is a claim to income different than a claim to your other property?"
Great questions! That's what the democratic process is for, for us to settle those questions. Right now, we have one set of answers to those questions. We won't always, because laws are always changing to reflect the society that writes them.
Hey, if you reeeeeally hate taxes, maybe you can make some pamphlets and get enough of us on board to vote in your new tax-free system.
>Remember, by definition, your tax obligation is not yours.
What a strange debt: one that a person assumes without their consent, and which you only know about by violating their privacy.
With regard to the last point: if I trade $1 million worth of goods with another private party, you have no way of knowing I "owe" you and the rest of society anything unless you somehow get details about that private trade. If myself and the private party do not divulge any information about our private activities, you would need to violate our privacy rights and force us to divulge information about our private interactions for you to uncover the existence of this debt that we owe you.
Flipping your argument around a bit, you work from 10am to noon every day in order to have civilization.
Starting at 10, you put in about twenty minutes of work defending you, your family, and your possessions from other, less scrupulous folks (defense). Then you spend about forty five minutes putting a little bit aside for your future self (SS, Medicare). After that, another 15 minutes of work provides insurance against becoming catastrophically poor and sick (Medicaid). The rest of the time covers everything else: building infrastructure so you can move around, inspections so that you, your food and your medicine are safe (FDA, USDA, OSHA, EPA), regulations so that you can save and invest with confidence (SEC, CFPB), and the like. You maybe spend thirty seconds, maybe a minute on research (which forms the basis for new treatments that keep you alive, lays the groundwork for new products that delight you, and even helps you understand your place in the universe). At the stroke of noon, you spend an instant working on some things that perhaps you're not sure about (National Endowment for the Arts, NPR (maybe)), and then you're back to making money for yourself.
Alright, Hank Rearden. Let's see you build a steel plant by yourself, starting with two coconuts and a bit of twine. Then we'll talk about your God-given property rights. In the meantime, as long as we rely on the patent system, banking system, courts, and police to build and maintain our businesses, I'm fine with the government coming and 'stealing' some of our profits.
Taxes also go to things like healthcare, because most of us recognize that living in a world where having people dying in the street is sub-optimal. And most people who are in a 50+% bracket are still getting a bargain, because their personal effort and skill contribute much less than 50% of their income.
I get your point, but there's something you aren't taking into account. You expect there to be public roads, bridges, and other infrastructure in your country, right? You also probably expect there to be armed forces to protect the nation, police officers and other LEO individuals to enforce the law as well. You also may expect some forms of public transportation and schooling as well.
These are public goods that we all benefit from and share the cost of. That is what taxes are supposed to pay for. That's why it's not slavery. You are paying for those things that damn near everyone agrees they want.
As for social programs where money is simply redistributed from one citizen to another - that's a whole other story. I agree with you there that is slavery. Those citizens can vote themselves money from your pocket and if you disagree - the guys with guns show up and take it anyway, and maybe even lock you up for disagreeing.
Many of those things are not "public goods" by the economics definition (see my reply to a sibling).
> You expect there to be... That's why it's not slavery. You are paying for those things that damn near everyone agrees they want.
If those things are important to me, then I will pay for them. Just because someone else "expects" certain things doesn't mean I do. Everyone manages to put shoes on their feet without the government. And charity could certainly take care of the rest without shoes.
Taxation is not a prepayment for services rendered. Or an insurance policy. Or a usage fee.
> social programs ... I agree with you there that is slavery
Excellent. Then let's agree to move in the direction where government only does the "public goods" stuff. Once we get there, we can disagree again on how far we want to go.
Agreed. I would love to be in a spot where the government abolishes all social programs and only supplies the so-called public goods that we communally benefit from. If all we had to argue about in terms of taxation was the public goods, we'd be in a great spot.
Not just luck, but the infrastructure that surrounds them and permeates every transaction. Luck alone gets you an extra coconut to take back to your mud hut, not a billion dollars and a super yacht. So yes, it's moral to charge them for that. It is not moral for them to take those services and benefits and not pay for them.
Ah the old "they benefited from living in this country, so the country has a right to rob them" argument. Self-righteous demmaogogues love to propose robbing successful people and spreading their wealth.
Ah, the old "taxes are robbery" argument. Libertarian romantics dreaming of their Randian Utopia, blissfully unaware of how wealth is actually created. Wealthy people are not necessarily successful people, unless your sole measure of a person is how much money they accumulate. Seems like a rather impoverished viewpoint.
Taxes on income are based on throwing those who refuse to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade in prison, where they are kept in a small enclosure, and where they often develop mental illness and suffer from physical and sexual assault.
You justify this in your own mind with ideological constructs and narratives about "Randians" and "libertarians". In reality, you support violating human rights, and no argument you conjur up can justify that.
In reality, there is no such thing as "private trade". You justify this in your own mind with ideological constructs and narratives about "private property" and "free markets". In reality, you support violating human rights, and no argument you can conjur up can justify that.
Of course there's such a thing as private trade. The very fact that the government needs to require people to surrender their privacy rights and disclose all transactions and sources of income for an income tax to be enforceable proves the trade the income tax taxes is private.
It is carried out between private parties in their private capacity. By every definition it's private trade. Common sense should tell you that too. No one has a right to 1) force people to give up their privacy and divulge details about the private interaction and 2) throw people in prison if they refuse to disclose this private information or if they refuse to hand over a share of the currency they are given in this private interaction. You believe in a world where people have no rights, especially if they engage in some private action that involves money changing hands (God forbid!). Typical socialist authoritarianism that rationalises imprisoning people by convincing himself ' there is no such thing as "private trade"'.
Behind every "private" trade is the power of the government to enforce the trade. Some contracts are unenforceable, and while you're free to make them, as a practical matter, they are generally avoided where there is an enforceable alternative. Because otherwise you're back in a state of nature, where the weak are at the mercy of the strong. That is the inescapable consequence of liberty as an absolute.
And of course we have the power to force people to give up their privacy and divulge details about private interactions: we do it all the time in the context of child pornography, for instance. As individual human beings, we recognize that privacy (and personal liberty) are important values. But they are not absolutes, and we strive to balance them against our other interests, such as our health and happiness. A democratic government is the means that we use to distribute the responsibility for striking the balance.
It might seem unfair that we don't get to choose at birth whether we want to live in modern society, where taxes are mandatory, or in a state of nature, where we are free of the terrible burden of taxation (and also free of any chance to amass a fortune, beyond a particularly large pile of coconuts). But there are many things we don't get to choose when we are born. Such is life.
>Some contracts are unenforceable, and while you're free to make them, as a practical matter, they are generally avoided where there is an enforceable alternative. Because otherwise you're back in a state of nature, where the weak are at the mercy of the
But income tax law does not distinguish trades based on contracts not enforceable by the government from those based on contracts that are, so even by this contrived standard of what constitutes private trade, income tax law violates human rights.
>And of course we have the power to force people to give up their privacy and divulge details about private interactions: we do it all the time in the context of child pornography, for instance.
We do not do it all the time in the context of child pornography. We only require someone to surrender their privacy rights if there is evidence they have traded child pornography.
Income tax law requires everyone to surrender their privacy rights. Moreover, it requires that those who refuse to surrender the privacy or property rights and comply to be imprisoned.
>As individual human beings, we recognize that privacy (and personal liberty) are important values. But they are not absolutes, and we strive to balance them against our other interests, such as our health and happiness.
We do not need to violate other people's human rights to be healthy and happy, and in any case, this would not be a justification for doing so.
>It might seem unfair that we don't get to choose at birth whether we want to live in modern society, where taxes are mandatory, or in a state of nature, where we are free of the terrible burden of taxation (and also free of any chance to amass a fortune, beyond a particularly large pile of coconuts).
The alternative to human rights violating taxes like those on income is not an absence of law and civilization. Governments can exist and raise revenue without taxing sales or income.
It may be possible for an agricultural village government to exist without sales or income tax, but not a modern industrial state with its concomitant opportunities for almost limitless wealth-building. What's the alternative?
I tend to agree with you that the "guilty-until-proven-innocent" nature of our income tax system runs contrary to our national values. But that's just a matter of reform, not repeal.
You're simply wrong that we don't need to curtail people's rights to be healthy and happy. If my neighbor pollutes my groundwater with his "private" activity, his privacy is going to have to be violated and his freedom to continue to pursue his business or hobby will have to be compromised. If government doesn't have the power to do so, I'll take matters into my own hands, and again we're back to a state of nature.
Yes, but not all humans have a concept of 'property' the same as all other humans, nor do some humans have a concept of 'property' at all. Look at Marxism, that idea of 'property' is very different than in capitalism. It is thought [0] that up until ~4k BC that no-one had an idea of property and we were all just gathering and hunting our way through life. If that is true, then the idea of 'property' is relatively new to humans as a species. So, we must define 'property' in a better way than I think is currently done. Unfortunately, the act of defining exactly what 'property' means can lead to conflict, such as the 50+ years leading up to the Civil War.
Well as it happens, I don't base my objections to slavery primarily on a notion "self-ownership", but rather on simple consequentialism. Slavery tends to lead to abuse of the enslaved, and allows no recourse for those under it.
And consequentialism also leads me to believe that defending property rights so far as to allow people to deny food to the starving, is not a good idea.
(And to be honest, to me the libertarian notion of "self-ownership" feels like a reverse-reasoning epicycle to try and base everything on property rights. I'm not sure it even makes sense: Surely if you own yourself you should be allowed to sell yourself?)
Interesting side-point there. I've heard the argument from libertarians that communism is evil because then you don't own your body, the collective does. I've always found that to be just a strange argument to put forth (logic of the conclusions aside) and if the situation arises, then there are obviously much larger and more fundamental issues to deal with. Like, that issue of what you can or cannot do with your body in a society is one that all societies have and have always had, regardless of the 'system' in use. It's not logic that applies there, it is humans acting like humans (typically as dumb asshats), so trying to ham-horn in property laws to define communism as evil is silly. Dumb humans are the root cause.
>but rather on simple consequentialism. Slavery tends to lead to abuse of the enslaved, and allows no recourse for those under it.
So slavery would be okay if the people who were enslaved could be protected from abuse whilst enslaved?
Think carefully about the implications of your philosophy.
>And consequentialism also leads me to believe that defending property rights so far as to allow people to deny food to the starving, is not a good idea.
You don't have a right to live by robbing others. Even if you don't care about the moral reasons for this, you must see how in the long run, a legal system that allows those with low resources to plunder those with high resources, deteriorates the incentives that sustain the economy, leading to far more death.
>(And to be honest, to me the libertarian notion of "self-ownership" feels like a reverse-reasoning epicycle to try and base everything on property rights.
If the term "self-ownership" rubs you the wrong way (because the concept of ownership has been stigmatized by socialist ideology), the libertarian notion could be reversed, and it would be equally valid. Unclaimed natural resources that are appropriated and turned into property become part of a person. They are us. So to violate someone's property is to violate their person.
>I'm not sure it even makes sense: Surely if you own yourself you should be allowed to sell yourself?)
I would argue you have no moral right to sell yourself into slavery, because the person you are five years from now is in some respects a different person, who no one else, even their past self, has a right to sell into slavery.
>So slavery would be okay if the people who were enslaved could be protected from abuse whilst enslaved?
I think if some form of slavery could be proven to lead to better outcomes for all involved, it would be a good thing. I just don't think such a system is possible.
>you must see how in the long run, a legal system that allows those with low resources to plunder those with high resources, deteriorates the incentives that sustain the economy, leading to far more death.
Actually, what I see is that in societies with lower taxes, inequality increases slowly over time leading to inefficiency, poverty and crime.
>I would argue you have no moral right to sell yourself into slavery, because the person you are five years from now is in some respects a different person, who no one else, even their past self, has a right to sell into slavery.
Okay, that's a reasonable argument, but it still feels like an unnecessary contortion to me.
Why not just say "slavery is bad because it denies individual freedom"? That seems far more like a position based in liberty. Whereas trying to base everything in property rights just feels like an exercise in oversimplification.
(Or if I'm feeling excessively cynical, it feels like an attempt to intertwine property rights into the philosophy so deeply that they can't be argued with directly.)
>I think if some form of slavery could be proven to lead to better outcomes for all involved, it would be a good thing. I just don't think such a system is possible.
What's a good outcome is subjective. For the slave, it cannot be better to be enslaved. For someone else, it may be very well be. That is why rights are important. Like I said, your moral framework is essentially sociopathic in its willingness to violate others rights. You're even willing to enslave others given the right circumstances.
>Actually, what I see is that in societies with lower taxes, inequality increases slowly over time leading to inefficiency, poverty and crime.
The US doesn't have lower taxes though. The countries that have the lowest taxes while still protecting private property rights have seen massive gains in wages and life expectancy over the last 60 years: Hong Kong and Singapore.
The countries that have increasingly adopted social democracy have seen wage growth stagnate.
Look at the US for example. The US has tried massively increasing social welfare spending since 1972:
Annual spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):
>Pensions and retirement: 4.4%
>Healthcare: 5.7%
>Welfare: 4.1%
Annual economic growth over the time frame:
>2.7%
The only thing it has to show for giving people more "free money" to spend is a higher trade deficit, stagnant wage growth, and, I would argue, an explosion in the amount of single parenthood:
The story has largely been the same in Europe, with the scale of forcible income redistribution growing, concurrent with increasing stagnation of wage growth.
>Why not just say "slavery is bad because it denies individual freedom"?
Because if the person is selling themselves into slavery, you have to ask how that is a denial of individual freedom. That is what I've attempted to answer.
>That seems far more like a position based in liberty. Whereas trying to base everything in property rights just feels like an exercise in oversimplification.
