Your definition of privatization here is what I call “faux privatization”. Remember, the state is not the legitimate owner of the property. Therefore, it cannot legitimately sell “its” property to the highest bidder. To do so would merely grant a special privilege or monopoly to a private group in patronage with the state. This new owner that the state has granted patronage to could potentially go on to act as a state themselves. This is one of the serious problems with vulgar libertarianism. The state is not a private property owner. It has no property rights. It cannot legitimately sell of such property as if it legitimately possessed it in the first place. There are endless problems involved with treating the state as a private property owner, and this is the implication of what you’re saying here. This route most certainly is not a transitional strategy towards a market anarchist society. It will fail.
It is also the preferance of me and millions of others, who could really care less about who they deal with so long as they are relatively respectful, to associate with others and include them in our economic interactions, because our main purpose is to buy and sell stuff. The ethnicity or religion or culture of the people buying and selling the stuff is rather irrelevant to us. So long as we get what we want, we could really care less. In either case, a restraunt that had an exclusive policy of “no nig-nogs, jews and wetbacks allowed” would lose in competition with a restraunt that had a policy of “we allow all willing customers in”. That’s my point. Even if one holds such personal preferances they are economically suicidal ones. The incentives would be in opposition to such highly exclusive preferances.
Just what is it supposed to mean to say that rights and relationships were appropriated by force (i.e. stolen)? Things can be stolen, but rights and relationships aren’t property. A city, by the way, is a real thing, not a set of rights and relationships. The claim was that government property can be homesteaded - which requires mixing labor with it, which is why you can’t homestead all government property in the city. You responded, Brainpolice replied, and now you’re talking nonsense.
People clamor for all kinds of things from government. If they wanted gays jailed, that wouldn’t make it right either.
Yes, and, once again, restaurants are not the same as countries.
I honestly don’t understand why this issue is even up for debate within libertarian circles. I would think that it should be rather clear that the only position compatible with libertarianism, or at least libertarian anarchism, is free immigration and the tearing down of political borders. It’s obviously a very touchy issue for many people.
A state selling off the properties it has acquired through expropriation does not result in monopoly unless the legal privileges of the state are sold as well. For example, selling off New York City would not imply that the state would also sell off the right of eminent domain, only the properties it has acquired through the use of eminent domain.
The state de facto owns property. It controls scarce, valuable resources that must, for the purpose of the proper function of society, be controlled by someone, otherwise the result is a tragedy of the commons. Although the legitimacy of the process of acquiring it is questionable, it was nevertheless lawful when it was done and is thus accepted as legitimate by the mainstream of society. So long as the law isn’t changed, the state legitimately owns property. To question this is to question the founding principles of legal justice. Your definition of privatization is what is known as jacobinism. Because you believe that property has been acquired illegitimately, you accord yourself the right to retroactively and arbitrarily reassign property rights. This is a recipe for violence and the breakdown of social order.
You are making a lot of assumptions as to what people who desire discriminatory immigration desire. No one refers to Mexican petroleum engineers as wetbacks, or strongly opposes their coming to America, because they bring more civilization with them, not less. The problem with the open borders position, and why it is ultimately incompatible with libertarianism, is that it attempts to make an unjust state policy into a new unjust state policy, that is to say unlimited acceptance of all immigrants, regardless of their quality, by all communities and properties in the country. It is a one-size-fits-all policy. If you were really interested in more freedom, you would agree with the proposal I outlined with this thread, that communities within the country be allowed to admit more immigrants so long as it is only within their own property and that it does not impact other territories.
I would think that it should be rather clear that the only position compatible with libertarianism is one that respects individual rights instead of applying a universal, collective policy on everyone.
Of course it does not. Unowned land is something that holds no value to anyone. Stolen property is, by virtue that someone considered it worthwile to steal it, valuable to at least two conflicting parties. Pretending that it is like unowned land is communism that results in a tragedy of the commons.
A debt, for example, is a relationship. It has no physical manifestation. It can be bought and sold like any piece of property. An employment contract is property. If I buy a sports team, it comes with all the star players under contract.
Well, I’d say a debt is an asset, not a relationship, but regardless, this makes sense. Now, what do you mean when you say that a city is a complex of relationships, rather than a bunch of land with buildings and such on it? And what do you mean when you say that acquiring government-owned property gives the buyer the rights the city had?
Rothbard said that property was a collection of rights, for example the rights to enjoy sunlight and clean air while performing a specific activity. A city is obviously not just a bunch of land with buildings on it, or at least it hasn’t been since the early 1800’s. There is infrastructure, services, parking spaces, public space that must be regulated. All of these are exclusive rights.
Yes, those things all exist. Public space we’ve already dealt with - it should be homesteaded by private individuals and used for some purpose. Infrastructure, i.e. roads and such, should be dealt with the same way. Parking spaces in most cities are already largely privately owned. The public spaces…need I go on? Services, though, are things people are paid to do. It’s just a special kind of labor. Why on earth need all this be owned together?
