What public property? In the absence of government, that fallacy no longer exists. We established what constitutes ownership (I thought), production. In the absence of government, their property is unproductive. Wonder what happens then…
Suppose, however, that condition (a) is not fulfilled: in short, that we know that Jones’s title is criminal, but that we cannot now find the victim or his current heir. Who now is the legitimate and moral property owner? The answer to this question now depends on whether or not Jones himself is the criminal, whether Jones is the man who stole the watch. If Jones was the thief, then it is quite clear that he cannot be allowed to keep it, for the criminal cannot be allowed to keep the reward of his crime; and he loses the watch, and probably suffers other punishments besides. In that case, who gets the watch? Applying our libertarian theory of property, the watch is now—after Jones has been apprehended-in a state of no-ownership, and it must therefore become the legitimate property of the first person to “homestead” it—to take it and use it, and therefore, to have converted it from an unused, no-ownership state to a useful, owned state. The first person who does so then becomes its legitimate, moral, and just owner.
Your argument that unowned property is not desired is absurd. If there is $100 bill laying on the sidewalk and you find it, it was unowned property until you claimed ownership over it. In your description of unowned property, you wouldn’t desire that $100 bill.
You’re still viewing the government as if it were a legitimate private property owner. It isn’t, at least not according to any anarchist libertarian perspective that I’m aware of. The government excluding appropriation or use of “public property” inherently is to accept that the government is a legitimate owner of “public property”. But it’s not. Furthermore, the desire of exclusion is not uniform among “the people”. There are many people who do not desire exclusion. To enforce exclusion of “public property” as a state policy would be to uniformly enforce one particular preference, that of what amounts to a special interest group (the pro-exclusion people). In either case, the government would still be acting as the owner of the property in this scenario. Even the pro-exclusion people themselves would not be doing the excluding.
Unowned property is desirable in terms of the desire to transform or initially appropriate it. People do have preferances to transform unowned things. That’s how private property comes into existance in the first place, I.E. by previously unowned/unused resources being transformed and/or appropriated by the first user.
That it is or is not legitimate has no relevance to the question of whether or not it is real. The government exists. Public property exists. There are men who act over it. Denying its existence is not going to make those acts go away.
The fact that many men act to exclude others from public property makes it radically different from unowned property, which by definition no one has acted upon before the homesteader arrives.
If someone dumped a 100$ bill on the street it is because he no longer desired it. This bill is then undesired until someone comes along, bends down and picks it up, thus revealing preference for having the bill over not having it.
No one is abandoning public property. It is, up to this moment, being used exclusively by the government. This implies that it is desired by at least the government and the people who are being excluded from it.
LOL, right back where we started from. The property is being used exclusively by the government (a monopoly). It was acquired through theft and deception (taxation and the idea that the property was actually “public”). If that is a legitimate claim to the property, than anything the government does is legitimate. There is no “public” property and private property is not safe because (in your opinion) the government can steal something and legitimately claim it as their own. That is the basis of every government action and program and now we know your perfectly ok with that. Why didn’t you just say from the beginning that you felt that way?
I believe someone that steals something doesn’t have a legitimate claim to it. Pretty simple. Does the government have the military force to keep people from using it? Sure they do. Doesn’t make their claim legitimate though.
Problem is, Stranger wants to do away with the concept of morality. Once that is done, terms like property, justice, just law, etc are rendered meaningless. The next problem is, Stranger wants to carry a conversation using meaningless terms. I admit I don’t see what’s the point of such a conversation.
It is necessary for economic analysis. Property, justice and law are not issues of morality, but of social cooperation. This is the tradition of the austrian school of economics. For example, Mises went to great lengths to refute socialism not as being immoral, but as being uneconomic.
Mises was a self-described utilitarian - a weak point for Mises, in my opinion. But I don’t think that’s relevant here. I’m not sure the ‘Austrian’ school is the same thing as utilitarianism. Anyway, economics as a ‘science’, Austrian or otherwise, is not above the political philosophy of libertarianism.
The point here is that your position is not consistent. Social cooperation can’t be a standard to define ‘just law’.
What’s that supposed to mean ? What am I failing to believe ? This is not revealed religion anyway - It has nothing to do with faith. The problem at stake is that your definition of property is not consistent.
All that matters for an immigration program to qualify as libertarian is for it not to create new injustices, compounding past government expropriations with new ones, which the plan I outlined complies with entirely.
Restricting the flow of labor, the right of association, the ability to make deals with anyone, etc. surely creates new injustices, at least for the libertarian.
The goods you are speaking of possess workers that use and maintain them. As the government dissolves, the workers should be given the rights to the land now created as property by their hands.
If a man alters the pole in order to call it his own, then he deserves the pole. And that’s not a tragedy of the commons statement.
That statement is one of a large market springing up.
Tragedies of the commons are cases where land is not privatized but held in common without restrictions on use, hence the word common.
Property, justice, and law are issues of morality, and not of social cooperation.
This is the tradition of individualist Anarchism. For example, Spooner went to great lengths to refute slavery, not as being uneconomic, but as being immoral.
I don’t understand this attitude of yours. Libertarianism is concerned with justice. A libertarian doesn’t just throw up their arms and proclaim, “well, this is how things currently are, so lets be ‘realistic’ and accept things for how they currently are”. The question at hand here is not fundamentally about what is, it’s about what should be or what is just. To say that a discussion or debate over what is just is irrelevant doesn’t make any sense to me. That’s precisely what this thread is about: a libertarian immigration policy.
The fact that many men act to exclude others from public property does not mean that it should be treated as if it were legitimate private property, which is essentially what you’re doing in this thread. To make an analogy, the fact that chattel slavery existed in the 18th and 19th centuries in America does not mean that people existing then should have just accepted things for how they were. No progress would have happened if it weren’t for people insisting on justice (I.E. the abolitionists). The reformists, in contrast, functioned to actually prolong chattel slavery. Libertarianism is abolitionism, not reformism.