Stefan,

Well, as I mentioned above, I don’t have a decisive opinion on the moral status of accepting a tax-funded salary; all I’m saying is that if there’s a moral problem, it has to do with the requirements of justice on your individual conduct, not with the sort of consequentialist calculation that was being suggested. I’m not positive that there is a moral problem.

As for Universities, I’m not sure precisely what question you’re asking. If you’re asking about the payments that governments make to some Universities at an institutional level, then it may well be true that justice obliges University administrators not to profit from the looting. Whether or not this is an obligation of justice, I think it would be wise not to lay claim to the loot: government money means government control, and the freer that Universities are from political power, the better. (Autonomy from political power is historically one of the most important values of the University; when Universities are reduced to branches of the civil service it debases them and undermines their purpose.)

If, on the other hand, you’re asking about salaries for faculty or staff at government Universities, I’m not worried much about that at all. The reason being that the money for those salaries isn’t solely tax loot. Some Universities are tax-funded but all are at least partly funded by voluntary contributions and fees from individual students. So what you’ve got here is accepting a salary from a tax-subsidized institution, rather than accepting a tax-funded salary. (The same would apply to, say, employees of firms that benefit from corporate welfare.) Now, you could argue that, if you accept position (2) as I outlined above (that nobody has a right to any tax-funded salary or benefits), then a professor would be morally obliged to return to net tax-payers whatever portion her salary comes from tax funds. But how could you calculate the portions, even in principle? The cases that worry me, and which push me towards position (3), are different ones, in which people are doing similar kinds of work but receiving a 100% tax-funded salary (e.g. teachers in K-12 government schools).

Ryan,

Granted: if you have unique skills to contribute (or not to contribute) to a position that’s especially demanding of them, then your co-operation or refual to co-operate with the government may make some concrete difference on the margin. Being in that position may create some special obligations for you, if your co-operation will make crimes possible that would otherwise not be possible. But this is not the position that most people on the government payroll are in, and it’s not the position that Ron Paul in particular or anybody else in the United States Congress is in. If Ron Paul resigns tomorrow, he will be replaced; and even if he were never replaced it would make absolutely no difference to the prospects of the U.S. Congress (plenty of seats have been vacant for various lengths of time). Whatever moral obligations Ron Paul has, as far as his seat and his salary are concerned, they have very little to do with the (effectively nonexistent) power that he has to sway the course of the federal government one way or another by those sorts of actions.

T.J. Madison: If by partially (or totally) withdrawing my support from the State I can decrease the number of such crimes, …

But T.J., you can’t.

If Ron Paul resigned tomorrow, his seat would promptly be filled. Outside the military, the government is not facing any kind of staffing shortage; every resignation or refusal means nothing more than that the seat will be filled by somebody else. Speaking strictly from the standpoint of consequentialist calculation, your personal refusal to fill any given government post, or to accept any particular salary from the government, is completely irrelevant, either on the whole or on the margin, to the prospects for the government’s ongoing cannibal feast.

I do think that there may be moral problems with accepting a government salary. But if there are any such problems, the reasons for them have nothing in particular to do with its practical effects.

J.C. Earnharth: I think there is something to be said for not allowing liberty to be swamped under by non-liberty minded folks.

1. Are you suggesting that the government has the right to use force against immigrants on the basis of their political opinions? Or, worse, on the basis of political opinions they may not even hold but happen to be held by a lot of people from their former home?

2. The post is about whether immigration without a government permission slip ought to be treated as criminal. Do you seriously think that liberty is going to be enhanced by condemning immigrants who don’t notify the government of their whereabouts and intentions at all times, and praising those who patiently trudge through years of pointless paperwork?

J.C. Earnharth: It’d be one thing if our nation was the nation of 1815, where basically the economic laws of gravity associated with liberty and freedom pretty much forced you to behave in a liberty oriented fashion in the U.S.

Yeah, unless you were a white planter in the South. Then there was that little slavery and ethnic cleansing thing.

But hey, who’s counting?

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?

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.

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?

Well, the issue isn’t whether or not Ron Paul would have to stop sitting in the House of Representatives. I agree that he isn’t necessarily under a moral obligation to do so. But he would have to stop trying to pass off himself and his colleaguesas legislators invested with the right to make laws wholly of their own device. As it stands he’s a professional usurper because whatever votes he makes in practice, he professionally claims an authority that he has not got.

Also, I doubt that he would have any right to accept a Congressional salary and benefits for his “services,” even if he were holding the position in a strictly defensive way (which of course he’s not).