Last month I wrote a short post about reconciling natural law property rights and government. After receiving a couple of emails from friends about the post being dense and unreadable, I have decided to attempt to clarify my argument.
Natural rights adherents usually ground their property rights theories in John Locke’s philosophy. Locke argued that every individual exclusively owned his own body and the that labor he performed with his body. Lock used labor as the foundation for property rights: specifically that property rights originated in the mixing of labor with unclaimed natural resources. Speaking of things appropriated from a state of nature, he wrote, “labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right.” John Locke, Two Treatises of Government 217 (Thomas Hollis ed. 6th ed. 1764).
One consequence of a Lockean theory of property rights is that there is no justification for taking the property of an individual unless that individual violated the rights of another or consented to the taking. This means that unless an individual consents to be taxed, there is no justification for taxation—even for the purpose of supporting a police force, a court system, or a defensive military. Murray Rothbard, one of the intellectual lights of the libertarian movement, passionately argued this point:
[T]he State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as ‘tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.
Thus, the State is a coercive criminal organization that subsists by a regularized large-scale system of taxation-theft, and which gets away with it by engineering the support of the majority (not, again, of everyone) through securing an alliance with a group of opinion-moulding intellectuals whom it rewards with a share in its power and pelf.
This is a compelling argument. What justifies taxation? How can an individual who believes in principled government and robust individual property rights escape the conclusion that any government that relies on compelled taxation is simply “a coercive criminal organization”? I believe the key lies in recognizing a questionable assumption in Locke’s philosophy of property rights.
Locke assumes that the first person to mix labor with a piece of property acquires an absolute right to that property. He makes this assumption even though he believes that before an individual appropriates a resource by mixing labor with it, “the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men”. Locke, supra, at 216. Locke’s equation doesn’t work. Adding labor, which is the sole property of the claimant, to a resource that is owned in common by all mankind doesn’t clearly grant the claimant absolute ownership over the resource. How did the claimant’s labor extinguish the claims of others who potentially could have claimed the resource through labor? Labor certainly gives the claimant a far stronger right to the resource than any other individual, but that doesn’t make the right absolute.
But if the claimant’s right is not absolute, then what residual rights remain to those others who could have claimed the resource?
I have not yet worked out all the details of these residual rights, but I am convinced of the following principles. These residual rights must not impose a burden on the claimant that is greater than the burden that the claimant causes by his claim. That would violate the principle of proportionality. Furthermore, these residual rights could only be applied for the equal benefit of all potential claimants. Since all potential claimants are burdened by the diminution of available resources, all of them must benefit from the exercise of the resulting residual right.
Thus these residual rights may properly take the form of minimal taxation in support of a limited representative government. It is not my purpose in this post to work through all of the details of such a government. That is not necessary to show that Lockean property rights and government are compatible. However, this limited government could certainly include a court system and a police force to protect against local threats and a military to protect against foreign threats. Notice that these services protect the rights of every member of the society equally and guard against the conflict often caused by scarcity of resources.
Finally, it is important to add that a government that imposes a burden on individuals beyond what is justified by these residual rights becomes precisely the coercive criminal organization that Rothbard warned about.