You cannot have a definition of liberty unless you define what people have a right to (their person and property).
>What's a good outcome is subjective. For the slave, it cannot be better to be enslaved.
The premise was if it were better for all involved. I've already said I don't think that's possible, and it sounds like you agree.
>You're even willing to enslave others given the right circumstances.
The right circumstances being that it's better for all involved yes. I would consider it immoral to deny people an option that makes them better off.
>The countries that have increasingly adopted social democracy have seen wage growth stagnate.
I think this has also corresponded with an increase in wealth inequality, largely as a result of increased importance of capital in wealth creation in those countries.
But I'm less confident here. Maybe you're right that lower taxes are better for the economy. My main point (although less so in this particular thread) is that arguments for property rights should be based on their positive outcomes for society, not a system of morals that denies economic criticism.
"Tax is theft" is an unassailable moral position.
"Countries with lower taxes do better" is an actual argument.
>The premise was if it were better for all involved.
How could any institution that denies a party the freedom to choose (e.g. slavery) be better for all involved. Maybe you're suggesting that if slaves were better off by some criteria with someone else making decisions for them, even if they would prefer to not be under the control of that third party, then slavery would be in their best interest?
>"Tax is theft" is an unassailable moral position.
Some people forget that government programs are paid for through forcible income redistribution that in turn relies on the fear created by throwing non-compliers in prison. It's good to remind them, as it may go against their own morals. I think most people are fundamentallt opposed to violating other's rights to their person and property, and it is only the complexity of government, and the ideological constructs created to euphemize and justify its actions, that obfuscates the violence that it deals out, and makes people consent to it, and vote for programs that rely on it.
All the other basic human rights flow from self-determination. If you don't control your own wealth, someone else does. If someone else controls the wealth, you'll have to do as they say in order to access that wealth. In effect, you'll never be free.
So if 100% of my income is taxed away from me, then I cannot enjoy the produce of my labor. In effect I am working completely for someone else, without my consent. Thus, I am a slave. Slavery violates the basic human right of liberty.
Thus, controlling your own wealth (right to property) is a basic human right.
Dignity is not a human right, since it is subjective.
It's not that obvious. At first I was inclined to agree with you but after some further thought I'm thinking the answer is actually that they are both not - and it's purely due to the constitution. In the case of jury duty, we have a constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial constructed from impartial jurors. Based on both statutory and common law that predates the formation of the US, this has always meant a selection of peers that are compelled to serve their nation. Because it is defined within the constitution, it rests alongside the 13th amendment. To end compelled juries, the 13th amendment would have had to explicitly state the lack of exception for the jury trial, thereby effectively nullifying it without repealing it. That, or the 6th amendment would have to be repealed altogether and replaced with something else to ensure a manner of securing a fair jury trial.
As for conscription, it's a similar situation. The constitution allows the government to "raise and support Armies" under article I section 8. This has been interpreted to mean the usage of the resources of the nation to build an army as approved by Congress. It can be money (taxes), land (eminent domain), or people (conscription). Again, because of historical precedent set in statutory and common law, as well as being included in the constitution, it has not been deemed to violate the 13th amendment and instead exists as another exemption.
> As for conscription, it's a similar situation. The constitution allows the government to "raise and support Armies" under article I section 8. This has been interpreted to mean the usage of the resources of the nation to build an army as approved by Congress. It can be money (taxes), land (eminent domain), or people (conscription).
Conscription stems from the understanding of the militia as being universal and the express power of Congress to "To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions", not from the power of Congress to "raise and support Armies".
A lot more folks are OK with jury duty than conscription, because it imposes a lot less on one's life, and the argument for its necessity to a just society is more convincing to many.
This seems a lazy and weak argument (verging on assertion) to me. Can you please elaborate; what is essentially lacking from the right to control one's own wealth that is present in the other basic human rights you enumerate?
@jonathanstrange - I disagree. Being able to control your own wealth is akin to retaining the fruits of your labor, which is the guiding principal of John Locke's labor theory of property. Not being able to control it is merely a variant on slavery - they may not be forcing you to work, but society must produce to survive and if they can take whatever they want whenever they want, you are not free under any reasonable definition.
Also, please consider the original coinage act of 1792. It carried a penalty of death (yes, death) for anyone caught debasing the currency. Why? Because debasing the currency was considered equivalent to the crime of counterfeit. And debasing the currency was effectively theft from literally every single person in the country through reduced value and less purchasing power via inflation. Counterfeit, debasement, and inflation were considered hidden taxes because they achieve the same goal.
Later coinage acts removed this penalty, which is why (in part) we have the problems we have today. We are approaching 20 trillion in debt. That was money that was spent that debased our currency and drastically reduced our purchasing power. Make no mistake, we are not truly free anymore because we do not enjoy this basic human right.
This is not to say "taxes are evil" or anything like that. But deficit spending through unbacked credit is theft. If the money were actually taxed instead of issued as unbacked credit, the value of the USD would not erode.
Locke lived and wrote in a time when populations were smaller and land and resources were generally far more available than the world we live in today. He stated the right to own property did not include the right to "spoil or destroy" it, and he also stated there was a moral limit to excess accumulation of property on the grounds that individuals have consumption and labor limits that should not be exceeded. His idea of property ownership was rooted in the idea that it would be somewhat fairly distributed. When humans start behaving like that, then I'll agree they should be able to fully control their wealth.
Yes, but John Locke also lived in a time and place where the average life expectancy was <40, meaning you could work until you died. There was no inherent need to accumulate wealth because most people could continue to labor right up until you got sick and died. You didn't have to save for retirement.
Obviously, the usage of the words 'own' and 'wealth' in the title have evoked assumptions/interpretations/implications that may or may not have been intended.
I do believe that there is a 'basic'/fundamental human right to retain the benefit of one's own labor.
The situation is complicated through trade. E.g., one might trade their labor for paychecks that can be exchanged for further trade opportunities. A government may provide various protections in exchange for taxes, levies, fees, etc.
In spite of those details, I also believe individuals have a general right to defend their ethically accumulated property/wealth from various re-distribution/re-negotiation/fraud -schemes which sometimes include inflation.
All of that leaves plenty of room for further debate about e.g.,
* What constitutes ethical accumulation?
* In which direction is there a balance due for services rendered?
* Were said services actually agreed-to/contracted/requested?
* Etc.
Bitcoin or any "cryptocurrency" has nothing to do with "human rights". You can keep it, but you also can choose not to. Human right is something you cannot easily revoke. For example, slavery was historically recently prohibited in the UK. Since then, you cannot sell yourself as a slave even if you are willing to.
"Human rights" were introduced historically very recently, including concept of their inalienability. Concept of "justice" is much older. Thank you for clarification, I really like the word "inalienable".
Human rights are things that are important even if violating them is legal. Slavery was very legal and very wrong because people have a right to be free. The practical difficulty of violating a right is beside the point when discussing justice.
Speaking of wealth in this context, I want to have inalienable right of not owning any wealth, because very idea of owning anything harms spiritual progress.
Money is an integral part of a social system and stability. You can't 'disrupt' money without disrupting governance, rule of law, accountability and systems.
We are far safer with governments and central banks that are accountable to us to varying degrees than self appointed shadowy crypto currency cliques with zero transparency and accountability. The monetary system certainly cannot be in private hands.
The 'solution' peddled in a frenzy by early adopters is tainted by self interest and infinitely worse than any problem with central banks and current monetary systems.
> We are far safer with governments and central banks that are accountable to us to varying degrees
Ah, but there's the rub. How accountable are they, really? In the software industry, you find out that if "everyone" is responsible for something, then all too often, no one is. And even if they are accountable to people in general, what happens when they fail individuals? Like this guy who had £440,000 of lawsuit-settlement money seized by Barclays on money-laundering suspicions:
I am not sure how is that supposed to work. If someone steals or cheats and then launders the money into Bitcoin or whatever, should he have the right to keep it? Presumably, no. That would mean that right itself would depend on the legality of the process with which the wealth was obtained, and that's kinda circular.
I could however imagine supporting right to control your wealth up to the point of the average wealth of a human being on the planet. That would be within the spirit of human equality and universality of human rights.
And in practice, I wish I had at least a right to count my money in public, and publish my salary (without annoying my employer).
The Databook has a table (Table 2-4) giving estimated median wealth per adult for all the world's countries (or something like all; I haven't checked). Many of the figures are small, but not one is negative. I'm fairly sure these figures are net of debt, but it's not 100% clear. So, just in case, compare those figures with the ones in the previous column, listing debt per adult; the only countries where the debt figure exceeds the wealth figures are (unless I missed some) Brazil, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany (!), Malaysia, Maldives, Sweden, the US.
(I believe from other sources that US median net wealth is comfortably positive, which is one reason why I am pretty sure the figures in the "median wealth" column of Table 2-4 are net of debt.)
Half of all adults own < USD $2,200.
The bottom 20% (something like 1 billion adults today) own < USD $248.
Inequality is increasing - the top 1% own almost 51% of global assets.
These statistics show that most humans have very little accumulated wealth to control, and very few humans have a lot of the total global wealth.
> I list [the lack of wealth redistribution] as a con because I think most people view it as one, but it’s not clear that it is one.
It is widely clear that its a con, especially in the advent of the current forces in the world. Global warming has made some places on the planet impossible to live on without wealth redistribution and technology gains largely go to the extremely talented or the extremely wealthy.
Furthermore "controlling your own wealth" is basically translatable to "doing whatever you want with stuff" which is so clearly a bad idea. Can I "control my wealth" towards bribing a politician? Can I "control my wealth" by burning a bunch of methane on a boat in the middle of the atlantic?
Property / wealth is an important institution for many reasons, and crypto-currencies should be tolerated for now, but if the world starts to show signs of regular kidnappings for BTC ransoms then we should use political action to put an end to the anonymity or lack of state control that they provide.
The misnomer in "own wealth" is in the word "own". The only reason that wealth exists is because of history and society. The only reason that its yours to control is because capitalism is a relatively efficient and natural way to allocate and control wealth.
Thought experiment: a world without history & society. 7 billion people, with the resources of the world fairly divided amongst those 7 billion, but these people come into the world as blank adults without any knowledge of the past.
They'd quickly starve. Even hunting and gathering requires a surprising amount of training to do successfully, and the world cannot support 7 billion people in a hunter and gatherer lifestyle.
Even if your Mom & Dad taught you the skills of subsistence farming you'd still starve; we don't have enough farmland to grow enough food for 7 billion without modern farming techniques.
But for the sake of this argument let's suppose your parents taught you how to farm and make your own tools, shelter, etc and you have enough land to live on. Subsistence farming is something you can do on a heavily populated world without the knowledge or cooperation or interference of any others. And it's pretty much the only thing.
Anything else requires history & society & cooperation forced or unforced.
We've the inheritance of Aristotle, Newton, Watt, Einstein, Borlaug, Caesar, Washington, Confucius and innumerable others. We control the wealth because they're all dead and we've inherited it. We're mice standing on the shoulders of giants.
Certainly we have all done something to be granted our wealth. Some of us may have inherited it, but most of us do our 9-5 or more. But what we do is such a small part compared to what came before. We spent 12-20 years in school being taught by society, protected by society, enabled by society and learning from history, given to you by your employer or your customers.
It's efficient and natural for you to control the wealth that comes into your hands; taxation and government implies a certain amount of waste. But society has just as much of a claim as you do. At least on any part more than that of a subsistence farmer.
The only reason that wealth exists is because of history and society.
That is a bit extreme. You can hoard basic goods (wheat, lumber, livestock) or build infrastructure (house, barn, pipes) for your own use in the future, without involving state or society.
Society can more or less work without private property but a free society can not. We tend to think of the State as an abstract law infrastructure, but it is not. Who does make, apply, execute the laws?
If you carefully save from your subsistence farm in the good years you might save a couple of tons of wheat to get you through the bad ones. Congratulations, you've just saved $300.
But you're right, our other freedoms do imply a certain amount of control over a certain amount property. The right to self-determination, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom of association et cetera would be hard to guarantee without a little bit of freedom of property.
As I mentioned, capitalism is a pretty good means to accomplish our goals. It's not an end in itself or a fundamental right, IMO.
Capitalism and private property are not the same thing. Capitalism is Karl Marx's definition of an economic system where the means of production are private property.
Private property is a more broad concept that means of production. You can put some goods out of market by law (a dam, roads, airports) so society will work better, but that isn't the same as preventing individuals from having their own private wealth.
Private property is based on the concept of rule of law. If the State can arbitrarily disposses you of goods you earned through fair trade, you are not really free.
The list of fundamental rights that are widely agreed upon are:[1]
- Right to self-determination
- Right to liberty
- Right to due process of law
- Right to freedom of movement
- Right to freedom of thought
- Right to freedom of religion
- Right to freedom of expression
- Right to peaceful assembly
- Right to freedom of association
If the state can arbitrarily dispossess you of all of your goods you don't have some of the above rights. However, the vast majority of most citizens' property and wealth is not necessary to exercise the above rights.
You can't have self-determination if you can't keep (at least a good part of) the fruits of your work.
Wikipedia is a fine source of knowledge, but I would take a look at what happens in every actual nation in Earth. If you can't work hard and save a portion of what you earn, you are living in a tirany that also disregards the rest of human rights.
It was once widely agreed upon that slaves had no rights. Just because something is widely agreed upon doesn't make it right. I would argue that the proceeds of the private trades you engage in are fully yours by right, and that no reasonable case can be made to the contrary.
To suggest that it is not a right is to imply that it is okay for a government to demand that two private parties divulge information about a private trade they engaged in, and throw the two parties in prison if they refuse to divulge this information, or if they refuse to hand over a share of the value they received in this private trade.
