The State as Illegitimate Easement

Miscellaneous General
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Imagine your neighbor builds a factory. Imagine that this factory blows odorless, noxious fumes over your property. Because they are odorless and because no one gets sick right away, you don’t file a lawsuit against him. Over time, you and your family begin to feel ill all the time and you can’t figure out why. You go to the doctor and finally, he diagnoses your family with toxemia. Realizing that there may be toxins in the fumes coming out of the factory, you have your air measured and find that there are unacceptable levels of toxins in your air.

However, when you go to court to sue him, your neighbor points out that you have not said anything these past 10 years that the factory has been running and that to object now is nothing short of extortion. He has been operating his factory for so many years and you’ve never objected. Suddenly, when his factory started to become really successful and earn lots of money, then all of a sudden it became “toxic.” Whatever toxins are in the air comprise an easement earned through years of no complaints.

In a lot of ways, I think this is very analogous to the State’s claims to tax and regulate. It’s been taxing and regulating all this time and nobody was complaining. All of a sudden, a few malcontents and anti-social types start setting up a racket either to be contrarian or because they’re greedy and don’t like contributing “their fair share.” How is it their fair share? Well, not by the laws of nature, of course, but through long use and tradition, that is, by virtue of an easement on our paychecks. No one minded when then government was collecting income taxes to the tune of a few percent and only from millionaires. But in allowing the camel’s nose into the tent, we essentially agreed to have the whole thing in there. It was just a matter of time.

Of course, we all understand that for an easement to hold up in court, it must be legitimate. You can’t steal someone’s stuff and then say “well, last time I stole your stuff, you didn’t prosecute me so that gave me an easement to take your stuff any time I feel like it.” What constitutes legitimacy is complicated by the fact that the State itself monopolizes the court system. However, the principle of legitimacy in an easement is still a common-sense principle that is understood by the masses. I think this is a chink in the State’s armor that we can aim for.

How? Well, follow the progression of taxation. First, the State funded itself by raiding villages and murdering and pillaging. Then, the State settled down and began to rule its subjects and plundered their wealth stores on a sporadic basis. Then, the State progressed to a more regularized wealth tax and created the class system (basically, a highly regimented way for “the rich”, that is, the nobility, to collect from below and pay taxes up the chain). As people began to question this system, the State finally shifted to taxation of income. It used to be that simply having wealth was a justification for taxation. Nowadays, having wealth is not in itself supposed to be a justification (most of the time, and as long as you don’t live in France) for taxation but transacting is. Of course, taxing transactions is just a “spread out” way to tax wealth. It’s the same principle, it just appears slightly different.

Now, they are shifting to the “VAT” tax. This tax will continue to spread out of Europe into the rest of the world. One way to apply pressure against the State is to question the legitimacy of taxing income. Why is transacting a justification for taxation? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like believing in the Easter Bunny.

Goods exchanging hands
???

Taxation is justified!

The way to apply the easement argument is simply to point people back to the origin of income taxation in the US. Before 1913, there was no income tax. After 1913, the income tax began (the top marginal rate was just 10% on millionaires!). But the government had no more right to begin collecting that small amount of tax money at that time than the neighbor with the factory has to even begin blowing odorless noxious fumes over your property. And it doesn’t matter that nobody complained for a long time because there was no indication that something was desperately wrong until your family began to come down sick - you had not actually agreed to the blowing of toxic fumes because there was no indication they were toxic (smell is the primary indicator of the presence of toxicity). The same goes for USG income taxation. Sure, we didn’t complain for a long time but that was before we realized that we were being systematically destroyed through economic crises and an orgiastic foreign policy of foreign wars and an imperial, military footprint.

Now that we’re coming down desperately sick, so to speak, we have discovered the original toxicity of the program since its inception. Our stomachs are telling us what our noses failed to detect… it’s just that stomachs aren’t as quick at detecting things as noses. That doesn’t give the government a license to continue on its “easement” because the easement is illegitimate from the beginning by virtue of its provable toxicity, that is, inherent antagonism to the ends of Americans both as a society and as individuals.

I don’t think the general public will be electrified by this argument as I’ve put it here. However, with a slight rhetorical makeover (think “George Ought to Help”), I think that the core of the argument would be extremely persuasive to the average American. This can go on top of the pile of 10th amendment issues - end Federal taxation and return the power to tax to the States and the people.

Clayton -

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Great post Clayton. Definitely think its true that people feel that taxation is an easement, but not all people justify the easement because its happened in the past and people didn’t complain or only a few complain. Some argue that the easement serves valuable ends, thus it should be preserved.

Of course people want to change the particulars of the easement, or the ends that it satisfies.

