Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Tax Day
Aired: 2022-04-19
Duration: 01:13:58


=== Two Tickets Left for Ben (07:36) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:30]  Here's your host, James Smith.
[00:00:33]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:34]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:37]  I'm Dave Smith.
[00:00:38]  He is the king of the caulks, Robbie the Fire, Bernstein.
[00:00:40]  What's going on, brother?
[00:00:42]  Oh, I'm just thrilled to see Reno currently sold out.
[00:00:45]  We did it, buddy.
[00:00:46]  Sold out.
[00:00:47]  Is the podcast officially sold out yet or just very close?
[00:00:50]  I think there's exactly two tickets left.
[00:00:52]  So that's going to be sold out by the time this is out.
[00:00:54]  Okay.
[00:00:54]  Yeah, fair enough.
[00:00:56]  That probably is good.
[00:00:57]  What if we just can't sell those last two tickets?
[00:00:59]  Sell everything out five weeks early, but we two tickets won't move.
[00:01:03]  That's possible.
[00:01:05]  If so, I'm going to focus on those two empty chairs the entire show.
[00:01:10]  Motherfucker.
[00:01:11]  Well, yeah, thanks to everybody who got tickets.
[00:01:13]  We are looking into options of possibly adding another show, seeing if we can add some seating, stuff like that.
[00:01:21]  We got to work with the venue on this.
[00:01:23]  The shows both sold out like five weeks to go.
[00:01:28]  So, you know, I apologize to anyone who didn't get tickets.
[00:01:31]  Bear with us for a little bit.
[00:01:32]  We'll try to see what we can do to add some more to find a way for you to get in to one of the shows.
[00:01:38]  And then also we got Chicago.
[00:01:41]  Those ticket links are live now.
[00:01:43]  That is, what is that?
[00:01:44]  The 18th, I believe.
[00:01:47]  I believe it's June 18th in Chicago.
[00:01:49]  So those ticket links are live now.
[00:01:51]  We'll put those in the episode description as well.
[00:01:54]  So yeah, come on out.
[00:01:55]  Come on out to see us.
[00:01:56]  We're very excited.
[00:01:57]  Looking forward to all this stuff.
[00:01:58]  That's a really cool venue.
[00:01:59]  We're doing a couple of shows in a one night.
[00:02:01]  It's not the world's biggest room.
[00:02:03]  So that's going to sell out quick.
[00:02:04]  So don't wait on those tickets.
[00:02:06]  One night only.
[00:02:07]  One night only.
[00:02:08]  I think two stand-up shows and a live part of the problem podcast with me and, of course, me and Rob Bernstein doing the stand-up and then doing the podcast.
[00:02:14]  So that should be a lot of fun.
[00:02:16]  Yeah, we're excited for that.
[00:02:18]  However, as you may have noticed today, both me and Rob are wearing black because, of course, it was tax day the other day and we mourn for all those terrible shirts.
[00:02:31]  That's it.
[00:02:32]  They only left Rob with one shirt.
[00:02:34]  That's how good of a year or bad of a year Rob's having.
[00:02:36]  I don't know whether it's a good year or a bad year where they just start coming after your clothes, but that's what we're dealing with here.
[00:02:42]  So yeah, it was, of course, the day where Americans pay their taxes just a couple days ago.
[00:02:48]  And we thought we would talk about that in today's episode as we mourn, as we mourn for all of those poor dollars that went into government coffers just recently.
[00:02:59]  So anyway, I saw this article that a lot of people were sharing on Tax Day.
[00:03:07]  And I will admit that I thought it was a new article.
[00:03:12]  I realize now as I click on it that I'm wrong.
[00:03:15]  This is an article from 2020.
[00:03:18]  And so, yeah, well, I'm already a point down.
[00:03:22]  I'm already confused.
[00:03:24]  So I already lost the opening round of this.
[00:03:27]  But it is an article by my brother, Ben Burgess, who I will start by saying I like very much.
[00:03:35]  And I think there's a mutual respect between me and Ben.
[00:03:38]  Ben's been on our show a bunch of times.
[00:03:41]  I've done his show and he's done like the Soho Forum debates.
[00:03:46]  He debated Gene Epstein.
[00:03:47]  He also debated Gene Epstein on our podcast.
[00:03:49]  Me and him debated informally on our podcast.
[00:03:52]  And then I more recently just interviewed him about His book, which was really, really good.
[00:04:00]  I really recommend people read.
[00:04:02]  If I give him a title, I believe it was called Canceling Comedians While the World Burns.
[00:04:07]  And it was kind of a leftist critique of the excesses of cancel culture.
[00:04:14]  And it was very, very good.
[00:04:15]  It was a really excellent book.
[00:04:17]  I highly recommend people read it.
[00:04:19]  So, anyway, Ben Burgess wrote this article two years ago.
[00:04:23]  We never took it on on the show, although we had done like we had done several podcasts where we were, you know, taking on videos that Ben Burgess had made, and then he did videos taking on our response to his videos.
[00:04:38]  And then that ultimately led to him coming on the show.
[00:04:41]  But so this article is called How to Debate Libertarians on Taxes and Destroy Them.
[00:04:48]  This is from 2020.
[00:04:52]  It was written in the summer of 2020 because, of course, that year, if you recall, Tax Day was pushed back a little bit.
[00:05:00]  So, anyway, let me just say before we get into this, as I mentioned earlier, I like Ben Burgess.
[00:05:06]  I respect the guy.
[00:05:08]  And he's, I respect him for a few different reasons.
[00:05:13]  Mainly, number one, he's just like a good dude.
[00:05:15]  And that kind of comes off when you do these things with him.
[00:05:18]  Like, he's, he's, he has honor and integrity.
[00:05:22]  And he, I, I always, he kind of earned my respect by initially coming on our show, by going to the Soho Forum, by like, you know, look, he's, he's really believes in what he believes in, and he's down to have debates on these subjects and even go into hostile environments.
[00:05:38]  It's incredible how many settings you can be in and not answer questions.
[00:05:43]  And he can do it in all sorts of different forms.
[00:05:46]  Well, I will say he also kind of blew up since this time.
[00:05:52]  I think it was in 2019 when he was on our podcast.
[00:05:56]  And since then, he's gone on, he's done a whole bunch more of these debates and done a bunch more like big podcasts.
[00:06:01]  And he's gotten much better at it.
[00:06:04]  I caught him young when he was green, which is a good move.
[00:06:07]  That's what you're supposed to do.
[00:06:08]  That's what like seasoned boxers do.
[00:06:10]  If you see like a prospect coming up, you want to fight him right away, fuck him up.
[00:06:14]  And then you want to make sure, you know, you don't want to wait till he's like gets more experience and gets into his prime.
[00:06:19]  And then if you have to fight him again, he'll have that memory of you catching him early.
[00:06:23]  Anyway, that was not the method to my madness at the time.
[00:06:26]  But Ben is Ben's like a good leftist, in my opinion, where he's like, he's good on the things you would expect a left winger to be good on historically.
[00:06:37]  So he's good on drugs and wars and cops and all that stuff.
[00:06:42]  And then also he's pretty good on like the woke stuff, which I appreciate.
[00:06:48]  And he spends a lot of time calling out the what he might call the excesses and me and you might call the insanity of the kind of modern progressive movement.
[00:07:01]  But I've also seen him recently where he's been, I think, had very reasonable takes on the war in Ukraine.
[00:07:09]  And he's basically been out there saying that it's like, yeah, we should just be working to negotiate a truce to all of this and not kind of like, you know, add fuel to the fire and stoke all this crazy war propaganda.
[00:07:22]  So he's very good on that stuff, but we're going to disagree with him when it comes to taxes.
[00:07:26]  And of course, this is the subject that me and him debated on this very podcast.
[00:07:32]  So let's go through this a little bit because I think basically what Ben is doing here, right?

