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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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There's no fundamental difference between taxes and theft, unless it’s designed from the ground up not to be theft. And that’s what the FairTax proposal would do: remove the famous libertarian / anarchist-capitalist moral complaint against taxes. Don’t want to pay taxes? Don’t be a business owner in the great market of America.

Even the so-called "fairtax" is still using the implicit threat of violence to coerce people into giving up money (i.e., the abstract potential for goods and services).

Just bite the philosophical bullet and concede that the only reason any act of collective coercion can ever be "just" is because justice itself is only another act of collective coercion.

If I go into Walmart and text someone to come buy something from me there, Walmart is within its rights to have me ejected, and my customer. Why? Because it's their space. Similarly, if I arrange with a barber to meet her at the local Supercuts where he isn't one of their barbers, they'd tell both of us to leave, and if we didn't, call the police. This is a "threat of violence" which is fully justified by the property rights of the business. I assume you consider these "the collective coercion of justice" too, along with the very idea of property rights?

I assume you consider these "the collective coercion of justice" too, along with the very idea of property rights?

Yes.

Because it's their space

It's only their space because we, as a society, have agreed that it is useful to enforce a concept of exclusionary control over particular patches of land that can be delegated to other people. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't do that. I think private property, and justice, and taxes are useful concepts to have. But they're only instrumentally good. There's nothing intrinsically wrong about limiting the extent to which we enforce private property rights.

How does this extend to non-humans? Primates show evidence of possession-based behaviour, as do young infants and of course many species will defend their land, den or recent kills.

It seems far more likely that our instincts about property came first, and our legal philosophy about it came later.

EDIT: this was a reply to your last message only, the thread above is kind of confusing.

How does this extend to non-humans? Primates show evidence of possession-based behaviour, as do young infants and of course many species will defend their land, den or recent kills.

I don't understand this question. I think nonhumans also have no natural rights? My whole point is that possession-based behavior is not intrinsically good even if it's often a utilitarian good at the individual (or genetic, or societal) level.

The innate possession instinct only applies to chattels, not land. (And only questionably applies to more chattels than you can carry). Given how much of libertarian dispute resolution comes down to "the landowner decides what to allow on his land", you need to justify property in land to get a workable libertarianism. This is the hard part of libertarian ethics - particularly if (like most libertarians) you are dependent on the goodwill of people who benefit from the existing pattern of land ownership. Our moral instincts about land ownership come from our views on the proper relationship between warrior elites (the original landowners) and peasants.

Locke/Nozick come up with a theory which makes sense, but if taken seriously requires the Norman robbers and their successors in title to give back the stolen land of England, and the parts of the United States where the Indians practiced a minimal level of land stewardship to be returned to the original owners.

If you want to justify your land title based on the lapse of time since the last time the land was stolen, then you have the problem that the State's rights to sovereignty over the land are just as ancient.

Ayn Rand dodges the issue by accepting that moral rights in land stem from the sovereign granting the original land title.