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)

"A successful liberal democracy requires

both a state that is strong, unified, and able to enforce laws on its own territory, and a society that is strong and cohesive and able to impose accountability on the state.  It is the balance between a strong state and a strong society that makes democracy work, not just in seventeenth-century England but in contemporary developed democracies as well.”

-- Francis Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, (p. 479)

Before you become a Libertarian activist, please consider....

• Libertarianism is utopian in its vision of society, and as history has shown, fighting for utopias often leads to the exact opposite.   It is a utopian vision because there has never been a completely free market with an attendant minimal government incapable of taxing or regulating business, as envisioned by libertarians, in any modern industrial society.  This is because such a weak, underfunded minimal government would be incapable of protecting individual rights, not to mention other responsibilities sensibly left today to government, and would quickly degrade to a plutocracy or gangster capitalism.  The inevitable corruption and injustice within such a society would likely inspire a revolution with potentially unlibertarian results.
• Libertarianism is profoundly anti-democratic.  Libertarians give lip service to democracy but their denunciation of government and their quest to privatize everything says otherwise.  You cannot have a strong democracy supporting individual liberty, including property rights, in a culture that celebrates a contempt for public service, idolizes the rule of the wealthy, reduces the decisions of what can be voted on to largely minor, inconsequential matters, and sneers at the suggestion that public -- that is government -- endeavors or places have any importance for building a healthy civil society.   Modern democratic governments in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia have created the freest, most prosperous societies in world history -- many with extensive welfare states, and all with a hefty dose of government regulation of the economy.  Libertarians, despite their intentions, by pursuing their utopian free market ideals, are inviting less freedom and even more injustice into our world.  
• Political and economic freedom needs strong federal, state, and local governments.  A smoothly functioning market requires strong government to even exist.  The libertarian paradigm of government power opposing market power is a cartoon caricature.   The real struggle today,  is between strong democratic government with relatively free markets vs. the rule of thugs, whether in the form of gang warfare or government dictatorships.
• Libertarianism is at odds with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  Libertarians only see liberty, as in freedom from government, in our country's founding documents.  They are blind to the equal importance in our country's founding principles of strong government "to enforce these rights" --  that is freedom made manifest through a government capable of efficiently enforcing laws protecting individual freedom, including the rights of minorities, property rights, trial by jury, the right to petition government, environmental protection, etc.   
• Libertarians are largely clueless to the necessity of equality in order for liberty to actually mean something for all Americans, regardless of race, religion, sexual preference, wealth, or status - to unite us as a people.  They act as if the only choice we have before us is, at one extreme, a material equality enforced by a communist dictatorship, or, at the other extreme, a rejection of equality as the enemy of liberty.  Libertarians assume the later and advocate the dismantling of the government safety net--Social Security, Medicare, minimum wage laws, etc. -- and all government assistance to anyone, regardless of need.  In their intellectual paranoia, libertarians are blind to the many positive effects of government wealth redistribution programs, including maintaining a strong middle class.  A weak middle class with the majority dominated by the political power of an extremely wealthy few (sound familiar) is a recipe for corruption and eventual dictatorship.  Libertarians, if they really believe in freedom in the real world, should celebrate the welfare state and democratic governance.
• Libertarians have little to say in how to fight racism, sexism, or homophobia in America. While libertarians firmly reject racism and sexism and openly embrace different sexual preferences, marriage practices, etc., they do not see government as having a positive moral role in eradicating the worse effects of bigotry.  As an example, libertarians oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and still do to this day, since they believe that government has no right to dictate how business owners run their businesses, including who they can serve or hire. Libertarians hold an almost child-like belief that their "free market" will somehow make everything better over time, including eradicating prejudice, since, libertarians argue, prejudice is not profitable. To their credit, libertarians do point out the decidedly racist consequences of drug law enforcement in the U.S. where blacks and hispanics are three times as likely to be jailed for illegal drug sales or possession than whites.  But to all the racist policies in effect over the past century and a half enforced by white landowners, white-owned banks and businesses, and state legislatures intent on keeping African Americans "in their place," libertarians have only hollow words of support and encouragement since, above all, for libertarians, property rights must be respected.  For the same reason, libertarians oppose any equal pay for equal work statutes to address the unequal treatment of women in our culture and are cool to any government action in support of the LGBT community.  
• Libertarianism unintentionally provides a moral veneer to white racism in America.  Property rights were used by white slaveholders in the south and, after the Civil War, by racists intent on keeping federal government authorities from intervening in support of racial or religious minorities.  "Protecting our rights" has been the excuse of bigots from George Wallace to the present day.  Libertarians have no problem with diversity, racial or otherwise and thus provide a kind of radical chic to pro-capitalist ideology that can make radical property rights seem "cool" to the newly initiated.  So it might seem unfair to accuse the libertarian movement of some kind of complicity with racists.  But the congruence of white racist views with libertarian views goes well beyond a shared opposition to anti-discrimination laws and legislation and should make libertarians question their priorities.  Libertarian historiography is profoundly anti-federal government in ways that American racists would agree with.  For example, libertarian historians regard Lincoln as a tyrant and support the old Confederacy's secession from the United States.  It is no coincidence that the racists within modern American conservatism also avidly defend a libertarian brand of free market ideology.   So where does the racism end and libertarianism begin?  Who can tell? 
