Libertarianism's Corrosive Effect on Democracy

In my libertarian days, the 1970s were a mere 25 years or so from the horrors of fascism in Europe, and Stalinism in Russia, while the stifling collectivism of China and eastern Europe still prevailed. In this sense, the early libertarian movement in America was a reaction trying to answer the question "how can we prevent this from happening to our country." So, in keeping with some of our ideological traditions, a hyper-individualism was embraced. No one, including government officials, may coerce another. Taxation becomes theft, and all that arise from tax payments - the courts, the police, the military, the parks, the libraries, care for the elderly and the poor, government research in medicine and space, etc., etc. - are products of grand larceny. Very quickly, despite the entreaties of some of its earliest intellectual godfathers and mothers - Hayek and Rand, for example - government, in the libertarian mindset, became analogous to The State, where the daily functions of democratic nation-states were just barely distinguishable from those of the worst dictatorships. And with that mindset, forget any sympathy with the concept of "citizenship," something which, I believe, we dearly need to get back to if we are to preserve and expand our democratic traditions.

The below, by David Brooks, will strike many libertarians as naive, but remember this, there has never been a functioning libertarian society in modern times; but we've had now over 70 years of dependable, reform-accepting, decent, democratic governments throughout many parts of the world. The onus is on the libertarians. Meanwhile, their efforts continue to corrode the basis for what Brooks calls "the lovely society," by making a mockery of the sentiments on which good democratic government is based, paving the way for a society of Donald Trumps.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/opinion/trump-taxes-and-citizenship.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0The 

If You're Leaning Progressive, A Vote For Johnson is a Vote for Trump

 I've been worried lately hearing that some former Bernie fans are leaning towards or planning to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.   In our current two-party winner-takes-all system, that would effectively be a vote for Trump.  It would be the most anti-progressive vote you could possibly make.  But more to the point, if your goal is to vote your conscience by voting for the candidate that best reflects your values, don't vote for the libertarians.  Here's why --  Let's just take four policies advocated by Bernie Sanders and compare them with Hillary Clinton's and Gary Johnson's take on the same issue:

College Tuition:  Bernie Sanders  - "It's time to make college tuition free and debt free."

Hillary Clinton - advocates free tuition for those students with family incomes below $125,000 at in-state public colleges and universities.
   
Gary Johnson - opposes government subsidies to students, including student loans, and would open college tuition up to the "free market."

Minimum Wage:  Bernie Sanders - Increase the minimum wage up to $15/hour over the next several years

 Hillary Clinton - supports raising the minimum wage to at least $12/hour and supports workers fighting for a $15/hour minimum wage, including strengthening the rights of workers to form or join a union.

Gary Johnson - would eliminate the minimum wage and all federal wage standards.

Health Care:  Bernie Sanders  - make guaranteed health care a right of citizenship by enacting a Medicare-for-all single payer health care system. 

Hillary Clinton -  defend and enhance the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare); double the number of public health clinics in rural America; supports a public option to broaden health care choices by letting people over fifty-five buy into Medicare.

Gary Johnson -  repeal the Affordable Care Act; maintain Medicare for those who have already paid into the system; advocates "block-granting" the programs, that is moving Medicare and Medicaid to state management.  Health care should be eventually turned over to the "free market."


Citizens United Supreme Court Decision Allowing Corporations to flood political campaigns with donations as a form of free speech:  Bernie Sanders - make overturning the Citizens United decision a litmus test for any Supreme Court appointee.

 Hillary Clinton - pledged to introduce a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United within her first 30 days in office.

Gary Johnson - supports Citizens United on First Amendment grounds; anyone, including corporations, should be able to contribute as much money as they want.


So as you can see, on just these four very important issues, Hillary's positions are far closer to Bernie's than Gary Johnson's.  And there are plenty more I could have mentioned - cimate change mediation, for example -- where Bernie/Hillary's stands differ radically from Johnson's.  If you really believed in and understood what Bernie Sanders was advocating, then vote for Hillary Clinton.  Don't hand over the Presidency to the likes of Donald Trump!

 I've focused here more on the Libertarian Party candidate, but the same argument also goes for the Green Party's candidate Jill Stein.  On just about every issue involving the economy, health care, and the environment, Hillary Clinton leans much closer to Jill Stein than Johnson or Trump, and Jill Stein doesn't have a chance in hell of winning in our winner-take-all two party system.  A vote for Stein also helps Trump.  As Bernie Sanders is advocating, you need to "think hard before casting a protest vote....":

“If you are a working person, do you really think that billionaires need a large tax break? Which is what Trump is proposing. If you are an ordinary American who listens to science, do you think its a good idea that the President of the United States rejects science and says that climate change is a hoax?” he asked. “I think that if you look at the issues—raising minimum wage, building infrastructure, expanding healthcare—Clinton, by far, is the superior candidate.”  

Source: http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/discouraging_protest_vote_sanders_says_elect_clintonthen_mobilize_20160918

Feel a Case of Free Marketitis Coming On? Here Are Some Cures

Are you finding yourself intolerant of all things liberal?  Do you hate environmentalists and regard people on welfare as "lazy bums"?  Do you use terms like "muscle mystics" and think Ayn Rand walks on water?  Do you regard the Koch brothers as national saviors?  Then you have, at the least, a rampant case of radical Free Marketitis!   For your sake, so you don't waste tons of time as I did pondering libertarian doctrine, and of course for the sake of the country, check out the books below....please!!:

The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes,  by Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein.
Great book which effectively challenges the "taxation is theft" doctrine.  Also see the excerpt I've included in this blog.

The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel.  Another excellent shot across the bow of the libertarian and hard-core conservative view on taxes.

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael J. Sandel.  A fine antidote to the mindset behind Walter Block's "Defending the Undefendable,"and an effective attack on some key libertarian nostrums.

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do, by Michael J. Sandel.  As with his above work, Justice directly addresses problems with libertarian orthodoxy.

Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: the Moral Limits of Markets, by Debra Satz.  Wonderful attack on the ideas propping up the lib/conservative movement's faith in the Holy Free Marketplace.

Austerity: the History of a Dangerous Idea, by Mark Blyth.  Being against taxation and hating government in general, libertarians (and now I suppose many conservatives) tend to worship at the altar of fiscal austerity, at least rhetorically, all while often following policies to "starve the beast" leading to even greater deficits.   Prof. Blyth lays out the many myths surrounding fiscal austerity thinking and how such policies can threaten political freedom.

