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Yasafi nor Daniel has posted yet to tell us why "I want to take what you earn" is selfless and progressive.

You wrote,

"all the great champions of economic freedom (aka capitalism) ultimately justify this system because only it affords true dignity to individuals."

Capitalism affords a good deal more than dignity.

It is the price system, and, for modern man, there is no alternative to it. Without the calculus of price, he must go back to the only conditions he could comprehend, the simple, primitive conditions of his remote ancestors and most backward contemporaries. But for the majority of modern men, return to primitive conditions is out of the question. The great increase in population over the last 200 years was made possible only by the productivity of modern, calculating, capitalist civilization. Without that civilization to support them, all but its most self-reliant children must perish.

For the majority of mankind today, capitalism is life, socialism death, and, the middle way, cancer.

Mises, for whom the ultimate justification for capitalism is that it enhances the standard of living for all members of a society, each by their own subjective standards (different people having such different and irreconcilable notions of what counts as "dignity" that it can't be appealed to as a consistent rationale).

Mill, for whom capitalism and political liberalism (whose justification is that it does respect the dignity of the individual) are intimately related, but not identical and differently justified.

Another understatement.

To say that capitalism enhances the standard of living is like saying that air enhances it. It doesn't just enhance it, but is as essential to it as air itself.

Again, capitalism is life, socialism death, and, the middle way, cancer.

Beside if Don Boudreaux hangs around sites that lean heavily to Socialism than inevitably he's going to find stuff that's going to get under his skin.

What is property? Human being themselves could be and have been, not so long ago, labeled "property" exchangeable in a market, but ownership of a human being is the antithesis of liberal ideals. Free labor was one of most essential elements of the 19th century liberalism that I still celebrate, but this liberalism opposed particular property rights. Deconstructing these rights, not strengthening them, was the movement's principal goal.

Furthermore, 19th century "libertarians", who were the actual forebearers of the modern "libertarian" movement, including mutualists like Benjamin Tucker, explicitly opposed "capitalism". They championed free markets as an alternative to what they called "capitalism". They associated "capitalism" with oligarchy, monetary authorities inextricably linked to the state and even slavery.

No, it's not simply about the material benefits. It's about the freedom to choose what one consumes in exchange for his produce. It's about a society organized around these voluntary, cooperative, mutually beneficial, market relationships as opposed to organization by a class of statutory title holders.

Whether the title is feudal "lord" or socialist "planner" or corporatist "manager" or capitalist "banker" or bureaucratic "civil servant" makes little difference.

'taxes that aren't theft'

"Taxation is theft" is only a reformulation in different terms of Proudhon's assertion that "property is theft". If we focus on the deeper logic of liberal ideals, rather than the superficial terminology that politicians continually game, we can understand why "liberalism" has come to mean nearly the opposite of an earlier meaning and also why the earlier "liberals", the classical liberals, where not champions of "capitalism" but opponents of it.

"Capitalism" is actually a term developed by Marxists to describe a straw man they constructed. Smith never uses the term. It is rooted etymologically in archaic terms with highly negative connotation in modern vernacular, terms like "chattel".

Do any of them actually practise what they preach, and forego any of the material perks of their high stations in life?

As Lenny Bruce observed, "Any preacher (or liberal) with more than one suit is a hustler."

And, any with a swimming pool, sending out tax collectors to hound hard-working waitresses for their tip money, is a liberal like Louis XIV was a liberal.

For one who didn't want to "push the semantic dispute too far," you've pushed it pretty far.

What are you going to tell us next, that the woman defending herself against a rapist is the real rapist?

This may come as a shock to you, but I largely agree with you. If you accept the idea of anything less than an absolutely pure free market, you're in murky territory.

Do any of them actually practise what they preach, and forego any of the material perks of their high stations in life?

Few do, because you construct a straw man yourself here.

What are you going to tell us next, that the woman defending herself against a rapist is the real rapist?

No. Do you have some evidence for this etymological evolution of the word "rape", or are you only constructing another strawman to avoid confronting the evolution of the word "capitalism"?

"Capitalism" is a word invented in the middle of the nineteenth century and has little if anything to do with the earlier classical liberalism of Locke, Smith, Bastiat, Ricardo and the rest. "Capitalist" describes a statutory proprietor, a statesman, and "capitalism" describes an ideology that developed among these statesmen. Ignoring this historical reality doesn't change it.

You could try to confront the assertion of historical reality with other historical evidence, but you haven't done that. Why?

If you accept the idea of anything less than an absolutely pure free market, you're in murky territory.

I favor a free market. The question is: what are we entitled to exchange there? This question concerns "property", not the market.

What is property? Are we "free" to own other human beings? May one man be subject to the mastery of other men for life, even masters "free" to exchange his subjection among themselves? This subjection was "property" only a bit more than century ago in the United States. The history is indisputable.

The territory you defend is so murky that you can't even see its internal contradictions.

The Dionne and the pope both fit the description.

I think Martin Brock is historically correct that Free Markets flourished under authoritarian, hereditary regimes in Europe. Austria Hungary. England, at the time of the American Revolution, was a mercantilist monarchy as Adam Smith pointed out that evolved, in America, to Free Market until about WWI when Statism started to move to ascendancy in elite, intelellectual thought and progressed from Wilson to Obama.

My point is that I do not see Mrtin Brock as disagreeing in substance, in this post, and he makes some useful points in terminology that make us more effective in communicating the value of Free Markets for Free People.

Here's my counter-example that the Dionne's of the world can't explain: people who buy thousands of acres of rain forest to preserve it themselves. Where's the materialism there?

Patrick Burke, Th.D, of the Wynnewood Institute, http://www.wynnewood.org,is writing a book on the differences between Rerum Novarum which was more influenced by Classical Liberalism and Quadagesimo Anno which was influenced by Marxism. See wikepedia.

Inadvertently, it seems, the Popes and the Catholic Church were promoting Marxism until Pope Paul who came from Poland and knew about the real thing rather than fantasy Group Think of Intellectual Elites who Know It All.