There is really only one property tax that works (from the tax collectors point of view).
That is taxing real estate cause all other property tend to move to another jurisdiction pretty fast once it get taxed…
Taxing capital is especially bad cause it is so easy to move and does generate wealth. Even here in socialist Sweden property taxes on capital have been abolished cause the politicians recently figured out they are bad for the economy and so easy for people to avoid there isn’t much benefit for the state anyhow.
I am not very much into confrontation but I thought this idea was worth debating to challenge myself and others. Perhaps my ideas aren’t “libertarian” but what is libertarian exactly as there are different views. I don’t profess to even know 1/100th of the ideas on libertarianism but I am making effort, as this idea was directly inspired by a reading of Bastiat (perhaps I’ve perverted his intent) Did your ideas orginate and end with Mises and Rothbard. If they improved on previous ideas, is it possible their ideas can be improved more? As far as I know, there isn’t a modern day example of an asset based taxation to compare to.
I came here looking for questions on how this might bolster or limit our current economy such as damping or bolstering the military-industrial complex and whether a fiat currency would taxed as an asset (could it not, but gold could be?) and how would that change the dynamics. Externatlities of this effect…
Apparently I am not indoctrinated enough into the libertarian resources to offer ideas outside their scope.
I will withdraw my active participation, learn myself to a respectable level, and perhaps check back and then I can debate about what you already know. With that said, I do not regret my contribution and you have to give me credit for standing my ground.
Your explanation does not explain anything. So, 11.66 is the ratio between the tax generated by the “tax on everything scheme” divided by the tax generated on S&P 500 earnings. You then compare the PE ratio of the SP 500 (20) to your 11.66 ratio, and conclude that S&P companies are paying only about 50% of value that government protections have garnered them.
Like I said, I have not seen analysis and conclusions like this since my socialist days in college. I believe your conclusion is completely off base, so much so, that I should stop the reply right here. But, since I’m a glutton for punishment, let’s assume your conclusion is correct: Why not, then, cut government “benefits” by 50%? No need to reply to this rhetorical question. Good luck to you and your “minarchism” which seems like Omnipotent Government to me.
Bastiat was a minarchist (with emphasis on min) but he is forgiven because he was an OG. Keep reading Bastiat.
This is an easy fallacy to fall into since, throughout all recorded history, humans have lived under states and property rights have always been monkeyed with by those states. But a thoroughgoing analysis of property will quickly run into the question of how property emerged before there were states. The Neandertal didn’t have a US Circuit Court of Appeals in which to “enforce” his right to his flint knife. But the Neandertal’s knife was in every sense property. In other words, property is antecedent to states. Your conception (the common conception) of property as a creation of the State is one of the central myths of the State.
Well, land and locale are just one sort of property. In the Lockean tradition, we think of the body itself as property. If all property is by grant of monopoly from the State, then my body is only mine by virtue of the good graces of the State, that is, I am a slave of the State. This, in itself, doesn’t prove anything except that the conception of property as monopoly grants by the State views all society as a tacit form of slavery.
More to the point, it’s not merely a problem of moving away if you don’t like it (voting with your feet). People have been escaping tyranny in this way for millenia. In fact, states criminalize attempts by their citizens to move their property out of the way of the taxman, i.e. “tax evasion” “money laundering” “tax havens” “offshore banking” etc. In some states, it is still illegal to attempt to move even your body out of the territory.
The problem is that people believe a set of interlocking myths about the State which make its existence possible. The net effect of these myths is a backwardation of reality. Hoppe identifies the Hobbesian myth (the war of all against all) as the single most important such myth. Other myths regard the possibility of the production of law and regulation on the market. The net result is the creation of a self-sustaining, self-justifying, expropriating criminal racket which people call “the government”.
Stephan Kinsella addresses the issue of property in airwaves here along with a wonderful definition of property:
… every scarce resource–things that can be contested; rivalrous things; resources that have exclusive use, so that use by me excludes use by you, and so on–is assigned an owner; that owner is the person who first appropriated or used the property in anemborderingway–that is as an owner. It’s the first person to erect publicly visible boundaries that others can respect and see; he has a better claim to the resource than any latecomer.
As for the “government created value and now it has to be paid for” argument, let me offer a logically identical scenario. Consider a housing development with 20 houses. Within the development is an empty plot. An entrepreneur buys up the empty lot and builds a park on it. After having built the park, he then proceeds to go from door to door with a contract requiring each homeowner to pay 1/20th of the cost of the park (plus a little extra for the developer’s very modest income expectations). After all, they enjoy the value created by the park since their children are free to enter and play on it as much as they like. If an individual homeowner objects, the developer points out that he is only increasing the cost which will have to be borne by the other homeowners, which is a form of stealing, really, so he had better pay up his share or the attendant armed man will place him in jail for stealing from his neighbors. This situation is logically indistinguishable from the “government has created value and now it has to be paid for” argument, yet it is an obvious affront to justice.
