This seems like it is based on an overly literal interpretation of a “contract” + not being willing to deal with complexities of the real world. There clearly is a difference between how much you have “agreed” to the “contract” of governance, and how much you have agreed to a robber breaking into your house and taking your valuables. These are all things that count as some amount of “agreement” to the “contract”, that don’t have analogs in the robber case:
Empirically lots of people do agree to the contract by explicitly getting a visa and coming to the country and later becoming citizens
You do use the services provided to you by the government (roads, utilities, fire department, police, parks, etc)
If there were some way of opting out of the contract (which also means you opt out of the services above), the vast majority of people would not do so
You personally don’t choose to renounce your citizenship and leave the country
You personally don’t choose to live in the wilderness and never interact with government services (and then you can just stop paying taxes and no one will come and take money from you). (I suppose you could argue that there’s an analog in the robber case that you didn’t personally choose to get the maximum security burglar-proofing for your house.)
I agree you have not literally signed a contract. Nonetheless, it seems clear you should not be using the same word for the case of a government collecting money and then providing services that empirically you do use, and the case of a stranger breaking into your house and taking your valuables.
If you want a more detailed reply to your objection, it might be worth picking up a copy of Huemer’s book, The Problem of Political Authority. The problem with most of these cases is that they only appear like strong arguments if we’re already committed to the premise that we should treat state actors and non-state actors differently. In other words, they only appear strong if we begin with the conclusion we set out to prove. For instance,
Empirically lots of people do agree to the contract by explicitly getting a visa and coming to the country and later becoming citizens
Suppose that you want to move to Hawaii because it’s so beautiful, but you know (because you saw something on the internet) that upon arrival, someone will rob you. If knowing this information, you still move to Hawaii, does this mean that you are consenting to being robbed? Even if when you actually get to Hawaii, you make sure to explain to every potential robber that you really really don’t want to be robbed?
You do use the services provided to you by the government (roads, utilities, fire department, police, parks, etc)
As Huemer points out, this fact can’t be strong evidence that I am consenting to be governed, because nearly everyone knows that they’ll be forced to pay taxes whether or not they use those services. Likewise, if you offer your kidnapped victims food, and they accept, that does not imply that they agreed to be kidnapped.
Personally, I don’t think the contract argument is the best argument for governance. I’d be more inclined to argue for the consequentialist argument for government: that is, that governance provides greater utility overall compared to the alternative. That’s also the argument that Scott Alexander seems to want people to use. Huemer also directly replies to this argument in chapter 5 and part 2 in his book, if you’re curious.
Suppose that you want to move to Hawaii because it’s so beautiful, but you know (because you saw something on the internet) that upon arrival, someone will rob you. If knowing this information, you still move to Hawaii, does this mean that you are consenting to being robbed? Even if when you actually get to Hawaii, you make sure to explain to every potential robber that you really really don’t want to be robbed?
Your argument here is both circular, and committing the noncentral fallacy!
To recap:
In a debate with rohimshah over whether taxation can be consensual (and therefore theft),your argument reads:
Taxation is analogous to robbery
Robbery (even robbery that predictably occurs when I consume a good or service) is not consensual
Therefore, taxation (even taxation that predictably occurs when I consume a good or service) is not consensual
Therefore taxation is theft
I won’t ding your OP for assuming that taxation is nonconsensual, since you were merely responding to Scott’s arguments that had already conceded that point.
However, to argue that all taxes are always nonconsensual is clearly absurd.
Many taxes (especially local ones) are nearly identical to fees that private actors charge under similar terms (e.g. property taxes are equivalent to HOA fees and rents). Not to mention plenty of times when people explicitly consent to taxation!
If you want to strengthen your argument, limit it to: ‘nonconsensual taxation is theft’.
Your argument here is both circular, and committing the noncentral fallacy!
Then you may be interested in Aaron Bergman’s defense of circular arguments (begging the question) and my defense of the non-central fallacy here.
Jokes aside, I didn’t think robbery was essential to my argument there. I could have said “Suppose that you want to move to Hawaii because it’s so beautiful, but you know (because you saw something on the internet) that upon arrival, someone will kill you.” and the structure of my argument would be identical.
My point was that merely taking an action that predictably results in some effect does not imply that you consented to that effect. If I take an action that predictably leads to my enemy capturing me in battle (since I have no better options), that does not mean that I am consenting to enemy capture.