It's not extreme at all. All of civilization has only existed for 10k years. Most of the time our species has spent on earth, there was no wealth, there was no hoarding of basic goods, and there was no infrastructure. Hunter-gatherer tribes did not accumulate wealth.
> the world cannot support 7 billion people in a hunter and gatherer lifestyle.
Not to nitpick, but if all of our species reverted to hunter-gather, it would quickly reduce the population to a level that could be sustained. Agriculture allows humans to have far more children then they could support otherwise, for better and worse.
I also disagree that we would 'all starve', for similar reasons.
> we don't have enough farmland to grow enough food for 7 billion without modern farming techniques
This is also probably not true. We do not go down that road because without modern farming techniques, we would need a far larger percentage of the population engaged directly in food production. This actually has many advantages over modern farming but it's a hard sell.
Not that the points are invalid, but this is posted on a site hosted by a company that profits when people switch to digital currencies. Good marketing uses truth, and you may agree and use their product.... which is what makes it good marketing. But it is still marketing, and it is good to be aware of that.
Interesting that the article talks about wealth but not income. After all, today's income is tomorrow's wealth. If control over your wealth is a "basic human right", then shouldn't control over your income and cash flow also be a"basic human right" for all the exact same reasons given? And if control over your income is a basic human right, and nations like US and Canada have tax rates approaching 40% on high earners, does that mean they are violating basic human rights? At what tax rates do we go from economic-policy to human-rights-violations?
I agree with the other comments here. The whole point of human rights is to enshrine the things that we absolutely need for our physical and psychological needs. Water, air, housing, safety, education. To claim that taxation, inflation and demonetization are a violation of human rights, devalues the term itself.
So your opinion is that every major nation in the world, by having mandatory taxes, is violating basic human rights.
It's exactly statements like this which dilute and devalue the power of terms like "human rights."
If you are a hardcore libertarian, and want to claim that every major nation violates libertarian principles, more power to you. But don't appropriate the term "basic human rights" towards a political ideology that it was never meant to represent.
The prohibition of other people controlling your wealth as a negative right (as is simply represents inaction of others interfering), therefore I must consider it a basic human right.
"Rights considered negative rights may include civil and political rights such as freedom of speech, life, private property, freedom from violent crime, freedom of religion, habeas corpus, a fair trial, freedom from slavery."
Putting all one's money in a bitcoin account doesn't sound like the best solution to hyperinflation and cash confiscation in poor countries. Why not buy US dollars or gold?
I disagree with the notion that property ownership should be provided as a right, for free, and that any regulation or control over the property the State protects is an atrocity on par with slavery.
Don't get me wrong, in general I very much like the concept of private citizens managing capital rather than the State (though I wish workers had a bigger say in how capital is managed, but I digress), but there are times when States have to exercise some control over the property they protect in order to protect itself and the property it guards. Keep in mind, the Draft is a thing the State can do, the trick is to use such controls as lightly as possible.
Private control and ownership of property, while important, must necessarily be secondary to the stability and protection of the society it inhabits.
Also read bryanlarsen's comment, they go into good detail on how the State enhances private citizen's ability to create and accumulate capital.
Also individual property rights have not been the norm for most of human history, and in much of the world they still aren't. Obtaining mining rights to land in Papua New Guinea is incredibly difficult because the state recognizes historic communal land ownership rights. One member of a tribe can veto mining rights.
The possibilities for wealth creation are enormous when you enforce individual property rights strictly, but it comes at the cost of a more egalitarian society.
> Also individual property rights have not been the norm for most of human history, and in much of the world they still aren't
And those places can be easily recognised by their widespread abject poverty.
Papua New Guinea has a GDP per capita of $2k, Australia $42k. PNG has a 40% poverty rate and it's ranked as one of the worst places for violence against women. Life expectancy is 62, a full 20 years behind Australia. But, hey, they're more egalitarian, so that's great.
I don't think hacknat disagrees with you, and I certainly don't.
What I read is that what we call "property rights" is a fairly new idea, and we shouldn't treat it as "natural" or as a fundamental law of the universe as some do.
For the record, I'm in full agreement that excessive restriction on property and capital has costs. Creating and maintaining the idea of "private property" has costs too.
We should all stop paying for third party enforcement of criminal and civil disputes. Any seizure of my property by the government is a curtailment of my property rights.
What benefits of the state are you willing to live without? All of them? If the answer is no you just want the line drawn further back or forward than others. My guess is like most of us you draw the line around services and benefits from the state that benefit you and people you know and not around services and benefits the state provides you deem unimportant to you and the people you know.
there are times when States have to exercise some control over the property
To be fair, the article's author seems to agree with that:
"This delicate balance of power between individuals and governments has been in flux throughout history, and it’s helpful to have some checks in place to ensure it doesn’t get too far out of alignment."
As usual, I find Paul Graham's comments on economic theory incredibly frustrating.
This piece just uses the pull quote "a great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace." Graham's article about that goes on to theorize that this might be sufficient, and if so that only guild monopolies prevented earlier industrialization.
This is, in a word, stupid. Stability is a necessary component of industrialization - though stability to invest is even more directly required than stability to profit. This is not a breakthrough idea, I learned it in high school. Graham just hasn't read enough of the "great deal" he references to discover that. Stability is thoroughly insufficient - there's a laundry list of other requirements, with agricultural advances driving most of the other keys (especially, concentration of capital for investment and displacement of workers from food production). All of this is well-studied, heavily-analyzed content. It's not new to this article, or Graham, they're just reworking theory from scratch.
It's not especially egregious here, and I'm not attacking the conclusions of the article by pointing this out. But it's a problem that crops up a lot (ever read pg's thoughts on the Edict of Diocletian?) and it's exhausting to read ground-up recreations of basic theory.
Since the article is about Bitcoin and human rights I think it's worth mentioning that Monero is the only crypto currency that protects your financial privacy. Privacy is an important part of controlling your own wealth not least because it makes money fungible and doesn't allow discrimination against where coins have been spent previously.
> everyman has a property in his person; this nobody has a right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hand, we may say, are properly his
- John Locke
Locke wrote this envisioning people producing a measured but fair output from their labor - growing food, making durable goods, etc - and the modest property and wealth that could be obtained from this effort. In modern times, the true value of goods and services is skewed drastically in favor of those that own means of production, increasing exploitation of those that don't. Locke saw the potential but then less fully realized problem of unlimited accumulation and concentration of property and wealth and he wrote the government should moderate this and more equally distribute wealth.
Allowing one to fully control their wealth may increase innovation, but there are downsides to this without some controls in place to control dangerous unchecked accumulation of wealth. I disagree with the premise that "smartphones and steam engines" are a justification for this because they improve the human condition. They improve it for some, at a huge cost to others.
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[ 16.0 ms ] story [ 858 ms ] threadThis is a blatantly incorrect statement (that shows the bias of the author). Old currency could be turned into bank accounts, and then out to new currency.
The inconvenience was around the logistics of getting new notes into circulation (which was indeed managed badly in many parts), but no way can this be conflated with 'wiped out a large percentage of wealth'. The author's bias is making that leap.
>But with the note shortage in India, cash is precious and the queue-jumping jugaad has a dark side. As banks quickly run out of cash, many have to go hungry if they cannot make it to the front of the line. Others have to take days off work to wait in line. One man, standing in the queue at the bank, who does odd jobs for a launderette, says he will phone his boss when he reaches the front, so that he can come and make a cash deposit. “Every man, whether he’s rich or poor, has a mouth to feed. But somehow, only ordinary folks like us end up standing in line,” he says.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/28/india-bank-lin...
I don't think it serves the Bitcoin ecosystem well when CEOs of some of its most trustworthy platforms make such flatly wrong statements on basic finanical issues. More generally, it's a counterproductive line of rhetoric to take when the average person in the developed world is several orders of magnitude more likely to suffer significant wealth loss through BTC volatility, platform malfeasance or government crackdown on domestic bitcoin use than hyperinflation or generalised currency seizures by Western goverments.
86% of the currency in the market was wiped out to target 6% of unaccounted income in cash. There is no way to even justify such a policy forget manage it.
Another example of misrepresentation. (The value was not wiped out.)
The reality is that the vast majority of the bank notes were actually deposited and did not get wasted.
Actually, some who have a slightly darker view of the actual reasoniwho behind why this was done contend that one of the biggest reasons behind "demonetizabehind was that the govt expected a significant chunk of money to NOT be deposited into banks, thereby helping the govt's finances (cash is essentially a loan owed by the govt. Cash that was not converted and therefore made valueless meant the govt owed less money). If this view is correct, one of the biggest failures of demonetization was that such a large percentage of cash was converted that the govt didn't benefit from this avenue.
Furthermore, all the articles about how day laborers go without food ignore the fact that day laborers routinely went without food even before demonetization. The question should have been how much worse it made things for day laborers, something which few articles even attempt to answer.
Finally, it's hard for Westerners to recognize how much more integrated digital services through cellphones are in the daily lives of poor people in Asia and Africa compared to NA and Europe.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been unusually silent on this.
This is a misinterpretation too. I did not say the value was wiped out.
The timelines were completely unrealistic from a logistical standpoint. India is not yet at a stage where poor people can make their day-to-day transactions with debit cards instead of cash. Being able to deposit their savings in time by the deadline is a pointless irrelevancy if the bank cannot give them enough valid currency in return for their daily needs.
One needs only look at the downturn in India's recent economic figures to see the macro results.
While I wholeheartedly agree with all the benefits a currency like Bitcoin can offer, I think we're a long way from being able to use Bitcoin as an embodiment of basic human right.
I do appreciate your point, although 'legal tender' is generally only a relative term with regard to payment of debts. A seller is not otherwise obliged to accept dollars.
They also dont accept debit cards so u can be screwed if u have only a 100 eur bill with you..
Basic human rights are being treated as an equal to other human beings and with human dignity, being allowed to live, prohibition of slavery, being treated equal in front of the law and getting due process, and not being tortured. Everybody should be able to agree on them.
Yes, maybe controlling your own wealth should a right. But please don't put it on a par with basic human rights.
John Locke wrote of "life, liberty and property".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_liberty,_or_give_me_de...
There are a lot of revolutionaries that would like to have a word with you.
EDIT: We even have good historical examples of the latter, such as the Great Famine in Ireland, where food exports continued - people died because other peoples property rights were put before their right to life, and people had no realistic prospect of acquiring or growing food in time to compensate for the crop failures. Notably, in contrast, in at least one past famine, the government had banned food exports to force prices down.
Not related to what I said.
Removal of property rights intrinsically takes people's ability to provide for themselves away and replaces it with dependency. Some people seem to prefer this arrangement and I can respect that, but when they describe it as 'liberty', I assume that they must have lost their minds.
Defining liberty as an absence of dependency cannot work in any society because it's going to degenerate into an unfree one more or less immediately. What's worthwhile to pursue is that all rules apply to everyone in the same way and that everyone has a realistic opportunity to shape the rules together with all the other people. This means participation in the political process, division of powers, transparency to avoid corruption, education for everyone, and enough executive power to prevent some random billionaire from unilaterally seizing power. It does not mean abolishing the organization tasked with guaranteeing those rights.
That is a direct parallel to the entire point of the "property is theft" argument: that strict enforcement of property rights is a limitation on peoples ability to make use of property, by monopolising use of it.
You can destroy the ability to make use of property by going too far either way.
A good example of how carveouts can increase the ability of people to make use of property and improve their ability to provide for themselves is the Scandinavian "freedom to roam": In Norway anyone can use "outland" - areas that are not part of urban settlement. Owning the land gives you a monopoly on certain users (e.g. you will own hunting rights and forestry rights, for example) but far fewer than most other places.
Apart from providing liberty in the form of being able to go where we want without having to ask permission of land owners, for centuries this has been an important means for people to help provide for themselves: Nobody can deny you the ability to e.g. pick berries or mushrooms, or let your sheep graze, for example. It provides a substantial increase in utility of land that would often see substantially less use, and makes a lot of people able to be independent and work for themselves instead of someone else. That is one way it can increase liberty.
But rights are things that circumscribe government actions, not individuals. A government's first job and most important job is to safeguard the lives of it's citizens. Liberty is it's second job.
I suspect the real reason for this is that security is easier to define and agree on than liberty is. Ditto for property vs liberty.
I think you could construct a reasonable argument that this is a basic human right.
And indeed, property is one such system wherein people are subject to seizure of assets according to particular rules.
Controlling ones own wealth also means there is a mechanism to seize it from anyone else.
That's not the case for the cryptocurrencies which Coinbase deals with.
It's sort of like countries that take steps to ensure everyone has access to the internet as a basic right: they acknowledge that participating in the modern economy, and the things that flow from that participation (security, dignity, basic sustenance) require internet access to do it meaningfully. How else are you going to apply for jobs, when companies no longer sort through CVs sent in by post?
(As an aside, this is one reason I rage at people -- and this has been a strain of thought popular in Britain recently -- that make negative comments about the homeless having "luxuries" like smartphones. How else are they supposed to find work, be contactable to do that work, etc.? Being able to make and receive phone calls, SMSes, and emails is essential in 2017, at least in Europe. Madness.)
Anyway, point is, it's not enough to say that "everyone has the right to life and not be tourtured" and other abstract concepts. Having a right, truly, means being able to exercise it meaningfully -- just having it under the law is not enough. Therefore, the prerequisites to exercising those rights need to also be in place, and form at the very least a part of those basic rights, even if you do not want to classify them as seperate, also basic rights. (But I think arguing about Linnean distinctions is a little pointless.)
I don't think so, no.
Basic human rights are something that we agree shouldn't be taken away, from anyone, even from prisoners.
