Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

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>The right to have your legally earned income is one given to you by society. It's not something that arose out of natural order, or given by God if you are a believer.

NO!

The right to the fruit of one's labor is a basic human right! The form the fruit of one's labor takes is irrelevant.

It basically boils down to the right to private property or to be able to have ownership of things. What you legally own is yours. If you grow a tomato in your garden it's your tomato. If you trade that tomato for a dollar it's your dollar. If you help someone grow tow tomatoes and they give you one it's your tomato. If you help someone grow a ton of tomatoes and they give you money it's your money.

We just so happen to tolerate society (via the government) skimming some off the top because the benefits (i.e. everything taxes pay for) far outweigh the cost.

Pretty much every society ever recognizes the right to private property. Taxes in various forms are an exception to that rule.

To proclaim that it is the other way around and that society owns everything by default and one may only keep what society lets them is basically the same as medieval Europe where the land and everything on it (people included) and all wealth generated by it are property of the lord by default and he/she can do with them as he/she pleases (only the lord is replaced with "society").

Taxes are an important part of a functioning modern society but people would do well to remember that private property is the rule and a forced contribution to the group fund is the exception not the other way around.

It is debatable of course.

But the current consensus is that property is not fundamental to the existence of a human. The term property doesn't appear once on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human....

Following your tomato example, you grew the tomato on some land and the plant absorbed nutrients from the land. Who gave your the right to do that? Do you own the nutrients?

How did humans come to own land? Was everybody born with their piece which they chose to trade? Of course not.

What we call property came about over thousands of years due to complex interactions between people. There is a concept of fairness to getting to keep what you made. But, there is nothing simple or fundamental about it.

>Following your tomato example, you grew the tomato on some land and the plant absorbed nutrients from the land. Who gave your the right to do that? Do you own the nutrients?

>Who gave your the right to do that? Do you own the nutrients?

If I lend you a pen and expressly state that I want it back when you're done and you use some of the ink in the pen that's to be expected.

If I rent you land it's foreseeable that you might grow something on it and unless our agreement stipulates that you can't it's implied that you can.

When property is in the hands of someone else we don't bother controlling for the common use cases. If I let you borrow my pen I expect you to write with it. If I sell you a pen it comes with the ink in it. If I rent you land I can expect you to grow something on it. If I sell you land it comes with everything therein.

We specifically negotiate for the uncommon use cases (e.g. mining/timber rights)

>How did humans come to own land? Was everybody born with their piece which they chose to trade? Of course not.

This is a sideshow and not material to the conversation.

Pretty much all land in the world is owned by someone or some entity. There is a chain of ownership. If you go back far enough the land was owned by whoever was there first.

> The right to the fruit of one's labor is a basic human right

Perhaps, but income isn't the fruit of your labor, it's the product of exchange of that fruit through mechanisms provided and protected at public expense and through limitations on natural liberty by the State.

Also, all actual things (tangible and intangible) in which legal property interests exist involve a mix of fruit of individual labor and either material alienated from the commons or the state-granted privilege of restricting others natural freedom (or possibly both of the latter.)

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