=== The Libertarian Redistribution Debate (09:31) ===

[00:07:37]  It's the title of the article is how to debate libertarians on taxes and destroy them on tax day.
[00:07:45]  Here's a guide to arguing with libertarians about redistribution.
[00:07:49]  So He's trying to give his democratic socialists tools to argue with libertarians.
[00:07:58]  And we can't allow that to happen.
[00:08:00]  So now we have to give tools to our people to battle back against the tools being used by these little Ben Burgesses out there running around trying to slap down our precious arguments about how taxation is immoral.
[00:08:14]  Okay.
[00:08:16]  All right.
[00:08:17]  So let's jump into the article.
[00:08:18]  And by the way, before we even jump into the article, I could my already one point is if I'm just being, you know, a real libertarian about this, I don't like the term redistribution.
[00:08:29]  I don't agree with it.
[00:08:30]  It implies that there was a distribution to begin with, and wealth is not distributed.
[00:08:35]  It's created.
[00:08:38]  That's a factual matter.
[00:08:39]  It's not like, you know, paychecks might be distributed, but wealth itself is not distributed.
[00:08:45]  It almost allowed you to go earn it, but it's only because the earlier people that put the systems in place that kept the other people down.
[00:08:56]  Right.
[00:08:56]  That's all stupid is my point.
[00:08:58]  And so the idea is almost as if, and I think sometimes this is almost what is like an undercurrent in some of this left-wing, like in their worldview.
[00:09:13]  It's almost as if like all human beings were born, you know, like we were all just born yesterday, and then all the wealth and resources that people have was just handed out by one person in the order.
[00:09:29]  They're just like, you, you'll get nothing.
[00:09:32]  Bezos, you'll get $100 billion.
[00:09:36]  This guy, you get $40,000.
[00:09:38]  This guy, you get like just randomly decided and they just hand it out.
[00:09:41]  And then they're almost like, hey, this is unfair.
[00:09:44]  We should redistribute this in a more even way.
[00:09:47]  And that would kind of make sense if the first thing had happened, but it didn't.
[00:09:52]  And that's actually not the story of how wealth is created.
[00:09:56]  And so that changes things quite a bit.
[00:09:58]  But anyway, I just don't really like that term redistribution.
[00:10:01]  It implies that there was an original distribution and there really wasn't.
[00:10:05]  Okay, so let's read the article.
[00:10:10]  Thanks to the three-month extension caused by the pandemic, tax day this year falls immediately after Bastille Day.
[00:10:18]  Libertarians might see a cruel irony there.
[00:10:20]  The slogan of the French Revolution, the slogans of the French Revolution were liberty, equality, and fraternity.
[00:10:26]  Most libertarians concede the need for a stripped-down state that enforces a contract and provide, that enforces a contract and provides for national defense that is morally acceptable.
[00:10:38]  But they see redistributive taxation as an unacceptable violation of liberty in the name of those other two values.
[00:10:45]  Even Americans' patchwork of means-tested social programs is too much for them since it's paid for with quote other people's money.
[00:10:55]  Libertarians deny that anyone has positive rights, like the right to health care or education.
[00:11:01]  Instead, they argue that liberty is best understood in terms of quote negative rights against interference by others.
[00:11:09]  Just as imprisoning Jeff Bezos would violate his rights to freedom of movement, redistributing some of his wealth every year without his consent violates their view of property rights.
[00:11:20]  If a future socialist government implemented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposal that Amazon be reorganized as a worker cooperative, it would presumably be an even deeper violation of Bezos's liberty.
[00:11:36]  One way to understand the libertarians' point is to think about the analogy between taxation and the death penalty.
[00:11:42]  When death penalty abolitionists say that the death penalty is murder, they're appealing to the principle that it's immoral for the state to do what would be immoral for individuals to do.
[00:11:53]  Last year, when I debated libertarian podcaster and stand-up comedian Dave Smith, he pushed this analogy hard.
[00:11:59]  If it's wrong for muggers to redistribute wealth at the point of a knife or a gun, he said, it's equally wrong for the IRS to rely on the coercive power of the state to do the same.
[00:12:09]  Put more succinctly for libertarians, taxation is theft.
[00:12:13]  It's an argument that every democratic socialist should know how to refute.
[00:12:20]  All right.
[00:12:21]  So that's the opening.
[00:12:23]  I wouldn't, I mean, I'm reasonably okay with how he laid that out.
[00:12:29]  So I give him credit for that.
[00:12:30]  It's not like a straw man.
[00:12:32]  I mean, I probably would say things a little bit differently.
[00:12:36]  I would also say that I wasn't making an analogy when we were arguing exactly.
[00:12:42]  I wasn't saying, I was asking him a question, which I was saying: if a group of people not part of the government and not called the IRS were to do the same thing the IRS is doing, would you consider that immoral or not?
[00:12:55]  And that it's asking a question to see if there is a contradiction here or what changes about the morality when these people become government.
[00:13:03]  I think he does address this later in the article.
[00:13:07]  How do you create a positive right?
[00:13:10]  And to be more specific with my question, how do you create limitations for it?
[00:13:17]  So if you say that there's some sort of a positive, well, he's not even, he's actually not using the term natural right.
[00:13:23]  So he's not, he's not trying to say that you have a natural right to healthcare because obviously, I guess if you were just born on an island, there wouldn't be any healthcare to provide to you.
[00:13:32]  So it's not, you know what I mean?
[00:13:33]  It's not necessarily a natural right, but he does say that there is something called a positive right.
[00:13:39]  And the two that he laid out, one was healthcare, the other was education.
[00:13:44]  But then I guess, is there a positive right to be fed?
[00:13:46]  Is there a positive right for land?
[00:13:48]  If the transgender is there, positive right that that should be paid for.
[00:13:52]  A lot of times this this comes down to, I think when, when libertarians and leftists talk about these conversations, it comes down to um like, almost like an issue.
[00:14:02]  It becomes semantics and where we start talking past each other.
[00:14:07]  So the thing is that what what we're saying is that the term rights means something to us, and it doesn't just mean things we'd like people to have.
[00:14:17]  You know, like we'd.
[00:14:18]  It'd be nice if everyone had a much higher standard of living, but I won't say that people have a right to have a much higher standard of living, because that takes a lot of work in order for it to happen, and not just that you would have to take something from someone else.
[00:14:32]  Well, this is of a natural right exactly, and this is what we talk about.
[00:14:37]  You know when people talk about the differences between um, you know rights and privileges.
[00:14:42]  You know what I mean.
[00:14:43]  Like when you, you would hear that when, like you were a kid or something like that.
[00:14:45]  I remember, like on um, you know when I played on my varsity basketball team.
[00:14:50]  You know, and they would have, like all of these, like you know things that you had to do.
[00:14:53]  You had to keep your grades At a certain level, you have to do like all this other shit.
[00:14:56]  And they'd be like, well, look, it's not a right to be on this team.
[00:14:58]  It's a privilege.
[00:14:59]  So that comes with these strings attached or something like that, right?
[00:15:02]  Something that's a right is something that you ought to be entitled to.
[00:15:06]  And the problem with positive rights is that they always come at somebody else's cost.
[00:15:16]  Like if you have a right to education, then someone has to educate you.
[00:15:20]  And if you have a right to healthcare, then there has to be a doctor and there has to be, you know, drugs and nurses and a hospital and all of these things.
[00:15:28]  Well, someone had to build that hospital.
[00:15:30]  Someone, that doctor had to go to school for years.
[00:15:32]  And then he has to, you know, like take his time and treat you and all of these things.
[00:15:36]  And the point is not that we don't want people to have healthcare.
[00:15:40]  The point is that you do not have an entitlement to somebody else's work.
[00:15:44]  That's kind of our basic argument.
[00:15:47]  I also don't think he, it seems a little bit dishonest because he's not, the building blocks of his argument is not that you have a right to stuff.
[00:15:56]  It's that he thinks that there's enough wealth in the world that we could redistribute it and have a better outcome.
[00:16:01]  And even that's, in my opinion, not even true, because if you actually had free markets, people would be able to acquire their stuff like at better prices.
[00:16:08]  The services they were looking for would be available and you'd have economic growth.
[00:16:12]  You'd have prosperity.
[00:16:13]  But like it's disingenuous for him to pretend as if he believes that there's some sort of a positive right.
[00:16:20]  That's not why you believe that people should have healthcare.
[00:16:23]  You believe that people should have healthcare because you think otherwise they're going to die unless it's provided for.
[00:16:28]  There's enough wealth and resources that someone might as well take come in and redistribute it.
[00:16:33]  But that's not really like it's not really coming from a positive right.
[00:16:37]  Well, this is this is what I, what I mean when I say we talk past each other a lot with these type of conversations.
[00:16:43]  Like if you're, if you're asserting that there will be better outcomes if government redistributes resources so more people have health care or education or all of these things, then fine.
[00:16:55]  But that's a separate argument than talking about what is liberty and what are rights.
[00:17:00]  And again, it's almost like at a certain point, you're kind of like, so then just pick a different word for it, whatever you want to say.
[00:17:06]  Like that's, okay, that's what we're talking about.

