Keeping the peace means enforcing nonviolent interaction and providing due process for conflict resolution. Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power. They are different words for a reason. You can be very poor and very free, or very comfortably enslaved. Liberty is fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you.
Your definition of liberty here is getting really tangled.
If liberty is “fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you” then how is having a set monetary policy incompatible with liberty as long as it comes from a “legitimate” source of power?
Because compliance with that monetary policy is enforced with.. force? You must pay taxes in USD, and if you don't you go to jail. The government also conveniently controls the USD supply, which allows the to debase it as they see fit, forcing you to obtain a set amount of USD per year to pay taxes. If the government accepted tax revenue in gold or bitcoin or anything else they don't totally control, you'd be absolutely right.
But we all agree that the government is legitimate, and so it's use of force is legitimate. Additionally, if the government forced you to pay it $1000 a year, even if you could deposit that in gold, you would still be forced to pay. The currency seems irrelevant.
It seems like what your saying is you believe taxation is legitimate, but requiring taxes to be pain in USD is illegitimate. Which, like, is just your opinion man (and makes the whole argument circular) I don't see any generic argument that makes taxation compatible with your definition of liberty but taxation in USD incompatible". I don't see really any generic definition of liberty that would distinguish between those two actions.
I'm rate limited, but to your example below of a currency no one could obtain, the government could equivalently apply a greater than 100% wealth tax. Or the government could define all speech as force or any number of other things. A capricious government can do bad things yes, but requiring taxes to be paid in a particular currency doesn't give them any more powerful ways to be capricious.
The currency seems irrelevant, but it's not. Imagine my government in Tyrannia only accepted taxes in a currency which was impossible to obtain except by stealing it (also illegal). The government would then hold every citizen in a catch-22, allowing it to arbitrarily decide whom to imprison for not paying taxes and who to imprison for stealing the currency required to pay them.
It is though, since they can debase that self same currency as they see fit. This fundamentally changes the playing field when negotiating your taxes with the government. The only reason USD has any value at all is because it's what everyone has to pay taxes to the US government in, and what US bonds are paid in.
What you’re saying is essentially “imagine a government with the power to create laws that allow arbitrary imprisonment with no recourse, that would be tyrannical”, which, yes, but that only has to do with the currency because that’s what you chose for your example.
Said government could pass a law stating that all citizens must be in two places at once, and achieve the same effect.
As mentioned in a previous comment, I'm saying "Imagine a government without broad power over general welfare". This was the US government until 1936 with United States v. Butler. I don't think it would be a catastrophe to reverse this decision again. It seems that in spite of best efforts, the US has failed to preserve the very meaning of liberty, as it was initially envisioned, from total deterioration even in its very definition.
The material distinction when the United States was founded wasn’t whether the state in general had broad power over the general welfare, but whether the federal government would. State government did have such power.
Any centralized authority with a monopoly on force is going to have to levy taxes. Otherwise you’d end up with people just refusing to pay because they didn’t get the judgements they desire.
If there is a state _at all_ there is force involved. I don’t really understand what you believe is possible here. What you’re discussing is tantamount to assuming that American traditions of due process just exist in a state of nature when they absolutely do not.
I believe it's possible to have a state whose powers and authority are fundamentally limited. I also believe that was the original intention of US. I agree taxes must be levied. I just disagree it's legitimate to levy them for most of what they are spent on today.
If I ask myself "what should the state be allowed to do?", it's basically answered by "what would I be comfortable holding a gun to someone's head for?". To take a popular example: If it's wrong to hold a gun to a doctor's head in order to force them to treat a patient (which I think it is), and it's wrong to hold a gun to a bystander's head to force them to pay the doctor, then it's wrong to fund healthcare with taxation.
Stealing from your primary food supply isn’t really what I had in mind when I was referring to petty theft. If anything I meant stealing a small amount from a significant excess.
> I'd have no problem holding a gun to someone's head in order to extract what compensation is due to me under a lawful agreement.
So if a doctor enters into a contractual agreement with the state to provide healthcare, then it’s ok?
Contracts should have monetary penalties only - you can't sign yourself into slavery. If the doctor breaches a contract, and the contract has provisions for what he will pay in breach, then he must pay it or have it seized (with force). We've long banned debtors prisons for good reason. There's no holding a gun to anyone's head required unless they try to stop you from seizing property to which you have a lawful claim.
So as long as I write the laws and excite the laws I can do whatever I want. Taxation is lawful because the government duly passes laws asserting such claims. Taxation therefore cannot be theft.
Unless there is some definition of “lawful” that exists outside of writing and enforcing the laws. Which begs the question according to who? In this instance that someone seems to be you.
Taxation isn't theft, it's robbery, since it involves the threat of force. The only remaining question is "What services is it ethical to rob people in order to fund?". My answer is "Not nearly as many as most people today suppose".
Anything that we enact into law is "lawful", it's circular reasoning. It doesn't say anything about the ethics of the situation. If 80% of people agree democratically to murder the other 20%, it will be lawful, but does it suddenly become ethical? And if they change the word so that it's "lawful execution" does that make it OK?
