Ok, let’s say we have a situation in market anarchy. What if you are a personal enemy of Mr. Moneybags, who happens to be one of the richest capitalists in society. You make a living exposing his corrupt practices that aren’t in line with libertarian principles to the public.
Now you live on a rather remote farm, but are surrounded by individual property owners. What if Mr. Moneybags decides to get revenge on you by purchasing all the property that surrounds your farm and, by owning the land, can enforce trespassing laws against you if you tried to leave your farmland? You are effectively caged in. Does this expose a flaw in a private property system or not? Just curious to hear your ideas.
I think it exposes a flaw in naive conceptions of absolute property rights in land. Sans the State, the ownership of land has always emerged in an organic manner, meaning that ownership was acquired by simply squatting on a piece of unused land. No one would squat on a piece of land which could not be lawfully accessed between the property of others, that is, there had to be some thoroughfare connecting the lawfully owned land to markets, etc. Hence, whatever that thoroughfare was - even if just a foot path - would constitute an “easement”, that is, a property right held by virtue of uninterrupted use of the resource under dispute. So, there must be at least one lawful easement from the surrounded farm through the surrounding farms.
I think the analogy you’ve chosen actually goes a long way to explain how the State does, in fact, operate. Look at the ancient city of Teotihuacan. It was fabulously rich and its ruler collected taxes and tribute from tribes far and wide. How did Teotihuacan become so wealthy? Well, in a special I watched on it, they explained that the city sits just near the narrowest point of the South American continent and they were able to control all the North-South trade routes, thus enabling them to tax all goods passing through. So, in this case, it is easy to see how the State arose through territorial aggression based on geographical opportunity. A border is a 1-dimensional strand which surrounds a 2-dimensional land area… controlling a border is much cheaper than controlling every square inch of the interior. I think that policing trade routes and ports and charging merchants protection money (pay or your merchandise ends up in our hands or at least goes up in smoke) is one of the key strategies by which the State has arisen. In my view, the entire tax code is just a highly obfuscated form of the very same thing. The real power of fiat money, for example, does not come from “the Bankers” it comes from the emborderment of all financial transactions in the denominated currency. To buy things in the US, you must convert all transactions into dollars, even if those transactions were with someone overseas. In doing so, you automatically pre-calculate your tax duty. In other words, “the dollar” acts as a kind of invisible border around all transactions performed in dollars. While fiat money also permits inflation, governments would rather do without inflation - if they had to - and keep the fiat money than give up fiat money entirely.
I think I agree with you on this one, Clayton. What defines “ownership” is a social phenomenon and the status of ownership doesn’t mean anything if people don’t respect your ownership. In this scenario, I think there is a legitimate claim to be made that this is aggressing against your ability to move freely and I don’t think any legal enforcement agency would comply or side with Moneybags because the obvious intent of Moneybags is to ruin somebody’s life. This is why I’m not an absolutist when it comes to private property, I just think private property works 95+% of the time. In the boogeyman scenarios where it seems inconsistent, I don’t think it’s a defeater for libertarianism per se.
If you are in a society in which this is an actual problem it won’t exist. If you are one irrelevant case, that can’t make a difference no matter what you do, consider yourself a foolish investor. If someone thinks “property rights” are this Platonic and they can get away doing this shit when more powerful social mechanisms will not tolerate that action - that person is a foolish entrepreneur on either side.
@Eric: No, I think you’re defining “property rights” too narrowly… the right to pass over another person’s land (easement) is a property right. I’m arguing that even if Moneybags buys up all the surrounding farms, he may not prevent you from passing over the customary easement which you had been using all along to get to town since that would be a violation of your property rights. Even in this scenario, property rights serve to protect the innocent party.
Now, let’s say Moneybags offers you a large sum of cash for the easement rights and you sell. Now you have a piece of land that is fully encircled and, essentially, useless. Now let’s say you later come back and argue that Moneybags must permit you to pass over one of his properties to get back in to your land and you sue him to this effect. I’m not sure how voluntary courts would come down on the issue but my guess is that - in this highly constructed scenario - they would say that you sold your easement knowing full well you would have no other way to access your property (except, perhaps, by helicopter) so it’s not Moneybags’ problem and he has no further duty to permit you to cross his land to access yours. In other words, “Don’t sell your easement, dumbass.”
A more interesting scenario (to me) is the following. Imagine a group of wealthy landowners who own large, contiguous chunks of property near a navigable river or port or major highway. They decide to form an association - I will call it a border association - such that no one may pass over the boundary of any of the properties except by permission of the border association. In other words, the border association exercises a kind of “jurisdictional” power over the contiguous property boundary of these joint properties. Over time, the property owners exercise very wise judgment to encourage businesses to locate within their borders and they sell “parcels” of their property to these businesses - on contractual condition that those businesses join the border association. Eventually, people begin to live there and build houses there and the border actually becomes patrolled. The border association has - from the beginning - the power to evict any person or property and the power to charge ingress and egress fees on any person and property (“customs”). Obviously, the border association would wield tremendous power.