=== Property Rights vs State Law (15:11) ===

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[00:18:53]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:18:55]  Back to the uh, the article.
[00:18:56]  This section is called the brewing objection.
[00:19:00]  Uh, the claim that liberty is non-interference has been expressed by libertarian thinkers like Murray Rothbard as the quote non-aggression principle.
[00:19:09]  Rothbard's formulation of the NAP was that no man may threaten or commit violence against another man's person or property.
[00:19:17]  He used this to condemn taxation, which he described as the use of violence by the state to obtain its revenue.
[00:19:25]  Um, so yes, I mean, again, I don't really want to get into the semantics here, like non-interference or non-aggression or something like that.
[00:19:33]  Yeah, that's what we mean by liberty.
[00:19:35]  That's what we're talking about when we use the word.
[00:19:37]  When we're talking about liberty, we mean like, yes, you're the uh, nobody is violating your ability to live your life peacefully and pursue your own, you know, desired life.
[00:19:52]  Um, okay.
[00:19:53]  Uh, okay, so to the next paragraph: taking this prohibition against threatening or committing violence literally would mean that even defense of violence was off the table.
[00:20:04]  But Rothbard wasn't a Gandhian pacifist.
[00:20:08]  It seems clear that what he meant to say was that no one may threaten or commit violence against the person or the property of another except in the course of a conflict initiated by the other party.
[00:20:20]  So far, so good.
[00:20:22]  But what does it mean to threaten or commit violence against property?
[00:20:26]  So, yes, obviously, and Rothbard was very clear about this: that what he's not talking about defensive violence, he's talking about initiating violence or an act of aggression.
[00:20:35]  So, back to his question: but what does it mean to threaten or commit violence against property?
[00:20:40]  It's far from clear that it even makes sense to talk about committing violence against inanimate objects is shooting an empty beer can for target practice violent.
[00:20:51]  When you eat a piece of pizza, are you breaking it down into its component particles, literally annihilating it as completely as is physically possible to annihilate anything?
[00:21:02]  But it seems wrong to say that you're committing violence against the pizza.
[00:21:05]  This is just so stupid.
[00:21:07]  I think he's almost being tongue-in-cheek with this, but it just didn't need to be in the article.
[00:21:12]  But he does get back to it.
[00:21:15]  If I steal something from you, the violence isn't to the object.
[00:21:19]  Obviously, I mean, the object hasn't been destroyed.
[00:21:21]  If I steal a watch from you and I keep the watch, there was no violence towards the watch.
[00:21:25]  The violence is in the action towards you that I took something from you.
[00:21:28]  So, I don't understand his point.
[00:21:30]  It's stupid.
[00:21:30]  So, he backtracks off of it right in the next paragraph here.
[00:21:33]  He says, A Rothbardian might say that the violence is being committed against the owner of the property if it's taken away from them or destroyed without their permission.
[00:21:42]  But this too is more than a little odd.
[00:21:45]  If a teenager sticks a candy bar in his pocket at the grocery store, has he really committed violence against the owner?
[00:21:52]  He certainly hasn't threatened the owner with violence.
[00:21:55]  Perhaps libertarians don't need to die on this semantic hill.
[00:21:58]  The non-aggression principle can be rephrased as: no one may threaten or commit violence against a person or take away their property except for in the course of a conflict initiated by the other person.
[00:22:10]  That's fine, but the key phrase is their property.
[00:22:14]  Okay, so just to be clear here, it's the non-aggression principle would, to me, most accurately be stated as something along the lines of it is immoral to initiate aggression against peaceful people, right?
[00:22:34]  So, that's more or less what we're saying.
[00:22:36]  And then, if you get into how you define aggression, then yes, it would be threats of or acts of violence against that person.
[00:22:44]  Now, to Ben's question, is it an act of aggression to steal from a store?
[00:22:52]  I would say that yes, it is.
[00:22:54]  That's an act of aggression against the person who owns that property.
[00:22:58]  And we can get a little bit more, I'm sure we will, as we read this article, into like the philosophical underpinnings of that.
[00:23:04]  But again, to just think about like, if somebody were to steal, like take it to the extreme to create an easier, you know, picture of this stuff.
[00:23:15]  But if somebody were to, I don't know, break into my bank account and take all of my money, like, okay, then I can no longer provide for my children.
[00:23:28]  Like, yes, I consider that an act of aggression.
[00:23:32]  And like, yes, I mean, this is, I think that's clear.
[00:23:36]  Now, taking a candy bar from a grocery store might be a much smaller version of that than taking everyone from someone and someone and ruining their life, but you are still taking something from them.
[00:23:48]  They put their time and their effort into making money and then purchased this candy bar with that money and you took it without a voluntary interaction, without like, okay, well, this is what it costs.
[00:24:00]  So yes, the act, the violation is against the person who owned that.
[00:24:06]  I don't know.
[00:24:07]  I think that's fairly obvious.
[00:24:11]  And I think that even in Ben Burgess's society, even if you had like worker cooperatives and a redistributive state much bigger than the one we have now, let's say hypothetically did a much better job at it, you'd still end up with this same issue that after you've redistributed all this money, after you have these worker cooperatives, you still can't say that it's not some type of aggression against someone to just go take their stuff.
[00:24:37]  Like, what if I just run up to somebody and take their wallet?
[00:24:40]  Is that not, do they not have a right to with force, take it back from me?
[00:24:45]  I mean, call it whatever you want to call it.
[00:24:47]  Okay, don't call it an act of aggression.
[00:24:49]  Call it some other type of violation.
[00:24:51]  But even in your society, you're going to have to acknowledge that like, yes, that's wrong.
[00:24:55]  You can't take someone else's stuff.
[00:25:00]  Okay.
[00:25:01]  So back to the article.
[00:25:02]  Note that this can't be a reference to legal property rights.
[00:25:06]  If it were, taxation would be fine.
[00:25:08]  Legally, the part of your paycheck you owe the IRS is the property of the federal government.
[00:25:12]  The only way to use the non-aggression principle to ground libertarians' objection to taxation is to say that it's wrong, to take away their property that a taxpayer is morally entitled to.
[00:25:22]  But as Matt Bruing points out, this is blatantly circular.
[00:25:26]  It's wrong to take something from you is a different way of saying you're morally entitled to it.
[00:25:33]  So I agree with the first part that obviously we're not making an appeal to legality.
[00:25:39]  We're making an appeal to morality.
[00:25:43]  But I don't understand.
[00:25:44]  Me and Ben talked about this when he was on the show.
[00:25:47]  I don't understand what he's even arguing is circular about this.
[00:25:51]  The fact that it's a different way of saying something doesn't make it a circular argument.
[00:25:56]  It's saying that taxation is theft is just a description.
[00:26:02]  It's just peeling away a euphemism.
[00:26:04]  That's all it's doing.
[00:26:05]  Saying this is more, you know, in the same way that I remember, which I always loved, and I think I've brought this up on the show before, but I remember there was this Christopher Hitchen thing.
[00:26:16]  He was on Bill Maher's show, and he was arguing, you know, he was a big atheist.
[00:26:20]  I'm not an atheist, but he was one.
[00:26:22]  And he was arguing with this like, I think, Catholic guy or something.
[00:26:27]  And he talked about the, he mentioned the scandal with the Catholic Church.
[00:26:32]  And Christopher Hitchens goes, the scandal, I'm not sure what you're referring to.
[00:26:35]  Are you referring to the systematic rape and torture of children and the subsequent cover-up?
[00:26:40]  And I remember just thinking that was so awesome because it's just like all he was doing was saying, like, no, fuck your euphemism.
[00:26:45]  Like, if we're going to have this conversation, let's have the conversation.
[00:26:48]  I'm not talking about the scandal.
[00:26:50]  That's a very nice way to put it, right?
[00:26:52]  No.
[00:26:53]  All he's saying is like, no, this is what it is.
[00:26:55]  This is literally what we're talking about.
[00:26:58]  That's what taxation is theft is.
[00:27:00]  It's just saying, no, what we're talking about here is theft.
[00:27:04]  And then, yes, obviously there's something following that.
[00:27:08]  Like, obviously, if you say the rape and torture of children, the subsequent cover-up, yes, most normal people's response to that is going to be like, oh, that's horrifically wrong.
[00:27:18]  But it's not like this circular logic where you're saying, well, because it's that, it's wrong.
[00:27:22]  And because it's wrong, it's that.
[00:27:24]  It's not circular logic.
[00:27:25]  It's just a description and it's an accurate description.
[00:27:28]  So that's, there's nothing there.
[00:27:30]  We're just saying, simply by saying it, you're just like, look, let's call it what it is.
[00:27:34]  It's, this is perfectly logically like valid and accurate.
[00:27:39]  Like to say, theft is wrong, taxation is theft, therefore taxation is wrong.
[00:27:45]  That is perfect logic.
[00:27:47]  There's nothing circular about any of that.
[00:27:50]  Okay.
[00:27:50]  And also his legal distinction is interesting, but if the state were to step in and say, let's just say your wife is the property of the state on Saturdays.
[00:28:01]  And so the governor can have sex with her.
[00:28:03]  Or if the state were to say, hey, 100% of your wealth is going to be going to the state, right?
[00:28:08]  So then we would all go, well, that's too like no one, no one would be okay with that.
[00:28:13]  Everyone would go, the fact that it's legally considered the state doesn't make it the state's property.
[00:28:18]  So I think it's important to kind of like for us all to say the state making a law that something's not your property does not necessarily mean that the state would be justified in taking it.
[00:28:28]  And we can all understand that if the state were to go, hey, I'm seizing your factory tomorrow.
[00:28:32]  And then everyone realized, wait, the governor's just seizing your factory because he's got a competing business that's owned by his brother.
[00:28:38]  We would all go, well, that's theft.
[00:28:40]  So just that like, so now the question becomes, does the government have a right to declare your property?
[00:28:46]  Like it is your property.
[00:28:47]  That's the starting point.
[00:28:48]  Like Ben is almost looking at it like, even though you earned it, it's federal property almost like they lent it to you.
[00:28:54]  And then they'd be allowing you to keep 70% of it.
[00:28:58]  So that I don't quite.
[00:28:59]  Well, right.
[00:29:00]  And but it's like to he's right about what he's saying.
[00:29:04]  He's like that this only works if we're claiming like what's right and wrong, not what is legal.
[00:29:10]  But that's also true for everybody.
[00:29:11]  That's that's true for everybody, unless you're really some like crazy, like relativist statist that just says, no matter what the government says under any situations and any error in any period, that's always right.
[00:29:25]  You know, then, okay, the Holocaust was justified and slavery was justified and every worst thing ever that's been done has all been done by governments.
[00:29:33]  So yeah, then, okay, right.
[00:29:35]  So all of us, Ben included, are not talking about that.
[00:29:38]  We're talking about what we believe is right and wrong.
[00:29:42]  Okay, back to the article.
[00:29:47]  And by the way, when he just said it's a different way of saying you're morally entitled to it, it's like, yes, that is the argument that we're making.
[00:29:54]  We are making the argument that you're morally entitled to your money.
[00:29:57]  That's why we call it your money because it's yours, you know?
[00:30:00]  But again, I'm not saying that that's just an assertion, but also what he's saying is just an assertion as of right now.
[00:30:05]  All right.
[00:30:06]  Imagine that some future socialist government carries out Bernie Sanders' proposal to impose a modest tax on Wall Street transactions to fund universal tuition-free higher education.
[00:30:19]  If the Wall Street traders have a moral right to that money, the tax is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
[00:30:24]  If the college student whose education is being funded have a moral right to it, no NAP violation has been committed.
[00:30:31]  As Brewing puts it, the NAP never does any argumentative work at any time.
[00:30:38]  So, Okay.
[00:30:42]  That is, that is kind of true.
[00:30:45]  That, yes, if you're it, right?
[00:30:50]  Like, this is very basic, but it's like, yeah, well, it all depends on whose money it is.
[00:30:53]  Yes.
[00:30:54]  If we're going to decide who is initiating aggression against somebody else, like that, then yes, you need to know whose property it is.
[00:31:04]  This is true across, by the way, every different system, including even this is even true under communism, like that you'd have to determine who in your system owns this.
[00:31:16]  And if you could say it's the government, but then it would be, in your opinion, an act of aggression if some person came and just took it, right?
[00:31:22]  But the issue that you're having here is that the non-aggression principle is not the foundational principle of libertarianism.
[00:31:32]  It's not.
[00:31:33]  Now, it gets talked about a lot as if it is, but it's not.
[00:31:39]  The foundational principle of libertarianism is self-ownership, that you own yourself.
[00:31:46]  That's the starting point.
[00:31:48]  And me and Ben actually talked about this when he was on the show.
[00:31:50]  And I remember kind of trying to pin him down on like, do you believe you own yourself?
[00:31:56]  And what he said, I believe in the podcast, this is years ago now.
[00:32:00]  So I hope I'm getting this close to right.
[00:32:03]  But what he said in the podcast was that, like, well, I'd certainly agree that I believe in bodily autonomy.
[00:32:10]  And again, this is where we get into like semantics and talking past each other.
[00:32:14]  If we're describing the same thing, we're describing the same thing.
[00:32:16]  It doesn't matter what you want to call it.
[00:32:18]  Call it whatever you want to.

