A post by Bitarch and Voluntarist about how taxes are unfair robbery, which seemed a bit boring to me, nonetheless sparked a lively discussion, since the comment section of the Telegram channel includes Alex Rozov, a lively and sane leftist. The main point of the post was that taxes are advertised as a means of taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, but the rich have a multitude of tools for tax evasion, and therefore the middle class suffers the most from taxes. To this, Alex inquired whether the authors of the post would support the introduction of a tax specifically on the rich (2% per year of the market value of assets worth over $10M) as fair? Bitarch chose not to answer this because he was caught in an obvious logical trap; in reality, libertarians condemn taxes not for the unfairness of the distribution of the tax burden, and therefore they cannot approve a legislative patch that increases the burden on a category that had previously successfully avoided taxation without contradicting their own ideology.

One could have ended the discussion there, but the conversation steered into a slightly different direction. In response to Alex’s question about whether it is moral that a significant percentage of people live in poverty, and an even larger percentage balance on the brink of poverty, I—balancing on the brink of poverty because I spend a disproportionate amount of effort on activities that bring only modest donations—replied that any distribution of wealth obtained through purely voluntary transactions is moral. However, in conditions of total systemic robbery, it is practically impossible to determine what the distribution of wealth would be through purely voluntary transactions.

To this, Alex rightly replied that it is impossible to fix a real situation if you treat it as if it were ideal. The reality is that the disproportion in the distribution of wealth and power is a self-sustaining and exacerbating cycle.

I agreed with this thesis, but noted that since we consider robbery immoral, then complaining that we receive too little from the robbery is simply irrelevant, and the task of restoring justice consists precisely in the abolition of the mechanisms of robbery. And in the case of success, one can completely ignore what this unfair machine of forced redistribution managed to grind out; the main thing is that we broke it, and now all that remains is to slap the hands of anyone who attempts to repair it.

After this, Alex reasonably wondered who would be doing the slapping and what would stop him from repairing the machine himself. I replied that such vigilantism must be strictly decentralized—specifically to prevent the obvious danger of a monopoly on the restoration of justice. Systemic decentralized efforts, however, require moral pressure from society.

And here Alex played his trump card, asking how I plan to ensure moral pressure in this direction if it is currently operating in the opposite direction: the broad masses enthusiastically welcome fiscal measures against the super-rich. However, since we had already moved to discussing moral positions, I could afford an ethical rather than a logical thrust, suggesting that he at least refrain from increasing moral pressure in the current vein himself, thereby shifting the general equilibrium slightly toward justice.

And, of course, after that, Alex had only one way to finish me off: by suggesting that since I expect to change the moral vector in society by persuading influencers from the left and adjacent areas of the political spectrum, why not try to persuade him as a test. Well, it means I will get to it; it is a worthy and interesting task.

So, I am announcing a new book with the working title “Charting a Libertarian Course in Leftist Discourse,” and considering how much time I spend on such large-scale works, I fear that the results will now have to be awaited for a year or two.