A Passion for Liberty
Tibor R. Machan @ Rational Review
Posts tagged taxation
Column on Choice & Rights
Jan 24th
Choice and Rights
Tibor R. Machan
It’s about who is to choose! Our rights identify the realm of our choices, where we and not others get to decide about how things go. When rights are violated, the violator deprives the rights holder of his or her proper, morally justified authority to chose.
So often both defenders and critics of private property rights get this wrong. They contend that property rights are mostly about who gets to have something. And while that’s part of it, the more important matter is who gets to choose what happens to something.
If the politicians and bureaucrats extort 40% of my earnings I do not get to decided what happens to this. I might have squandered it, yes, just as that enemy of private property rights Karl Marx argued. But I could also have done something else, such as sent part of it to a charity, contributed it to some innovation, stashed it away so my kids might get it when they grow up, or sent it to a political candidate I support. But this is just what the confiscators of my resources prohibit me from doing. They want to destroy my proper authority to use my resources and use it themselves.
Check me out. In all cases of taxation what happens is that the taxed lose the opportunity to allocate the resources that belong to them and those who tax gain this opportunity without any consent from the taxed. But why should they? Democracy doesn’t justify such confiscation, nor does being some monarch or bureaucrat or whatever, only our permission would. We are supposedly equal in having rights, including private property rights. No one else may, therefore, take what is mine or yours or anyone’s and start deciding what happens to it however good intentioned that tax-taker might be, however noble are that tax-taker’s goals. This is why it is so important to understand that private property rights are about our choices to do one thing, another, or yet another, not primarily about having wealth, about greed or such.
But that is just what the enemies of private property rights, starting with Marx, cannot stomach–our having the opportunity to use and dispose our labor and its results. They want it! This despite all that talk about how labor belongs to the laborer. No, that is not what the taxers believe. They believe, and many of them have actually said this, that your time and labor and skills belong to society! And they, of course, must be the representatives of the people, of society.
But that is a ruse, just as when kings claimed that they are the representatives of society or God or History. No, these folks represent only themselves and when they tax you and me and the rest and deprive us of the choices our rights entail, they are extortionists, thieves, or robbers. But most of all they remove from us the opportunity to exercise free choice with what belongs to us.
Some have tried to refute these points by the fairy tale that all wealth belongs to society, the people, or even the government. Again, these are lies. Sure, our resources are acquired with a lot of support from and cooperation with others, including the lawmakers who enacted sound principles way before we were born. But that’s all irrelevant. Artist, too, paint with colors that have existed way before they started to use them but these colors, once made into pictures, become theirs and no one else has the authority to intrude on what they do with it, not unless it involves the violation of another’s rights somehow.
It is best that whenever politicians and their cheerleaders speak “for us” it is recognized that they are speaking only for themselves and all that talk of “we” or “the people” or “Americans” or “humanity” is meant to disguise this fact. It’s time they are stopped in carrying out this gross deception. If not, they will continue to shut off our choices in life and imposing theirs on us all.
Column on Rights are to Freely Act
Dec 31st
Rights are to Act Freely
Tibor R. Machan
I do not have a right to my car but I do have a right to buy, keep, trade and otherwise act in relation to my car. Rights are what define our range of free actions. In some cases the right to act garners us huge wealth, in others, fame, and in yet others it will gain us knowledge, health and happiness.
If I had a right to my car as such, I would get to have my car even if I paid nothing for it. Rights need not be paid for. For example, my right to my liberty–to sing to smile to think to worship and so forth–isn’t something I need to pay for. Nor can I lose such a right. Even if I end in jail for assaulting someone, it is because I acted, freely, so as to land me there. Sounds a bit odd but still true! It can be appreciated by considering that prisoners retain their rights to due process, representation, and so forth while they are in prison. They do not lose their rights but when they exercise them in certain ways, there are unwelcome consequences. As when one exercises one’s right to liberty by getting married and henceforth is no longer free to fool around.
So those who would insist that our rights be limited are advocating that other people, usually those in government, have the authority to violate our rights, that some people be in control over other people in disregard of their rights. There is no escaping this conclusion. Those who are naively thinking that “limiting” rights will just happen, by way of some cosmic power instead of human beings who would want to control others, need to realize that they are supporting involuntary servitude, plain and simple.
