Why, could you make a case where taxation is not theft?
If you applied the time you do into writing on this forum, you would find the necessary empirical evidence yourself simply by living life and cooperating with those around you - whether it be running a business, or working in agriculture, like myself.
Hobbes has already been mentioned, so why don’t you consult Locke, Aquinas, Rousseau or any other philosopher who came to that conclusion? There have been plenty who made a case for taxation.
Because there is no state where he lives?
Why don’t you make a case yourself? Appealing to authority is a very weak argument.
Even with the state, not every exchange between individuals includes the state.
Making a case for taxation (an excellent case even) doesn’t mean it isn’t theft, it could be considered “necessary theft.” Of course, one could just define away the issue completely, but that wouldn’t really resolve the underlying problem.
Well that’s easy: government itself proves that social cooperation is possible without the state, since there’s no third party to enforce contracts among the individual members who make up the government. (See Cuzán and Plauché for details.)
Unlimited secession rights (i.e. ethical claims) would require ethical arguments, no?
And their cases have been embarrassingly awful. There are plenty of bad arguments given in favor of libertarianism, but the analogy between taxation and slavery is not one of them. As Christopher Wellman writes (p.5):
Thus, when one pauses to look closely at the comparison between slavery and political imposition, one sees that it is surprisingly difficult to distinguish between the two. The key shared element is nonconsensual coercion. This feature that makes slavery impermissible is also utilized by all governments and thus places the burden upon any of us who are reluctant to label all political states unjust. Thus, the analogy between slavery and political coercion appears not only apt, it is helpful insofar as it motivates the central and most important question of political theory: Why not be an anarchist?
Not for me. As a libertarian, I want society to be, well, libertarian. In fact, the whole point of advocating competition in legal systems is to achieve this end.
Um, isn’t this the whole point? Anarchists are trying to mold society to conform to our preconception that there shouldn’t be a monopoly on law.
Of course, I didn’t mean that arguing secession allows one to bypass ethics. It just treads ethical paths with which the vast majority of people arte quite familiar and willing to follow to eh very end (always to their own surprise). It’s just easier. As for personal beliefs, even we do not know why we hold them.
You place too much emphasis on consent. Very few things are fully consensual. How many people actually consented to respect your so called property?
Why would someone have to consent to respect your property? Couldn’t they simply leave it alone?
You want to shoot them just because they use a car parking on the street?
Please pretend I’m 5 years old and explain that to me because I have no clue what you’re saying.
To scineram, Giles and all those who claim to have rediscovered the virtues of the state:
I see where you are coming from. From an economic point of view, the state fulfills a role that no other entity on the market could imitate and as such is a most intriguing thing to experiment with. Then there is all the objective ethics stuff that permeates libertarian literature and makes it all look a little cultish and cranky upon closer examination.
Still, most of the accusations libertarianism hurls at statism still apply. There is no functioning mechanism to limit the expansion of the state. Thus, unless you think total state control is a good thing, I don’t see how you can approve of that institution. The calculation argument is still valid, the state is a terrible economic decision-maker and in light of that, I don’t see how advocating state control of arbitrary service X would be anything but a statement of personal preference.
And appealing to Hobbes, come on. You’ve got to be kidding me. Social contracts? Putting some humans in charge of all the others as a safeguard against human nature? If Hobbes has any other defenses for taxation, please let me know, but this is way more fallacious than even a die-hard Randroid could ever be.
So, my question would be: why throw the baby out with the bath water? What caused you to reaccept the state paradigm? I don’t see any benefit in that institution except for personal enrichment at the expense of the public.
But the nature of rights is that other people have to respect them regardless of whether they want to or not. Consent isn’t required for everything; I don’t need your consent to stop you from violating my rights.
That doesn’t determine how society will “look.”
Not in terms of specifics, but I would say that it has some bearing on the structure (rather than content) of law. It certainly is a certain mode of the relationship between society and political institutions. In a sense, any political ideology, including libertarian anarchism, is inherently normative and has implications for how interpersonal relations function. This doesn’t necessarily mean central planning, but it certainly is prescriptive and transformative towards society in an obvious and fundamental sense. The structure and function of law is a part of how society “looks”, in that law is an aspect of society.
I don’t see why there should be a problem with admitting that libertarianism is, at a certain level, precisely about how society should function (in terms of the use of aggression and the structure of law). Such a prescription is exactly what libertarians do every time they advocate their goals, even if the very nature of this goal has a cut-off point beyond which the particulars are not explicitly determined. But something very general and structural is explicitly determined, namely, a certain standard or demarkation for the structure of the political in terms of aggression and law.
To propose something like a polycentric legal order is to make a certain kind of determination of society, and the temptation to portray oneself as saying absolutely nothing about the structure of society when one is talking about politics seems to be kind of dishonest (at least to oneself).
The anti-monopoly position is negative, merely saying that a monopoly is unjust and/or harmful. It doesn’t try to “mold or model” society, any more than taking the lid off a terrarium would “mold or model” the evolution of that ecosystem. Certainly the resulting situation would be different (which is the whole point), but there is no concrete vision of society being advocated.
There’s a difference between advocating a polycentric legal order (or common law, etc.) and speculating that such would evolve in the absence of a monopoly on law (for instance, as a means of allaying people’s Hobbesian fears).
Sure there is: a vision of a society without a monopoly on law, which can only be realized through the inertia of proactive action within a society. Certainly, this doesn’t mean central planning or some kind of authoritarian “molding”, but it is a structure of legal pluralism. What isn’t concrete are the particulars within each legal domain, but there is a vision of society being advocated in terms of political structure. That’s essentially what all political philosophies do in that they pertain to structure.
I think I agree but I don’t see how that’s relevant to my point. Advocation and proactive action is itself a kind of determination, a prescription, a structuring. Polycentrism isn’t non-structural, it’s a meta-level context for political organization, and within that context you have a multitude of sub-structures. That’s just a part of what political ideologies involve, even pluralistic ones.
Anti-monopolism needn’t involve advocating polycentrism.
Is that really the case? That seems more like how states form.
In any case, an anti-monopolist can sidestep all this by reducing his position from, “Let’s break the monopoly on law and keep it broken” to “Let’s break the monopoly on law and see what happens.”
Of course there are. The Constitution held back the american government somewhat. It was not perfect, nothing is. The Articles were better.
What? No, that’s a complete non sequitur.
This is true, but still the nirvana fallacy. It is flawed, but the alternatives are worse.
You don’t see them, but you still use valuable services that the government provides. Whether they can be better provided by the market can be debated, and it must be, not assumed.
Your rights again. Of course if you start with libertarian premises then you get libertarian conclusions.
See, this defeatism is exactly my problem:
Political philosophers have for centuries tried to put a square into a round hole by attempting to find restraints on an institution whose virtue is said to be its supreme power over all that is within its territory. Few of them have honestly expounded upon why a monopolistic law code provided by a too-big-to-fail organization is necessary in the first place, and if they did, their answers were most unsatisfactory to me (see Hobbes).
Say what you want about the anarchists, but at least they dared to ask questions about the nature government that had been overdue for a long time.
That looks like a rising trend to me. I will admit that default is likely to precede total state control, but my point remains: those who claim we need government at 5% of GDP doing X and Y have not been able, theoretically or practically, to defend that position.
And said worse alternatives would be?
Sure I do. But I don’t see how this constitutes an argument.