On 17 April I wrote:
Taxation, then, is a liberty issue before it is a 'green eyeshade' issue: the more the government takes, the less concrete liberty you have. Without money you can't get your kids out of a shitty public school system that liberals have destroyed with their tolerate-anything mentality; without money you cannot live in a decent and secure neighborhood.
But I just now found something over at Jim Ryan's Philosoblog that gives me reason to think that I blundered. Ryan writes:
As Isaiah Berlin said, echoing the Bishop Butler, "Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice...." Unjustly high taxation is unfairness, injustice, and theft. It is not a violation of liberty rights. The price for ignoring this fact is that we let the verbal trap stand and you lose the basis for dismissing out of hand the leftist's argument for redistribution of wealth. There is plenty of reason to indict unjustly high taxation. There is no need to resort to verbal trickery. Leave the verbal trickery to the leftist, isolate it, and expose it.
Although Ryan was not responding to me when he wrote this, he could say to me, Your talk of 'concrete liberty' being lessened by high taxation smacks of the very sort of thinking that you presumably oppose in leftists. Liberty is liberty. There is no such thing as concrete liberty. As opposed to what? Abstract liberty? You would agree that justice is justice and that there is no such thing as social justice or economic justice. Similarly with liberty. It is what it is and not some other thing. The argument against high taxation is not that it violates or lessens your liberty. It doesn't. The problem with it is that it is unjust. High taxes don't violate yout liberty; at most they impede the exercise of your liberty, which is something different.
I need to think further about this.
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