Such general points need sometimes be noted because of all the sophistic and dangerous loose talk about how rights are limited, not absolute. This is merely an excuse for not respecting and protecting people’s rights, for violating them at the discretion of certain citizens who find the rights of other citizens inconvenient because they stand in the way of making use of these other people for their own purposes.
For example, to claim that one’s right to the use and disposal of one’s property is limited to only a percentage of what one owns, in fact, is merely to offer a spurious reason to take what belongs to others and use it for purposes to which they have not agreed. Saying that no one has absolute rights to what he or she owns is bunk–”absolute” has nothing to do with this. Either one has the right to keep and hold and trade and otherwise use and dispose of one’s belongings or one does not and others then are given free reign over these (and allow one some usage). If I do have a right to my resources, then when others take these from me without my permission, they are violating my rights. And that’s exactly what happens when taxes are confiscated from us all. No fancy talk about no one having absolute rights excuses it–taxation is a kind of extortion: you must hand over part of what you own and ought to be able to keep, hold, trade, etc., otherwise you are going to be imprisoned or otherwise harmed. Sure, you may get some benefits from those who confiscate your belongings but that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that you didn’t give your consent.
At this point democracy tends to come up because the sophistic, spurious arguments for these ill gotten gains never ends. So if a whole bunch of other people–the majority of those who vote–agree that your belongings may be taken from you, it is supposed to be OK? Of course not. But because democracy concerning the selection of political representatives is highly prized, this same method is used for expropriating people’s lives, liberties, and property. It should not be. Multiplying the number of the criminals doesn’t eliminate the crime.
These matters are not very simple to integrate with our lives in complex societies where our actions are a mixture of free and coerced, often quite imperceptibly. Who can keep track of what we must do because otherwise we will be assaulted by the powers that be and what we do of our own free will because we have decided it is a good idea? As one goes through one’s life, with all the task one faces, it is nearly impossible to tell which of the task were freely assumed and which were imposed on one by governments (of which one is surrounded everywhere). And since some of what governments do can be of considerable value, those running government have an edge–they know that hardly anyone wants to give up the security offered by the police and the military, so they tend not to protest when these agencies abuse their powers. But those who notice have the responsibility to do so!
On Distributive Justice
Dec 13th
On Distributive Justice
Tibor R. Machan
For a long time political philosophers and such were interested in identifying the nature of justice. It started with Socrates and lasted to when John Stuart Mill did his work, although by that time there had been talk of this thing called distributive justice. By now most political theorists dwell on little else.
Yet I have never quite understood why the idea has become so prominent since it is clearly question-begging. Distribution is something done by people who have things to distribute, who are legitimate, rightful owners of what may be wanted from them about town. Money, mainly. So in our day government takes money from people–the resources they have made, earned, found, won or whatever–and hands it to some other people (after taking a good cut for itself). How the distribution goes may be judged as arbitrary, fair, unfair, corrupt, or, just. But all this couldn’t even begin if it were determined that the initial taking of the resources is wrong. And as I have managed to figure these matters, taxing people is wrong. That means that distributing what is taken in taxes is also wrong. Accordingly distributive justice could not be justice at all. It is at most something touched by a bit of generosity, as when bank robbers divvy up their loot among some needy folks, in what is taken to be a Robin Hoodish way (but Robin just took money back that had been taken in taxes instead of taxed people).
Why is taxation wrong? It is depriving people of what belongs to them without their consent. Sure, some people in a society may consent, by voting for it, to the taking of other people’s resources but that couldn’t possibly make the taking anything better than confiscation, an unjust taking because it involves coercion and lacks the consent of the owners. And this is what had been realized, more or less, when individual rights were finally clearly enough understood and affirmed by some political philosophers. Few came right out and condemned taxation because they held the mistaken belief that the administration of a just legal system required it, but it does not. They had similar ideas about slavery in various places until finally they gave that up. They should have given up taxation along with its conceptual sibling, serfdom. Both of these had their home under feudalism and other types of monarchy since in such systems the government–king, czar, pharaoh, dictator, ruler, politburo or whatnot–owns everything and thus when people live and work withing the realm, they are made to pay taxes as their rent and fees. Government in such systems permits people to live and work and charges them for this by making them serve in the military, subjecting them to forced labor, etc., etc. The benefits government provides are privileges, grants from the sovereign to the subjects. Such systems do not recognize individual rights!
