A thing like CHAZ could only happen with city and state officials who misconceive their duties and do not grasp their responsibilities to the taxpayers of Seattle. If Seattle residents do not remove and replace their political leaders, they may as well dispossess themselves of everything they own or else buy AR-15s. The instinct of many Americans is to remove the occupiers forcibly at the earliest possible moment. I prefer action now by the least violent means, and I’ve contacted several members of Seattle’s government accordingly. This blog is not about the practicalities of what to do. It’s about how to think about the situation in libertarian terms.
I laud Jeff Diest for bringing out into the open a problem that divides libertarian theorists. Are CHAZians homesteaders or squatters? Are they liberators or thieves? Analyzing this question reveals a rift between two libertarian theorists, Walter Block and Hans-Hermann Hoppe and a disagreement between Block and Stephan Kinsella. These disagreements go back years and they remain unsettled.
My arguments, begun immediately below, reach what I regard as an obvious conclusion, which is that CHAZians are behaving illegally. They are occupying turf to which they have no right. The land and buildings don’t belong to them, and they cannot justify denying its full access and use to either the residents of Seattle or to the Seattle government. They are not homesteading a thing. The property they’re using is not stolen property. There is no viable libertarian case that justifies what they’re doing. This is not a secession, because they never resided there in the first place.
People within America, the land governed by the U.S.A. and its state and territorial governments, have the freedom to move from one locality to another. They have the freedom to buy or rent housing and like property. In doing so, they knowingly enter a tax jurisdiction. There is migration domestically or internal migration, and the taxes that must be paid are a factor in deciding where to settle. The quality of schools and the attendant taxes are other factors that influence internal movements. Yet another is the quality of local services provided by governments or regulated by governments: the condition of roads, the traffic, the parks, the libraries, the zoos, the museums, the very air and water and their quality, the sanitation, the animal control, and the police, etc. All of these things are goods. They come in a bundle, unlike other goods, but there is an element of voluntary choice in selecting a bundle. Not only that, after one settles somewhere, one can vote and one can become politically active if one wants to influence the bundle of goods, their quality and their delivery.
What this element of voluntary movement means is that to some extent, local property taxes are voluntarily incurred. This means that taxes are not 100% theft. There is an element of consent attaching to taxes. This analysis can be pursued to the state and federal levels, where it becomes less and less persuasive, because the costs of moving from one location to another rise to a high level. Yet the description of choice of location still holds. Although most of us ordinarily do not exit from a country in order to find a better place to live, we must remember that all the immigrants to America, our parents, grandparents, and forefathers, did exactly that.
The current taxpayers in Seattle support the properties owned and operated by the city. The CHAZians may be taxpayers too, but their pro rata share doesn’t entitle them to expropriate 6 blocks of prime real estate owned by other people and by the city. They have no right to interfere with the comings and goings of Seattle residents and its visitors, allowed by the taxpayers by city rules. Seattle’s residents and taxpayers have established their rights by the voluntary basis of paying taxes.
The most far-reaching libertarian model of political relations posits no state government, and one may attempt to apply or tease out the resulting theoretical insights as to how to think about and deal with existing states. Nonetheless, the model remains just that, a model, and in different hands, there are going to be different and sometimes contradictory results. Even in a given theorist’s hands, there are going to be results that vary from one time to another, and results that seem screwy.
There are two main models that compete with the libertarian model. The two authors are Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The libertarian model is an extension of Locke’s political theory. Hobbes arrived at the conclusion that existing states were sovereign through the relinquishing of each person’s right to all. The right of all to all in his state of nature gives way to a sole sovereign when people agree with one another to give up that right and live under a state. The Hobbesian state is powerful, although it has obligations that do limit it. Upon certain mis-behavior of the state, people may revert to a state of nature. The Hobbes model has great merit because it describes and explains logically why we have states with the powers they have. Its weak spot is that the state’s powers are so absolute and far-reaching.
Locke’s model is what the U.S. government (the U.S.A.) is based upon, but imperfectly. By allowing for a different kind of state of nature, one in which people had limited rights of property, Locke arrived at limited government and constitutional government. The Hobbes model has in it a kind of consent, and so does Locke’s model. Locke’s model does have descriptive power for existing states, but their tendency to become absolute powers is notable. We actually live somewhere in between the models of Hobbes and Locke.
The libertarian model points away from a strong and almost unlimited sovereign toward limiting government further and further to the point where it does not and need not have much presence.
