The fundamental right of man is to be. The right to exist. The right to his life. His means of survival is his mind and to use it effectively within a civilisation he must work, beg or steal. This means he must use his brain to do whatever he can to secure a form of living.
The prime method civilised men use to earn their living is by trading. Each man offers whatever services he can provide in exchange for whatever he can get. Each man buys whatever services he can providing always that he pays for them from his own resources. This is the fundamental basis of civilisation. All other matters are for negotiation between men. The law defines those things he cannot do such as beg, steal, lie or cheat.
The right to work does not mean the right to a job. All jobs have to be created by a man, or men, who invest money and time in creating a company to perform a service. A demand that they should provide a job to another man is an assault by force upon the rights of those men and is totally illegal and immoral. It is an effective enslavement of the man who provides the job.
Men may join together in organisations to help improve their performance but no organisation may have rights beyond those of its individual members. Indeed, an organisation cannot have rights. The very idea is a negation of the concept of rights. Rights belong only to individual men.
A man must also have the right to keep the product of his work. A man cannot have the right to work if he cannot keep the benefits of his endeavour. A man must have a right to his property. To remove the product of his work is to enslave him and can only be removed from him by force.
It is no accident that taxes are levied by governments as they are the only body that can exercise force and without force there could be no taxation. The conclusion of this argument must be that taxes are immoral and should be illegal.
The legitimate functions of government are relatively few and are of immense value to men. There are plenty of men and companies who would be pleased to pay for insurance a fee easily sufficient to cover the costs of legitimate government. This would effectively be a tax on the well off and those not well off would pay no tax. Businessmen and the rich need to use the law much more than private individuals and it is logical that they should pay for it. This does not mean that poor people would be in any way disadvantaged. They would effectively ride for free. This arrangement is intended to be a substitute for the current system, not an additional tax. The system would be obviously complicated but the mandatory insurance of vehicles is similar and has worked well for nearly a century. People without a vehicle do not pay for insurance but are protected by the insurance of those who do.
Note. It is actually illogical to have mandatory insurance of vehicles as that is an immoral use of force. But vehicles can be extremely dangerous devices and the consequences of operating a dangerous machine in public are so severe that the government is justified in making laws to protect other men from those consequences.
Work is man’s highest achievement. It is the means by which he turns ideas into actuality. A thought without action is idle speculation. Action without thought is wasted effort. Man’s best method of survival is to think, to plan and to act; all of these things guided by his reason – his ability to think.
18th May 2011
Colin Walker