Are HOAs (home owner’s associations) unlibertarian?
Consider:
They are voluntary in the sense that you can choose to move away or not purchase the property in the first place, but a statist can make the exact same argument about taxes and governments in general.
They have the power to foreclose on your home and give it to a board member for pennies on the dollar, over a small infraction or debt. This seems to be punishment vastly disproportionate to the damages, as per the NAP or as per anyone’s idea of common sense.
What do you guys think? Anyone willing to shed more light on these two items?
They are not unlibertarian because they are completely voluntary. To be analagous to the State the HOA would have to annex your property, or have done so to some owner of the property in the past, and then forever lay claim to it even if they make no further agreements with future owners.
Your second point contains very good reasons why I wouldn’t advise anyone to join an HOA with broad power over your property or with the ability to change the rules of the HOA without giving you the ability to quit the association. Being unadvisable and being unlibertarian are two entirely different things, however.
The difference is that someone who owns property through homesteading or exchange has a legitimate claim to that property while the state has no such claim over property. It’s presumed authority is arbitrary and coercive, destroying any similarities between the “love it or leave it” mantra and a privately negotiated contract concerning property exchange.
“They are not unlibertarian because they are completely voluntary. To be analagous to the State the HOA would have to annex your property, or have done so to some owner of the property in the past, and then forever lay claim to it even if they make no further agreements with future owners.”
What is the threshold between voluntary and not voluntary. Does the HOA contract apply only to the property holder, or can it also to the property holder’s children, by adding such a clause? Is it still voluntary if the HOA includes clauses such as “we require 6 weeks a year of community work as well as 10% of income”, would this be OK?
What if the statist claims that all property is illegitimate to the same degree, since it was all stolen from native americans who were the original homesteaders of the land. If we accept that the stolen private property is legitimate, don’t we also have to accept the government’s claims over the land? The statist would be equating the government as just another form of HOA, and voluntary in the same way that the HOA is voluntary.
“Your second point contains very good reasons why I wouldn’t advise anyone to join an HOA with broad power over your property or with the ability to change the rules of the HOA without giving you the ability to quit the association. Being unadvisable and being unlibertarian are two entirely different things, however.”
Agreed, but telling someone that “It’s his fault if he lost his house over a $300 debt and the council gave the home to a buddy for pennies on the dollar” won’t win you many friends. It is possible that a libertarian judge could see such a contract as cruel and unusual punishment, and refuse to enforce it?
“The difference is that someone who owns property through homesteading or exchange has a legitimate claim to that property while the state has no such claim over property. It’s presumed authority is arbitrary and coercive, destroying any similarities between the “love it or leave it” mantra and a privately negotiated contract concerning property exchange.”
The statist would just argue that private property holders have no more of a legitimate claim than the government does, since most land has been stolen through theft or force at some point in its history, this is still true even today through zoning laws, eminent domain, deals between supposedly “illegitimate government” and private developers, etc…
HOAs do a great job of illustrating to libertarians (who seem to need to learn this more than the average person, for some reason) that the world is not a deductive system, and all facts about human relations don’t follow from a simple logical calculus. Simply spinning out definitions of voluntary and involuntary quickly gets you into a conundrum here. It is voluntary to join an HOA. It is fine and libertarian for them to require, as a condition of joining, a deed restriction - an agreement not to sell it to anyone who doesn’t agree to join. It is fine (and advisable) for there to be some mechanism for setting HOA rules, and likely it is some sort of majority rule. It is likely that the majority will agree, rather quickly, to turn things over to a few officers, since most people have lives and don’t want to spend all their time dealing with HOA rules - unless it’s a retirement village. Very quickly, you will have an immaculate conception of a totalitarian state in this thought experiment. If you lived in that later state - say, your great grandparents joined, and you inherited the house - would it be unlibertarian of you, a violation of contract law, for you to tell a punk who demands $1,000 because he doesn’t like the color of your house, to shove it?
Ultima, I’ve also pondered this analogy between states and HOAs/corporations/co-ops. It looks like the differences are reducible to mere semantics. Here’s a recent thread I started with a similar question:
Very quickly, you will have an immaculate conception of a totalitarian state in this thought experiment. If you lived in that later state - say, your great grandparents joined, and you inherited the house - would it be unlibertarian of you, a violation of contract law, for you to tell a punk who demands $1,000 because he doesn’t like the color of your house, to shove it?
I haven’t thought this through very much, but here is a thought:
It seems to me that we are not arguing over whether a HOA contract is unlibertarian, but whether or not an individual can be bound to a contract before he/she is born (or whether person A can bind person B after A’s death), which seems to me to be a separate issue. In the case you describe, we, of course, can’t say what would happen, though in a libertarian (ancap) world, I foresee such a contractual arrangement (binding someone before birth) being challenged and subseqently arbitrated in a private law court. My presumption is that, very quickly, HOA contracts would be found not to be binding on individuals not alive at the time of their formation, pushing HOA’s in the direction of agreements that are operative so long as the original parties are alive.
No one is bound to anything before they were born. Your son inherited your shares in the corporation (co-op) with all the benefits and liabilities associated with them. He is free to sell them on the open market and move to a co-op with bylaws/fees that better suit his preferences, or buy himself a piece of property unassociated with any co-op, with no obligation to follow any bylaws and to pay any fees.
It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to propose that most of them first appeared as HOAs of lords and kings, each bringing “their” property (fiefdom) into the mix.
Did a person join the organization knowing it either does not allow for secession, or that it has a rules process that may come at some time to prohibit secession? If so, what is ‘unlibertarian’ about it?
Sure, and not that I know of, but that doesn’t speak to my point.
In the case of an HOA (and an other cases we can imagine, such as Nozick’s immaculate conception argument) we see that we can bring about by ‘libertarian’ means a situation which is ‘not libertarian,’ or more correctly, a situation in which there is a clear property rights answer, and a clear intuition from libertarianism, that conflict. This should not happen if libertarianism (or the world) were a deductive system where, given the right axioms and well-applied reason, the answer is automatic. Libertarianism, rather, is a way of life and a way of looking at things, not an automatic answer to every problem.
If you purchase the p[property no one has the right to impose something on you, even if the sale contract stipulated such rights. Ownership gives 100% rights and cannot be subject to impediment. Thus, HOAs are, to my mind, very unbliberatrian and actually remind me of these block parliaments we had in Albania during communism.
For a HOA to be truly libertarian, it would have to own all property and than rent it out to clients and than stipulate any conditions it pleases, but like this, they’re just ministates.
Is the contract of you selling yourself into perpetual slavery libertarian? Should it be enforced? It’s the same thing here: as long as it’s your property (house/body) you can change your mind about it at every time, and ask for no one’s permission in doing so.
No one can drag you to a work you no longer want to perform anymore than they can fine you for not enforcing a rule you no longer want to enforce.
Doesn’t this go against what most anarcho-capitalists believe in? If the HOA stipulates that the walls must be painted green for all time, and all occupants of the property must work 6 weeks out of the year for the HOA, and the original purchasers (and subsequent purchasers) accepted these agreements, isn’t this consistent with anarcho-capitalism?
Indeed, HOAs can act like mini-states. Although libertarian in theory (through voluntary agreements), the actual outcome could be quite unlibertarian in actual effect. Given an unlibertarian HOA, would the love it or leave it argument apply, or not?