Control of wealth is not one of those things, I don't think. There are times when it's fair for your country to take your money from you against your will. There are times when it's fair for your country to audit or freeze your finances against your will, or simply stop you accessing them.
Is control of money & access to the economy important? Sure. It's important enough to be in the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war are expected to be paid, and have access to a shop.
Is it a basic human right? I don't think so.
And there are times when you can be jailed against your will. There is a huge gray area between absolute private property and absolute state property that's where every country in the world is, including worst tiranies. Also free societies are more on the more private property half of that area.
You seem to be suggesting a positive correlation between private property and freedom, but I think that's a far more complicated relationship than an implied correlation allows... as shown by the fact that 'socialist' democracies like New Zealand, Canada, Denmark, etc. consistently rank highest on indices of freedom (e.g. Cato) and laissez-faire democracies like the US tend to trail them.
Edit: BTW, my point was that your previous point is nonsensical. The fact that the State can suspend one right doesn't mean that right is less important.
Also you don't seem to understand that "social democracy" is actually what happens in every western country, even the USA. The goverment seizes at least half the production of the country. Maybe USA spends a lot in the military while other countries spends more on public health. But that's how they spend the money. The fact that money is collected and percentage of wealth seized is the same.
What (hopefully) we're talking about here is the legal safety that you have for the money that you have after taxes. If the State can arbitrarily seize money, raise the taxes to confiscatory levels or use another trick to crush you, that's lack of control.
I don't think that's worse in NZ than in the USA. Actually I believe it to be the other way around.
You're analysing my point backwards. Fundamental right aren't more important because the state can't suspect them... they are more important, so the state shouldn't suspend them.
Do we now agree, or do you still disagree even with the order corrected?
> Also you don't seem to understand that "social democracy" is actually what happens in every western country, even the USA.
Okay, slow down and take the time to read what I actually wrote, because you're quoting and arguing against something I didn't say... and being kinda rude with it. I'm fine being easy-going about your manners, but if you're not going to bother reading what I wrote then writing more is kinda pointless.
Basic human rights are something that we agree shouldn't be taken away, from anyone, even from prisoners.
That seems like a clear (and wrong) point. Free speech, freedom to move and so on are human rights and everybody understand that. One prisoner has none of these.
So first you make an obliquous attack on private property, you don't say it's not a human right, but you create a distintion between "basic" and "advanced" human rights and proceed to define a rule that separates ones from the others.
But that rule doesn't work. We suspend basic human rights to prisoners because, well, they're prisoners and there are good reasons to do it.
Now you say that the point is backwards because casuality is the other way around. But it makes no difference. Please explain what it is said difference if you disagree. But then, you would have no point at all, it's just your opinion on what should be.
Also you blatantly misrepresent what I said:
You seem to be suggesting a positive correlation between private property and freedom
That's taking a clear point (that without private property there is no freedom) and introducing a scale of "more private property" vs "less private property", that's also misleading, because all the countries that you mention have well protected private property.
So you're consistently trying to dilute others' points, making distracting distinctions and then ignoring the original points. I hadn't complained, but it's not a nice way to discuss, FYI.
I'm not asking you to be kind. I expect you to either read what I write, or be polite enough to discuss the misunderstandings without being rude. Neither of those have consistently been the case so far.
You feel like I'm moving goalposts, I don't see how that's true because I've spent most of this conversation trying to interpret and reword the things you're saying to openly attempt to understand what you're getting at. I haven't found your comments so far very clear.
>... Also you blatantly misrepresent what I said
Not at all. I said openly that I didn't follow your point: "Sorry I'm not sure what your point is here. You SEEM to be..." [emphasis added]. I don't think it's a reasonable position that I'm "blatantly misrepresenting" what you said there. I openly stated my confusion at the point you were trying to make.
I'm happy to discuss opposing views but please drop the attitude. It's neither helpful nor necessary... but I'll have another go at trying to find the source of our disagreement.
> That seems like a clear (and wrong) point. Free speech, freedom to move and so on are human rights and everybody understand that. One prisoner has none of these.
I disagree. Prisoners should have fundamental rights (and do in many cases, it varies wildly). There are organisations who spend a lot of time watching for & correcting human rights violations within the criminal justice system (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, ACLU).
Freedom to move is a point worth discussing too. I think "freedom to move" while often discussed as a fundamental right is interpreted as freedom of residence, or to not be stopped while travelling around a state; I don't think it means everyone should be allowed to go everywhere at all times. I don't think anyone would think it reasonable to let serial killers roam around freely.
> But that rule doesn't work. We suspend basic human rights to prisoners because, well, they're prisoners and there are good reasons to do it.
So your assertion here is that prisoners are stripped of all human rights? Which country does that?
No, it's only a prerequisite as a result of the existing economic model. Human rights should transcend that.
I think capitalism is mostly effective at producing good outcomes, and as such it should be supported in as far as it does. But the important thing is the outcomes, not the capitalism.
Precious metal miners?
I appreciate my smartphone, but understand a trail of human misery was used in its creation.
>I appreciate my smartphone, but understand a trail of human misery was used in its creation.
Are you implying all mining produces human misery? I suggest you look into how a modern mine works in a developed country. A mine that kills people is a reflection of the country, not the act of mining itself.
Considering the total number of people globally working with coal it's still a significant issue.
PS: Spraying it with water can help with transportation, but you can't do that right before burning.
- control
- wealth
- ownership
3 concepts that are tied too our current society. You can imagine other societies where those don't hold anymore, but where human right should still hold.
Property rights are weird. We all mostly agree that no one should be able to steal your phone off your desk at work. We very much don't agree that governments should not be able to tax income. When someone says "controlling your own wealth should be a basic human right", I don't know whether I agree or not until I know quite a lot more about what that person means. Which probably means I disagree that it's a basic human right.
Stealing your phone or taxing your income is fundamentally the same. And it doesn't matter how many agree that it's acceptable. In a lot of countries, a lot of people agree that those who make blasphemous statements should be imprisoned or put to death. They do not see any inherent right to free speech. By your logic, if a lot of people agree that blasphemy should be punishable by the state, free speech is not necessarily a human right.
No, it's only a prerequisite as a result of the existing economic model. Human rights should transcend that.
Not very convincing. Do you have some alternative to the "existing economic model"? I ask because I can't think of a single example of a free society where there's no private property.
The people that think such things as the State having no right to collect taxes are terribly naive. But it's equally naive to think that you can be free in a society where you don't have economic freedoms.
I don't know if there is a viable alternative economic model, but I can certainly conceive of them, and I don't think "Human Rights" should preclude those models, nor do I think they need to.
If the current economic system requires certain prerequisites to meet our Human Rights, then those prerequisites are implied by those rights in the context of that system.
>But it's equally naive to think that you can be free in a society where you don't have economic freedoms.
To "be free" is a nebulous concept. There are many possible freedoms one can have, and many of them conflict with each other.
To some, economic freedoms mean the freedom to deny food to the starving. Many people disagree on whether this is a freedom worth defending.
So you neither know nor you acknowledge that's absurd.
To "be free" is a nebulous concept. There are many possible freedoms one can have, and many of them conflict with each other.
That is terribly wrong. Freedom is not some abstract idea, it's freedom from tirants that try to keep you enslaved using a variety of means. That's why freedom is a whole.
Come on, that's like politics fundamentals. Is this really news to you?
A freedom is the ability to choose to do something. But choosing to do some things will limit the choices of others. Therefore we must inevitably trade some freedoms against others.
Generally we agree on certain trade-offs. We agree that freedom from murder is more important than freedom to kill. We agree that freedom from slavery is more important than freedom to enslave.
But there are many cases where people do not agree on the trade-offs. If you respond to these cases by insisting that your preferred trade-offs are somehow correct by definition, you're avoiding the argument. Why are those freedoms preferable?
And freedom to control property is one of case where people disagree. In order to own property, you must deny others the ability to use that property, and in extreme cases that means denying the starving the ability to eat. Many people believe that in such cases, the freedom to survive is more important than the freedom to control property.
And make no mistake: that's also true for modern tyrannies, communism, right wing dictatorships or theocratic regimens.
My point is very simple and I'm sad to see people answering to my comments are not properly addressing it.
My point is that there is not a single country that can be considered free where you cannot safely own wealth. This is not just an idea: it's a fact that you can easily check.
If you come to think about it, it's a very similar reasoning to the one that originated socialism. You can't be free if you're starving or if you're so poor that you can't get out of poverty, or you can't afford proper healthcare, or you can't give your children an education.
In the same way, you can't be free if the State has arbitrary power to ruin your life. There must be some safety, a rule of law that assures that reasonable expectatives are met.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_freedom really? Notice that almost this entire article is discussing the various differing opinions on what constitutes freedom, and in particular the trade-offs between positive and negative freedoms.
Yes they share some broad similarities, and everyone agrees that obvious historical tyrants are bad, but there's a lot of nuance once you get into the details.
>My point is that there is not a single country that can be considered free where you cannot safely own wealth.
That depends what you mean by "safely". Plenty of countries charge property taxes, and many have eminent domain laws which can force you to surrender land. Property is not absolute, nor do I think it should be.
Which is why I don't think these kind of economic decisions should be considered Human Rights.
That depends what you mean by "safely". Plenty of countries charge property taxes, and many have eminent domain laws which can force you to surrender land. Property is not absolute, nor do I think it should be.
Of course property is not absolute, it's you who said it, not me.
Which is why I don't think these kind of economic decisions should be considered Human Rights.
That's not a good point. Free speech is a human right and it's not absolute, is it?
Anyway, you're missing the point. What we are talking about (if for no other reason, because that was TFA's point) is safety for personal wealth that was acquired legally and after due taxes are paid. We're talking about arbitrary seizure, not about taxes.
Actually I have learned today that for some reason, there is people that conflates them. So it's either communism or wild capitalism. Honestly I didn't expect that.
His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it.
Sometimes that may be worth it: the deprivation of others may be small, and the benefits to the individual of being able to wall something off might be high.
Even the vast majority of anarchists and communists would draw a sharp line between private property + the "means of production" vs. personal property. To put it rather pointedly: Pretty much everyone agrees that granting every random stranger the right to use your toothbrush deprives us of more rights than it provides us.
Where exactly the line goes on what should be shared and what should not is one of the major differentiating factors of political ideologies, but that there is a line is recognised by every present-day government in the world.
The enforcement of exclusionary property rights might enhance everyones rights and freedoms when what is walled off is so common that there is no perceptable increase in freedom from protecting part of it or when the benefits of exclusionary access are large enough to overcome the downsides, and it might enhance some peoples rights all the time, but it may also cause a drastic, profound reduction in the rights of many once something is scarce enough that allowing some people exclusionary control of it has the potential to significantly deprive others.
To take an extreme example: If all the resources you could have used to obtain food belongs to someone else, you've just de facto lost the right to live and having a de jure right to life does not help you.
This also acts as its own counter-example: If you don't have right to control your own wealth, then the ability to eat depends on the willingness of socity to let you.
And therein lies the problem with looking at a right to controlling your own wealth: Depending on how the society you happen to live in today is structured in terms of your ability to obtain wealth, and who has ownership, you may have more de facto rights with a right to control your own wealth or more without it. And that structure can change, and suddenly reverse the effect.
In other words, a "right to control your own wealth" does not provide a universal good, but one that is conditional on circumstances. That is my biggest problem with considering it as suitable to be a human right.
That makes absolutely no sense. That's like saying preventing people from feasting on your flesh makes them all poorer. I'm using an extreme example to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument that enforcing exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources that you've appropriated and applied work to in order to turn it into something highly valuable (whether that be soil, water CO^2 and sunlight that you converted into food and then into bodily mass, or sand that you melted into silicon and turned into a microprocessor), deprives others of their rights.
We can play your game the other direction. If using "practically free" natural resources doesn't deprive you of your rights, you would have no objections to a company rolling into your neighborhood with bulldozers and taking all of the nutrient-rich soil so that they can turn it into something highly valuable and sell it to other people. You would have no objection to a company like Nestle claiming ownership of a local river and prohibiting nearby residents from drinking from it.
I have no problem charging private entities rent for the appropriation of natural resources. What I have a problem with is demanding a share of the private property that they fashion out of those natural resources. From a public standpoint, it should make no difference if someone appropriates a ton of iron ore and places it in their living room as a collector's item, or if they use it to create a supercomputer. They should pay the same fee to the public in both cases, since it is the natural resource usage that should be charged, (and that the public has a legitimate right to charge a fee for), and not their private actions upon that material. But current tax laws, and Proudhon's argument which the parent comment cites, delegitimizes the value that one adds in the process of creating the latter.
Before your body was formed, there was no "you", so the concept of ownership didn't apply. The "offender" in that case was the laws of physics, or some deity if you prefer.
Things like land, mineral resources, and water are definitely not "abundant and practically free", but in most places, scarce and highly contested. Furthermore, the people who control them to a large extent did not work for them, but inherited them. So to what extent you have access to some portion of these scarce resources doesn't depend on your own labor, but on whether you happened to get lucky in the birth lottery and get born to someone who, in the 19th century, signed a favorable water-rights contract in California, or a favorable ranching/mineral-rights contract in Texas. You'd have to have quite some metaphysical faith in the "labor mixing" theory to believe that because some pioneer in the 1850s got a good deal on land or water, it metamorphosized into "his land" in perpetuity, even though he didn't create it. Or, in many cases, even put any actual labor into it in the first place (many of these deals were "paper" deals where east-coast financiers acquired Western land holdings, and sent other people to work them).
What I did claim is property rights over any scarce resource inherently reduces the liberty of others.
That does not mean it can not be legitimate - we reduce the liberty of others for various legitimate reasons all the time.