=== Defining Bodily Autonomy and Ownership (02:44) ===

[00:32:19]  When we talk about owning something, when we're talking about what belongs to who, okay, what we're talking about is who is morally entitled to control something.
[00:32:33]  That's what we mean by ownership.
[00:32:35]  Who is morally entitled to make the decisions about something, to control it, to exercise it, to use it?
[00:32:41]  Okay.
[00:32:42]  And who, who, again, none of us are talking about legally here.
[00:32:45]  We're talking about morally.
[00:32:46]  Who's morally entitled to control something?
[00:32:49]  So that's the definition that I'm using of ownership.
[00:32:52]  Okay.
[00:32:53]  So by that definition, who wants to argue that you don't own yourself?
[00:32:58]  You shouldn't get to choose what you do with your body.
[00:33:02]  That you someone else should?
[00:33:05]  Should women get to choose who they date?
[00:33:07]  Should men and women get to choose who they date and marry?
[00:33:10]  Should they get to choose?
[00:33:10]  I don't know if I want to raise my hand or put it down.
[00:33:13]  Who's to make that decision?
[00:33:14]  Now, what you see immediately also in that is that if anybody else is making that decision, we've got a conflict.
[00:33:20]  Now, this is more of the Hoppyan argument that he would make here is that, which as long as we're in the business, like Ben's in the business of writing these articles and we're talking about it on the podcast and he likes to have these debates.
[00:33:33]  He's debated a lot of different people on various topics.
[00:33:36]  So we all obviously prefer to avoid conflict and work things out.
[00:33:41]  You know what I mean?
[00:33:42]  Like by persuasion.
[00:33:45]  So obviously we want to avoid conflict.
[00:33:47]  So that's kind of the Hoppyan take on it there that like that's where you get to like self-ownership.
[00:33:52]  But regardless of how you get there, if in other words, being like, if we all agree that we want to avoid conflict, well, the only way to avoid conflict is for people to get to own themselves.
[00:34:02]  If anyone else tries to own you, then of course we're going to have a conflict over that.
[00:34:07]  But regardless of that, this is the libertarian position that you own yourself.
[00:34:11]  You can call it bodily autonomy if you want to, whatever else.
[00:34:13]  But if we're describing ownership by the way we just defined it, then that's the starting principle.
[00:34:18]  And if you own yourself, and obviously there are man is like born naked into the world.
[00:34:26]  There are all of these natural resources around.
[00:34:28]  And then we work to like turn natural goods into economic goods, right?
[00:34:34]  Being the starting point.
[00:34:36]  Well, then you, let's say you own yourself.
[00:34:39]  And let's say you, you know, Robbie, you go out into the woods and you go into a plot of land that no one's using and you chop down a tree and you, you know, you build a chair out of your tree and then you build it and you go to sit on it and someone else comes and grabs it from you and runs off.
[00:34:57]  Well, why is it that I would say that that person has committed an act of aggression because that chair belongs to you?

