----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2003 9:21 AM
Subject: OWNERSHIP: redistirbution 2 -
absolute property rights
I was reflecting over the holiday on the three inalienable rights of
live, liberty and property (also known as the pursuit of hapiness to fudge the
slavery issue in the Declaration).
It seems to me that while all of these rights are inalienable, it is
impossible to maximize all three in all situations. In fact, sometimes
they are in conflict. As Laswell first said, the allocation of values
(he had eight, for now I will stick to the three basics) is the primary
function of government.
Let us look at some examples.
In the Middle Ages, and even later, theivery was a capital crime.
Therefore, property, especially noble property, was more important than life,
especially the life of a peasant. Nowadays, property is more important
than liberty, meaning that thieves lose their liberty by taking property
(instead of simply paying a fine - although to some extent prison for property
crimes is a form of debtors prison, as those who cannot afford to pay a fine
were imprisoned while those who could were allowed to to avoid jail in some
places).
The abortion question is a classic example. Sometimes abortion is a
question of Life v. Life, the life of the mother vs. the life of the
child. Sometimes the question is put as the health of the mother vs. the
life of the child. Of course, because under the constitution, rights
literally begin at birth - or the ability to be born (viability), the Court
has fudged the issue. Sometimes abortion is justified (badly) as the
liberty of the mother vs. the life of the child. Only the shrillest
pro-abortionist puts it in these terms. Rather, the essence of the
pro-choice argument is that the mother has a liberty interest versus the
society (rather than against the child) in making the determination to end the
pregnancy. Most doctors who perform abortions do so because if they did
not, others who would put the life of the mother in danger would. It is
also the case that when abortion is made illegal it is much harder to procure
one! when the mother's life is truly in danger - and the wheels of government
are too slow when such a life or death decision is to be made. TIn the
case of incest, abortions are thought to be necessary due to the likelihood of
genetic deformity (although this can be tested) so that their is a life
interest in avoiding bringing to term a child with a fatal birth defect.
Again, legalized abortion prevents government interference in this decision,
which is best left to doctors.
The other reason for abortion has to do with both life and
property. This is the most common conflict over
abortion. It occurs in two cases. Young teens have a property
interest in their future (teenage pregnancy also has a higher risk to the life
of the mother, depending on her physical condition). In many cases
their parents insist that they terminate their pregnancy in order to
secure an education and be able to acquire a decent level of
property. The other case is of a family wishing to limit the number
of children to its income. This is both a property and a life
question, as many fear that if they have too many children starvation
and malnutrition are real possibilities, so life interests are
implicated as well as property.
As I have written on both my web sites, redistributional taxes and the
empowerment of youth are a way to remove the concern of life versus property,
by simply instituting a negative income tax in the spirit of the Earned Income
Tax Credit (only larger by 6 times) to remove this concern. Using
corporate rather than personal income taxes is considered a better vehicle for
this, as it more neatly integrates the payment into salary and by doing so
hastens the day that employee-owned firms adjust salary for child birth as a
matter of course, ending the need for tax incentives for this purpose.
Continuing to rely on personal income taxes, or even capital credit
for each child, keeps the government's hand in this question forever.
Adjusting corporate taxes is therefore the more libertarian
alternative.
To say that redistributing income for the purpose of providing for an
income for family size is to put the property interests of taxpayers over not
only the property but also the life interests of the
beneficiaries. The poorer the recipeint, the greater their life
interest. In a perfectly competitve labor market where the worth one
adds to the product is the sole determinant of the base wage, larger families
are out of luck unless some explict payment is made for the subsistence of
children.
Also, at the concrete level (watching the money flows rather than
justifying them as taxation versus money creation and capital insurance),
improving the access of poor individuals to credit in such a way that
ultimately denies credit to wealthier individuals has the same affect in terms
of total wealth flows as redistributional taxation or the redistribution of
incomes within a firm due to the imposition of a redistributional tax credit
for families as part of an expanded corporate income tax.
The capital flows between a negative personal income tax on an individual
level and an expanded corporate income tax are the same because of the
role of employers in withholding and paying personal income taxes for most
workers. If the EITC were expanded to $500 per child per month (federal)
with a match $300 per child state credit, tax rates in general would have to
increase and employers would take more from higher salaried employees and give
more to lower salaried employees with larger families (assuming the change
were revenue neutral). In concrete terms, it matters not at all whether
a personal income tax or a corporate tax is used for this, except that using
the corporate income tax eliminates the obligation to file taxes and pay
interest income from lower-income employees. Employees above a certain
level would continue to file personal income taxes, so that they may keep
their non-employment related financial information away from their
employers.
Finally, the whole argument that CESJ makes stating that shifting
personal income taxes to employers removes visibility from government spending
and taxing decisions is more Milton Freeman and Norm Kurland than Louis
Kelso. I am not unfriendly to the goal of ultimately limiting government
involvement in fiscal affairs, although I would do so by privatizing
corrections, mental health care, education and assistance to the poor while
making the payment for these services to some providing organization mandatory
(though in lieu of a tax system).
Michael Bindner