In the same vein, I'm using the common definition of "robbery" without any legitimizing window dressing. I'm asking "under what circumstances is it ethical to rob people?" and "under what circumstances is it ethical to enslave them?"
Surely some exist. For instance, being drafted to fight a war and being enslaved are basically equivalent in terms of lived experience. We've decided that yes, in order to defend society against existential threats it's ethical to enslave people. I don't disagree, and would like to point out adherence to the maxim of violating liberty only in direct defense of liberty.
But this does frame the draft to fight WWII and the Vietnam War differently. It's much harder to make the case that North Vietnam was an existential threat to US liberty, so drafting/enslaving people to fight there seems much less ethical.
Following this line of reasoning, the question is "Is it ethical to rob people to pay doctors?". And since lacking a doctor doesn't deprive anyone of liberty, the answer must be "No".
You'll note that all of this can basically be derived from the following (from the Declaration of the Rights of Man)
> 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights...
> 4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights...
By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways, right?
> Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power.
I didn't say they were synonyms. I said prosperity was a prerequisite to liberty[1]. A poor person isn't free to inhabit a house, and if they try to do so the state will use force to prevent or remove them.
[1]: actually I said all else equal, more prosperity means more liberty. To use your example (which I don't really buy, a rich slave is sort of not a thing), a "rich" slave is able to purchase better food for themselves than a poor slave whereas a poor slave would need to resort to theft, and risk force as a consequence.
> A homeless person can be more free than a person confined in a mansion, can they not?
Sure. But a rich homeless person is no longer homeless, and a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home. You haven't addressed my point.
> Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free.
Right, so when I said
> You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not
I was correct. The government decides which things are good or not (using force in disallowed ways) and prevents those. Generally governments high in libetry also do things like punish fraud, because fraud is bad and misleading people and stealing their money...reduces liberty? Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty, and should the government even do it?
> a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home
I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement.
> Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty
Fraud is related to securing of property rights, which are a part of liberty. How free are you if people can remove the food from your pantry? Fraud as a criminal offense has been derived from "theft by false pretense". But I'm pretty sure we'd be fine if we decriminalized it and relegated it to a tort.
> I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement.
Is level of confinement the only thing that defines slavery?
Assume the rich person and the poor person want the same thing. The rich person can acquire it. The poor person cannot (or can only do so by risking force in response).
All else equal, the rich person can do strictly more things. How are they equally free? The definition of freedom is usually something along the lines of "the ability to do things". The rich person can do more things, they're freer.
The term for what I'm describing is sometimes "freedom from want" and is a commonly considered to be a freedom/right when discussing freedoms if you look beyond liberalism as it was in 19th century. The idea being that while liberalism does a decent job of ensuring that the government doesn't oppress you, it does nothing to ensure that other people don't oppress you. Granting some standard of living to everyone ensures that you can't be taken advantage of because you have no better option, no one can treat you worse than the living standard the government provides.
> The idea being that while liberalism does a decent job of ensuring that the government doesn't oppress you, it does nothing to ensure that other people don't oppress you.
The government does this by... oppressing you, by limiting your choices and your freedom. Nature itself is oppressive. We are all born naked and hungry and at the mercy of others. This does not constitute oppression by other people, and no amount of governance can change this. All government can do is provide due process to resolve the inevitable conflicts. What is should not do it paternalistically dictate how people should interact peacefully.
It very much does if it involves limiting what terms employers and employees can agree to. And it certainly requires oppression if you're going to seize and redistribute wealth to finance the required bureaucracy.
> It very much does if it involves limiting what terms employers and employees can agree to
You don't really need to do this if you provide a strong welfare state. Provide government healthcare and benefits to all citizens equivalent to say $10 an hour, and you don't need to limit how employers and employees interact. They have the freedom to quit.
> And it certainly requires oppression
So we come back to the beginning: all taxation is oppression?
Keep in mind that my scheme actually probably involves less government force than yours. People will be less violent, requiring less respondent force, if given a minimum standard of living. So do you want the government to use more force? Or is "oppression" the issue, I can't keep up.
> You don't really need to do this if you provide a strong welfare state
Why is providing a welfare state a prerequisite here? From where do you derive the need to protect people from the total consequences of their failure or misfortune by forcing the collective to bear the burden?
> all taxation is oppression?
Of course it is - it's robbery. Just like the draft is slavery. The important question is "What circumstances make it ethical to rob/enslave people?". They do exist, but they are quite limited.
> do you want the government to use more force
It's not about degrees of force, it's about what situations force is applied to. The only acceptable application of force (read violation of liberty) is to defend liberty itself from imminent danger. Applying any degree of force to compel cooperation is indistinguishable from that degree of slavery. What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?
> From where do you derive the need to protect people from the total consequences of their failure or misfortune by forcing the collective to bear the burden?
I'll answer this with a question: you said elsewhere that its unethical to compel doctors to treat a patient. Let's assume that's the case. What happens when you are robbed by someone, shot, and your wallet is stolen, you even pass out from the shock and blood loss.
