Comments Elsewhere

Kennedy:

Assuming Paul has only acted justly, defensively, he doesn’t owe you anything.

That’s begging the question. The claim is that he can’t act justly while taking money that belongs to other people, so if he does keep it, then he owes a debt of compensation to the victims.

He cannot steal from the state and he’s not responsible to secure any of your rights.

He can’t steal from the state, but he can and does accept stolen goods from it. You can homestead unclaimed property, but not claimed property that happens to be inaccessible to the claimant due only the actions of criminal conspirators with your co-operation. (This isn’t like finding buried treasure, after all; the victims are identifiable and the piracy is extensively documented.)

If you think the property is unclaimed by net taxpayers, well, here: I want mine back.

Stefan:

For one thing, it would seem to follow from your logic that a net-taxpayer could receive money via “repayment” and then pay Ron Paul, a net tax-recipient, with the money. It would then be his, no?

Sure, if they wanted to voluntarily contribute to his upkeep. I wouldn’t, personally, since I think Ron Paul’s presence in a single seat in Congress is perfectly useless as a defensive measure. But to each her own.

In fact, Ron Paul could even deliberately choose to “repay” net tax-payers who would then kick back the money to him, as long as he didn’t pay them over what they were owed, on net, by the Treasury. I think that would be morally sketchy, but it would arguably be a vice rather than a crime.

And why does restitution get metted out on a first-come first-served basis? This is a fungible good we’re talking about. It seems that in an anarcho-capitalist society both Kennedy and Lopez would have a claim on that $500, and that some kind of arbitration would be in order.

I would hold that because it is a fungible good, the $500 is available for something analogous to homesteading by whichever of my victims can recover it. (After all, what matters is getting the amount back, not getting back the specific dollars I stole, so it doesn’t matter whether those $500 were originally Kennedy’s, Lopez’s, the casino’s, or mine.)

It may be prudential for Kennedy and Lopez to work out some agreement via arbitration and then pool their resources for recovery. But from the standpoint of justice I owe both Lopez and Kennedy $1,000, but without some kind of contractual agreement neither Kennedy nor Lopez owes the other aid in recovering his share of the money. So if Kennedy gets $500 of his money back before Lopez can get to it, Lopez only has a claim against me, not against Kennedy.

My problem with the Bizarro Ron Paul who actually votes in accord with perfect justice is that he has no claim to the money he’s taking as salary in the first place, so he’s not eligible to recover it or to homestead it.

Macker:

Oh, come on, surely you excommunicated him from libertarianism long ago for ….. holding public office.

I think both Kennedy and I made it pretty clear that the problem isn’t that he holds public office. It’s that he’s a statist.