It would be difficult to precisely define consent. However, I think under any common sense definition of consent, something can still be non-consensual even if you knew it would happen to you as a result of taking an action.
If you want to strengthen your argument, limit it to: ‘nonconsensual taxation is theft’.
I agree, although I assumed that was already implicit in what I had said.
If there were some way of opting out of the contract (which also means you opt out of the services above), the vast majority of people would not do so
It depends on what you mean by this. Imagine a community of 99 poor people, and one rich person. Every year, the people conduct a vote on whether to tax the one rich person and redistribute his wealth. Sure enough, most people vote for the policy, and most people like the benefits that this governance structure provides. If given the choice, the vast majority of people in the community would not opt out. But that’s leaving out something important.
If everyone really were given a choice to opt out, then precisely one person would, the rich person. After opting out, the community would lose a large tax base, and would therefore require taxing the next richest person. This next richest person would probably then want to opt out.
Put another way, governance is an iterated game. If given the choice, the vast majority of people would prefer not to opt-out in the first round. After sufficient iterations, however, it seems most would prefer to opt-out.
And that’s not even getting into the objection that one of the main reasons why people would not opt-out of governance is because they’ve been indoctrinated into believing government is good. Given the choice to opt-out of aging, many say they would not want to. However, if we grew up in a world where aging was always known to be optional, I’m sure the statistics would be different.
If the rich person is giving up the ability to use public resources and have the protection of the community’s laws, are they still going to opt out? Sure, they’ll have more money, but they’ll have to use that money to hire bodyguards, since the other members of the community are now free to rob or kill them. They’d also have to make sure they have some way of enforcing the contract with the bodyguards, since they can’t use the community’s court system. Presumably the rich person has some source of income that is making them rich; will they be able to maintain that without the community’s cooperation? Honestly, I think just losing access to the legal system would be enough to prevent virtually everyone from opting out of membership in a modern liberal democracy.
In order to successfully opt out, you’d probably need to have enough people to form a competing community that can sustain and protect itself. After some time goes by, that competing community probably doesn’t look all that different from a government. I recognize that this might not apply to people who live self-sufficiently in the woods, or to billionaires who actually could afford a private defense force, but it applies to the vast majority of people.
In this hypothetical scenario, the rich person was the sole source of funding for the community’s services. Once they opt out, the community will no longer be able to pay the police, and since all the police salaries came from the rich person’s pockets—the rich person will be able to use the same amount of money previously used to pay the police force to finance their own private security.
Same for all the other services the community was providing.
Of course, the community will still have all the infrastructure and equipment that was purchased with the rich person’s taxes in the past, and the rich person will start with nothing—but this is just a temporary setback. In a few years the rich person will build new infrastructure and the community’s infrastructure will not hold for long if they keep using it without being able to afford its maintenance.
This leaves us with the core community service the rich person was enjoying. The only service that does not (directly) cost money to provide. Social norms.
As you said—once the rich person opts out of the community, the members of the community is no longer obliged to refrain from robbing or kill them. And they have an incentive to do so. They may no longer be able to pay their police in the long run, but it’ll take some time for all the cops to quit and it’ll take some time for the rich person to build their own security force (unless they have prepared it in advance? They probably did), so if they act quick enough they can launch an attack and have a good chance at winning. And even if they get delayed and the balance of armed forces swifts—large enough masses of poor people can take down the rich with their armed guards.
So this is what’s going to stop the rich person from opting out. The threat of violence if they do so. In that light—can we still say they are allowed to opt out?
So this is what’s going to stop the rich person from opting out. The threat of violence if they do so. In that light—can we still say they are allowed to opt out?
Well, in the hypothetical, yes, they can opt out. We will assume that in the hypothetical, the people would not rise up against the rich person if they voluntarily opted out of governance under some hypothetical agreement.
Can you clarify your point more? I am unsure whether you are merely making some general observation about why rich people can’t opt out of taxes in the real world, or whether you are making some theoretical argument for the implausibility of one of the assumptions in my thought experiment.
I was replying to ShemTealeaf’s claim that the rich person still has an incentive to stay—remaining under the protection of the community’s court system. I was arguing that what the rich person needs from the community’s court system is not its resources (which the rich person was providing anyway, and would dry out once they secede) but its social norms—the people’s agreement to respect it’s laws, which mean they would not attack the rich person. My point is that if the reach person’s incentive to stay is to not get robbed and killed by the community—then we can’t really say that they are allowed to opt out.