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True and this argument won’t reach those people but you can’t do everything with a single argument.

Clayton -

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This could be an interesting reversal on the State as Landlord argument.

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LOL. Great analogies throughout. But you forgot a couple undeniable truths (/sarcasm), as stated by SCTAX.org:

[Why do we pay taxes?]

"There are many services offered to citizens that could not be managed effectively under any other system.

We can all admit that these services are necessary. But why must they be paid for
with taxes? Why shouldn’t we just pay individually for what we use? The answer is
simple: Because no one could afford it. Each person would have to pay the full fee for
the service regardless of their ability to pay."

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Also, and I’m sorry to muck up your awesome post, but JESUS CHRIST HELP US: http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=17

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I’ll enjoy reading that website, but I’ll have to get pretty drunk first.

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This is trivially false for almost every “service” that the government monopolizes. Clearly, there is nothing non-excludable about roads, powerlines, buses, trains, phone lines, building inspection, fire services, etc. etc.

It is also false on closer inspection for almost all the rest. Policing, for example, is theoretically supposed to be for security… this is an excludable service though it may require a little bit of thinking to see how. Even “collective action” problems such as maintaining a code within a neighborhood is solvable through HOA’s. Parks and other kinds of “positive collective externalities” can be produced through bond measures (everyone who is interested in seeing the park built pledges what it is worth to them personally to have it built and if the promoters finally raise enough money to build it, then the money is disbursed at that time). The vast majority of negative externalities that governments are supposed to prevent can be prevented through private propert combined with liability. For example, air pollution from cars can be combatted by allowing private owners of roads to be sued for the pollution rolling off their highways and onto other people’s property.

I’m not saying “this is the way it oughtta be”… the point of these illustrations is merely to point out that it is easily false that government is necessary for solving the vast, vast majority of problems that we are to believe it is necessary for.

The toughest nuts to crack are regional defense and law. Law is very hard to see how it can be produced without government but the fact is that careful thought shows there is no reason you need government to have law. In fact, careful thinking will show quite the opposite. The effect of government is to corrode the law, create privileges for itself and its buddies and reduce social cooperation. Regional defense can be resolved in a variety of ways… by permitting “overlapping” defense agencies, through private cooperatives (in other words, landowners of contiguous land forming a covenant/HOA and establishing their outer perimeters as a “border”), through non-aggressive free-riding (moving next to a large factory that is well-defended by its wealthy owners in order to get the benefits of the “blanket” of protection surrounding it), and so on. I’m not saying these solutions are obvious, or even the right solutions, only that they are imaginable and roughly consistent with human nature and, thus, disprove the notion that government is necessary in order to pay for anything!

People get stuck on these particulars as if we need to solve them. We don’t. People will solve the relevant problems as they arise. What we do need to do is recognize that the State has reached a crisis point and we need to take advantage of the opportunity to expose the illegitimacy of its basic claims and demand that the inexorable process of political aggregation that has been underway for at least the last two centuries be stopped and reversed. Governments everywhere in the world - but especially in the US - are “too big to succeed”.

Clayton -

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We need someone to write a book called something like “Too Big to Succeed.” It should be only lightly footnoted and should contain the following argument:

a) Evolutionary psychology shows that there are a lot of things in the modern environment that our “caveman brains” simply do not comprehend. When we see the smiling face of the Dear Leader on television, the part of your brain that doesn’t know what a television is actually feels comforted, befriended.

When we look at a map of a 3,000 mile wide country, we do not really take in the scale - the brain fails to comprehend how large the country actually is. When you think of 300 million or 7 billion people, you can’t really comprehend numbers that large. You can manipulate them. You can recognize the difference between them. But you can’t actually fit inside your head the full import of what they mean. When you think of numbers like “$16 trillion national debt”, your brain cannot actually comprehend that number. You can use analogies of football stadiums packed to the rafters with pallets of $100 bills but you cannot actually comprehend 15 trillion dollars. The part of your brain that knows how to ride a bike can never wrap itself around numbers like these.

b) One of the preconditions of individual choice is that we must be able to comprehend the choices themselves and the means by which we might be able to bring about the states of affairs we desire. Imagine an airplane cockpit with 50,000 blinking lights and buttons but no joystick or rudder or even windows. The pilot is tasked to fly the aircraft by maintaining the correct state of all 50,000 buttons based on the patterns of the 50,000 lights, moment by moment, millisecond by millisecond. This task is impossible because no human can cope with such an instrumentality. The part of your brain that knows how to ride a bike could never be taught how to operate such an aircraft.

