Nozick and taxes

Link’s not working, at least for me.

I’ve often had a similar thought about Nozick on this issue, but I’ve never been able to articulate it at all, so I look forward to reading your original post/paper.

Forget guest blogger; I suggest CT tender an offer to John.

Your argument relies on (what I believe to be) the faulty assumption that the government owned the property in the first place, and then granted property rights to private owners in the same way that a landlord grants limited rights to a tenant. But I see no good reason for making this assumption. While Lockean theories of initial acquisition, namely homesteading, may be lacking, so too are socialist, social democratic, and welfare statist theories of initial acquisition by society/government.

It seems to me that all initial acquisition theories are lacking. One way to deal with the problem is to assert some sort of statute of limitations. Another is to simply ignore rights-based arguments altogether and instead focus on consequentialist justifications for libertarianism, which is much more fruitful, in my opinion.

Perhaps that should have read, “the government legitimately acquired the property in the first place.”

Why assume that the government had the authority to grant property rights in the first place?

Ownership of land has always been maintined by force or by laws backed by the force of a government.

It is much easier to live under the second system but then you have to pay for it. If the government is going to defend you property rights then it makes sense that you should pay taxes to cover these costs.

But what if you can defend your own property rights? Or what if you have friends who can help protect them? Or what if you can purchase protection from a private security firm? In all these cases, it does not make sense that you should have to pay taxes to cover these costs, because you can choose to acquire defense from other sources.

And even if it is the case that defense of property rights can only be defending by a single institution with a monopoly on the initiation of force within a single geographic area, that would only justify Nozick’s “Night Watchman” state, but would do nothing to justify the larger welfare-regulatory social democratic state.

“Whether revolutionary governments expropriate existing rights and grant new ones, or honour pre-existing rights, the rights are still derived from the government, just as, to the extent that pre-existing debts are honoured, they are owed by the government.”

Rights are never derived from the government. Rights are inherent in the people. Government should be constructed so as to intrude as little as possible on the rights of the people. One of these rights is the right to private property (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”) For the full list: See the Bill of Rights. People have different standards for what constitutes reasonable search and seizure. Some consider taxes unconsciable, others not, but things like eminent domain and taxes only exist because the people permit them to.

As for the question of ‘ground zero’, I would say this point is when the most recent social contract was agreed to.

Interesting points all. micha – I think whether or not you can defend your property now is somewhat irrelevant. You can’t simply proclaim a clean break from the moment that you no longer wish to take advantage of government services on.

The fact is that your property is only yours because the government protected/owned it in the past. Unless you come upon some brand new piece of land in the middle of the ocean, the land you are claiming to be yours free of obligation has certainly in the past been the subject of “investment” by others – i.e. government/society.

That is, you can no more justly say that land that has been defended in many ways(militarily, environmentally, etc.) by a gov’t/society is “yours” free of obligation, than you can borrow vast sums of money and then, when you have bought what you need with it, decide not to repay the debt.

If you want to get into a spaceship and fly to Mars and claim squatter’s rights on some land, be my guest. But your beach-front property has been protected from invasion, erosion, pollution, etc. for hundreds of years. You can’t say “oh, I don’t need your protection anymore, I’ll just stop taking it and stop paying you for it”(and this is aside from the overwhelming freerider problems with such an argument)

You can’t simply proclaim a clean break from the moment that you no longer wish to take advantage of government services on. The fact is that your property is only yours because the government protected/owned it in the past.

If you come to my house and mow my lawn, without me asking you to do so, and then demand that I pay you for your service, do I have an obligation to pay? What if you claim that my lawn is only mowed because you mowed it and would not have been mowed otherwise?

If you come to my house and mow my lawn, without me asking you to do so, and then demand that I pay you for your service, do I have an obligation to pay? What if you claim that my lawn is only mowed because you mowed it and would not have been mowed otherwise?

Aside from this not being a good analogy, you have things completely backwards. Who was here first, the United States, or you? If you were a settler here and some people got together and created the US and included your land in it, you might have some legitimate greivance. Instead, you got your land from someone who explicitly or implicitly accepted the it was part of this country(and would accept the protections of the country and the costs of those protections), and he got the land from someone….etc. back 200+ years.