Of course—if they poor people that remain the community will not attack the rich person once they leave—then they are indeed allowed to opt out, but in that case their incentive to stay is gone.
That’s fair; maybe I didn’t understand the hypothetical. If the person is so rich that they are providing 100% of the funding for the government, my criticism doesn’t apply. If you can fund the services that a government would provide on your own, I can see the case for opting out. In practice, I don’t think that applies to more than a handful of people. If the argument is that the top 0.01% richest people and a few loners in the woods are being unjustly prevented from opting out of taxation, I’m willing to concede that point. I don’t think it changes the overall picture that the overwhelming majority of people would not want to opt out.
Also, I wasn’t really talking about an organized uprising in terms of why the person opting out would need protection. I assume there are plenty of criminals who already exist that would enjoy the chance to engage in some theft without risking jail time. The community would just put up a sign outside the rich person’s property saying “this house is not protected by community laws or police”. Maybe if the rich person wants to use a public street, make them wear a shirt that says “this person does not have the protection or backing of any nation” to ensure that they’re not free riding on the police protection that they’re opting out of. None of that involves the community threatening violence; it’s just withdrawing protection.
Furthermore, legal protection is just one of many services that the state provides. At the most basic level, it’s pretty hard to get around without using public roads, and it’s pretty hard to stay rich if the government decides you can’t do business in its territory.
I think there is some academic merit in taking this example to the extreme and assuming that the rich person is responsible to 100% of the community’s resources, and they alone can fund the its entire activity, and if they secede alone the community is left with nothing. They can’t protect people in their streets because they can’t afford a police. They can’t punish criminals because they can’t afford a prison. They may be left with their old roads, but without maintenance they quickly wear out while the rich person can build new ones. Their permission to do business means nothing because they have no means to enforce it (no police) - they can’t even make a credible embargo because the rich person is the only one you can offer jobs and the only one who has goods to sell, so the incentive to break the embargo is huge. The rich person has all the power and zero incentive to give in to the community which will take it away and give their “fair share” of 1100 of it in return.
Of course—this extreme scenario never happens in real life, because in real life there are always alternatives. There are more rich people, to begin with, so no single rich person can hold all the power. People can start their own business, breaking the 100% dependency on the rich class from our example. And—maybe most importantly—modern society has a huge middle class that holds (as a socioeconomic class) a considerable share of the power.
So, a real life rich person cannot have a full Shapley value like our hypothetical rich person, and the poor people’s Shapley value is more than zero. Still—a rich person’s Shapley value is much much higher than a poor person’s, and therefore there is a point where taxation is heavy enough to make it worthwhile for them to secede.
I agree in theory; I just don’t think that the hypothetical bears much resemblance to reality. The tax burden of the richest individuals in the US is just a tiny rounding error in the federal budget. Even if you could stop the tax payments of every billionaire in the country, the federal government would barely notice the difference. You’d have to stop the tax payments of millions of people before it would start having a noticeable impact on the government ability to enforce its will.
Also, on a practical level, I think that the downside of losing membership in the state is so enormous that it would outweigh almost any tax burden. Just to start with, you would lose the ability to enter into most countries, since you would not have a valid passport. Even if your former government is willing to let you travel through their territory to leave your property (something which they are under no obligation to do), where are you going to go? How are you going to maintain your income? Realistically, how high would the tax burden have to be for you to accept those costs of secession?
Realistically, how high would the tax burden have to be for you to accept those costs of secession?
France’s 2015 taxes of 75% made rich people secede, so we can take that as a supremum on the minimal tax burden that can make people secede. Of course—France’s rich didn’t have to go live in the woods—they had the option to go to other countries. Also, they did not have the option to not go to any country, because all the land on earth is divided between the countries.
I agree that the main benefits for the rich to remain in under the state’s rule and pay taxes is to be able to do business with its citizens. And of course—to be able to pass through the land—otherwise they won’t be able to physically do said business. So the core question is:
Does the state have the right to prevent its citizens from doing business with whoever they want?
They practice that power—that’s a fact. They send the police to stop business that’s not licensed by the state. But should this be considered an act of violence, or as an act of protecting their property?
France’s 2015 taxes of 75% made rich people secede, so we can take that as a supremum on the minimal tax burden that can make people secede. Of course—France’s rich didn’t have to go live in the woods—they had the option to go to other countries. Also, they did not have the option to not go to any country, because all the land on earth is divided between the countries.
