Libertarian Capitalists Seriously

[Ocean Seal]

I can understand most mainstream capitalists when they talk about "well da rich create the jobs and if we get rid of them our economy won't grow. Trickle down economics bro."

But the libertarian capitalists/ anarcho-capitalists don't really make any sense. I don't get their rhetoric of taxation is theft. OMG those poor rich people they're holding them at gunpoint and telling them to pay taxes to subsidize the poor.

Why the fuck do they act as if taxes are the worst thing in the world? Not even from a "well taxes stop economic growth perspective", but from an "its immoral to steal the fruits from the "labor" (which we all know is proportional to what the bourgeoisie get)" perspective. I mean if they are bourgeois or even petite-bourgeois, I can understand this, but otherwise why?

Tax a billionaire 90% and s/he will still have more than enough money that they'll never run out.

And then they always resort to ad hominem. Well how much have you donated? Your a parasite who has no idea what its like to work for a living (even though I presume most of them come from petite-bourgeois backgrounds).

Seriously with everything that is wrong with society, why the fuck rage over taxes?

[Apoi_Viitor]

I can't really explain it, but if you understand the moral foundations of libertarianism, then I think you'll understand why.


Nozick takes his position to follow from a basic moral principle associated with Immanuel Kant and enshrined in Kant’s second formulation of his famous Categorical Imperative: “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.” The idea here is that a human being, as a rational agent endowed with self-awareness, free will, and the possibility of formulating a plan of life, has an inherent dignity and cannot properly be treated as a mere thing, or used against his will as an instrument or resource in the way an inanimate object might be.

In line with this, Nozick also describes individual human beings as self-owners (though it isn’t clear whether he regards this as a restatement of Kant’s principle, a consequence of it, or an entirely independent idea). The thesis of self-ownership, a notion that goes back in political philosophy at least to John Locke, is just the claim that individuals own themselves – their bodies, talents and abilities, labor, and by extension the fruits or products of their exercise of their talents, abilities and labor. They have all the prerogatives with respect to themselves that a slaveholder claims with respect to his slaves. But the thesis of self-ownership would in fact rule out slavery as illegitimate, since each individual, as a self-owner, cannot properly be owned by anyone else. (Indeed, many libertarians would argue that unless one accepts the thesis of self-ownership, one has no way of explaining why slavery is evil. After all, it cannot be merely because slaveholders often treat their slaves badly, since a kind-hearted slaveholder would still be a slaveholder, and thus morally blameworthy, for that. The reason slavery is immoral must be because it involves a kind of stealing – the stealing of a person from himself.)

But if individuals are inviolable ends-in-themselves (as Kant describes them) and self-owners, it follows, Nozick says, that they have certain rights, in particular (and here again following Locke) rights to their lives, liberty, and the fruits of their labor. To own something, after all, just is to have a right to it, or, more accurately, to possess the bundle of rights – rights to possess something, to dispose of it, to determine what may be done with it, etc. – that constitute ownership; and thus to own oneself is to have such rights to the various elements that make up one’s self. These rights function, Nozick says, as side-constraints on the actions of others; they set limits on how others may, morally speaking, treat a person. So, for example, since you own yourself, and thus have a right to yourself, others are constrained morally not to kill or maim you (since this would involve destroying or damaging your property), or to kidnap you or forcibly remove one of your bodily organs for transplantation in someone else (since this would involve stealing your property). They are also constrained not to force you against your will to work for another’s purposes, even if those purposes are good ones. For if you own yourself, it follows that you have a right to determine whether and how you will use your self-owned body and its powers, e.g. either to work or to refrain from working.

So far this all might seem fairly uncontroversial. But what follows from it, in Nozick’s view, is the surprising and radical conclusion that taxation, of the redistributive sort in which modern states engage in order to fund the various programs of the bureaucratic welfare state, is morally illegitimate. It amounts to a kind of forced labor, for the state so structures the tax system that any time you labor at all, a certain amount of your labor time – the amount that produces the wealth taken away from you forcibly via taxation – is time you involuntarily work, in effect, for the state. Indeed, such taxation amounts to partial slavery, for in giving every citizen an entitlement to certain benefits (welfare, social security, or whatever), the state in effect gives them an entitlement, a right, to a part of the proceeds of your labor, which produces the taxes that fund the benefits; every citizen, that is, becomes in such a system a partial owner of you (since they have a partial property right in part of you, i.e. in your labor). But this is flatly inconsistent with the principle of self-ownership.

The various programs of the modern liberal welfare state are thus immoral, not only because they are inefficient and incompetently administered, but because they make slaves of the citizens of such a state. Indeed, the only sort of state that can be morally justified is what Nozick calls a minimal state or “night-watchman” state, a government which protects individuals, via police and military forces, from force, fraud, and theft, and administers courts of law, but does nothing else. In particular, such a state cannot regulate what citizens eat, drink, or smoke (since this would interfere with their right to use their self-owned bodies as they see fit), cannot control what they publish or read (since this would interfere with their right to use the property they’ve acquired with their self-owned labor – e.g. printing presses and paper – as they wish), cannot administer mandatory social insurance schemes or public education (since this would interfere with citizens’ rights to use the fruits of their labor as they desire, in that some citizens might decide that they would rather put their money into private education and private retirement plans), and cannot regulate economic life in general via minimum wage and rent control laws and the like (since such actions are not only economically suspect – tending to produce bad unintended consequences like unemployment and housing shortages – but violate citizens’ rights to charge whatever they want to for the use of their own property).

[gendoikari]

I can understand most mainstream capitalists when they talk about "well da rich create the jobs and if we get rid of them our economy won't grow. Trickle down economics bro."

But the libertarian capitalists/ anarcho-capitalists don't really make any sense. I don't get their rhetoric of taxation is theft. OMG those poor rich people they're holding them at gunpoint and telling them to pay taxes to subsidize the poor.

Why the fuck do they act as if taxes are the worst thing in the world? Not even from a "well taxes stop economic growth perspective", but from an "its immoral to steal the fruits from the "labor" (which we all know is proportional to what the bourgeoisie get)" perspective. I mean if they are bourgeois or even petite-bourgeois, I can understand this, but otherwise why?

Tax a billionaire 90% and s/he will still have more than enough money that they'll never run out.

And then they always resort to ad hominem. Well how much have you donated? Your a parasite who has no idea what its like to work for a living (even though I presume most of them come from petite-bourgeois backgrounds).

Seriously with everything that is wrong with society, why the fuck rage over taxes?
same problem as the normal capitalistsThey either already have it all and want more, or think they will have it all some day and don't want it taken away when they get there. Don't worry about them though, they will be the first ones exiled after the revolution.