The above description of how it is that paying taxes entitles Seattle’s residents to the city’s streets and their property, including a police precinct building, is a Lockean description. Most Americans will take this description for granted. They will take it as common sense that the CHAZians be removed, simply because they have no proper claims on the property they’re occupying.
Libertarians may still argue the matter in order to understand where the libertarian model goes. In this case, where does it go? How can it possibly provide any justification for the CHAZ occupation, if it is that, or seizure, if it is that? Some within CHAZ seem to recognize that they cannot justify seizure, or will find it impossible to maintain. They already want to change the name to CHOP: Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone or Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone.
In one portion of his argument (p. 609), Block writes (against Stephan Kinsella’s position): “My point is that the radical scenario I am positing seems to me more compatible with the libertarian ethos than the more conservative one depicted by our author.” The radical scenario is that the property controlled by governments is stolen property. Stolen from whom? Block says it’s stolen from taxpayers (p. 605): “…Yellowstone Park, which Hoppe and I agree has been stolen from the taxpayers of America.” And again:
“My response is that I do not at all claim that property such as government roads or libraries is ‘unowned.’ Rather, I claim these holdings were stolen. I agree that the state now possesses them; I argue, only, that this is unjustified. And, yes, I insist, the same libertarian analysis can be applied, in this context, to virgin and stolen land. Why? This is because for the libertarian, at least as I construe him, stolen land is de jure virgin land, ready for the next homesteader to seize it (on the assumption that the rightful original owner cannot be located, or he acquiesces in the state’s seizure, or that, arguendo, we can ignore this rightful owner.)”
Block has 3 provisos at the end of this passage that can flip the analysis around in a particular case, so as to reach dramatically opposite judgments. (1) Stolen property, like the streets of Seattle in Block’s analysis, may lawfully be seized by a person (a homesteader). It is virgin property, assuming “the rightful original owner cannot be located”. However, the rightful original owners can be identified. They were prior and now are current taxpayers. A road is financed continually and so are all other city holdings and services, from their origination to the present. There is never a lapse in such supporting payments, and these are the basis for the entitlements of the taxpayers. (2) “…or he acquiesces in the state’s seizure…” That is, the original owners agree to “the seizure” which means the property owned and maintained by the city. But of course they do agree. They voted in the governments that took on these services. They settled there. They paid taxes there, rather than buying a cabin in the hills that had no city services. (3) “…we can ignore this rightful owner…” That proviso is merely for the sake of argument. It does not apply.
We cannot assume away rightful original owners and we cannot assume away that they’ve acquiesced to the city’s property ownership. Therefore, we cannot say that the city property is stolen.
One libertarian presumption and slogan has apparently been assaulted in this analysis. It is that “taxes are theft” because government is coercive. Hoppe and Kinsella have their own ways to handle this assault and deflect it, and they are not explained here. My way is that taxes are not purely for services rendered; they are “dirty”. The services come as a bundle. Taxpayers partly accept a part of taxes as payment for services, but partly they do not accept taxes when governments do various things they disapprove of or provide services they do not want or provide services badly. Most people are not entirely happy with governments, but neither do they destroy them until some sort of very serious breaking point occurs. And often they migrate to some other city, state or country. Is there a definitive answer? Are taxes 90% theft, or 50% theft, or 25% theft, or all theft? No one can say. If government coercively extracts taxes, does that imply that taxes are all theft? Not in the models of Hobbes and Locke, and the reality of how states operate and explain their actions more closely mirrors their models than it does the libertarian model. The libertarian model expresses a fundamental displeasure with government, one that’s radical in some hands and conservative in others.
CHAZians and CHOPers are not liberators of any property. They’re occupying property illegally, maybe seizing some illegally. This distinction makes little difference to the case. The property they’re occupying is not virgin land or stolen from its rightful owners. The ownership has been established long ago (1851) and maintained continuously ever since. The city’s relationship with taxpayers and residents makes it a kind of agent of the people or a property manager, so to speak, but a manager with the powers of a government. The city claims certain properties by deed and purchase, having used taxpayer funds to buy them. Their ownership is not for the private use of the city officials, and if it were used that way, there are sufficient laws to bring actions against them. The fact that such laws exist that restrain elected officials bolsters the case that taxes are not purely theft. These laws help flesh out a form of covenant or agreement between taxpayers and the people they elect to run their government.
10:10 am on June 15, 2020
