The authors develop their case primarily at the level of political theory; seeking conceptual victories, they are eerily silent on the empirical literature. To be sure, our authors don’t agree with the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon that “property is theft,” but they do justify high taxes by claiming that private property is, at bottom, a creature of the state—and not, as libertarians and others would have it, something that individuals hold as of right, which the state is then obliged to protect. According to Murphy and Nagel, the distribution of pretax income is not really the result of a “free market”: “There is no market without government and no government without taxes; and what of market there is depends on law and policy decisions that government must make.” The state, therefore, may tax as it will the property it has created.
But note what their account leaves out. In postulating the primacy of the state over property, the authors present us with a faceless, disembodied government; no one knows who runs this government, how its officials are chosen, or what laws limit their powers. Yet if private ownership is a myth, then so too is the ordinary liberty to pray, to speak, to marry, or to work. These things, too, require the protection of government: People need to have their private spaces protected from interference by others. Does that kind of government involvement mean that the freedom of religion, for example, is a “myth”? The authors constantly carp at the naive reluctance of the “everyday libertarian,” a.k.a. the common man, to accept their views. But the ordinary citizens are right: If property is a myth, then liberty is a myth as well. By making our rights entirely contingent on government, Murphy and Nagel leave us no way to push back against Leviathan.
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