the gold standard of art

[quarrel]

Libertarians — and staunch conservatives in general, actually — take an extreme stance on property. In their view, anything you make or earn is 100% yours to control, and you are the only entity with a legitimate say in how any of it gets used. “Taxation is theft,” they say, because in taxation, an outside agency takes something you earned and gives it to other people regardless of whether you approve.

The feeling runs so strong in some circles that proponents of this philosophy advocate returning to the gold standard so not even inflation can involuntarily reduce a person’s wealth. You see, if you owned enough gold to buy thirty-seven pairs of pants ten years ago, you would own enough gold to buy thirty-seven pairs of pants today, whereas if you had enough fiat money to buy that many pants in 2003, then as of today you could only afford twenty-nine pairs (and some socks). Since you never voluntarily gave away 21% of your wealth, logic says it must have been taken. I’ve even heard it asserted that counterfeiting was the only crime that the Founding Fathers unanimously agreed should be punished by death, presumably due to the fact that creating more currency out of thin air makes all existing currency worth less. The severity of the crime is magnified by the fact that its victim is everyone in the country who owns money, so printing even one fake dollar causes more aggregate harm than does killing someone.

For the record, I personally don’t put a lot of credence in this worldview, mainly as a result of seeing so much misunderstood or misapplied game theory used to justify it. I think there is nothing inherently criminal about the concept of taxation itself, nor other concepts like eminent domain or adverse possession.

But a thought struck me the other day: why is there so much public support for at least some level of wealth taxation to fund government services, but no support for forced distribution of intellectual property? In fact, there’s a high correlation between people who favor ample government spending and people who staunchly defend artists’ rights to control the distribution of their own work. Is this, perhaps, contradictory?

Let’s say an American author writes a Young Adult novel that’s well-suited for use in classroom instruction. Currently, a public school that wants to use that book needs to negotiate licensing rights, which will cost money, which will be paid for by taxes, which are levied on the public by the government. What if, instead, the government exerted authority over the author’s intellectual property rights? What if, by federal decree, public schools could reprint this book at will for educational use without the author’s permission and without compensating her? Taxes wouldn’t rise as much. The author would not lose general copyright on her work, and could still sell it on the open market. That’s the thing with digital media, after all: you can get a copy of it for yourself without depriving someone else of it. That’s why piracy isn’t prosecutable as theft.

What if taxes were more like piracy?