>People starve to death because we find protecting property rights more important than letting them eat. How does it not make sense?

You're not framing the situation accurately. The question to be asked is: should people starve to death because we refuse to rob someone? The answer is yes.

Even if you don't care about the moral reasons for this, you must see that a legal system which allows those who are resource-poor to legally plunder those who are resource-rich perverts incentives and misallocates capital, leading to less innovation and development, and consequently, less progress in reducing the total number of deaths.

>And of course it would - if they enjoy human flesh and were denied it, they would certainly be poorer for it - but we thankfully value your right to keep your own flesh higher than someone elses abiltiy to be able to feast on it.

My point was that even if they would be richer for being able to cannibalize you, denying them that 'right' is not morally wrong. They do not have a right to feast on you. Even if a group of people were starving, and murdering and cannibalizing you would let them all survive, it would be morally wrong for us as a society to allow that to happen.

>It's not a zero sum game - a lot of our laws centre around reducing our liberty in ways that increases it more in other ways: Making violent crime illegal and backing it up with the willingness to deprive those using violence of liberty is a restriction on all of us, and certainly even more so of those we justifiably lock up for our protection.

Liberty is historically and conventionally defined as rightful action with one's own person and property. Denying someone access to another individual's person and property does not limit anyone's liberty. That is simply contrary to what liberty means.

>If something is abundant, then the argument doesn't apply. That is the entire point: It applies to scarcity. If something is abundant then everyone who wants it can have access.

You're not getting my point. I'm saying that if someone takes abundant resources, applies work to it, and produces something of value that is scarce, they should have full moral rights to it, yet Proudhon's argument, as well as yours, denies them that right.

>But land is one such thing that is distinctly scarce. Suitable farmland even more so.

And therefore it's perfectly suitable to tax valuable land. What is not appropriate is taxing everything a person generates.

Let's say that each tonne of iron ore extracted from the crust costs society $10.00 in diminishment of natural resources, and in environmental damage. Let's say society charges an iron ore miner $50 to extract a tonne of iron ore, to compensate for these costs.

Now if the iron ore miner pays the fee, mines the ore, smelts the iron, and fashions the iron into an incredible machine, you have absolutely no right to what the machine produces. An income tax is not a tax on using scarce natural resources, or a charge for damaging the environment. It is robbery against someone successfully generating economic value. It is a human rights violation.

Proudhon's argument rationalizes the violation of human rights and legalized plunder against those who strive and succeed.

>That is not really a hypothetical example. E.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland, Irish food exports increased while hundreds of thousands starved to death because their crops had failed and they could not afford to buy the plentiful amounts of food being exported from the island.

The Corn Laws prevented the Irish from importing food. It was not liberty that caused the Great Famine in Ireland.