Comment by user34283
15 hours ago
Property rights exist within a legal framework defined by the people, through law.
What you're talking about here with self-ownership and the state "infringing" upon property rights when you're taxed and can't transact privately, it seems less than "reasonable".
It seems like you're trying to paint routine and widely accepted functions of democratic governments as if they were unreasonable, authoritarian overreach.
Authoritarian overreach is itself a routine and widely accepted aspect of democratic governments. Authoritarians get 1 vote/person, same as everyone else. They're allowed to advocate for policies and score the occasional outrageous political win, just like everyone else. There are a lot of them out there and they are a significant political force.
Something being routine and done democratically is no defence at all of it being liberal or in line with the principle of property rights. Or even of it being legal in a lot of instances, democratic governments lose legal challenges quite regularly.
And in this case, attacks on private transactions are absolutely unreasonable authoritarian overreach. The government doesn't need to surveil people when they have no reason to suspect those people of wrongdoing.
Voters generally seem willing to embrace authoritarian solutions when it is applied to the things they dislike. The political classes have multiple incentives to appeal to those voters. Outside of a few outliers, neither group generally concerns themselves with the underlying principles of civil liberties until their favored causes are attacked. Hypocrisy abounds. Reasoning from first principles is dismissed as ideological extremism.
From here it is easy to see how the incentives of a democratic-regulatory-state work against property rights, free speech, privacy rights and other civil liberties.