It does mean that whenever we enforce property rights we are making a tradeoff between the liberties of differents sets of people.
>What I did claim is property rights over any scarce resource inherently reduces the liberty of others.
All property is scarce, which is why it has market value. You're saying people have no right to the property they create, if it happens to be scarce (which it always is).
Maybe you have some vague arbitrary definition of "scarce" that allows you to claim that the property rights you exercise over your possessions are legitimate, while the property rights of those with much more than you are not.
There's a fundamental difference between creative capitalism, which is the application of intelligence and organisation to the creation of new resources and opportunities from new materials and ideas, and extractive rentier capitalism, which is a zero sum game that works on the principle of monopolised control of limited resources - to the extent that it may actually deliberately limit those resources purely for profit. (See also Enron, pharmaceuticals, OPEC, and many other examples.)
If I own a significant amount of property in a town I can increase rents to "the level the market will bear" - which will have the sole effect of enriching myself at the expense of everyone else in the town.
Proponents of capitalism who don't understand how capitalism actually works always say "Yes, but someone can always compete with me and charge lower rents."
Except they won't, and this never happens, because once an exploitative individual begins creating a monopoly, the feedback loop never works in that direction. It's incredibly hard to destroy a monopoly through market means alone, and lower prices certainly aren't enough to do it on their own.
Why worry about monopolies? Because they're the inevitable outcome of limited ownership. Unequal access to resources is magnified until either a monopoly or a cartel results.
Any suggestion that equates the ability to create this outcome with a basic human right is preposterous. A more nuanced definition of economic rights would severely limit rentier capitalism while encouraging creative capitalism - but intervening to maintain innovation before monopolies or cartels become the main political and economic players.
It is absolutely absurd, and my first example makes perfect sense if one has the capacity to understand what is being discussed.
>There's a fundamental difference between creative capitalism, which is the application of intelligence and organisation to the creation of new resources and opportunities from new materials and ideas,
Proudhon's argument is that all property is "theft", so there is no such distinction in his philosophy. He was the angsty teenager with the edgy arguments of the 19th century.
>It's incredibly hard to destroy a monopoly through market means alone, and lower prices certainly aren't enough to do it on their own.
Government is a monopoly of force. You want to cure market monopolies by expanding the power of a monopoly that employs threats of violence. Good luck with that.
>Why worry about monopolies? Because they're the inevitable outcome of limited ownership. Unequal access to resources is magnified until either a monopoly or a cartel results.
This is unscientific quackery. You have provided no evidence at all for this inflammatory fearmongering. You're making a very specific argument about the cause of a particular outcome, in a system with an untold number of factors at play that could explain any set of outcomes.
>Any suggestion that equates the ability to create this outcome with a basic human right is preposterous.
Violently attacking someone and/or throwing them in prison for their refusal to hand you a share of the currency they received in private trade is a grotesque violation of human rights.
Trying to justify this grotesque violation of human rights with economic quackery that you are trying to pass off as fact (just another variation of the "if you don't rob the rich guy, you'll starve to death" snake oil that is always used to justify socialist ideology that violate human rights) is childish idiocy.
This argument will be a lot more interesting as soon as someone demonstrates a functioning advanced economy absent a sovereign state, as we commonly think of it, and without someone or something else becoming the de facto sovereign in short order, since then we'll know the state isn't entirely necessary for the levels of wealth and advanced commerce and industry we presently enjoy, as it currently very much appears to be. I'm not holding my breath.
Or you could destroy it by reducing the power of government to use violence to guarantee exclusionary land use.
> Violently attacking someone and/or throwing them in prison for their refusal to hand you a share of the currency they received in private trade is a grotesque violation of human rights.
I would be fully for giving you the right to live untaxed if you also agree to not make use of any of the shared goods paid for by those taxes. That would be including most roads, of course. Have fun trying to earn more that way.
Exclusionary land use is necessary for anything as basic as having privacy in your home and personal security. Shifting taxes from income to land would certainly be beneficial, but it would not eliminate monopolies.
>I would be fully for giving you the right to live untaxed if you also agree to not make use of any of the shared goods paid for by those taxes. That would be including most roads, of course.
And that would be absolutely fine. The vast majority of taxes are used for forcible income redistribution (social welfare) and government largess (e.g. miliarily occupying other countries).
If government stuck to providing national defence and roads, it could collect all the revenue it needed from something like a split-rate property tax, and there'd be no need for a human-rights-violating income tax.
I really wish libertarians would stop using this facile rhetorical device: "Government must be bad, it relies on THREATS OF VIOLENCE!!"
But if you're talking about property rights, unless you're suggesting enforcement by stern warnings, you're already talking about using threats of violence to coerce people.
I mean if you're going to criticise libertarianism, at least learn the basics, like what the Non Aggression Principle (notice it's not called the Non Violence Principle) is.
Libertarianism is just the formalization of common decency and common sense. People denigrate it so that they can term basic decency as the tenet of some fringe ideology and get a pass to promote tyranny over other people through political action.
Of course. But my objection is that libertarians like to imply that violence coercion is inherently bad for rhetorical effect when criticising government.
>Using violence to punush someone for refusing to hand over a share of currency they receive in private trade, or for being 'too successful' at selling a widget and therefore being categorised as a monopolist, is not.
Well clearly we disagree. I think asking participants in society to pay for the benefits it affords, and discouraging anti-competitive practices are perfectly reasonable uses of violent coercion, and lead to better outcomes overall.
If you disagree that those policies are effective, that's fine. But please don't elevate your economic theories to morality.
>at least learn the basics, like what the Non Aggression Principle is (notice it's not called the Non Violence Principle).
I know what the NAP is, and I agree right up until libertarians start trying to define aggression to include theft. Honestly, the NAP seems at best like an awkward attempt to simplify a political philosophy, and at worst like a rhetorical device to hide property rights inside something that seems superficially unobjectionable.
>Libertarianism is just the formalization of common decency and common sense.
Yes, that's certainly how it likes to portray itself, but my impression is that as soon it gets into details, it's all about property rights.
I think society should be designed in the way that leads to the best utilitarian outcomes, and I think property rights are a very effective tool and should be part of that system. But they are not perfect, they are not morality, and they're certainly not "common decency".
I was implying that using threats of violence against non-violent people engaging in voluntary trade with other consenting adults is wrong.
>Well clearly we disagree. I think asking participants in society to pay for the benefits it affords, and discouraging anti-competitive practices are perfectly reasonable uses of violent coercion
So you're willing to use violent coercion against non-violent people for their refusal to pay a debt they did not voluntarily assume and/or for their engaging in too much voluntary trade with other consenting adults. Your moral framework is essentially sociopathic.
So are you. Theft is not violence. If you walk into my house and take my valuables, at no point have you done anything violent.
So you can't use the moral weight of the former to make responding to the latter with actual physical violence seem significantly more necessary to me than responding with physical violence to people who don't pay taxes.
People starve to death because we find protecting property rights more important than letting them eat. How does it not make sense?
I am not saying that reducing enforcement of property rights does not negatively affect the owner. I am saying that there are plenty of cases where property rights reduces the ability of others to make us of it.
This makes it a tradeoff, not something worthy of absolutes.
> That's like saying preventing people from feasting on your flesh makes them all poorer.
And of course it would - if they enjoy human flesh and were denied it, they would certainly be poorer for it - but we thankfully value your right to keep your own flesh higher than someone elses abiltiy to be able to feast on it.
Liberty is not some absolute - pretty much every one us would agree that directly harming someone infringes more on their liberty than outlawing it would.
It's not a zero sum game - a lot of our laws centre around reducing our liberty in ways that increases it more in other ways: Making violent crime illegal and backing it up with the willingness to deprive those using violence of liberty is a restriction on all of us, and certainly even more so of those we justifiably lock up for our protection. But one that simultaneously increases our overall liberty by constraining a tool of oppression.
> I'm using an extreme example to demonstrate the absurdity of the argument that enforcing exclusive control over abundant and practically free natural resources
If something is abundant, then the argument doesn't apply. That is the entire point: It applies to scarcity. If something is abundant then everyone who wants it can have access.
But land is one such thing that is distinctly scarce. Suitable farmland even more so.
> deprives others of their rights.
If you starve to death because you can not afford food, much less land to grow a crop, nor afford to move anywhere else, you might think otherwise.
That is not really a hypothetical example. E.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland, Irish food exports increased while hundreds of thousands starved to death because their crops had failed and they could not afford to buy the plentiful amounts of food being exported from the island.
They were deprived of their right to life because others property rights were given precedence - to the extent of the UK giving military escorts to ships exporting food.
Were those who died not deprived?
You're not framing the situation accurately. The question to be asked is: should people starve to death because we refuse to rob someone? The answer is yes.
Even if you don't care about the moral reasons for this, you must see that a legal system which allows those who are resource-poor to legally plunder those who are resource-rich perverts incentives and misallocates capital, leading to less innovation and development, and consequently, less progress in reducing the total number of deaths.
>And of course it would - if they enjoy human flesh and were denied it, they would certainly be poorer for it - but we thankfully value your right to keep your own flesh higher than someone elses abiltiy to be able to feast on it.
My point was that even if they would be richer for being able to cannibalize you, denying them that 'right' is not morally wrong. They do not have a right to feast on you. Even if a group of people were starving, and murdering and cannibalizing you would let them all survive, it would be morally wrong for us as a society to allow that to happen.
>It's not a zero sum game - a lot of our laws centre around reducing our liberty in ways that increases it more in other ways: Making violent crime illegal and backing it up with the willingness to deprive those using violence of liberty is a restriction on all of us, and certainly even more so of those we justifiably lock up for our protection.
Liberty is historically and conventionally defined as rightful action with one's own person and property. Denying someone access to another individual's person and property does not limit anyone's liberty. That is simply contrary to what liberty means.
>If something is abundant, then the argument doesn't apply. That is the entire point: It applies to scarcity. If something is abundant then everyone who wants it can have access.
You're not getting my point. I'm saying that if someone takes abundant resources, applies work to it, and produces something of value that is scarce, they should have full moral rights to it, yet Proudhon's argument, as well as yours, denies them that right.
>But land is one such thing that is distinctly scarce. Suitable farmland even more so.
And therefore it's perfectly suitable to tax valuable land. What is not appropriate is taxing everything a person generates.
Let's say that each tonne of iron ore extracted from the crust costs society $10.00 in diminishment of natural resources, and in environmental damage. Let's say society charges an iron ore miner $50 to extract a tonne of iron ore, to compensate for these costs.
Now if the iron ore miner pays the fee, mines the ore, smelts the iron, and fashions the iron into an incredible machine, you have absolutely no right to what the machine produces. An income tax is not a tax on using scarce natural resources, or a charge for damaging the environment. It is robbery against someone successfully generating economic value. It is a human rights violation.
Proudhon's argument rationalizes the violation of human rights and legalized plunder against those who strive and succeed.
>That is not really a hypothetical example. E.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland, Irish food exports increased while hundreds of thousands starved to death because their crops had failed and they could not afford to buy the plentiful amounts of food being exported from the island.
The Corn Laws prevented the Irish from importing food. It was not liberty that caused the Great Famine in Ireland.
I feel his argument was a utopian and philosophical one, and is quite hard to consider practically, hence the other replies less articulate indignance to the idea.
> His point is that enforcing property rights explicitly deprives others. If something is scarce, then the moment I wall it off, others become poorer for it.
I keep hearing this argument. And its so obviously illogical.
Establishing the concept/law of property and property ownership is probably the first thing a society does as soon as it gets formed.
And so are autocracies, inequality between genders, slavery, feudalism, rule of the strongest etc...
Private (not personal) property doesn't a priori have to be more of a natural law than any of those.
Private property is every bit as natural as personal property. Both are enforcing exclusive usage of some part of the natural world for one's own self. Both are required for one to be able to enjoy the full value that they create through their own efforts. The personal/private distinction an arbitrary one with no philosophical basis. It's purely done for sophistry.
I can image a society where the first is considered ridiculous. The second, not so much
We could require all owners of property to pay rent for their use of natural resources, at a rate commensurate with the value of said natural resources, and there would still be trillions of dollars worth of private property, and socialists claiming a right to an equal share of it based on some contrived justification.
>or paying someone only part of what their labor is worth, you're enjoying more than just the value of your own efforts.
If someone voluntarily gives you more labour than what you pay them for, that's still a voluntary transaction, and anything you earn from that labour is legitimately yours. If you build me a shed in exchange for $1, because you're such a generous guy, I still have full rights to that shed. Of course in most cases people do not accept a job that pays them below market rates.
I assume you're implying that profits are the surplus value of labour that is unfairly provided to employers, which is simple Marxist ignorance.
Profits are the compensation the employer earns for the organisation and capital they provide. Labour is worth whatever its market price is, not whatever revenues are generated in enterprises where it's employed.
It's sad that I have to debunk 150 year old Marxist fairy tales on hackernews.
That is demonstrably wrong, given that a large number of people throughout history has enjoyed the full value that they create without enforcing property rights.
If you want to make an argument that property rights are beneficial, then make that argument, because that is an argument that you may be able to defend depending on your underlying assumptions.
But the very point of property law is to limits others ability to make use of property. Its very point is to reduce the liberty of those who does not have ownership.
It's ok to feel that this is an acceptable, justifiable reduction of liberty, but it doesn't change the fact that it places substantial restrictions on others, and trying to pretend that it doesn't will not change that.
That is not demonstrable at all. That's idealising the past for ideological convenience.
>But the very point of property law is to limits others ability to make use of property. Its very point is to reduce the liberty of those who does not have ownership.
