Off-Topic Posts from "Is taxation by big non-local governments non-consensual or consensual?"

[Ecurb]

Whence "moral duties" or "absolute duties" arise is problematical. You and GE appear to agree that some rights (and hence some duties) are "absolute" and "moral". But I don't buy it. Of course some rights (and duties) are more universal than others. But why would the Ten Commandments need to order: "Thou shalt not murder" if it was a universally accepted duty? In the tribal societies that GE calls "cooperatives", murdering non-members was often considered an acceptable activity. The commandment was necessary because a prohibition against murder was NOT a universally accepted duty. The same is true for prohibitions against stealing, adultery, coveting, etc. One doesn't need specific rules prohibiting what everyone knows is prohibited.

Morals are culturally constituted (your notion that they may be God given is equivalent to my notion they are culturally constituted).

When you rescued the teenager, you thought it was a necessary moral truth that if one can save someone at little or no cost or risk to himself, he is morally obliged to do so. I agree. I also think that if someone can give food to the starving and health care to the ill at little or no cost to himself, he is obliged to do so. If everyone agreed, we wouldn't need taxes to pay for these services. But some people don't agree. So we coerce them to pay their fair share by a reasonable tax system. GE's notion that this constitutes theft (and even "slavery") diminishes the evils of actual theft and actual slavery. Of course because taxes are coerced, they vaguely resemble theft and slavery, just as consensul sex vaguely resembles rape. But just as suggesting (as some do) that consensual sex between people whose wealth and power is different is a form of rape is an obnoxious over-exaggeration that minnimizes the evils of actual rape, so is suggesting that taxation to support the indigent is a form of slavery.

[Leontiskos]

Whence "moral duties" or "absolute duties" arise is problematical. You and GE appear to agree that some rights (and hence some duties) are "absolute" and "moral". But I don't buy it. Of course some rights (and duties) are more universal than others. But why would the Ten Commandments need to order: "Thou shalt not murder" if it was a universally accepted duty? In the tribal societies that GE calls "cooperatives", murdering non-members was often considered an acceptable activity. The commandment was necessary because a prohibition against murder was NOT a universally accepted duty. The same is true for prohibitions against stealing, adultery, coveting, etc. One doesn't need specific rules prohibiting what everyone knows is prohibited.

But the existence of a law and the knowledge of a law are two different things. This also applies to physics. We might say, "If the law of general relativity really exists, then why would Einstein need to publish it? He only published it because it wasn't universally accepted, and the fact that it wasn't universally accepted proves that it was never a law in the first place." I think we can see why this is poor reasoning. It is the argument that publishing a law--moral or scientific--somehow proves that the law doesn't exist in any absolute sense.

The other thing to note is that legislation is usually not introducing novel ideas. Jefferson didn't pen a right to life because no one acknowledged a right to life. He penned a right to life to enshrine it within the legal framework and system which was being constructed. Similarly, the ancient Hebrews weren't ignorant of the law against murder before Moses gave the civil law. Moses would never have had to flee from Egypt after murdering the Egyptian if there were no general prohibition against murder.

Morals are culturally constituted (your notion that they may be God given is equivalent to my notion they are culturally constituted).

When you rescued the teenager, you thought it was a necessary moral truth that if one can save someone at little or no cost or risk to himself, he is morally obliged to do so. I agree. I also think that if someone can give food to the starving and health care to the ill at little or no cost to himself, he is obliged to do so. If everyone agreed, we wouldn't need taxes to pay for these services. But some people don't agree. So we coerce them to pay their fair share by a reasonable tax system. GE's notion that this constitutes theft (and even "slavery") diminishes the evils of actual theft and actual slavery. Of course because taxes are coerced, they vaguely resemble theft and slavery, just as consensul sex vaguely resembles rape. But just as suggesting (as some do) that consensual sex between people whose wealth and power is different is a form of rape is an obnoxious over-exaggeration that minnimizes the evils of actual rape, so is suggesting that taxation to support the indigent is a form of slavery.