Our Declaration: a Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, by Danielle Allen.  Shortly after volunteering to work at Libertarian Party Headquarters in the late '70's, the LP Director at the time handed me a copy of Murray Rothbard's "Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature."  I inhaled it of course, along with all paranoid libertarian warnings against promoting equality.  Libertarians regard the Declaration of Independence as one of the great founding documents of the modern libertarian movement.  But, as Prof. Allen beautifully points out, our Declaration is a clarion call for both liberty and equality.

Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer.  This is an absolutely excellent history of the rise of the American plutocracy behind a libertarian facade.  It's an eye-opening account of the Koch brothers' full scale assault against good government.

Altruism: the Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, by  Matthieu Ricard.  This should be must reading for the Ayn Rand newbie who is seriously heading towards becoming a total altruism-hating Randroid.   A thorough and magnificent work by the esteemed buddhist monk.

American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper,
by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.  From Ayn Rand to the Koch brothers, one of the central myths pounded into libertarian doctrine is that there is a severe conflict between government and the marketplace, and that the industrial and technological revolutions we are still seeing today flourished in spite of government interference.  From aviation to computers this is historical hogwash.  There is also the libertarian paranoia that any close relationship between business and government presents the specter of incipient fascism.  Not if it's done the American way, argues Hacker and Pierson.  An excellent antidote to free market mythology.

The Soft Underbelly of Libertarian Free Market Fundamentalism, by Jay Hilgartner

     Listen closely to any of the arguments made against government programs or regulation of the marketplace by libertarians and you will notice something right off -- they almost always use what could be called practical arguments against whatever government policy is being proposed; rarely do they use libertarian moral arguments against government interference.  Some examples:  Minimum wage laws "destroy jobs;"  Obamacare is "too expensive;" EPA regulations "hurt small businesses;" Public schools "don't teach;"  Social Security will "bankrupt America;" regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration "don't work because they're controlled by the industries they're supposed to regulate," "There's "no proof of human-caused climate change; " and so on.

     But here's the kicker -- for libertarians, the practical arguments ultimately have nothing, repeat NOTHING to do with their opposition to government programs, agencies, or regulations.

     Libertarians are opposed to government regulation or subsidization of the economy on principle.
The philosophical basis of American libertarianism is what they call the non-aggression axiom: no one has the right to initiate force against another, including the government.  Government regulation or taxation of private property, including businesses, is regarded as "the initiation of force," so it must be opposed.

So, taking the examples cited above, Libertarians:

• oppose minimum wage laws because they believe no one, including government, can forcibly dictate to a business what they can pay their workers.
• want to repeal Obamacare because they do not believe the government should guarantee health care for anyone, since doing so requires taxes and regulation of the health care industry.
• want to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency because they oppose government regulation of private property.  You might ask "what about pollution?" Libertarians want to privatize all land, water, and air resources, enabling pollution to be treated as a nuisance or trespass problem.  The protest that, even if possible, this will take time to implement, so what do you do about present pollution problems? -- falls on the deaf ears of libertarians.
• are critical of public schools because they don't believe government should be concerned with providing education for all, since that involves taxes.
• want to "privatize" Social Security (meaning abolish it) since any government guarantee of a minimum income for senior citizens and the disabled requires taxation.
• would abolish government regulatory agencies like the FDA because government shouldn't interfere in the free market.  "What about harmful products?," you might ask.  Libertarians would answer "that can be handled by the market and tort law."
• must deny that human-caused climate change is a real problem because trying to mitigate it inevitably involves government regulation of carbon dioxide emissions.   For radical free market believers, anthropogenic climate change can not, absolutely not exist.  By now, you can probably guess why.  As Naomi Klein put it in her latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, "A belief system that vilifies collective action and declares war on all corporate regulation and all things public simply cannot be reconciled with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that are largely responsible for creating and deepening the crisis (p.41)"  There are simply no private solutions that can fully address climate change, so it must be denied by the free market fundamentalists.

       Just imagine how flat the above arguments would fall on the ears of the general public. When I was a professional libertarian working for the Libertarian Party, I almost never mentioned the non-aggression axiom on matters involving the economy, except when speaking to a political science class or to an audience that I believed might be very receptive to libertarian ideas.  I knew that if I did, I would sound nuts or heartless or both.

     So you might ask "why didn't that make you reconsider your ideas?"  I answer this question in depth in my post entitled "How Could I Believe This Crazy Stuff," but, suffice to say I was possessed with the typical hubris of the idealogue.  I knew I was right and, importantly, my ideological fervor guided me to uncritically accepting whatever practical arguments could be made against government policies and programs.  But, importantly, while I came to believe the practical arguments I made against government, it was libertarian ethics that fueled my enthusiasm.

     There would be no modern radical libertarian political movement without the non-coercion axiom as applied by libertarians to property rights.  We might still have the Kochs and the other big business self-interests proselytizing Congress with their dollars, but you would not have the ground troops --the legions of libertarian enthusiasts who are not millionaires by any stretch of the means, who often come from low and middle income backgrounds, but who truly believe that what they are fighting for is right.  It is this libertarian ethos that fuels the self-righteous fervor of libertarians, and now many conservatives, against taxes and other government interventions in the economy.

     To be clear, corporate self-interest and racism are also important to understanding the appeal of free market fundamentalism in America today, but those are hardly positive selling points in an election. They cannot be overtly used, and neither can the non-aggression axiom -- an ethic that says that government must be essentially useless in the face of poverty, racism, environmental problems, or fighting the power of wealthy corporations.  Thus the practical arguments against government are mostly what you hear.   But this also requires a degree of subterfuge, conscious or not, on the part of libertarians.  This is why I believe the libertarian non-aggression axiom is the soft underbelly of libertarian free market fundamentalism.
   
     Ideological hubris and subterfuge are much easier to attack.   Practical arguments can quickly become wonkish, enabling a libertarian to bury criticism of their views in a tiresome debate of statistics and economic jargon, and with enough truths about government/corporate corruption to inspire the listener to think "well, that libertarian has a point."  But bring up libertarian ethics as applied to the economy, and the libertarian can soon sound frankly ridiculous.

