Howard Pearce wrote: BH> Do you consider taxes on negative externalities -- e.g. pollution taxes -- to be theft? What about a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax? <BH
HP> Taxes are taxes ..... what's the problem? <HP 1) A tax on aggression -- like a pollution tax -- is not itself aggression. 2) A tax on the economic rent of land is aggression only if you disagree with the geolibertarian premise that because land is not created by labor, the occupation of land does not include an entitlement to its economic rent. (The economic rent of a piece of land is equal to the economic advantage obtained by using the site in its most productive use, relative to the advantage obtained by using marginal land for the same purpose, given the same inputs of labor and capital.) Land rent is just one of many questions about property rights that cannot be settled by invoking the non-aggression axiom. Other questions relate to atmosphere, bodies and streams of water, rain, sunlight, wind, migratory game, fisheries, minerals, spectrum, orbits, expressions, inventions, and reputations. Depending on your axioms about the nature of property, any or all of these could in principle be taxed without committing aggression. 3) Taxes used to finance the protection of liberty are fundamentally different from taxes used to finance rent-seeking <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking> (i.e. extracting undeserved benefits from the government). Aggression does not end up minimized if liberty-lovers merely resolve to promote aggression-virginity through the example of their chastity. I value the actual protection of real-world liberty over its sacrosanct hypothetical inviolability. I value the minimization of real-world aggression over maintaining the non-coercive purity of my white-gloved hands. The child and her doctor both seek to minimize her pain, but only one recognizes the necessity of needles. HP> 1) To seize (private property) for the public treasury. 2) To seize by or as if by authority. <HP Seize/confiscate has connotations that are not satisfied by taxation. One is that the seized/confiscated thing is a distinct entity or collection that was the particular target of an intent to take possession of it. A mafia goon might "seize" or "confiscate" your wallet or all the cash you happen to have in your pockets, but if instead he says he'll be back each week for $100 in protection money, a native speaker of English would instead say he is "exacting" or "extorting" when he collects it, not "seizing" or "confiscating". The object of a seizure or confiscation is a particular thing that you in some way possess at the time of the threat or exercise of the force involved in the seizure or confiscation. By contrast, taxation/exaction/extortion often imposes a debt that is certifiable not by any particular thing(s) you currently possess, but rather by some dollar-denominated (but otherwise arbitrary) subset of your future earnings or holdings. The goon doesn't care which hundred-dollar bill you give him next week, or that you don't have any now, so long as you cough one up each week. Just because taxation and confiscation both involve threatened force doesn't make them the same thing. The 1972 SoP list of "confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain" is clearly a list of practices in which distinct instances (or entire classes) of property are appropriated in their entirety. The 1972 SoP could have trivially included taxation on that list, but instead the larger 1972 Platform said only two things about taxes: "we support immediate reduction of taxes" and "we support the eventual repeal of all taxation". The Platform would have never said "we support the immediate reduction of eminent domain and the eventual end of all eminent domain". Thus, it's just not plausible to read "confiscation" in the 1972 SoP as including all taxation.
