I have a lot of sympathy for many of the ideas behind libertarianism, from a consequentialist point of view. Our government is large, and its very size, not to mention many of its policies, cause lots of problems. In a lot of ways, it would be nice to be able to trade in our large government problems for the different set of problems you get with a very small government, for the change of pace if nothing else. Plus it would be really interesting to see if it works.

However, much of the libertarian discussion I've participated in over the years is about the moral dimension of government, and here, the libertarian argument falls flat. Not only that, but the libertarians seem to me to be quite smug and glib about their supposedly more moral government. It's quite the turn-off, and I wonder if that sort of thing hurts the libertarian cause. patrissimo provided an example this week of the shaky nature of their arguments in a series of posts on the topic.

It started when he was posting on an only semi-related topic (why we shouldn't be quite so proud of the moon landing</a>), and I objected to the standard libertarian practice of equating taxes to theft. They share some similarities, I wrote, but so do taxes and home owner's association fees, and anyway "some similarities" aren't enough for equivalence. Here was the evolution in the discussion over time:

1) The government is like the mafia in that they take money backed with the threat of force and don't do anything worthwhile with it. I think that's fundamentally a disingenuous position when talking about morals, since "taxation is theft" doesn't say anything about what you do with the money. If the government did good things with it instead of mostly wasting it, libertarians would still dislike the large government and taxation. And would be even more in the minority than they are now. Patri more or less agreed that taxation would still be immoral.

2) The discussion then veered into issues like whether being able to leave matters (Patri says no with a series of over-the-top analogies that he must know couldn't possibly convince someone who didn't alread agree with him) and the moral basis of democracy, but those are pretty much beside the point. Libertarians believe that taxes are theft regardless of whether you can leave or how the government decided to impose them.

3) So why aren't taxes like rents in an apartment building? You have to pay it if you live there, and it sucks when they go up, but the landlord isn't behaving immorally. The libertarian answer, and I think the only answer possible, is that the landlord legitimately owns the land, whereas the government doesn't legitimately own the territory it controls. Patri indeed makes this argument here and in several other comments, by pointing out that the government stole the land from the native people through force.

There are two huge problems with this position that I have never seen answered. The first is that literally every inhabited patch of land in the world was taken with violence from one group or another in the course of history, many times over. If the only way to have the moral right to impose rents or taxes on your territory is to have an unbroken chain of custody extending into antiquity, then no property is morally held. Not just by government, but by individuals, who are in adverse possession of stolen property and must return it immediately.

I'm pretty unimpressed with an argument that says that because bad things happened a few hundred years ago (or more in the case of older countries) that nobody has any land rights now. And even if there's an argument I haven't thought of that persuasively distinguishes private property from territories of nations in terms of legitimacy, this still renders all governments, no matter how free or corrupt, equally immoral. Something's wrong with that.

The other problem with this position is that it seems to me to be rationalizing. I am quite sure that when someone declares taxes to be theft, they don't mean "taxes are theft (unless the government acquired the land in a moral way 200 years ago)." They mean they think taxes are like theft. The silly historical justification of territoriality is only needed to explain why taxes are bad but things that look a lot like taxes, such as HOA fees or rents are ok. But I think libertarians are fundamentally against taxes because they don't like them, and the moral justification is just trying to make it look coherent.

This is why I don't mind consequentialist libertarianism. If your argument is that taxes are bad because big governments are controlled by special interests and are inherently unwieldy and wasteful, that's a perfectly reasonable position to take. You might well be right, and it'd be nice to have some more empirical evidence either way.

But moral libertarianism is basically the religious belief that taxes are wrong, backed up by arguments that sound reasonable but are either incoherent (government ownership of stolen territory is wrong, but private ownership of stolen territory is fine) or totally inconsistent with belief in real property (all land is stolen, it should be returned to descendants of the original owners).

Now, maybe I'm wrong. But I've had at least half a dozen conversations with people who took the moral libertarian side, and they always backed into the "stolen land" argument eventually. And I have a hard time believing that any of them remotely considers how the government acquired its territory when they are thinking about their positions. They take for granted that government is somehow illegitimate as the foundation for their beliefs, and don't really need to think about why.

To be fair, I think basically all arguments about the moral basis for government have the same underlying problem: that people assume that certain classes of government are good or bad and prop up their belief with weak arguments. That's why I think you have to approach government from a consequentialist perspective: what works, what makes people the most well off, and who cares about the moral justifications.

Edit: Just to clarify, this isn't meant to be an attack on patrissimo. He has generally been all about consequences and not at all about the moral underpinnings, until a few posts this week. His recent posts have just moved back to the (in my view inconsistent) libertarian mainstream.