     For example, let's say you're someone who has no philosophical problem with the government using its power to regulate the economy and you're debating someone you know to be a libertarian.  If the libertarian says "I'm opposed to minimum wage laws because they destroy jobs," my advice is to avoid an economics-only debate with him.  Turn the argument around by asking "But as a libertarian, would it be true to say that you oppose minimum wage laws because you don't believe in government regulation of business, regardless of whether minimum wage laws destroy jobs or not?"  The libertarian has to either 1) lie, and disagree, thus creating an opening for supporting minimum wage laws, or 2) agree.  If it's the later, then you can just carry the libertarian argument to its logical, absurd conclusions -- "So you don't believe in government labor laws in general, such as requiring workman's compensation for on-the-job injuries, or fair employment regulations outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual preference, or religion?"

     Here's another example -- the libertarian argues "government schools don't teach; in our inner cities, public schools have become violent warehouses for the children of the disadvantaged that do little to prepare their students for the outside world."  The libertarian goes on to argue for a government voucher program "to give parents living in poverty the option of sending their kids to private schools."   There are pros and cons to education vouchers, but if you know the person making that argument is a libertarian, my advice is to go to the heart of the matter -- "but as a libertarian, and correct me if I'm wrong, you don't believe in public schools do you;  that is you don't believe that government should provide education for anyone, isn't that correct?"  If the libertarian is honest and agrees, then they are effectively sidelined to the radical fringe by their fundamentalist position and you can carry the debate beyond vouchers to argue for ways of making public schools better.   Also, listeners to your debate will understand that libertarians support education vouchers as a means to abolishing public education, not primarily as way of better delivering educational opportunity for all.

     I hope you can see that the same method - attacking libertarian free market fundamentalism by going directly to libertarian ethics -- can be very effective on any of the other economic issues confronting us.  For example, "But as a libertarian, you don't believe government should provide health care for anyone, isn't that correct? .. You would also abolish not just Obamacare but Medicare and Medicaid as well, right?"  "But isn't your opposition to climate change science guided by your fear that, if true, any global solution requires extensive government regulation of the fossil fuel industry, and you are, in principle, opposed to government regulations of the market, regardless of the harm being done?"

     You can always go straight to the matter by asking a libertarian if they think taxation is theft. (Note - libertarians will often tip themselves off by saying something like "I don't believe government should steal people's money to pay for ...... fill in the blank").  If the libertarian is honest, he or she will say "yes," and then you can go all out.  Don't be aggressive, just act curious and allow the libertarian, in their hubris, to sideline themselves -- "So (to the libertarian) I take it that means no public universities, no interstate highway system, no national parks, no army, navy, air force, or marines."  At this point, the blossom of libertarianism-as-an-attractive-alternative will begin to wilt for most people listening in.

     There are standard fall-back positions libertarians can take, such as "We believe that government should provide for an effective criminal justice system and for national defense, but we wouldn't have the government breaking into your private phone conversations or intervening in every conflict around the globe."  If you're a liberal you could still respond, "that's something I agree with, but an effective criminal justice system at the local, state, and federal levels, plus a national defense would still require billions of dollars - how would you pay for that without taxes?"

     Always remember that we have at least 70 years of modern liberal democracies around the world demonstrating that they can effectively govern and be reformed, either way - left or right - while providing arguably the greatest prosperity and freedom for their people ever known, all during a time of incredible social and technological change.  Liberal democratic governments, including their myriad interventions into the marketplace, not only have worked, but have allowed modern markets to exist and prosper.  Libertarians, especially on economic matters, should be the ones put on the defensive.  They are fundamentalists, as profoundly irrational in their belief in a governmentless Holy Market as any religious fanatic.  And you know that feeling you get when you suddenly realize that the person you're having a conversation with is a religious fundamentalist, right?  You want to either leave the room or at least change the subject to something relatively harmless like "how about those Orioles?"

Focus on libertarian ethics when debating a libertarian and you can use their honest enthusiasm and hubris for their cause to present such a profoundly unrealistic and unattractive vision that everyone listening really just wants to change the subject or leave that room all together.  

How Could I Have Believed This Crazy Libertarian Stuff? - a Cautionary Tale for Young Activists, by Jay Hilgartner

Here is my mea culpa -- I spent far too much time in my past--from the mid 1970s to the late 1990's--promoting libertarianism. It all started in 1973 while in the Air Force in Alaska when I picked up a copy of Ayn Rand's Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. From there on I was hooked on a revolutionary vision of a radically free market. After a year at Penn State, I moved to Washington, D.C. where I attended my first Libertarian Party (LP) convention. On a fateful day in April 1977, I walked to the LP office in downtown Washington and volunteered my services stuffing envelopes, dropping off news releases, etc. I was hired full-time at the LP office in 1978, working there as a researcher and state ballot-drive coordinator, and then also as a researcher from 1980-81 with the Libertarian Party's Clark for President campaign. In those years I was actually paid to be a libertarian.  

For those not entirely familiar with the Libertarian Party, the three main legs of their platform are 1) a strong support for civil liberties, 2) a pro-peace, noninterventionist foreign policy, and 3) a passion for radical capitalism. I make no apologies for still supporting the first two, which I continue, as a reformed liberal, to advocate. It's my past defense of the radical capitalist libertarian position - as defined as no government regulation or subsidization of the marketplace -- that I regret.

From Libertarian to Liberal

Relatively free markets, with appropriate government regulation for the protection of workers, consumers, the environment, and the smooth functioning of democracy, are terrific. But the radical free market doctrine of American libertarianism, which has been put to the test in actual real-world experience, has produced the exact opposite - gangster rule, oppression, and terror. Take for example the ineffective states of Somalia, the Sudan, Honduras, and those attempting to govern portions of gang-infested Mexico. Once any government becomes weak enough "to drown in a bathtub," as libertarian anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously advocates, there is nothing to check the power of concentrated wealth, whether in the form of corporations or criminal gangs. Libertarians would object that this is not a fair statement of what they advocate, arguing that their ideal libertarian society, under their concept of minimal government, would embody a strong rule of law, bringing about a just, innovative, and prosperous society. My position is that, since no such minimal state has existed in modern history, libertarians have much in common with other utopian political visionaries, whose radical dreams, once turned into reality, became nightmares. The burden of proof is on the libertarians.

