The underlying false assumption that pervades this discussion is the concept of property as an absolute.
Fact: If you create anything of value, you did it because of thousands of generations of humans who built the infrastructure - physical and mental - that was your starting point. That, plus whatever qualities of character, knowledge, intelligence you have created in yourself as Value Added. This clearly applies to both physical and mental capital. How many useful words have you invented? Thrown into a wilderness without hope of contact with civilization, how long would you survive? And that's with all the incredible wealth of capital that you have in your head. You are utterly dependent upon other people, past and present, for your existence, although you are also clearly dependent upon your own virtues for how well you use that inherited capital.
As I've discussed elsewhere, the only solution that solves the general problem of property, including the impossible to answer issues that libertarians avoid talking about, such as children's rights and limits on original claims (claiming the moon, or all the land to the horizon, or to the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy, etc.) is to set property in the context of its origin, the common law - literally, the law of the commons.
Once you realize that property itself, including the contents of your mind, is derived from the commons - plus your own value added - then the issue of financing a state, or the anarchist equivalent in function - becomes one of charging for the private use of that commons. If everyone pays a lease fee for taking property out of the commons for personal use, a fee that reflects the natural expenses of maintaining the commons itself, insuring against damages due to malfeasance or criminality on the part of the lease holder, paying the rest of humanity for its loss of control and use of that particular piece of commons, sustaining the commons infrastructure, including the common law legal structure, etc., then there will never be a need for additional "taxes."
Since the commons itself is limited in any given temporal/spatial locale - there's only so much land, and only so much of that land suitable for farming, etc., the lease fees will naturally also be bid up by those who see a way to profit, thereby providing a bonus distributed to all the members of the commons equally.
During reasonably prosperous times, there should be enough bonus that most people could live on the bonus alone, although very frugally compared to their neighbors who chose to be more productive. During the extremely prosperous times that we are facing as we move toward the "Singularity" - assuming we don't wipe ourselves out first - most people could probably retire and live on the commons fees if they so chose, enjoying riches as far beyond those of today as the life of the common man in the Ist World is today beyond the dreams of a Medieval monarch, although still very frugally by comparison to the gainfully employed.
In case you haven't noticed, this totally solves the problem of the "contradiction" plaguing libertarians and objectivists regarding the necessity to initiate force (taxation) to pay for state services. Unlike the unlimited and ultimately catastrophic competition of "need" that drives state decisions, the commons would be run on the basis of maximum profit, unless most people are insane, in which case - ceteris paribus - no system would work anyway. Most people, even in the 3rd world, have absorbed the principle of not killing the golden goose, meaning that they would be quite happy to see productive people succeed and grow rich, as they would be getting a cut of the action via the bidding up of lease fees, just as a stockholder in a company wants to see that company succeed.
|
