Here’s a nice appeal to authority for you. If you bother to read Rothbard’s For a New Liberty or Ethics of Liberty, you might learn that property rights are an extension to the right of self-ownership.
I would quite fallaciously argue that Rothbard’s understanding of political theory trumps yours.
Nobody has a right to life and liberty per se. That implies that you have the right to enforce positive obligations on others to save you if you’re near death, etc. Instead, property rights are an extension of self ownership. Thus, anything that violates property rights or self ownership is a violation of basic libertarianism.
The analogy doesn’t hold. There’s a huge difference between owning a house, and owning a city (including all of the people within it). It’s as if I compared “the nation” to a house to defend state borders and state immigration restriction policies. The analogy simply doesn’t hold. “The nation” has no discernable owner. Neither does a city. It has multiple owners within it. If we want to talk about decentralization - decentralize the cities! Decentralization ends at individual choice, not city-states.
And where do these individual rights come from, according to Bastiat, if I may ask? Self-ownership? Fiat? Divine intervention? As long we have not identified the roots, it’s difficult to argue a position here.
But wait. Given that you now seem to be an amoralist, what’s the point of ever argue anything anyway ? Whatever happens, happens. Who cares ?
Ethics and morality are shaped in an evolutionary process. The ethics of private property seem superior to all other known ethical concepts to me, so I will champion them and try to convince others to adopt them.
I don’t view them as objective truths, though, since I realize that things only gain value once we subjectively attribute it to them. Plus, private property and selective non-aggression preference are only half-consistent, given that they apply to humans only. As I said in a previous thread, ignoring the spheres of life around us does not make them vanish or stop mattering.
By the way, you shouldn’t confuse my position with an “I don’t care” one. I do care, I just don’t assume - quite like Plato - to be in a position of ascendent mental clarity, so I don’t argue with the assumption of me being objective.
I don’t believe in dualistic self-ownership, since it’s based on cartesian epistemology. I’ve explained why in various threads and blogs. Rights are derived from individual sovereignty, which is not self-ownership but merely lack of ownership over you altogether. But rights over external objects does not come first, it follows from the application of individual sovereignty.
These are ridiculous non-sequitors, I never implied positive rights. I don’t believe individual sovereignty is a property right. People are not (or should not be) property, period. I don’t believe property rights over external things comes first conceptually. There are more fundamental things that precede it, that it is derived from. This is the problem with thin libertarianism, it treats everything as an axoimatic property right without digging deeper into the conceptual foundation.
Sorry, but you just seem confused. Anarchy is a lack of rulers by definition. This does not mean that all property is banned, because property ownership in and of itself is not rulership. And it’s not my preferences in question, it’s the fundamental concepts of libertarian justice that we presumably already agree on. The sovereignty of a property owner does not give them the right to be a ruler over others. It’s self-governance, individual sovereignty, not arbitrary externalized authority.
I’ve explained ad nauseum why libertarian anarchism does not mean that you can literally do whatever you want to people by appealing to property rights. You cannot enslave and murder people by merely appealing to ownership. That is simply veiled statism, and divorces libertarianism from justice.
Or panstatism.
Noone ever talked about it as if it was applied to non-humans. That’s a dumb red herring.
I will concede to you the point about lack of ownership over a person altogether as the definition of self-ownership. That’s a nice angle that I hadn’t discovered yet. Of course, if you put it that way, then some property constellations may become questionable. Interesting.
Implies that I’m pro-state which I’m not. States, by definition, are entities that claim jurisdiction over a property they have not properly acquired. I demand proper acquisition before any property rule can be legitimately exercised.
Noone ever talked about it as if it was applied to non-humans. That’s a dumb red herring.
Well, that’s precisely the point. Ignoring everything besides humans to justify usage of the term “objective” seems strange to me.
Right. The general right to liberty, for example, disallows ownership of people. I also think that the right to property that we derive from it also has built-in limits, since there is only so much property than an individual can aquire voluntarily or on their own (It is simply impossible for me to homestead the entire planet, for the most obvious example). Property claims in excess of homesteading and voluntary exchange, as well as claims of a right to enslave and murder people via appeal to property ownership, inherently come into conflict with libertarianism in my view. Hence my concern with delegitimizing certain property titles and not treating property rights as axoimatic absolutes.
I agree that part of the definition of a state is that it did not justly aquire property. However, this is not the entirety of what defines a state. Irrespective of the question of property aquisition, the actual specific kind of power held over people in a given area also defines a state (the power of taxation being one of the most basic of these).
