Last year the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, sent a letter to novelist John Hart demanding thousands of dollars in back taxes. The city alleges that Hart needs a business license to write, and if he doesn’t pay up, they will seize his property, throw him in jail, or both.
Interestingly, if Hart wrote magazine or newspaper articles he would be exempt from the city’s business licensing. But since he writes novels, he needs a license, and he is a criminal if he doesn’t get one.
This might be a humorous example of the arbitrary powers of government, but Hart’s livelihood, well-being, and property rights are at stake. There is nothing humorous when property rights are at stake.
All individuals, including Hart, have a moral right to create and trade values without needing government permission. And any form of business licensing by government means that one cannot create and trade values without the government’s permission.
Legally, we often need the government’s permission to sustain our lives–to create the values that life requires. Morally, no permission is necessary.
James Madison, the Father of the United States Constitution, recognized this fact in his essay “Property”:
In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.
In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.
In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.
It is truly sad that Charlottesville, home of Thomas Jefferson and twenty-eight miles away from Madison’s Montpelier, doesn’t get it. But Charlottesville isn’t alone. Few Americans get it.