Throwing someone in prison for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade is no less egregious a violation of human rights than invading their privacy or their right to free speech.
The right to control one's own wealth is arguably the most important human right, since its infringement is the cause of so much death and poverty around the world.
Surely, the problem is in defining what it's "one's own wealth". It's there where opinions are going to diverge.
Very few people will dispute your right to own a pair of boots, but a lot more could have problems with you owning more land that all the farmers of your country together or more money that an entire country.
In most cases, it's not a problem defining what one's own wealth is. If I receive currency in private trade, that's my own wealth. The fact that the government needs me to surrender my privacy and disclose how much currency I received in order to be able to enforce a tax on currency transactions (e.g. an income tax) is an indication that currency received in trade is truly 'private' property. A law requiring me to hand over a share of that currency, and requiring that I be imprisoned if I do not comply, violates my human rights.
The edge cases are natural resources - the most prominently example being land. But the current bevy of economic laws make no distinction between this class of property and other classes, and limit one's right to what is clearly their own wealth.
There is not such thing as "clearly their own wealth" because there is not a natural right to private property but a society agreement. What you can or can't own depends on the circumstances.
For instance, can you be the owner of 1000 can of food?
Absolutely, if you are in the bay area, because the society there allow you that.
What about an island without any other food that is inhabited by 40 other people? I doubt it very much.
The right to private property is every bit as natural as the right to one's own body. Both come from the act of appropriating natural resources and converting it into something of greater value that is personally useful, and making exclusive of the resulting property.
>What you can or can't own depends on the circumstances.
You're confusing the act of protecting a right with the right itself. A right does not cease to exist because the law fails to protect it.
"Both come from the act of appropriating natural resources and converting it into something of greater value that is personally useful"
Where is that written?
I would like to point to you that your "private property", including your own body, could be considered as a "natural resource" ready to be exploited by other agents in the environment.
I doubt that throwing copies of "Atlas Shrugged" to their heads is going to change their mind (even signed copies!).
That is how property has historically been justified. Read up on property rights if you want to learn more about it.
>I would like to point to you that your "private property", including your own body, could be considered as a "natural resource" ready to be exploited by other agents in the environment.
The principle of property rights is that you cannot make use of natural resources that have already been appropriated and turned into someone else's property, so no, another person couldn't simply exploit my property/body under the property rights framework.
Natural resources, from which most current wealth is created are 'edge cases' ?
And your first paragraph is pretty much "all taxes are theft", that is usually the mantra of fanatical libertarians.
The economic illiteracy required to come up with your conclusions is astounding. But then I actually looked at your comment history and the pattern became clear.
Most current wealth is not in the form of natural resources.. Buildings, machinery, intellectual property (including trademarks) are not natural resources. We could charge every appropriator of natural resources a fee commensurate with the value that they are appropriating, and there would still be vast amounts of private property in the world, and that socialists would still think they have a right to forcibly redistribute.
>And your first paragraph is pretty much "all taxes are theft", that is usually the mantra of fanatical libertarians.
One person's "fanatical libertarian" is another person's human rights advocate.
>The economic illiteracy required to come up with your conclusions is astounding.
> Most current wealth is not in the form of natural resources.. Buildings, machinery, intellectual property (including trademarks) are not natural resources.
Incorrect. Buildings stand on land (natural resources) and require significant amounts of energy to be erected (natural resource). So does machinery.
IP is the only thing you have going for here. How useful is IP without infrastructure and capital to support it? Is it useful, for example, to know how to make a solar panel if you have no means of producing it or extracting the metals and materials needed to make it, because that area is controlled by someone else?
> One person's "fanatical libertarian" is another person's human rights advocate.
No. Fanatical libertarians are a fringe group, as is evidenced by elections and the amount of ridicule they rightly garner in any factual discussion. There's no human right to "not be taxes while enjoying the benefits of infrastructure". Perhaps some libertarians' positions are more nuanced, but you wouldn't know it from their comments.
> Worthless ad hominem.
