Comments Elsewhere

Kennedy,

Doesn’t it follow from your argument that you’d be justified in recovering your property from any welfare recipient, for instance, who received benefits in excess of what he’d paid into the system since he was receiving stolen goods?

I don’t know. I also don’t know whether it would make it unjust for other employees at 100% tax-funded institutions (government school teachers, EPA bureaucrats, contractors on government buildings, or whatever you like) to accept their salaries. As a practical matter, I’m not worried very much about welfare recipients (since I think all or nearly all of them are arguably net taxpayers, not net tax recipients, once all taxes, indirect taxes, and compliance costs for getting the benefits are factored in), but there are other cases where practical worries are raised, and it’s an important theoretical question regardless of practical import. I have to admit that I have conflicting intuitions, so this is more a matter of doubting the legitimacy of taking a Congressional salary than it is positively denying it, until I have a better idea of how to sort it out.

As I see it, there are three viable options:

1. Net tax-recipients can lay claim to the loot as lost property, no matter how they acquire it; as long as they played no active role in the process of expropriating it, the victims’ claims are only against the expropriators, not against those who received it. (Thus, accepting a Congressional salary and accepting a government school salary are equally just, even above the total debt of the Treasury to you.)

2. Net tax-recipients can’t lay claim to the loot, no matter how they acquire it, since it is owned property; even if they played no active role in expropriating it, laying claim to it rather than returning it to its owners makes one an accessory to theft. (Thus, neither acceping a Congressional salary nor accepting a government school salary would be just, once you’d already made back whatever the government owes you in taxes.)

3. Net tax-recipients can sometimes lay claim, and sometimes they can’t, depending on how they acquire it; this would need to involve some kind of distinction between loot paid out for some purposes (say, Congressional salary) and loot paid out for others (say, government school salary). This would have to make the fact that even a legislator who happens to vote in accord with perfect justice is still being paid for a job description that involves criminal usurpation, whereas a government school-teacher (say) is not.

I lean towards (3), and if not (3) then I’m undecided between (1) and (2). I understand (1) to be your position; please correct me if I’m wrong. (3) would be an eirenic solution, but I’m not sure whether this distinction can actually do the work that it needs to do to justify it. In any case, I think the issue is tricky, simply because the moral law around conspiracies and accessory is tricky.

There are also, actually, difficulties with immediately translating the injustice of accepting loot from a particular class of individuals, into a right of recovery by any member of that class against particular recipients (it may be that it’s unjust for Bizarro Ron Paul to take the salary, but that no particular net tax recipient has a right to recover from him in particular; if so, then he’d be obligated to turn it over but the obligation wouldn’t be legitimately enforceable). But this is already running too long.

Just out of curiosity, do you think that your argument applies in all cases of receiving stolen property? I.e., are there any cases where you consider it a moral crime to receive property you know to have been stolen from one or more identifiable victims?