So for you now to declare that the land is some sovereign terroritory of micha is kind of naive.

Who was here first, the United States, or you?

The implication here is that the United States is a moral entity just like you and me, capable of exercising its rights and morally obligated to respect the rights of other entities. What are these rights? How does the United States legitimately acquire property? Where does it get the money to do this? Was there unanimous consent in its formation?

This thread was supposed to be about original acquisition of rights. It seems that you are trying to skip this step and simply assume that the initial acquisition was just.

Daniel,

Yes, yes, very funny. I see just a wee bit of difference between trying to stay on topic on a website that is admittedly not my own, and coercive benevolence. I certainly have no power (or desire) to force everyone to stay on the topic John Quiggin raised, but it does seem useful to remind ourselves every now and then exactly what the hell we are supposed to be talking about.

I’m not clear on your particular housing situation, but as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I’m somewhat skeptical of legacy contracts which bind people long after the original parties are dead.

micah – just to go over the thread from my perspective:

1) you said assumption gov’t “owns” property is faulty
2) it was countered that the gov’t protects the property
3) you countered that maybe you don’t need the protection
4) I pointed out that whether or not you need(or say you need) it now, your ownership of property now cannot simply ignore history

Now if you want to say that the gov’t aquired authority over the land of this country unjustly, that’s fine. But I think if you’re going to ask that that authority be nullified because it was unjust, then you have to acede to taking all the land of the country and divying it up equally between the people living here. How can you fairly say that the gov’t that allowed you to aquire this property is unjust, and yet your keeping the property is all well and good?

Nicholas’ post reminds me: David Friedman has already addressed most of the issues raised in this thread in his response to Mike Huben’s “A Non-Libertarian FAQ.”

It seems to me a theory of initial aquisition of property rights is usful only to rationalize or moralize about a particular system of property distribution. Property rights are abstract, have no reality in the physical world. Their is no physics of property rights.

What is real is the aquiring and holding of property. It’s one of those questions that a society is continually answering: what system are we going to use to aquire and protect property?

In this country, via the struggle of politics, we have developed a property system where–to a large extent–the government regulates aquisistion and holding of property, and charges us for it.

There are plenty of examples of more libertarian systems–those in historic central america for instance. Most of the time it seems like most of the property ends up in the hands of a few families.

I think our current system is better on the whole.

Hmm. Ok, I should clarify- the above link isn’t a response to that particular rebuttal, but a general listing of Huben’s responses to Friedman’s ideas.

just pointing out that by referring to “my house”, you appeared to be begging the question by assuming unproblematic ownership of your house.

Good point, which brings me back to my original observation that neither libertarian nor egalitarian theories of initial acquisition are well grounded, and further, that there is no way (other than perhaps consequentialism) to resolve the dispute between the two.

I recall a philosophy professor of mine who used, as an example, the conflict between socialist and libertarian theories of property rights to explain Thomas Kuhn’s theory of conflicting paradigms that cannot be resolved by any rational process.

But this is an absurdly strong requirement which leaves you “somewhat suspicious” of massive chunks of common law. My house is on a 125 year lease, and this is by far the most common model for property ownership in London.

How can you go from “somewhat skeptical” to “an absurdly strong requirement”? I didn’t claim that legacy contracts were completely invalid; I merely expressed skepticism that such contracts should continue to hold after hundreds of years. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I am still entitled to a little bit of skepticism, no?

It seems that commenters who object to your view think that rights, or at least ownership, are prior to government. And how do they justify that beleief? AFAIK the answers are either theological or based on fanciful “states of nature”.

But the historical record, supported by archaology, does not show us any state of nature. It shows us human beings always organized into groups and ruled by a minority according to local laws and customs. The primate band is prior to rights and the growth of rights is the historical dimunition of the powers of the ruling minority.

Going back to the original post, John’s argument does a good job of showing how Nozick’s argument could lead to a Georgist view of land (all granted by the government reserving rights to tax & regulate), as well as rights over corporations, intellectual property, etc., etc.

