> I mean, obviously, it's ideological rhetoric
> designed to make people
> believe they share something with rentiers. But, is
> there something worth
> taking seriously in the incessant conflation of
> wealth and income?
Maybe I am not reading the right stuff, but I don't encounter this distinction in reading libertarian literature. Nozick says that redistributive taxation is equivalent to forced labor, but that goes for both investment income and "earned" income for him. He thinks that whatever the source of "your" money it is "yours" and you are "entitled" to it, so the state can't take it away without violating your rights.
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of libs: natural rights libertarians like Nozick or John Hospers, and utilitarian libs like Jan Narveson or Mises and Hayek. Natural rights libs like Nozick oftena ccept some version of a labor theory of property, that I am entitled to anything unowened that I can appropriate and use or anything that people will voluntarily (without exercise of force or fraud) give me for free in exchange for what I give them. This way of talking doesn't make a theoretical distinction between property acquired by labor or by other means except ath the very beginning, the initial appropriation stage, when there isn't any otherway to acquire property. And anyway we are way beyond any situation where there is ieven arguably unowned stuff to be picked up and used, except maybe for intellectual property where the copyright or patent has expired.
Utilitarian libs like Narveson or Hayek and Mises argue that for one reason or another a minimal state with a capitalist economy and no redistributive taxation leads to the best outcomes on average or in total, for example, in the Mises-Hayek version of the argument, because planning always fails and the more there is the worse off we will be. This argument also makes no reference to or use of the distinction between property acquired by labor and that acquired by investment.
In fact, one would expect libs to deny the significance of this distinction. They'd want to assimilate acquiring property by investment to acquiring it by labor, not only because their high level theoreticala rguments don't use this distinction, but because they want to play, somewhat dishonestly, on the idea that them that has _deserve_ their property as the reward for labor or risk or sacrifice, and they treat investment as a kind of labor (market research), or risk-taking (because you could lose your investment), or sacrifice (deferred gratification).
Leaving\ aside the problems with specific details of these arguments, this move is a bit dishonest because most libs don't reallt care about desert but only about entitlements. If I inherit a fortune I don't deserve it on any grounds, but libs think that I am entitled to it as a voluntary gift on the part of someone who maybe did deserve it but anyway came by it legitimately and was himself entitled to it.
Be that as it may I don't know that the distinction is important to any lib theory know about.
Nonlibs, whether welfare state liberals, social democrats, anarchists, or socialists, might well want to insist on the dsitinction insodar as they puit weight on a labor theory of property, that I am really only entitled to what I earn by my labor. A lot of socialists go for this idea with slogans like that rejected by Marx to the effect that labor creates all wealth (and so deserves all of what it creates). There are lots of problems with this view too, some of which are summed up by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Program (what about those unable to work?).
But one still might want to make the distinction to make the theoretical point that rentiers are not productive, that merely owning things does not increase the sum of social wealth, and that ultimate the primary if not necessarily the only source of the necessities and luxuries of life is labor. That doesn't commit one to a labor theory of property, and it doesn't even deny that some investment-related activities -- market research, entrepreneurship -- are labor in the relevant sense. But it does allow us to drawa line bewtteen productive activities (including productive investment activities) and parasitical ones.
Once it is established that some things are merely parasitical, the question arises, why support these things? In some cases we might say, because justice requires that we, e.g., support the disabled or the aged or children, or because life is better if we support the arts or sports or recreation. In other cases, we might say that we can't think of any raeson why we should permit some people to take a lot of money just because they own stuff, and so we might then want to say that either we will end their ownship of it by expropriation or anyway tax any the money they would have received just for owning it.
jks
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