An alternative to the "warlord" argument against anarcho-capitalism

Economics Political Theory
1

What is property? The clearest answer, I think, is things you can, and indeed do, keep on or with your person. Possession is one meaning of ownership (nine-tenths of the law, they say). However, clearly that is not a perfect meaning, and certainly does not encompass all the meanings it is commonly given. Property is also taken to include land and natural resources. In an anarchist world, I assume that the owner of a piece of land is basically whoever gets there first, per the homesteading principle.

How much land or natural resource can be claimed this way? If I claim a 100 acres, is that reasonable? 1,000? 10,000? Is there a limit? Once I have claimed all that land, I can set the conditions for others to live there, right? What if it’s the only aerable land around? What if they’re starving? Certainly, I will have private guards. I will mine, and raise crops and livestock. All worked by people I allow to work on my land for a generous portion of their product. Just because I got there first and can enforce my claim.

How is this different than primitive monarchy? How will you prevent the most successful (initially) from making such claims/buying up such land, and creating such conditions, and indeed, passing on their property to their descendants? Rather than the dominance of warlords, what if government starts naturally, privately, through markets and just property? What keeps the most wealthy for buying up, at the risk of sounding Marxist, all the means of production, and then setting what conditions they wish for them to be used by others? Might not anarcho-capitalism just wind up setting us back to primitive feudalism?

Is government the natural state of man? Might it be inevitable, a product, not of things going wrong with the plans of those who would abolish it, but the ultimate fullfillment of a society with no government, only property and contract?

2

Nowadays most property is privately owned anyways so that scenario wouldn’t happen if the US were to become anarcho-capitalist. However, that is something I’ve thought about myself. Something just seems wrong about the anarcho-capitalist’s general rule for the initial aquisition of land.

3

I notice this problem: land is already claimed. If for some reason all existing claims to ownership of land were suddenly abolished, only then would the argument carry a lot of weight, but as it is, most everyone has some chunk of ground – maybe it can’t sustain any crops, maybe it’s just a half-acre, but it’s generally all owned. Even St. Helena is owned by someone, even if it is a government. There can be no homesteading today.

I imagine that existing claims to massive swaths of land could follow something like arguments against minimum wage. You already owned half a million acres of land and want to set yourself up as a de facto feudal lord. Others do the same and you all charge or expect way too much. When you can’t find a suitable workforce, or peasantry, you have to lower your rent, if you will. In a way, it’s all a moot point because society is much more industrial than agrarian. And as I understand it, feudal estates and monoplies are both immortal only so long as a higher power props them up. When corporations reach a certain point they become stagnant, almost immobile and only through burdensome regulation can they crush more mobile, tenacious competition. The so-called Progressive Era seems full of such monoply-through-regulation situations.

Besides, the old lords of the manner still exacted a smaller toll than our three tiers of government.

4

It was poorly stated, my focus on homesteading, but ultimately irrelevant. Most people have a price for which they’ll be willing to part with any piece of land. Sure, there may be a few holdouts, but the most successful/wealthiest could quickly or gradually come to acquire the majority of means of production through voluntary purchase. Each could, to a greater or lesser degree, act as a lord over their tracts of land, and indeed, squeeze out the holdouts by cutting them off from markets. If I own all the land around your land, you can’t even walk to the next town without tresspassing. Right?

Why couldn’t I find a suitable workforce? Keep in mind that coordination and price fixing between businesses is not illegal under anarchy, because nothing is illegal. I and the next landowner over could both agree to have truly heavy demands for those who, voluntarily and contractually, use our means of production to support themselves. We and the next landowner over, too. Sure, a few might be nicer, and be more attractive to prospective “employees”, but they will not have infinite capital and will not be able to expand it infinitely quickly. There will be the unemployed, the hungry, who will turn where they have to turn.

If you intend to rely on the goodwill of the gifted, I fear you are being quite naive. Oh, sure, maybe when I buy the land, I’ll be nice. But will my children? My grandchildren? One thing many capitalists don’t seem to realize is (again risking sounding Marxist) that the owners of capital can make more money cooperating than they can competing. The reason why I focus on land is because land is durable and scarce. Once bought, particularly sans taxes, one has no requirement to part with it. The same piece of land can be held for generations and generations by the same family. What is more, once all the land is bought (which, as you have pointed out, is already the case) going somewhere and finding alternative, unclaimed land is impossible. Seeing as you require physical space just to exist, you MUST enter into contractual agreement with someone, or wind up in the ocean (are patches of ocean counted as land under anarcho-capitalism?). If everyone, or almost every one, is a exploitive rat bastard, you’re SOL. Heck, even if there are plenty of people who aren’t rat bastards, but to get to them you have to pass through a rat bastard’s land, you’re SOL.

