[dragonwriter]

> Taxes are pretty much theft at gunpoint,

It's odd how the people that think this are generally the same ones most likely to argue that “positive rights” that impose a cost on others are an incoherent concept, and positive entitlement can at most be a limited privilege granted by others based on available resources and expected utility of the grant. But they fail to recognize that the “right” to wall off goods from the commons and exclude others by force—i.e., property—is very much a positive right that has a cost for others.

[nybble41]

Property is not a positive right. Property ownership is derived from the self-ownership of the person who created the property by combining their own labor with unowned land. The exclusive right to decide how the property is consumed is a negative right; others have no obligation to provide anything to the property owner, only to leave the owner (including their property) alone. Homesteading imposes no cost on others for the simple reason that these others have no claim to the unowned land being homesteaded.

Your error is starting from the assumption that land is owned in common by everyone, rather than unowned. If land were actually owned in common then you would need to obtain permission from every single person on the planet before using any of it. You would starve to death long before you obtained even a small fraction of the necessary consent. And no, the government cannot grant that consent on behalf of others who never deliberately and voluntarily agreed to permit the government to represent them. You would need the consent of each and every individual.

[Kaiyou]

You're using some words that I do not know if I understand them correctly, but let me just say that I personally think of rights as something that is either given to you by someone or taken by force and the only rights you truly have are the ones you can personally defend with your own force, since the other ones can be taken from you at any time. If you think you should have rights that you cannot take with your own force, that is the definition of entitlement.

[kortilla]

> It's odd how the people that think this are generally the same ones most likely to argue

Don’t attack strawmen, it’s boring.