I spend way more time that I intended re-reading it. My take is he's not able to stay along one line of logic. I'm not even sure if I'd call it logic as its was not an A = B = C kind of flow. It felt like a rubbing together of different adjacent ideas to create an attempted proof to disprove an argument that was not part of the original question.
I had to do a bit of a break down as its the only way I could really parse it with what I mean:
Within the first paragraph, I'm getting the tingling of an atheist that is using this issue to slander anyone with a religious based moral standards. I'm not requoting to save on space.
There is no serious political theory according to which my pre-tax income is ‘mine’ in any morally significant sense.
I'm pretty sure political theory has nothing to do with money/curreny/income? At least I thought political theory was about governing systems, ie monarchs, republics, theocracies, etc, and how they operate as a whole, not so much about a subset tool within it, ie money, that is used in to push the influence of said governing system. I'm not even sure how morals come into play for a political theory outside of a person chosing a political theory based on their pre-standing moral convictions. Wouldnt that just kind of religion if a political theory had a heavy emphasis on morals?
The more interesting question is whether taxation is moral theft, and this depends on whether citizens have some kind of moral claim on their gross income. It is to this question I now turn.
Hmm, focus on the moral argument, eh? Didn't want to look to hard on the legal aspect of it, i guess.
Your gross, or pre-tax income, is the money the market delivers to you
I guess Economics is now part of political theory too.
Your gross, or pre-tax income, is the money the market delivers to you. In what sense might it be thought that you have a moral claim on this money? One answer might be that you deserve it: you have worked hard and have done a good job, and consequently you deserve all your gross income as recompense for your labour. According to this line of reasoning, when the government taxes, it takes the money that you deserve for the work you do.
This is not a plausible view. For it implies that the market distributes to people exactly what they deserve for the work that they do. But nobody thinks a hedge-fund manager deserves many times more wealth than a scientist working on a cure for cancer, and few would think that current pay ratios in companies reflect what philosophers call desert claims. Probably you work very hard in your job, and you make an important contribution. But then so do most people, and the market distribution of wealth patently does not reward in proportion to how hard-working people are, or how much of a contribution they make to society. If we were just focusing on desert, then there is a good case for taxation to correct the amoral distribution of the market.
He's injecting additional "moral" arguments on top of the "moral" argument already proposed. Repeating his literal lines: "nobody thinks a hedge-fund manager deserves many times more wealth than a scientist working on a cure for cancer" but I'm sure everybody but the deviant minded believes both deserve to get paid/compensated for the job they performed, even if the overall amount is unbalaneced or "unfair". Right now its in the form of income.
What you deserve is what you ought to have as a result of hard work or social contribution; what you are entitled to is the result of your property rights. Libertarians believe that each individual has natural property rights, which it would be immoral for the government to infringe.
At this point, income and property are about to be the same "thing" even through there was no worked out logic. He's about to assume the "Right Wing" Libertarian definitions even though he seems biased against them.
But do we really have natural rights to property? And even if we do, does taxation really infringe them? To begin to address these questions, we need to think more carefully about the nature of property.
So now we're at, is "taxation theft?" in the "moral" sense (legal was too straightforward I guess, and gov't can't do anything illegal, right??) and that depends if its taken as the "Libertarian" standpoint
(What about Democrats or Republicans or Independent? Since we're now scoped to political ideologies umbrellas. Are there "Libertarians" outside of the USA? I only know of US politics and poorly at that). The standpoint of income as a type of property rights. So now we got to define propery rights and whether its moral to own it.
A person has a moral claim on all her gross income only if property rights are natural, not human constructions
Something about this rubbed me the wrong way, in the statement's placement I mean. There's a flow break here. He's agreeing with the point that he's trying to disprove?
For the social constructivist, the right to property is not some natural, sacred thing that exists independently of human conventions and legal practices. Rather, we create property rights, by setting up legal institutions to ensure that people have certain legal rights over the material world. For the libertarian, in contrast, facts about property exist independently of human laws and conventions, and indeed human laws and conventions ought to be moulded to respect the natural right to property.
This distinction is crucial for our question.
