A method for resolving conflicts over privatization

[Bostwick]

Paul:

In your quote Rothbard was discussing privatization of a Communist economy. That is different from the USA because there are no obvious tax payers and tax receivers, everyone is a state employee.

@Paul

But it doesn’t follow that just because they’re state employees they’re responsible for any illegal (from the libertarian viewpoint) acts of the state - postal workers are not doing anything that would be illegal under liberty.

I did not suggest that they were responsible for the state’s crimes. If they were one would have to advocate confiscating all their property, which I certainly do not.

People are responsible for the crimes they committed on behalf of the state, police officers chief among them, but the mailman committed no crime. However, he did not pay taxes, he received them, so he has not been robbed by the state.

@Paul

It’s not a “workers own the means of production” thing - I wouldn’t expect the ownership to stay there very long, and it’s exactly the same argument Rothbard made.

In his blog Brainpolice provided this excerpt in which Rothbard addresses American privatization.

@Murray Rothbard

In the case of the State, furthermore, the victim is not readily identifiable as B, the horse-owner. All taxpayers, all draftees, all victims of the State have been mulcted. How to go about returning all this property to the taxpayers? What proportions should be used in this terrific tangle of robbery and injustice that we have all suffered at the hands of the State? Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State. Of this group, the most morally deserving are the ones who are already using the property but who have no moral complicity in the State’s act of aggression. These people then become the homesteaders of the stolen property and hence the rightful owners.

Take, for example, the State universities. This is property built on funds stolen from the taxpayers. Since the State has not found or put into effect a way of returning ownership of this property to the taxpaying public, the proper owners of this university are the “homesteaders”, those who have already been using and therefore “mixing their labor” with the facilities. The prime consideration is to deprive the thief, in this case the State, as quickly as possible of the ownership and control of its ill-gotten gains, to return the property to the innocent, private sector. This means student and/or faculty ownership of the universities. As between the two groups, the students have a prior claim, for the students have been paying at least some amount to support the university whereas the faculty suffer from the moral taint of living off State funds and thereby becoming to some extent a part of the State apparatus.

@JonBostwick

Local municiples should be incorporated and all customers should be shareholders. They were the ones that built the network after all.

It seems that Rothbard and I came to the same conclusion; that it is the customers, not the workers, who have homesteaded.

Oh well, not forging new ground in libertarian theory just yet. [:P]

[Paul]

The situations are not really comparable, though; the argument wrt universities (where is that quoted from? The only reference Google finds is this thread!) isn’t about “the customer” (and in any case, many/most of the students probably haven’t paid a dime: either their parents paid, or someone else did through scholarships, etc., or, esp. for earlier education, it’s “free”)