5

Do forgive my ignorance. I am an infant in this radical free market school of thought. I haven’t fully explored some of the possibilities, let alone considering all of them. In time I might be able to give a more rational, logical rebuttal, but for now the best I can offer – though unsuitable – is anecdotal thoughts and my own world view. Yes, it is terribly naïve but as I said, I’m still an infant.

Now, if you buy up all the land around me and then refuse any and all access to markets, even despite my willingness to pay a fee to cross your land, what recourse do I have? I can either starve to death on my own land (I assert no right to be fed) or I can violate your property rights. Obviously, I will cross your land. Do I consider that violation to be contrary to anarcho-capitalism? Personally, not at all. You will have established yourself as a tyrant of sorts by refusing to accept any fee for the use of a path across your land. Such a notion is more malicious than market. Also, there are, perhaps, elements of coercion and the age-old lifeboat dilemma in your arguments.

But that’s just my own personal view, and that might be totally at loggerheads with anarcho-capitalism, I simply don’t know. I will have to give your arguments a lot of thought. Yet I would no more prefer to abolish the state and become a serf than depose a lord and submit to a state. Both are repugnant.

6

What about Antarticia, the ocean(s), space, the Moon, Mars, etc. With the advance of technology people in the future will be able to live in places that were once inaccessible. In an anarcho-capitalist society without a state to enforce homesteading laws that state how much land you can claim what would keep the first private astronaut that lands on Mars from claiming the entire surface of the planet as his? Would the private court systems come up with a general consensus of how much land a person can homestead and that astronaut woudln’t be able to use their services unless he gave up most of his claims? Would the persons private defense agency force him to give up most of his claims inorder to be protected by their services? But in an anarcho-capitalist society a person woudln’t nessessarily need a private defense agency. He could just stand watch over his property with a gun all day or pay someone else to do that. Or in the case of space exploration have a ship in orbit around Mars that would shoot down any other ship attempting to land on the planet preventing anyone else from homesteading there.

Maybe my arguements about someone claiming an entire continent or planet are a little far fetched. And I’m not putting enough faith in humanity that the astronaut who lands on Mars (most likely a billionaire) would want more people to live there so he could make even more money by selling them goods and services. But I’m just trying to think of anything that could possibly go wrong.

7

Block addresses this with a reductio ad absurdam that I think should become the standard hypothetical situation: what if you build a fence around the equator? Can you then claim to have “homesteaded” the southern hemisphere? Clearly not, so clearly building a fence doesn’t, by itself, confer ownership. Rothbard would argue that only that land with which you’ve “mixed your labor” is yours. That helps, but leaves open the question what exactly constitutes “mixing your labor.” At that point Block would abandon the question by calling it a “continuum problem.” In other words, fencing in an acre clearly does make it yours, but fencing in a hemisphere clearly doesn’t. Somewhere in between, an arbitrary line must be drawn.

I would add one thing to the mix. In my view, would-be homesteaders must negotiate with each other. In each case an “arbitrary line” will end up being drawn, but it will differ from case to case. That doesn’t fully answer the question either, but I think it points things in the right direction.

There’s only one difference, but it’s all-important. A monarch has life-and-death power over his subjects. A successful homesteader’s ultimate recourse is not the death penalty; it’s banishment (AKA eviction).

Yes and no. Apes form tribal units, led by an alpha male, and they have since long before humans evolved. In that sense, a tribal society–in fact, a partriarchal one–is the “natural state” of man. I believe it’s why humans are so reluctant to embrace anarchy: we’re hard-wired to exist in small tribes, and even though it leads us to make disastrous decisions when the “tribe” has 300,000,000 members, we can’t shake our tribal roots. So I’d say that “government is the natural state of man,” yet I’d also say that it’s not man’s best state. It’s a survival instinct gone horribly wrong.

–Len.

8

I’ve repeated this a thousand times, but it bears repeating again. Land ownership does not make someone a government. To be a government, they must also have a monopoly over justice on their land, such that they can initiate conflicts in their territory and rule in their favor, thus gaining the power to unilaterally transfer private property to themselves.

It is possible to be a government without owning any land. However, the powers of government are so tempting that over time it will tend to tax all land.

9

About homesteading, the limit of the continuum is not so much fencing as an action that produces a future good. For example, if I dam up a river and build canals in some dry piece of desert, then I have homesteaded all land that is now irrigated because I have produced a future good, which by the rules of appropriation I must now own. If I restrain my fishing in ocean shelf in order to preserve the natural stock of fish, I have acted in a way that preserves future stocks, therefore I can exclude other fishermen from fishing it. If I simply build a fence I have not really produced anything other than a fence, I have just declared my intention to defend a certain area.