=== TrueBill Promo and Aggression Claims (03:07) ===

[00:35:04]  Where do I get that from?
[00:35:05]  Well, if we're going to accept that you own yourself and you chose to put your time into building this thing, then who has more of a just claim on it?
[00:35:18]  Yeah, but you were the other person.
[00:35:19]  It's lucky to have the knowledge of the carpentry and the tools available for you to go into the woods and the ability to find a tree.
[00:35:27]  So how does that compare to that other guy who doesn't never had the right to education to carpentry?
[00:35:32]  Yeah, there you go.
[00:35:33]  Life isn't fair.
[00:35:35]  I'm not saying that everything is perfectly fair, but the point is that if somebody can just take that from you, then it is an act of aggression because they have essentially, in effect, retroactively enslaved you to build them a chair, right?
[00:35:51]  So we all acknowledge that it would be a violation if someone were to like put a gun to your head and say, you're my slave.
[00:36:00]  Now chop down a tree and build a chair for me.
[00:36:02]  But what is the difference between that and you going and doing it with the obvious intention that you'll get to enjoy the chair at the end and someone coming and taking it from you, right?
[00:36:12]  It's the same thing in effect.
[00:36:14]  They've done it retroactively.
[00:36:16]  So this is where the argument.
[00:36:17]  So the non-aggression principle does have something to say.
[00:36:22]  It does have an argument to make if you start with self-ownership.
[00:36:27]  Okay.
[00:36:27]  And then you can deduce from that the non-aggression principle and private property rights.
[00:36:32]  So anyway, that's just, that's what the argument is.
[00:36:36]  All right, guys, let's take a second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is TrueBill.
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=== Taxation as Theft Arguments (15:34) ===

[00:38:11]  Okay.
[00:38:12]  If a libertarian tries to bypass the philosophical machinery of the non-aggression principle to express their objection to taxation by saying that redistributive taxation is wrong because it's theft, Brewing's point can easily be extended to handle this move.
[00:38:30]  Again, this is a tricky thing that Ben's done a few times that I called him out on when we were podcasting.
[00:38:37]  But I've never once heard a libertarian say, ever, ever, ever, ever, say taxation is wrong because it's theft.
[00:38:46]  He's changing the argument to make it a circular argument, just to be clear here.
[00:38:51]  They're saying taxation is theft.
[00:38:53]  They're saying taxation is wrong.
[00:38:54]  That is different than saying it's wrong because it's theft.
[00:38:59]  And this is why he's trying to claim that it's a circular argument, because basically if theft is wrong and you're saying it's wrong because it's wrong, then yes, that would be a circular argument.
[00:39:11]  But that's not the argument they're making.
[00:39:12]  It's not even really an argument.
[00:39:14]  It's a description.
[00:39:14]  It's an assertion that taxation is wrong and that taxation is theft.
[00:39:20]  That's like it's not circular.
[00:39:23]  I'm not sure I follow you here.
[00:39:25]  If someone says taxation is theft.
[00:39:29]  So I'm deducing from that that they're telling me that taxation is wrong because it's theft.
[00:39:36]  Well, okay, what they're saying here is that taxation is theft.
[00:39:41]  Theft is wrong.
[00:39:42]  Therefore, taxation is wrong.
[00:39:44]  So I get what you're saying, but he's trying to intentionally phrase it in a way where it's saying it's wrong because it's theft.
[00:39:52]  In a sense, saying that.
[00:39:54]  I don't get the distinction.
[00:39:55]  Well, what he's trying to say is that this is circular logic because basically you're saying it's wrong because it's wrong.
[00:40:02]  Whereas what we're saying is that this is theft and theft is wrong because.
[00:40:07]  And then we could have an answer for why theft is wrong.
[00:40:10]  Theft is wrong because if something something is wrong, if something is wrong because it's wrong, right?
[00:40:20]  But objectively, that wrong, like the wrong part is true, then fine.
[00:40:24]  That's not like things can be wrong because they're death, killing someone is wrong because it's killing someone.
[00:40:31]  Well, right.
[00:40:31]  If you're going to interchange someone, they kill it.
[00:40:33]  Like it's not.
[00:40:34]  Well, yes, but technically that would be kind of circular, what you just did.
[00:40:37]  But the point is this, that there is another component.
[00:40:40]  Right, but hold on.
[00:40:41]  But there is another component to it.
[00:40:42]  So if you say, like, murder is wrong because you, like, because you robbed someone of their life and you have no right to take somebody else's life away, like this is, you know, and that, and you have no right to take away this life from all of the other people who loved them and you've caused all of this damage to all of these other people, blah, blah, blah there is a reason, obviously, why you think murder is wrong.
[00:41:05]  The point is that you usually don't even think that's necessary to say because it's so universally agreed upon that murder is wrong.
[00:41:13]  So, but how, however, if you didn't have that other piece to it, just on the logic of it to say that was murder and therefore it's wrong.
[00:41:22]  And then someone goes, well, why is it wrong?
[00:41:24]  And you go, because it's murder.
[00:41:26]  Technically, that is circular logic.
[00:41:28]  So my only point here is that it's not just like we don't have a justification for this.
[00:41:32]  It's that in the same sense as this argument with murder, once you say that, it's usually pretty universally accepted that, well, yes, obviously this would be wrong.
[00:41:41]  That's kind of my only point.
[00:41:42]  Let's not get too stuck on this part.
[00:41:45]  Okay.
[00:41:48]  Theft can be precisely defined as taking something you have no right to take.
[00:41:56]  Therefore, theft as a legal category is taking something you have no legal right to take.
[00:42:00]  And theft as a moral category is taking something you have no moral right to take.
[00:42:04]  If the Wall Street traders have a moral right to the money, the socialist government is committing theft.
[00:42:10]  If the college students have a moral right to it, the socialist government is acting justly on their behalf, like a police recovering a stolen car.
[00:42:19]  Who's right about this gets down to what philosophers call a theory of entitlement?
[00:42:27]  Other words, a theory of who has a moral right to what.
[00:42:30]  If you believe that everyone has a moral right to whatever they end up with as a result of the market transactions, taxation is theft.
[00:42:38]  But why should you believe that?
[00:42:40]  Now, okay, so again, now, so he wants to argue that taxation is justified theft.
[00:42:45]  So he's okay with the definition of taxation as being theft, but he wants to say that there's just no, no, I think he'd be saying it's not theft if someone else has the moral right to it and you don't.
[00:42:57]  In the same way that we would go.
[00:42:58]  So the argument that he's making is essentially like this: that in the same way that we would say, if someone steals your wallet from you and then you run down after the guy and take the wallet back, so he took it from you, you took it back from him.
[00:43:16]  We view that second act as not theft because you are morally entitled to the wallet.
[00:43:22]  So the first act was theft because he's not morally entitled to it.
[00:43:25]  The second act is just taking back what's yours.
[00:43:28]  So his point is it all comes down to who you think is morally entitled to it.
[00:43:32]  And he's right about that.
[00:43:34]  But that, again, that's not answering.
[00:43:36]  So what's his definition of being morally entitled to someone else's possession?
[00:43:41]  Well, he has not even attempted to address that.
[00:43:46]  But what the libertarian argument is, is that since we all own ourselves and that it's an immoral, which he seems to concede, that it's immoral to use violence against a person.
[00:43:57]  I mean, he would, I'm sure, concede that it's immoral to threaten someone with violence and enslave them to produce something for you.
[00:44:03]  We are saying that by taking the fruits of what somebody produced, that you're retroactively enslaving them, that you're essentially robbing from them the time and energy that they put into this, into whatever it took to produce what they have.
[00:44:19]  So it's not that he's not, it's not that he's wrong technically about what he's saying.
[00:44:25]  It's just like, yes, we are arguing that people's money is theirs, that it belongs to them.
[00:44:32]  That is our argument.
[00:44:34]  All right.
[00:44:36]  And when he says, if you believe that everyone has a moral right to whatever they end up with as a result of market transactions, taxation is theft.
[00:44:44]  But why should you believe that?
[00:44:46]  Well, the reason you should believe that is because market transactions are really just a code or a code, just another way of saying voluntary transactions.
[00:44:56]  That's what market transactions are.