Radical free markets for me now present a dystopian vision inviting the rule of the wealthy and most ruthless over the many.  And, since people have a tendency to revolt against unjust power and, since we can never be sure the direction revolutions will take, the dogmatic pursuit of an idealized "free market", if effective, will lead to weakened democratic government, tremendous corruption, and possibly even dictatorship. A strong government, strong that is in it's ability to protect individual rights, offset extreme inequality in wealth, and provide for the general welfare and common defense, is essential for a marketplace to function properly and for freedom and democracy to prosper.

So, how did I come to believe in libertarianism's laissez-faire hyper-capitalist doctrine? How could I have once been an advocate for a political philosophy calling for privatizing public lands, including selling the national parks, doing away with public schools, and getting rid of minimum wage laws, anti-discrimination statutes, child labor laws, and numerous other government protections that we take for granted today? How could I have believed this crazy stuff? Here's my excuse, for what it's worth. I became a libertarian because 1) of the times, that is the post Vietnam War/Watergate tumult of the 1970's, which encouraged my disenchantment with government in general, 2) I was seduced by libertarianism's logical consistency and fierce support for civil liberties, open immigration, and peace, all of which made it easier for me to ignore its more extreme radical capitalist positions, and 3) libertarianism gave me in my youth, direction, focus, and a sense of intellectual self-esteem.  

The Times They Were A' Changin

The modern libertarian movement was born in the 1960s and ‘70s.  When I started working for the Libertarian Party at the age of 25, the Vietnam War -- that horrendous war-of-choice against a people who never threatened us in any way -- had ended only a few years before, following a vigorous anti-war and anti-draft movement.  Meanwhile,  much of the world was like an Ayn Rand nightmare with all of Russia, eastern Europe, and China under a gray, seemingly irreversible communist authoritarianism. A good portion of Asia, South America, and Africa to me appeared a depressing collection of dictatorships, many of which the U.S. government had installed and heavily subsidized.  The Soviet Union and the U.S. threatened each other with a combined 60,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.  Annihilation by thermo-nuclear war was a real threat.  The decade of the ‘70’s, then, easily became a giant advertisement for a saner foreign and military policy counseling an end to CIA-backed coups and paying dictators to be our "friends," along with a general military disengagement from the world’s troubles.  Click - the libertarian platform's foreign policy of non-interventionism sounded great to me.

The second leg of the libertarian platform-- civil liberties-- was also a no brainer.  Yes, I was an introverted loner who, like most of my generation, had never been tear-gassed or even marched in a demonstration.  But I was still proud to be a part of the ‘60’s generation.  In my youthful conceit, I believed our generation had invented “free love,” civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.  The legalization of marijuana seemed inevitable and the case against drug prohibition was growing stronger each day. Plus, legal American apartheid had ended in the ‘60’s with the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts.   Then as now, libertarians were also the opposite of today's xenophobes, welcoming open immigration with great moral clarity.  

By the mid 1970s, conservatives were always on the defensive and generally ignored (they would get their revenge later in the Reagan and Bush/Cheney administrations).  Richard Nixon had resigned and liberalism reigned supreme.  I was young and hopelessly naive. In the future, I convinced myself, you wouldn’t need anti-discrimination legislation because racism and sexism would be gone, pot would be legal, and most everyone would be cool.  Civil liberties, the next leg of the libertarian platform, was also easy for me to embrace.

I Wanted to Believe

On economic policy, liberalism was suffering from its own incredible victories.  I grew up in the 50's and 60's when jobs were plentiful, at least for young white guys.  You could fairly easily live on your own, have a car, and set yourself up in a small apartment with a minimum of effort.   You could even work your way through school without incurring much debt at all.  Going bankrupt because of a health problem just didn’t happen to anyone I knew.  Things like a company health plan and workers compensation for on-the-job accidents were totally taken for granted.  In my young mind, organized labor’s great victories, after decades of brave confrontations with company thugs and eventual support from the federal government, were a fait accompli, a natural outcome of American capitalism, a view that took no notice of the blood and guts it took to accomplish.  The New Deal was just ancient history and Big Labor seemed as dirty as the soles of union organizer Jimmy Hoffa’s cement shoes. 

When I started reading radical capitalists like Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises, I could easily believe, in my ignorance, that the benefits offered by businesses in those days were the result of free market competition for labor.  Government regulations had nothing to do with my prosperity and unions just got in the way.  I admit now that I was being terribly ungrateful back then, but that attitude, I believe, was common among many in my generation. When you are young and growing up in prosperous times, it is easier to be ignorant of the often decades-long struggles it took many brave people, great dreamers, and government actions, along with sheer happenstance - like the post World War II devastation leaving America largely unscathed -- to get us to that level of economic security.

Then there was the problem of the New Left which, by the mid ‘70’s, seemed increasingly tired and irrelevant in its identity politics and blatant Marxism.  I grew up with my middle class Dad and stepmother on four acres of beautiful Maryland land.  This was when an acre in Baltimore County, close to the city, was only $400 (it's more like $100,000 or more today). My dad was a successful mid-level salesman for General Electric. My step-mom was a secretary for the Kennecott Copper Refining Company. We were not at all wealthy, but we were very comfortable.  A dairy farm was on one side of our property.  On the other side were hundreds of acres of woods preserved by a retired and reclusive heart surgeon.  Below were nestled a few houses where our neighbors minded their own business and kept their land well tended.  My summer jobs were selling vegetables grown locally by a farmer who worked hard for what he had. My experience with private property was totally positive. When I started reading the radical capitalists, their arguments that private property rights are the basis of political freedom and that government was the great monopoly creator was easy for me to embrace, and much of the basics I still agree with.  Ma Bell was a government monopoly.  The war-machine companies (remember this is just after Vietnam) like Boeing, Lockheed, and DuPont seemed to owe their existence to government subsidies and contracts.  The FCC prevented more competition in television and radio.  Trucking and the airlines were protected by the government’s Interstate Commerce Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board (The later was actually eliminated with the support of Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter - liberals!).   For me, radical capitalism was a pro-private property, anti-corporate welfare alternative to the New Left’s Marxism.   

