I like where you go towards the end there. The idea of selling liberty as self-interest rather than “morally righteous” is much more efficient imo. Idk about your concept of property, it seems like its only property if someone has a big enough gun to keep everyone else off. But the self-interest idea is much more pertinent, and very close to what I’m working on as well.
Awesome. One of the reasons I’m migrating to forums like mises and away from more “open” forums which are mostly about libertarians fighting off everyone else who is there to troll and mock is that I’m tired of never finding anyone who has anything positive to contribute to the lines of thinking I’m pursuing, so it’s nice to find a place where we can focus on similarities rather than always on differences.W
When you say “you are working on it as well”, what do you mean? I’m interesting in hearing more.
As for my derivation of property: I’m not very good at explaining it yet, that’s clear to me. And it’s not as fully formulated as what you are responding to positively above. But I’m 99% sure that it’s basically the same construction, perhaps just in logic and form, perhaps as part of the exact same construction. After all, if I’m selling the idea of pairwise mutual non-aggression pacts, what exactly is that the people are agreeing to not agress against? Each others’ persons, sure, but the same logic that says it is easily and obviously (to them, and thus sellable) that they would agree to not agress against each other’s bodies says that they would also agree to not agress against each others’ “property”. But note there I’m not invoking some philosophical concept of “property” that pre-exists their agreement; I mean it in a very common-sense way, like “ok, clearly, you built that house and you planted those fields near that house; I have my house and my fields, and I’ll agree not to agree against yours if you don’t agress against mine because that’s clearly in our mutual self interest.” If one of the people says “and oh btw, my ancestors from 1000 years ago were the first to step foot in North America and they claimed it as their property so you have to agree to not agress against that either”, that’s probably not something that the other party is going to see as in their self-interest.
I kind of look at it like this: concepts like “property” and “NAP” are great philosophical constructs. We can argue about the nuances of thier philosophical construction, and we can debate the implications and consequences in the real world that would occur were we to adopt subly different definitions of these (or other) terms and concepts. Those are important and interesting conversations. But no matter what “we” decide, taking those definitions to the general public and saying “see here, we’ve devised the perfect definitions, now understand why they are perfect and you will voluntarily jump on board and off to libertopia we go” isn’t going to work. What we need to do is to devise ways that most people will behave more or less in accordance with those definitions, and the best way to do that is to sell them much more easy to understand and easy to see as being in their self-interest that effectively recreates those definitions.
IOW, don’t start with the perfect definition of “property” and then hope to get people to honor something “property like” by explaining to them your theory of property; instead, incentivize them to behavior from which more or less the same functional definition of “property” emerges. In both cases, the same analysis of the consequences and effects applies, since you have essentially the same functional thing happening in both cases, so all of the arguments that we have developed explaining why property and NAP are good things still apply. It’s just that that’s not necessarily the best way to get them to behave that way.
I’d argue that these pairwise bilateral contracts do exactly that, but they are much more sellable.
[And of course I don’t really think that there are literally going to be pairwise contracts between everyone. It’s kind of a shorthand. Most pairs of people will never interact and so they don’t need contracts or any other construct to guide their interaction, by definition. And practically speaking, most remaining contracts would be “cliques” to use the graph-theory term: contracts that bind a group of people. That’s basically what a PDA would define in AnCap: all of the “members” or “clients” of the PDA would be bound by the same contracts to all other members, thus taking care of that n(n-1)/2 pairwise relationships; the n1*n2/2 pairwise relationships between the n1 members of one PDA and the n2 members of a second PDA would be bound by a different “contract” (the decisions of whatever arbiter they have agreed to use to settle any conflicts between their members); etc.]