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Comment by hnracer | Hacker News Reader

Familial wealth disperses and collapses pretty quickly, eventually being split up between 2 to the n heirs thereabouts.

Irrespective, the wealth is the property of an individual who earned that wealth through voluntary exchange. If they want to give it all to their kids, to a charitable cause, or just destroy it, that should be their right as owners of that property, it is not just for the state to steal that property because some people don't like it when the parent decides to give that wealth to the child. Focus taxation on things that harm an unwilling third party, not things that involve only two consenting parties where nobody is made worse off.

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> Irrespective, the wealth is the property of an individual who earned that wealth through voluntary exchange.

Hard disagree. We won't see eye to eye on this point, and it really invalidates the rest of w hat you are saying.

If I'm a fitness coach charging $60/hour, all my customers are there because they think I'm providing a service of value greater than $60/hour. Perhaps their subjective value is $80/hour, so they get $20/hour benefit and decide voluntarily to engage in this transaction with me. This is a positive sum voluntary transaction where all parties are better off (except for the carbon pollution which we expelled to drive to the venue, which I think should be taxed!).

I find it hard to believe that anyone could disagree with the above, which means you must disagree that the fruits of this exchange should be my property. Well let me ask you this: the customer made $20 in utility by engaging in this transaction with me. Why should they be able to keep the $20 utility but I must give up part of the $60? And what right do you have to reach into my pocket? If my customers instead traded groceries for my hour of training, should I not be able to keep these groceries?Is it only money that makes the difference for you?

No one is trying to take the $60 an hour you make coaching. The way Bezos or Gates or Zuckerberg make their wealth is not at all similar to how you or I do. If you want to take the conservative argument, Gates taking my tax dollars by selling his computers to the government is not a voluntary transaction. He then takes that money to lobby the government so that I have to give him even more of my tax money.

If I provide significantly large value to enough clients (i.e. I make a lot of money) then the state will take 53 percent of my marginal profits.

As far as pushing back against crony capitalism and corporatism goes, we are in total agreement.

This is a common hard-libertarian talking point.

Consider point 13.6 of Scott Alexander's (Slate Star Codex) Non-Libertarian FAQ:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

If you assume that "individual property earned through voluntary exchange" is the ultimate value to be upheld, you may end up having to defend a hellscape world. You need at least to temper it with something along the lines of the Lockean proviso.

I fully agree with this, I see it as one value to be upheld among many others in a Pareto-like trade-off. Optimizing for only a single value is going to lead to pathological outcomes as you rightly point out.

But I do consider it an important value since a lot of the motivation behind redistribution is self interest and jealousy (this is a finding in social science research), benelovant compassion only explains a small proportion of the variation.

"voluntary" is pulling a lot of weight here. Let me know when food and water become voluntary things for people

I made my money by creating software and engaging in voluntary transactions with people (mostly wealthy people) who wanted to transact with me and would've been worse off having not done so. It was totally positive sum with no harmed third party. A very large proportion of transactions (plastic surgery, sports cars, entertainment, holidays, restaurants, personal trainer, Netflix, etc) are of this nature where the rebuttal that "it's not really voluntary" doesn't apply in the least.

Good faith line of questioning. Promise.

1. Who do you think decides what rights an individual has in a society, and on what grounds do they hold that right? 2. Why grant property rights

1. As for what decides the individual's rights in a society, this is a pretty complicated question but the answer is going to be rooted in evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution and memetic evolution.

On what grounds do they hold that right? I'm not religious so I can't appeal to an ultimate moral authority. See (2).

2. If you grant and enforce property rights you stake the individual, and the overall outcome is a more prosperous world. Removing property rights is a good way to collective starvation, it's been tried before. So it's moral in the sense that enforcing property rights minimises human suffering through the above mechanism.

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