humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Apr 13, 3:02 pm, Ken Gardner wrote:
> To expand slightly on my own comment, why aren't these coercive wealth
> redistribution schemes a form of involuntary servitude?  I can easily
> see a Lochner-era court saying, "hell yes it is!"  And they would be
> right.

Leaving aside the "and they would be right" aspect, I don't *think*
there's any evidence that any judges or justices thought that c.
1870-1930. I'd be intrigued to learn otherwise. All I can see here is
a kind of original meaning argument, but it's a stretch.

However... when I was working on my sovereign immunity article, I
recall reading stuff about how taxation was viewed in the Middle Ages
that was really amazing. First, it seems to have been assumed that
sovereigns and fighting vassals had their own income generating
private property, and thus did not need to be maintained at the public
expense, so there is no notion of minimum routine public expenses,
even for defense. Second (or what comes to the same thing) the idea of
taxation seems to have been associated strictly with *emergencies*. No
emergency, no tax. And levying a tax was such an extraordinary thing
that the king simply couldn't do it alone, unlike all the other things
that kings did--it required the consent of some kind of assembly that
represents the public (notice I didn't say a legislature, because
there was no sense of any need for any legislation at all--natural
justice sufficed--assemblies did not legislate in the modern sense),
which would presumably take notice of and acquiesce in the response to
the public plight.

So while I doubt that your picture is historically accurate for the
Lochner era, as an account of what was thought, I think it was at one
time exactly right. The idea of a permanent tax, let alone a permanent
spending scheme, was damn near unthinkable, at least in England, once
upon a time.