[00:44:58]  And those are often what you might want to call redistributive.
[00:45:03]  People give away their money all the time.
[00:45:06]  Like there's people give money to needy to people who need it.
[00:45:11]  People give their money away in exchange for people's labor.
[00:45:15]  People trade things all the time.
[00:45:18]  But the thing that makes them market transactions is that they're all done voluntarily.
[00:45:24]  So that's the idea that voluntary exchange in the marketplace.
[00:45:31]  Yes, you should, like that is what we're arguing.
[00:45:34]  That you should have a moral right to what you end up with through voluntary, peaceful exchanges, because peaceful exchanges are preferable to violent exchanges.
[00:45:47]  Okay.
[00:45:47]  If you have the far more plausible belief that considerations like fairness and the importance of securing goods like healthcare and education enter into the question of who has a moral right to what, this wouldn't justify taxation for purposes like arming Saudi Arabia for its monstrous war in Yemen, but it would certainly justify it for purposes like abolishing tuition at public universities.
[00:46:14]  Well, I appreciate that he doesn't think that the government should be funding the Saudi genocide.
[00:46:21]  But what about the warhawks that want that?
[00:46:23]  I mean, you're saying that taxation should come in and give people the things that they want.
[00:46:27]  So you might want health care for your kids, but these warhawks want starving Yemenis and they want to know that we can have oil from Saudi Arabia so that we can be lock in our supplies of oil and the value of the dollar.
[00:46:41]  It's incredibly important to them.
[00:46:43]  So why shouldn't they have some of my money to acquire what's important to them?
[00:46:46]  I get your point.
[00:46:48]  And while I will certainly concede that tuition-free public universities is not as horrible as a genocide going on in Yemen, it does seem very arbitrary to just say like, well, that would be a dollar.
[00:47:01]  Well, right.
[00:47:01]  What do kids earn at their universities that's keeping the dollar value and oil?
[00:47:07]  It's a very seemingly arbitrary and random thing to seem like you just kind of decided that you wanted that.
[00:47:14]  Who's to even say that's the best use of this money?
[00:47:17]  Making public schools, public universities, tuition-free?
[00:47:21]  I don't know.
[00:47:25]  It's seven grand a student a year.
[00:47:27]  How many years are you in school for?
[00:47:28]  At least 10?
[00:47:29]  And then college is probably more.
[00:47:31]  It probably goes up to 10.
[00:47:32]  So right away you can each get 100 grand to just start a business.
[00:47:35]  Right.
[00:47:35]  I mean, why not give them money that them and their parents can decide where they want to go, what they want to do with this money?
[00:47:43]  Who knows that they decide that a public university happens to be where they want to go with it?
[00:47:49]  And that's just one other example.
[00:47:50]  There's like infinite other things that you could suggest we should be doing with this money.
[00:47:55]  And you could certainly make an argument that actually none of this money should go towards kids in this country.
[00:48:00]  And we should just be helping people in Central Africa with that money because they need it far more.
[00:48:05]  I mean, there's a lot of just like different things you could say, but the point is that now you are, again, you are kind of making a decision about very arbitrarily where you feel the money morally ought to go.
[00:48:21]  And the libertarian argument is that basically we're saying that we don't think we have a right to arbitrarily make these decisions, but we do think that we could try to persuade people to contribute to whatever we might think is a good idea.
[00:48:36]  That's kind of the essence of all of this.
[00:48:38]  All right.
[00:48:38]  So next is muggers and taxmen.
[00:48:42]  We still haven't said anything about Dave Smith's point.
[00:48:45]  We can all agree that a mugger taking away someone's wallet out of sheer greed might be committing theft in the moral sense of theft.
[00:48:53]  But what about a mugger who intended to redistribute the contents of your wallet to the needy following the Robinhood model?
[00:48:59]  One interesting thing to notice here is that this objection could be turned around and used against the libertarian.
[00:49:05]  Can taxpayers justifiably mug public school teachers, firemen, and others whose income is derived from taxation?
[00:49:13]  At least as long as they don't steal more than they paid in taxes in the first place.
[00:49:18]  Is this like recovering stolen property?
[00:49:21]  I teach at a public university.
[00:49:23]  Should I keep my hand on my wallet when I go to debates with libertarians?
[00:49:27]  Okay, so this is an interesting point.
[00:49:29]  This is something that Ben did bring up when we debated.
[00:49:33]  And of course, we can both practically say that this isn't, you know, the thing that doesn't exactly make this argument a good comparison is that it's not if you go to steal,
[00:49:50]  say, your money back from something that your tax dollars paid into, when you're talking about going and robbing, you know, like whatever, some a janitor at a public school or something like that, because he was paid in tax dollars.
[00:50:07]  Yeah, that's not exactly the same thing as the tax collector who stole your money from you.
[00:50:13]  And I think that even me or you would say that, you know, if your money was stolen, like someone mugged you and then went and spent the money at a store.
[00:50:23]  Yeah, you probably can't just go into the store the next day and steal the money back from them because it's just it things get a little bit complicated when there's these many steps involved.
[00:50:34]  Like that person doesn't know that you're the person whose money they stole.
[00:50:39]  You don't even really know that the money that you're stealing back is the money that was stolen from you.
[00:50:43]  They also traded a service with the person who came in and stole your money.
[00:50:48]  So it's not a no, you'd the only way this would work is if you were going to the person who actually stole the money from you, or you could, through some type of system, prove to them that this money was stolen from you and that, okay, I deserve the money back and you have to go recoup whatever goods you gave to the person who came and bought it.
[00:51:05]  So it gets just, it just doesn't work very well as a counter analogy.
[00:51:11]  But the example that I'm giving to Ben Burgess here is very straightforward and simple.
[00:51:18]  Like if somebody is going to rob you, if someone just robs you on the street, but then they go and they give the money to like a public school, you know, someone, some kid who has to pay tuition for public school, that should be just as morally justified to Ben Burgess as if the IRS were to do it.
[00:51:37]  Why wouldn't it be?
[00:51:38]  By his justification of what makes it morally justified, it's the same exact thing is happening.
[00:51:44]  Now, he may not think it's a great system, but if he's going to say that that's theft and that's immoral, then why would it not be immoral just because the government is doing it?
[00:51:54]  Morality is not transcended by a social construct like government.
[00:51:59]  That's just something that we all agreed to, right?
[00:52:02]  Not all of us, I guess.
[00:52:04]  And also, that's not the Robin Hood model exactly.
[00:52:06]  I'm pretty sure Robin Hood was stealing from the government.
[00:52:08]  If you actually go back and look at the story.
[00:52:11]  But okay.
[00:52:16]  So again, no, I don't think that it's justified to just go around robbing people who may have received some tax dollars through several steps.
[00:52:27]  But if we're just talking about what's justified, not what I recommend anybody do, because you might get yourself in a lot of trouble, but just in an abstraction, what's morally justified?
[00:52:37]  Yes, if a tax collector came to try to take your shit from you and you will not allow him to have it or take it back from him, then yes, I do think that's morally justified and I have no problem saying so.
[00:52:47]  And again, okay.
[00:52:49]  Both reasonable socialists and reasonable libertarians have a handy answer available to this objection.
[00:52:54]  There is a moral problem with vigilantes performing what should be the functions of the state.
[00:52:59]  Having speed limits on the highway set and enforced by agents of institutions considered legitimate by the general public is better than letting random private citizens walk out into traffic with a gun to force passing motorists, motorists drive at what they consider to be a safe speed.
[00:53:15]  It is morally preferable because it will lead to far less confusion, fear, uncertainty, and chaos.
[00:53:21]  Okay, again, I just find this as Ben kind of dodging what the point of this is.
[00:53:26]  We can all argue, and obviously he could argue that, look, if you believe in redistributive welfare programs, obviously, I understand that you're going to say that that is a better system, that it will lead to less confusion and all of this than you just going out and mugging someone and individually giving it out to someone.

