What are arguments against property that could justify taxation? If one believes ownership to be a right...

>If one believes ownership to be a right, taxation cannot morally be justified
The state needs money to sustain itself, unless you think you're better of without (you're not) there isn't an argument against taxation

>Social contract
Being born in a country in itself cannot obligate you to anything.
Duties cannot justify immoral actions.
An efficiency problem does not make theft less immoral.

You can say the same about prisons being wrong if you believe in freedom. The justification on base of how interests of many trumps interests of ones.

The social contract is a meme
m.youtube.com/watch?v=dOQ6Gug_jgI

Being born into the country doesn't obligate you to pay taxes because babies don't pay taxes. As an adult who is (I assume) fairly resourceful, you are free to find your way to a country where tax collection is more lax.

> justify taxation
>taxation cannot morally be justified
A property claim is only as good as one's ability to enforce it. For anything beyond a small plot of arable land, that necessitates contract enforcement by a third party which all inhabitants agree holds the monopoly on force. The earliest proto-governments of ancient Sumeria were primarily involved with contract enforcement and defending the property rights of all the investors.

Property, therefore, is the creation of the state.

Because the laws create the property, the laws therefore may dispose of it.

Taxes are no more immoral than charging rent. You like living in a nice society, you have to contribute to its upkeep. Saying that property like land is "yours" is like saying that an apartment is "yours" just because you were raise in it, that apartment was there before you were born, it will be there after you are dead, you will only ever be its temporary occupant.

This is how property works in a modern, post-agricultural society

why should ownership be a right

not left wing by the way

if everyone voluntarily submits to a system that includes taxes, because everyone agrees that in their individual self interest they can live better lives in such a society, then there you go.

Taxation isn't theft; unless it's involuntary, then it is.

You're confusing unanimous consent with active majority consent. Through a multitude of actions, all but the most independent minded citizens actively consent to taxation, the state, and its monopoly on force. Even rebels in other lands consent to taxation and a monopoly on violence, the only difference is at what level said taxation and monopoly are administered/enforced

Property does not exist without laws defining what property is. SO fuck off.

Ancap pls

Could you explain? I don't think I understand what you mean.

I feel like you're saying exactly what I said - true consent is definitely the minority right now, but the thread is asking to defend that taxation, and I said there needs to be no justification if everyone within the system being taxed truly consents to it, as they've decided for themselves that it is the best way to live.

The majority passively consents, but they've never even thought about it. I guess I'm just talking purely in theory, where I'm discussing as if everyone within the society is independent and educated enough to make active decisions. In such a society, if everyone consents, there needs to be no justification. No one is being fucked over, because all the options were weighed and they decided it's best to have a system that includes taxes.

You're missing the point. Taxation is a method of the state to gather funds to do stuff. What justifies the state doing stuff? Also what justifies the state doing certain stuff vs other stuff?

>what justifies the state doing stuff
What doesn't justify it, and what justifies a private individual doing things a public institution doesn't?

Such a theoretical society leads to this logic: something that requires consent is better in a society where said consent is more straightforward and active.

The above is obviously true, but where are you going with this?

This is social contract theory 101. You can take it in many directions, but the reductio ad absurdum (Hobbes) is that the state exists solely to protect its citizens from a violent death (unless said death comes directly from said citizens opposing the state).

>If one believes ownership to be a right

It's not really a right.

What is ownership anyway? Can you own a factory in the same manner you own your pair of boots?

I think it's an interesting question, but instead of arguing, some people just agree on taxes, so others can agree on ownership.

Ayy taxes are great. The lowered/nonexistent costs of public shit like health care, schools and elderly care is beneficial to the whole of society.
Taxation should be proportinal to the income though. No bullshit flat 10% tax of flat 50-60% tax.The rich pay a higher percentage and the poor pay a lower.

