By what authority are those assets "yours" in the first place? Whence did those assets originate?
If I choose to buy land, goods, services, the seller chooses the "value". If I agree on the value, I have free will to to purchase the land, goods or service. If I do not agree on the value, I can either offer a lower price, or walk away.
If I purchase said land, goods or service, and later decide that I no longer want those things, I can choose to sell them. At that point, I set a value. If the purchaser agrees on the value, I then sell/transfer ownership to that person. If the value has grown since I purchased said land, goods, service, I could potentially profit. If the value has not increased, I am at a loss.
So, to directly answer your question about "authority". (In my case, land that was owned, and worked, for 100 years in an area that no one wanted to live). A price for said land was agreed upon. The sale was advantageous for the seller as he no longer wanted to tend it. I assumed the risk, taxes, etc. Working said land was extremely arduous. Shepherding it through multiple hurricanes, floods, etc bore a financial burden. Many years later, as the area began to develop, my asset grew in value. Selling it produced a profit. This profit allowed me more ability to purchase other land, goods and services.
As I'm tying this, I'm certain you're aware of these basic economic principles, but simply don't agree with them. Disagreement is fine. But this is the way things are done in my country. And, I choose to live here because I agree with those principles. If I wanted to live in a country where an entity could come and confiscate my wealth, and redistribute it, those countries exist. I could likely move to one of them.
So I would say they should belong to the keeper right now.
And if it was a gift, it would still be a property transfer. So still his.
I suspect that whatever price was charged was a bargain compared to what it's actually worth - and thus the transfer was at the expense of the rest of society.
> And if it was a gift, it would still be a property transfer. So still his.
And if that "gift" was stolen from someone else beforehand?
Then that would be theft and not legitimate property transfer. I was talking about cases where a gift is from someone who earned it and transferred something, a donation.
Not from a government that gifts via regulations or a thief that steals something and donates after the fact. Though there is no difference in either IMHO.
How about from a government that - instead of taxing that aforementioned conquered land and the ownership thereof - shifts the tax burden onto the working class (via income and sales taxes), robbing us blind while subsidizing the owning class (who is then happy to rob the working class further via skyrocketing rents)?
The vast majority of people "earning" tens of millions of dollars in this country are not doing so via their own hard work. They are doing so by rentseeking - by being parasites on local, national, and global economies. Their wealth derives from theft, plain and simple.
And there just so happens to be a solution to that theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
So yes, a government that taxes people against their will for a service they do not use, from my perspective, is theft to tax payers.
A different story is wether we want to support to some extent people who need it: in that case, it would not be theft against a person giving support, but it would not be a tax either.
As for who earns and how, yes, crony capitalism is quite bad. What I support is mostly free market capitalism as much as it is feasible and realistic.
I am not sure it is ideal, but as long as laws for damage are applied and the consumer is informed, it works way better than all this political cloud full of a system with favors, licenses, and excuses to avoid comptetition.
I am even more against subsidizing than taxes themselves. That is the worst possible distortion of things.
I am hopeful there are other ways, and I would like to put them in practice.
But those come from our own beliefs.
The land conquering is a difficult topic. I agree it is not a good thing. But the history of humanity is the history of conquer. A person that violently takes territoy in some way should not be the owner. I am not sure it is practical or even possible to fix that, though.
Fortunately, that ain't the case for a land value tax as alluded to above. The government provides landowners a service (enforcement of their land deeds), and any "tax" on it is a payment for that service. As it stands, landowners have successfully lobbied the government such that they only pay a tiny fraction (at most) of the rents due to society at large. And so:
> For a tax to exist, there must be a justification.
And there you have the justification. Landowners owe the full value of the land they own to the society willing to respect and enforce that ownership. Anything short of that full value is theft, and is indeed rather directly responsible for the continued prevalence of socioeconomic inequality both here in the US and worldwide.
I do agree with you that how that tax revenue gets spent is an issue. The maximally fair answer would be to disburse it equally to all citizens as a dividend, and then citizens can put that money toward the things they believe to be worthwhile.
And on that note:
> A person that violently takes territoy in some way should not be the owner. I am not sure it is practical or even possible to fix that, though.
LVT happens to be a maximally fair and practical way to fix that, especially when paired with a citizens' dividend per above; assuming, per above, that land ownership and socioeconomic inequality are causally linked, shifting the tax base away from the products of labor (i.e. abolishing taxes on income, sales, and buildings) and onto land values would satisfy the goals of things like reparations, such that those who materially benefited from such conquest are the ones compensating those who did not.
Thanks for this very positive exchange.
There are two senses of theft at issue:
1. Some government establishes (or expands) its sovereign territory through violent conquest.
2. Private parties obtain a service from said government and the society it ostensibly represents without paying in full for it (specifically: the issuance, recognition, and enforcement of land titles/boundaries, those being definitionally subsets of said government's sovereign territory - which, again, may or may not have been obtained through violent conquest)
Here in the US, both of those sorts of theft are in play:
1. The entirety of US territory was obtained either by conquering it from other entities (e.g. Native American tribes, Mexico, Spain) or by purchasing it from other powers who had previously done so (e.g. France, Spain, Britain, Russia).
2. The US government (or state/local subdivisions thereof) issues and enforces deeds representing subsets of its sovereign territory to landowners, at the exclusion of the rest of its citizenry - yet the landowners do not pay anywhere near the full rental value of the land to said government or said citizenry.
> Am I to assume that every piece of land has an "original owner"? Who is that?
In the case of American land, that'd be the indigenous peoples thereof.
In a more general/legal sense, the "original owner" would be the government of whose sovereign territory that land is a subset. If that government ostensibly represents its citizens, then said "original ownership" would rest with each and every individual citizen equally. As Locke explained in his Second Treatise of Government:
> Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.
That is: every member of society is entitled to an equal share (by value) of the land on which that society exists. Those who own more than their equal share of that land value owe compensation to those who own less than their equal share. The lack of said compensation is theft.