I thought in the beginning it was about the moral definition of Taxation as theft. So I guess we're back to the legal definition. I guess I dont see why we'd ever need to look at anything else
Suppose we accept the social-constructivist view that property rights are merely legal. Now we ask the question: ‘Do I have a moral claim on the entirety of my pre-tax income?’ We cannot argue that I am entitled to my pre-tax income on the basis of my natural property rights, as there are no such things as ‘natural’ property rights (according to the social-constructivist position we are now considering). So, if I have a moral claim on my entire pre-tax income, this must be because it is exactly the amount of money I deserve for my hard work and social contribution, presumably because in general the market delivers to each person exactly what they deserve. But we have already concluded that this is not a plausible claim
To me this feels along the lines of: I strip away all choices until the one I like is left, so logically, that is the correct answer.
Now we ask the question: ‘Do I have a moral claim on the entirety of my pre-tax income?’ We cannot argue that I am entitled to my pre-tax income on the basis of my natural property rights, as there are no such things as ‘natural’ property rights (according to the social-constructivist position we are now considering). So, if I have a moral claim on my entire pre-tax income, this must be because it is exactly the amount of money I deserve for my hard work and social contribution, presumably because in general the market delivers to each person exactly what they deserve.
I remember talking to someone long ago that told me about a technique to make yourself look smarter(competent?) during Q&A sesssions. If someone ask a question that you do not know the answer, respond back with a similar sounding question then follow up with the answer to that, then move on. This feels like the same kind of mental logic to avoid the actual question.
Here’s where we’re up to: to make sense of the idea that taxation is (moral) theft, we have to make sense of the idea that each person has a moral claim on the entirety of her gross income, and this can be made sense of only if property rights are natural rather than mere human constructions. We need, therefore, to defend a theory of natural property rights. Our next task is to explore philosophical theories of property rights.
But he already said he's working under the stance of "social constructivist", why does he need to go any farther? Here's another one of those weird through flow breaks.
On the Right-wing libertarian view, it is perfectly morally acceptable for one person to claim a vastly unequal proportion of land and resources for himself, resulting in his propertyless neighbours being forced to work for him to avoid starvation
Way to jump off the deep end for example. I'd like to see how that one person with "unequal proportion of land and resources for himself" managed to stop the starving neighbor from eating food of that very same land, much less even where to find them. In the same vein, what's stopping the starving neighbor from looking around, seeing noone, and claiming the land for themselves?
Moreover, as I will now try to show, even if Right-wing libertarianism is true, even if there are natural property rights, even if such rights allow private individuals to carve off for themselves a vastly unequal share of natural resources, even then we cannot make sense of the idea that actual people living today have a moral claim on their pre-tax income.
Professor Schmidt’s salary comes from the state: she has no right to complain that she keeps only some of this stolen money
What if Professor Schmidt’s salary comes a privately owned company? Its a useless example.
In almost every country, there is a certain amount of taxation, at least to pay for roads and infrastructure, if not for education and healthcare.
I don't see how "roads and infrastructure" equates to "acquired land or natural resources". I guess there's a bush that grows roads and tree that grows into infrastructure because that's the only way those things could have gotten there.
Now consider a Ms Jones, a libertarian British businesswoman who resents paying tax on dividends from her lucrative company. Although she is not directly paid by the state, the profits generated by Jones’s business are dependent on many things that are funded by the state: perhaps she receives state subsidies, but even if not, certainly the success of her company will depend on infrastructure, roads, rule of law, and an educated and healthy workforce. It doesn’t matter whether in principle these things could have been provided privately; in reality, they are provided by the state and funded through taxation.
He's willing to go "back to the basics" an attempted outline of property rights, yet doesnt show how property ("acquired land or natural resources") but doesnt do the same for any of the resources the hypothetical company is dependent on. I mean, our modern world obviously was here all along!
It’s hard to shake the feeling that the gross income figure on your payslip represents your money, and that the difference from your take-home pay represents how much the state has taken from you. In fact, there is no coherent way of justifying this conviction.
But that's exactly what it is. As far as I'm aware, no other entity reduces the take-home pay in that manner without your "consent" (ie 401K or equivalent kind of deferred adjustment).
Still, the vast majority happily vote for low taxes, rejoicing that they get to keep their morsel while in reality all they’ve done is protect the spoils of a tiny minority at the top. The result is our failure to create what we really need: a tax system that – as part of the wider economy – creates a just society.
What an abrupt stop. And also a hint of a different talking point? Who's the "tiny minority at the top" that is only now getting brought up?
His whole article is essentially what Lobaczewski called a "paramoralism" - an attempt to justify an incorrect statement via an appeal to morality.