=== Beyond Negative Liberty Definitions (15:40) ===

[00:53:46]  That's a given almost in this example.
[00:53:49]  But I'm just saying, would that be morally wrong?
[00:53:53]  Would just the act of it be wrong?
[00:53:55]  Not whether this is a good system to redistribute money to the people who need it.
[00:54:00]  I'm just saying, if I were to just walk out onto the street and just take someone's shit and go give it to someone else who needs it better, have I done anything morally wrong?
[00:54:08]  And would you consider it theft?
[00:54:10]  Now, this was the argument I was really trying to hammer him down on, or the question I was trying to hammer him down on at the time, because I was saying, look, if you're going to acknowledge that that is theft, then you would also have to acknowledge that taxation is theft.
[00:54:21]  And then you're in the position of having to argue that theft isn't wrong, which I think is a more difficult argument to make.
[00:54:27]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is, of course, yokratom.com, the biggest sponsor of everything we do at Gas Digital Network, everything we do at Part of the Problem.
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[00:55:26]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:55:28]  Anyway, okay, so he says, all else being equal, it's morally preferable for similar reasons that the redistribution of wealth and the expropriation of private business be carried out by democratically legitimized public institutions.
[00:55:46]  Okay, hold on.
[00:55:49]  Let me see.
[00:55:50]  Okay, we're getting toward the end here.
[00:55:52]  Liberty, equality, and fraternity.
[00:55:55]  Everything that's been said so far has relied on granting for the sake of argument that libertarians premise that liberty is non-interference.
[00:56:03]  But the moral case for redistribution is even stronger when we switch to the more plausible view that the kind of freedom that matters most is freedom from arbitrary domination.
[00:56:15]  This is what's sometimes called the Republican theory of liberty.
[00:56:19]  This the theory that Karl Marx was working with when he expressed his hope that the despotic system of the subordination of labor to capital can be superseded by the Republican and beneficient system of the Association of Free and Equal Producers.
[00:56:36]  If Amazon was taken away from Jeff Bezos and reorganized as a worker cooperative, then everyone who worked in one of those warehouses would have a greatly enhanced level of control over their own lives.
[00:56:49]  Even short of these radical long-term aspirations, if a future socialist government was increased, progressive taxation used increased progressive taxation to pay for social goods like a single-payer healthcare system, this would meaningfully diminish the unfreedom of employees who currently get their insurance through their employers.
[00:57:10]  If the boss tells you that you can't get a tattoo if you want to keep your job at his restaurant, you're a lot less likely to tell him to get lost and get it anyway.
[00:57:19]  If losing your jobs means losing your health insurance.
[00:57:23]  Okay, so to take this on, this is what I mean by where the semantics get into this.
[00:57:28]  Like when we talk about liberty, and I will say, I think most people, when they talk about liberty in this way, what they do mean is non-interference.
[00:57:38]  They mean like you are right.
[00:57:39]  You know, if you are out on like the frontier in the 1800s and you're just going out and trying to like explore new land and no one's interfering with you, then you have your liberty.
[00:57:53]  Your standard of living may not be great.
[00:57:55]  It's not going to say like, oh, everything's going to work out for you here, you know, but that's what we're talking about when we talk about liberty.
[00:58:01]  What Ben is talking about here is more just like what's going to be more beneficial?
[00:58:09]  What's going to work better?
[00:58:11]  And he's asserting that all of these things will work better.
[00:58:15]  But again, none of that is, this isn't an argument.
[00:58:18]  It's all just an assertion that things will work better if we did it this way.
[00:58:22]  People will be happier.
[00:58:22]  They will enjoy more life, more things about their lives.
[00:58:26]  So, if you're going to make this, there has to be an argument attached to it, or there's almost nothing to counter with.
[00:58:32]  You're just using the word freedom and then applying it to, you're using the word like freedom or liberty, where what the people you're arguing with clearly mean by that is, as you said, a lack of interference, a lack of people violating what we consider to be your negative rights, and then saying, Well, more accurately, we should just say, we should just use those words to what will work out better.
[00:58:53]  Doesn't it make more sense to say, You have the liberty to more money or something like that?
[00:58:57]  Like, oh, yeah, life will be better that way.
[00:58:59]  But it's just this is a like a trick.
[00:59:02]  This is you could you can say separately say, Look, I don't believe in negative rights.
[00:59:09]  I believe that we have a right to violate your negative rights.
[00:59:12]  I don't believe in any of these rights.
[00:59:13]  This is all nonsense to me.
[00:59:15]  And I think life will be better if we violate all of these rights.
[00:59:19]  Um, and here's why life will be better.
[00:59:22]  But you haven't given me a why, you've just told me that life will be better, and you're saying that's actually negative rights, or that's actually liberty or freedom or whatever.
[00:59:30]  So, this is all just to me, this is like a trick.
[00:59:33]  This isn't a real argument.
[00:59:35]  Um, and Ben Burgess's uh show is called Give Them an Argument.
[00:59:39]  So, I think he needs to give us an argument here.
[00:59:41]  By the way, check out his podcast.
[00:59:42]  It's a very good podcast, Give Them an Argument.
[00:59:45]  Um, anyway, uh, okay, anything you wanted to add to that?
[00:59:49]  Yeah, his example is also asked backwards.
[00:59:51]  I mean, his example is that you'll have less control over where you work because with employer healthcare, without government protections, uh, you're going to be stuck at a job and you won't have the freedom to do something like get a tattoo.
[01:00:06]  That overlooks so many laws that is a stat that have been established that ties your employer in with healthcare or even the existence of insurance and the entire marketplace for healthcare.
[01:00:18]  Well, exactly.
[01:00:18]  But this is kind of the point that I'm getting at: if you're not just asserting things will be better like this, you have to actually make an argument as to why.
[01:00:27]  And then we actually have to get into the weeds of, well, what's led to these policies?
[01:00:31]  What actually would make this better?
[01:00:33]  What was the cause of this problem to begin with?
[01:00:35]  And therefore, what would the solution be?
[01:00:37]  And also, you can't just look at things like, look, there's a few things here, right?
[01:00:41]  Like, just to say, like, oh, making Amazon a worker cooperative would make life better for the average worker in Amazon.
[01:00:51]  It's like, maybe, only maybe.
[01:00:54]  This depends on a lot of different factors.
[01:00:56]  And also, by the way, if Amazon goes out of business in a few years, it's not very clear that that's a worthwhile trade-off for the worker in Amazon, right?
[01:01:05]  Like, even if you were to get like better, better pay and better medical care for a few years, then you lose your job.
[01:01:10]  That may not be such a good trade-off.
[01:01:12]  So, there's a lot of different factors that you'd have to account for here.
[01:01:16]  But you'd also have to account for things like, like, it's like when people talk about, you know, sometimes people will say, you know, raise the minimum wage.
[01:01:24]  I don't care if I pay an extra dollar for a McDonald's burger or something like that.
[01:01:29]  And you're like, okay, fine.
[01:01:30]  But then you also have to account for that.
[01:01:32]  You don't just get to account for the guy working behind the counter gets a few more bucks an hour.
[01:01:38]  You also have to account for the fact that every working class, poor person who comes and eats at McDonald's is going to pay more for their money.
[01:01:45]  So would Amazon still be as successful of a company?
[01:01:48]  Would they serve their customers as well?
[01:01:50]  Like all of these things have to be accounted for.
[01:01:52]  It's a lot more complicated than just asserting like everything would be better.
[01:01:56]  There's no cost-benefit analysis here.
[01:01:58]  It's just things would be better like this.
[01:01:59]  And to your point, the fact that he is complaining about how health insurance is tied to your job and that makes people much less likely to want to lose their job, that that part is true.
[01:02:11]  But that all originated from government intervention to begin with.
[01:02:16]  It was during World War II when they had price controls and wage controls.
[01:02:22]  So you weren't allowed to give people raises.
[01:02:26]  You weren't allowed to pay people above a certain amount, but you were allowed to give them benefits.
[01:02:31]  And this is when employers started offering health insurance as part of their benefits.
[01:02:37]  And there's also all of these regulations right now that make it very, very difficult and burdensome to buy directly from health insurance companies to buy like a plan directly from them.
[01:02:50]  And it's much easier for businesses to buy bulk plans.
[01:02:54]  And a lot of this is because it's like a hyper-regulated field.
[01:02:59]  And so there's like all of these government policies that encourage health insurance to be tied to your job.
[01:03:06]  I do agree with him that I would rather live in a world where that wasn't the case.
[01:03:11]  But it's interesting that he's complaining about that because this was actually government interventionist policies that caused this whole situation.
[01:03:20]  Okay.
[01:03:22]  So back to the article.
[01:03:23]  It's important to be able to show that libertarian arguments don't work even on their own terms, but it's even more important to demonstrate that the socialist project is underpinned by a commitment to a far more expansive understanding of human freedom.
[01:03:38]  Again, you're just confusing human freedom with like human flourishing or success, and you haven't actually made an argument for why you think it'll be more successful, at least here in this piece.
[01:03:46]  Ben has made this in other places.
[01:03:49]  But again, it's like, that's not what we're talking about when we use the word freedom.
[01:03:54]  And I think we believe that a free society will lead to more human flourishing.
[01:04:00]  Okay.
[01:04:00]  And then finally, the final paragraph, Ben says, on this tax day, it's worth remembering that the first federal income taxes in the United States were imposed to form, to fund the war, to break the power of the planter class and free 3.9 million slaves.
[01:04:20]  This was without a doubt the deepest and most important advance in human freedom enabled by taxation thus far, but it won't be the last.
[01:04:31]  All right.
[01:04:32]  So I would just finish by saying this.
[01:04:38]  Ben Burgess, who I really do like and respect, but the title of this piece is How to Debate Libertarians and Destroy Them.
[01:04:47]  And the truth is that, and I think Ben would be the first to acknowledge this, that when we debated this very subject, he did not destroy me.
[01:04:55]  That was not the consensus.
[01:04:58]  And also, I don't think Ben thinks that.
[01:05:01]  And if you're going to try to debate libertarians and destroy them, and you're giving advice to these guys, do not bring up that last paragraph.
[01:05:10]  That's just very, very bad.
[01:05:12]  If you're debating any libertarian worth his salt, ooh, you're going to get really fucking wrecked when you bring up that last one.
[01:05:18]  Because here's the problem of saying on this tax day, it's worth remembering that the first federal income tax in the United States were imposed to fund the Civil War.
[01:05:28]  See, this is another added benefit of income taxes, Rob.
[01:05:31]  They fund wars.
[01:05:33]  Now, forget the fact that, okay, you can say...
[01:05:36]  Think about how many Americans died in the Civil War.
[01:05:38]  Right.
[01:05:38]  I mean, but even forget the fact of like, whatever, 600,000 Americans died.
[01:05:43]  It's the bloodiest war in American history.
[01:05:47]  Forget the fact that the Northern Army was conscripted and forced to go fight and kill their own countrymen.
[01:05:55]  You know, like if your whole thing is celebrating that it abolished slavery, you have a little bit of a problem with the fact that, you know, conscription, I know you may not like this.
[01:06:05]  I don't know if you're going to think this is circular logic or not, but conscription is a form of slavery.
[01:06:11]  So if your argument is that this freed slaves, that's not great.
[01:06:14]  Now, abolishing slavery was a very good thing.
[01:06:17]  And I think there's a very strong argument to say that that's the greatest advance in liberty in history, perhaps.
[01:06:27]  Slavery was also abolished throughout the West without fighting civil wars.
[01:06:32]  It's to America's great shame that it took a civil war in order to abolish slavery.
[01:06:39]  It's not something to gloat about that, like, oh, isn't this so wonderful that we had this tax base to fund civil wars, the civil war.
[01:06:49]  However, I think the much bigger problem than that is that you can't just pick one war and then say, hey, look, taxes funded this war and something good came out of it, therefore.
[01:07:05]  You know, I mean, therefore, what?
[01:07:07]  I mean, he doesn't exactly make a clear argument.
[01:07:09]  He just kind of ends it with a like, let's remember this on this day.
[01:07:12]  But so my counter then would be on this tax day, two years later, after you wrote this piece.
[01:07:19]  I'd say, well, if you're going to think about the war, one war that was funded through taxation, and let's just say like none of those problems even existed in the Civil War, right?
[01:07:28]  There's nobody died in the Civil War.
[01:07:30]  The army was completely voluntary.
[01:07:32]  They just walked in there and freed slaves.
[01:07:34]  You don't get to just think of one war that was funded by taxation.
[01:07:39]  You got to think of all of them because they were all funded through taxation, right?
[01:07:44]  So sorry, but you also got to own Vietnam and Korea and Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and Libya and even that genocide in Yemen that you're talking about.
[01:07:54]  Oh, those Saudi planes were refueled by American military members who were paid by U.S. tax dollars.
[01:08:02]  Now, you may not like that, and you can say that that's not justified, even as he said before.
[01:08:08]  Like, I guess that is theft if you tax people to go, you know, start wars of genocide.
[01:08:14]  But moving away from the theoretical to the real world, that's really what's happening under this system.
[01:08:20]  And so, that's also one of the costs that you have to think about when you talk about setting up these systems.
[01:08:27]  Like, if you're talking about setting up a system where there are a group of people, politicians in Washington, D.C., who have the legal ability to take by violence, take through violence and the threat of violence, working people's money.
[01:08:45]  Now, this is a democratic socialist who claims to be a champion of the working class.
[01:08:49]  You also have to account for how that could be used in the real world.
[01:08:54]  Otherwise, your theoretical model is nonsense.
[01:08:57]  Otherwise, your theoretical model is like, well, it's okay as long as they're using it for only really good things that I care about.
[01:09:04]  But what are the odds that when you create this power center, it's going to be used for those very good things?
[01:09:10]  And how much evidence, how many examples do you need of what they're actually being used for in real life?
[01:09:18]  So, I'll end the podcast on this because I always love this is what Scott Horton used this example.