Here is what I said in my last post:

There simply is no justification for a natural duty/right to give/receive alms. I know of no philosophers--Christian or non-Christian--who argue for such a thing. The closest we would get is the tribal scenario set out earlier. There is, however, justification for a Christian duty/right to give/receive alms. Indeed, in Matthew 25 we see that the Christian who fails to give alms will be severely punished for failing to do what they are bound to do.

Now if you are right and every possible law is on equal footing and equally enactable by a culture, then it would not be more difficult to justify one possible law than another. But this isn't so. Morton's laws against stealing from or murdering fellow citizens are much easier to justify, are much more readily agreed to, and are unanimously held by all cultures. Your law about giving alms, even to outsiders, is much more difficult to justify*, is much less readily agreed to, and is held by only a tiny minority of cultures, if that. This is because the former sorts of laws are derived from natural reason and natural justice, whereas the latter sorts of laws are not. They come from contractual grounds, or religious grounds, as I have already noted. This is why we would never think to mete out equal punishment for theft and for failing to give alms. It's not just that theft is more grievous, but also that theft is more obviously a crime.

* Just think about your justifications, such as the justification that coerced public welfare is narrowly admissible in the same way that coerced insurance is narrowly admissible in certain situations. This argument is highly controversial, and is not nearly as strong as arguments against theft or murder.

[Ecurb]

But the existence of a law and the knowledge of a law are two different things. This also applies to physics. We might say, "If the law of general relativity really exists, then why would Einstein need to publish it? He only published it because it wasn't universally accepted, and the fact that it wasn't universally accepted proves that it was never a law in the first place." I think we can see why this is poor reasoning. It is the argument that publishing a law--moral or scientific--somehow proves that the law doesn't exist in any absolute sense.

The other thing to note is that legislation is usually not introducing novel ideas. Jefferson didn't pen a right to life because no one acknowledged a right to life. He penned a right to life to enshrine it within the legal framework and system which was being constructed. Similarly, the ancient Hebrews weren't ignorant of the law against murder before Moses gave the civil law. Moses would never have had to flee from Egypt after murdering the Egyptian if there were no general prohibition against murder.

There simply is no justification for a natural duty/right to give/receive alms. I know of no philosophers--Christian or non-Christian--who argue for such a thing. The closest we would get is the tribal scenario set out earlier. There is, however, justification for a Christian duty/right to give/receive alms. Indeed, in Matthew 25 we see that the Christian who fails to give alms will be severely punished for failing to do what they are bound to do.

Now if you are right and every possible law is on equal footing and equally enactable by a culture, then it would not be more difficult to justify one possible law than another. But this isn't so. Morton's laws against stealing from or murdering fellow citizens are much easier to justify, are much more readily agreed to, and are unanimously held by all cultures. Your law about giving alms, even to outsiders, is much more difficult to justify*, is much less readily agreed to, and is held by only a tiny minority of cultures, if that. This is because the former sorts of laws are derived from natural reason and natural justice, whereas the latter sorts of laws are not. They come from contractual grounds, or religious grounds, as I have already noted. This is why we would never think to mete out equal punishment for theft and for failing to give alms. It's not just that theft is more grievous, but also that theft is more obviously a crime.

* Just think about your justifications, such as the justification that coerced public welfare is narrowly admissible in the same way that coerced insurance is narrowly admissible in certain situations. This argument is highly controversial, and is not nearly as strong as arguments against theft or murder.

Of course I agree. The fact that I think all morals are culturally constituted does not imply that I think they cannot be crticized, rebelled against, or analyzed. Murder is about as close as one can get to a universal and acceptable moral prohibition (stealing, of course, is less so because property rights are always problematic. Robin Hood is a legendary hero.). (Actually, the one universal moral rule acc. anthropologists is an incest prohibition.)