There is no limit to the scale of appropriation. If I were to begin terraforming Mars to become human-inhabitable, then I could legitimately claim to own all of Mars.

10

Ah yes, the socialist’s favourite “objection” to anarcho-capitalism (in their case it will suffice to apply analogous reasoning to their cherished communes to deflect the criticism.) All I can say is that if some people are so stupid to sell all their land to a single few individuals, they will deserve what they get, and this will be a situation, that although similar in all its superficial features to a state, is ultimately not one, and that thus they will have no legitimate recourse against it. Of course, they wouldn’t be as stupid as those people who actually give a group of individuals monopoly power over a territory which these individuals did not homestead, such that they may tax (read: steal), conscript (read: enslave), regulate (read: meddle) and outlaw competition (read: act like a mob, minus the self-realization of being a criminal.) Feudalism would be wonderful in comparison to the current system in fact!

So even if I were to grant that this scenario were plausible (it isn’t), it still isn’t an argument for statism…

BTW, it will not suffice to merely claim land. It must be fenced and work done to it according to local standards. This is a point Hoppe raises when outlining his theory of appropriation. There is no reason to accept mere claims to land.

11

“BTW, it will not suffice to merely claim land. It must be fenced and work done to it according to local standards. This is a point Hoppe raises when outlining his theory of appropriation. There is no reason to accept mere claims to land.”

Whose “local standards”? The majority? The majority will do what is best for the majority, not justice, and besides, what does “local” mean? If I fence it and my employees work it, does that count? How much time do I have to work every square foot? Who monitors whether I have worked the land sufficiently?

Why should I accept a claim to land more just because someone drags a hoe across some dirt and puts up some chain link? Because Hoppe says so?

Please explain why the scenario is not plausible. What about the short-sighted and ignorant behavior of the masses now would lead you to believe that individuals would guard against such losses at the immediate expense to themselves? What makes you think they’d even necessarily be aware of the deals happening with other landowners?

Finally, let me just say that using words like “deserve” is rather a risky thing. As William Munny once said, “We’ve all got it comin’, kid.”

12

I think that speaks directly to negotiation, as I mentioned above. The issue isn’t exactly “who decides,” since the very principle at stake is that nobody has the power to “decide,” if that means enforcing his decision. Hoppe’s own argument, if we take it back to first principles, is that homesteading and self-ownership represent the path of minimal conflict.

A bunch of settlers jostling for position risk lots of conflict, so they minimize conflict by agreeing on homesteading “rules.” These rules by definition have no force of law, because they pertain to unowned property. But they can be enforced with social pressure, at the very least. The exact “rules” will vary, though. Historically, waves of settlers have usually shared a common means of livelihood, so for example dairy farmers have a general consensus on what kind of farm a man can reasonably manage, and so do cattle ranchers. The ranchers need much larger tracts than the dairy farmers, because they have larger herds. Significant deviations from the local norm are punished with social sanctions.

A very different model was used in the California gold rush, but again it was driven (mostly) by standard practices among gold miners, and enforced (mostly) using social sanctions.

War that broke out between the cattle ranchers and the sheep herders was essentially a tragedy of the commons. Government limited homesteads to a size insufficient for ranchers’ needs, so they made up the deficit by over-grazing public land. Without the artificial scarcity created by government, the land would have been divided into homesteads of suitable size, and herds managed for sustainable profit.

–Len.

13

Out of curiosity, have most of you attended public schools?

See Len’s explanation.

Because Hoppe argues so. It seems a lot of people here have some problem with philosophical arguments that get in their way. Then provide me with a better one.

My, it seems the Hobbesian authoritarian is deeply embedded in you. Odd that you should even call yourself a libertarian, as this is a very shaky ground to base the belief upon. If the masses (which are only as stupid as they are due to the public school system) were so horribly dull and ignorant as to need a state to nanny them, then they’ll get what they deserve - or if ‘deserve’ bothers you, what suits them. What if all the minarchist governments in the world secretly conspired to establish one world state under which their authority would be absolute (this shouldn’t be too hard for them)? Presumably, they govern justly, hence this arrangement too would be just. Then again, the burden of proof is on you to show that this is plausible. So far, you’ve just asserted it. I can conjure up any number of hypotheticals I so please. Doesn’t make them any more plausible or probable.

If this is the best argument there is for minarchy, colour me unphased.

14

Bit snide there, “quis”-ling. Ad hominem much?

Very well. Property ought, I think, be measured in the value of a physical thing. As Hoppe would no doubt agree, one has a right to the value one creates. One also has a right to the value gained by a voluntary contractual agreement. These are, however, the only way to have a right to value, through trade, gift, or original creation. Land, which preexists owners and was not created by any agent that claims them, can never be owned, given that ownership means exclusive and permanent rights to a particular piece of land. Thus, land is not property. It is indeed the commons, and the common person, sharing equal rights with all others, has a right to see it administered for the common good.

