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Anarchy State and Utopia, Freedom, Government, political philosophy, Robert Nozick, taxation, taxes
“Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Some persons find this claim obviously true: taking the earnings of n hours labor is like taking n hours from the person; it is like forcing the person to work n hours for another’s purpose. Others find the claim absurd. But even these, if they object to forced labor, would oppose forcing unemployed hippies to work for the benefit of the needy. And they would also object to forcing each person to work five extra hours each week for the benefit of the needy…
The man who chooses to work longer to gain an income more than sufficient for his basic needs prefers some extra goods or services to the leisure and activities he could perform during the possible nonworking hours; whereas the man who chooses not to work the extra time prefers the leisure activities to the extra goods or services he could acquire by working more. Given this, if it would be illegitimate for a tax system to seize some of a man’s leisure (forced labor) for the purpose of serving the needy, how can it be legitimate for a tax system to seize some of a man’s goods for that purpose? Why should we treat the man whose happiness requires certain material goods or services differently from the man whose preferences and desires make such goods unnecessary for his happiness? Why should the man who prefers seeing a movie (and who has to earn money for a ticket) be open to the required call to aid the needy, while the person who prefers looking at a sunset (and hence need earn no extra money) is not? Indeed, isn’t it surprising that redistributionists choose to ignore the man whose pleasures are so easily attainable without extra labor, while adding yet another burden to the poor unfortunate who must work for his pleasures? If anything, one would have expected the reverse. Why is the person with the nonmaterial or nonconsumption desire allowed to proceed unimpeded to his most favored feasible alternative, whereas the man whose pleasures or desires involve material things and who must work for extra money (thereby serving whomever considers his activities valuable enough to pay him) is constrained in what he can realize?”
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From Robert Nozick’s seminal work on libertarian political philosophy, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
There is perhaps no other political philosopher who can, with such ease and readability, lure you towards such an otherwise complex and apparently significant conclusion. As with all of Nozick’s famous thought experiments, this is worth reading several times and slowly, and pondering, and reading again.
If anyone knows of a solid rebuttal to Nozick’s conception of taxes, please let me know here.
danielmullin81 said:
Thanks for posting. I hadn`t thought in these terms before, but when you change the `currency` from money to time, nobody would support redistributivist policies. A very interesting angle!
jrbenjamin said:
Yeah, I feel the exact same way. Absolutely brilliant rhetorical move that’s extremely compelling and difficult to refute. It doesn’t exactly tell you how to formulate the tax code (which I still see as necessary), but it should give proponents of robust welfare statism pause.
drgeraldstein said:
Although I’m neither an economist nor a philosopher, I don’t think it is that simple. First, not all money “taken” from the worker is for someone else. Most of us support fire departments, roads, bridges, police, soldiers, etc. Secondly, I wonder how those who are totally against any kind of redistribution would feel if the presence of more “street people” got in the way of living the lives they wanted, led to increased crime from people who could not otherwise eat, etc. Or, to go to a further extreme, led to a permanent underclass that undermined the manufacturers and shop owners in their effort to find people to buy their products.
deisticchristian said:
It really irritates me when people equate taxes with stealing. That’s not what is going on at all. Instead, society is getting together and agreeing that the poor and less fortunate among us need extra help so that they can have a minimal level of living (as is just in a society as rich as ours). Thus, they agree that they will give up some of their excess wealth to do this. It is NOT stealing, and it pisses me off to no end when people call it that.
The only way it feels like stealing is that a rich man likely did not vote for the representatives who decided that on our behalf. It explains why there are so many superPACs dedicated to screwing the poor as hard as they can. A rich man does not like to be parted from his money. Jesus was all about that in the parable about Lazarus and the rich man. It’s been 2000 years and nothing has changed. The rich still hate the poor for the very fact they are poor and aren’t willing to give up even a penny that they won’t even miss to help them out.
The only thing that pisses me off even more is when rich people try to use the Bible to justify their mistreatment of the poor, as today’s GOP does.
Chris said:
I think you’re missing the point. You might have a poor man putting in more hours than a rich man. This is how I understand the dilemma:
we all spend our time engaged in certain pursuits. Some of these pursuits have a dollar sign attached to them. Assuming we agree that the taxes we give are part of a debt to society, why should one man’s debt be larger because he works more hours?
If Bob works 20 hours and lives on it, and John works 50 hours to get ahead, does that make John more indebted to society than Bob? Assume they are earning the same wage.
sofie.elise.quist@gmail.com said:
I would be inclined to say that John is more indebted to society because resources and oppertunities are not unlimited. Leaving Bob out of the equation, let’s assume someone else wanted John’s job, and the opportunity to work 50 hours a week and earn money to ‘get ahead’. But he can’t because John has the job. So when you earn money, seize an oppertunity or otherwise obtain a part of the resources available to people in your society – you also prevent someone else from obtaining that, and therefore you are indebted to society.
Dave said:
if i havent been asked my consent and monies earned from my labor are taken, how do you call it anything other than stealing?
you say people are coming together to do this, i was not asked for my consent.
marfmc said:
All true! Thanks. Love, M
Sent from my iPhone
Robert Benjamin said:
Easy on generalizations…poor and rich, we are all part of our society and nation.