Reason and justice are themselves culturally derived concepts. We learn to reason. We learn what constitutes justice. We use language to delineate rights and duties. Without language, and math, and logic (all culturally created phenomena) reason would be quite different from how we see it today. When GE talks about "moral agents". What is it that make us moral agents, while many of our cousin animals fail to attain that status? That's a difficult question. Brain size and intelligence probably have something to do with it. But the main thing that makes us moral agents is our culture -- our ability to manipulate concepts through the use of tools like language and logic. Indeed, these tools and their value to our species were probably what led to the evolution of bigger brains. Once we started to develop these tools, their value was so great that those individuals who could manipulate them with the most facility tended to thrive and leave descendants (this is a guess, but it is backed by some archeological and anthropological evidence).

Of course the notion that morals derive from the divine is a reasonable theory, although claims to know the divine will are subject to doubts. Who can know the mind of God? GE's notion that secular morals can be objective and reached through reason is, I think, incorrect. (I know I'm probably misstating your position, GE. Sorry.) I prefer the Christian approach to morality (although I'm not a Christian), which is analogical rather than logical ("What would Jesus do?), and positive rather than negative (Love your neighbor; do unto others). If we hve a duty to love our neightbors, do our neighbors have a right to be loved? I'm not sure. The rights/duty connection may not be transitive in that direction. It's clear that rights confer duties, it's not so clear that duties confer rights. If we fail to love our neighbors, have we violated their rights, just as if we had murdered them or stolen from them?

[Leontiskos]

But the existence of a law and the knowledge of a law are two different things. This also applies to physics. We might say, "If the law of general relativity really exists, then why would Einstein need to publish it? He only published it because it wasn't universally accepted, and the fact that it wasn't universally accepted proves that it was never a law in the first place." I think we can see why this is poor reasoning. It is the argument that publishing a law--moral or scientific--somehow proves that the law doesn't exist in any absolute sense.

The other thing to note is that legislation is usually not introducing novel ideas. Jefferson didn't pen a right to life because no one acknowledged a right to life. He penned a right to life to enshrine it within the legal framework and system which was being constructed. Similarly, the ancient Hebrews weren't ignorant of the law against murder before Moses gave the civil law. Moses would never have had to flee from Egypt after murdering the Egyptian if there were no general prohibition against murder.

There simply is no justification for a natural duty/right to give/receive alms. I know of no philosophers--Christian or non-Christian--who argue for such a thing. The closest we would get is the tribal scenario set out earlier. There is, however, justification for a Christian duty/right to give/receive alms. Indeed, in Matthew 25 we see that the Christian who fails to give alms will be severely punished for failing to do what they are bound to do.

Now if you are right and every possible law is on equal footing and equally enactable by a culture, then it would not be more difficult to justify one possible law than another. But this isn't so. Morton's laws against stealing from or murdering fellow citizens are much easier to justify, are much more readily agreed to, and are unanimously held by all cultures. Your law about giving alms, even to outsiders, is much more difficult to justify*, is much less readily agreed to, and is held by only a tiny minority of cultures, if that. This is because the former sorts of laws are derived from natural reason and natural justice, whereas the latter sorts of laws are not. They come from contractual grounds, or religious grounds, as I have already noted. This is why we would never think to mete out equal punishment for theft and for failing to give alms. It's not just that theft is more grievous, but also that theft is more obviously a crime.

* Just think about your justifications, such as the justification that coerced public welfare is narrowly admissible in the same way that coerced insurance is narrowly admissible in certain situations. This argument is highly controversial, and is not nearly as strong as arguments against theft or murder.

Of course I agree. The fact that I think all morals are culturally constituted does not imply that I think they cannot be crticized, rebelled against, or analyzed. Murder is about as close as one can get to a universal and acceptable moral prohibition (stealing, of course, is less so because property rights are always problematic. Robin Hood is a legendary hero.). (Actually, the one universal moral rule acc. anthropologists is an incest prohibition.)

