Now that ought to make a difference!
The latter consideration is not a huge deal: The folks at the Ayn Rand Institute are clearly time-servers, bovine blunderers who think their function is to bleat and re-bleat the big-boss bloviator’s atrocious arguments. But I gain nothing from lamenting their uninterruptible ineptitude, so I would rather just put paid to the whole pathetic lot of them.
Here are the issues Luke raises, growing out of his admirable and highly-recommended deep reading of my writing:
I was reading an article on your site and have a question.
You say: “Your money was stolen from you, yes. But once it was, it became part of a vast pool of stolen funds, and none of that money is yours.”
My question: then whose is it? Who (if anyone?!) has the valid claim to the money? Surely not the looters?
Also, if innocent taxpayers have no valid claim on that pool, how could they rightly claim a tax refund, ask for it back, or sue, since the funds would inevitably come from that pool? (The latter two you suggested Ayn Rand should have done here.)
I do accept your point that the pool is draining, hence the dollar value of any tax victim’s justified claim must shrink over time, eventually to zero.
That’s actually more and less than I said, but these are great questions. My answers are matters of both ontology – what is true – and teleology – what you should do about it.
So my argument – old enough to be unemployably college-miseducated by now – is that you own your property to the extent you can defend it. People love to talk about “rights” as if a right had a tangible existence. This is false to fact. Rights are useful fictions, but they are never other than ideas. Your imagined “right” to your property is expressed by your actual defense of it, and, if you fail in that defense, your “right” has been terminated – regardless of anything you might say about it.
So I would argue that every taxed dollar ceased to be yours at the moment you voluntarily surrendered it. Yes, tax collectors are brutes employed by thugs, but no one other than your self can cause you to take any purposive action, and to voluntarily surrender your property out of fear is not somehow not voluntarily surrendering it. You failed to defend your property by giving it away, and you have no ongoing claim to it.
How would you defend your property? Forcibly. It’s raise, check or fold in every transaction of your life, and you have chosen to fold – repeatedly and without exception. All of the subsequent chatter about “rights” amounts to salving wounded vanity: “It’s a matter of principle, damnit!”
No. It’s a matter of everyday negotiation. When the neighbor kid swipes your lawn ornament, you defend your property by demanding it back from his parents. When ants find their way to your sugar bowl, you defend your property by discarding the now-contaminated sugar – and by eradicating the ants. When vandals swipe your hubcaps, you replace them and never think about it again – voluntarily surrendering your “rightful claim” because the cost of defending that property is too high in your estimation.
This latter strategy is the one you’re taking with taxes, as well. You do not believe that taxation is morally righteous, but you prefer to fold rather than raising the stakes by rebellion, where the American patriots chose to keep raising the stakes until they were too high for their predators to bear.
So whose money is it, once you have voluntarily surrendered your funds to the tax collector? As a matter of fact if not of “right,” that money belongs to the taxing authority, as evidenced by their success – and your failure – at defending it.
This does not make that behavior morally defensible – too much the contrary – but it does establish the ontological boundaries of teleological claims: If you are not willing to risk your life to defend your property, you will in due course voluntarily surrender it to someone who is willing to kill you to steal it. People who beat their swords into plowshares plow for those who do not.
So when Luke asks “Who has a valid claim to the money?” – he is inquiring about a world not in evidence, with the word “valid” implying that fiction is fact – and that the fact should yield to the fiction. That kind of claim can work among people mutually committed to a common ideal of moral goodness. But as each of us can note from our repeated voluntary contributions to our thuggish overlords, a validity defense is the table-pounding you undertake only after your actual defense of your property has already failed.
Is the money validly the property of the taxing authority? Blah, blah, blah. Is it actually their property – and no longer yours? I say yes.
And: “[I]f innocent taxpayers have no valid claim on that pool, how could they rightly claim a tax refund, ask for it back, or sue, since the funds would inevitably come from that pool?“
I don’t think they could. I offered those options as a way of illustrating how Ayn Rand might have behaved, if she actually did think she had an enforceably-valid claim to her own past voluntarily-surrendered tax contributions:
How might she have recovered her property, if she actually believed it was hers? First by simply asking for it back. Second by suing to be made whole. Third by direct action. She did none of these things. Instead, by way of her attorneys, she filled out paperwork and stood in line, metaphorical hat in hand, begging for alms from her own despoilers.
By these actions, she demonstrates that she herself did not believe the property was really hers. Instead, she was knowingly and willfully pilfering other peoples’ funds, like a slave swiping biscuits from the master’s table, and calling that restitution[.]
I’m not commending any of these actions. I am simply pointing out that taking money as alms from the taxing authority is not restitution but is instead the fullest possible endorsement of its predations: To repeatedly volunteer to be preyed upon by your neighbors is shameful, but to make your neighbors your prey is criminal.
(I have further thoughts on Ayn Rand’s late-life Social Security parasitism if anyone cares to revisit that topic.)
I can think of three different ways of getting lost in issues like these.
The first is simply the idea of “objective” “rights” discussed above – claims that exist apart from the minds of the people entertaining them. If you voluntarily surrendered your property, it is no longer yours – not by right and not in reality.
The second is the “it’s a matter of principle, damnit!” dodge. “Fiat justitia ruat caelum!” we bellow in the courtroom – or the barroom. “Let justice be done though the heavens fall!” But almost no one alive right now says that about his own heaven – and that’s what gets the taxes paid. If we were willing risk death killing tax collectors to defend our property, there would be no taxes.
And the third is simply the idea of a final reckoning. The stuff in that warehouse full of stolen gear can be restored to its original owners because it is non-fungible and undiminished – and because that particular crime spree is now over. With the exception of a brief paradise in the Hellas of old, taxation is never over, so a once-and-for-all-reckoning cannot happen until it is. Even then, there is no reasonable way to tell which dollar is whose – and the money has all been flushed, anyway.
So what should you do about all this? Cultivate indifference and press on regardless.
You obviously do not intend to forcibly defend your wealth from the tax collector, so why not quit bitching about it? You only exterminated those few ants in your kitchen, even though they’re all out to get you – and you don’t do anything at all about petty vandals. If you are willing to voluntarily pay taxes in order not be be imprisoned – or killed – pay up and put it behind you. You are voluntarily a slave and that’s shameful, but you only make that shame worse by pretending to a ferocity you do not exhibit. Whatever it is that mattered to you more than defending that tax money, put your mind to that and make the most of it.
There is more here, and more of Ayn Rand and her mindless minions, too: Abstract justice versus actual egoism. Pursuing your own values is your only job – not simply as a human being but as an organism as such – and, accordingly, it is not your job to fight your neighbor’s battles while he is always in a state of surrender. Arguing abstract justice with criminals is futile, anyway, but surrendering your own values for someone else’s sake is immoral, in my view, since it is self-destructive.
With ants, vandals and oligarchs, you have by your choices negotiated the trade-offs you can live with. The rational thing to do is simply to get on with your life. Until you are willing to risk your values fighting your predators, you will accomodate them instead. You may someday change that resolution, but until you do, you should pursue the values that mattered to you more and rejoice in what you have, rather then lamenting what you have lost.