A bystander calls an ambulance. Then what? The ambulance service, the hospital (and the doctor) have no idea if you can pay for their services. Let's assume you can, you have fantastic insurance. What is the right way to resolve this situation? It seems to me your answer is that the hospital should have every right to refuse to serve people without identification (and in fact this is probably in the hospitals best interest, from a pure ROI perspective).
So do we throw our hands in the air and let some people who, by any account, don't deserve to die (they're insured, if their wallet wasn't stolen, there'd be no issue at all!) through no fault of their own, or do we protect people from the total consequence of their misfortune by providing some kind of guardrail?
A more general answer is that people, in aggregate, don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state. If you provide absolutely no welfare state, and I lose my job and can't find a new one, it is very likely that the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone. And people generally speaking dislike that because unlike robbery from the government, which involves paperwork and court rooms, that kind of robbery really actually involves guns. And people seem to find suits and paperwork to be less force than guns.
So you pick your poison: a democratically controlled nonviolent robbery that you can influence and plan for, or a stochastic violent robbery that you can't control at all. Personally, I find paperwork to be less violent than a gun, but you have weird ideas about what constitutes violence, so I'm curious what you'll say.
> What's the problem with strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual interaction between people?
It doesn't exist. Is coercion voluntary? If it's violent to threaten someone's life by holding a gun to their head, why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live (or the money they need to buy the food they need to live, or the healthcare they need to live, or the money they need for that healthcare)?
> What happens when you are robbed by someone, shot, and your wallet is stolen, you even pass out from the shock and blood loss.
You are at this point reliant on the charity (read: voluntary) of others. Even if you were identified and your insurance accepted, the paramedics or doctors can just refuse to do their jobs, for whatever reason, and face only professional consequences. You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.
Also, the insured could demand coverage for this case from their providers, with liability to their estate if they are not treated. This would force insurers to negotiate with hospitals to treat these patients rather than incur the liability.
> don't deserve to die
What do you mean "don't deserve?". If you're laying shot in the street, then clearly you're going to die soon without lots of outside intervention. This is your lot. Insurance isn't there to provide a guarantee of some outcome, it's there to reimburse as best it can after the fact.
> don't like the instability that comes from a lack of welfare state
Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.
> the best thing for me to do is to steal from someone
That depends on the risk/reward balance between stealing and figuring out how to be productive. If the punishment for robbery is severe, then chances are you'll figure out how to be useful to someone before resorting to it.
> Is coercion voluntary
Yes? If your grandmother offers you a cup of tea, insists, and will be offended if you don't take it, does that make it involuntary? She's clearly coercing you.
> why isn't it violent to withholding food they need to live
Everyone needs inputs to live, and everyone is born without the means to provide them for themselves. Therefore everyone must, at some point, enter into a negotiation with those who possess what they need. Absent any law and order, these negotiations often turn violent. All we've any right to do is make some rules around the negotiations, not prescribe universal cooperation.
> This would force insurers to negotiate with hospitals to treat these patients rather than incur the liability.
The ROI here functionally never makes sense for the insurer to do this, unless clients are paying enough to offset the cost of paying all unidentified people.
> You are in no way guaranteed to be treated.
Are you saying that this is the case today, or that this is how it would be. Because I agree with you. Despite laws that require doctors to treat you that exist today (to prevent this exact scenario), no one ever holds a gun to anyone's head. There's no need for violence. Professional (and in general civil) consequences are enough to enforce this.
> She's clearly coercing you.
Coercion requires force or threat. From me shooting you is the same as the harm from me starving you, so the threat is the same. A grandmother being upset isn't a threat, and certainly not the same level of threat, not is it force. So perhaps let's ask a different question: is choice freely given when your life is threatened?
> Doing what "people like" isn't the same as being ethical.
Utilitarians would disagree with you.
The root problem with how you approach the world is that you see any government force as worse than all force by everyone else. Like given how your approach contacts, if I coerced you to sign yourself into slavery, that's acceptable, since it meets your definition of "strictly voluntary, at-will, consensual".
If you believe government is the worse bad and nothing else can be as bad, sure that's a viewpoint. But it fails when you have other powerful organizations that hold the same power over an individual as a government does.
Imagine for a moment another extreme example where the government has a total use of force monopoly, and I have a monopoly on the water supply. You say that is unethical for the government to act against me, and also unethical for individuals to act against me, no matter what. This is true even if I use that Monopoly to enslave people or commit genocide, because I'm doing it without violence, only coercion. If that's your ethics, something's broken.
And pragmatically it's also stupid: people will lose faith in a government that fails to protect them. So a government that fails to protect its citizenship effectively will quickly cease to exist (the people with guns will desert to protect their families and tada: a new government). So once you accept that democracy is ethically good (and really even if you don't), the ethics are irrelevant. Governments must keep people happy or they will quickly cease to exist. And I subscribe to the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does. Governments try to make their citizens happy. If they don't, they'll be replaced by one which does, because that's what the people want. Your job is then to convince me, and everyone else's that sacrificing my safety is worth a government that is in your view more ethical.