Liberty is historically and conventionally defined as rightful action with one's own person and property. Denying someone access to your own person and property does not limit anyone's liberty. That is simply contrary to what liberty means.
So my point was not that if something is accepted in society ==> Its right. There is no such thing as right/wrong/moral/etc. Its about consistencies in the contracts we humans sign with each other.
Post-property rights, I no longer have the freedom to walk and inhabit any space I want. I can't walk into your living room and stay there. I can't sleep in your bed. Your "right to own property" has severely curtailed my ability to move freely about the world. Men with guns will come after me if I don't leave your bedroom.
Your "private property" has imprisoned me into a tiny rabbit warren of publicly-owned spaces.
So you did not lose right to move in private properties (because you did not have any) but you gain right/assurance to move freely in public properties without danger to your person.
If aliens invade earth and set their own property laws it would not be stealing. It would be nothing. Because we dont have any contracts with aliens that we can claim aliens have broken.
That does not automatically mean it is bad - to determine that you need to first consider whether a given reduction in liberty is justified. Sometimes it will be, and sometimes it isn't.
In case you're interested, there are quite elaborate theories of distributional justice. For example, New Theory Of Fairness And Social Welfare by Marc Fleurbaey and Francois Maniquet is a very good recent book on the topic, if you're fine with a decent amount of economic apparatus.
You are forgetting that you can be enslaved in a lot of indirect insidious ways that doesn't involve chains or swords.
Most people in absolutist societies weren't murdered or technically slaves. But we considered them not free. Also free expression is a basic human right and we should consider private property the same. Of course every right has limitations, but freedom is a whole, either you are free or you aren't.
Nope. I think the OP is talking about universal human rights (which are universal in space and time).
Given the current structure of society, controlling your own capital is a means to obtain your basic human rights, and it's totally fine to view it that way, and enforce laws related to it. However, it is not a human right in itself - it is the path to one.
If we made it a basic (universal) human right, then we are putting ourselves in handcuffs - not allowing for a society that could potentially give all the basic human rights, simply because this one human right is forcing us to structure society in a capital oriented way.
The claim is that there are some rights that should be due to us because of the context we are in, and some rights that should be due to us simply because we are human.
'Right to a job' would definitely be a right based on context, especially since there are contexts where the concept of 'job' might not make any sense at all.
The question is whether right to property is of the context type or not.
It exists in classical liberal societies because liberalism doesn't really have a consistent concept of positive duties, either on the individual or the societal whole. But there's definitely other forms of political thought, liberalism is just seductive because it claims to arise from the natural state of things.
The fundamentals of social structure are so close to the U.S that you have to squint a bit to see the differences.
Yeah it gets abused and it's pretty hard to live on it, but the alternative (as far as a slim moral majority tends to vote) is worse.
Yes, taxes are a bit higher. It's not the end of the world.
Still got problems with homelessness, because that's a hard problem. You can live off benefits but you need to be basically functional to do it.
Most of Europe provides those kind of protections to (greatly) varying degrees, because the alternative seems too horrifying.
(and yes, "US conditions" regularly gets pulled out in many European countries as a negative example of the consequences of cutting welfare systems)
Thus the distinction between negative and positive rights. The fundamental (natural) rights of life, liberty, and property are negative rights in that others may not violate those rights with impunity. (I have a right to defend my life with violence)
Jobs, healthcare, education, income, etc are all positive rights, in that they require someone else to act in order to fulfill my right to those things. Thus all positive rights eventually violate the natural rights of another, since when reduced to the desert island example, the other becomes my slave.
We're on a desert island and:
I have a right to education, and you're a teacher
I have a right to a kidney transplant, and you have two kidneys
I have a right to healthcare, and you're a doctor
I have a right to eat, and you have lots of food
I have a right to shelter, and you have the only hut on the island
In all of these cases, you become my slave, since you are forced to fulfill my "right" to something.
Of course, we're talking about a legal ethic here, not a moral one. If I need shelter, and you have the only hut on the island, then it would be properly moral for you to share with me, but I cannot legally compel you to do so, from a natural rights perspective.
This is not slavery: No one is forced to work.
Why not? It is essential to taking care of my family.
http://echr-online.info/right-to-property-article-1-of-proto...
"Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for by law and by the general principles of international law."
> Everybody should be able to agree on them.
The major problem with rights-based reasoning is that, while you might be able to get people to agree on the rights, you can't necessarily get people to agree on the implications or interpretation of the text.
E.g. Article 8 ECHR effectively overrides the immigration system, which is not immediately obvious from the text.
E.g. US commerce clause in Wickard v. Filmore.
The right to control one's own wealth is arguably the most important human right, since its infringement is the cause of so much death and poverty around the world.
Very few people will dispute your right to own a pair of boots, but a lot more could have problems with you owning more land that all the farmers of your country together or more money that an entire country.
The edge cases are natural resources - the most prominently example being land. But the current bevy of economic laws make no distinction between this class of property and other classes, and limit one's right to what is clearly their own wealth.
For instance, can you be the owner of 1000 can of food?
Absolutely, if you are in the bay area, because the society there allow you that.
What about an island without any other food that is inhabited by 40 other people? I doubt it very much.
>What you can or can't own depends on the circumstances.
You're confusing the act of protecting a right with the right itself. A right does not cease to exist because the law fails to protect it.
Where is that written?
I would like to point to you that your "private property", including your own body, could be considered as a "natural resource" ready to be exploited by other agents in the environment.
I doubt that throwing copies of "Atlas Shrugged" to their heads is going to change their mind (even signed copies!).
That is how property has historically been justified. Read up on property rights if you want to learn more about it.
>I would like to point to you that your "private property", including your own body, could be considered as a "natural resource" ready to be exploited by other agents in the environment.
The principle of property rights is that you cannot make use of natural resources that have already been appropriated and turned into someone else's property, so no, another person couldn't simply exploit my property/body under the property rights framework.
where is the money in that private deal coming from if not the state? And what it is the state if not and element (for best or worst) of how we, as a society, have chosen to organize?
Well, it's not your proposal that we organize society following your favourite principles instead?
And your first paragraph is pretty much "all taxes are theft", that is usually the mantra of fanatical libertarians.
The economic illiteracy required to come up with your conclusions is astounding. But then I actually looked at your comment history and the pattern became clear.
>And your first paragraph is pretty much "all taxes are theft", that is usually the mantra of fanatical libertarians.
One person's "fanatical libertarian" is another person's human rights advocate.
>The economic illiteracy required to come up with your conclusions is astounding.
Worthless ad hominem.
Incorrect. Buildings stand on land (natural resources) and require significant amounts of energy to be erected (natural resource). So does machinery.
IP is the only thing you have going for here. How useful is IP without infrastructure and capital to support it? Is it useful, for example, to know how to make a solar panel if you have no means of producing it or extracting the metals and materials needed to make it, because that area is controlled by someone else?
> One person's "fanatical libertarian" is another person's human rights advocate.
No. Fanatical libertarians are a fringe group, as is evidenced by elections and the amount of ridicule they rightly garner in any factual discussion. There's no human right to "not be taxes while enjoying the benefits of infrastructure". Perhaps some libertarians' positions are more nuanced, but you wouldn't know it from their comments.
> Worthless ad hominem.
Worthless libertarian drivel. Calling someone illiterate or incompetent in a subject is not an ad hominem when it is based in fact. It's clearly not your area of expertise, so it's not shameful to admit so.
Everything is made from natural resources. That goes without saying. The question is what portion of the value of the property is constituted by the value of the natural resources.
The value of the natural resource inputs to production form a minor fraction of the total value of what is produced. This is because the effort it takes to configure and organize those natural resources into something with added value is what holds the majority of the value. This is why economic systems make such a big difference in the success of economies. Good laws incentivize and reward effective efforts.
>No. Fanatical libertarians are a fringe group, as is evidenced by elections and the amount of ridicule they rightly garner in any factual discussion.
Ok let's play this game:
Libertarians are the ultimate human rights advocates. The majority believes in a lot of silly stuff, like using violence against non-violent people. The majority believing something doesn't make it right.
Your inane insults are typical of anti-libertarian extremists who can't tolerate someone advocating that other people be left alone and not violently forced to conform to a plan imposed by others.
>Worthless libertarian drivel.
Everything you've written has been worthless and intolerant authoritarian drivel. It's the product of an infantile and narcissistic mind, that psychologically projects their own characteristics onto others in the form of insults.
Such a society would be not be just and nobody wants to live in it. The general idea to prevent this kind of barbarism is that additional fairness criteria are needed that ensure that everybody can live in dignity, and only if your wealth does not violate these principles should you have a right to it. Fair resource distribution principally conflicts with the right to one's own property and unfortunately out of the box also with the Pareto efficiency of transfers.
That's like saying we should not have an absolute right to be more intelligent than the average person since such a right is perfectly consistent with a society where one person is infinitely more intelligent than everyone else.
Material equality is not a right, and the pursuit of a society with material equality does not grant any party a right to imprison someone for their refusal to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade.
There is a fundamental moral difference between using violent threats and physical confinement from using offers of payment to compel work.
Taking a job because the alternative is to starve is still a consensual interaction. We need to work to survive. We can go out into the wilderness, and live off the land, which would let us survive at subsistence levels, or we can go into civilization and work within an employment contract that gives us a much higher standard of living.
The freedom to choose ensures that generally speaking, people in a market economy are choosing one of the better options available to them, rather than one of the poorer ones. It also ensures that when people DO interact with others, it is because it is generally mutually beneficial. This basic dynamic leads to an emergent property of actions carried out in markets generally being a net-value gain for the economy as a whole.
If someone points a gun at you and tells you to work, your choice is obedience or death.
If someone hoards all the food and tells you to work for it, your choice is obedience or death.
In what way are these meaningfully different?
>We can go out into the wilderness, and live off the land
No you can't, because the tyrant owns all the land and calls the police if you try to take any of their food.
It's everyone's, in the form of the government.
So you're saying that it does not violate my rights when someone else claims to own an arbitrary portion of my income? With 25% taxes, I work for 3 months of the year for someone else. If I choose not to pay, then people with guns come to lock me up. How is that not slavery?
> It's everyone's, in the form of the government.
Government is not society. Government is a group of people who consume the productive output of society by force.
jonathanstrange is right: Property rights are a complex issue, attempts to align them with "basic human rights" have limited success, and invariably muddy the waters.
You and I are on an island. You have money (or coconuts, or whatever). We agree that if I work for you, then you will give me some payment. That payment is my income.
How does that example depend on the state or a tax system?
The income you and I have today is inextricably tied to the system of government, taxation, and trade that we are in. You can't talk about holding one fixed and changing the other in any meaningful way.
Now the toy examples - two guys on an island have some of their own problems. If it's just you and I on an island we won't bother with currency or payment (this is part of why it's a toy model). Their tends to be furious hand-waving between this sort of example and a "real" economy, and part of the reason for that is much of the mess as it scales up in practice (e.g. in actual history) tends to be creation of exactly the sort of institutions OP is trying to elide. I'm not sure I buy it, but there is at least an argument to be made that they are necessarily tied together.
You can talk about purely theoretical systems with a different basis - but they are completely different systems. Ones that nobody has actually worked out how to implement, for that matter, though there is lots of theorizing. Always worth remembering that the majority of economic theorizing seems to have a fairly loose connection to the observable world.
Fwiw: the desert island scenario, along with Smith's bartering villages are flawed enough to be probably best avoided.
> The income you and I have today is inextricably tied to the system of government, taxation, and trade that we are in.
Yes, that is our current context.
> You can't talk about holding one fixed and changing the other in any meaningful way.
Yes, the world is complex. I simply wish to see one with more voluntary interaction and less coercion. Too few hold liberty as a political value, settling for lesser subjective things such as "fairness."
Here is a better one: on the island there is you, me and Bob. Bob does not participate in our trades, but is responsible for things like protecting the island from neighboring tribes, putting out forest fires we accidentally start while camping, and building the paths and roads we use to get around the island.
These things not only benefit us, it can easily be argued that our everyday trades would not be possible without them. Without roads I would not be able to reach you, without Bob's protection I would be robbed or worse on the way to meet you.
This is why Bob is inherently entitled to a portion of our income. Without Bob, the environment in which you and I can comfortably conduct business would not exist.
The real counter-examples comes at larger scales. At a certain point it becomes impractical for a large number of people to individually make voluntary agreements about their responsibilities to each other, so generally people agree to some system of deciding rules, and agree to the outcome of those decisions in advance, without consenting to each one individually.
You're free to choose another place to live. You're free to choose how you earn your living, or even whether or not you do earn a living. Nobody will beat you senseless if you decide to take a vacation this week. Nobody has absolute control over every detail of your life. You can marry and associate with whom you choose. You can object to paying 25% of your income, hand out tracts to that effect, and vote for politicians who may change that. You can't be bought and sold.
If that were the only way taxes were spent, then taxes would be very low indeed, and we may not even need to have this discussion.
> and needs
Taxes pay for way more than "needs." Do we need to bomb people in the Middle East? If there no other way to pay for things than by the threat of violence?
> You're free to choose another place to live.
Am I? The United States must grant permission for you to renounce your citizenship, and until then, they claim taxes on your income no matter where derived. The government also controls the movement of people and may detain me if I attempt to leave the country. Of course I must also have the consent of some other government to gain entry and a work visa.
I did not freely choose to live in my country of birth. I did not consent to the obligations of taxes.
> You can object to paying 25% of your income, hand out tracts to that effect, and vote for politicians who may change that. You can't be bought and sold.
But in the end, you must pay...
The slave trade was abolished, I don't think you really need to write a thesis on it. Everyone accepts that, and now would like to elevate attention to more nuanced inequalities.