Right, but they’re presumably moving to another country where they’re still paying taxes and participating in the state. If they had the option, do you think that they would prefer to opt out of the state completely (with all the associated downsides), rather than just moving to a country with somewhat lower taxes?
Does the state have the right to prevent its citizens from doing business with whoever they want?
I think we can sidestep this question, because I don’t think the state even has to do this with force. If they just say “anyone who does business with Person X loses access to roads, police, courts, sanitation, etc.”, that’s a very strong disincentive.
This seems like it is based on an overly literal interpretation of a “contract” + not being willing to deal with complexities of the real world. There clearly is a difference between how much you have “agreed” to the “contract” of governance, and how much you have agreed to a robber breaking into your house and taking your valuables. These are all things that count as some amount of “agreement” to the “contract”, that don’t have analogs in the robber case:
Empirically lots of people do agree to the contract by explicitly getting a visa and coming to the country and later becoming citizens
You do use the services provided to you by the government (roads, utilities, fire department, police, parks, etc)
If there were some way of opting out of the contract (which also means you opt out of the services above), the vast majority of people would not do so
You personally don’t choose to renounce your citizenship and leave the country
You personally don’t choose to live in the wilderness and never interact with government services (and then you can just stop paying taxes and no one will come and take money from you). (I suppose you could argue that there’s an analog in the robber case that you didn’t personally choose to get the maximum security burglar-proofing for your house.)
I agree you have not literally signed a contract. Nonetheless, it seems clear you should not be using the same word for the case of a government collecting money and then providing services that empirically you do use, and the case of a stranger breaking into your house and taking your valuables.
If you want a more detailed reply to your objection, it might be worth picking up a copy of Huemer’s book, The Problem of Political Authority. The problem with most of these cases is that they only appear like strong arguments if we’re already committed to the premise that we should treat state actors and non-state actors differently. In other words, they only appear strong if we begin with the conclusion we set out to prove. For instance,
Suppose that you want to move to Hawaii because it’s so beautiful, but you know (because you saw something on the internet) that upon arrival, someone will rob you. If knowing this information, you still move to Hawaii, does this mean that you are consenting to being robbed? Even if when you actually get to Hawaii, you make sure to explain to every potential robber that you really really don’t want to be robbed?
As Huemer points out, this fact can’t be strong evidence that I am consenting to be governed, because nearly everyone knows that they’ll be forced to pay taxes whether or not they use those services. Likewise, if you offer your kidnapped victims food, and they accept, that does not imply that they agreed to be kidnapped.
Personally, I don’t think the contract argument is the best argument for governance. I’d be more inclined to argue for the consequentialist argument for government: that is, that governance provides greater utility overall compared to the alternative. That’s also the argument that Scott Alexander seems to want people to use. Huemer also directly replies to this argument in chapter 5 and part 2 in his book, if you’re curious.
Your argument here is both circular, and committing the noncentral fallacy!
To recap:
In a debate with rohimshah over whether taxation can be consensual (and therefore theft),your argument reads:
Taxation is analogous to robbery
Robbery (even robbery that predictably occurs when I consume a good or service) is not consensual
Therefore, taxation (even taxation that predictably occurs when I consume a good or service) is not consensual
Therefore taxation is theft
I won’t ding your OP for assuming that taxation is nonconsensual, since you were merely responding to Scott’s arguments that had already conceded that point.
However, to argue that all taxes are always nonconsensual is clearly absurd.
Many taxes (especially local ones) are nearly identical to fees that private actors charge under similar terms (e.g. property taxes are equivalent to HOA fees and rents). Not to mention plenty of times when people explicitly consent to taxation!
If you want to strengthen your argument, limit it to: ‘nonconsensual taxation is theft’.
Then you may be interested in Aaron Bergman’s defense of circular arguments (begging the question) and my defense of the non-central fallacy here.
Jokes aside, I didn’t think robbery was essential to my argument there. I could have said “Suppose that you want to move to Hawaii because it’s so beautiful, but you know (because you saw something on the internet) that upon arrival, someone will kill you.” and the structure of my argument would be identical.
My point was that merely taking an action that predictably results in some effect does not imply that you consented to that effect. If I take an action that predictably leads to my enemy capturing me in battle (since I have no better options), that does not mean that I am consenting to enemy capture.