Distributive justice is a weird hybrid that combines feudal or monarchical features with those of a fully free society, one in which it is individuals citizens who are sovereign, not the government. But the two, wealth-distribution by government and justice plainly enough don’t mix, despite how sophisticated folks claim they do. Justice requires acknowledging the sovereignty or self-rule of individuals, with what little government is warranted existing with the full consent of the governed. This government has no rightful authority to do any confiscation or conscription at all. Its sole function is that of a protector of individual rights or, as the American Founders put the matter, to “secure [the]… rights” everyone has by virtue of his or her human nature. (In America much of this was discussed but sadly not fully applied since a bunch of perverse ideas, held by powerful recalcitrant people, needed to be accommodated for the sake of establishing a sustainable country.)
When one hears of distributive justice–or another version of this oxymoron, social justice–it is best to conjure up the idea of a square circle or worse, a free slave. Governments that have resources to distribute came by it unjustly, by seizing it from people who are the just holders of those resources.
As to how legal services might be paid for, well, that is important but the answer cannot be “by confiscating the resources of those for whom they are being administered.”
Revisiting and Expanding the Laffer Curve
Nov 20th
Revisiting and Expanding the Laffer Curve
Tibor R. Machan
The Laffer curve is about how much imposition or other types of trouble people are willing to tolerate from their fellows. Arthur Laffer, a professor at the University of Southern California, is supposed to have drawn a bell shaped graph on a napkin once to show that up to the peak point of it people are likely to put up with the burden of taxation. The peak isn’t the same for everyone, but everyone does have such a peak.
In particular, then, the Laffer Curve concerns taxation, a form of extortion, which government uses to obtain funds to operate its undertakings. Reminiscent of how organized crime groups, such as the Mafia, operate, the government threatens heavy fines and jail so those being threatened hand over funds. Since, however, many governments, unlike the Mafia, can be voted out of office, the severity of the extortion has to be gauged with the possibility of eventual electoral resistance in mind. This is no easy task and can often go awry. Yet in most countries tax revolts are relatively rare since few people wish to risk losing their forms of life just so as to retaliate against the powerful forces of the state. This, again, is similar to Mafia type extortions in which the victim is given some benefits in order to be placated—e.g., protection from vandalism (the bulk of it initiated by the gangsters themselves).
Now the Laffer Curve is extendable into much more than the sphere of taxation-extortion. Any sort of government intrusion is subject to its insight. Censorship comes to mind—a certain amount of it will not be widely resisted. Government regulation, all of it a violation of the prohibition of prior restraint—is also subject to it since it is taken to be more trouble at times to resist than to comply with it. Indeed, statism as such is subject to the Laffer Curve analysis—in most societies it is not significantly enough resisted for it to subside, let alone disappear. People subjected to statist measures of any sort simply will not mount effective resistance because to do so may involve greater losses than gains and they are, after all, often able to circumvent it reasonably successfully by using their own intelligence or hiring expert help in the form of specialist in various branches of intrusive law.
Finally, the Laffer Curve is useful, also, to explain why there is not enough political resistance to statism and why only a small percentage of the population bothers to mount any, especially in advanced, developed countries where people live quite well, and where mounting resistance is quite costly, relatively speaking—that is, the possibility of success is small while the cost of the revolt is considerable. In undeveloped countries the situation is different, which helps explain why so often it is in such countries that we see rebellion and revolt against prevailing authorities and why there is frequent regime change in many of them. Put bluntly, the bulk of the population has little to lose from rising up against the state. That is not so in most developed countries.
The small percentage of citizens who will insist on making an issue out of nearly any measure of statism in developed countries will not manage to achieve regime change, of course, but it will keep the idea of it alive. Yet this itself can contribute to the ineffectuality of such marginal efforts, since the rest of the population may perceive the small resistance as sufficient and proceed without given it any aid or even much attention.
Is there a remedy or is this normal? In a sense it is normal—most people will put up with some trouble from others. They will accept a certain amount of intrusive noise from neighbors, being bumped on the sidewalk as they hurry to some destination, even some fender bender type auto accidents, let alone insults and humiliation. Minor thefts or assaults are rarely reported to the authorities.
However, what is not normal is becoming habituated to such tolerance for invasiveness from others. Most of us fear the consequences of such habituation—just as we fear being habituated to anything that harms us in the long run.
If it becomes evident enough, via education or the example from other regions of the world, that statism even in small increments has bad overall consequences, that things could turn out measurably better without it, the peak of the Laffer Curve may become more easily reached for the bulk of the people and the level of tolerance of statism could diminish considerably.