• Libertarianism has a schizophrenic relationship with the best spirit of our times.  On one hand, libertarians do celebrate diversity and innovation.  They do not fear world trade or open immigration and are severe critics of militarization and war.  Libertarians are strong defenders of free speech and a free press.  To this extent, libertarianism seems to be a philosophy for our future - one where our planet is truly becoming one world, with deeply integrated markets, entwined with the music, art, and ideas from everywhere, made real by instant communication with every corner of the globe.  And then libertarians go crazy in the opposite direction -- insisting with puritanical vehemence that markets must be "free" of all government regulation or subsidy.  Libertarians are firmly opposed to laws prohibiting child labor or government agreements protecting wildlife.  Government protections for consumers, workers, indigenous tribes, or the environment are rejected by libertarians.   Any hint at world governance, either through the United Nations or by other intergovernmental organizations are condemned as the beginnings of a much-feared world government.   Only world "governance" via nondemocratic private organizations and corporate boardrooms is acceptable to libertarians - a real recipe for dystopia.
• Libertarians are helpless before the threat of human-caused climate change.  Since libertarians reject government regulation as coercive, they believe they must reject any attempts by governments to impose restrictions on fossil fuels, or any government programs to address the consequences of a changing climate, regardless of the science.  Their only course is to either a) reject the science altogether, b) argue that higher CO2 levels are a net benefit to the world, or c) feign helplessness.  There is no greater illustration today of the idiotic consequences of a puritanical adherence to libertarian radical capitalist doctrine, then the proud know-nothingness on this issue by today's libertarians and radical free market conservatives
• Libertarianism is inadvertently anti-science.  We are witnessing an Age of Discovery unlike any in human history.  The space programs of the United States, Russia, and Europe have opened our eyes to the wonders of the cosmos as never before.  U.S. government efforts to map the ocean floor and to understand and even predict motions within our earth and in our atmosphere have led to unparalleled excellence in severe storm and climate forecasting.  Our Centers for Disease Control and its counterparts in other countries, financed by tax dollars, has saved countless lives.  The internet was initially developed as a government effort.  Yet libertarians would reject all of this.  They would counter, ever hopeful in their utopianism, that the free market would of course explore the heavens, forecast the weather for everyone, cure disease, and invent the internet, all without taxation.  The burden of proof is on the libertarians.  But what a wonder of scientific discoveries and endeavors to condemn and throw away on a utopian (or dystopian) dream.
• A libertarian society, even if momentarily realized, would be less free than our current messy American democracy.  Government makes us freer not only by enforcing and maintaining individual rights, as mentioned above, but in many other ways.  For example, prior to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the elderly were often the poorest segment of our population.  That's no longer the case thanks to the government. And because our elderly are better taken care of, imagine how that frees up their lives and those of younger generations.  We still have to look after our parents and older relatives, of course, but we are no longer solely responsible for their welfare, and that relieves many of us of an enormous potential burden.  Then there's travel on the open road.  Remember, libertarians would do away with taxpayer-funded public roads, including the interstate highway system.  Private transportation companies would replace some of these services but always with a cost passed on to the consumer.   So libertarians would "free" us to use toll roads -- thanks a lot.  How about affordable college?  Whether through the G.I. Bill, direct loans, or government funding of public universities, government has made college available to those from low and middle incomes.  Libertarians would do away with all of those programs.  There are so many ways that government frees up opportunities for the poor and middle class, that to argue for the abolition of most government, as libertarians do, is to argue for less freedom and opportunity.
• Libertarians are opposed to national parks, and for that matter state and local parks, whatever has to be funded by tax dollars.   I agree with Ken Burns that the national parks are indeed one of America's "greatest ideas," and I challenge any libertarian to come up with something better.  Libertarians will point to Nature Conservancy's protection of endangered ecosystems, yes, but the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, owned by a private entity whether a corporation or nonprofit?  These are places for all Americans, not just for some board of directors ever sensitive to more profits from wealthier patrons, to control.  Libertarians would counter that "the people" do not control the National Parks, only government bureaucrats do.  Not true -- the National Park Service, like any government bureaucracy, is extremely sensitive to political pressures from politicians and their constituents.   It can be slow and sloppy yes, but it has worked wonderfully.  The evidence is in the parks -- magnificent beauty and incredible ecosystems that we have preserved over time.  Libertarians would trash these for their dystopian dream.
• The embrace of an extreme form of individualism within the American libertarian movement culture encourages alienation and nondemocratic impulses.  I can perhaps illustrate this best with an example -- take two policemen.  One works for a city police department and is paid out of the public treasury.  The other works for and receives his wages from a private security company.   Both do their jobs well.  Libertarians would tend to see both as equivalent in status, with perhaps a nod to the private cop as being more ethical, since he would not be taking tax dollars.   In contrast, a people embracing a healthy democratic spirit would view the former as having a far greater responsibility.  The city policeman does not just work for the city, but for the people of that city.  He has sworn an oath to serve and protect.  The private policeman's ultimate duty is to the corporation that employs him; but for a public servant, it must be otherwise.  Every public servant is working for the people of their community, state, and or country.  If you listen for it you will hear this sentiment.  I have. I have heard it from policemen, park rangers, weather forecasters for the National Weather Service, NASA astronauts, and our men and women in the armed forces.  From the local to the national level, there is something about public service that carries a greater responsibility than being in the private sector.  And it is this sentiment - "I am working for the people of America" -- that daily "greases the wheels" of our democracy.  Does this public service sentiment prevent corruption?  Of course not, but it carries a strong moral incentive not to engage in corrupt activities, an incentive that cannot be matched in the private sector except by the ethical constraints an employee imposes on his or herself.  For the private sector employee, their behavior is an individual matter than might affect their company and its clients.  For the public sector employee, there is a communitarian responsibility to all the people within their jurisdiction.  Corruption violates that trust.   However, public service "does not compute" in the libertarian paradigm.  Libertarians are complete cynics when it comes to public service.  They even mock it.  And by doing so, libertarians help to erode yet another foundation of the only form of government--democratic government-- that has brought us, however imperfectly, the freedom and prosperity many of us enjoy today.