Bastiat’s central thesis in The Law is that the collective can have no novel powers beyond what the individual has, since the right of the collective to act only emanates from its acting on behalf of protecting the legitimate rights and interests of the individual. The only difference between my park scenario and the government’s actions (the government does, in fact, build parks then raise taxes to force people to pay for them) is that my scenario is an individual acting on his own prerogative. Since an individual acting on his own prerogative has no right to force other to pay for his pet community improvement projects, neither does the government, by virtue of being an organization which purports to represent the collective.
My, oh my. The first amendment is not some contractual guarantee by the government to not prohibit people from speaking. Rather, it was an attempt to restrict the state from interfering in the right to free speech by statutory (constitutional) limitation on state power. Unfortunately, this has not worked any better than any other attempt to limit state power through constitutional means.
Of course.
Monopolization is inherently criminal since it is a denial of the most basic human right of all, the right to act.
Clayton, thank you for your constructive yet challenging reply. It will take some post-holiday time to digest this but I hope to be back to concede or address. I suppose if I like my city’s electric plan and provides services no other company will offer in this rural area to do barriers to entry, I can be OK with being a socialist so long as my neighbor isn’t paying for my electricity.
I"m sure this is addressed in large on this site previously but it seems to be that where does one draw the distinction between anarcho-capitalism and minarchism and what is the defintion of government. I think my working definition is: any entity contracted by two or more parties to guarentee property or liberties which leads me to believe that pure anarcho-capitalism is impossible unless one refuses to contract out property and liberty guarentees (liberty guarentee of giving up one form to enhance another)
Problem is that governments aren’t contracted by people to guarantee property; they demand tribute and kill you/toss you in jail/confiscate your stuff/all of the above if you don’t give them tribute.
I knew I said I would go into hiding but I had a lingering question from Clayton’s post. Neandarthal A has the intelligence to build his flint knife. Neandarthal B has the strength to force the knife into his posession. Is the knife now property of B?
Another hypothetical: There are two minarchist city-states called Sparte and Ethens and located suffieciently away from each other that they do not normally engage in any cross-state agreements. However, both cities depend on the radio spectrum heavily and each independetly allow the privatization through market exchanges. The cities may contract with each other to reduce transmission levels to prevent interferance. Enter Rogue C that sits squarely on his own land exactly inbetween the two cities boundaries. Rogue C broadcasts invitations to his “Socialist Education Meetings” across the spectrum, at varying powers, times and frequencies that overpower the transmissions within the city-states and done in such away as not to turn off listeners thus done sporadically. Do the city-states respond and how?
Well, let’s go back to Kinsella’s definition of property. “… every scarce resource–things that can be contested; rivalrous things; resources that have exclusive use, so that use by me excludes use by you, and so on–is assigned an owner; that owner is the person who first appropriated or used the property in anemborderingway–that is as an owner. It’s the first person to erect publicly visible boundaries that others can respect and see; he has a better claim to the resource than any latecomer.” [Emphasis added]
In the case of the two Neanderthals, the one who made the flint knife has the better claim to its exclusive use because he was the first to appropriate it and use it “in an embordering way”, that is, in an exclusive manner with publicly visible boundaries.
Of course, this raises the question of how two Neandertals could settle a question of rights, in the first place. In reality, they probably operated more according to evolved social norms than any self-conscious construction of rights. I’m working on an article on this very subject and I eventually plan to post it here for critique. The main gist of the article is as follows. All rights are property rights (Rothbardian propertarianism), however, I reject natural rights as a foundation for law. Law is a non-violent means for settlement of property disputes. Property, in turn, is a conflict avoidance strategy. So, property helps prevent conflicts from arising in the first place (by means of pre-assignment of exclusive use rights to specific individuals - owners) and law is a non-violent means for settling such disputes when they arise anyway.
To apply this to the Neanderthals, the concept of property (which Neanderthals certainly had, since we know they engaged in trade) would have been present in Neanderthal A’s belief that the flint knife was “his”. Neanderthal B’s violation of A’s beliefs about the property lines results in a dispute. The dispute can be resolved by direct, physical conflict. However, direct, physical conflict is extremely costly and typically negative-sum. If both parties present a sufficient threat to one another, each party has an incentive to find some non-violent means to resolve their disputes. This is the reason for the emergence of law. Law is an infinitely more efficient way to resolve disputes than physical conflict.
I would just point you to Kinsella’s article, for now. His view depends strict tort liability (objective proof of cause and effect), easement and other concepts.
I think this is a bit like defining Toyota as the corporation that is Moving You Forward. “Enforcing property rights” and so on is the goal that some theorists of government imagine that government can or should achieve. But the goals that some people believe government is intended to accomplish is a long shot from describing what a government is. I like to define government in 3 steps:
Government is an organization (telic entity made up of many people)
Government is easily distinguished from the people it governs
Government is unique from all other organizations by virtue of its monopoly on law and force and its generation of revenues via coercive collection (taxation)
When understood in this manner, it should be clear why government is morally repugnant. It is not a force for good, never has been, never will be. It is the single most deadly human institution ever invented and is the organization responsible for more and greater crimes than any other individual or organization.
