rp08orbust
Member
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2007
- Messages
- 4,803
From another thread:
After a couple weeks' thought, I disagree with all of the above points. In order to see what more people think about my reasoning, which goes beyond the topic of the original thread, I thought I'd start a new one.
First of all, acceptance of the Congressional salary by this hypothetical "perfect Ron Paul", who votes against all acts of aggression by the federal government with perfect consistency (meaning he is necessarily a voluntarist/anarcho-capitalist), does not cause anyone's property to be expropriated. Rather, the expropriation is caused by the individuals who vote for, command and execute the expropriation: His fellow congressmen, the president, IRS agents, etc. To assign blame for the expropriation to all members of the institution would be to adopt the same illogic used by the collectivist. Acceptance of the salary itself does not compel the government to raise the revenue needed to pay it through taxes. Instead, the government could, for example, sell assets, hold a voluntary fundraiser, or better yet, declare bankruptcy and shut down. These, of course, are the same options available to a voluntary government, and our perfect Ron Paul would endorse any of these over taxation.
To say that accepting his Congressional salary causes people to be taxed is no less of a fallacy than to say that civil disobedience against an involuntary government causes people to be taxed. After all, the police must be paid to arrest the rebel, the magistrate must be paid to hear his charges, the judge, prosecutor and jurors must be paid to try him, the jailer must be paid to guard him, etc, and all of these payments for services require the expropriation of property. The answer to this fallacy is the same as the answer to the fallacy that accepting Congressional pay causes taxation: No, it doesn't. Everyone in government could see the light of voluntaryism and decide to pay for all of the above services from voluntary funds, or better yet, not arrest you for a victimless crime in the first place. Triggering such enlightenment is of course the purpose of civil disobedience.
Furthermore, it is not always wrong to accept stolen property. For example, there is nothing wrong with a private police department auctioning or raffling off (or simply keeping) stolen property whose owners it has not been able to identify, and there is nothing wrong with bidding on, winning or accepting such property. There is no perfectly just remedy for such a situation, but returning the property to the thieves would surely be the least just!
I would argue that in the case of any given amount of money sitting in the US Treasury, the rightful owner or owners cannot possibly be identified. Unlike the free market, which produces concepts like shares, interests, units etc for rendering justice in dispute settlements and company liquidations, coercive government destroys all possibility of justice. Does a government asset belong to the government's creditors, taxpayers, or some combination of the two? What if the government is insolvent on its own statist terms (i.e., its liabilities to creditors exceeds its assets)? If we decide that all assets on the US government's balance sheet belong to taxpayers before creditors (who are paid back pro rata only after all taxes have been refunded), then on what basis is each individual's share determined? Can children claim refunds for taxes paid by their deceased parents, or grandparents? It takes very little thought to see that determining an individual's "fair share" of the federal government's balance sheet is as impossible as making reparations for slavery.
The matter is further complicated by the fact that at least some of the US government's assets were obtained through voluntary transactions. For example, Warren Buffet is known to complain that he isn't taxed enough, from which we can conclude that all taxes that he does pay are entirely voluntary. Thus some unknowable percentage of the US government's assets were justly obtained, and were our perfect Ron Paul to claim that all of his salary comes from such sources, it would be impossible to argue about it one way or the other.
But there is no doubt that a great deal of the US government's assets were obtained through aggression. Then again, some of that aggression was against Ron Paul the involuntary income tax payer himself, entitling him to some of the proceeds from a liquidation of the US government. But determining exactly what his "fair share" is by considering all of the US government benefits he has received in his lifetime (including, but not limited to, his Congressional salary) on the one hand, and all of the ways in which he has been victimized by the same government on the other, is impossible.
I'm well aware that this reasoning has implications far beyond Ron Paul and his Congressional salary. Am I implying that Octomom is doing nothing wrong by accepting welfare payments for raising her own kids? I sure am. No individual ever commits aggression by merely accepting something from another individual or group when there is no clearly identifiable victim. And "the taxpayers" is not a sufficiently well-defined victim by the rigorously individualistic standards of libertarianism. The crime involved in welfare programs is not in the distribution of benefits, but in the taxation used to fund them in the first place, and acceptance of the benefits need not imply endorsement of the taxation.
Thus, not only should Octomom not be condemned by libertarians, but she, and anyone who milks the government of benefits, should be praised as saboteurs against the state (even if unwitting ones) by helping to hasten its inevitable bankruptcy and collapse. If everyone managed to extract more in benefits from the government than they pay in taxes the way Octomom likely does, then statism would die a quick death. On the other hand, promoting fiscally scrupulous citizenship only helps keep the state alive and well.
Likewise, any libertarians who manage to get elected to public office should, first and foremost, oppose all forms of aggression by the governments they are a part of, but additionally, if they want to be serious about abolishing coercive government, they should also support all forms of victimless spending. For example, instead of voting against Congressional medals for Rosa Parks, they should write bills awarding gold medals to every individual American they know until the US government is bankrupt, the Federal Reserve's printing presses break, and the US government's medium of tyranny, the US dollar monopoly, collapses (the printing of money itself is not an act of aggression within a fiat system, since the notes come with no claim to any commodity; rather, the enforcement of monopoly through legal tender laws, income taxes, capital gains taxes, etc, are the acts of aggression that must be opposed by libertarians).