Also, unlike Marxism, libertarianism didn’t challenge my patriotism. I could honor the best of Jefferson, Paine, and the other Founding Fathers, while still being very critical of the U.S. government.  I suspect this is a very important factor in the current libertarian Right as well today.  In libertarian historiography, the American Revolution is regarded as the first libertarian revolution of consequence.  Therefore, a government small enough “to drown in a bathtub" is a completely patriotic sentiment to libertarians, since that kind of thinking falls in line with what libertarians regard as America's anti-statist tradition. 

What about environmental problems? Human-caused climate change was not even on the national radar until the late 1980's. In the 1970s, the Libertarian Party, where I worked, had released a fascinating booklet written by R. J. Smith covering environmental issues from a radical capitalist perspective. Montana State University also had a number of free market economists doing interesting work on water and land use policy. Pollution, libertarians argued, could be handled by extending private property rights to the air and water, that is by "internalizing the externalities" as we used to say, using economic jargon (yes, we were nerds).  Whales could be saved by private whaling companies with recognized ownership in whale herds, encouraging their profitable management and propagation (Yes, I convinced myself, that would work!).  Private conservation organizations like the Audubon Society and Nature Conservancy could manage the parks, and, hey, my generation invented Earth Day.  Of course we would take care of the environment.  And if there were any fuzzy anti-environment  challenges to my new radical capitalist orthodoxy, I thought, they could be ignored for the time being.

So like that poster on Fox Mulder's wall from the X-Files -- you know the one with the UFO on it and the caption "I Want to Believe"-- I embraced radical capitalism. I would work to eliminate corporate welfare, open up the free market in every way, and, very importantly, suppress any scary possible anti-capitalist reservations I might have. Child labor would never come back in America, I reasoned, as that would be handled as child abuse instead of as economic regulation of the now-holy free market. Social Security and Medicare would be even better privatized, I convinced myself, and besides that's way down the road. First things first -- get rid of the corporate monopolies with a radical free market. So, click in my brain went the third and final leg of my new libertarian dogma - radical capitalism.

Consistency Became a Hobgoblin

Libertarianism all seemed so very logical to me and what was viewed as its philosophical consistency was a great attraction to many of the libertarians I worked with. We would say "both conservatives and liberals are the inconsistent ones -- it is libertarians who want government both out of the economy AND out of the bedroom," and I thought that was neat. When you really think about it, logical consistency is not something that would inspire most people to rise up and start a revolution. Emerson warned that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Consistency is very important to ideologues and religious fundamentalists of any stripe including radical libertarians. And curious, though uneducated, as I was, it was important to me.  

I was struck by the fact that every libertarian political position consistently follows from one central principle, which libertarians refer to as the non-aggression axiom: no one has the right to initiate force against another. Sounds good, right? Most people would have no problem with this. It echoes the famous, more elegantly stated Golden Rule "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." On a one to one basis, it's a great rule for an ethical life. But it's when libertarians apply the non-aggression axiom to property rights and then to government policies that their positions start becoming, in many cases, profoundly strange, defying common sense and historical experience.  

For libertarians, the non-aggression axiom necessarily means no one has the right to initiate force against another's justly acquired property. What exactly constitutes justly acquired property I'll leave to the libertarian philosophers (last I read, it was still being debated). For the sake of brevity, suffice to say that when I joined the Libertarian Party in 1977, existing property relationships in the United States, with some notable exceptions such as land confiscated through eminent domain, were generally viewed as just by libertarians, having been worked out within a pro-property rights, relatively free market legal and political framework.  So, for libertarians, society is not the problem, since they view society as a collection of individuals in some sense almost completely divorced from what ever state governs over them. Society is good to the extent that individuals are able to voluntarily relate with one another forming markets and benefiting each other through free trade. It is government that is the problem for libertarians, not only because government insists on coercively regulating private property, and thus the marketplace, but because all governments rely on taxation to function.  

As the libertarian bumper sticker goes "Taxation is Theft." Refuse to pay your taxes and you wind up in jail or worse. Therefore, libertarians reason, any government, to the extent that it relies on taxation, is illegitimate (of course this means every government is illegitimate, but libertarians get around that by fantasizing about a voluntary government that functions without taxation). Every libertarian political position, especially including the stranger ones, flow from their belief that taxation is legalized stealing. Every libertarian activist, from those misguided souls taking over a government wildlife refuge in Oregon, to Tea Party conservatives battling against increases in the minimum wage, to Charles and David Koch attempting to buy the U.S. government so they can abolish it, I suspect they all justify their actions on some variation of the libertarian non-aggression axiom. It is how libertarians can feel all warm and fuzzy inside while working to eliminate public schools and defund Social Security and Medicare. If more liberals understood this, free market fundamentalism could be attacked more easily...but that's another story.

I just remember that when I embraced libertarian ideas for the first time, what I perceived as it's logical consistency really helped to radicalize me -- the world started to make sense, even if it was, as I came to understand later, an extremely distorted worldview. From my libertarian readings, I learned basic techniques for dissecting an issue or policy, some of which today I still find useful. Also, my enthusiasm for the libertarian alternative stimulated in me a curiosity about history, economics, law, etc. that, even though I was just a dilettante in those subjects at the time, made me feel like I really understood the world and could even carry on an intelligent conversation about the issues of the day.

Embracing My Paradigm

But how could I have held on to such a radical political ideology, especially in the face of competing ideas and newly acquired knowledge, in the years after my "conversion"?  It was actually pretty easy. I was young and ignorant. In my 20's, I had not been exposed to knowledge that would have contradicted my libertarian beliefs (I didn't go to college for my degrees in history and atmospheric science until I was in my 30's).  And once I had my ideology kind of set in my mind, it acted as something of a filter, blocking any serious challenges to my free market fundamentalist beliefs. As with most ideologues, if the facts didn't fit my ideology, I just threw out the facts, or simply ignored the inconvenient ones entirely.  

I realized I had censored myself from alternative, nonlibertarian ideas especially after I was required to read, while in college in the 1980s, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Kuhn described how ideas and viewpoints coalesced to become what he called a paradigm.   A paradigm is one way the human mind handles inadequate knowledge.   None of us can know everything.  In science, by necessity, researchers will be guided by a dominant worldview, or paradigm, that suggests appropriate research paths to follow while, importantly, allowing scientists to ignore facts or new knowledge that may contradict the paradigm they have come to embrace.  A light bulb went on in my head. I realized then that my libertarianism was, like most other highly doctrinaire political philosophies, a paradigm and thus a worldview that also blinded me to alternative viewpoints and explanations...but I get ahead of myself.

