It’s my understanding that many on this site do believe that you can indeed sell yourself into perpetual slavery (take the dying man of thirt in a desert situation, and a man offers him water in return for perpetual slavery).
What if you no longer decide to paint your walls green, and the contract stipulates that they can simply take your house away from you if you don’t follow the rules. Since you voluntarily agreed to it, isn’t it a valid contract? If not, then why not?
Does stealing already stolen property also make the claim less legitimate? Also, was the property really stolen twice, or did the “governed” consent to it?
If we are not going to roll back claims back to the native americans, then why wouldn’t we consider the state the original owner of the land? Marshals of the state drove out the indians, thus “homesteading” the land, and making it available to white settlers. This argument against the validity of a government claim to land while accepting all private claims to land seems biased: We are discriminating against the government simply because they are called “the government”, when in reality they are just an actor like any private actor. If government ownership by force was illegitimate, why is private force legitimate? If government made land available to white settlers via force, then why aren’t they considered defacto ultimate owners of the property?
This argument against the statists simply does not seem very robust; if we accept “love it or leave it” in the case of an HOA, then it seems we also have to do so with government, at least governments that have been entrenched for a long period of time, and didn’t just come in recently and steal the land from a bunch of other people.
A purchase with the stipulation that the seller can arbitrarily change the terms at will is not really a purchase at all. It is simply person A giving person B money for nothing. “You pay me x and I still own the house.” That is not a valid contract to begin with.
If there was such as a thing as a value as rent contract and you were mentally retarded such that you would pay the value of a house as rent, the seller could take your money and instantly evict you for any invented reason, rinse and repeat.
HOA’s are as libertarian as Kim Jong Il’s Palace. Like professional associations (unions), they only work within the existing state system and have no theoretical plausibility beyond.
Well, what if the contract says “You own the house, but we reserve the right to foreclose to settle debts and rule violations”. What if the contract says “You agree to contract modification by majority vote”. Isn’t it voluntary if you agreed to the contract, whether by buying the property new or as a resale?
I’m not sure that you’ve proven that point. I don’t like many things about HOAs, but I have not yet found anything decidedly unlibertarian about them. I find that disconcerting, given my own voluntarist leanings.
It’s decidedly illogical. It’s the democracy fallacy. One of the possible outcomes of the arrangement is the nullification of the arrangement. Agreeing to agree with conceivably anything is null. It’s like I came here and said, “I hereby agree with everything that you ever say henceforth.” It makes no sense. Period. That is why it is the same as the seller still owning the house. An owner has the equivalent power of that “agreement” from anyone and everyone else. It’s just semantics, word play, guff.
Is it the idea of a unilaterally modifiable contract that you don’t accept, even if entered into voluntarily? It might be illogical, but plenty of people live in HOA arrangements today where the HOA has the power to seize their home and sell it for pennies on the dollar if they neglect to pay their bills on time or break HOA regulations.
What if instead of being unilaterally modifiable, the HOA simply said that “you must paint your walls green and work 6 weeks out of the year for the HOA”, but with no possibility of further modifications without renegotiation. Would you accept this contract, if entered into voluntarily?
What if instead, the HOA had a modifiable contract as before, subject to majority vote, but instead of attaching it to the house itself, they attached it to the common property outside of the house. Now, instead of being foreclosed on, you will simply be barred from leaving your home if you don’t agree to all of the HOA’s rules and stipulations. Would you also consider this unlibertarian?
Try this out: A person builds a house in a development, and freely chooses to join the adjacent HOA. That is his right. He lives there until he dies, and leaves in his will that the property shall forevermore belong to the HOA. That is NOT his right. He does not have the just power to restrict the rights to his propery in perpetuity. The only thing he may justly pass on to the HOA is the right to choose whether or not to release the property from the restriction.
Libertarian: The HOA recieves a property, and decides on a continual basis whether or not to maintain the restriction. Later occupants have the ability to buy the deed and own the property unencumbered.
Unlibertarian: The HOA recieves a property with said restriction. A later occupant wishes to buy the deed unencumbered, but is not able to do so because the encumberments are considered to exist forever, even after the property has changed hands.
