It is immoral for the state to forcibly confiscate privately owned wealth and property. That’s theft. If it is against civil society’s general rules of behavior for private citizens to forcibly take another citizen’s private wealth or property, then the same guidelines for common civility and respect for rights to life, liberty and property should apply to the state.
The Declaration of Independence recognizes every individual’s rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These are natural, inherent rights that we have as human beings. An individual has a right of ownership of one’s physical actions including one’s physical and intellectual labor, prior to selling such labor to an employer or client or customer. When an individual does sell one’s labor in a mutually agreeable voluntarily exchange, the individual has a 100% absolute right to all of what one has received in that exchange, and a right to do with those “earnings” or “fruits of one’s labor” whatever one wishes, as long as one isn’t violating another individual’s same rights. Therefore, any forcible confiscation of those “fruits of one’s labor” is not only theft, but involuntary servitude. You can rationalize it to your heart’s content, but that’s what it is, and it is immoral, period.
It is even more immoral for the government to forcibly take an individual’s wealth or property to fund programs which one believes to be immoral, including or maybe especially government’s foreign expansionist policies of military invasions and occupations, especially those that cause destruction and violence against innocent people. It is also immoral to force your neighbors to fund abortions that they believe to be the killing of innocent life.
One thing I’ve learned is to never believe politicians, because they are liars. It is the nature of those who are driven towards the use of political force to further social agendas or otherwise asserted goals. The state itself exists as a “compulsory monopoly” in “territorial protection,” in which everyone within the territory is compelled to rely on for protection and justice. As economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe has noted,
…once there is no longer free entry into the business of the production of protection and adjudication, the price of protection and justice will rise and their quality will fall. Rather than being a protector and judge, a compulsory monopolist will become a protection racketeer — the destroyer and invader of the people and property that he is supposed to protect, a warmonger, and an imperialist…
If the individual has an inherent right to life and liberty, then one has an inherent right to opt out of such a system, especially when it has become as corrupt and invasive as it is now, and thoroughly disorganized and inefficient as it is now. You might say that well, if you don’t like the system as it is now, then go to some other area. However, within these territories (the geographical territories of the United States of America), each individual still has that inherent right to life and liberty, a right of sovereignty over one’s life, one’s property, one’s body, and actually has that inherent, god-given right to opt out of such a corrupt and invasive system.
There is too much dependence on centralized government, especially federal centralized government. Dependence on a “compulsory protection monopolist” is a very bad thing, what makes a society dysfunctional. The compulsory monopolist doesn’t worry about sustaining itself as do regular folks who rely on their customers’, consumers’ and clients’ voluntary patronage. No, the compulsory monopolist relies on taxation imposed on their “protected” clients who have been compelled into such a relationship. As Hoppe states,
It is absurd to believe that an agency that may tax without consent can be a property protector. Likewise, it is absurd to believe that an agency with legislative powers can preserve law and order….Indeed, no one in his right mind would agree to a contract that allowed one’s alleged protector to determine unilaterally, without one’s consent, and irrevocably, without the possibility of exit, how much to charge for protection; and no one in his right mind would agree to an irrevocable contract which granted one’s alleged protector the right to ultimate decision making regarding one’s own person and property…In fact, any such protection contract is not only empirically unlikely, but praxeologically impossible. By “agreeing to be taxed and legislated in order to be protected,” a person would in effect surrender, or alienate, all of his property to the taxing authority and submit himself into permanent slavery to the legislative agency.
This reliance on governmental force for protection is a big reason why government has grown so much, including the welfare state and the warfare state, the “military industrial complex.”
But getting back to my statement that politicians are liars and should not be believed, I have a theory (“Ahem,” as Miss Anne Elk would say, repeatedly) that people go into government “work” because they have a compulsion to intrude into other people’s private lives, a compulsion for aggression, if you will. (Going into their neighbors’ home and rummaging through their personal belongings and their private documents etc. might be too conspicuous.)
A good anti-spyware software program is helpful. I use Spyware Doctor, which does a great job blocking “attempted intrusions.” We need something similar to block the intrusions of government officials.
It was difficult to believe President George W. Bush’s sincerity in his asserting a plan for “protecting” the country following his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq when he refused to protect our borders. I’ve mention that here several times and will continue to reiterate it. How can a president claim that he is protecting his country when he keeps the borders open to anyone who can easily sneak through? How many terrorist sleeper cells are there now because of such irresponsible leadership? And we are further suffering now from the results of the “compassionate conservatism” political correctness that is a trademark of that former president. Am I the only one who could see that Bush’s priority was to get Saddam Hussein (to honor Bush’s father who started all this)?
Maybe I’m the one who’s nuts. It is not good to support policies based on emotion rather than reason. Bush was supported based on his fear mongering, just as much as abortion “rights” have gotten support based on the fear mongering of warnings of “back-alley abortions.”
If the United States government pulled all its forces out of all other countries (a condition of occupations which is itself against all the wisdom and advice of the American Founders) and allowed private citizens, groups and businesses to have competing private protection services, given past historical evidence that shows that free markets achieve goals better and are more efficient than government-controlled or government-monopolized services, we’d be better protected and certainly a more moral and civil society than we are now.
The only morally acceptable use of aggression is in the case of actual self-defense, as a reaction to, in retaliation against an actual initiation of aggression. Aggression initiated against others cannot be justified. It is especially immoral to forcibly confiscate the fruits of a private citizen’s labor or otherwise privately owned wealth and property to support non-retaliatory military invasions and occupations.
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