Taxes to help those in need and maintain the services required for a functional society like fire departments and police and bridges are good. The problem arises when you trigger the destroying economic forces of diminishing returns, when you overtax the deserving to the benefit of the undeserving, taking away the incentive to work and produce.
The challenge is to never reach the limit of charging too much and never pass the apex in the graph of returns when taxes become destructive to society. Affecting all.
Remember that a dollar taken by the government has the imbedded assumption that the government and its burocracy is wiser in spending it than the individual that earned it…which has been proven wrong many times.
john said:
Thank you for the post, thought provoking as it was. I do not agree with the premise or the conclusion, but it was interesting to read.
Carl said:
Statists don’t like the reasoning, but it is perfectly rational. There is no reason to have an entity stealing from individuals. The idea that a community of people won’t build roads or put out fires is preposterous, and it is especially shallow to assume that the State is the only entity that is able to help the downtrodden. In fact, as we see, the State only grows more and more until it is nothing but a fraudulent enterprise for corporate welfare, for stealing the fruits of people’s labor and wasting it.
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Brian T. Raven said:
RE: “…If anyone knows of a solid rebuttal to Nozick’s conception of taxes, please let me know here…”
Libertarian godfather Robert Nozick……..“…To this, Nozick replies: “All that intellectual pomp, arrayed to convince me that my talents are not mine? But my talents aren’t like fire and disease. They aren’t fatalities I insure against. Quite the opposite: My talents constitute the substance of who I am, and I am right to bank on them.” Having cornered us with Kant, with Marx, and, most of all, with our own vanity, Nozick concludes, “No end-state principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives,” confident that “interference” is sufficiently morally offensive to carry the day.
How could a thinker as brilliant as Nozick stay a party to this? The answer is: He didn’t. “The libertarian position I once propounded,” Nozick wrote in an essay published in the late ’80s, “now seems to me seriously inadequate.” In Anarchy democracy was nowhere to be found; Nozick now believed that democratic institutions “express and symbolize … our equal human dignity, our autonomy and powers of self-direction.” In Anarchy, the best government was the least government, a value-neutral enforcer of contracts; now, Nozick concluded, “There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion …”
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luzao said:
I read a few -not all- of the comments here, and I can’t help but notice how people see it just as “the rich not wanting to help the poor” nobody says the’re not going to be helped, why is it so much more horrible to believe in the voluntarism of people, in the capability of empathy? why is it less horrible to take part of someone else’s earnings to help others disregarding the altruistic feelings they may already have? This is just one of the areas where we spend tax money, because we’re also paying for war, nobody asked me if I wanted to give money to buy buy bullets to kill, it’s easy to just use the social part as an example of how good and necessary taxation is. But I believe that there are more good people in this world, I talk for myself when I say this but I think others would agree, I would have so much to give to specific causes, if I didn’t have to work extra to pay taxes, it pains me know that while I’m contributing to wars I have to generate extra to be able to send help to people that happened to be born in the wrong side of the fence. If we could just stop the cycle…
Daniel said:
This is why some core industries should be nationalised, like banking. Energy, health, education, transport run at a sustainable level of profit subsidised by the public who are treated as shareholders who in turn receive subsidised services. Reset the economy to a two day working week. Our growth based consumer economy based on profit at the expense of everything and anything is not sustainable. It’s a primitive system that serves the Few at the expense of everything else. Time is priceless, money is just printed.
Jesse Hermans said:
Nozick is undermined by believing he complies with the “Lockean proviso” for Locke’s “Labor theory of property”, when he in practice completely ignores it like Rothbard.
As such, he hypocritically condemns public appropriation of economic wages while implicitly condoning the private appropriation of economic rents, which stem from government enforced monopoly property rights. The only just source of taxation under this conception of Libertarianism (one which upholds the Lockean proviso) is the public appropriation of economic rents through means such as land value taxation, resource rent charges, regular tenders of leases to those property rights etc. This is explained to a reasonable quality in the Geolibertarian and Left-libertarian Wikipedia pages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism#Classical_liberal_radicalism
Rick said:
Not only did Nozick walk back his extreme view later in life (as mentioned several posts above), the most devastating rebuttal to Nozick’s argument about taxation being theft can be found in chapter 13 of the very same book — the chapter on utopia. In that chapter, Nozick plainly states that n ultra-minimal state is a meta-utopia where those with certain views (e.g., that taxation for the pursuit of social justice is awesome) can come together and “make a go of it”. The implication is clear — that taxation is not theft if one voluntarily signs up for it, and can leave if they choose. Well wait a minute it… which is it? Is taxation theft? or is it part of a voluntary social contract? Which Nozick should we trust. I argue we should trust the Nozick of chapter 13 because many times in that book, Nozick makes it very clear that HISTORY matters. And in the case of taxation, you, the tax-payer has a choice early on to earn that income or not–to stay in the country or not– and you voluntarily chose to stay in the country and earn income, knowing that you were accruing a tax debt. If you try to evade taxes and the armed government agents show up at your door, and you run, YOU are the thief, not the government — by Nozick’s own logic (chapter 13 + the history argument)
Rick said:
correction.. chapter 10… : )