It would be difficult to precisely define consent. However, I think under any common sense definition of consent, something can still be non-consensual even if you knew it would happen to you as a result of taking an action.
I agree, although I assumed that was already implicit in what I had said.
It depends on what you mean by this. Imagine a community of 99 poor people, and one rich person. Every year, the people conduct a vote on whether to tax the one rich person and redistribute his wealth. Sure enough, most people vote for the policy, and most people like the benefits that this governance structure provides. If given the choice, the vast majority of people in the community would not opt out. But that’s leaving out something important.
If everyone really were given a choice to opt out, then precisely one person would, the rich person. After opting out, the community would lose a large tax base, and would therefore require taxing the next richest person. This next richest person would probably then want to opt out.
Put another way, governance is an iterated game. If given the choice, the vast majority of people would prefer not to opt-out in the first round. After sufficient iterations, however, it seems most would prefer to opt-out.
And that’s not even getting into the objection that one of the main reasons why people would not opt-out of governance is because they’ve been indoctrinated into believing government is good. Given the choice to opt-out of aging, many say they would not want to. However, if we grew up in a world where aging was always known to be optional, I’m sure the statistics would be different.
If the rich person is giving up the ability to use public resources and have the protection of the community’s laws, are they still going to opt out? Sure, they’ll have more money, but they’ll have to use that money to hire bodyguards, since the other members of the community are now free to rob or kill them. They’d also have to make sure they have some way of enforcing the contract with the bodyguards, since they can’t use the community’s court system. Presumably the rich person has some source of income that is making them rich; will they be able to maintain that without the community’s cooperation? Honestly, I think just losing access to the legal system would be enough to prevent virtually everyone from opting out of membership in a modern liberal democracy.
In order to successfully opt out, you’d probably need to have enough people to form a competing community that can sustain and protect itself. After some time goes by, that competing community probably doesn’t look all that different from a government. I recognize that this might not apply to people who live self-sufficiently in the woods, or to billionaires who actually could afford a private defense force, but it applies to the vast majority of people.
In this hypothetical scenario, the rich person was the sole source of funding for the community’s services. Once they opt out, the community will no longer be able to pay the police, and since all the police salaries came from the rich person’s pockets—the rich person will be able to use the same amount of money previously used to pay the police force to finance their own private security.
Same for all the other services the community was providing.
Of course, the community will still have all the infrastructure and equipment that was purchased with the rich person’s taxes in the past, and the rich person will start with nothing—but this is just a temporary setback. In a few years the rich person will build new infrastructure and the community’s infrastructure will not hold for long if they keep using it without being able to afford its maintenance.
This leaves us with the core community service the rich person was enjoying. The only service that does not (directly) cost money to provide. Social norms.
As you said—once the rich person opts out of the community, the members of the community is no longer obliged to refrain from robbing or kill them. And they have an incentive to do so. They may no longer be able to pay their police in the long run, but it’ll take some time for all the cops to quit and it’ll take some time for the rich person to build their own security force (unless they have prepared it in advance? They probably did), so if they act quick enough they can launch an attack and have a good chance at winning. And even if they get delayed and the balance of armed forces swifts—large enough masses of poor people can take down the rich with their armed guards.
So this is what’s going to stop the rich person from opting out. The threat of violence if they do so. In that light—can we still say they are allowed to opt out?
Well, in the hypothetical, yes, they can opt out. We will assume that in the hypothetical, the people would not rise up against the rich person if they voluntarily opted out of governance under some hypothetical agreement.
Can you clarify your point more? I am unsure whether you are merely making some general observation about why rich people can’t opt out of taxes in the real world, or whether you are making some theoretical argument for the implausibility of one of the assumptions in my thought experiment.
I was replying to ShemTealeaf’s claim that the rich person still has an incentive to stay—remaining under the protection of the community’s court system. I was arguing that what the rich person needs from the community’s court system is not its resources (which the rich person was providing anyway, and would dry out once they secede) but its social norms—the people’s agreement to respect it’s laws, which mean they would not attack the rich person. My point is that if the reach person’s incentive to stay is to not get robbed and killed by the community—then we can’t really say that they are allowed to opt out.
Of course—if they poor people that remain the community will not attack the rich person once they leave—then they are indeed allowed to opt out, but in that case their incentive to stay is gone.