After a couple weeks' thought, I disagree with all of the above points. In order to see what more people think about my reasoning, which goes beyond the topic of the original thread, I thought I'd start a new one.
First of all, acceptance of the Congressional salary by this hypothetical "perfect Ron Paul", who votes against all acts of aggression by the federal government with perfect consistency (meaning he is necessarily a voluntarist/anarcho-capitalist), does not cause anyone's property to be expropriated. Rather, the expropriation is caused by the individuals who vote for, command and execute the expropriation: His fellow congressmen, the president, IRS agents, etc. To assign blame for the expropriation to all members of the institution would be to adopt the same illogic used by the collectivist. Acceptance of the salary itself does not compel the government to raise the revenue needed to pay it through taxes. Instead, the government could, for example, sell assets, hold a voluntary fundraiser, or better yet, declare bankruptcy and shut down. These, of course, are the same options available to a voluntary government, and our perfect Ron Paul would endorse any of these over taxation.
To say that accepting his Congressional salary causes people to be taxed is no less of a fallacy than to say that civil disobedience against an involuntary government causes people to be taxed. After all, the police must be paid to arrest the rebel, the magistrate must be paid to hear his charges, the judge, prosecutor and jurors must be paid to try him, the jailer must be paid to guard him, etc, and all of these payments for services require the expropriation of property. The answer to this fallacy is the same as the answer to the fallacy that accepting Congressional pay causes taxation: No, it doesn't. Everyone in government could see the light of voluntaryism and decide to pay for all of the above services from voluntary funds, or better yet, not arrest you for a victimless crime in the first place. Triggering such enlightenment is of course the purpose of civil disobedience.
Furthermore, it is not always wrong to accept stolen property. For example, there is nothing wrong with a private police department auctioning or raffling off (or simply keeping) stolen property whose owners it has not been able to identify, and there is nothing wrong with bidding on, winning or accepting such property. There is no perfectly just remedy for such a situation, but returning the property to the thieves would surely be the least just!
I would argue that in the case of any given amount of money sitting in the US Treasury, the rightful owner or owners cannot possibly be identified. Unlike the free market, which produces concepts like shares, interests, units etc for rendering justice in dispute settlements and company liquidations, coercive government destroys all possibility of justice. Does a government asset belong to the government's creditors, taxpayers, or some combination of the two? What if the government is insolvent on its own statist terms (i.e., its liabilities to creditors exceeds its assets)? If we decide that all assets on the US government's balance sheet belong to taxpayers before creditors (who are paid back pro rata only after all taxes have been refunded), then on what basis is each individual's share determined? Can children claim refunds for taxes paid by their deceased parents, or grandparents? It takes very little thought to see that determining an individual's "fair share" of the federal government's balance sheet is as impossible as making reparations for slavery.
The matter is further complicated by the fact that at least some of the US government's assets were obtained through voluntary transactions. For example, Warren Buffet is known to complain that he isn't taxed enough, from which we can conclude that all taxes that he does pay are entirely voluntary. Thus some unknowable percentage of the US government's assets were justly obtained, and were our perfect Ron Paul to claim that all of his salary comes from such sources, it would be impossible to argue about it one way or the other.
But there is no doubt that a great deal of the US government's assets were obtained through aggression. Then again, some of that aggression was against Ron Paul the involuntary income tax payer himself, entitling him to some of the proceeds from a liquidation of the US government. But determining exactly what his "fair share" is by considering all of the US government benefits he has received in his lifetime (including, but not limited to, his Congressional salary) on the one hand, and all of the ways in which he has been victimized by the same government on the other, is impossible.
I'm well aware that this reasoning has implications far beyond Ron Paul and his Congressional salary. Am I implying that Octomom is doing nothing wrong by accepting welfare payments for raising her own kids? I sure am. No individual ever commits aggression by merely accepting something from another individual or group when there is no clearly identifiable victim. And "the taxpayers" is not a sufficiently well-defined victim by the rigorously individualistic standards of libertarianism. The crime involved in welfare programs is not in the distribution of benefits, but in the taxation used to fund them in the first place, and acceptance of the benefits need not imply endorsement of the taxation.
Thus, not only should Octomom not be condemned by libertarians, but she, and anyone who milks the government of benefits, should be praised as saboteurs against the state (even if unwitting ones) by helping to hasten its inevitable bankruptcy and collapse. If everyone managed to extract more in benefits from the government than they pay in taxes the way Octomom likely does, then statism would die a quick death. On the other hand, promoting fiscally scrupulous citizenship only helps keep the state alive and well.
Likewise, any libertarians who manage to get elected to public office should, first and foremost, oppose all forms of aggression by the governments they are a part of, but additionally, if they want to be serious about abolishing coercive government, they should also support all forms of victimless spending. For example, instead of voting against Congressional medals for Rosa Parks, they should write bills awarding gold medals to every individual American they know until the US government is bankrupt, the Federal Reserve's printing presses break, and the US government's medium of tyranny, the US dollar monopoly, collapses (the printing of money itself is not an act of aggression within a fiat system, since the notes come with no claim to any commodity; rather, the enforcement of monopoly through legal tender laws, income taxes, capital gains taxes, etc, are the acts of aggression that must be opposed by libertarians).
Last edited:
