1

Libertarians frequently complain that when a government taxes some of its citizens in order to help others, it is forcing them to behave altruistically. And obviously, we are meant to think, that use of force is morally objectionable. One obvious question is this: what makes ‘enforced charity’, as some libertarians call it, morally wrong? It can't be the mere fact that people being are forced to do something, since, as libertarians themselves acknowledge, it is sometimes perfectly alright to use coercion. For instance, it is fine to use force against those who are threatening others with violence. What makes taxation objectionable? One answer that many libertarians give is that forcing some people to benefit others is wrong because it involves forced labour. The underlying thought seems to be that there is something morally troubling about making some people work for others.

My aim in this article is to scrutinize that thought. In particular, I want to ask what it really means and whether there are any good reasons to think it true.

2

Let's start with what it means to say that taxation is forced labour. For a start, we need to distinguish between two kinds of taxation. In the first place, there is the kind that funds public goods, like national defence and a viable police force. Let's call that public goods taxation. As a matter of fact, tax monies raised in this way could, without distortion, be described as forcing some people to work for others. This is because one of the features of public goods is that everyone gets to share in the benefits they make possible. We can all sleep more soundly knowing that the army and the police force are there, whether or not we have paid our taxes. When Donald Trump boasted about not paying income tax, he didn't hastily add, ‘Oh, and by the way, if I ever phone the police for help, they should just ignore me.’ Like the people who did pay their income tax, Trump probably just expected the police to be there if and when he needed them. But then it looks as though the Americans who did pay their taxes were being forced to help people like Donald Trump. Needless to say, Trump's boast did not elicit much of an outcry from libertarians.

Why don't libertarians generally get worked up about public goods taxation? There are several reasons. One is that, since public goods benefit everyone, they benefit those who pay their taxes too: Richard Branson, who does pay income tax, can rest assured that, in the event of a Norwegian invasion, the British Army would be there to repel it. Second, the primary rationale for public goods taxation is that public goods are socially desirable: they make it possible for everyone to lead better lives. The fact that people other than the taxpayers benefit from the resources which their taxes pay for is not the primary reason for having a system of public goods taxation.

This brings us to the kind of taxation that is the real target of libertarian hostility. Let's call this altruistic taxation because its primary rationale is that the monies it raises should be used to benefit other people, in particular, people who are less well off economically. The intention behind altruistic taxation is to provide things like good affordable healthcare, and safe and comfortable housing, and access to the best education for everyone.

Now that we know which kind of taxation is at stake, we should proceed to ask: what is meant by calling it forced labour? We all have a pretty clear idea of what forced labour involves: it's a matter of rounding people up, putting them in labour camps, and forcing them to work. So one possibility is that libertarians are thinking of altruistic taxation as an instance or kind of forced labour. To get at what is meant by calling a thing that people do an instance or a kind of something, think of a person who says that euthanasia is murder. Such a person believes that injecting a terminally ill patient who is in great pain with a drug that will kill them is the very same thing as shooting your next-door neighbour because you don't like the music they play. On this view, both killings are instances of, or different ways of committing, murder.

If we take the claim that taxation is forced labour in this way, I rather doubt that it is what libertarians mean. After all, well-off people in Britain and the US are not in fact rounded up and made to work for others. So I am going to assume that what libertarians must mean is that taxation intended to assist other people is morally on a par with or morally equivalent to forced labour.

3

Having explained what is meant by the claim that taxation is forced labour, we can turn to the question of the grounds libertarians have for making it.

To give our discussion some context, let's imagine that we are talking about a society in which earned incomes above a certain basic minimum are heavily taxed, with the bulk of those tax revenues being used to benefit economically disadvantaged people. Let's just stipulate that in our thought experiment the best-off people, after paying their taxes, can keep at most only ten times more than those earning at the minimum. (In the contemporary US, the best-off people earn hundreds of times more than those at the bottom.)

Now picture yourself as a fairly talented person with the skills that would enable you to earn at top levels: you could work in IT or in the financial sector, say. In our imagined society, you would face the following alternatives. You could elect to earn at the minimum level (say, by flipping veggie burgers or working in a chemist's shop). In that case, you would escape taxation altogether. Your other option would be to earn a lot more money doing a job you found very interesting, but you would then have to pay the steep taxes. At most you could hope to end up with ten times what you earned by flipping burgers for eight hours a day.

According to libertarians, in our thought experiment you would be forced to work for others. This is because you would have to choose between two unpalatable alternatives, alternatives that nobody – least of all the government – has the right to force on you. Either you do mindless work whose earnings benefit you alone; or you take the job you'd strongly prefer, but then a lot of your earnings would be going to help other people.

This invites the question: why doesn't anyone have the right to force those alternatives on you? Libertarians have a nice answer to this, an answer that depends on a distinction between posing a threat to other people versus failing to help them. I pose a threat when I run towards you angrily waving a knife, while I fail to help if I keep on brushing my teeth as you drown in my bathtub. To be a little more precise, we could say that I pose a threat to you if some intentional or negligent action of mine is liable to initiate a causal sequence that will end up harming you. On the other hand, I would be failing to help you if some inaction of mine would do nothing to prevent something bad from happening to you.

This brings us to the moral bedrock of the argument that taxation is forced labour. It's the idea that no one has a right to force you to do something unless you pose a threat to other people. This allows us to state the underlying moral principle on which the libertarian argument turns:

This principle enables us to draw a clear contrast between forcing someone in order to prevent her from harming others and forcing her to help those others. In the first case, in the relevant sense, the person against whom force is deployed poses a threat, while, in the second, force is deployed against someone who poses no threat to anyone else.

It's not hard to see how this is the real root of the forced labour argument. In contemporary capitalist societies, there are wealthy hard-working people who pose no threat to anyone else and who live their lives simply engaging in innocent capitalist transactions with other consenting adults. Those transactions are what make the wealthy and hard-working as well off as they are. To make them pay taxes to help the disadvantaged would be forcing them to work for the disadvantaged. It would be (about) as bad as rounding them up in trucks and making them work in a labour camp.

4

Our next job is to assess the argument. One way to test it is to ask whether it's consistent with other things that libertarians believe. To do this, I shall need to make an important stipulation. I am going to call the argument I rehearsed in section 3 the standard version of the forced labour argument. By that I am going to mean a statement of the argument in which the simple principle of non-aggression figures as the primary normative premise, or moral bedrock, of the argument. Another way to put this is that libertarians making the standard version of the forced labour argument hold that ultimately what makes altruistic taxation wrong is that it violates the simple principle of non-aggression.

The trouble is that the simple principle of non-aggression is too simple even for libertarians to believe. For one thing, someone might pose a threat to another person's property without in any way posing a threat to the person herself. I might be intent on stealing or damaging what belongs to you but I could well act on that intention in such a way that you yourself remain wholly unthreatened. Here I'll introduce the expression ‘to trespass against someone's property’ to refer to acts like stealing a person's stuff, damaging it, or simply using it without their consent. The point I am making is that trespassing against other people's property need involve no threat at all to them. If I'm intending to steal a small ugly garden gnome from your holiday cabin while you're safe and secure miles away in your primary residence, I pose no threat at all to you. But no libertarian would deny that you or your agents enjoy the right to use force – indeed, potentially lethal force – to prevent my taking the gnome. Given the possibility of rightfully repelling those who trespass against our things, the simple non-aggression principle would have to be amended to read:

Is their being a threat or a trespasser the only legitimate reason that libertarians can allow for initiating aggression against someone? I do not think so. This is because libertarians usually accept what they call a strictly historical theory of justice. They believe that what you are entitled to depends to a large extent on the things you and others have done or left undone in the past. If you have been lazy, you deserve to be badly off, but if you have worked hard, then you have a right to be well off.

Consider a case in which I buy property from someone whom I know to have stolen it from its original owner, or a case in which I inherit something from a person I know to have used her slaves to make the thing, or a case in which I fraudulently acquire a piece of property. Such cases run afoul of capitalist principles for transferring goods, because such principles are supposed to rule out any use of theft or force or fraud as ways of acquiring or producing things. This means that we need to add a further clause to the principle of non-aggression:

But, it seems that no libertarian who embraces a strictly historical theory of justice could be content with this principle either. This is because there is the absolutely fundamental question of how the resources of the external world, out of which all material resources get manufactured, came to be private property in the first place. After all, the very first people in the world faced a world in which no one in particular owned anything in particular. By some mysterious process, we moved from a state of affairs without any private property at all to a state of affairs in which most of the world's resources are privately owned by someone or other.

Libertarians need a principle of justice that tells us when it's alright for someone to make some bit of the unowned external world into their own property. Let's call such a principle the principle of original appropriation. Given the role that such a principle plays in libertarian thought, it is clear that any such principle will complicate the principle of non-aggression even further. For instance, libertarians agree that justice would not allow the first person who arrived on a desert island to force a castaway from a shipwreck off his island because that would violate the principle of original appropriation.

So it seems safe to conclude that anyone who accepts a full-scale libertarian theory of justice must reject the simple non-aggression principle in favour of

Earlier, I stipulated that by the standard version of the forced labour argument I was going to mean all and only versions of the argument which rely on the simple non-aggression principle as their basic normative premise or moral bedrock. What has now become clear is that any libertarian who believes that justice depends on what people have done to others and with things in the past has to reject the simple and accept the complex non-aggression principle.

But this means that libertarians making the forced labour argument now face a dilemma. They must choose between continuing to make the forced labour argument in its standard form, or they must choose a new way of presenting it. If they do keep making the argument in its standard form, then the normative bedrock of their argument – the simple principle forbidding aggression – is one that they themselves, as libertarians, have good reason to reject. Remember this is because the complex non-aggression principle is something that many libertarians actually believe.

But if they move away from the standard version of the forced labour argument, they have to rest their case on the complex principle of non-aggression. But in that case, they render their position vulnerable in a whole new way.

5

To see this, we need to consider what we can think of as a non-standard version of the forced labour argument, whose major normative premise is the complex principle of non-aggression. Anyone who makes the argument in this form would now have to prove that the entire existing distribution of resources in, say, Britain or the US, satisfies this complex principle. In other words, she would have to show beyond reasonable doubt that none of the economically worst-off people in the contemporary US or UK are badly off and none of the rich are rich because of past violations of the principles of libertarian justice.

I do not think this can be done. After all, at least some of the worst-off people in Britain or the US are people whose forebears were held in slavery and forced to make things for their owners. Others who fall into that category are people whose forebears were forcibly removed – sometimes in extremely violent ways – from territory that rightfully belonged to them. And at the other end of the economic spectrum, at least some of the best-off people in Britain and the US are people whose forebears knowingly profited from these grave injustices.

Anyone who accepts a strictly historical theory of justice believes that if your forebears stole a piece of land from Smith's forebears, then you have an enforceable obligation to return the land to Smith or else a duty to compensate Smith to ensure that Smith is no worse off than he would have been had the theft not occurred. By the same token, if your forebears enslaved Jones's forebears and the work done by Jones's forebears made your forebears rich, then you have an enforceable obligation to make Jones as well off as she would have been had the slavery never occurred.

What this shows is that that forcing people to behave altruistically is not necessarily morally objectionable even by libertarian standards. It all depends on the actual history of the society in which the forcing takes place. Sometimes, it seems, forced labour is the very thing that libertarian justice demands.

6

In section 3, we asked why it was that libertarians denied democratic governments the right to tax well-off people. The answer we gave was that this would be very much like forced labour. All that I have shown so far is that libertarians themselves are committed to taxing the well off if that were needed to rectify past injustices. This does not go without saying, but it certainly fails to get at the heart of the disagreement between libertarians and those who favour altruistic taxation. It does not go without saying because one searches the public platforms of the two political parties most committed to minimizing taxation – the Republican Party in the US and the British Conservative Party – in vain for even a single mention of historical injustice. Members of those parties must, it seems, be assuming that the existing distribution of resources in their respective countries is entirely free from historical injustice. Either that, or they must think that historical injustice is morally irrelevant when it comes to deciding who should get what here and now. Neither of these assumptions is defensible from a moral standpoint.

But nothing that I have said so far engages with the principles of libertarian justice itself. This is because the only kind of altruistic taxation I have hitherto considered is rectificatory in intent. I began by defining altruistic taxation as taxation that benefits other people by functioning to help those who are economically disadvantaged. Rectificatory taxation would indeed be taxation to benefit other people, but the point of benefiting them would simply be to correct for past injustices. Such taxation would not be, in an important sense, intrinsically altruistic. That is to say, it would not be taxation intended to benefit others whether or not they were the descendants of the victims of injustice.

So it might be useful to set up another thought experiment. Imagine that we were in a world in which all historical injustices had been rectified. Surely, a libertarian would say, in a situation like that, it would indeed be forced labour if we were to tax the well-off to assist the economically disadvantaged. Doesn't this show that intrinsically altruistic taxation would be wrong?

To make some headway in trying to answer this question, let's develop our second thought experiment a little further. Imagine that we were trying to choose between two quite different economic systems. The first would a libertarian system, with no altruistic taxation at all, and hence with no government-funded schools or colleges or healthcare or housing. Everything that could be privatized would be. The second economic system we could choose would be a form of market socialism: people would be free to choose their occupations, but there would be steep altruistic taxes used to pay for things like good-quality schools and colleges and healthcare and housing that were accessible to everyone.

Once again, picture yourself as a fairly talented person with the skills that would enable you to command a good salary in IT or the financial sector. If we opted for market socialism, you would have to choose between earning at the minimum to escape taxation or else you could earn a lot more money doing a job you found engaging but you would then have to pay the steep taxes. Libertarians would say that because you would face such unpleasant options, you would be forced work for others. Finding their argument persuasive, let's pretend, you decide that we should make our society a libertarian one.

A few years pass; you get a good job, you buy health insurance, and you get a mortgage on a nice house. And then, out of the blue, you are involved in a nasty bike accident that causes you brain damage. You use your savings and your insurance to pay for your health care. But, being unable to keep up with your mortgage, you lose your house. Once you have recovered from the accident, you find that cognitive impairments prevent you from going back to your old job, but you are capable of simpler tasks like operating a cash register. Once again, you would face two rather unpalatable options. Either you could live on the streets, hoping to benefit from other people's charity or else you would have to find a job like flipping veggie burgers or working in a chemist's shop.

I am going to end with some final observations. The first has to do with being forced to work for others. The point is that if it's true that you would have been forced to work for other people in the market socialist system, then it's equally true that (after your accident) you would be forced to work for others under the libertarian system. In both cases, working for others is the lesser of two evils with the main difference being that, in the first case, you would have to work for the economically disadvantaged, while in the second, you would have to work for the economically well-off.

My other point involves comparing people's positions in these two kinds of society. First, consider how the best-off do in a libertarian society as opposed to a market socialist society. They are likely to be much wealthier in the former, but they would have to work for others in the latter. But now compare the fates of the economically disadvantaged in these two societies. This time, they are likely to be wealthier under market socialism, but they would be forced to work for others under libertarianism. Finally, consider the worst that can happen to anyone in each society. Under libertarianism, the worst that can happen is that you end up jobless and homeless, depending on charity, while under socialism, the worst that can happen is that you have to earn at the minimum.

Given these considerations, it is far from obvious that the forced labour to which libertarians take such exception is more objectionable morally than the kinds of options their ideal society would force upon people.