In other words, while the method of aquiring property is an important question, what specific power owning property justly grants an individual is also another important question. I do not believe that owning property justly grants someone absolute power (including the power to enslave and murder) over other people in society or anyone who happens to exist at a given moment on their property. Furthermore, I do not see this as a denial of property rights, but putting them in their proper context (I.E. as integrated with the right to life and liberty, avoiding contradiction).
I think that issue is more or less semantic over the word “objective”. When certain libertarian anarchists claim something to be “objective”, they don’t necessarily mean that it has no context or scope. If someone claims, for example, that the NAP is “objective”, they don’t mean that it applies to things it’s not meant to apply to. Built into its definition should be what it applies to. I essentially never use the term “objective” anyways, I simply make arguments.
I see no issue with social conservatives that recognize that many so-called conservative values are also universal human values. Otherwise, they’re kookoos.
seriously brain, some of this stuff is outrageous.
that its unseemly for someone to own a lot,?? for someone to own a mass of property on a par with a planet? i.e. that there is no legitimate way to do it. you cant conceive it. so maybe you need some lessons in conception…
im sure i cant wait for you to spell out which property titles you are trying to undermine…
this is retarded, the only thing that differentiates a tax from any other paymernt demanded, is that a tax is levied involuntarily without any prior consent. but this is irrelevant if you are contractually bound to pay rent, because you consented to pay rent!
you are just choosing to ignore the contradiction you create when you arbitrarily erode private property rights. you litereally have undermine the liberty of the private property owner, as there are things that because of someone elses illegitimate trespass the rightfull owner can not do. if the property in question was life supporting, then you have derived a contradiction over life as well. im not sure im impressed by your mental gymnastics , though honourable they may have been in their attempt to uphold life and liberty, they simply fail to do this. this is because you ignore the fact that human rights, aer property rihts. the right to life is not really a right to life, its an anti-concept understood by its opposition, it is a buzzword for use in everyday conversation, in essence it is the right of an owner to own property, and to not have it agressed. no more.
Self-ownership is just a metaphor. And anyway, the point remains. You can’t legitimately kill a self-owner. So self-owners have a right to life. You don’t like that rights-language ? That’s just a semantic objection.
Another point that remains is that (external) property rights are an extension of self-ownership, so they are legitimate only if self-ownership is legitimate, and being an extension they are subordinated to self-ownership.
I never said that. Having a right to life doesn’t mean you have a right to a free lunch - that’s just a strawman, go figure.
There’s nothing particularly outrageous about it, unless you’re blinded by bias.
I’m merely outlining proper concept formation and integration for libertarianism.
I said that it’s physically impossible for a single person to homestead literally the entire world. That’s truly what’s an outrangeous notion. There are natural limits on how much property an individual can voluntarily aquire. That’s not really a socialistic sentiment, it’s a simple fact that has to do with scarcity and the limited capacity of human labor.
It’s not as if this should be controversial. Rothbard himself, in “The Ethics of Liberty”, talks about how utilitarians too often turn a blind eye to the question of the legitimacy of property titles. Not all current private property titles are valid according to Rothbard’s property theory.
I didn’t say anything about rent. You’re taking me out of context to take a cheapshot.
I do not erode private property rights. I actually give them a rational foundation, rather then treating them as axoimatic absolutes. “Private property” is not the first concept involved, it is derived from other concepts. Welcome to the world of proper concept formation.
You’re being reactionary as a result of a misunderstanding of my position. Pointing out that you cannot murder and enslave people simply for being on your property is not against the liberty of private property owners, it’s against tyranny of private property owners.
You’re using a false dichotomy yourself. No, property rights are human rights. Property rights are not all rights, however. Property rights are derived from the right to life and liberty. Property rights does not come about in a vacuum, they are not axoimatic. In either case, there is no absolute dichotomy. I am integrating the right to life, liberty and property. Neither of them contadict the other, when properly understood in their contexts.
If anything, you are using “property rights” as an anti-concept. For you, it seems to mean “absolute power to do what I want to other people”. Unfortunately, that clashes with (1) the property rights of other people and (2) the right to life and liberty of other people who happen to be on your property. “Property rights”, in proper context, does not mean “the right to murder someone for being on my property, for no other reason than that they are on my property”. We’ve already been through this ad nauseum, and you’re still clinging to these absolutist dogmas.