As a point of interest, as I listen to the audiobook of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood I find that Robin never steals against the rich tout court. He only steals against evildoers (who also happen to be rich). In a moral sense he functions more like vigilante justice rather than an exception to moral norms, and his activity tends to be a moral exception to the immoral norms that often obtain. Whenever Robin acts to steal in a simple sense, he does it as a joke or prank, and the prank always goes awry. It's very much traditional morality. In particular, when Little John steals the sheriff's silverware Robin disapproves and forces him to return it to the sheriff, explaining that he only took a bag of the sheriff's money because the sheriff was trying to cheat a 'young man' out of his livestock.

Reason and justice are themselves culturally derived concepts. We learn to reason. We learn what constitutes justice. We use language to delineate rights and duties. Without language, and math, and logic (all culturally created phenomena) reason would be quite different from how we see it today.

I don't have time to get into this, but I don't really agree with any of this. Math and logic are no more culturally derived than reason or justice. They are culturally mediated, but not culturally derived. If, for example, mathematics were culturally derived, then each culture would have a different system of mathematics. The laws are mathematics are things to be discovered by rational beings, not things to be created or invented. The fact that hardly anything is strictly culturally derived explains why it is possible to develop appreciation for cultures other than our own - because we can see how cultural practices can be objectively reasonable and beautiful without being identical to our own. Without that common underlying foundation appreciation would not be possible. In effect objective and rational principles which apply to all cultures tend to work themselves out in different ways in different settings, as the final determination and relation of those principles is not a matter of necessity. C. S. Lewis looks at this idea a bit in the appendix of The Abolition of Man.

When GE talks about "moral agents". What is it that make us moral agents, while many of our cousin animals fail to attain that status? That's a difficult question. Brain size and intelligence probably have something to do with it. But the main thing that makes us moral agents is our culture -- our ability to manipulate concepts through the use of tools like language and logic. Indeed, these tools and their value to our species were probably what led to the evolution of bigger brains. Once we started to develop these tools, their value was so great that those individuals who could manipulate them with the most facility tended to thrive and leave descendants (this is a guess, but it is backed by some archeological and anthropological evidence).

Right, but the tools have objective worth and use. Our most basic tool is language, and all cultures have utilized this tool. Language is for the purpose of communication, and this is why all cultures place moral worth on truth-telling. If one culture decided that it was no better to tell the truth than to lie, then their language and communication would begin to break down and the society itself would not be far behind. Language use and an emphasis on truth telling are two great examples of things which are not culturally derived. They are common to all cultures, despite the fact that different cultures develop different forms of language and different emphases on telling the truth.

Of course the notion that morals derive from the divine is a reasonable theory, although claims to know the divine will are subject to doubts. Who can know the mind of God? GE's notion that secular morals can be objective and reached through reason is, I think, incorrect. (I know I'm probably misstating your position, GE. Sorry.) I prefer the Christian approach to morality (although I'm not a Christian), which is analogical rather than logical ("What would Jesus do?), and positive rather than negative (Love your neighbor; do unto others). If we hve a duty to love our neightbors, do our neighbors have a right to be loved? I'm not sure. The rights/duty connection may not be transitive in that direction. It's clear that rights confer duties, it's not so clear that duties confer rights. If we fail to love our neighbors, have we violated their rights, just as if we had murdered them or stolen from them?

Well, there are different Christian approaches to morality. Catholicism is two-tiered in the sense that there is the stuff that we don't need God's help to know, and then there is the stuff that we do need God's help to know. Usually when I post on this forum I try to stick to the first tier unless someone is specifically inquiring into revealed religion.

[Leontiskos]

Ecurb, as I was looking for an answer to someone else's question I ran across the English historian Tom Holland talking about the way that anti-slavery laws are essentially Christian. It touches on our topic in a number of ways, so you may be interested. One piece of it is the idea that <Jesus says the rich should give to the poor; therefore the poor have a right to what the rich give them; therefore the poor have a right to certain things; therefore the poor have a right to liberty>. Holland is gesturing towards the idea that anti-slavery laws inevitably grew up in a Christian culture and would have been incomprehensible to ancient cultures, which runs parallel to some things you have been saying. Actually Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) also made arguments such as this. I tend to resist them because I think they are taken too far, but there is surely some truth here.