c) Modern governance is supposed to respect individual self-determination. Note that this is not necessarily the same thing as individual rights. Whatever rights the individual has or not, we should be able to say that the typical individual has a meaningful influence in society (so long as he does not shirk it). For example, people say that if you don’t like the government you live under, “you should leave.” This implies that people think individuals should have the right to choose what sorts of social rules they find acceptable and, if they find they cannot influence the society where they live to change more to their liking, they should be unencumbered and freely allowed to seek greener pastures elsewhere. This is far less the case in supposedly “democratic” countries than is made out by the democracy apologists.

d) The scale of modern governance means that it is not possible for the individual to actually influence the rules because he simply cannot comprehend them. The part of the individual’s mind that knows how to ride a bike cannot comprehend the tax code, or TARP bailouts or $15T in debt and so on.

“Experts” is not a solution to this problem because it does not preserve self-determination. That is, expert-reliance converts the social order into a technocracy or Platonic Republic ruled by the philosopher-kings in the “expert” bureaucracies. Cf the Federal Reserve or any number of choice-stifling bureaucracies.

e) Uncontroversial ideas in public choice theory show that the larger the group, the less say the typical individual in that group has. This is self-evident but it can be shown empirically, as well. As each individual has less say, he has less reason to be educated about the policies of the group or to attempt to influence it. Modern society seems to think the solution is to educate the typical individual to believe that he should do so anyway and, therefore, it magically will get done.

But there are two problems with this. First, individuals tend to do what is in their actual interests no matter what they are taught. This point is controversial. But it doesn’t matter because, second, self-determination is not preserved for this solution because not all people are as apt at civic affairs and “believing” they can change things, so the net effect of a “belief-in-one’s-ability-to-change-things”-based democracy is that it shifts the say in how things are run from the typical individual to the hyper-involved. This is slightly different from the philosopher-king social order of technocracy… we could call it a zealocracy.

f) The political order has been on a multi-century trajectory of aggregation. And not only have political units been aggregating but population has been growing as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The net effect is that the scale at which policy decisions operate has increased several orders of magnitude in just a half-dozen generations. The population of France in 1800 was 30 million people. That’s just slightly more than the population of the City of Mexico. But the territorial areas of political units has not decreased with increasing population, it has actually increased. The say that an individual has in the rules he is compelled to follow has, concomitantly, decreased.

The conventional wisdom is that continued aggregation is both inevitable and desirable and will eventually lead to a world government or world coalition or whatever-you-want-to-call-it. However little say the typical American among his 300 million peers has in USG policy, imagine how little say he would have in a government with an electorate 20 times larger (world population). Of course, no one worth mentioning is suggesting plunge-off-the-cliff global democracy tomorrow but it is held up as a reasonable or viable long-term goal in some quarters.

First of all, it’s not inevitable. There are counter-vailing forces to political aggregation, in particular, the political ambitions of major political leaders. It is better to be President of half the world than Vice-President over the whole world.

And, secondly, as I will show, it is not desirable if we hold that government should at least respect individual self-determination.

g) Some point to the US and EU as examples of how political aggregation goes hand-in-hand with economic efficiency and growth. In particular, monetary union is a massive boost to unified political territories because it reduces the transaction costs of international trade and thereby increases the division-of-labor.

However, assuming the choice is between self-determination or growth, self-determination or a certain level of general prosperity, then the correct answer is that we should forgo the growth and do what is right. A thought-experiment will easily show this is the case - if we could magically double the real per-capita income of every person on the planet by murdering one innocent person, should we? Of course not and only a few loony utilitarians might try to say otherwise.

Thankfully, the choice is a false dichotomy:

h) The Misesean calculation argument and the Hayekian knowledge argument show the futility of central economic planning. While it is true that eliminating political borders results in increased prosperity and economic growth, it is not true that political aggregation is the only way to eliminate political borders! Political borders can be eliminated simply by removing tariffs and stifling, protectionist import/export regulations.

But the primary effect of political aggregation is an increase in centralization. Look at the USG’s Dept. of Education and its abysmal “No Child Left Behind” program. It is a picture-perfect example of the failure of central planning and of the superiority of leaving decisions to those who are actually familiar with conditions on the ground in their respective localities.

i) Answers could include secession, nullification or… something like a political divorce? Maybe we need to move out into unexplored territory and allow a smaller political unit to set up an “exit plan” from the larger union. Federal lands inside a State’s borders should be no reason that political separation is impossible… the State can buy the Federal government out of the lands within its borders. And so on.

Clayton -

*Please don’t pick nits on this point, all the objections have been answered

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Excellent posts Clayton. Now if only the professor of the government is good site challenges you to a debate…