I believe real estate law in some parts of the US takes the second route. That is decidedly unlibertarian. The owner of a property cannot justly continue to control it for decades, centuries, or eternities after his death. A deed restriction can only be justly enforced until the person who created it dies, at which time the person who recieves the property has the full and exclusive right to use and dispose of it.
Do away with that tiny (but significiant) detail of property law, and the HOA as an instutution is no threat to a free society.
You can’t enter into it. It’s a contradiction of the mechanism of ownership transfer.
They have the power that the state confers to them, which is hardly libertarian.
That is quite different. Note, however, that silly terms would require discounting the sale price to find buyers.
A modifiable contract is only valid if a range of possible modifications is given. Otherwise it is still the same as no ownership transfer. How non-compliance is handled is, firstly, a matter that pertains only to valid contracts. Secondly, you can’t simply seize a house for some little rule violation unless that consequence is also specified, as it would fly in the face of all sense of proportion.
Think of it like this. If you flipped it around so the terms said the buyer, rather than the seller, can change what the buyer must do, it would cancel out and be a simple sale.
This argument against the statists simply does not seem very robust; if we accept “love it or leave it” in the case of an HOA, then it seems we also have to do so with government, at least governments that have been entrenched for a long period of time, and didn’t just come in recently and steal the land from a bunch of other people.
It is robust unless you want to prove that the state a) homesteaded every single bit of territory it arrogates under its name (if it did so with stolen funds it’s already lost the case) and b) that there is some issue with a voluntarily arising “love it or leave it” type situation.
I see a fine difference here.
If the HOA sells you a house, it can impose two kind of conditions.
conditions preceding the sale, i.e. sign the contract in a red tux. That’s OK because this condition is part of the contract and failing to comply will fail to transfer property.
condition after the sale: this is nonsensical. The moment I sign the contact the house is mine and no one can take it away anymore. It’s my property. Whatever conditions the HOA sought to impose cannot be enforced because property has now been transferred to me, and no conditions can apply to the usage of my property.
Now the HOA could give you single-rent contract: you pay the market value of the house upfront, and what you get is to rent the house. You keep it as long as you comply with the owners (the HOA) regulations. Perhaps on termination you even get back what you paid, without interest of course. So there are ways around that. But other that this, I see imposing conditions on the use of someone’s property as wholly unliberatrian. You must be one someone else’s property for him to impose his will on you.
Note that this is no different form what the state does nowadays: “sure man, it’s you house but there are limits. Even here its my law, not your, that goes”. I find this particularly despicable in states. At least socialists had the decency of taking away all property before using it as they saw fit.
Try it like this: anyone can change his mind about every contract he has signed at every moment. Always!
So, what happens if some guy form the HOA comes by and, noticing you have a red and not blue wall, wants to take away the hose? You cancel the contract you have with them on the spot!
Now, if you originally bought the house, canceling the contract will erase your conditions and the HOA guy can suck it.
If you’re just renting the house, canceling the contract will force you to leave.
The same with slavery: sure you can sell yourself into slavery but you, just like your master, can cancel the contract at every moment. This goes for every contract. The human will is absolute and above everything, hence it canto be constrained. You’re always free to change your mind.
This (bolded statement) is tautologically true but does not entail that HOA-contracts are illegitimate. In order to get to this conclusion, you must also assume that property boundaries must be (metaphorically) smooth rather than jagged – i.e., you must assume that certain rights, though logically disconnected, are not legally disconnectable.
For example, the right to eat an orange is logically dependent on the right to break its skin – you cannot do the first without doing the second. Hence, possession of the first right must come with possession of the second.
On the other hand, the right to go fishing on a certain lake and the right to harvest ice from it are logically unconnected – you can do one without doing the other, and vice-versa. There is therefore no basis to say that these rights cannot be held by two different people.
I am not saying that it is impossible to separate rights in usage. Every continental civil code that I know off does exactly that. What I’m saying is just that that would be unwise and, in a market of competing arbiters, it wouldn’t fly.
