Property and taxation: acts or omissions?

Property exists because the state says it does and makes it stick with the threat of force.

And the real thing, for that matter, push come to shove.

That said, the deprivation of the poor is an act, not an omission.

But though you may be the willing and grateful beneficiary of this act that does not make it your act.

While your ending the deprivation in any particular case by a small gift, relative to your total stock, would be - as would be putting a stack of twenty dollar bills out on the curb for anyone to take.

That would be consistent with human egoism, however, only if you cherish fellow humans as others cherish white rhinos, polar bears, or members of other endangered species.

Or as others do their pets.

Otherwise the motive could only be madness.

Or, again perhaps within the realm of reason, fear.

Fear of our fellow human beings is, after all, both more common and more rational than love. 

But even then only if the sacrifice was only of your superfluity, or of what had to be sacrificed to prevent greater loss.

Taxation, too, exists by the will of the state, again backed by force.

And the same is true of enjoyment of and entitlement to the proceeds.

Just as the property of the heir is not the creation of his act, the income of the state pensioner is not the result of his.

The political struggle, however, to bring state power into line with one's own interests or those of one's class, race, sex, nationality, or other interest or identity group is no omission.

Even though the battle is a clash of mobs more than armies and the result depends not at all on the individual action of any particular bit of canon fodder.

The case is otherwise, of course, for those who can and do choose whether or not to send out the mobs to fight their battles for them.

Or even, and perhaps more so, for the directors of those mobs.

Though not those of any individual among the mass of his privates, Napoleon's victories were, indeed, his own.