Note that this is not socialism, at least not in the common sense. I do not claim that governments have any right to seize or tax any property, nor to regulate behavior which harms no one but the doer and other voluntary participants. I do not think the government has any place providing any welfare/education/etc. services. What I am claiming is that the normal definitions of property, particularly the idea of homesteading, on which anarcho-capitalistic arguments are based are fundamentally flawed. Without homesteading, all chains of ownership leading to today are illegitimate.

15

It was an honest question.

He wouldn’t (and doesn’t) agree to that because if one can be said to own value, as opposed to physically tangible things, such as products of labour, homesteaded items and the like, one can easily say market competition is harm because it lowers the value of what others own &c. Besides being unworkable, it’s not very favourable for the libertarian.

In effect, the Georgist view on property. There is no such thing as the commons, though. Whence the right to it? Who gifted this commons to mankind such that all men can be said to own it? The rational view would be to assume that it is unowned and up for grabs. All production is transformation, and all resources derive from land ultimately, so I fail to see why the rationale should not be extended to capital, and moreover, land can be so transformed and improved. Brainpolice has a good video dealing with Georgism. And at any rate, if it is not value but tangible objects one owns, the entire thesis falls apart.

The only thing flawed is Georgism.

16

Actually, I need to thank you, Inquisitor. I did not realize that this idea already existed like this. I guess I’m kind of a Geolibertarian. In any case, I would add some stuff to it, but I don’t really want to share that just yet.

17

And thanks for the plug! :slight_smile:

18

How did you homestead 100 acres of land?

By the way, if you did, that’s enough to justify your ownership of it, however, you are assuming that people were there pre-homesteading, in which case, the land was homesteaded by them, and you do not own it.

19

I’m not sure if you’re understanding the homesteading principle properly. The homesteading principle does not justify a mere abstract “claim” on land. One cannot just land on an island and then claim the entire island for oneself irrespective of the extent to which one makes use of and labors upon or transforms that land. The homesteading principle is based on labor, not mere claims of ownership upon merely laying one’s eyes on a territory. That is, one can only legitimately lay claim to land to the extent that it has been transformed through labor. After this has taken place, the legitimate criteria is that it must be voluntarily exchanged for by someone who originally transformed it through labor or got it through someone else who did so, or be a gift or inheritance from someone who originally transformed it through labor or got it through someone else who did so. The criteria for original appriopriation, before any exchange or gift takes place, is based upon labor. Entirely baren, unused land has no legitimate owner. Murray Rothbard went over this in detail in “The Ethics of Liberty” with his Crusoe scenarios. I’d suggest you read the book if you haven’t yet.

Fuedalism is what occurs when there is intergenerational absentee landlordship, a claim of ownership over land that has long since been abandoned by the original owners while other people actually make use of and labor upon and transform that land. That is, the original owners and abandoners are long since dead, but their ancestors or some other aristocracy is exercising a claim of ownership over it while a whole bunch of other, unrelated people actually make use of and labor on that land. The homesteading principle, properly understood, does not justify this scenario because the land in question is not really a product of the fuedal lord’s labor, nor has it legitimately been granted to them by inheritance. In such a scenario it is the peasants who have become the genuine homesteaders of the land. The land has been transformed and put into productive use by them to such an extent that the fuedal lord really has no legitimate claim over it at all. If the homesteading principle is properly understood and properly applied, then this scenario would not arise in the first place. Kapice?

As for the scenario of a wealthy individual or group buying up a nation-sized territory, I find this scenario to be practically impossible if the people are supposed to be abiding by the principles of voluntaryism. That is, in order for the scenario to play out, every single original owner within the territory would have to voluntarily sell off their property. I find it highly unlikely that every single person within such a large territory would willingly sell off their property. This is not explainatory of how states actually form, since in my understanding states are fundamentally founded not on voluntary buy-outs of huge plots of land but outright land theft and intergenerational absentee landlordship. States are not formed by an “invisible hand” process, as Nozick seemed to suggest.

20

The homesteading principle is not retroactive. It is useful in order to settle present and future disputes over property, but it cannot be involved to settle past grievances.

Feudalism is more than just land ownership, it is a set of legal privileges associated with land ownership, such as for example peasants being tied to an estate. When those privileges are abolished, and free labor is established, feudalism has ended, even though the noble families maintain physical ownership of the land.

Over time, competition between the estates along with the production and accumulation of capital by the new capitalist class will increase diversity in land ownership and erase the feudal origins of the estates. That does not mean that they can be violently expropriated to help the process along, as that would be another form of socialism.