I disagree that class action settlements set up permanent policies. They are handled on a case by case basis. Just because everybody in a fixed group of people who bought a “Lemon” model car between 2005 and 2009 gets awarded X amount of dollars in a class action suit, for instance, does not establish any sort of guarantee whatsoever for anyone buying a Lemon in the future, or for anyone who bought a different model between 2005 and 2009 that had the exact same problems as the Lemon.

If you’re talking about class action fines, then let’s call them that, rather than muddying the waters by calling them taxes. Otherwise it just looks like your agenda is to undermine the libertarian opposition to coercive taxation.

You write that “Breathing is not aggression,” and then follow that statement with, The exact language in my Free Earth Manifesto is: ‘Production of property via extraction of natural resources from a community commons should require a fee to the community proportional to the decrease in ability of that commons to sustainably support such extraction.’”

But the statement from your Manifesto does not explain why breathing is not aggression. If you are saying the impact of a person breathing is so minimal as to have no measurable impact on the ability of the commons to sustainably support such extraction (of oxygen), that is *not* the same as saying that no aggression has occurred. Other examples of aggression illustrate this — for instance if I trespass on your property in a manner which does not interfere with your ability to use the property, trespass has still occurred.

Of course I’m not arguing here that breathing *should* be treated as aggression. What I’m getting at is that you have not provided a solid standard on which public policy can be predictably based. Where do you draw the line on when use of the commons has enough of an effect to warrant a fee, and why?

You defend your taxation formula on the grounds that in contrast with Skip’s formula which “is used by every government,” the formula you propose “is used by none.” But in a previous post on this board you criticized anarchists for lacking evidence that anarchism could work in the modern world:

“…anarcholibertarians can merely wave toward a couple of medieval island nations with populations and population densities four orders of magnitude less than those of modern industrialized states. As great as America is, we have detailed, redundant, and current empirical evidence backing up the mainstream findings of modern economic science about how market-oriented reforms within the statist framework can make America even more free and even more prosperous. Anarcholibertarians have nothing of the kind to support their moralizing a priori claim that America would be a better place if we completely dismantled our system of rights protection in favor of a promise by liberty-lovers to set a good example of aggression abstinence.”

Now you’re telling us that the *virtue* of your taxation proposal is that it is nowhere currently in use?

In denying that anarchism is the purest form of libertarianism, you provide a link to a web page where you’ve written about the Non-Aggression Principle (which you call ZAP and claim is only one of many). But on that page, I find you’ve written the following:

“The dictionary tells us that, to competent speakers of English, ‘libertarian’ means ‘one who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state’. I accept that definition of libertarianism…”

Well, the minimal role of the state is zero. So whether or not you believe it is practical or desirable to attempt to implement anarchy, it seems to me that based on what you’ve written above, we are in agreement that anarchists are more libertarian than other Libertarians. This is not saying that anarchism is the *best* political philosophy, only that it is the most *libertarian* political philosophy.

As the hypothetical of the person falling off the 10th floor balcony and saving himself from death by grabbing a flagpole protruding from the 9th floor and trespassing by climbing onto that balcony illustrates, the *most libertarian* solution — in this case avoiding trespass by falling to one’s death — is not always the *best* solution, although I would contend that it *usually* is, especially in public policy.

I never said we can’t dismantle one tax at a time. Instead, I just pointed out that this (untenable) assertion is a corollary of your apparent belief that restricting taxation to just aggression (e.g. pollution) would inevitably lead back to Leviathan/fascism. If instead you now say that it’s possible within the political framework to make significant and enduring inroads against taxation, then I welcome your agreement with me.

I never said that the optimal level of pollution is zero. That is yet another straw man.

Ron Paul’s “Revolution” was effectively one man running in one race in one year. The existence of the LP did not hinder Paul’s candidacy, and in many ways made that candidacy possible. Meanwhile, the idea of freedom is offered to millions of voters by hundreds of Libertarian candidates in every election year — even the years when no Ron Paul is running. As long as the State allows us to organize a freedom party that advocates against its own injustices, the freedom movement would be foolish not to take that opportunity. I wish all the best for Ron Paul and his Campaign For Liberty, but I’m not willing to bet that candidates running under the C4L (or any other non-LP freedom-oriented) banner will get more votes and media exposure than the LP in 2012 and 2016. Are you? Most kinds of political activism aren’t fungible zero-sum kinds of effort, and the ones that are point to the wisdom of having precisely one freedom party: http://libertarianintelligence.com/2008/09/why-multiple-freedom-parties-is-dumb.html

One, you’re obviously assuming that the only way to fight pollution is through some sort of government action. That is incorrect and the Law Merchant is an example. A private judicial system would have a much greater chance at curtailing pollution than what we have in our existing fascist system where polluting industries are protected in many instances by the politically appointed courts and law. You then assume wrongly that you “can’t” dismantle one tax at a time until they are all eliminated but that politically you will be able to solve such problems, if likeminded people of your ethical and intellectual level, only were able to obtain political power”. That Brian is a fantasy my friend. You will never beat them at their own game and I wish you could convince G. Edward Griffin of that as well. He is a great guy but he like you believe that you can beat them at a game, a game that necessitates political power to win in the first place and that is a contradiction to liberty.