The Joy of Knowing "The Truth"

For me, personally, my new libertarian paradigm was exhilarating.  In the 60's and early 70's, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was curious but I could not make much sense of anything.   Libertarianism changed all that.  From the New Left foreign policy revisionists to the Austrian school of economics, I found the readings fascinating. Libertarian writers helped me believe I was acquiring an understanding of how the world worked. Between Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate at one end and the New Left Marxists on the other, libertarianism presented to me a wonderful third alternative. Suddenly I found myself learning with gusto all different sorts of obscure things, such as the effects of the National Flood Insurance Program on housing construction in hurricane-prone areas, or the history of drug prohibition in the United States, or Native American tribes as successful examples of political anarchism -- topics I would never have explored without the fire of libertarian ideas to motivate me.  But of course, when I did tackle a topic, at least in the early days of my conversion, I tended to read  libertarian writers which only, of course, reinforced my paradigm.

Attaching myself to a rigid political philosophy helped give me, however misguided, a sense of purpose.  In this I probably have much in common with many who find themselves a cause to work towards to give their lives meaning.  There is nothing wrong, of course, with working for a cause, except to the extent that you use pride in your work to cover over your own fears and perceived inadequacies. Suddenly, as a libertarian, I "knew" something more than most people.  I had attained special knowledge.  I had my finger on the pulse of the world.  In the worst cases of ideological radicalism, some people will do terrible things “for the cause,” as if preserving their sense of self and their allegiance to their doctrine are more important than the people they are hurting.  When I joined the Libertarian Party in 1977, we weren’t hurting anyone, as far as I could tell.  But I could still hold a smug assurance that I knew basic economics, correct political philosophy, and had a good understanding of history, even though in all of these subjects my understanding was at the most basic, elementary level. Most importantly to me, I had the correct libertarian ethics upon which to judge a particular policy as right or wrong. The world began to make sense, and that felt empowering.

Tool of the Kochtopus

On top of it all, and something which I never dreamed would be so effective but has had great consequences for the politics of today (liberals take note), my knowledge and radicalization was being subsidized in large part by the billionaires Charles and David Koch. The Libertarian Party where I worked in the late '70's was heavily funded by the Kochs. David Koch was the Libertarian Party's Vice-Presidential candidate in 1980 so he could personally bankroll the Clark campaign (where I was employed as a researcher), getting around election law restrictions at the time. I studiously devoured Libertarian Review, Inquiry, Reason , the newsletter of the Council for a Competitive Economy (which later became the Competitive Enterprise Institute), and publications of the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies, which were also all heavily funded by, you guessed it, the Kochs. I got my first degree (in history) in 1986 from George Mason University, where the Kochs had just donated $30 million to set up a radical capitalist economics department on a campus strategically located near Washington, D.C. I remember a poster on a wall of the old LP office which celebrated "the New Paradigm." At the time, I only partially understood what it meant, but clearly the Kochs, even way back then, knew exactly what they were doing. They were working to build the intellectual foundation for a radical capitalist political revolution.

So in my own small way, I became a grunt helping to lay the foundations for America's growing plutocracy. My apologies. Understand, there were many good and valuable relationships I had, experiences and knowledge I acquired, while being a "professional libertarian" that I appreciate and will always be very thankful for. But as someone still very interested in political freedom, I regret the years I wasted unintentionally helping, in my own small way, to erode democracy, all while ignoring other political/economic viewpoints that offer so much for our country and planet.  

Losing Faith

Radicalism, I suppose of any sort, can carry a kind of momentum in your soul that can last decades. It did for me. The first cracks in my free market fundamentalist beliefs began while pursuing my degree in history at George Mason. But even then it was a slow and incremental process. I found myself reading communitarian anarchists like Ursula Le Guin and pouring through the history of Native American tribes as a kind of libertarian alternative to capitalism. My wife at the time, Cynthia, who I had met while working at the Libertarian Party, combined a progressive Christianity with her anti-statism which also softened for me some of the harder hyper-individualistic edges of strict libertarianism. The problem for me was how to reconcile environmental problems (I couldn't totally buy the pro-privatization arguments) along with the plight of people suffering from poverty, racism, and simple bad luck, with libertarianism's capitalist contempt for the regulatory welfare state. Without reconciliation, I muddled along in my libertarian political beliefs while pursuing Life. Science for me seemed refreshingly unmuddled, and had long been a close competitor with political philosophy for my attention. So, having my fill of politics in Washington, we packed our bags and headed out to Jayhawk country -- Lawrence, Kansas -- for some fresher air and so I could pursue a career in one of my favorite sciences - meteorology.

My disenchantment with the libertarian movement really didn't start developing in a big way until Cynthia and I worked closely with an antiwar group at the University of Kansas opposing the first Persian Gulf War. The antiwar activists, mostly leftists, were intellectually challenging and a joy to work with. I also got an appreciation for communitarian approaches to property, along with an awareness of the historically vicious side to the private property ethic, while doing a series on the Native American tribes of northeast Kanas for KTKA, the Topeka television station I worked for. But even then, through my new career as a broadcast meteorologist in Kansas and Arkansas in the 1990s, I still largely held on to an only mildly-watered-down free market radicalism. That was finally killed by the worse American president in my living memory George W. Bush.  

In Palm Beach County, Florida -- the absolute epicenter of the 2000 Presidential election controversy -- I found myself wasting, absolutely wasting, my vote on the Libertarian Party's candidate for President. Cynthia and I had just moved to Boynton Beach that summer so she could pursue her career as a history professor at a nearby university. So there I was in November 2000 using what was to become the infamous "hanging chad" ballot to play my own small part in helping the Supreme Court send George W. Bush to the White House.  

To those Bernie Sanders supporters foolishly vowing that they will not cast a vote for Hillary if she wins the nomination, let this be a warning to you. My vote really did count in that election in Florida, but instead of voting for Al Gore, who would have made a far better president, I just threw it away, rationalizing to myself that there was no essential difference between Gore and Bush. On the campaign trail, George W. Bush was the "compassionate conservative;" he spoke Spanish to hispanic audiences and advocated immigration reform, and he said he was against "nation building," implying a less interventionist foreign policy. While I still shake my head in disbelief at my thinking back then, given what I know now, at the time I regarded Al Gore and George Bush as tweedle dee and tweedle dum. So, feeling somewhat noble even in my then highly diluted libertarian principles, I punched the chad at the ballot booth for the Libertarian candidate one last time, and the rest is history. 