Where this argument fails as to the status quo is the individual income tax. If Nozick’s argument is correct, then, irregardless of history, there is NEVER a right for the government to tax my earnings from my labor.

Dick,

I don’t recall anyone in this thread trying to justify the existence of rights. You are arguing against a straw man.

But I do agree with you that the traditional justifications for rights are extremely weak, which is why I tend to be more concerned with consequences.

Gareth,

But logically, the same point could be made for a zoning by-law: if I bought the land knowing it was zoned residential, how is that different from buying it knowing there was a restrictive covenant on it?

This is why my primary tactic in this thread was to deny the authority for government to implement such zoning laws in the first place. Otherwise, I would agree that the two are basically the same.

Unfortunately decnavda, the same point can be made for income tax. Last year, I negotiated a certain income from my employer in exchange for work. We both knew that a certain percentage would go to income tax. We also both expected (as Canadians) that the government would provide me with a basic health insurance package at a nominal premium paid for out of those taxes.

I don’t think this follows. While it is true that you both knew a certain percentage of your income would go to the government, your decision to go through with the labor contract in no way implies that you gave implicit consent to taxation. Imagine a mafia that moves into your neighborhood and demands a percentage of all wages in exchange for “protection.” The fact that you begrudgingly give in to the mafia’s demands does not mean that you consent to them. Until someone can establish where this authority to tax comes from, the state remains unjustified.

The point is that the “process” model of justice, once detached from historically-specific common law concepts of property and civil rights amounts basically to respecting people’s existing expectations. It is an argument against dismantling a welfare state or seniority rights as much as against setting them up in the first place.

This seems to be simply a definition of conservative ideology. The problem with this defense of the status quo is that it has nothing to do with rights or justice. To paraphrase what you wrote, if a libertarian party came to power two hundred years ago and eliminated slavery, it would be interfering with the bargain slave sellers and slave buyers agreed to. To which I say, So what?

gareth-
Your argument against me flowed thus:

1. If A freely purchases property subject to a restriction against building a factory, and then freely transfer this property to B, B is still subject to the restriction because he can only recieve the rights held by A and no more. I agree, and I think Nozick would too.

2. By analogy, if I purchace a plot of land subject to zoning restrictions, those restrictions have moral force because I knew when I bought the property that it was subject to zoning restrictions. I agree. Nozick might balk, but John in this post demonstrated how it flows from his arguments because the land was, as historical fact, initially owned by the government at one time, and transfered to individuals subject to the government’s laws.

3. By analogy, if I took a job knowing that I am subject to an income tax, that tax has moral force because I knew about it before I accepted the job. Wrong. From a Noizickean point of view, what matters is not prior knowledge of coersive restrictions, but but the legitimacy of initial aquisition and the chain of transfer. John’s argument works for land because it was at a prior time, woned by the government and transfered subject to restrictions. But another premise of Noizickean theory is that each individual intially ownes their own labor. The government’s requirement that I pay it a tax on my labor is not legitimate because, unlike land, (or corporate charters, or intelectual property monopolies, etc.) they never owned my labor and never transfered my labor to me suject to any restrictions.

Your argument about respecting people’s expectation to welfare from the government is a good one, but it is separate from the question of how the government should raise the revenue to pay for these programs.

After giving this much thought, I think I came up with a way to save John Quiggin’s criticisms of Nozick from my rebuttal. (Of course, you say, Quiggin doesn’t need saving because I never successfully rebutted his arguments. Well, just bare with me anyway.)

Quiggin claims that “given any plausible starting point, Nozick’s approach leads to the conclusion that the status quo, including taxes, regulations and other government interventions is just.”

I still disagree with this formulation of his argument, because historically, I do not believe that the government ever had a legitimate claim on the land, which is a necessary premise to reach John’s desired conclusions.

But I do think it is possible to construct a hypothetical situation whereby the status quo of a large, regulatory welfare state could have come about without violating any libertarian premises. And as John notes, this should present a problem for libertarians who base their political ideology on natural rights as opposed to consequentialism.