I believe so because that would open Pandora’s Box. What do you buy when buying a property? Which rights? Thos enumerated in the contract? What about those not enumerated? What if two such rights, held by different people conflict?
Let us discus s an example .Say I own a yacht but only to actually sail it, while my brother owns the yacht only as far as its moored. This is not joint ownership, the yatch is 100% mine while sailing. Now some other guy in a yacht hit mine and sinks it. Who is he to repay? Me? My brother? How much to each? Only my brother as the yacht was moored at the time? What if I, due to stupidity, let it sink while sailing. Must I pay m brother? How much?
We could go on, but my point is that breaking ownership would create insurmountable problems, not unlike those of socialist calculation (if widespread).
Now, what you can do is rent off some right, i.e. rent the right to use my yacht while moored but you can cancel that at any moment and the yacht is undoubtedly yours at all times. Property is indivisible and confers full sovereignty, while benefits of use can be rented away. This is the only feasible way I see to tackle the issue.
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.
This isn’t even true of economics (as Mises states himself), why would it be true of libertarian political theory? I mean that assumes the axioms and corollaries are easy to identify and unpack and that deductions proceed correctly; errors can occur in any phase, and the conclusion might appear startling (like the law of association.) Praxeological conclusions are often quite startling even if deductively formulated. I think the point you should be making is that one rather.
well, in my amateur opinion, if a person purchases a house (property), it becomes HIS property and only his and no other party can force him to do XYZ.
But if there is a contract which says, that you buy a house, but you have to become HOA member etc… then it’s just a rent. Either absolute ownership or nothing.
Same would be with software (a little bit OT), if you buy a cd with a program and the contract says, that you have no right to copy it or re-sell, then this CD is really just rented and not your own property. So I am somewhat agree with Merlin.
Maybe I am wrong, I’d like to know other peoples opinions and arguments.
The transfer of ownership theory is interesting; I haven’t thought of it in that way before. If there are clauses on the use of the property after the transfer has been made, then the property hasn’t truly been transferred as the old party still has a claim on it. Thanks for mentioning that, guys.
My question then, is what if HOAs fully embrace this theory? What if instead of selling property, they simply sell the right to live in the property, subject to their terms and conditions. If you voluntarily accept that then you don’t own full rights to the property, but merely the right to live there, then is this still unlibertarian?
How about the common property owned jointly by the HOA members, such as the sidewalks and streets? Let’s say that the rules stipulate that you will not be allowed to enter the common property unless you abide by all the rules and regulations. You will essentially be under house arrest. Would you also consider this libertarian or unlibertarian?
Why does he have to suck it? Is there no longer a rule of law enforcing penalties upon breaking contracts?
If you sell yourself into perpetual slavery, wouldn’t the damages be quite high?
I agree 100% with this; however, many HOAs do write this into their contracts, and they take advantage of this clause, too.
If they sold the “right to live in the property” rather than the property itself, or let’s say they sell the property but “retain the right to foreclose if certain laws and regulations are not abided by”, and this is voluntarily accepted (the buyer knows that the HOA retains some rights, therefore they know they do not have 100% control over the property), is this libertarian?
This article appears to support HOAs as they currently operate:
“Now, consider the homeowners association (HOA). … Now, I’m not saying that some residents will not suffer the occasional annoyance as HOA trustees hold the color pallet against your mailbox to verify the hue of the stain which you applied … Other than showing excessive exuberance at times, the HOAs are typically indicted in the press when the singular property owner wants to turn his front yard into a memorial for the flag, replete with search lights and a continually repeating sample of Taps. What’s worse, the property owner knowingly agreed to such restrictions prior to purchasing the property. The homeowner, attempting to trample on the agreement, is hailed as the last defender of Lady Liberty herself, while the HOA, defending its contract with all homeowners, is perceived as evil incarnate.”
Emphasis mine.
Instead of selling total control over the property, the HOA could simply sell the right to occupy the property and make certain alterations. The HOA would retain a degree of ownership in the property. Or on the other hand, they could sell the deed, but simply prohibit the owner from entering common territory if there were rule violations or debt in arrears.