Added Note: We, those who believe in liberty and free markets over force, understand that we may choose to sometimes allow pollution, as we allow people to drive cars that are currently polluting because it is a necessary reality that we must deal with until alternative(s) are found. If we had to all park and stop driving our combustion engine vehicles, the U.S. economy would literally shut down over night.

If libertarians want to achieve something, other than political power that has surely been shown to be a very ineffective method, then would it not be best to focus our attentions on the worse of the aggressions being perpetrated on American Citizens. We are so fragmented with at least 50 different groups, fighting against 50 different socialistic policies, that it takes always from the power of our people to achieve anything.

Don’t get me wrong, in that running a libertarian candidate for President does allows our advocates to be “educators” and that is a very good thing but you surely don’t need as the Ron Paul Revolution showed, the Libertarian Party” to do that. Ron Paul achieved many times more popularity and votes when running as a Republican than running as a Libertarian. If we can find another spokesman like Ron, I’d like to see him run as a Democrat next time. I’d rather see the libertarians join in some form of a libertarian association with the non-aggression axiom as a basis for membership and then start tackling single issues one at a time.

Until such time as the majority of people become aware of the fallacies of socialism and are organized and focused, we will continue to be ineffective. Even with knowledge we must have a focus and that focus must not be just curtailing of socialism, but on specifics and one at a time if necessary and I vote for one at a time being necessary.

You need not give up any rights to “property or happiness” to advocate a geominarchist state — unless, of course, you think that the commons is your property, or that your happiness consists in polluting it. Geominarchism solves two problems that no other school of libertarianism even claims to solve: http://knowinghumans.net/2008/04/geolibertarianism-squares-two-circles.html

To me the most important question that we must ask ourselves in this debate is, it appears we must give up some rights to property or happiness if we are to establish any sort of ruling body to pay for its operations. What than are the “very specific” distinctions between when I should give up/acquiesce my property and happiness for the common good and when I should not. And knowing that there is a great probability that once I would have acquiesced one right to property and happiness, that very group is going to at least attempt to coerce or steal more properties and happiness, does not make the heart feel good about given to a system of that nature. There is so much taking now that it becomes practical to pay them off rather than spends one’s life fighting the multitude of abuses. In my life time the losses far outweigh the wins by the libertarians as force appears to always win out over voluntarism. Mini-archaists’ believe that we can keep that governing group in check by some means. Obviously none of us are doing well against fighting the tyranny and corruption that the force of socialism procreates and I have been saying for some time that we must pick the most offensive of the communist’s enactments and join all our advocates together and legally and passively fight them on that front. To me that enactment is the income tax. It is the most egregious of all takings and it appears to be the one that frightens them a great deal based on how they are willing to risk their sovereign immunities by corrupt and treasonists practices to thwart the anti-income tax movement. There are many ways to skin a cat and to me wasting the time and money through a political party is both ineffective and counter philosophic to our goals.

Answering your questions on education: 1) Both/either. 2) Apart from a geolibertarian citizen’s dividend, I don’t think it should.

Brian you are very difficult to follow. Would the parents, or the child enter into the contract? Why should money or tax credits for education be given to pay for the children of a parent(s) who have more children than then can afford. Why not pay for all their expenses and let all parents just procreate as many children as possible while they are young enough to do so, and let society take care of the expenses. That is quit fair for the individuals who cannot have children or do not have children because they feel that they cannot afford to have them. People whom are good at having children like me, should not pay any taxes, that is the responsibility of the village as Hillary once noted. Isn’t it interesting how liberals always forget to mention the negative ramification and unentended conscequences of their altruistic social engineering.

Of course I am supposing here a fair and equitable process of levying such fines, and that the moneys collected are going to victims, not to government. In many cases, governments ostensibly impose penalties for congestion, pollution, monopolization, etc., of the commons, such as parking tickets, which are in reality just a way for them to take more money out of our pockets. The penalties are not proportionate to the offenses, and the takings are not tailored to benefit the victims of the alleged aggression.

I don’t think default contestable fines (i.e. “taxes”) on prima facie aggression are themselves aggression. If you’re going to rule out all use of force in any situation in which the target might eventually be able to prove his innocence, then you’re ruling out way more than just taxes. You’re also ruling out most judicial processes, and indeed almost anything that isn’t immediate bodily self-defense.