The Bush administration was a national disaster - launching an unnecessary war-of-choice in Iraq, approving the wide-spread use of torture, cutting taxes while radically increasing spending to end any hopes of balancing the budget, installing anti-regulation "regulators" in the SEC and then watching the economy begin to crash - a total mess, all courtesy of an avowedly pro-free market conservative administration.

Then what followed was almost worse - the mightily obnoxious anti-government conservative revolution that rose to power in the Bush administration's wake. The intellectuals and activists of this new American "Tea Party" thoroughly embraced a very libertarian free market fundamentalism and hostility towards government, combined with a barely disguised racism and terror of feminism. I could not in good conscience align myself with the likes of Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter. And now the libertarian Kochs were openly bankrolling this new radicalized conservative movement, pledging hundreds of millions of dollars to any candidates who supported their anti-government doctrine. 

It was during the disaster of the George W. Bush administration that I realized that I finally had to choose between fighting for democracy and good government on one hand or continuing to hold on to what was left of my radical never-worked-in-the-real-world free market ideology on the other. I chose democracy. How could I not? I became a proud liberal, but not at all a doctrinaire one. Ideology is for people with closed minds. Humility is the best temperament to cultivate learning. I volunteered in Florida for John Kerry in 2004 and, after moving back to Maryland, knocked on doors for Barack Obama in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia during his 2008 and 2012 campaigns. I have tried through letters-to-the-editor and occasional radio call-ins to make liberals and independents aware of the huge libertarian contribution to today's radical conservative movement and the danger that free market fundamentalism poses to our country. 

This blog is a part of my efforts to make others realize that the Kochs and the libertarian movement in general must be especially fought against in the realm of ideas. For the Kochs, It's not just about profits but about ideology, as Jane Mayer's excellent new book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right finally makes abundantly clear. The tide I think is beginning to turn. It's very possible that the influence of radical capitalist doctrine has peaked in American politics. But what rough beast have the Kochs and the libertarian movement helped to create in its wake? We shall see. In the meantime, defenders of liberal democracy need to stand tall and be proud of what they have accomplished thus far. There should be no resigned slouching towards an American dystopia. We should align with libertarians on issues of civil liberties, immigration, and foreign policy where we can agree. But, like the billionaires who funded the radical free market movement with such effectiveness, democracy advocates have to be similarly smart, organized, and confident. Democracy must be appreciated and cherished like a new garden which must be cultivated and weeded every generation. The best America could ever be, I believe, is still very much a future that can be won. I hope you enjoy this blog, my latest reach for absolution.

Why Taxation Is Not Theft

From The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel

Jay’s Note -  As a libertarian, I believed that taxation is theft. To argue otherwise among libertarians is to invite disdain or incredulity.   I wasted an awful lot of time grudgingly believing that indeed taxation is a form of stealing that must be either rejected or justified somehow as a lesser evil.  

Looking back, one of the reasons I held on to this view for so long is a method of analyzing political philosophical issues used by libertarians called "methodological individualism." This technique distills any political/economic question down to a few individuals and judges the ethics from there. For example, what if Farmer A went to Farmer B, pointed a gun at him and demanded some of his money. Even if it was for something useful to both farmers, such as to repair a road between their two farms, it would still constitute armed robbery, and justifiably so. However, libertarians extrapolate examples such as this out to all of society, so that any coerced taking of another's property by the state, even for laudable reasons, is stealing, which is why libertarians reject any proposed policy that involves the use of tax money and always support legislation that cuts taxes. 
 
Methodological individualism can be a useful technique for evaluating the appropriateness of many policies, but there's also a danger in oversimplification when employing this method and the taxation issue is a case in point.  For example, in the farmer scenario above, their property is recognized in deeds on file at the county courthouse and under the protection of the local sheriff and courts, all taxpayer funded arms of the government. If Farmer A and B were truly isolated individuals, without recourse to any higher legal authority, then any question of who is stealing what from whom could quickly devolve to which farmer is willing to use the most force to get or keep what is "theirs."  Saying "this is mine" doesn't make it so without a legion of government employees and offices to make your ownership real. Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel make this argument much better than I ever could in their book The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice. If you are just getting acquainted with libertarian philosophy, read Murphy and Nagel’s book.  You may grit your teeth at times but it will be a powerful antidote to many minimal or no-State radical capitalist assumptions.  Here are some excerpts:  

Libertarian views come in a variety of different forms, but the two that are most important for current purposes can be referred to as the rights-based and the desert-based.  The former turns on a commitment to strict moral property rights; it insists that each person has an inviolable moral right to the accumulation of property that results from genuinely free exchanges.

    The implication for tax policy of rights-based libertarianism in its pure or absolute form is that no compulsory taxation is legitimate; if there is to be government, it must be funded by way of voluntary contractual arrangements.  On this extreme version of libertarianism we should never reach the issue of the fair distribution of mandatory tax burdens, because all such burdens are illegitimate.  However, ...a less absolute libertarian position would authorize compulsory taxation to support a government that permits the market to operate, and that would justify sharing out the burden equally.

According to desert-based forms of libertarianism, on the other hand, the market gives people what they deserve by rewarding their productive contribution and value to others.  Such a view would imply that the market-based distribution is presumptively just without raising any objection to compulsory taxation--provided, again, that the burden is shared out equally.

We discuss desert-based theories of justice in chapters 3 and 5.  Here we note just one point.  The notion of desert entails that of responsibility; we cannot be said to deserve outcomes for which we are not in any way responsible.  Thus, to the extent that market outcomes are determined by genetic or medical or social luck (including inheritance), they are not on anyone’s account, morally deserved.  Since nobody denies that these kinds of luck at least partly determine how well a person fares in a capitalist economy, a simple and unqualified desert-based libertarianism can be rejected out of hand.