Here is the link to that timestamp: <History for Atheists - Tom Holland>.

[Good_Egg]

1) If an act is an act of justice then it renders what is due.
2) If an act is an act of charity then it renders what is not due.
3) Suppose some act, act X, is simultaneously an act of justice and charity.
4) Act X must therefore render both what is due and what is not due.
5) What is due to one person may differ from what is due to another person.
6) Some people may, on principle, think they have a duty to donate to the indigent.
7) Performing one's duty is an act of justice, and it renders what is "due" to the person who performs it.
The person who benefits from this performance of duty may not deserve it, and it is not "due" to him.
9) Therefore, an act may simultaneously be an act of justice and charity, because it is just for one person, and charitable toward another.

This actually makes a sort of sense to me, though I wouldn't put it in quite those terms.

Seems to me that it is meaningful to talk of duties of friendship. That Alfie has positive moral duties toward Bruno, because he has entered into a friend-relationship with Bruno. Duties that he does not have towards strangers. What exactly those duties are will be culturally determined. It's a sort of implied promise. If he calls Bruno friend, he implicitly promises to act towards him as friends do in their culture.

Now people are different, and can meet and like people from different subcultures. So it is conceivable that Alfie counts Bruno a good friend whereas Bruno considers Alfie a (possibly rather annoying) acquaintance. In which case a good deed by Alfie to Bruno might be felt by Alfie as a duty of friendship but felt by Bruno as a merciful kindness (what you've been calling charity).

That idea can be extended, both to family (you choose your friends) and to other degrees of acquaintance, such as good neighbours.

Such duties are voluntary. You don't have to have friends, you can disown your family, you can live in the wilderness as a hermit with no neighbours. Relationships are optional.

As distinct from the universal negative moral duties - not to murder, rape, torture and rob. You can't evade those.

Now if you follow a religion of universal brotherhood, you may feel you have duties of friendship to all human beings (and any passing ETs as well). That's fine.

What's not fine is using your feelings, or your religion, as the excuse for coercing others into fulfilling duties of friendship to those whom they have not accepted as friends or brothers.

On this basis, compulsory charity via taxation is less like theft and more like rape. It insists that others act as if they were in a relationship that they have chosen not to enter into.

[GE Morton]

Similarly, indigent citizens might not be due health care or food through their merit, but through ours. We see it (or some of us do, at any rate) as our duty to provide for them.

You're quite free to "see," (i.e., take on) any duty you wish, in keeping with some private morality you find appealing. But if you wish to claim that duty is universal, binding on all moral agents, then you need some sound, rational moral argument --- assuming, of course, you wish your claim to be taken seriously by philosophers.

[GE Morton]

You can always find common goals if you make the goal broad enough --- "everyone wants to live," etc., and by confusing "common2" goals with "common1" goals.

None of this makes your case. Whenever a group of people interact it is in each of their private interests to interact well, and this always involves common goals (and "common goods"). The common goal/good is smooth and optimal interaction.

You're still doing it --- inventing broad, synthetic, pseudo-goals in order to assert common goals where there are none. No, a "smooth, optimal interaction" is not the goal of either party to, say, a sale transaction for a house. The goal of the buyer is obtaining a house; the goal of the seller obtaining some cash. Whether that transaction is deemed "smooth and optimal" by either party will depend solely on whether it satisfies his actual goal. Likewise with whether the interaction goes "well." Your pseudo-goal is simply the transaction itself, when successful, not a "goal" of that transaction.

[Ecurb]

As a point of interest, as I listen to the audiobook of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood I find that Robin never steals against the rich tout court. He only steals against evildoers (who also happen to be rich). In a moral sense he functions more like vigilante justice rather than an exception to moral norms, and his activity tends to be a moral exception to the immoral norms that often obtain. Whenever Robin acts to steal in a simple sense, he does it as a joke or prank, and the prank always goes awry. It's very much traditional morality. In particular, when Little John steals the sheriff's silverware Robin disapproves and forces him to return it to the sheriff, explaining that he only took a bag of the sheriff's money because the sheriff was trying to cheat a 'young man' out of his livestock.