Over the course of a few generations, the original landowners and their children have all died out and there is no longer any remaining vestige of those original properties which were joined together to form the border. Instead, there are just thousands and thousands of individual properties all joined by their contractual agreement to the border association (government?) The laws of the border association would not be unitary law - like common law - since the border association possesses a veto power that no one else has… it can simply evict anyone it doesn’t like, including common law judges who don’t follow the border association’s dictates. In the end, this border association looks to me every bit like a State yet, at the same time, I can see no flaw in its pedigree in terms of non-aggression and property rights
I am also starting to take the concept of expectations very seriously, and I think this dovetails inl with such ways one conducts themselves in their very real environment.
Haha, Clayton, I thought of that when I first posted this. I was thinking, “well I guess if there was a road that the person took to town that they’d still have access to that…” but I decided to leave that out of the scenario. You are right though, this is a highly theoretical situation, but I was just wondering if it may have exposed a flaw in an exclusively property-based legal order.
The big difference between your border association and a government is that it kind of operates like a voluntary government. I think something like this could become very common on a micro scale. The major difference is that the land is acquired by common property deliniations and the people that move into the land know full well that they are agreeing to follow the rules in exchange for their operating on the land. With a State, this agreement is assumed and it claims land that it never touches.
No solution. He’ll have to take the punishment. If one starts adding ‘easement’ rights and so on top of property rights, than they are no longer property rights, for I can no longer do as I wish on my property. No, our champ can’t do a thing. (After market anarchy is enforced, we might well see that the arbitration market finds a different solution, but I still would go with absolute property rights).
Now, in practice he’d phone all the medias and cause a sh*#storm for the capitalist pig, and that alone would probably be enough (“Superbusinessman cages family in!”, “Starvation!”, etc.) do deal with it.
Firstly, if the only enforcement power it has is eviction, then it’s less dangerous than any state that exists today. It would still be a massive improvement over what we currently have.
Secondly, there’s one massive flaw I see: Where does abandonment come into this? If the property has been unused by the border association long enough such that the use of it no longer has any ties to them, I think it’s safe to say the property really does belong to the children now. I see no way for a party to legitimately have usage rights and for a second party to legitimately have eviction rights.
This is only a problem if you think property rights extend to the edge of the atmosphere and to the core of the earth. Rothbard covered this somewhere, but I can’t remember where.
I agree, and have suggested the same thing here before (too lazy to dig it out). An extreme simplification of human history would present kings as such large landowners “selling” off parcels to smaller entities (lords, knights, individuals, businesses, etc.) under certain conditions (i.e. limitations to absolute property control/ownership such as liens, easements, contracts, or why not, laws) to which the original “owners” have likely voluntarily consented. But the whole idea of a “clean pedigree” in terms of non-aggression and property rights is utopian, IMO. Nailing down “legitimate” ownership (or a chain of justified/unjustified application of force, i.e. defense/aggression) going back centuries in time is bound to fail.
No, you are not caged in. Or more correctly you are no more caged in than you were before.
If before you had an easement, the ownership of the right to use a path on land of one of the individual farms you still own that easement and can leave any time you wish by the use of this path and Mr. Moneybag can do nothing about it.
If you do not have this right, then you never had it and were at the mercy of your neighbours even beforehand and therefore could be caged in, if you had made them mad. Mr. Moneybag isn’t the source of your problem and can not make it worse. The problem if it exists preceeds him.
Yeah, a right to cross land is often registered against a title deed as a real property right. I think that there’d need to be written title deeds to facilitate property transfers for modern insurance and legal purposes. The immoveable property in question is described in the title deed, and easements/servitudes held by neighbours can be described therein as well. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a personal contract seperate from the title deed, and for practical reasons such as easement it often isn’t.
Maybe the scenario still wouldn’t be entirely impossible, but honestly, it’s so ridiculously unlikely… If you anger someone who’s so rich and powerful that he can afford to waste so much money purely to make your life more difficult, I think you have more likely things to worry about than this. What if Mr Moneybags pays everyone you know to personally boycott you?
People don’t like being bought out, especially if they believe it is for an insidious reason. For this reason, it will be exceedingly expensive for Mr. Moneybags, especially since it is an all or nothing game: he must buy up every piece of property around my farm or else his plan is foiled.
Also, people who behave this way are unlikely to become wealthy enough in a free market to even consider being able to pay for this. And if it all odds were overcome, and one little farmer got kind of screwed, does it really mean anything? In my opinion, the outrage caused by this happening or even possibly happening would completely assure that it never happens again.