You have it backwards. Is there a property right that can not be constructed out of one or more human rights? Property rights are human rights. But property does not come first, people do. People’s sovereignty as individuals come first, then we derive property rights as an implication or application of it. “Rights” does not reduce only to questions of who is the owner of something, it pertains to norms of what you can do to other people in general. Rights are interpersonal norms, and while property is a significant aspect of rights, it is not the only aspect. In fact, this axoimatic approach undermines all rights by reducing rights to commodities and the justification for absolute power over others, which inherently clashes with various rights.
obviously you have failed to make a distinction between what can be acquired by homesteading and what can be acquired by transfer from prior homesteaders, as such its perfectly feasible to imagine planet owners, furthermore, if someone owned a small army of robots and set it to plant corn all over some far flung green ball floating in space, who are you to say that he has not homesteaded it all?
but no one disputes this. so why bring it up. ???
you are having a failure to compute. in brief you were saying that The Power To Tax exemplifies a ‘bad right to do something that someone might have over someone else’. if you are bringing it up because you are opposing it to someone elses views on this thread, then you are simply WRONG, because no-one hear has said its legitimate to do anything to a non-consenting party. but you keep imagining that that is what you read.
you talk a lot of big talk about ‘proper concept formation’ , are these proper concepts lockede up in your private vault, a little trade secret for only the chosen elite. i understand you claim to have properly conceived concepts. but i’ll be damned if ive ever seen you evidence that. by writing them down/
i hear you talking about a right to tresspass and a right to squat. but that does not impress me.
blah blah blah
failure to read. obviously private property rights means the abosulte power to do what i want with my property. this has NO EFFECT on other people who ‘respect my private property rights’
again, i here you proclaiming trespass, ‘low-market-value thievery’, squatting are hardly crimes at all, and are fully consistent with libertarianism, but as before, im not impressed.
If you are going to have a market-based society, then yes, rights will be commodities just like everything else. So if you want to exercise your right to eat pork and drink beer while walking thru the Muslim side of town, you’ll have to pay a lot of money for security when they get pissed off at your infidel ways and decide to stop you. Or, you’ll have to bribe the PDA’s that they hired in their turn to enforce halal.
The alternative, of course, is a state-based society, where the central state can wield sufficient power to regularize all manner of rights regardless of their utility.
im amazed that people dont recognise that there is no-such-thing as a ‘right to life’. right to life is only a metaphor. a body owner has a right to not have his body property transgressed. ergo, he should not be butchered and beaten, he sohuld not be killed. this is negative rights.
you guys keep positing a right to life like its a positive right. by extension you must believe in rights to food, shelter, medicine, and you must believe that the ‘right to life’ owner can place obligations on everyone else to provide for their life sustenance.
ergo. abandon this ‘right to life’ nonsense. property rights are all you need. or else stop talking about rights all together. seriously, sheeeeesh
No, it isn’t feasable at all, it’s batshit insane. It requires things such as (1) every square inch of the planet has been homesteaded or (2) every single owner in the world voluntarily sells or gives up their property to this single person. The second one is simply impossible, it requires uniformity of desires and suicidal tendencies. As to the first one, it is physically impossible for an individual to homestead every square inch of the planet, and practically speaking the entire human race has yet to even approach accomplishing this. Furthermore, if you cannot see why a single person or organization claiming dominion over the entire world is dangerous, I don’t know what to tell you. World government anyone?
Haha. What does that have to do with anything? The fact is, right now, these are silly thought experiments.
Because it’s precisely what I’m saying more or less, and you are disputing it and being reactionary towards it.
I’m, I only brought up the power to tax as a basic example of a power of the state that defines it that isn’t just a question of who is the owner of the land. You’re taking me way out of context.
You misunderstand my arguments. I argue against unecessarily initiating force on people merely on the grounds that they are on your property. Like, for example, if my friend comes over and enters my house, I do not gain the right to kill him arbitrarily, for no real reason other than “he’s in my house”. That you imply a communist bugaboo out of this only reflects your own comprehension and bias problem.
My argument is that it does not mean the absolute power to do what you want to other people who are on your property. You do not gain the right to rape a girl because she’s on your property. You do not gain the right to arbitrarily murder someone because they are on your property. This is fairly basic.
I have not said a word about tresspassing or squatting. You bring this up as a reactionary bugaboo that ignores my argument. “Ahhh! Ahhh! Brainpolice is trying to justifying the reds squatting!”.
But now I will talk about them, since YOU brought them up. To use the state as an obvious example, since the state is not a legitimate owner, yes, “tresspassing” and squatting is perfectly legitimate by libertarian standards. Individuals are free to use state property as they please, because it has no just owner currently. This was a position on state property that Rothbard took in the early 70’s. I hold to it. The state has no right to restrict me from using the property that it doesn’t justly own to begin with.