> Trying again... If your demand for the return of your laptop includes a threat, is it extortion? I say no, because it is not legitimately mine to keep, but that admits the possibility that there may be other reasons something might not be one's to keep. That was my point.

I don't want to bicker about what property is. Here's one idea: property is value that you want to control. For example, if you write a SaaS app, you don't want anyone else to get the source code, because then they could make money off of your work, against your will.

Another idea is that property is a "rivalrous" resource that you have exclusive control over. In this case, rivalrous means that only one person can control that resource at a time, and thus, there may be "rivalry" over the resource.

But this is all perfectly aligned with our intuitive sense of what property is. If you've got an apple in your hand, everyone else will automatically consider it your property, and so on.

What you're doing here, is muddying the definition of property in an attempt at scraping together some semblance of legitimacy for taxation. "Heyyy, if everything everywhere is the government's property, then taxation is not extortion!".. Well, next we'd need to delve into what constitutes legitimate property. Common sense suggests that anything acquired through coercion is not legitimate property.

Furthermore, if everything really were the government's property, would taxes need to be collected by force? Wouldn't people acknowledge that in fact, whenever they produce value to someone else in exchange for a payment, the money they receive is actually the government's property? But that makes no sense whatsoever, of course. It's not the government that just produced value to whoever paid you for it - it was you.

> Do you see that this here is an appeal to outcomes that I object to as well?

What you think is a good "outcome" might not be what someone else wants. If you impose your will on him anyway, you've got issues. Stalin had good outcomes in mind, and pursued them regardless of anyone else's objections. In fact, if anyone objected, Stalin just killed him. But if all you're thinking about is "outcomes", you might not even see anything wrong with what Stalin did.

Basically you want Good Things for everyone, right? But then you declare that if achieving Good Things requires doing Bad Things to other people, that's alright because the end justifies the means. Do you really not see the problem here?

But you know, throughout history, where ever there's been a freeish market, it's produced widespread prosperity. Take the early United States, for example. A minimal government, and massive wealth. That's your "good outcome" right there. When you get out of the way and let people produce wealth, they'll just go ahead and do it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL05A07B2585EC9019&feature...

> [Austrian economics] My objection is that it is not actually seeking truth by any mechanism likely to arrive at it.

And you know this by.. never even looking into Austrian economics? Watch this and you'll see how delightfully practical Austrian economics is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL0C620AECA6617E2E&feature... - you'll have a hard time disagreeing with what they say.

> Austrian economics is based on Mise's Praxeology and makes certain assumptions about how humans behave whilst ignoring the huge amounts of psychological research we have into "how humans actually behave".

See the above video for some of the fundamentals behind Austrian economics. But feel free to tell me about those assumptions you bemoan, and tell me why they're wrong.

(Or feel free to accept the obvious, practical reality of the fundamentals of economics when Mr. Herbener explains it to you)

The point here is that it's important to understand that maximal freedom produces maximal prosperity for everyone, ie. the best "economic outcome". Voluntary exchanges benefit both parties, and so, the more of those happen, the more instances of people being better off will occur. Voluntary exchanges are maximized by maximizing freedom. In other words, getting out of the way and letting people trade and markets work.

> [Keeping the US government in check] Honestly, it's been working out okay.

You're either not paying attention to anything around you, or you know that's not true.