Bullshit. If you poison everyone's air, we're justified in demanding you reimburse everyone you hurt. That's a pollution tax, not a birth tax. You know this.

I was born here on earth, but you would force me to pay rent to private landowners or die. THAT'S a lot more like a birth tax if you ask me.

1. If we use a state to organize compulsory restitution, that is a tax. Drop the semantics.

2. If all land is owned, how do I get my own without paying the NPV of all its future rents?

And you haven't explained how anything anyone here proposes is a birth tax.

1. What do you call it when the state collects these funds for the purpose of dividing it up between victims? Maybe I've been against taxes all along. 

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value
It does include all future rents, but discounted due to risk like you describe. So yeah, I have to either pay landlords or die. Telling me to just offer more is like telling you to just convince people to vote differently.

@OP, not @current discussion.

(I'm a U.S. resident)

I like anti-trust laws and their enforcement. (I'm pretty certain)

I like that the cost of educating all of our children is distributed. I want to pay for less privileged children to have a shot at a life. (Maybe there is a better way of doing this than with taxes...)

Today I was just thinking that I like that I can pick up any package of food or any beverage and get what feels like a pretty rigorous and trustworthy analysis of its contents. I often take this for granted, but it is something I use on a daily basis. It is invaluable to me.

Seriously? Isn't this obvious? Language, for a start, is a huge barrier. No wonder same-language immigration is more common.
And... don't you have friends, family? What about culture? Eventually properties you want to keep etc. There are so many barriers in long distance immigration, you must be too cynic to even ask such question.
Just compare the percentage of people who don't live in the same city/town they were born with the percentage of people who don't live in the same nation they were born.


I'm not assuming that wouldn't happen (although the actual reason would never be economies of scale, that might be an excuse perhaps). I'm just saying that if it happens, it will be a change from a better configuration to a worse one. A regression.


Not sure I understood your question. Free trade is always optimal.
If you are wondering if free-trade would really happen, then well, I say it would, because these city-states would not be able to afford creating large barriers to trade. And the more free-trade there is, there richer the city-state would be, attracting more immigrants as I explained before.
But, even if you believe free trade is bad and we should only trade locally (what's false, but let's take it for granted), then still you have to agree that the city-states who raise such barriers would be more prosperous, and others would copy.

The point with competition is that it creates incentives to improvements. We don't even need to agree on what "improvement" means to see it.


Again, I'm pretty sure the city-states who follow such path would prosper less, and thus competition would end up killing such bad policies. But the same thing I said above applies. If you believe free immigration is bad for the economy, it should be clear to you that the city-states which allow it would have economic issues, compared with those which don't allow it.


By the way, do you know of a single empiric counter-example to this theory?
Can you point a micro-state, encrusted in a larger state, which is not better off than the large state? All examples I know are better off (Monaco, Lichtenstein, Singapore etc). Even when we take very-autonomous-but-not-really-independent regions like Hong Kong, Macau or Gibraltar, the principle remains.
There might be a few exceptions as for every rule, but I don't know any. It's clear that, in general, micro-states are better off than their neighboring large states.

1. Thank you! You just made all my future arguments with anarchists much easier. My support of men with guns demanding restitution for the people isn't a tax, it's a court judgement! I hereby request you report for arbitration on November 4th at a voting booth near your home.

2. If every natural source of food has been privatized, taking away my ability to hunt/farm without paying a capitalist, then yes that is an injustice. I do not agree to give you full ownership of something no person has created, and was a shared resource by default.

In case anyone is interested in what I'm actually saying and not Myrkul's impressive interpretation, a good summary is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

1. Well gosh, VOTING?!?! If you're so surprised I think we should VOTE on the things I outright called a tax from the start, then maybe you shouldn't try to play semantics and act like you have no idea how taxes and governments work. I don't even know how you think there COULD be taxes without government, which in a modern context assumes voting.

2. Brilliant, if I was arguing against work, which I'm not. I'm arguing against giving away land for free to whoever gets there first and "homesteads" it.

1. Then let's stop wasting time. I'm proposing we vote on people with guns to go door to door demanding payment for land use, and distribute that between residents of the jursidiction. Either call that a tax and dispute it, or call it restitution and don't. Every other libertarian I've ever talked to calls this a tax. Your call.

2. The deer and tomato are natural capital.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_capital
If you're collecting tomatoes in a public place, you should reimburse everyone else whose tomatoes you're taking. If you've paid land taxes to farm them in private, we're already getting reimbursed for the factor of production so any surplus tomatoes you can grow belong to you.

Example:
Plot of land will naturally yield 10 tomatoes.
We allow you to privatize it.
Under your wise supervision, the plot yields 100 tomatoes.
We still deserve reimbursement for the 10 tomatoes we can no longer pick, but not the 90 that are a result of your labor - those are yours.

Here's an excellent example of natural capital at work. Please read the article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/blue-whale-poop/

Also, the deleterious effects on the climate, assuming you read the article fully. Which in turn affects the value of real estate, species extinction rates on land due to their inability to relocate their habitats due to barriers, which in turn affects the health of ecosystems due to how species co-evolved to live together...