Comment by palmfacehn 16 hours ago
Conversely, property rights are also a good thing. I don't agree that it is as simple as you present it. Even if you believe that the state has a right to confiscate, regulate or inflate away value for a "greater collective good", reasonable people might also recognize the potential for abuse.
So no, it isn't obviously a "good thing", unless you reject these nuances in favor of an all powerful state.
Even if you accept those premises, reasonable people would expect limits on the power of the state to infringe upon property rights, even when backed by a popular majority. Furthermore, the principle of individual self-ownership is a key starting point for modern, liberal ideas of law. Of course you are free to reject those premises, but I would characterize that as authoritarian rather than obvious.
Property rights exist within a legal framework defined by the people, through law.
What you're talking about here with self-ownership and the state "infringing" upon property rights when you're taxed and can't transact privately, it seems less than "reasonable".
It seems like you're trying to paint routine and widely accepted functions of democratic governments as if they were unreasonable, authoritarian overreach.
Authoritarian overreach is itself a routine and widely accepted aspect of democratic governments. Authoritarians get 1 vote/person, same as everyone else. They're allowed to advocate for policies and score the occasional outrageous political win, just like everyone else. There are a lot of them out there and they are a significant political force.
Something being routine and done democratically is no defence at all of it being liberal or in line with the principle of property rights. Or even of it being legal in a lot of instances, democratic governments lose legal challenges quite regularly.
And in this case, attacks on private transactions are absolutely unreasonable authoritarian overreach. The government doesn't need to surveil people when they have no reason to suspect those people of wrongdoing.
Voters generally seem willing to embrace authoritarian solutions when it is applied to the things they dislike. The political classes have multiple incentives to appeal to those voters. Outside of a few outliers, neither group generally concerns themselves with the underlying principles of civil liberties until their favored causes are attacked. Hypocrisy abounds. Reasoning from first principles is dismissed as ideological extremism.
From here it is easy to see how the incentives of a democratic-regulatory-state work against property rights, free speech, privacy rights and other civil liberties.
Political solutions are often messy and complex. Pragmatic fixes are rarely obvious and overreaches are common. Reforms are ongoing. Conversely, absolutists have no use for nuance.
The war on cash is a good example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
https://ij.org/federal-court-rules-in-favor-of-convenience-s...
Talk about rejecting nuance, but now the state is "all powerful" because you can't transact privately.
Yes, the state has control of finance and transactions. It always does.
Democracies are build on principles like Popular sovereignty, political equality, or the rule of law.
Private transactions or tax-free property isn't a democratic feature. Yes, it's that obvious.