who's suggesting that property laws are obvious? Property laws exist because property is
rivalrous, and the commons are generally abused, for example how the #1 polluter in the US is the US government, how the soviet bloc and china were far worse per capita polluters than the US.
> But this is also true of all laws,
Yes, that's true for all laws. It's funny that no one says it's part of the "social contract" when someone gets choked out and killed by the police for selling bootleg cigarettes on the corner.
I'm also going to point out that the central problem with income tax is that we think it's great because it's "punishes" the wealthy, but the equilibrium state is that due to bracket creep, it winds up screwing over the poor and middle class while the wealthy find escapes. Of note: I remember a year when I paid more in income taxes (as a proportion of my income) having made 30k than Bernie Sanders did.
The general paradigm among the liberal left is that the poor are screwed over by the political power because they are poor. I think it might be worth rethinking that - the poor are and continue to be poor because they don't have political power. The problem is that political power is a zero-sum game, so any solution that gives those in power more power will only make matters worse.