Breathing is not aggression. The exact language in my Free Earth Manifesto is: “Production of property via extraction of natural resources from a community commons should require a fee to the community proportional to the decrease in ability of that commons to sustainably support such extraction.”

My point about Leviathan was to distinguish Skip’s taxation formula from my own. Skip’s formula is used by every government; mine is used by none. George’s attempted point was that geominarchism is on a slippery slope to Leviathan. His point was so ahistorical that it may not have even registered on you.

“Starvation diet” was a metaphorical name for a diet that makes you lose more than 80% of your weight. Such a diet nearly always kills a human, but an 80% cut doesn’t have to kill a government.

I don’t agree that anarchists are the most libertarian of us, for reasons I enumerate at http://libertarianintelligence.com/2008/11/none-of-many-zaps-define-libertarianism.html.

Skip, if you think I don’t know enough economics, then check out my blog postings on that subject: http://knowinghumans.net/search/label/Economics. Or visit LPplatform-discuss and do searches like

Kuznets curves
free rider problem
club goods
Tiebout sorting
Pigovian taxes
Nash-Cournot equilibrium
Kaldor-Hicks efficiency
moral hazard
negative externalities
natural monopoly
public choice theory
Pareto optimality
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Allais paradox
Coase theorem
asymmetric information
Arrow’s theorem

If you harm another person you should pay retribution to your victim and that is surely different than paying some arbitray tax to achieve some arbitray benefits to the public good. Brian you need to study economics above 101 if you intend to make any real contribution to society.

John if you believe as a caring person that you can defeat people that are sociopaths, you will find that their is another sociopath waiting in his shadows, that will cut your throat to gain his position. Only by not giving them your money can you achieve a civil society as Ghandi once stated.

Minarchists (a term I dislike, but we seem to lack a suitable replacement) may consider some, though probably not all, of what falls under your four categories to be aggression (*breathing* is technically consumption of the commons — do you assert that this activity should be taxed?). Some may support the concept of class-action fines, just as some (like yourself) support various types of coercive taxation. Of course there is some point beyond which a person’s support for government would render the label “minarchist” or “supporter of limited government” inaccurate, but I’m not prepared to say exactly where that point is. I do think that the more government a person favors, the less libertarian his or her views.

I don’t mind admitting that the amount of government George Donnelly favors (none) makes his views more libertarian than mine. I believe abolition of government is the libertarian ideal; the only reason I don’t advocate it is because I’m afraid it would not be sustainable. Perhaps after a period of truly limited government, humanity will reach a point where anarchy can be safely allowed without fear that it will soon revert to tyranny.

I’m not sure what you believe is proved by asserting that no Leviathan has ever been maintained by taxing only the monopolizing, consuming, pollution, or congestion of the commons. Has any Leviathan ever been maintained by taxing *only* the consumption of drugs? No. But a government which taxes drug use is likely to exceed its proper scope in lots of other ways as well, and I think this would likewise be true for a government that imposes coercive taxation of any kind. When one embraces legal aggression, an important line is crossed. If involuntarily collected moneys are being taken as penalties for aggression, then their collection is not itself aggression, and they should be called fines rather than taxes to avoid confusion.

I don’t believe what you suggest qualifies as a “starvation diet.” Over time, a “starvation diet” starves the dieter. Your use of this term in the context of government use of resources implies that your intended result is the starvation and death of government, i.e. anarchy.

No Leviathan has ever been maintained on my starvation diet of taxing only these four kinds of aggression. Every Leviathan depends on Skip’s diet of taxation to finance whatever is in “the best interest of the majority”.

Of course some believers in limited government do not support coercive taxation for *any* reason. Your taxation of “public bads (i.e., monopolizing, consuming, polluting, or congesting the commons)” sounds like a formula for Leviathan.

Skip, private markets in rights enforcement is different from private markets in, say, shoes (to use Rod Long’s example). They are different because of rivalry and excludability lead to market failures in the provision of one but not the other. Yes, there is such a thing as government failure, but merely citing its existence (as you do above) cannot expunge the idea of market failure from all our economics textbooks. I’m still waiting for you to identify a modern instance of a vacuum in State authority where protection markets have operated not like the Sopranos but rather like anarcholibertarian fantasy. Until you do, I rest on my argument that there is insufficient historical evidence for the proposition that American should try anarchism instead of minarchism. However, I have no problem with anarchists migrating to vacuums of State authority such as in Somalia. Good luck with that.

By the way, we minarchist libertarians don’t agree with you that the power to tax should ideally be used to finance whatever is in “the best interest of the majority”. Mandatory taxation should fall only on public bads (i.e., monopolizing, consuming, polluting, or congesting the commons) and should finance only public goods (i.e. non-rivalrous non-excludable services for protecting life/liberty/property). Your “best interest of the majority” sounds like a formula for Leviathan.