Where is that happening? Unless you are talking about taxes, which are only yours if you believe that you made that (government-supplied!) money by yourself without infrastructure like plumbing, roads, schools and hospitals to educate and heal your employees, a strong legal system to enforce property rights…
Just look at corporations. Nearly everyone who has gotten insanely wealthy in the US in the last 100 years or so has done so through a corporation, or some other liability-protection business structure. These business formations are nothing more than government-provided, and government-enforced, fictions.
True. Without the understanding of the judicial system that a corporation is more than the sum of its parts it would be much easier to directly litigate against company execs.
Also known as a mere bunch of people who enforce their decisions using monopoly on violence.
> by yourself without infrastructure like plumbing, roads, schools and hospitals to educate and heal your employees, a strong legal system to enforce property rights…
Surely a government cannot do it by itself either? Who’ve decided that the decision should be deferred to them and not me or someone else? Oh, right, it was decided using the infrastructure and processes imposed by the government.
The only realistic alternative to “it’s not truly yours” is not global horizontal fair decision-making, it is a bunch of bureaucrats making decisions on behalf of (ie instead of) other people. That’s a road to serfdom paved by well intentioned naïve people.
> Who’ve decided that the decision should be deferred to them and not me or someone else?
The people through the process of democracy, where you also have a say as a voter and potential candidate. Property rights is a legal construct, created by the state. A technology if you will. Part of the rules of that construct is that property can be taxed for public provision purposes.
> The people through the process of democracy, where you also have a say as a voter and potential candidate.
“The process of democracy” is hand waving. There is a complex web of institutions and traditions that reinforce themselves. What country would be more “democratic”: the one where people can vote for one of several handpicked candidates or the one where they can impose their will through community organizing and strikes? The one where billionaires own media and put forward their agenda or the one where the media landscape is dominated by self-sustained media co-ops?
> Property rights is a legal construct
That’s the main issue I have with your view. Property rights are a construct as much as the legal system is a construct, democracy is a construct, the state is a construct and “the rules” you appeal to are a construct. There is no any primacy of the state and the government.
A lot of what you say is true, but in my opinion you are romanticizing right-libertarianism. I’m pretty happy to not have to continually and physically defend my possessions from my will-to-power neighbors. To me the life you describe sounds like The Road by Cormack McCarthy (spoiler: it isn’t fun)
Property didn't just appear in your hands out of thin air. Unless maybe you appeared naked on a deserted island and made everything yourself from scratch. It's only "your" property because of the social structures that make it so.
If you want to know what Nussbaum has to say about it, you should probably read them yourself.
You sound like someone who appreciates the costly systems that protect their property, but finds those “collective” efforts inconvenient to acknowledge.
“Property” is most definitely a social aspect of reality. It does not water down its usefulness, or moral rationale, to recognize that any view of property beyond “things you can physically defend without help from others” involves social agreements and efforts.
I don’t think dismissing others good points out of hand is the best way to communicate your own ideas.
Human beings benefit so much from social agreements it is profound. This is not news to game theorists, but some people seem to find it to be a bitter instead of sweet pill.
The question for the animal which creates exponentially more value for itself via many and varied social constructs, than any other animal, is to optimize positive sum social structures (in form and depth), and avoid and mitigate negative sums. Not deny their obvious existence or that our own existence (and freedom) as individuals and a species would be significantly curbed without them.
I do appreciate property and property rights (which I fund to be defended by my taxes). They are my only material means (aside from my bare hands) for achieving my values for myself and people I love.
If you have "collective efforts" you want funded or built, you're free to ask people voluntarily to put their lives, children, families etc. on hold for whatever cause you think is important that I don't see that you have insight into.
But at some level, people who live together have to be able to make some decisions together.
The top level of that is what we call “government”.
It complicates things that governments are as prone to dysfunction as any other structure. And that governments are often weakest at the job of improving themselves.
This is getting a bit abstract.
The specifics of what a government taxes and for what matter. The line would be only to tax for things that generate a net positive expected sum for all citizens, and only in cases where the positive sum is significant and only achievable as an agreement at the top level of society. And these systems are monitored and adapted or cancelled based on their actual, not envisioned, impact.
There isn’t going to be a general answer to the question of whether taxation is good or bad. Only cases where the net benefits are positive and negative. Real or imagined.
I share the view that blind redistribution does not deliver positive returns in reality or in any sober theory.
But the societal level returns we get, from real (not unmeasured, not just imagined or ideologically assumed) surpluses of common efforts, are a legitimate source for funding those efforts.
> If you have "collective efforts" you want funded or built, you're free to ask people voluntarily to put their lives, children, families etc. on hold for whatever cause you think is important that I don't see that you have insight into.
Such collective efforts are already underway. One is called the United States, a system where the legal construct property is bounded and compatible with taxation for public provision. The US is a club of people who have banded together for common goals and with democracy as a tool for updating the system. If you don't want to be part of that club then leave.
I don’t think you will find any disagreement on either point.
“Democracy” is often used as a general term for governments that in some sense are a delegation of citizen power. Even though a pure democracy would remove the delegation.
As a practical matter, the US model has devolved into a party-duocracy. Power at all levels has nearly completely centralized at the national level of each majority party. Of which there are only two. The extreme minimum of choice even for a Republic.
Incorrect, it was founded with more goals than that. It also has the mechanism of democracy for updating over time, and such updates have added prosperity producing things like taxation for public provision of education, infrastructure and much more. Which means that the initial version of the technology called the United States have long since gotten various updates.
There is certainly an emotional reaction that happens when something you consider yours is lost. We have all felt it at some point. But consider: everything you have was either stolen from somebody else at some point in the past, or created from resources that were stolen from somebody else, probably before you were born.
I'd reply that a properly regulated and bounded bundle of property rights is compatible with taxation for public provisioning of e.g. police, judiciary, health care, infrastructure, education and many more things. If you disagree with that then the discussion would move back to more fundamental normative background questions. Like how can a valid claim to property come about in the first place. For example if you think a necessary condition for a valid property claim is that the holding can be traced back through a chain of voluntary transaction then most current holdings of land in the US are unjustified, since they trace back to genocidal oppression by european settlers. In addition there are dire problems for other libertarian talking points about property.
