link to original reddit post by /u/BastiatFan
In the last few hours, a series of posts have been highly upvoted on Reddit. Using memes, these posts have focused on the difference between normal property owners and the state, and have triggered conversations about the nature of consent, when it applies, and under what circumstances it is violated.
Here is the highest upvoted comment where someone from the left, /u/platypus1720, whom I feel it only fair to tag here in this response, attempts to explain their reasoning:
There are a few reasons why taxation cannot possibly be a form of theft. In order to be taxed, you must first engage in some kind of voluntary transaction such as buying goods, owning a business, choosing to accept a gift (estate tax), etc. If you take this action knowing that you will be taxed, you have given consent to pay that tax. If you want to say that these actions aren’t truly voluntary because the only meaningful alternative is to drop out of society, that’s fine. But then change your slogan to “Capitalism is theft.” You don’t have a property interest in your pre-tax income, so it can’t be “stolen” from you. Legally, a portion if your income is property of the IRS. But your pre-tax income isn’t “yours” in a moral sense, either. The free market doesn’t magically give each person the exact amount they morally deserve. We can imagine many different disparities in salaries that have no moral justification behind them. The government has a stronger claim to that money than you do, since they supply the infrastructure that allows you to generate that income in the first place.
Here I will go through their arguments and explain the ways in which we disagree with their fundamental assumptions and how that leads us to radically different conclusions.
Their first argument:
In order to be taxed, you must first engage in some kind of voluntary transaction such as buying goods, owning a business, choosing to accept a gift (estate tax), etc. If you take this action knowing that you will be taxed, you have given consent to pay that tax.
This seems to rest on the assumption that so long as one has an option to avoid some threatened response from another, one consents to the response if they take the action. This is an old argument, going back at least as far as Aristotle, who argued that since slaves did not commit suicide, they consented to be ruled by their masters.
The flaw with this argument seems obvious to me, but apparently it is an attractive one to many, as it constantly recurs, and, in this case, received many upvotes on one of the largest left wing subreddits.
It's quite simple: no one accepts this argument when it is applied anywhere else in life. Nowhere can someone argue this as a defense and have it accepted.
A mugger steps out of the shadows and presses a knife to his victim's belly. "Make a sound and I'll gut you like a fish," he says. When the victim shrieks, have they consented to having their insides become their outsides?
The poster says: "If you take this action knowing that you will be taxed, you have given consent to pay that tax."
Is it also true that "if you take this action knowing that you will be stabbed, you have given consent to endure the knife"?
I hope not!
And so the problem is that the underlying principle is simply not one that anyone accepts. We don't need to delve deeply into meta-ethics. It doesn't matter which ethical framework they assume.
I don't believe they actually accept the principle that this argument is based on.
Moving on.
If you want to say that these actions aren’t truly voluntary because the only meaningful alternative is to drop out of society, that’s fine. But then change your slogan to “Capitalism is theft.”
This section is a non sequitor, as it does not involve the concept of consent or relate to the previous argument. The only response to this is that it does not represent our response, and the proposed response ignores the concept of consent and its nature.
You don’t have a property interest in your pre-tax income, so it can’t be “stolen” from you. Legally, a portion if your income is property of the IRS.
This, obviously, is irrelevant, as the poster next acknowledges. The king's decrees do not inform of us the king's morality, or the ethical standing or ontological status of the kingdom.
But your pre-tax income isn’t “yours” in a moral sense, either. The free market doesn’t magically give each person the exact amount they morally deserve. We can imagine many different disparities in salaries that have no moral justification behind them. The government has a stronger claim to that money than you do, since they supply the infrastructure that allows you to generate that income in the first place.
Here I face an issue commonly encountered in these sorts of discussions: no clear underlying principle is established, leaving me to attempt to reverse-engineer the underlying principle based on the conclusions drawn from it.
This is made especially difficult in this case, since it seems to be a non-standard, presumably ad hoc ethical framework. Whatever principle underlies this argument seems divorced entirely from Aristotle's slave-consent argument and its underlying principles. Here we find no mention of consent at all. These are clearly two entirely separate principles which, I suspect, are incompatible at a fundamental level.
They key phrase, which will allow us to find the underlying principle here is: "The government has a stronger claim to that money than you do, since they supply the infrastructure that allows you to generate that income in the first place."
From this, I conclude that the underlying principle used to prop up this argument is something like: "whoever supplies infrastructure which allows for the creation of something has the best moral claim to that thing."
Which... seems bizarre to me. For this to even stand as a usable principle, it would need further sub-principles and well-defined terms and explanations of its assumptions.
Further, I doubt very much that this argument supports the user's own claim. It seems more to say that the capitalist, who provides the machines, raw materials, etc. (the infrastructure required for all production in society), has a better claim to the wages of his workers than do the workers, and so he may take from them without their consent (or, using the poster's reasoning from their previous argument, with their implicit consent, since they work on the machines).
Imagine an oil rig. Big, mightily expensive machine. The capitalist provides $650 million. The state provides some small amount of infrastructure, sure, such as the road to the dock, the court system to enforce any contracts, and so on. But the cost of that infrastructure pales in comparison to the cost of the infrastructure the capitalist has provided.
And let us apply this principle elsewhere in life, to see if it is broadly applicable and widely accepted in day-to-day life. Is there anywhere else where this principle holds? Well, let's look for other places where people provide infrastructure (a vague concept, which causes all sorts of problems for the application of this principle).
There is the aforementioned capitalist. Capitalists provide the majority of the infrastructure for society. They make the machines that plant and harvest the crops, that weave our clothes, that remove the oil that powers life from the ground and which purifies it for our use. They make the microchips which expand our capabilities and connect us like never before.
Yet, you might object, the capitalist does not provide that infrastructure for free, as the state does. And so perhaps some formulation of this principle would include such a provision. Very well. Where else in life might we find infrastructure provided for free? Charity. Does a homeless shelter, which provides the infrastructure for life, have a better claim to the lives of its guests than they have for themselves? I can't imagine anyone believing so. Charity hospitals. Do they gain some claim to those they treat?
Does a slave owner, who provides for his slaves from cradle to grave, gain a moral claim to his slaves because of the infrastructure he has provided to them? Again, like with Aristotle, these arguments are old--and have always been used in an attempt to sidestep consent and justify slavery.
These are literally the same arguments used by slave owners, both in the antebellum south and in antiquity. And slave owners certainly provided much more infrastructure for their slaves than a state provides for its subjects! All their needs were provided. Food, shelter, chains, and scars.
Of course, this is all ignoring the question of why we would believe this principle to be true. Certainly it is one we disagree with. We believe in property rights, wherein the first to acquire an object from nature gains an inalienable right to that object. With transfer of title only taking place with the explicit consent of the owner. Alas, we cannot explore this further, since the poster has provided no justification for the truth of these claims. Only the claims themselves. And since they are not part of some established ethical tradition, we cannot even speculate at their meta-ethical underpinnings. Though, since the two principles offered seem contradictory, or at the very least disconnected, I suspect that there are no underpinnings to explore. Only these ad hoc justifications for the dismissal of the concept of consent.