You also define property a bit narrowly. Land is only one form of property. Time can be construed as property, possessions other than land, monies, and your own body.
Sure... but that is not what Libertarians are really concerned about. They are only really concerned with land and money.
In Fact, their notions that the government can not tell you what to do with your own body are their primary means to attract young and naive people to their ranks... Who doesn't like the idea that Pot should be legal? ( this is a false dilemma- there is no reason elected government can not legalize Pot And STILL regulate corporations.)
And they love to conflate ownership of, say, a CAR to ownership of anything else ( hint hint- LAND & MONEY ) Their idea being that the government has no more claim to dictate what you can do with your land or money than what you can do with your car.
Get it?... by establishing what everyone agrees to as the nature of something discrete and Impermanent, like a Gizmo you bought at the store, they want to convince you that Land and Money ( wealth) are no different.
But they are different... EVERY gizmo you can buy is temporary. Your car will LOSE value, your gizmo will break down... even your HOUSE depreciates and requires constant investment to maintain its value...
But
not the
land on which it sits, and
not the
millions of dollars you can accrue.
Beyond a certain point, Money ACCRUES more money- just ask Mitt Romney- who has no paying job.
It does not make this money out of thin air... it makes this money by TAKING money from other people. ( investments take profits out of companies, or interest from loans )
That makes Money entirely UNLIKE any real property you can actually own.
And like land, it is a limited resource. There is no one making more land. and the
real Money supply only grows when productivity grows. (i.e. products produced by actual
labor- y'know, that thing Mitt Romney does NOT have to do...)
The way capitalism works is that CAPITAL rules. It OWNS.
It pays workers to work, giving them only a PORTION of the income from business. Workers who then go out and buy goods and services, and only a portion of THAT money goes to workers, who then go out and buy.
At every iteration, every cycle, a portion of money is transferred UP the ladder of ownership. The money from the poor subsidizes the higher salaries of the middle class, and that from the middle class subsidizes the upper middle class, and their's subsidizes the ultra rich.
You see? Its is a CIRCULATION... like rain falling from the sky, it runs in one direction, gathering into ever larger streams, then reivers and thence into the ocean.
It is the FLOW of money that creates work... So money is not the same as owning a cell phone. It is the medium of exchange.
The natural tendency of money in capitalism is to flow to the top 1% or fewer. ALL mathematical models of pure capitalism show that ALL the money will collect in the hands of just a few people and leave everyone else destitute. ( this is what happened in the era of JP Morgan and the other Robber Barons)
The uber wealthy do not
have to use that money to pay people to produce... they, Like Mitt, can just sit on their asses and let their money Gather more money than they actually spend.
Without taxation, without inheritance taxes, there is no real incentive for them to give any of their growing piles of cash to poor people to do work... at least , not nearly in proportion to the money they hold onto.
because the simplest way to stay rich is to KEEP all the money you can.
But water in the ocean is undrinkable. It does no work.
Just as with the water cycle, there
has to be a force to lift money out of the oceans of the 1% and distribute it as Rain on the highlands of poverty.
So that it can flow and do work.
Corporate taxation is NOT just so the government can make revenue. Corporate taxation is ALL about the LOOPHOLE. Properly contrived loopholes FORCE corporations to re-invest in greater productivity.
The idea is, you don't want to pay 50% ( Eisenhower's corporate tax rate? ) then you take as much of your profits as your stockholders will allow and you invest in growth... new jobs, new products, new markets.
Inheritance taxes are also aimed at minimizing the rate at which all money accrues to the 1%. Great, you made out... you died with 20 billion dollars.
Should your heirs get ALL 20 billion, so they can sit on their asses and watch it grow? Or, hey, isn't HALF enough? 10 Billion? That's a pretty good start, eh?
So- YES government is there to re-distribute wealth. It takes some money form all those who have ANY wealth, (including the middle class ) and moves it around.
In the 1930, 40s 50s and 60s a big chunk of that money went to the poorest workers... the blue collar folks who were building the damns, aqueducts, roads, bridges, electric grid and interstates that formed the backbone of our modern infrastructure.
And that money flowed thru the economic strata doing work and created the entire middle class and the American Dream of home ownership.
BUT, since Reagan, the idea has been to re-distribute that wealth to the top 1%... and let it trickle down...
but to go back to our analogy, that is like pumping water out of the ocean, and the lakes and the rivers and the streams ...
and spraying it all into the ocean...
Do you understand, now, why poverty has grown and the middle class wages have stagnated?
Why the past 30 years has seen our infrastructure crumbling as government taxation on the uber rich has been cut time and again?
Money is not like your car, or smoking pot. Money is the Blood in the arteries of our body politic.
And land is not yours to despoil as you please... we have children we are giving birth to who will have to eek their living from that land someday. whether they own it, or are tenants to some wealthy over-class.
Absolutely agitate for greater personal freedom... vote only for those who will represent your views in that regard in congress.
But DO not make the mistake of thinking that all things you can own are equivalent, because the men who HAVE all the money and OWN most of the land? They are not so stupid as to be making that mistake.
Consider the mortgage disaster... They knew full well that they were pushing government to allow them to make loans to people who- eventually- would not be able to pay.
Why did they not worry about this blowing up n their faces?
Because Money and land are not like other things you can own.
here's how their conversations around the board table went...
Lose
enough money and the Government will be forced to give you a transfusion- because its the blood in the nations veins.
And hey- Worst case scenario? We got several years of Cash... and then we got to foreclose on all the Land and sell it over again....
Either way, they OWN the things that matter.
Let the rubes smoke their pot and fiddle with their iPhones... just as long as they don't wise up.