Both forms of libertarianism have implausibly radical consequences.  But there is a still more fundamental problem with this approach to tax justice--a conceptual problem.  Our use of libertarianism to make sense of the equal-sacrifice principle has relied so far on the following assumption:  That so long as government does not pursue redistributive expenditure policies, the pretax distribution of resources can be regarded as the distribution produced by a free market.  But, in fact, this is deeply incoherent.

There is no market without government and no government without taxes; and what type of market there is depends on laws and policy decisions that government must make.  In the absence of a legal system supported by taxes, there couldn’t be money, banks, corporations, stock exchanges, patents, or a modern market economy--none of the institutions that make possible the existence of almost all contemporary forms of income and wealth.

It is therefore logically impossible that people should have any kind of entitlement to all their pretax income.  All they can be entitled to is what they would be left with after taxes under a legitimate system, supported by legitimate taxation--and this shows that we cannot evaluate the legitimacy of taxes by reference to pretax income.  Instead, we have to evaluate the legitimacy of after-tax income by reference to the legitimacy of the political and economic system that generates it, including the taxes which are an essential part of that system.  The logical order of priority between taxes and property rights is the reverse of that assumed by libertarians.

This problem could not be avoided by moving from a baseline of actual pretax incomes to a hypothetical baseline of incomes in a government-free market world.  There is no natural or ideal market.  There are many different kinds of market system, all equally free, and the choice among them will turn on a range of independent policy judgments.

(pages 31-33)

The tax system is not like an assessment of members of a department to buy a wedding gift for a colleague.  It is not an incursion on a distribution of property holdings that is already presumptively legitimate.  Rather, it is among the conditions that  create a set of property holdings, whose legitimacy can be assessed only by evaluating the justice of the whole system, taxes included. Against such background people certainly have a legitimate claim on the income they realize through the usual methods of work, investment, and gift--but the tax system is an essential part of the background which creates the legitimate expectations that arise from employment contracts and other economic transactions, not something that cuts in afterward.

There is no default answer to the question of what property system is right--no presumptively just method of distribution, deviations from which require special justification.  The market has many virtues, but it does not relieve us of the task of coming to terms with the real values at stake in tax policy and the theory of distributive justice.  (pages 36-37)

What, then, are the legitimate ends of government, and what are the legitimate means of pursuing those ends, particularly insofar as they involve the taxing power?

It is essential to keep in mind, when considering these questions, that government doesn’t only regulate people’s lives.  By providing the institutional conditions without which modern civilization and economic activity could not exist, government is substantially responsible for the kinds of lives that people can lead.  The issue of political legitimacy therefore applies to this framework itself and to the kinds of options, choices, and lives it makes possible, as well as to the government’s control over the conduct of individuals within the framework.

That means that when we ask what we owe our fellow citizens, by way of positive assistance or mutual restraint, it cannot be understood as a question addressed to us as prepolitical beings, who will use the state as an instrument to fulfill our interpersonal obligations.  The situation is rather that we begin from the point of view of members of an existing society--beings formed by a civilization and leading lives that would be inconceivable without it--and our task is to decide what norms the design and regulation of that social structure should respect, as an expression of the consideration that is due from each of us to our fellow members as well as the independence we are entitled to retain from one another.

Taxes are part of that structure, but they have to be evaluated not only as legal demands by the state on individuals but also as contributions to the framework within which all those individuals live.  Ultimately, the question of political legitimacy is the question of what kind of framework we can all find it morally acceptable to live inside of, and it is to that question that values such as liberty, responsibility, equality, efficiency, and welfare have to be applied.  (pages 41-42)

Excerpt from their Conclusion:

Where our approach departs greatly from the standard mentality of day-to-day politics is in our insistence on the conventionality of property, and our denial that property rights are morally fundamental.  Resistance to traditional concepts of tax fairness and their political analogues requires rejection of the idea that people’s pretax income and wealth are theirs in any morally meaningful sense.  We have to think of property as what is created by the tax system, rather than what is disturbed or encroached on by the tax system.  Property rights are the rights people have in the resources they are entitled to control after taxes, not before.

This doesn’t mean we can’t speak of taking money by taxation from the rich to give to the poor, for example.  But what that means is not that we are taking from some people what is already theirs, but rather that the tax system is assigning to them less that counts as theirs than they would have under a less redistributive system that left the rich with more money under their private control, that is, with more that is theirs.

This shift to a purely conventional conception of property is, we acknowledge, counterintuitive.  Taxes are naturally perceived by most people as expropriations of their property--taking from them some of what is originally theirs and using it for various purposes determined by the government.  Most people, we assume, instinctively think of their pretax income as theirs until the government takes it away from them, and also think the same way about other people’s earnings and wealth.  Political rhetoric picks up on this natural way of thinking: “You know better what to do with your money than the government does.” “The surplus doesn’t belong to the government; it belongs to the people.”

Changing this habit of thought would require a kind of gestalt shift, and it may be unrealistic to hope that such a shift in perception could easily become widespread.  It isn’t that people are unwilling to pay taxes, but they tend to think of taxes as an incursion by the government on a prior distribution of property and income by reference to which expropriation and redistribution has to be justified.  That question has the form: “How much of what is mine should be taken from me to support public services or to be given to others?  How much of what others possess should be taken from them and given to me?”  Whereas we have been arguing that the right question is:  “How should the tax system divide the social product between the private control of individuals and government control, and what factors should it cause or permit to determine who ends up with what?”

As we have seen, putting the question this way still leaves room for radical disagreement about the answer, but it is likely to arouse strong resistance nonetheless.  It sounds too much like the claim that the entire social product really belongs to the government, and that all after-tax income should be seen as a kind of dole that each of us receives from the government, if it chooses to look on us with favor.  To this the natural indignant response would be that just because we are all subjects of the same state, it doesn’t follow that we collectively own each other, together with our productive contributions.

But there is a misperception here.  It is true that we don’t own each other, but the correct place for this observation is in the context of an argument over the form of a system of property rights that gives due weight to individual freedom and responsibility.  It doesn’t justify starting with pretax income--over which individuals couldn’t, as a matter of logic, be given full private control--as the baseline from which departures must be justified.

The state does not own its citizens, nor do they own each other collectively.  But individual citizens don’t own anything except through laws that are enacted and enforced by the state.  Therefore, the issues of taxation are not about how the state should appropriate and distribute what its citizens already own, but about how it should allow ownership to be determined.   (175-176)