Julian Sanchez on his blog attempts to show that there are problems with the libertarian slogan taxation is theft. Lomasky and Zwolinsky are not anarchists, so its no surprise they dont like this slogan. Sanchez tries to diminish libertarians who hold it by continually referring to it as a mere slogan, e.g. in this condescending comment: Matt Zwolinski recently brought up a thoughtful old Loren Lomasky essay arguing that this is an unhelpful way for libertarians to talk, and promptly drew all sorts of fire from people who are fiercely committed to their slogan and, if anything, wish it would be chanted louder and with greater frequency. Its not a slogan--its a way of stating our libertarian principles, or one implication thereof. Of course you can nitpick and say that taxation is legal so it is not theft, but obviously libertarians are simply saying it is no different than what we recognize as theft in other contexts and should be recognized as illegitimate because of this. but one of Sanchezs arguments relies on a false understanding of Lockean homesteading: the contention that you need to trace title back to its origin to have good title. This is *simply false*. Here is what he says: One additional theoretical consideration that’s largely independent of Lomasky’s (and Zwolinsky’s) main point. The slogan that “taxation is theft” is ambiguous: We can read it to mean, as the anarchist typically does, that taxation per se is categorically illegitimate, but also as a more specific claim that actually-existing taxation involves depriving people of specific holdings to which they are entitled. The second claim, it seems to me, is indefensible even if we suppose the anarchists are right as a matter of ideal theory. If we take that theory to be some variant of neo-Lockean/Rothbardian/Nozickian/whatever account of initial appropriation and transfer, almost nobody residing in any actually-existing state can justify their present holdings by reference to an appropriately untainted provenance running back to the State of Nature. Serious theorists tend to acknowledge this at least in passing, but it’s one of those elephants in the room that anarchist and minarchist libertarian thinkers alike have tended to give conspicuously short shrift. In Nozick it’s basically relegated to an unsatisfying footnote to the effect that, yes, maybe we need a one-time carnival of patterned redistribution. (This is the political philosophy equivalent of Richard Dawkins tweeting “j/k: God did it up to amoebas, but THEN evolution.”) In other writers, it rates a few (equally unsatisfying) pages of hand-waving about homesteading and adverse possession. If there’s a libertarian theorist who’s grappled with this at the length it merits, I haven’t seen it. I would love to be able to point to a few serious book-length efforts, but the Year Zero approach that just takes current holdings as given and proposes Entitlement Theory Starting Tomorrow have always struck me as the sort of ad hoccery that makes caricatures of libertarianism as an elaborate rationalization for privilege more plausible than they ought to be.... He wonders if anyone has written on this. Yes. See Rothbard: libertarianstandard/2010/11/19/justice-and-property-rights-rothbard-on-scarcity-property-contracts/ It might be charged that our theory of justice in property titles is deficient because in the real world most landed (and even other) property has a past history so tangled that it becomes impossible to identify who or what has committed coercion and therefore who the current just owner may be. But the point of the “homestead principle” is that if we don’t know what crimes have been committed in acquiring the property in the past, or if we don’t know the victims or their heirs, then the current owner becomes the legitimate and just owner on homestead grounds. In short, if Jones owns a piece of land at the present time, and we don’t know what crimes were committed to arrive at the current title, then Jones, as the current owner, becomes as fully legitimate a property owner of this land as he does over his own person. Overthrow of existing property title only becomes legitimate if the victims or their heirs can present an authenticated, demonstrable, and specific claim to the property. Failing such conditions, existing landowners possess a fully moral right to their property. And as I noted in What Libertarianism Is, mises.org/daily/3660 -- any real property conflict is always between two or more identifiable people. And as between then, you only need trace ownership title back to a common owner. Not to the dawn of time. As I wrote at text at note 25: More generally, latecomers claims are inferior to those of prior possessors or claimants, who either homesteaded the resource or who can trace their title back to the homesteader or earlier owner.[25] 25. See Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure, Art. 3653, providing: To obtain a judgment recognizing his ownership of immovable property … the plaintiff … shall: Prove that he has acquired ownership from a previous owner or by acquisitive prescription, if the court finds that the defendant is in possession thereof; or Prove a *better title* thereto than the defendant, if the court finds that the latter is not in possession thereof. *When the titles of the parties are traced to a common author, he is presumed to be the previous owner*.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 15:10:51 +0000
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