Robin Hood robbed from the rich to give to the poor; he also robbed from the rich to pay the rightful king's (Richard) ransom. You're probably right about the details, Leon (it's been a few years), but of course the reason his actions are acceptable -- even heroic -- is that certain moral necessities trump others (like the prohibition against stealing). If taxation is robbery (which I dispute), then this would be the excuse for taxation, too.

I don't have time to get into this, but I don't really agree with any of this. Math and logic are no more culturally derived than reason or justice. They are culturally mediated, but not culturally derived. If, for example, mathematics were culturally derived, then each culture would have a different system of mathematics. The laws are mathematics are things to be discovered by rational beings, not things to be created or invented. The fact that hardly anything is strictly culturally derived explains why it is possible to develop appreciation for cultures other than our own - because we can see how cultural practices can be objectively reasonable and beautiful without being identical to our own. Without that common underlying foundation appreciation would not be possible. In effect objective and rational principles which apply to all cultures tend to work themselves out in different ways in different settings, as the final determination and relation of those principles is not a matter of necessity. C. S. Lewis looks at this idea a bit in the appendix of The Abolition of Man.

My memory is that in Abolition of Man Lewis argues for universal (and possibly divine) sensibilities, not so much for the primacy of reason and logic (although, of course, he believes in reason and logic, too). He supports Coleridge's admiration of the tourist who calls the waterfall "sublime" because he thinks certain things can universally merit a particular reaction. Instead of the comment being merely a personal opinion (Lewis claims) the waterfall is intrinsically sublime.

Obviously both reason and logic seem, at least, to be universal in that logic (the laws of non-contradiction) seems infallible. The Medieval philosophers thought we could accept reason and logic as gifts from God, who would not decive us. Modern people accept them on a different sort of faith. It's a big issue, about which I am relatively ignorant.

Right, but the tools have objective worth and use. Our most basic tool is language, and all cultures have utilized this tool. Language is for the purpose of communication, and this is why all cultures place moral worth on truth-telling. If one culture decided that it was no better to tell the truth than to lie, then their language and communication would begin to break down and the society itself would not be far behind. Language use and an emphasis on truth telling are two great examples of things which are not culturally derived. They are common to all cultures, despite the fact that different cultures develop different forms of language and different emphases on telling the truth.

The emphasis on telling the truth is far from universal. Are all myths "the truth" (we'll exempt Christianity from this discussion)? How did they develop? Myths differ from fiction in that fiction is accepted as invented. Myths, on the other hand, are presented as histories, and every society (except, perhaps, the Piraha) tells them. The Ten Commandments forbid "bearing false witness", but not lying in general. Tall tales, exaggerations, fictions and myths enrich language and culture.

[GE Morton]

For example, when Ebay was invented a common good was realized which allowed individuals to realize their commonly held private goals (i.e. liquidation of frozen capital and access to goods).

You seem to think I'm denying there are any common goods. Yes, eBay is a common good --- for people who use it. What I'm denying is that there are any goods which are "common1" among all members of modern, civilized societies. There are many goods which are common1 among some subset of the society, and also some which are common2 among all (or nearly all) members.

[Ecurb]

You're quite free to "see," (i.e., take on) any duty you wish, in keeping with some private morality you find appealing. But if you wish to claim that duty is universal, binding on all moral agents, then you need some sound, rational moral argument --- assuming, of course, you wish your claim to be taken seriously by philosophers.

I don't care if I'm "taken seriously" or not. I've never studied philosophy (except "Intro to" my freshman year 45 years ago). I disagree that one's philosophy must be predicated on "sound, rational arguments". All such arguments must start from premises which are not logically derived. However, in the interest of game-playing, here goes:

P1: Property rights are utterly dependent on the law and government protection.
P2: The law is dependent on the elected officials in accord with (in the U.S.) the Constitution.
P3: Taxes are an inherent part of property law.
P4: "Stealing" is "taking money or goods illegally".