I would like you to realize that it requires indoctrination to agree with you. Indoctrination that the end result of due process is "right". Indoctrination that the word tax is exempt from scrutiny.
The normal response by anti-tax people is that all of the roles of government should be funded by opt-in systems, where you agree to pay a fee to get the service.
However, this doesn't work for a lot of public goods that suffer from free loader problems; you can't prevent people from benefiting from the good if they don't pay. Take, for example, roads; either roads are public, and a freeloader can choose not to pay and use them anyway, or they are private toll roads, and a person could be literally imprisoned because every road to move around requires payment to use.
An even more obvious example is something like pollution control. Society has an interest in preventing people from dumping toxic waste into rivers and lakes, so we create restrictions. However, someone has to enforce those restrictions, and that requires funding. Without taxes, we would have to volunteer to pay money for the enforcement; however, why would I pay? I get to enjoy the clean water whether I pay or not, so why not just freeload? This will mean enforcement funding will not be there, and people can just pollute as much as you want.
You need a way to get everyone to contribute for public goods, which is why we need taxes.
An income/sales tax is not "all taxes".
It's hard to imagine a society not oriented around roads, since the government has been building them for so long. But lots of people have an economic interest in using and maintaining the roads.
> An even more obvious example is something like pollution control.
Ah, the good old, "Libertarians can't handle externalities."
Well there is lots of free-market scholarship on pollution and courts going back decades. If you're actually curious about it, I can point you in that direction. If you've already made up your mind, then there's no point elaborating.
One quick aside: during the Industrial Revolution, government courts sided with industry in pollution matters, granting them the right (sometimes monopoly) to pollute. Plaintiffs were ignored by the government in pollution cases, since industrial progress was more important than their health. So government actually made pollution worse...
Even more so, they are often so unsure of their ability to judge whether you are unwilling to work vs unable, they'll give you money in the form of social benefits if you are poor, just in case. You have the choice in these nations to live (albeit a modest life) without working at all. That's the opposite of slavery. It's closer to aristocracy!
It's conditional upon you choosing to work, but the demand made upon you is illegitimate nonetheless. You choosing to work and consequently earning income does not grant someone else a moral right to force you hand over a share of that income to them (to labour for them).
>You have the choice in these nations to live (albeit a modest life) without working at all. That's the opposite of slavery. It's closer to aristocracy!
Given it's a life dependent on income forcibly redistributed from others, it's similar to the life of a slave owner, but a very poor one that shares the loot with millions of other co-recipients.
But it's not slavery because you are not forced to produce on threat of death. My issue was the devaluation of the term "slavery", not the legitimacy of the confiscation. If you consider it entirely illegitimate, then what was described is armed robbery.
(This assumes that the government has crowded out private charity, which is the case in most developed countries.)
Because they will not come with guns if you choose not to work.
I do not think you understand slavery, where you cannot choose not to work.
That is part of the terms of your citizenship here, an agreement to which your parents consented on your behalf when you were too young to consent.
If you refuse to pay the tax, people with guns do not come for you. Your wages may be garnished, or money taken from your savings accounts, because that money you owe in tax is not yours. It's all of ours, to use for public goods and services, to be shared by all of us.
People who refuse to pay tax are stealing from all of us.
People who don't like the tax arrangement in this country are free to 1) try to change it or 2) leave. I welcome both options. Stealing from us, that just makes me angry.
Seriously? People get put in jail for tax evasion all the time. Certainly lots of guns involved in that process.
> money taken from your savings accounts
Not theft?
> public goods and services, to be shared by all of us
No. Tax money is distributed to favored interests. It is not shared among all.
So what portion of your property do I have a right to? Which part of your home or possessions may I come and direct to my purposes? Or to "the rest of us" even? May I go to your fridge and distribute some fruit to your neighbors or to the homeless? How is a claim to income different than a claim to your other property?
The vast majority of people who do not pay tax--who steal from the rest of us--simply have it taken from their accounts or paychecks by the legal machinery we've established to do so.
And again, garnishing paychecks or withdrawing from accounts is not theft, because it is not your money.
Remember, by definition, your tax obligation is not yours. It never was. Keeping it from the rest of us is stealing from us.
And last....
"So what portion of your property do I have a right to? Which part of your home or possessions may I come and direct to my purposes? Or to "the rest of us" even? May I go to your fridge and distribute some fruit to your neighbors or to the homeless? How is a claim to income different than a claim to your other property?"
Great questions! That's what the democratic process is for, for us to settle those questions. Right now, we have one set of answers to those questions. We won't always, because laws are always changing to reflect the society that writes them.
Hey, if you reeeeeally hate taxes, maybe you can make some pamphlets and get enough of us on board to vote in your new tax-free system.
What a strange debt: one that a person assumes without their consent, and which you only know about by violating their privacy.
With regard to the last point: if I trade $1 million worth of goods with another private party, you have no way of knowing I "owe" you and the rest of society anything unless you somehow get details about that private trade. If myself and the private party do not divulge any information about our private activities, you would need to violate our privacy rights and force us to divulge information about our private interactions for you to uncover the existence of this debt that we owe you.
How absurd your moral framework is..
Starting at 10, you put in about twenty minutes of work defending you, your family, and your possessions from other, less scrupulous folks (defense). Then you spend about forty five minutes putting a little bit aside for your future self (SS, Medicare). After that, another 15 minutes of work provides insurance against becoming catastrophically poor and sick (Medicaid). The rest of the time covers everything else: building infrastructure so you can move around, inspections so that you, your food and your medicine are safe (FDA, USDA, OSHA, EPA), regulations so that you can save and invest with confidence (SEC, CFPB), and the like. You maybe spend thirty seconds, maybe a minute on research (which forms the basis for new treatments that keep you alive, lays the groundwork for new products that delight you, and even helps you understand your place in the universe). At the stroke of noon, you spend an instant working on some things that perhaps you're not sure about (National Endowment for the Arts, NPR (maybe)), and then you're back to making money for yourself.
I would argue this is a fantastic deal!
If that's all the government funded, then taxes would be very low indeed.
> some of our profits
But it's not "some" is it? It's over 50% in places.
These are public goods that we all benefit from and share the cost of. That is what taxes are supposed to pay for. That's why it's not slavery. You are paying for those things that damn near everyone agrees they want.
As for social programs where money is simply redistributed from one citizen to another - that's a whole other story. I agree with you there that is slavery. Those citizens can vote themselves money from your pocket and if you disagree - the guys with guns show up and take it anyway, and maybe even lock you up for disagreeing.
> You expect there to be... That's why it's not slavery. You are paying for those things that damn near everyone agrees they want.
If those things are important to me, then I will pay for them. Just because someone else "expects" certain things doesn't mean I do. Everyone manages to put shoes on their feet without the government. And charity could certainly take care of the rest without shoes.
Taxation is not a prepayment for services rendered. Or an insurance policy. Or a usage fee.
> social programs ... I agree with you there that is slavery
Excellent. Then let's agree to move in the direction where government only does the "public goods" stuff. Once we get there, we can disagree again on how far we want to go.
http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/investing-is-more-luck-than-t...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-01/why-luck-...
You justify this in your own mind with ideological constructs and narratives about "Randians" and "libertarians". In reality, you support violating human rights, and no argument you conjur up can justify that.
It is carried out between private parties in their private capacity. By every definition it's private trade. Common sense should tell you that too. No one has a right to 1) force people to give up their privacy and divulge details about the private interaction and 2) throw people in prison if they refuse to disclose this private information or if they refuse to hand over a share of the currency they are given in this private interaction. You believe in a world where people have no rights, especially if they engage in some private action that involves money changing hands (God forbid!). Typical socialist authoritarianism that rationalises imprisoning people by convincing himself ' there is no such thing as "private trade"'.
And of course we have the power to force people to give up their privacy and divulge details about private interactions: we do it all the time in the context of child pornography, for instance. As individual human beings, we recognize that privacy (and personal liberty) are important values. But they are not absolutes, and we strive to balance them against our other interests, such as our health and happiness. A democratic government is the means that we use to distribute the responsibility for striking the balance.
It might seem unfair that we don't get to choose at birth whether we want to live in modern society, where taxes are mandatory, or in a state of nature, where we are free of the terrible burden of taxation (and also free of any chance to amass a fortune, beyond a particularly large pile of coconuts). But there are many things we don't get to choose when we are born. Such is life.
But income tax law does not distinguish trades based on contracts not enforceable by the government from those based on contracts that are, so even by this contrived standard of what constitutes private trade, income tax law violates human rights.
>And of course we have the power to force people to give up their privacy and divulge details about private interactions: we do it all the time in the context of child pornography, for instance.
We do not do it all the time in the context of child pornography. We only require someone to surrender their privacy rights if there is evidence they have traded child pornography.
Income tax law requires everyone to surrender their privacy rights. Moreover, it requires that those who refuse to surrender the privacy or property rights and comply to be imprisoned.
>As individual human beings, we recognize that privacy (and personal liberty) are important values. But they are not absolutes, and we strive to balance them against our other interests, such as our health and happiness.
We do not need to violate other people's human rights to be healthy and happy, and in any case, this would not be a justification for doing so.
>It might seem unfair that we don't get to choose at birth whether we want to live in modern society, where taxes are mandatory, or in a state of nature, where we are free of the terrible burden of taxation (and also free of any chance to amass a fortune, beyond a particularly large pile of coconuts).
The alternative to human rights violating taxes like those on income is not an absence of law and civilization. Governments can exist and raise revenue without taxing sales or income.
I tend to agree with you that the "guilty-until-proven-innocent" nature of our income tax system runs contrary to our national values. But that's just a matter of reform, not repeal.
You're simply wrong that we don't need to curtail people's rights to be healthy and happy. If my neighbor pollutes my groundwater with his "private" activity, his privacy is going to have to be violated and his freedom to continue to pursue his business or hobby will have to be compromised. If government doesn't have the power to do so, I'll take matters into my own hands, and again we're back to a state of nature.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_society#Prehistoric_...
And some human beings don't have a concept of 'self-ownership' and think slavery is justified.
And consequentialism also leads me to believe that defending property rights so far as to allow people to deny food to the starving, is not a good idea.
(And to be honest, to me the libertarian notion of "self-ownership" feels like a reverse-reasoning epicycle to try and base everything on property rights. I'm not sure it even makes sense: Surely if you own yourself you should be allowed to sell yourself?)
So slavery would be okay if the people who were enslaved could be protected from abuse whilst enslaved?
Think carefully about the implications of your philosophy.
>And consequentialism also leads me to believe that defending property rights so far as to allow people to deny food to the starving, is not a good idea.
You don't have a right to live by robbing others. Even if you don't care about the moral reasons for this, you must see how in the long run, a legal system that allows those with low resources to plunder those with high resources, deteriorates the incentives that sustain the economy, leading to far more death.
>(And to be honest, to me the libertarian notion of "self-ownership" feels like a reverse-reasoning epicycle to try and base everything on property rights.
If the term "self-ownership" rubs you the wrong way (because the concept of ownership has been stigmatized by socialist ideology), the libertarian notion could be reversed, and it would be equally valid. Unclaimed natural resources that are appropriated and turned into property become part of a person. They are us. So to violate someone's property is to violate their person.
>I'm not sure it even makes sense: Surely if you own yourself you should be allowed to sell yourself?)
I would argue you have no moral right to sell yourself into slavery, because the person you are five years from now is in some respects a different person, who no one else, even their past self, has a right to sell into slavery.
I think if some form of slavery could be proven to lead to better outcomes for all involved, it would be a good thing. I just don't think such a system is possible.
>you must see how in the long run, a legal system that allows those with low resources to plunder those with high resources, deteriorates the incentives that sustain the economy, leading to far more death.
Actually, what I see is that in societies with lower taxes, inequality increases slowly over time leading to inefficiency, poverty and crime.
>I would argue you have no moral right to sell yourself into slavery, because the person you are five years from now is in some respects a different person, who no one else, even their past self, has a right to sell into slavery.
Okay, that's a reasonable argument, but it still feels like an unnecessary contortion to me.
Why not just say "slavery is bad because it denies individual freedom"? That seems far more like a position based in liberty. Whereas trying to base everything in property rights just feels like an exercise in oversimplification.
(Or if I'm feeling excessively cynical, it feels like an attempt to intertwine property rights into the philosophy so deeply that they can't be argued with directly.)
What's a good outcome is subjective. For the slave, it cannot be better to be enslaved. For someone else, it may be very well be. That is why rights are important. Like I said, your moral framework is essentially sociopathic in its willingness to violate others rights. You're even willing to enslave others given the right circumstances.
>Actually, what I see is that in societies with lower taxes, inequality increases slowly over time leading to inefficiency, poverty and crime.
The US doesn't have lower taxes though. The countries that have the lowest taxes while still protecting private property rights have seen massive gains in wages and life expectancy over the last 60 years: Hong Kong and Singapore.
The countries that have increasingly adopted social democracy have seen wage growth stagnate.
Look at the US for example. The US has tried massively increasing social welfare spending since 1972:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-...
Annual spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):
>Pensions and retirement: 4.4%
>Healthcare: 5.7%
>Welfare: 4.1%
Annual economic growth over the time frame:
>2.7%
The only thing it has to show for giving people more "free money" to spend is a higher trade deficit, stagnant wage growth, and, I would argue, an explosion in the amount of single parenthood:
http://pinetreewatchdog.org/500-rise-in-single-parenthood-fu...
The story has largely been the same in Europe, with the scale of forcible income redistribution growing, concurrent with increasing stagnation of wage growth.
>Why not just say "slavery is bad because it denies individual freedom"?
Because if the person is selling themselves into slavery, you have to ask how that is a denial of individual freedom. That is what I've attempted to answer.