>inb4 hurr you stupid poor commie cuck, you're only saying this so you get free shit
Think again. Parents are doctors, dad comes from relatively well off family (grandpa was a doctor of veterinary medicine), both are left leaning. I study veterinary medicine, so not working class scum either.

In complex societies property is a legal concept, a concept that is not some sort of absolute.

How does property have anything to do with taxation being morally justifiable though?

I'm just bringing up the Union of Egoists idea of everyone voluntarily being part of whichever society best represents them

Everyone itt was arguing about property and NAP and inherent rights, but I was just pointing out none of that matters at all if you yourself voluntarily (as opposed to right now, where taxation and whatnot is inflicted without true consent) participate in that.

Just a tangent

>If one believes ownership to be a right

Not everyone thinks this. But even if you do, taxation is justified because no-one owns land /legitimately/, in the sense that they came upon virgin ground and "mingled their labor" with it in some way. Every piece of land, without exception, was at some point stolen from someone else, and this means that no current claims of land ownership are legitimate /by the very standards such people claim to hold/.

Ownership isn't a right. Rights don't exist. Live by yourself on an isolated island and you have no rights. Any right you think you have is defined and defended by the state. You want the right to leave your house without fearing that the next bigger bastard could just steal all your shit? that requires a court system, and people who enforce the laws set by the court system. People don't work for free.
If you start spouting shit about "I didn't choose to be apart of this contract therefore it is invalid" fair enough you didn't have a choice on where you were born, but the second you hit adulthood and decided to carry on using roads and electricity you agreed to the benefits provided by taxation, luckily you don't pay taxes until adulthood, when the choice to opt out becomes possible.

Here, OP sets up a false dilemma: the only arguments that could justify taxation are against property ownership, and the two are thus mutually exclusive.

Property is a resource limited by population. A society that allocates property by population as well as taxing property that extends beyond that which a person is allocated would have both ownership and taxation.

>parents are doctors
>becomes a fucking vet

Your parents are secretely ashamed of you.

yeah but using the convenient functions of the government (like an army that protects you against other armies) you're pretty much renting with tax.

Like a Landlord and tenant

even if gov't is evil it's a necessary one.

1. Living by yourself on an isolated island is an exception and not the rule.

2. Rights can only be said to exist where there is more than one person. If you have a right there is duty applied to everyone else in the system. You can't have rights without duties and therefore you need two people for there to be a right.

I agree with you but a flat tax with an exemption (say no tax up to $30,000 then 50% for each dollar after that) can be progressive. It's much better to have a progressive conventional tax anyway due to diminishing marginal utility.

I'll take it anyways if you don't give it voluntarily.

1.The lonely desert island is the metaphor from which I extracted my argument. Not its literal base. The island can be any system without enforcement of duty and granting of rights. Abject poverty, living in an area stricken by war, a theoretical un-contacted people. Any situation where the state cannot exercise its power. Situations where people are completely outside of the influence of any government are vanishingly rare so the desert island is used as a placeholder.
2. fair enough. not much to disagree with here. The only example I can think of could be children, who have rights without duties. But that's stepping outside of the implicit framework of the discussion.

Why would somebody have to justify something that's totally voluntary?

One of the difficulties here is that you view government as either existing or not, when there are informal governing structures everywhere and at every level of social interaction. An example of a basic societal unit is the family, where everyone is given certain rights and duties toward each other in accordance with the dictates of the parents and the cultural expectations of the broader society. The parents in a family are like the government in that they make the rules and provide for the enforcement of those rules.

Secondly, the rights of property and self ownership ares ones which are naturally asserted by people by instinct. As bears or tigers assert mark out the boundaries of their person and territory and defend it against intrusion so do people. Using the example of the family again, it's typical for parents to have to teach their children how to share and not how to assert a property interest. If some outsider threatens the well being of a person within the family, those most able to deter the threat with force will act in such a way to enforce the natural right against trespass of their person. There are rights, and there is enforcement of rights even without formal government.