Oh makes sense. Because of how I was notified, I thought you were replying to me. Read my comment as if I thought you were. :)
That’s fair; maybe I didn’t understand the hypothetical. If the person is so rich that they are providing 100% of the funding for the government, my criticism doesn’t apply. If you can fund the services that a government would provide on your own, I can see the case for opting out. In practice, I don’t think that applies to more than a handful of people. If the argument is that the top 0.01% richest people and a few loners in the woods are being unjustly prevented from opting out of taxation, I’m willing to concede that point. I don’t think it changes the overall picture that the overwhelming majority of people would not want to opt out.
Also, I wasn’t really talking about an organized uprising in terms of why the person opting out would need protection. I assume there are plenty of criminals who already exist that would enjoy the chance to engage in some theft without risking jail time. The community would just put up a sign outside the rich person’s property saying “this house is not protected by community laws or police”. Maybe if the rich person wants to use a public street, make them wear a shirt that says “this person does not have the protection or backing of any nation” to ensure that they’re not free riding on the police protection that they’re opting out of. None of that involves the community threatening violence; it’s just withdrawing protection.
Furthermore, legal protection is just one of many services that the state provides. At the most basic level, it’s pretty hard to get around without using public roads, and it’s pretty hard to stay rich if the government decides you can’t do business in its territory.
I think there is some academic merit in taking this example to the extreme and assuming that the rich person is responsible to 100% of the community’s resources, and they alone can fund the its entire activity, and if they secede alone the community is left with nothing. They can’t protect people in their streets because they can’t afford a police. They can’t punish criminals because they can’t afford a prison. They may be left with their old roads, but without maintenance they quickly wear out while the rich person can build new ones. Their permission to do business means nothing because they have no means to enforce it (no police) - they can’t even make a credible embargo because the rich person is the only one you can offer jobs and the only one who has goods to sell, so the incentive to break the embargo is huge. The rich person has all the power and zero incentive to give in to the community which will take it away and give their “fair share” of 1100 of it in return.
Of course—this extreme scenario never happens in real life, because in real life there are always alternatives. There are more rich people, to begin with, so no single rich person can hold all the power. People can start their own business, breaking the 100% dependency on the rich class from our example. And—maybe most importantly—modern society has a huge middle class that holds (as a socioeconomic class) a considerable share of the power.
So, a real life rich person cannot have a full Shapley value like our hypothetical rich person, and the poor people’s Shapley value is more than zero. Still—a rich person’s Shapley value is much much higher than a poor person’s, and therefore there is a point where taxation is heavy enough to make it worthwhile for them to secede.
I agree in theory; I just don’t think that the hypothetical bears much resemblance to reality. The tax burden of the richest individuals in the US is just a tiny rounding error in the federal budget. Even if you could stop the tax payments of every billionaire in the country, the federal government would barely notice the difference. You’d have to stop the tax payments of millions of people before it would start having a noticeable impact on the government ability to enforce its will.
Also, on a practical level, I think that the downside of losing membership in the state is so enormous that it would outweigh almost any tax burden. Just to start with, you would lose the ability to enter into most countries, since you would not have a valid passport. Even if your former government is willing to let you travel through their territory to leave your property (something which they are under no obligation to do), where are you going to go? How are you going to maintain your income? Realistically, how high would the tax burden have to be for you to accept those costs of secession?
France’s 2015 taxes of 75% made rich people secede, so we can take that as a supremum on the minimal tax burden that can make people secede. Of course—France’s rich didn’t have to go live in the woods—they had the option to go to other countries. Also, they did not have the option to not go to any country, because all the land on earth is divided between the countries.
I agree that the main benefits for the rich to remain in under the state’s rule and pay taxes is to be able to do business with its citizens. And of course—to be able to pass through the land—otherwise they won’t be able to physically do said business. So the core question is:
Does the state have the right to prevent its citizens from doing business with whoever they want?
They practice that power—that’s a fact. They send the police to stop business that’s not licensed by the state. But should this be considered an act of violence, or as an act of protecting their property?
Right, but they’re presumably moving to another country where they’re still paying taxes and participating in the state. If they had the option, do you think that they would prefer to opt out of the state completely (with all the associated downsides), rather than just moving to a country with somewhat lower taxes?
I think we can sidestep this question, because I don’t think the state even has to do this with force. If they just say “anyone who does business with Person X loses access to roads, police, courts, sanitation, etc.”, that’s a very strong disincentive.
Does it? Do you have evidence for that?