=== Punitive Taxes and Fifth Amendment Rights (03:49) ===

[01:09:26]  But let's say, right?
[01:09:28]  Let's talk about what's really being defended here as we come off of this year's tax day.
[01:09:34]  Let's say, hypothetically, that we lived in what me and you would consider a free society, something close to that.
[01:09:42]  So, there was no income tax, right?
[01:09:45]  And let's say we had never heard of an income tax.
[01:09:48]  We had never thought of the IRS or the anything like this, right?
[01:09:52]  And the Soviet Union or Vladimir Putin invaded or China invaded.
[01:09:59]  Pick whoever your biggest boogeyman is.
[01:10:01]  Like, if you're a left-winger, Vladimir Putin, and if you're a right-winger, it's China, okay?
[01:10:06]  Whoever your biggest boogeyman is.
[01:10:07]  That's it.
[01:10:08]  They invade and they go, all right, guys, we're instituting this new thing.
[01:10:13]  Now that we've conquered you and you're our bitch, we're instituting this new thing.
[01:10:18]  But there's no term for any of this yet.
[01:10:21]  So we'll just describe it to you.
[01:10:23]  Here's the new system.
[01:10:25]  We have made it a crime to work.
[01:10:31]  We've made it a crime to produce stuff.
[01:10:36]  And the punishment is a fee.
[01:10:40]  So there is now a fine.
[01:10:43]  for production.
[01:10:45]  You know, it's in all other areas of life, right?
[01:10:47]  Like people, even Ben Burgess, I'm sure, will understand basic economic incentives, right?
[01:10:52]  Like if you put a fine on something or a tax on something, it's to disincentivize it, right?
[01:10:57]  Okay, so anyway, or to punish it, right?
[01:10:59]  You put a tax on something to punish people for doing it, a fine on something to punish people.
[01:11:04]  You don't fine people, you know, whatever for, you don't fine someone for like parking in front of a hydrant because you want more people to do it.
[01:11:12]  You do it to punish that person because you want less people to do it.
[01:11:15]  So they've now announced Vladimir Putin and China have taken over and they've announced we're now putting a fine on production.
[01:11:23]  And we have repealed the Fifth Amendment.
[01:11:26]  You no longer have the right to not incriminate yourself.
[01:11:29]  In fact, we insist once a year, every year, that you incriminate yourself.
[01:11:34]  And we insist that you show all of your, you have no more privacy rights.
[01:11:39]  We insist that you show us all of your papers, all of your bank accounts, all of your money.
[01:11:44]  We need to see everywhere where you've made a dime because you might have produced something and not paid your fine.
[01:11:49]  And if you don't, if you are not completely transparent with us, if you get something wrong while in this process where we've stripped you of your Fifth Amendment right, when you are being forced to incriminate yourself to the government, if you get something wrong, don't think we won't ruin you.
[01:12:04]  We will make your life a living hell.
[01:12:06]  And if you avoid us, we will go back 20 years on you and force you to pay all of this.
[01:12:10]  And if you get something wrong when reporting yourself to us, we always reserve the right to separate you from your loved ones and throw you in a cage like you're an animal.
[01:12:21]  If that just happened, because Putin and China invaded and conquered our country and is now treating us like the bitch losers that we are, which one of us would defend this system on moral grounds?
[01:12:36]  You're only defending it because it wasn't done by some foreign occupying army.
[01:12:41]  It's done by a domestic occupying army known as the Democrats and the Republicans.
[01:12:46]  Because it's these corrupt, blood-soaked lawyers in Washington, D.C., we're supposed to treat this as if it's any different than if China invaded tomorrow and did this to us.
[01:12:56]  The whole system is nuts.
[01:12:59]  It's insane.
[01:13:00]  And I will say I welcome Democratic socialists trying to engage libertarians on this debate.
[01:13:09]  So anyway, that's our tax day episode.
[01:13:12]  Check out Ben Burgess's podcast, by the way.
[01:13:14]  Give them an argument.

=== Episode Wrap-Up and Future Dates (00:43) ===

[01:13:15]  He's a good dude and he has a lot of really interesting guests on.
[01:13:18]  And he's right about a lot of issues, just not this one.
[01:13:21]  But you know how you can celebrate your freedom?
[01:13:22]  Sure, the government took some of your money yet to pay taxes.
[01:13:25]  Come out for summer porch tour and the kickoff party.
[01:13:27]  It's going to be at Top Lobsters Ranch with the lock with Clint and the Tower Gang pod.
[01:13:33]  And then I got one coming up in California.
[01:13:35]  More dates come your way.
[01:13:37]  If you go to my Twitter handle, Robbie the Fire, there's a link to the Eventbrite, which also has the, I got to get links up.
[01:13:44]  We'll have in the episode description the links for all of this and also for Chicago and more dates coming your way.
[01:13:50]  All right, brother.
[01:13:51]  Sounds good.
[01:13:52]  And of course, I'm looking forward to Reno and Chicago with you.
[01:13:55]  These are going to be some fun shows.
[01:13:56]  All right.
[01:13:57]  Thanks for listening, everybody.
[01:13:58]  Peace.