I posted the following hypothetical situation on Catallarchy.net in response to this thread:

Suppose there is a small group of neighbors. This group of neighbors decides to form a homeowner’s association in order to solve various public goods: peace and quiet, zoning, private police protection, and so on. The association’s purpose, procedures, and limitations are laid out in a constitution, unanimously agreed upon by the initial owners. Whenever new owners wish to join this association, they must pledge fealty to the constitution by swearing to uphold it and abide by its authority. There are various elected officials charged with creating new legislation within the bounds of the original constitutional limitations. If they wish to change any part of the constitution, it requires support from two-thirds of the voting population.

As time passes, the small homeowner’s association grows larger and larger, as new tenants wish to join. They do so not necessarily because they agree with everything the homeowner’s association does, but because all of the other homeowner’s associations available are even worse. This is their least-bad solution.

A few hundred years pass. This homeowner’s association has now encompassed the whole of North America, minus some quirky neighbors to the north. A significant number of tenants really do not like the homeowner’s association’s rules and regulations, but they are in the minority and do not have the power to change the status quo. They were born into this system, or came here because they were even more oppressed elsewhere. But they never really chose this system, in the sense that they do not consent to its high taxes, burdensome regulation, and busybody paternalism. They simply have no other choice but to put up with the system, as bad as it is.

Sound familiar? This is precisely the situation we now find ourselves in, except that in our reality, the Constitution has No Authority, because it was never unanimously agreed upon by its initial constituents.

But let’s suppose that it was. Would libertarians end all criticisms of this state of affairs? It seems to me that such a society would satisfy all natural rights requirements, as it is essentially just a large private organization.

In the same way that egalitarian premises can lead to inegalitarian conclusions, so too libertarian premises can lead to illibertarian conclusions. This doesn’t bother me very much as a consequentialist, but I think it may present a problem for rights-based libertarians.

A society is, by definition, whatever set of arbitrary rules the members create, so any rule that society creates through it’s rule making process is legitimate.

Which members?

Georgist philosophy on this question rocks —

Land, not being the product of anyone, belongs in common usufruct, and those who desire exclusive rights to land owe compensation to the community thereby dispossessed.

I can see absolutely no philosophical objection to the above.

Definitions about “compensation” and “community” are admitedly tricky, but David LLoyd George’s:

“To prove a legal title to land one must trace it back to the man who stole it.”

is the last word on this particular issue IMV.

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for lunch. The other 49% are the lunch. Still, I suppose it’s better than one wolf having two sheep for dinner…

It dosen’t even have to be as few as 49% who disagree. That sounds like a majority rules democracy. But any process a society uses to create it’s rules are legitimate in the sense that whatever the rules are IS the society. THe rules may be cruel, inefficient, unfair, confusing, whatever. But none of these abstract concepts exisit outside of society in the non-human universe, so it doesn’t do any good to say that these rules are bad becasue Jesus wouldn’t have like them, or they don’t support the thrust of human evolution, or they are against natural law.

Such a view boils down to a justification for the Nazi holocaust, antebellum slavery, and the killing fields. There were rules, created by “society”, they were enforced by “society”. Very effectively. The victims of these atrocities tried to change the rules, tried to adjust to them, and even tried to escape. But they ran into the human meat shredder of “society”.

Which again is: a society can have any rules it’s members want. You can make up rules that lead to the extermination of millions and there will be no tidal waves or plauges of locusts or black holes.

And I am saying that there is a contradiction in this statement. When you say “it’s members” which members do you mean? Surely not the ones being exterminated. Otherwise, your statement simply boils down to an observation that the people who have power have power. Okay, no problem. But I assume that most people, whether they be libertarians, egalitarians, etc are arguing about which people ought to rule, and what the rules ought to be.

Back to your original statement:

A society is, by definition, whatever set of arbitrary rules the members create, so any rule that society creates through it’s rule making process is legitimate.

If by “members” you mean each and every member, then I submit that taken from the purely moral standpoint, this view is most consistent with market anarchism.