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This is a helpful thought experiment that exercises what you're describing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_theft#How_many_men? https://en.wikipedia.

This is a helpful thought experiment that exercises what you're describing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_theft#How_many_men? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_as_theft#How_many_men...]

CharlesColeman 8y ago
> This is a helpful thought experiment That "thought experiment" isn't really helpful. It just starts with a particular morally-charged framing, and creates a mechanism to push that framing forward towards a conclusion, while discouraging thought about any other principles. You could probably construct an infinite number of other "experiments" that push towards an infinite number of different conclusions on any topic, like "How many men...does it take to give you property rights? Do you own the car if only you say so? What if a gang of five men say you own the car..."
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  I would disagree... I believe the point is to illustrate that you either have inalienable natural rights or you don't -- which is usually the basis of the "taxation is theft" argument -- i.e. you either own the produce of your labor or some other entity owns it and allows you to keep a portion of it out of kindness or whatever. Not arguing for or against just explaining the reasoning behind their reductio ad absurdum "thought experiment".
nearbuy 8y ago
This sounds more like wordplay than an argument. It's trying to establish that the word "theft" means any forced surrender of property including tax. But it never establishes why "theft" is bad under this definition. The answers you give to the questions in that thought experiment have no practical purpose - you're just choosing a definition for the English word "theft". The questions can be meaningful if you replace "Is it theft if..." with "Is it bad if...". Is it bad if one man steals a car? Is it bad if a majority of voters decide to take some money from the rich to build roads and help the poor? Answers to these questions lead to actionable policy. The original questions do nothing but make communication more difficult by creating personal, non-standard definitions of a word.
- freedomben 8y ago
  I can definitely see where you'd get that impression, but that's not the impression I got from it. I don't think he's trying to define or establish meaning of the word "theft" at all. He seems to simply be establishing a baseline for the thought experiment by asking a rhetorical question. Most people would agree that it is "theft" if one man steals a car. It's similar to a thought experiment I heard regarding abortion, where you start at 1 day and say, "Is it ok to abort at 1 day? what about 1 week? month? 20 weeks? 40 weeks?" But I could very well be misunderstanding it myself.
  - nearbuy 8y ago
    There's an important difference between asking "Is it ok..." (to abort/take property/whatever else) and asking "Is it theft...". In essence, the argument is using our negative feelings about "theft" to distract us from the relevant question of "is it ok/good?". It's a technique that works for any category of things where there's a spectrum from bad to good and you want to persuade someone that the good instances are actually bad. To take the abortion example. You ask someone who's undecided on abortion, "Is it okay to abort the moment after birth? What about the moment before birth? An hour before birth? A day? A month? 8 months? The day after conception?" Phrased this way, the answers are likely to change from "no" to "yes" at some point through the spectrum. The person will likely feel it's okay to kill a single celled zygote with no brain and no mind, but not okay to kill a freshly born baby, and this phrasing makes it easy to acknowledge the difference. But you can muddy the waters by changing the question from "Is it okay..." to "Is it murder...". After all, if you consider it murder to abort a fetus just before birth, it's not obvious why you wouldn't categorized aborting younger fetuses as murder. One reasonably answer might be that you could consider killing a fetus/embryo at any age to be murder, but that still doesn't make it wrong to kill at early stages. A technically correct answer would be it's not murder because our legal definition of murder excludes abortion. However, people presented with this argument often won't say either of these things, and that's why this technique is effective. It obfuscates the question we're actually interested in ("is it okay?") by breaking it into two parts. It's trying to convince you that 1) killing a fetus is murder, 2) murder is not okay, therefore killing a fetus is not okay. This is an obvious fallacy. If you change what's considered murder to include something that is okay, then you've invalidated 2). However, these last steps of the argument are usually subconscious and people miss the fallacy. The taxation argument has the same problem. Sure, you can call taxation "theft" if you want, but that does nothing to explain why it's bad. Or we can stick to the official definition of theft, which excludes tax. Either way, they've failed to explain why tax is bad.

