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Comment by ajnin | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, as a libertarian, how do you come to the conclusion that private property, which is a political construct, is a good thing, while taxation, which is also a political construct, established by the same set of laws, is a bad thing (If judging by your description of one being "theft" of the other) ?

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I think that private property can be easily derived from individual rights. The right to control my own life, the right to do what I want, the right not to be interfered with. Those set a pretty strong precedent for private property. If I create something out of nothing, shouldn't I be able to keep that?

I could be down with taxation if someone actually offered me a contract to join the USA with all the provisions. But they didn't, they just implicitly assumed it, without my consent.

Why would I care about individual rights if there is no government ?

I mean if I have enough power and there’s no one to stop me, I may as well take your property AND your person and make you work for me.

It’s just a matter of who has the most guns, and my willingness to cheat on the rules of the game.(you assume individual rights, I don’t)

Do note this is more of a tongue in cheek question, than a serious one.

individual rights drive from government control law order etc., right?

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're boring to everyone else and not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Concept of private property is as old as civilisation. Whereas taxation (at current depth and scale) is barely 50yrs old and already showing cracks.

Conversely, the concept of taxation is as old as civilization, and private property at current depth and scale is barely as old as the most recent extension of the rights associated with copyright in the DMCA, and already showing cracks.

You are talking to a libertarian and you assumed a right granted by state is a private property. Why ?

The private property I referred is land right, which IS as old as civilisation and have been acceptable by most humans ever.

Since most democracies are less than 200yrs old, the taxation cannot have been as old as civilisation.

When 100 people form a camp, they implement property rights before taxation. Historically taxations have been imposed by distant rulers not socially decided at local level.

> Since most democracies are less than 200yrs old, the taxation cannot have been as old as civilisation.

That would be true if the concept of taxation was dependent on the concept of democracy (and if it was correct that democracy was less than 200 years old, which is off by around an order of magnitude), which it is quite obviously not; taxation long precedes democracy.

> Historically taxations have been imposed by distant rulers

Historically, taxation (until fairly recently, in-kind; money taxes as the primary form is fairly new) has been imposed at every level from small bands to vast empires; it certainly is not correct that they've normally been imposed by distant rulers.

We are taking about subset of taxation not all taxation, namely "politically constructed taxation" as described by ajnin.

Historically, taxation has been imposed at every level from small bands to vast empires

Agreed.

it certainly is not correct that they've normally been imposed by distant rulers

Then by whom is it normally imposed ? Give an example of a historic taxation voted and imposed by a small-band/.../vast-empire on itself.

Coming back to the topic, my claim is that private property social contract have been more stable than taxation (the social-contract version).

One of the oldest forms of writing that we know of, Babylonian tablets, are mostly about goods exchanges and paying taxes. I think that you assessment that taxation is a new thing is blatantly wrong.

Taxation is old. Democratically-decided taxation is new.

Then democratically-decided property law is new too.

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