The article seemed to take this out of context from this article.
He seems to be bringing up the etymological problems with “anarchism”.
Murray Rothbard:
We must conclude that the question “are libertarians anarchists?” simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist. Then, when, in the jousting of debate, the inevitable challenge “are you an anarchist?” is heard, we can, for perhaps the first and last time, find ourselves in the luxury of the “middle of the road” and say, “Sir, I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road.”
The article seems to be using the historical meaning of anarchism in defense their usage of anarchism. Beside’s semantics, they don’t seem to make a strong case against anarcho-capitalism as it is. To quote from the article:
That this analysis is right can be seen, somewhat ironically, from Rothbard himself – at least, the future Rothbard. Some decades later we discover Rothbard arguing that the state “arrogates to itself a monopoly of force, of ultimate decision-making power, over a given area territorial area.” He then went onto note that “[o]bviously, in a free society, Smith has the ultimate decision-making power over his own just property, Jones over his, etc.” [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 170 and p. 173] The logical contradiction in this position should be obvious, but not to Rothbard. It shows the power of ideology, the ability of means words (the expression “private property”) to turn the bad (“ultimate decision-making power over a given area”) into the good (“ultimate decision-making power over a given area”).
@Bert: As is typical of collectivists, these folks have no coherent theory of property. They conflate “property” with “property in land” and fail to distinguish between property lines and national boundaries as well as between naked property claims and justifiable property claims.
The quote you cited is interesting because it highlights a theory of law which I am currently developing and looking to support from the Austrian/Hayekian literature. The author of the article says, “It shows the power of ideology, the ability of means words (the expression “private property”) to turn the bad (“ultimate decision-making power over a given area”) into the good (“ultimate decision-making power over a given area”).” The production of law is entangled with the concept of property because how property is defined (what is the “correct” definition of property) affects not only who is right in a dispute but what the dispute is. Someone who rejects the notion of property in ideas, for example, will not agree that a dispute between himself and a claimant of IP is over the patterns but over the use of the media containing those patterns. This definitional problem extends to any legal dispute.
My theory of propertarian law is that property is the boundaries of ethical universalizability, that is, property defines the boundaries around those things for which my claim to action is as good as anybody else’s. Inside property boundaries, someone’s claim is better than the claims of all others. Outside property boundaries (non-property or unowned property), no one’s claim is better than anyone else’s claim. Ethical universalizability (EU) is an idea which bas been expressed in a variety of ways… “treat others the way you want to be treated”, “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”, and so on. The essence of EU is that the truth value of an ethical proposition should not turn on the identity of the object or subject of that proposition. “It is wrong for X to murder Y” is only ethically universalizable if it is true for all X and all Y. If there are exceptions, such as, “except John may murder Sue”, then the proposition is not EU.
A specific instance of owned property, however, is distinguished exactly by virtue of the fact that its use is not subject to EU. “X may turn off John’s television at any time” is true only if X is John. That is, we explicitly recognize a double-standard regarding the use of John’s television… there is one standard for John and another standard for everybody else. What John may do with his television is different than what anybody else may do with John’s television and this double-standard is definitional of private property… it is what we mean by private property.
The State is a counterfeit of private property and has the undesirable consequence of broadening the extents of the ethical double-standard that define property to wide swaths of physical resources and assign the benefits of that double-standard arbitrarily, that is, in unjustifiable and capricious ways. One of the benefits of private property defined by self-ownership and original appropriation is that it minimizes the extents of non-EU actions*. Non-EU actions (that is, actions subject to an ethical double-standard) are strongly delimited to only those actions with respect to the use and disposal of private property. All other actions are subject to EU.
Clayton -
*This is one of the assertions I’m still trying to justify… I sense that it is true but cannot yet articulate why I think so
its obvious they don’t realize what arrogate means. It means to take something without justification. That is what the state does via taxation and war and such. They are confusing arrogation with legal contracts and such. People do not arrogate land but instead it is voluntarily exchanged. This website obviously just can not wrap their words around vocabulary so i have no faith in them understanding any type of philosophy.