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?

MikeT: Well, at least you can rest easier knowing that DNA evidence (you know, that old dead white man notion of due process of law) has proved that they didn’t rape her.

No, it didn’t.

WinstonWebb: Well, whaddya know? The stripper was lying.

The article you linked to doesn’t say that she was lying:

“It doesn’t mean nothing happened,” Nifong said at a public forum at North Carolina Central University, where the 27-year-old alleged victim is a student. “It just means nothing was left behind.”

No charges have been filed.

Nifong said prosecutors were awaiting a second set of DNA results, but did not say how those differed from the tests reported Monday. Nifong added that in 75 percent to 80 percent of sexual assaults, there is no DNA evidence to analyze.

The district attorney said a rape case can built on testimony from the alleged victim and other witnesses. Nifong also said the hospital exam of the woman has led him to believe a crime occurred at the March 13 party.

According to court documents, a doctor and a specially trained nurse found the alleged victim had “signs, symptoms and injuries consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted.”

If you want to work yourself up into righteous indignation about evidence and proof, then you had better learn to read your sources carefully, to represent your sources honestly, and to learn to exercise basic logical distinctions, such as the distinction between (1) the lack of a particular line of evidence for an event, and (2) particular evidence for the lack of that event. What you’ve got here is at the most (1) and not (2).

But hey, don’t let that stop you from your little “women who accuse male atheletes of rape are lying whores” jag.

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.

(4) seems clearly wrong. At the most it is a parochial about the conventions for modern works (and I’m not sure it’s universally true even there). We know, for example, that “Iliad” is the title of the Iliad, but we have no way of knowing whether that title was assigned by the author or was merely conventional, and assigned after the fact. We know for a fact that “Metaphysics” (or “Meta ta phusika”) was assigned by later editors and not by Aristotle, and yet it is in fact the title of the Metaphysics.

Actually, every single one of the points, except possibly (1) (and I’m not sure about that) seems based on pretty parochial intuitions. I’m inclined to doubt that any general theory of titles is possible at all.

Well, “P because Q” doesn’t actually entail that “If it weren’t the case that Q, it wouldn’t be the case that P.” There are cases where one cause trumps another cause that would have been sufficient had the trumping cause not been present: where if Q hadn’t caused P, something else would have.

Example: A is going on a three-day expedition deep into the desert. B wants to kill A, so B secretly poisons the water in A’s canteen. C also wants to kill A, but doesn’t know that B poisoned the canteen, so C drains all the water out of the canteen. A dies in the desert of dehydration; A was killed because C drained the canteen. But it’s still true that even if C hadn’t drained the canteen, A would still have been killed: she just would have been killed by the poisoned water instead of by dehyrdation.

This could also be the case in terms of war justifications. (You might think that there’s a secondary reason that would be sufficient, even if the primary reason turned out not to be sufficient after all.) But of course you’re right that most people argue in the way you have in mind are just making excuses for a predetermined policy, so just about anything at all would do. In that case you’re right that the “because” hasn’t been earned.

John,

B can’t recover it from A because once recovered by A, it belongs to her.

This is no different from any other situation in which assets on hand aren’t sufficient to cover all the debts that are out.

If I take out $100,000 in loans each from A and B and then default, but I can only pay back $20,000, then there’s no way for me to pay back everything I owe. But if I pay back $20,000 to A and nothing to B, B has no right to take the $20,000 from A on the grounds that it’s really her money.

Similarly, if I steal $1,000 from you and another $1,000 from Lopez, then blow $1,500 in Vegas before you catch me, you’re still entitled to recover $500 from me. You’re not obliged to turn over all of it, or part of it, to Lopez, and he’s not entitled to take it from you.

Because it was taken from them.

If you’re bankrupt, there’s no just way to pay off all of your creditors, since at least some debts are going to get defaulted on. That doesn’t mean that you’re not obliged to do what you can towards paying off at least some of them.

Kennedy: He can morally take as much of the stolen loot as he wants. What else should be done with it? The original rights to the loot are unsalvageable.

How so? Money’s fungible. It seems as though it would be pretty trivial for him to find net tax payers that he could return it to.

Do you think that he has a right to accept money or benefits above the total amount he paid out in taxes before he became a government employee? Or are the reasons that it would be legitimate other than whatever compensation the government owes him for taxes extorted?

“Your questions challenge the some of the most basic elements of international customary law”

That’s deliberate, and it’s a matter of conviction rather than ignorance. I don’t accept the legitimacy of “international law.” My interest is not in how well governments get along with each other, but rather in the kind of powers that governments do or do not have over peaceful individuals who are harming no-one.

“We make immigrants and non-immigrant visitors identify themselves and their intentions (filling out paperwork) to demonstrate to foreign countries that we are taking steps to ensure the safety of their citizens (read: we can easily find and identify them upon request). You would be surprised to know how many criminals and terrorists can be turned away by a little paperwork and an interview.”

You seem to have switched from one justification to another in mid-sentence. In the first case you seem to claim that the government is justified in using force against immigrants without documentation in order to assure the governments over their former home that the U.S. government is adequately attending to their safety. In the second you seem to claim that the government is justified in using force against undocumented immigrants to block or remove “criminals and terrorists,” presumably for our safety. Those are two separate claims; and frankly I don’t find either very persuasive. The latter because the government has no right whatever to force people through ex ante screening (that is, treating them as presumptive criminals) without probable cause. The former because the rights of peaceful immigrants not to be molested are more important than how comfortable the governments they formerly lived under are made. Neither you nor the government have any right to arrest, beat, restrain, confine, or exile an immigrant who has chosen to come here without a permission slip from the federal government, just in order to make their former government feel better, of all things, about the physical security (!) of their emigre subjects.

“I am not advocating that we criminal illegal border crossing, but we should be able to take such individuals back to the border to fill their paperwork out properly before re-entry.”

You act as if La Migra were just walking them home after school. In fact what you’re proposing is that La Migra use force against undocumented immigrants, arrest them, restrain them, confine them, beat or shoot them if it’s necessary to ensure compliance, and ship them in chains down to the border to get them to fill out the right forms in triplicate. Whether you call this “criminalizing” or not, that’s treating innocent people as criminals when they have violated nobody’s rights. And for what?

“Finally, allowing foreign citizens to enter the US in contravention of their domestic laws causes unnecessary political headaches.”

So what?

“Changing citizenship is a big deal and customary law dictates that both states involved in the immigration process have a voice in the process.”

Well, I didn’t say anything about changing citizenship. What I’m talking about is whether people who are in this country without a permission slip from BICE and who don’t have citizenship status should be arrested and forced into exile for it. I don’t think they should. If undocumented immigrants were free to live on property where they were welcome, and free to work for willing employers, with or without citizenship status—if they weren’t treated as outlaws and put at the mercy of La Migra, then I really wouldn’t care much at all how byzantine the rules for changing citizenship were. The issue here isn’t so much changing citizenship as whether or not non-citizens have rights that the State is bound to respect, and if so how far those rights extend. I think that they extend, at the very least, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“The core values of an immigration system should be responsibility, expediency, and fair treatment.”

The core values of an immigration system should be packing up their guns and going home. Moving is not a crime, and it’s not a problem to be solved.