Stranger, it’s clear that you have a solid grasp of Rothbardian property rights, and for the most part your arguments are pretty sound. In spots, though, I wonder whether I’m understanding you quite right. Selling off municipal assets wouldn’t give the buyers the right to tax people, for example, so I don’t see how they would control ALL the rights currently enjoyed by the city. It’s clear enough that many rights would pass to the buyer, like the right to set speed limits as the road’s owner.
True. And you clearly see the city as a bundle of property rights that can be privatized and subdivided. So I think “owning a city” is a confusing phrase to be using. After selling off the parks, roads, municipal buildings, mass transit, etc., all to separate buyers, who then “owns the city”? The phrase fairly describes the status quo, because government claims the entire bundle.
Seems to me that much of the argument would evaporate were it not for a couple of confusing phrases.
State enforced immigration restriction and border enforcement does not respect individual rights. It is precisely the application of a universal, collective policy on everyone.
Obviously it is, but changing the collective policy to a different collective policy is not libertarian. Individualizing the policy is, which is why I’ve made the above proposal.
I don’t understand why you’re speaking in terms of selling off entire cities when clearly this is not what’s in question. You cannot literally sell off the entire city. In either case, it does not matter. The individual or group that it is sold to would now for all intents and purposes control a monopoly over the city. The very act of being able to buy off the state’s property would be a legal privilege in and of itself. This is not a recipe for a transition to a market anarchy. It is a recipe for corporatism. It is quite blatantly state-buisiness patronage.
What are you talking about? You know very well that the state cannot legitimately own anything. If you concede to the notion that the state legitimately owns property, then you’ve given the whole ball game up and I don’t see how you can proclaim yourself a market anarchist. “The law” is irrelevant to the question at hand. “The law”, as it currently exists, is not the correct measuring stick of justice from a libertarian perspective.
Nonsense. I do not advocate an arbitrary reassignment of property rights. I deny that the state has any property rights to begin with and advocate that it be appropriated as if it is unowned, because there is no current just owner of it whatsoever. Furthermore, the selling off of this unjustly controlled property to the highest bidder is arguably an arbitrary reassignment of property rights and it treats the state’s property as if it is legitimately aquired private property, which it is not. Treating the state as private property ruins the whole point and leads to endless absurdities.
I’m not advocating a state policy. I’m argueing that the state be done away with. Part of what defines the state is its territorial dominion, I.E. “borders”, I.E. precisely what you propose to enforce. You are advocating state policy, and the reinforcement of precisely what defines it: its territorial dominion. It is the closed borders position that is entirely incompatible with libertarianism because it is by definition a state enforced policy of exclusion and enforcement of the state’s claimed boundaries. It is a one-size-fits-all policy by definition. The “open borders” position is “hands off” (I.E. laissez-faire), or better yet the lack of a state in the first place, which is no policy at all. I don’t advocate state policy for immigration or state intervention. I advocate a lack of intervention with respect to the migration of people and the movement of labor. Your position requires state intervention in the name of restricting this.
The proposal you made in the OP is a state policy of protectionism. It is not “more freedom”. It is not freedom at all.
Stop the red-baiting. Noone here is a communist. And noone here is advocating common ownership per se. So stop repeatedly setting up a straw man by which people are mischaracterized as proposing communism when they are doing nothing of the sort.
Taxation is not a right. It is a privilege, the power to unilaterally declare someone else’s property to be your property. So for example, you need the power of taxation to raise taxation rates from 2% to 3%, because that means that you are unilaterally declaring one percent of another’s property to be yours.
I absolutely did not claim that the bundle of property can be subdivided, just that it is heterogeneous. Just like you cannot privatize the post office in pieces without breaking it apart and preventing it from operating normally, you cannot sell off a city in small chunks, where someone buys a park, the other buys Linden Street and a handful of parking spaces. The city must be privatized as a whole enterprises under its current organization.
This is a delusional idea of homesteading. You cannot impose homesteading on something that already has value without breaking it apart in the race to homestead it before all others.
The former scenario in which at least it sells off different pieces to different groups, is much more decentralized then your proposition that the whole thing be sold only to one party. Selling the whole thing to one party will lead to a monopoly by default. Transfering the state’s monopoly on such things to one “private” institution merely transfers the monopoly to that “private” institution. For all intents and purposes, this “private institution” would likely henceforth become a state, or something close to one, because it would essentially have been granted a territorial monopoly. Clearly, the state selling stuff to private institutions is not really laissez-faire but a blatant case of patronage between the private and “public” spheres. Quite likely, the state would use patronage with such private groups for its own benefit, at the cost of not only money but allegiance. This is how states sustain themselves, not dissolve.
By definition, in the process of being appropriated by individuals, it would be broken apart or decentralized. It is not likely that it would be just one single group or individual appropriating the whole thing at one time. Different people and different groups would appropriate different portions exclusively.
This is only true if the law remains the same and the state can continue to expropriate. The goal of Libertarians is to change the law, not to change property titles.
The law is what establishes proper action in society. You may disagree with the law, think it unjust, but you have no right to expropriate other people because your definition of the law is incompatible with theirs. They are acting from what civil society expects of them.
That may be your opinion, but until it is law, and it never can be because it makes no sense whatsoever, it will be irrelevant to the problem of social cooperation and organization.