Conclusion: Therefore, taxation is not stealing, but an inherent part of property law. It's irrelevant to the discussion how the money is spent.

[Ecurb]

What's not fine is using your feelings, or your religion, as the excuse for coercing others into fulfilling duties of friendship to those whom they have not accepted as friends or brothers.

On this basis, compulsory charity via taxation is less like theft and more like rape. It insists that others act as if they were in a relationship that they have chosen not to enter into.

We all use our feelings, beliefs and religion as an excuse for coercing others. For example, we coerce others to respect our property rights because we believe in property rights. Compulsory charity does not insist others "act as if" anything. Instead, it ogbliges people who take advantage of the property laws enforced by the state to contribute some property to the state. Then the state decides how to spend it, at the will of elected officials. The notion that taxation is "like" theft or rape is of course correct. Property law is like slavery, because it coercively prohibits freedom opf movement. Laws prohibiting stealing are even more like slavery, too, because conficted thieves are jailed. So cut the nonsense. Vague allusions of similarity to universally despised actions are a debating tactic that persuades only the ignorant or the stupid.

[GE Morton]

However, the duty to give alms is not necessarily a Chritian duty. Muslems accept the same duty (and I'm guessing other religions do as well). So do many atheists. Of course we can argue about what conditions create such a duty -- but one of them is a democratic system of government in which duly elected officials decide how much to tax people and what to spend the taxes on.

Most ancient religions, such as Christianity and Islam, began as the tribal religions of some kinship-based tribe. Thus they tend to embody the organic fallacy.

But I'm amazed that you're arguing that moral duties can arise from the dictates of "officials" or from majority opinions --- an egregious example of both the ad baculum and ad populum fallacies. I suspect that sophomoric mistake derives from some archaic "divine right of Kings" conception of the moral status of governments.

So I think I have a right to Medicare -- and I think my fellow citizens who haven't paid as much in taxes as I also have a right to benefit. That's because our system of laws confers such a right.

Oh, you do have a legal right to it. No one questions that. You also have a contractual right to it, assuming you've paid the taxes imposed to finance it. But there is no natural or common right to medical care (or to any other services of other persons).

[GE Morton]

I don't care if I'm "taken seriously" or not. I've never studied philosophy (except "Intro to" my freshman year 45 years ago). I disagree that one's philosophy must be predicated on "sound, rational arguments". All such arguments must start from premises which are not logically derived.

The premises of a sound, rational argument need not be "logically derived." They only need to be true.

However, in the interest of game-playing, here goes:

P1: Property rights are utterly dependent on the law and government protection.
P2: The law is dependent on the elected officials in accord with (in the U.S.) the Constitution.
P3: Taxes are an inherent part of property law.
P4: "Stealing" is "taking money or goods illegally".

Conclusion: Therefore, taxation is not stealing, but an inherent part of property law. It's irrelevant to the discussion how the money is spent.

Well, as you constantly do in discussions on this topic, you're evading the issue. No one denies that to the extent a person benefits from a rule of law (such as protection of his property), he has an obligation to pay for those benefits. But there is no logical path from that obligation to an obligation to pay (say) for someone else's health care. I.e., you can't glide from an obligation to pay for benefits you receive to an obligation to pay for benefits to someone else.

[GE Morton]

P1: Property rights are utterly dependent on the law and government protection.
P2: The law is dependent on the elected officials in accord with (in the U.S.) the Constitution.
P3: Taxes are an inherent part of property law.
P4: "Stealing" is "taking money or goods illegally".

Conclusion: Therefore, taxation is not stealing, but an inherent part of property law. It's irrelevant to the discussion how the money is spent.

What a glaring non sequitur! Per your own argument, only taxes collected to enforce property law are not stealing. That argument supplies no justification for taxes for any other purpose. How the money collected is spent certainly is relevant.