>That seems far more like a position based in liberty. Whereas trying to base everything in property rights just feels like an exercise in oversimplification.
You cannot have a definition of liberty unless you define what people have a right to (their person and property).
The premise was if it were better for all involved. I've already said I don't think that's possible, and it sounds like you agree.
>You're even willing to enslave others given the right circumstances.
The right circumstances being that it's better for all involved yes. I would consider it immoral to deny people an option that makes them better off.
>The countries that have increasingly adopted social democracy have seen wage growth stagnate.
I think this has also corresponded with an increase in wealth inequality, largely as a result of increased importance of capital in wealth creation in those countries.
But I'm less confident here. Maybe you're right that lower taxes are better for the economy. My main point (although less so in this particular thread) is that arguments for property rights should be based on their positive outcomes for society, not a system of morals that denies economic criticism.
"Tax is theft" is an unassailable moral position.
"Countries with lower taxes do better" is an actual argument.
How could any institution that denies a party the freedom to choose (e.g. slavery) be better for all involved. Maybe you're suggesting that if slaves were better off by some criteria with someone else making decisions for them, even if they would prefer to not be under the control of that third party, then slavery would be in their best interest?
>"Tax is theft" is an unassailable moral position.
Some people forget that government programs are paid for through forcible income redistribution that in turn relies on the fear created by throwing non-compliers in prison. It's good to remind them, as it may go against their own morals. I think most people are fundamentallt opposed to violating other's rights to their person and property, and it is only the complexity of government, and the ideological constructs created to euphemize and justify its actions, that obfuscates the violence that it deals out, and makes people consent to it, and vote for programs that rely on it.
Thus, controlling your own wealth (right to property) is a basic human right.
Dignity is not a human right, since it is subjective.
Sharecropping was abhorrent but was distinct from slavery.
Slaves may be killed legally by their owner.
As for conscription, it's a similar situation. The constitution allows the government to "raise and support Armies" under article I section 8. This has been interpreted to mean the usage of the resources of the nation to build an army as approved by Congress. It can be money (taxes), land (eminent domain), or people (conscription). Again, because of historical precedent set in statutory and common law, as well as being included in the constitution, it has not been deemed to violate the 13th amendment and instead exists as another exemption.
At least, that's my understanding.
Conscription stems from the understanding of the militia as being universal and the express power of Congress to "To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions", not from the power of Congress to "raise and support Armies".
Also, please consider the original coinage act of 1792. It carried a penalty of death (yes, death) for anyone caught debasing the currency. Why? Because debasing the currency was considered equivalent to the crime of counterfeit. And debasing the currency was effectively theft from literally every single person in the country through reduced value and less purchasing power via inflation. Counterfeit, debasement, and inflation were considered hidden taxes because they achieve the same goal.
Later coinage acts removed this penalty, which is why (in part) we have the problems we have today. We are approaching 20 trillion in debt. That was money that was spent that debased our currency and drastically reduced our purchasing power. Make no mistake, we are not truly free anymore because we do not enjoy this basic human right.
This is not to say "taxes are evil" or anything like that. But deficit spending through unbacked credit is theft. If the money were actually taxed instead of issued as unbacked credit, the value of the USD would not erode.
I do believe that there is a 'basic'/fundamental human right to retain the benefit of one's own labor.
The situation is complicated through trade. E.g., one might trade their labor for paychecks that can be exchanged for further trade opportunities. A government may provide various protections in exchange for taxes, levies, fees, etc.
In spite of those details, I also believe individuals have a general right to defend their ethically accumulated property/wealth from various re-distribution/re-negotiation/fraud -schemes which sometimes include inflation.
All of that leaves plenty of room for further debate about e.g.,
That's because human rights are inalienable, meaning they can neither be taken nor given away.
We are far safer with governments and central banks that are accountable to us to varying degrees than self appointed shadowy crypto currency cliques with zero transparency and accountability. The monetary system certainly cannot be in private hands.
The 'solution' peddled in a frenzy by early adopters is tainted by self interest and infinitely worse than any problem with central banks and current monetary systems.
Ah, but there's the rub. How accountable are they, really? In the software industry, you find out that if "everyone" is responsible for something, then all too often, no one is. And even if they are accountable to people in general, what happens when they fail individuals? Like this guy who had £440,000 of lawsuit-settlement money seized by Barclays on money-laundering suspicions:
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jan/22/barclays-took-...
I could however imagine supporting right to control your wealth up to the point of the average wealth of a human being on the planet. That would be within the spirit of human equality and universality of human rights.
And in practice, I wish I had at least a right to count my money in public, and publish my salary (without annoying my employer).
Talking about wealth to the poor is like talking about intelligence to the idiots... I think Coinbase are too full of themselves!
For global wealth info, go to https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about-us/research/resear... where you'll find a nicely presented Report and a Databook with more numbers in it.
The Databook has a table (Table 2-4) giving estimated median wealth per adult for all the world's countries (or something like all; I haven't checked). Many of the figures are small, but not one is negative. I'm fairly sure these figures are net of debt, but it's not 100% clear. So, just in case, compare those figures with the ones in the previous column, listing debt per adult; the only countries where the debt figure exceeds the wealth figures are (unless I missed some) Brazil, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany (!), Malaysia, Maldives, Sweden, the US.
(I believe from other sources that US median net wealth is comfortably positive, which is one reason why I am pretty sure the figures in the "median wealth" column of Table 2-4 are net of debt.)
These statistics show that most humans have very little accumulated wealth to control, and very few humans have a lot of the total global wealth.
> I list [the lack of wealth redistribution] as a con because I think most people view it as one, but it’s not clear that it is one.
It is widely clear that its a con, especially in the advent of the current forces in the world. Global warming has made some places on the planet impossible to live on without wealth redistribution and technology gains largely go to the extremely talented or the extremely wealthy.
Furthermore "controlling your own wealth" is basically translatable to "doing whatever you want with stuff" which is so clearly a bad idea. Can I "control my wealth" towards bribing a politician? Can I "control my wealth" by burning a bunch of methane on a boat in the middle of the atlantic?
Property / wealth is an important institution for many reasons, and crypto-currencies should be tolerated for now, but if the world starts to show signs of regular kidnappings for BTC ransoms then we should use political action to put an end to the anonymity or lack of state control that they provide.
Thought experiment: a world without history & society. 7 billion people, with the resources of the world fairly divided amongst those 7 billion, but these people come into the world as blank adults without any knowledge of the past.
They'd quickly starve. Even hunting and gathering requires a surprising amount of training to do successfully, and the world cannot support 7 billion people in a hunter and gatherer lifestyle.
Even if your Mom & Dad taught you the skills of subsistence farming you'd still starve; we don't have enough farmland to grow enough food for 7 billion without modern farming techniques.
But for the sake of this argument let's suppose your parents taught you how to farm and make your own tools, shelter, etc and you have enough land to live on. Subsistence farming is something you can do on a heavily populated world without the knowledge or cooperation or interference of any others. And it's pretty much the only thing.
Anything else requires history & society & cooperation forced or unforced.
We've the inheritance of Aristotle, Newton, Watt, Einstein, Borlaug, Caesar, Washington, Confucius and innumerable others. We control the wealth because they're all dead and we've inherited it. We're mice standing on the shoulders of giants.
Certainly we have all done something to be granted our wealth. Some of us may have inherited it, but most of us do our 9-5 or more. But what we do is such a small part compared to what came before. We spent 12-20 years in school being taught by society, protected by society, enabled by society and learning from history, given to you by your employer or your customers.
It's efficient and natural for you to control the wealth that comes into your hands; taxation and government implies a certain amount of waste. But society has just as much of a claim as you do. At least on any part more than that of a subsistence farmer.
That is a bit extreme. You can hoard basic goods (wheat, lumber, livestock) or build infrastructure (house, barn, pipes) for your own use in the future, without involving state or society.
Society can more or less work without private property but a free society can not. We tend to think of the State as an abstract law infrastructure, but it is not. Who does make, apply, execute the laws?
But you're right, our other freedoms do imply a certain amount of control over a certain amount property. The right to self-determination, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom of association et cetera would be hard to guarantee without a little bit of freedom of property.
As I mentioned, capitalism is a pretty good means to accomplish our goals. It's not an end in itself or a fundamental right, IMO.
Private property is a more broad concept that means of production. You can put some goods out of market by law (a dam, roads, airports) so society will work better, but that isn't the same as preventing individuals from having their own private wealth.
Private property is based on the concept of rule of law. If the State can arbitrarily disposses you of goods you earned through fair trade, you are not really free.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_rights
Wikipedia is a fine source of knowledge, but I would take a look at what happens in every actual nation in Earth. If you can't work hard and save a portion of what you earn, you are living in a tirany that also disregards the rest of human rights.
To suggest that it is not a right is to imply that it is okay for a government to demand that two private parties divulge information about a private trade they engaged in, and throw the two parties in prison if they refuse to divulge this information, or if they refuse to hand over a share of the value they received in this private trade.
Not to nitpick, but if all of our species reverted to hunter-gather, it would quickly reduce the population to a level that could be sustained. Agriculture allows humans to have far more children then they could support otherwise, for better and worse.
I also disagree that we would 'all starve', for similar reasons.
> we don't have enough farmland to grow enough food for 7 billion without modern farming techniques
This is also probably not true. We do not go down that road because without modern farming techniques, we would need a far larger percentage of the population engaged directly in food production. This actually has many advantages over modern farming but it's a hard sell.
"Governments exist to serve their citizens."
In a democracy you also need 51% or more of the votes and everybody is equal.
We all know the real world works very very differently.
I agree with the other comments here. The whole point of human rights is to enshrine the things that we absolutely need for our physical and psychological needs. Water, air, housing, safety, education. To claim that taxation, inflation and demonetization are a violation of human rights, devalues the term itself.
Thus Taxation by the definition, is a human right violation for many.
It's exactly statements like this which dilute and devalue the power of terms like "human rights."
If you are a hardcore libertarian, and want to claim that every major nation violates libertarian principles, more power to you. But don't appropriate the term "basic human rights" towards a political ideology that it was never meant to represent.
So yes its absolutely appropriate. You dont have to be even a libertarian to realize that.
"Rights considered negative rights may include civil and political rights such as freedom of speech, life, private property, freedom from violent crime, freedom of religion, habeas corpus, a fair trial, freedom from slavery."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
Putting all one's money in a bitcoin account doesn't sound like the best solution to hyperinflation and cash confiscation in poor countries. Why not buy US dollars or gold?
Don't get me wrong, in general I very much like the concept of private citizens managing capital rather than the State (though I wish workers had a bigger say in how capital is managed, but I digress), but there are times when States have to exercise some control over the property they protect in order to protect itself and the property it guards. Keep in mind, the Draft is a thing the State can do, the trick is to use such controls as lightly as possible.
Private control and ownership of property, while important, must necessarily be secondary to the stability and protection of the society it inhabits.
Also read bryanlarsen's comment, they go into good detail on how the State enhances private citizen's ability to create and accumulate capital.
The possibilities for wealth creation are enormous when you enforce individual property rights strictly, but it comes at the cost of a more egalitarian society.
And those places can be easily recognised by their widespread abject poverty.
Papua New Guinea has a GDP per capita of $2k, Australia $42k. PNG has a 40% poverty rate and it's ranked as one of the worst places for violence against women. Life expectancy is 62, a full 20 years behind Australia. But, hey, they're more egalitarian, so that's great.
What I read is that what we call "property rights" is a fairly new idea, and we shouldn't treat it as "natural" or as a fundamental law of the universe as some do.
For the record, I'm in full agreement that excessive restriction on property and capital has costs. Creating and maintaining the idea of "private property" has costs too.
What benefits of the state are you willing to live without? All of them? If the answer is no you just want the line drawn further back or forward than others. My guess is like most of us you draw the line around services and benefits from the state that benefit you and people you know and not around services and benefits the state provides you deem unimportant to you and the people you know.
To be fair, the article's author seems to agree with that:
"This delicate balance of power between individuals and governments has been in flux throughout history, and it’s helpful to have some checks in place to ensure it doesn’t get too far out of alignment."
This piece just uses the pull quote "a great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace." Graham's article about that goes on to theorize that this might be sufficient, and if so that only guild monopolies prevented earlier industrialization.
This is, in a word, stupid. Stability is a necessary component of industrialization - though stability to invest is even more directly required than stability to profit. This is not a breakthrough idea, I learned it in high school. Graham just hasn't read enough of the "great deal" he references to discover that. Stability is thoroughly insufficient - there's a laundry list of other requirements, with agricultural advances driving most of the other keys (especially, concentration of capital for investment and displacement of workers from food production). All of this is well-studied, heavily-analyzed content. It's not new to this article, or Graham, they're just reworking theory from scratch.
It's not especially egregious here, and I'm not attacking the conclusions of the article by pointing this out. But it's a problem that crops up a lot (ever read pg's thoughts on the Edict of Diocletian?) and it's exhausting to read ground-up recreations of basic theory.
Locke wrote this envisioning people producing a measured but fair output from their labor - growing food, making durable goods, etc - and the modest property and wealth that could be obtained from this effort. In modern times, the true value of goods and services is skewed drastically in favor of those that own means of production, increasing exploitation of those that don't. Locke saw the potential but then less fully realized problem of unlimited accumulation and concentration of property and wealth and he wrote the government should moderate this and more equally distribute wealth.
Allowing one to fully control their wealth may increase innovation, but there are downsides to this without some controls in place to control dangerous unchecked accumulation of wealth. I disagree with the premise that "smartphones and steam engines" are a justification for this because they improve the human condition. They improve it for some, at a huge cost to others.