Worthless libertarian drivel. Calling someone illiterate or incompetent in a subject is not an ad hominem when it is based in fact. It's clearly not your area of expertise, so it's not shameful to admit so.
>Incorrect. Buildings stand on land (natural resources) and require significant amounts of energy to be erected (natural resource). So does machinery.
Everything is made from natural resources. That goes without saying. The question is what portion of the value of the property is constituted by the value of the natural resources.
The value of the natural resource inputs to production form a minor fraction of the total value of what is produced. This is because the effort it takes to configure and organize those natural resources into something with added value is what holds the majority of the value. This is why economic systems make such a big difference in the success of economies. Good laws incentivize and reward effective efforts.
>No. Fanatical libertarians are a fringe group, as is evidenced by elections and the amount of ridicule they rightly garner in any factual discussion.
Ok let's play this game:
Libertarians are the ultimate human rights advocates. The majority believes in a lot of silly stuff, like using violence against non-violent people. The majority believing something doesn't make it right.
Your inane insults are typical of anti-libertarian extremists who can't tolerate someone advocating that other people be left alone and not violently forced to conform to a plan imposed by others.
>Worthless libertarian drivel.
Everything you've written has been worthless and intolerant authoritarian drivel. It's the product of an infantile and narcissistic mind, that psychologically projects their own characteristics onto others in the form of insults.
I don't understand how you can have a truely private trade. If a trade depends on roads or schools or the internet or police, don't the people who provide those things have a right to share in the benefits of that trade?
where is the money in that private deal coming from if not the state? And what it is the state if not and element (for best or worst) of how we, as a society, have chosen to organize?
You can use private currency. No need to use government issued money. Yet tax laws make no distinction between trade involving government issued currency and trade involving wholly private currencies/properties. And you're making a fallacy of composition in claiming we as a society have decided something. What you're really arguing is that the majority has decided something and that they have a right to force their will on everyone.
The only principle that I want society to follow is to not rob others of their right to their person or property. Everything else can be organized through voluntary association.
As desirable as it is, it's important to realize that a right to one's own wealth cannot be absolute. Since a right to one's own wealth does not say anything about a right to obtain wealth - that is the role of equal chances, equality in front of the law an other fairness principles encoded in modern societies -, it is for itself perfectly consistent with a society that has Gini index 1. That means that only 1 person owns all resources and everyone else owns nothing.
Such a society would be not be just and nobody wants to live in it. The general idea to prevent this kind of barbarism is that additional fairness criteria are needed that ensure that everybody can live in dignity, and only if your wealth does not violate these principles should you have a right to it. Fair resource distribution principally conflicts with the right to one's own property and unfortunately out of the box also with the Pareto efficiency of transfers.
>That means that only 1 person owns all resources and everyone else owns nothing.
That's like saying we should not have an absolute right to be more intelligent than the average person since such a right is perfectly consistent with a society where one person is infinitely more intelligent than everyone else.
Material equality is not a right, and the pursuit of a society with material equality does not grant any party a right to imprison someone for their refusal to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade.
The problem is that extreme inequality under a property system is functionally equivalent to slavery. If one person owns all of a society's resources, then everyone else must work for them if they want to survive. To claim that the enforcement of property rights is still just in such a scenario, is to argue that autocracy is just.
It's not functionally equivalent to slavery. Slavery has nothing to do with being resource poor. It has to do with threats of violence being used to compel one person to work for another.
There is a fundamental moral difference between using violent threats and physical confinement from using offers of payment to compel work.
Taking a job because the alternative is to starve is still a consensual interaction. We need to work to survive. We can go out into the wilderness, and live off the land, which would let us survive at subsistence levels, or we can go into civilization and work within an employment contract that gives us a much higher standard of living.
The freedom to choose ensures that generally speaking, people in a market economy are choosing one of the better options available to them, rather than one of the poorer ones. It also ensures that when people DO interact with others, it is because it is generally mutually beneficial. This basic dynamic leads to an emergent property of actions carried out in markets generally being a net-value gain for the economy as a whole.
The right to control one's own wealth is arguably the most important human right, since its infringement is the cause of so much death and poverty around the world.