CharlesColeman 8y ago

> This is a helpful thought experiment That "thought experiment" isn't really helpful. It just starts with a particular morally-charged framing, and creates a mechanism to push that framing forward towards a conclusion, while discouraging thought about any other principles. You could probably construct an infinite number of other "experiments" that push towards an infinite number of different conclusions on any topic, like "How many men...does it take to give you property rights? Do you own the car if only you say so? What if a gang of five men say you own the car..."

UncleEntity 8y ago
I would disagree... I believe the point is to illustrate that you either have inalienable natural rights or you don't -- which is usually the basis of the "taxation is theft" argument -- i.e. you either own the produce of your labor or some other entity owns it and allows you to keep a portion of it out of kindness or whatever. Not arguing for or against just explaining the reasoning behind their reductio ad absurdum "thought experiment".

nearbuy 8y ago

This sounds more like wordplay than an argument. It's trying to establish that the word "theft" means any forced surrender of property including tax. But it never establishes why "theft" is bad under this definition. The answers you give to the questions in that thought experiment have no practical purpose - you're just choosing a definition for the English word "theft". The questions can be meaningful if you replace "Is it theft if..." with "Is it bad if...". Is it bad if one man steals a car? Is it bad if a majority of voters decide to take some money from the rich to build roads and help the poor? Answers to these questions lead to actionable policy. The original questions do nothing but make communication more difficult by creating personal, non-standard definitions of a word.

freedomben 8y ago
I can definitely see where you'd get that impression, but that's not the impression I got from it. I don't think he's trying to define or establish meaning of the word "theft" at all. He seems to simply be establishing a baseline for the thought experiment by asking a rhetorical question. Most people would agree that it is "theft" if one man steals a car. It's similar to a thought experiment I heard regarding abortion, where you start at 1 day and say, "Is it ok to abort at 1 day? what about 1 week? month? 20 weeks? 40 weeks?" But I could very well be misunderstanding it myself.
- nearbuy 8y ago
  There's an important difference between asking "Is it ok..." (to abort/take property/whatever else) and asking "Is it theft...". In essence, the argument is using our negative feelings about "theft" to distract us from the relevant question of "is it ok/good?". It's a technique that works for any category of things where there's a spectrum from bad to good and you want to persuade someone that the good instances are actually bad. To take the abortion example. You ask someone who's undecided on abortion, "Is it okay to abort the moment after birth? What about the moment before birth? An hour before birth? A day? A month? 8 months? The day after conception?" Phrased this way, the answers are likely to change from "no" to "yes" at some point through the spectrum. The person will likely feel it's okay to kill a single celled zygote with no brain and no mind, but not okay to kill a freshly born baby, and this phrasing makes it easy to acknowledge the difference. But you can muddy the waters by changing the question from "Is it okay..." to "Is it murder...". After all, if you consider it murder to abort a fetus just before birth, it's not obvious why you wouldn't categorized aborting younger fetuses as murder. One reasonably answer might be that you could consider killing a fetus/embryo at any age to be murder, but that still doesn't make it wrong to kill at early stages. A technically correct answer would be it's not murder because our legal definition of murder excludes abortion. However, people presented with this argument often won't say either of these things, and that's why this technique is effective. It obfuscates the question we're actually interested in ("is it okay?") by breaking it into two parts. It's trying to convince you that 1) killing a fetus is murder, 2) murder is not okay, therefore killing a fetus is not okay. This is an obvious fallacy. If you change what's considered murder to include something that is okay, then you've invalidated 2). However, these last steps of the argument are usually subconscious and people miss the fallacy. The taxation argument has the same problem. Sure, you can call taxation "theft" if you want, but that does nothing to explain why it's bad. Or we can stick to the official definition of theft, which excludes tax. Either way, they've failed to explain why tax is bad.