Whilst I agree with you that government is entirely a product of normal social contract and that "government" will arise in some form at all social strata: However I don't agree that just because a behaviour is instinctual it is a "right".

It is also instinctual not only to protect your own property, but to try and gain more. A baby will refuse to share their toys and then push over their playdate to get their toys too. If this can be considered the right of conquest, an extension of the right to work, then it makes little sense for a person to hold both the right to conquest and the right to property as they are in direct conflict. In modern times the right to conquest is rarely advocated as legitimate, but is as much ingrained into human instinct as the right to property and throughout history was regarded as a truth. If the concept of what is and isn't a right can shift based on cultural values, even if both are a part of human instinct. Then it follows that what isn't and is not a right, is to at least some degree, arbitrary. If a right is only then made a right by its definition by government, at whatever scale, then rights cannot exist in any real sense outside of government.

>grandpa was bitter all his life for not studying "real" medicine
>dad grows up surrounded by animals, wants to be a vet
>grandpa tells him "fuck no son you're going to be a REAL doctor"
>dad becomes a p. good doctor (PhD finished this February)
>from a young age I've had a great interest in nature.
>almost sudy biology but dad tells me that I should fulfill his dream of being a vet
>now study at same school as grandpa and uncle now
user things go in cycles. Kinda wish I'd gone for human medicine though, vet students are seriously retarded.

Also pretty good for a buch of polack farmers.
I lived in Sweden for a bit (14 years) and that was basically their system. Up to 50000kr/month you paid ~30% tax, taxing the middle class fairly. Above that threshold you paid 50%, but only on the sum exceeding 50k.
All in all great country, don't belive shitposting. Healthcare, schools and everything is free. I still get grants from the government just for being a citizen studying.

I don't understand why you would have a threshold in tax system?
Why not make it contains function since we can do the math and removes possibility of weird incentives near boundary.

Might is Right

Your property ceases to be your property after I kill you and take it.

The boundary is just above what is seen as upper middle class income. An argument against high taxes/high government involvement/socialism is the fucking over of the middle class. This kinda makes it more fair: if you earn a middle class income cool, if you earn above it you still get some nice shit, but you really don't need more than that to live VERY comfortably.

>Property, therefore, is the creation of the state.
other way round, without a state there is no property

taxes are justified, because the government said so. without taxes, or levies, our economic system won´t work, because goods can´t be measured against something.. our system only works because people need the money to pay taxes, and the state grants you your property to pay taxes

They're two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other.

>what is the soviet union?

A world in which we all renounce the instincts to steal and hurt others is, in the simple case, superior to a world in which conquest is permitted. In a world without rights against trespass of property or person Neighbor A who is envious of Neighbor B could kill him and take his cow, but in a world with rights Neighbor A would have to acquire enough property to buy his own cow. In the first world there is only one cow, but in world two there are two cows. Property rights align those instincts of conquest and jealousy in a way that produces a positive sum rather than a negative or constant sum.

The complex case in which right of conquest might exist is where the conqueror seeks to establish or does establish the rule of law and protects the rights of the conquered in a manner superior to the incumbent. The Roman conquests are an example of conquests that made the conquered people better off precisely because smaller powers where deterred from settling disputes with violence within the borders of the empire.Trade of goods and ideas could flourish within the borders and city-states were made safe by the power of the ruling armies. The right of conquest in not a general right that can be held by all and applied at all times, to all persons, thus it differs from the rights of property as defined.

A state wherin the state owned all the property and ran it like a private enterprise anyway.

its ownership, because you have no instance above you who can enforce something if one wants to steal your stuff

A clear instance where state power raged out of control with respect to property ownership, resulting in a system where there was still a dedicated capital owning class that had successfully disenfranchised its population, only they were government bureaucrats instead of robber barons.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

The Lockean Proviso and the need for tax to defend your property (as well as stopping you from violating other's property) justifies at least a level of taxation.

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